Plato: “Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.”
Researchers are under enormous pressure in the academia. This pressure has coined the term "publish or perish" which means a researcher has to publish frequently high-quality research results. It is considered as the strength of a scientist if he/she continuously publishes in journals.
For an early career researcher, this would make it possible to secure a tenure-track position in an academic institution. Senior scientists, also often tend to show off their competency in research by showing off the statistic of their publication records.
Nowadays, one of the most common questions in the academia is “how many papers have you published?” or similar questions about citations or H-index. Some others look at the impact factor of the journal one publishes as a measure of the success. However, many scientists believe one should ask“what contributions have you made?”
Unfortunately, the demands of the academic system, to publish more and more, enforces many academics to publish without having a novel idea, or even a new result. Such issues could be avoided, if qualitative measures are introduced and used rather quantitative measures to judge the performance of a researcher.
Engineer, entrepreneur and philanthropist, Dr Alan Finkel, is expected to be declared Australia’s new Chief Scientist.
He will take over the role once the sitting Chief Scientist, Professor Ian Chubb, finishes his five-year stint in the job on December 31 this year.
Finkel was most recently Chancellor of Monash University, a post he has held since 2008. He is also the President of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE).
Finkel is an outspoken advocate for science awareness and popularisation. He is a patron of the Australian Science Media Centre and has helped launch popular science magazine, Cosmos.
He is also an advocate for nuclear power, arguing that “nuclear electricity should be considered as a zero-emissions contributor to the energy mix” in Australia.
The Australian Academy of Science (AAS) President, Professor Andrew Holmes, has welcomed the expected appointment of Alan Finkel to the Chief Scientist’s role.
“The Academy is looking forward to the government’s announcement, but Professor Finkel would be an excellent choice for this position. I’m confident he would speak strongly and passionately on behalf of Australian science, particularly in his advice to government,” he said.
“The AAS and ATSE have never been closer; we have worked together well on important issues facing Australia’s research community, including our recent partnership on the Science in Australia Gender Equity initiative.”
Professor Holmes also thanked outgoing Chief Scientist, Professor Ian Chubb, for his strong leadership for science in Australia, including establishing ACOLA as a trusted source of expert, interdisciplinary advice to the Commonwealth Science Council.
“Since his appointment, Professor Chubb has been a tireless advocate of the fundamental importance of science, technology engineering and mathematics (STEM) skills as the key to the country’s future prosperity, and a driving force behind the identification of strategic research priorities for the nation,” Holmes said.
This story was edited at 4:25pm AEDT to reflect that the government has yet to make an official announcement of the appointment of the new Chief Scientist.
It often happens that we want to draw some graphs with few traces that have sharp resonances/sharp peaks, etc. As illustrated in the below figure, flat parts of the curve get a lot of markers, while sharp parts get only few markers, if any. An illustration of the problem is in the figure below:
Too many markers in the slow area, and only few markers in the sharp area
Matlab users often have this problem (I had this issue very often when I used it to draw graphics). This issue can be avoided in graphs drawn by pdfLaTeX and PGFplots by the following trick.
\makeatletter\tikzset{
nomorepostactions/.code={\let\tikz@postactions=\pgfutil@empty},
mymark/.style 2 args={decoration={markings,
mark= between positions 0 and 1 step (1/20)*\pgfdecoratedpathlength with{%\tikzset{#2,every mark}\tikz@options
\pgfuseplotmark{#1}%},
},
postaction={decorate},
/pgfplots/legend image post style={
mark=#1,#2,every path/.append style={nomorepostactions}},
},
}\makeatother
Here, we define a custom TIKZ style, and specify the maximum distance between adjacent points.
Sharp traces with equally spaced markers
This post is based on this answer from StackExchange.com. For additional info about this please see here.
A complete working example is as follows:
Can good teaching be measured and should it be rewarded?
John Croucher
The recent budget in the UK announced plans to allow universities that exemplify good teaching to increase their caps on fees, meaning they will be financially rewarded for good teaching practice. But how do you measure good teaching at university level? Student grades? Satisfaction surveys? Peer review?
I did my university education in the 1960s and, like all students even today, experienced the highs and lows of teaching ability. In one instance I was unfortunate enough to have the same lecturer (in mathematics) for three different subjects.
I never saw his face. The lectures consisted of him walking through the door and making a beeline for the blackboard where he wrote copious incomprehensible notes and formulas for 50 minutes before hastily retreating, while we were still copying them down. No questions please. If you did have a question, the response was always the same: “look it up in the library”.
