Recent Posts

Students plagiarise, professors get mad and universities draft policies. AI-based essay generators emerge and people begin to use them. Somewhere, an entrepreneur dreams of proctor drones monitoring online exams. What if many students don't want to plagiarise, but they simply do not know how to write with originality? Maybe plagiarism is just a symptom of inadequate preparation rather than generational laziness or an emerging digital dystopia. Here I consider the particular case of science education.

Many food processes are designed to either promote or prevent the physical separation of particles from liquids. The behaviour governing such separation phenomena is described using an equation known as Stoke's Law. Students of food science are familiar with this equation, although it is commonly misunderstood. Technical fixes for the physical instabilities in liquid foods are simple and long-standing, yet are sometimes mistrusted by the public. This short post discusses this equation and a simple interactive animation for developing intuition around the phenomena it describes.

I made a website when my academic job began to require more online teaching. The idea was to craft a space for exploring my personal and scholarly interests in a more integrated and informal way. Under time pressure, with little programming experience and a minimal amount of research, I chose WordPress as a publishing platform. This choice made it quick and easy to get a functioning site up-and-running, but creating the content soon became a chore. In parallel, I became a more proficient user of GitHub. For every incomplete blog post there was a new software project in a GitHub repository. For these and other reasons I have decided to migrate the website to GitHub. This post serves to outline my motivations and get this blog started.