Talking about nuclear energy

The Wisconsin Public Utility Institute recently hosted a "Power Lunch" on Nuclear Energy. You can find most of the presentations posted there. The whole program was recorded for posterity in two segments. One for the morning and one for the afternoon. I was on the program, both giving a lecture on the nuclear fuel cycle in the morning (2:24:30) and on the panel discussion at the end (1:33:00).

The Pessimism of Youth

When we discussed nuclear non-proliferation in my class on Friday, none of the students could even imagine a world without nuclear weapons. While I admit that I don't expect it soon, I can imagine concrete steps towards it - a trajectory that would not be impossible to begin. I thought I was supposed to be the jaded and cynical one.

Fun engineering design competition - and effective too!

2nd Place Team
Originally uploaded by gonuke

At the 2008 ANS Student Conference @ TAMU this weekend, the organizers did a fantastic job pulling off an engineering design competition. We had tossed this idea around when we hosted the conference in 2004, but it was a huge failure on many levels. The biggest contributor to this success was getting us all into it when we were a captive audience - they also offered big $$ prizes.

Each table got a box of stuff - two thin dowels, a role of twin, some rubber bands, a plastic cup. a small plunger, springs, zip ties, a coil of wire.... and so on, with a small marble. The goal was to create a contraption that would keep the marble moving longest after starting it off. You could release it, but not push it, to start. There were a number of rules (more on that later) to limit what you could or couldn't do. Our table came 2nd.

We went with a simple pendulum supported by a bipod held in place with guy-wires. We suspended the cup and filled it with as much mass as possible. Finally, we put the plunger head upside down in the top of the cup with the marble - the shape of this surface was conducive to keeping the marble moving and wobbling even if the pendulum was slowing down.

Now for the rules - and the pedagogical value. The rules were designed to be simple. They defined what "moving" meant to avoid typical engineer arguments like the earth is always moving so the marble is too - or Brownian motion, etc. They also did not allow the contraption to be fastened to the table. (Some groups feel we ran afoul when we held our box with the endorsement of the judge - they were probably right!) These rules were quite clear an unambiguous. Less clear was the guidance on the size/footprint of the system.

As the instructions were given to us, we were told to fold our box flat and put it on the table - this was the footprint our system had to fit into. Some groups, including ours, took that to mean that the system must be built upon the flattened box. Others just assumed that any system that was smaller than the size of the flattened box was OK and that the box was available to be used as part of the building materials.

At least two pedagogical lessons:

• sometimes rules are vague - you have to interpret them for yourself
• diversity of opinions can lead to better design

Graduate student training

One of the things that I do as a professor is train graduate students to be productive scientists. There are many apsects to this: research, communication, and teamwork skills, and maybe even some teaching experience. The faculty-student mentoring relationship for these skills is well defined. Students expect to pick up these skills and look to the faculty member for help, either from direct instruction and feedback, or by following the example set by the faculty (hopefully a good example). In addition, over time, many people are working on resources to help with this.

But occasionaly I encounter a dimension that is more difficult: personality coaching. On one hand, many aspects of this are related to the other skills mentioned above. But on the other hand, when students have personalities that make it difficult for them to interact constructively with others, they have a hard time acquiring these other skills. It becomes a barrier to many of the other aspects.

More importantly, this aspect of the relationship between faculty and student is not well defined. It somehow seems more difficult to approach a student on this topic. Nevertheless, students who behave poorly can not only hamper their own professional development, but can interrupt the development of other students.

Perhaps there is room to develop resources to help us deal with this aspect too.

Mail Merging Postal Codes

I fought for too many hours trying to merge some labels and have all the postal codes be formatted correctly. Why does it need to be that hard? No matter where I looked, I could not find any information that made it clear how Word intepreted the columns of a data source and why it chose to force them to be numbers. As a result, no matter what I tried, Canadian postal codes came out as the number 0 in all cases. I had to give up...

RIP Oliver

Oliver was hit by a car and died two days ago. While it is true that we didn't always see eye to eye, I will miss having him around. Watching Moira's reaction has been fascinating. She has a very matter-of-fact sense of the whole incident and is anxious to tell as many people as possible about all the details she knows.

I am digging a grave for a soon to be held memorial. The vet suggested 5 ft.... That's a long way down. I think I will aim more for 3 ft, and put a big heavy rock on top.