Fortunately those “golden days” of teaching are long gone, including those lecturers who simply sat in front of the class and read the textbook, punctuating their monologue occasionally with “any questions?”. But it was irrelevant, as almost everyone was thinking about or doing something else. Curiously, in those days, lectures were still well attended despite their obvious shortcomings.
In the 1970s students at Macquarie University were fed up with poor teaching and set up their own system where anyone could submit comments and rate their lecturers. It was published annually as a magazine and was free.
The ‘golden days’ of teaching, where lecturers simply sat in front of the class reading the textbook, are long gone.from www.shutterstock.com
Although the administration may have been appalled and the outcomes heavily skewed (usually only unhappy students made submissions), there was no other “official” method of determining student satisfaction or measuring the ability of individual lecturers.
Some 50 years on and everything has changed, although good teaching can still be hard to define and there is no single way of measuring it. In my own experience as both a teacher and a student, I’ve found there are some key skills that good-quality teachers have in common.
They need to be creative, enthusiastic and clear, while keeping the information relevant and challenging. Those tired lecturers, who never vary from the same worn lecture notes or PowerPoint slides year after year until they reach retirement, do a great disservice to themselves, the students and their profession. Class discussion and participation are essential.
For the last decade I have lectured MBA students with an average age of 30, many of whom are in middle to high management positions. They do not want simply to be entertained, but actually want to learn something of substance that can be applied in the “real world”. Otherwise they see a course as a waste of their time and money.
Lecturers need to be creative, enthusiastic and clear. Class discussion and participation is essential.from www.shutterstock.com
Student surveys can be an imperfect indicator, but mature students can usually distinguish a “quality” teacher from a “popular” one, who might present an easy course that can be passed with little effort.
In this sense these students’ judgements generally coincide with what academic colleagues feel about the teacher as well. If they felt that a lecturer is delivering poor value for money they will be the first to complain to the Dean. I have always found student feedback very useful in shaping my lectures.
When it comes to undergraduates it is a little trickier. Lecture attendance can be as low as 20% as there is a multitude of material available on the web and attendance is not recorded. It wouldn’t make much sense to survey the small percentage who attend as they may well be biased in favour of the lecturer or else they wouldn’t be there.
Local rewards best
There needs to be a mechanism for surveying all enrolled students, perhaps online, although this may also mean you get answers from students who have never attended a lecture.
There is a school of thought that suggests any lecture survey results be published and freely available. Such public shaming of lecturers means that students, if there is a choice, will not enrol in their offerings but select classes taken by more highly fancied teachers who will then be overloaded with many more students.
Apart from job well done, rewards best come from the lecturers' institution or department.from shutterstock.com.au
This leads to the question of how excellent teachers can be rewarded for their efforts. On a national scale, there are currently the Australian Teaching Awards administered by the Office for Learning and Teaching, but these are very difficult to win and their future is uncertain, with changes to the Office for Learning and Teaching around the corner.
And so, apart from an inner glow for a job well done, rewards best come from a local level, most likely the lecturer’s own institution or department. These can provide their own prizes in the form of recognition with both a monetary reward and a certificate of some kind.
My faculty does this annually in terms of a Dean’s Award for Outstanding Teaching. Certificates are given out at a small ceremony. Any teaching award should have the impetus to be taken into account in the promotion process. John Croucher is Professor of Statistics at Macquarie Graduate School of Management at Macquarie University.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.
Point contacts -when two faces have only one point in common- are problematic for antennas and other electromagnetic devices. The problem is we cannot determine if current is going through the point junctions or not (as different simulation methods have different results).
What we get in the real world is slightly connected, or separated, which are similar structures with different outputs. In our recent paper "Point Contacts in Modeling Conducting 2-D Planar Structures" 1 published in IEEE Antennas Wireless Propag. Letters, We have a clear message for readers: "AVOID POINT CONTACTS" since manufacturing errors make the performance of your device unpredictable.
More details:
It is customary to look for the optimum shape of electronic devices with optimization methods. A common method to generate new geometries is by placing small rectangular patches at random places. A common problem of this routine is that it often yields to exotic shapes which include faces that do not touch except in one common point which is called point contact. These points are source of uncertainty in modelling, fabrication, and measurement of electronic and radiating systems.
