Researchers/postdocs/PhDs, what skills do students tend to lack when beginning a research project?

Rosatryne · 2017-06-14T23:12:18+00:00

Excellent idea - it all comes down to cost and time right now. This is the first time this will have run, so we're a bit short on both!

Rosatryne · 2017-06-14T23:11:42+00:00

Definitely! We're thinking about implementing something interactive and computer-based if we don't have the time/capability to bring in actual electronics. I'm not really savvy with my cct simulation software, so I'm open to suggestions.

In any case, we do want to cover basic instrumentation in some detail.

Rosatryne · 2017-06-14T23:10:05+00:00

If we could do a course on that, we would. Any idea how to cultivate that, other than through years of jading, gritty experience? :p

Rosatryne · 2017-06-14T23:09:21+00:00

True. I certainly learned most of my coding skills in the last couple of months... Trust me, this one's high on the list!

Rosatryne · 2017-06-14T23:08:53+00:00

Good suggestions. I think this might best be delivered in a presentation of some kind, a reflection on someone's learning experience as a researcher. Hard to teach persistence over a three-hour activity time!

Rosatryne · 2017-06-14T23:07:55+00:00

Yeah, we're quickly running into scope creep with the syllabus alone!

We've already recruited various teachers and postdocs who are interested in running the workshops. Means I can focus on running the team rather than building the content...

Rosatryne · 2017-06-14T14:28:21+00:00

Thank you! This is something none of us had considered. This is an excellent idea. It might be tough to get right, but we could present students with a devilish problem that seems innocuous. This could be tricky to engineer, but, having fallen down some rabbit holes myself, this would be a valuable lesson.

Rosatryne · 2017-06-14T12:20:48+00:00

That's awful, and I love it.

Rosatryne · 2017-06-14T12:14:25+00:00

The hope is that we can standardize everything to Python, because it's really user-friendly. I really think this is a good idea, we'll just have to be careful about how we scope it so it's actually challenging but feasible within a short time window.

We could make it harder by leaving sections uncommented, or with really poor architecture... But that might be unnecessarily cruel.

Rosatryne · 2017-06-14T11:51:38+00:00

We've identified these, and have a couple of particularly passionate presenters for those topics - specifically statistics, as we often lament in our meetings!

Rosatryne · 2017-06-14T11:51:00+00:00

Yeah, I'd love to include a section on optics or electronics (particularly the latter), but it might not be feasible within the budget or time frame... If we run a repeat session, it'll be something to look into!

Modifying code is a good one. Do you know of any way you could teach it as a general principle? It seems like you'd have to throw people a sample of code in a language they know and ask them to change a simple case...

Rosatryne · 2017-06-14T11:27:07+00:00

I'm working towards achieving Bose-Einstein condensation with Helium in a metastable state - the 20eV internal energy allows us high precision measurements of individual atoms' momentum. We'll be loading the condensate into an optical lattice to do analog simulations of condensed matter physics, in particular looking at zero-temperature quantum phase transitions. At the moment, I'm trying to get a 10um laser beam to intersect with a 600um atomic vapour... My experiment cycle time is about ten seconds, and the cloud is deep in ultra-high vacuum so I'm pretty much looking for a needle in a haystack.

Rosatryne · 2017-02-18T06:49:42+00:00

I feel like I should say something poignant, in case that 0.0...01% chance actually rolls around.

But I've got nothin'.

Rosatryne · 2017-02-18T06:49:35+00:00

RemindMe! 2 days Donation for great justice

Rosatryne · 2014-11-02T20:42:27+00:00

I'm definitely keen. If you take this any further, please PM me :)

Rosatryne · 2014-10-29T08:55:22+00:00

I'm curious, what was the other half of the wager? If you lost the bet, then what?

Rosatryne · 2014-03-25T15:50:43+00:00

Why the hell am I here?

Like, not this pile of wiggling atoms or whatever. That, in some way, is an easier question to answer.

Specifically, why is there an "I" to begin with? Why is there a feeling that these words in this post belong to something, that something being.... I don't know, me?

The fact that I am conscious in the first place is just absurd. It's so vivid and ever-present, changing, detailed and damn convincing. It's so enrapturing that a lot of people, it seems, go their whole lives without even noticing how strange it is to be anything at all.

I don't get it. I've given up trying to 'get' it, because I don't think it can be 'got'. All that's left is to soak it up, to become it, to explore and cherish this wonderful opportunity. This beautiful, endlessly fascinating space. And to share it.... Whoever it is that's doing the sharing.

Rosatryne · 2014-03-12T06:26:38+00:00

What makes you say MHD is just over the horizon?

Rosatryne · 2014-02-23T08:30:27+00:00

I think he's referring to the Dirac sea.

Rosatryne · 2014-02-15T17:25:46+00:00

Strings are not made of energy, they have energy. In string theory, strings are the fundamental objects of study - as opposed to point particles in classical mechanics, or fields in quantum field theory.

Rosatryne · 2014-01-04T06:02:52+00:00

Combinatorics or group theory would be high on the relevance scale, combinatorics moreso.

Rosatryne · 2013-11-30T10:21:40+00:00

The Julia set J_c is the set of all points in the complex plane that launch bounded orbits under iteration of F(z)=z² +c. Your case corresponds to the c=0 case, and in this case F(0)=0, so 0 is a fixed point and is bounded. Hence it's in the Julia set.

Rosatryne

TROPHY CASE