Every year our final-year MPhys students give short talks on what they did during their Research Years. The Research Year is around 11 months doing real leading edge research. All our MPhys students do this after 2½ taught years. After the Research Year they come back for a final ½ taught year, then graduate. This year […]
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Over the years I have worked a fair amount on colloids. Colloids are just suspensions of small solid particles or liquid droplets in a liquid, often water. The particles or droplest are too small to be seen by the naked eye, typically around a thousandth of a millimetre across. Colloids are common. For example, milk […]
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Hi, I’m Sarah, a fresher here at the University of Surrey and I must admit I’ve been rewriting this post quite a bit… I was asked to write about life as a first year undergraduate and as always, I’ve been suffering from writer’s block. Truth is; I don’t know how to say how much I […]
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I don’t read many psychology research papers – maybe it is some sort of bias of natural scientists like me have against social scientists. But the classic paper by Dunning and Kruger, Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessment, is just great.
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One of my many jobs is that I am the academic library rep for the Department. In this capacity I attended a meeting on Friday with the person in the University’s library who is in charge of Physics, and two sales representatives from one of the big publishers in scientific publishing. The reps were nice […]
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The above is a quote from 1955, from a guy called Alex Lewyt, who was then president of a vacuum cleaner company. Fifty-five years later I still have to plug mine into the mains. It is one of a number of predictions about future technologies that have proven over optimistic. I came across this while I […]
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