It is not possible to fabricate such single point junctions in the real world. However, one often gets junctions that are slightly shifted, rounded, bridged, or chamfered. In the other words, it is either connected or not connected. To examine the issue, we simulated the similar structures with different junctions by using different computational methods. Impact of various junctions on dipole and loop antennas were modeled by method of moments (MoM), finite-difference time domain (FDTD), and finite-element method (FEM) solvers.
In this research, we studied current distribution, radiation pattern, and impedance properties. Radiation pattern defines the area that is going to be under antenna coverage (shape of the coverage), and impedance determines the maximum power that an antenna can radiate (extent of coverage). Different computational methods do not agree on modelling of the point crossing junctions which is a warning about uncertainty in using such junctions. For example, integral methods, believe that current cannot pass a point junction, while differential methods model the exact opposite results (current goes through the junction). In addition to current, other parameters like radiation pattern and impedance support that argument. On the other hand, solvers agree that a negligible change in the junction would significantly change antenna performance.
For example, some people can get out of the coverage if a piece of metal fills the gap between two chamfered cells (in the BTS antenna) and make two unconnected parts connected. Another impact is on power which leads to huge reduction of the coverage radius. For instance, if the output power of transmitter for FM radio is decreases by a factor of 10, then the range of coverage would be just 100 meters instead of 10km.
We proposed that one should consider bridging and chamfering of the conflicting cells to find optimized structures. This is a new approach which not only reports the problem, but also provides a solution which can revolutionize both antenna industry and optimization algorithms. 1 Thiel, D.V.; Shahpari, M.; Hettenhausen, J.; Lewis, A., "Point Contacts in Modeling Conducting 2-D Planar Structures," IEEE Antennas Wireless Propag. Letters , vol.14, no., pp.978,981, 2015 DOI:10.1109/LAWP.2014.2387437 arXiv: 1504.05944↩
A template for supplementary material of the manuscripts in IEEE format (IEEEtran.cls) is not wrapped up for the IEEEtran. For my latest manuscript (which is still under review), I needed to put some graphs in the supplementary, so I could gather these hacks from the web. I gathered all these HACKS couple of months ago, from different blogs, and sites for supplementary files of other journals. I could not find those blogs, so sorry for not providing reference.
I liked to change the section, figure, table, equation, citation numbering to include an additional S. The following should be inserted into preamble.
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% Hack For section headers starting with S\renewcommand{\thesection}{S.\Roman{section}}\renewcommand{\thesubsection}{\thesection.\Alph{subsection}}
To change the format of citations in the bibliography and the main text, a combination of natbib and IEEEtranN is needed
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% Hack for citation command % use bibnumfmt to change style at the end of the document\usepackage[numbers]{natbib}\renewcommand{\bibnumfmt}[1]{[S#1]}% citenumfont command adds S to all numbers\renewcommand{\citenumfont}[1]{\textit{S#1}}
Numbering of the figures and table are done with
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% Hack for making figures Say \figurename S\thefigure, e.g. Figure S1:\makeatletter\makeatletter\renewcommand{\fnum@figure}{\figurename~S\thefigure}\makeatother% Hack for making figures Say \figurename S\thefigure, e.g. Figure S1:\makeatletter\makeatletter\renewcommand{\fnum@table}{\tablename~S\thetable}\makeatother
And for the equations, we need the following
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% Hack for making SOM Equations Conform to Science Format% e.g. (S1), (S2), etc\renewcommand{\theequation}{S\arabic{equation}}
A drawback of this method is that \eqref is not working, but \ref command still works pretty good. :)
I also find it handy to cross-reference labels between main and supplementary document. In the supplementary, we need to reference to the aux file of the main file, like:
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\usepackage{xr}\externaldocument{Main}% Main.tex is the main file of the manuscript.
As you might guess \(\mathbf{E}\) and \(\mathbf{H}\) are electric and magnetic field densities. Therefore, \( \mathbf{E}\times\mathbf{H}^*\) refers to the Poynting vector \(\mathbf{s}\), which shows the direction of the flow of the electromagnetic energy.
Well, first post is always the most difficult one. I just decided to create this blog, because of a number of reasons. Maybe, the most important one is that not many blogs are around about my research. So, here I am. I try to write a post every few weeks (try to keep few down to one). I'm a PhD candidate at Griffith University. I am at the final stage to write up my thesis. I focus on antennas, electromagnetic waves, ...
