In addition to eating too much, watching too much rubbish tv, and maybe drinking a little too much too, I have been reading a paper on the statistics of times-between-failures of air conditioning units of Boeing 720 airliners. These airliners are now obsolete, as I guess are the air conditioning units – the paper is from 1963. But the paper is a classic, the maths in it is relatively formal but the idea is simple.
This is a departure from my usual posts. It is real science, done by me. For a change I thought I would show you a little bit of scientific research being done, and a little nugget of understanding about a physical process being gained. Some aspects of this are a bit technical, so I have […]
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This may or may not seem a silly question to you. The reason I ask is that there is a mechanism in place to determine bang for the taxpayer pound in research. In its current incarnation it is called REF (Research Excellence Framework). It’s purpose is to “provide accountability for public investment in research.” As […]
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With the cold weather today, my teaching in the Malaysian workshop seems a lot longer ago than two weeks. But only two weeks ago I was teaching the statistics of crystallisation in sunny Malaysia. I enjoyed it. One of the fun things about teaching at this sort of workshop is listening to the other speakers. […]
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Reading an interesting, well written, scientific paper can be a genuine pleasure. But, possibly because I am a bad person, I enjoy even more seeing a scientific paper taken down. If you do too then Aaron Clauset’s (quite old, 2008) post is for you. The post reanalyses some data from a paper by Yu et […]
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I am in Malaysia for a school for Malaysian PhD students and postdocs. I have given four hours of lectures on modelling how crystals form. That is a lot – about 200 slides to prepare. That was hard work, but teaching really helps your understanding. Generally if you understand something you can, hopefully, explain it […]
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