My PhD student passed her viva yesterday. Of course she was relieved. So was I. Basically, a PhD is an apprenticeship in research. A student, who already has a first degree, spends typically three to four years doing research, then writing a thesis. The thesis is book length, often more than 200 pages.
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We had a forum for our final year undergraduates on Friday. This was to allow them to give feedback on what the Department is doing well, and more importantly what we, and the rest of the Uni, could do better. The coordinator will gather together the feedback and send it round – maybe I’ll do […]
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Many of the most powerful, and to me, most interesting, ideas in science connect two apparently unrelated observations. The breakthrough is to realise that there is a hidden connection between two aspects of the natural world. A simple example is the force one charge exerts on another, that is a distance r away. Coulomb’s Law tells […]
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Over the last few days, I have been struck by the number of uses of the statistics term ‘median’ by a number of politicians and commentators. This is a relatively technical term and I rarely hear it from politicians, or indeed anyone else on TV or in newspapers. The terms has been used in the […]
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Nowadays when you are teaching a course at university, you are co-teaching it with Dr Wikipedia. Your lecture notes will be supplemented, for free, by Wikipedia. This is almost always good. Although it does mean that you if took inspiration and examples off Wikipedia, which I have done, you will be found out. Incidentally, the […]
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