Peter Hill Explains

Peter Hill Explains

By Peter HillNatural Sciences
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Peter Hill Explains episodes

  • Podomation Update - 30
    A standard story of bug identification and repair. The quality feedback system is rolled out, but the template had to reflect the number or questions, and a few cosmetic essentials like carrying through carriage returns into the automated authoring of web pages. There is a more or less routine list of things to do to make the Quizzes more usable like produce a PDF of answers for the class test. It is relatively straight forward to place them in a mobile phone APP. Now there is nothing remotely militaristic about automation of quizzes however the social transformation and shaping people up for a strategic objective comes straight from the doctrines of Mechanization of army units. There are a lot of people who have written on this, some from the wrong side of history some infected with the madness of their age. However you need not just the central asset mechanized, all the support and command and control has to be mobile and able to follow it out into the field. We or rather I have to engage getting the right skill sets in the right people with a clear vision of what is going down. It all sounds easy but the solution is not there yet. MP4 recording     MP3 recording -- -- Your browser does not support the audio element.
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  • Experiment Design Preliminaries 2
    This experiment is going into uncharted territory for many of us. It is however simple enough to be profound, and profound enough to be simple. It has the right mix of it is surely simple enough I ought to understand and dumbfounding connection to big idea physics. Now this is probably too long, however pitching the talk to people who I know have been left behind through no fault of their own has meant I have slowed and dug deeper. It is going to be a collective effort to get this experiment built, explained and marketed. As always there is a long haul of insightful near misses before we hit the target on this one. The key ideas here is the use of a copper conduction wire that is glued to the top a ferite rod, then some loops and exit out the axis down the bottom and then support a tensioning mass. Another idea is the use of a twin pole relay that really shows what the current is doing. If you hit the resonant frequency of the pendulum the universe will come to the party to conserve momentum. MP4 recording     MP3 recording -- -- Your browser does not support the audio element.
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  • Simple Circuit Quiz
    This Quiz should be published with quality insights on one button press. Let's hope it does. It really shows me how having deeper insights makes it that much harder for an instructor: In this case I have moved onto understanding circuits in terms of electric fields from photonics and radio frequency circuits. Also there is the fundamental understanding that the common battery is a transportable electro-chemical cell. It really shouldn't be called dry or wet but more a moist cell. I am gaining little bits of time like typing this while Audacity does it thing. I hope I have hit all those technical things the pros are fussy about. Here goes the single button press. Fingers crossed! All up and ready "no worries" as we say in Australia.  I will have to dissect what is going on with no line breaks coming through in the automatic publication of podcasts and also I will have to feed forward the counting of questions in the Podcast-Atoms.  In this format I can do noise removal,  but I would also appreciate some of the finer feed back on the audio quality enhancement. I will do some low level enhancements, then get on to structuring the explanation brackets so the support each other, then move from the atoms back into the podcast which promises to be a painful process. I will move the posting of the podcast forward ahead of the upload so I can get on with parallel development while it is composing and uploading in background. Quiz ToolboxSimple Circuit Quiz: Trailer Simple Circuit Quiz: Radio Program Style Simple Circuit Quiz: Class Test Simple Circuit Quiz: Just the information Welcome to the Quiz Toolbox for Left click to play any of that above files. Right click and select "save link as", then select your devices drive or your USB to download and play on the go or in class. To down load right click "save link as" the following link. Simple Circuit Quiz:All files Podcast-Atoms for Quality Feedback
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  • New Scientist 24 Nov_5
    I was very skeptical at the start of the plant learning article. I feel there were experiments but there was capacity to really extend the results by doing a large series of varied test, and not double blind, but at least some controls where the experimenter did not know the history of the plant they were looking at. The Victoria and Albert museum opening in east London seems it could have happened in Australia with developers trying to make sense of an old Olympics site. There is something special about an large museum storage collection that I feel gets lost having a see-though roof. I am sure the light will damage some items and the layer of dust and the smell is just part of the authentic gig. The use of hallucinogenic drugs to treat mental disorders has me really troubled simply because we have not had them for so much of human history. Drugs have entered human society by really getting into the social rituals, and the societies have evolved in response to them. There is something like the guava root in Papua New Guinea and the leaf the Somalians chew that makes them very aggressive. From my perspective I see television and the internet as having elements of hallucinogenic drugs. Although I don't propose this as a theory or lens with which to dissect our world, I do think marketer, politicians and those who sense the power of a social mind or consciousness are thinking in these terms. The lastword section which host a reader question and reader answer forum has a real eye opener on the chemistry of albumen in eggs. The gas transport and the response to carbon dioxide is amazing and reflects the role of acidity related to carbon dioxide that allows the blood to intelligently oxygenate cells that are releasing carbon dioxide as they function. On reflection the description of eggs going from too fresh to definitely stale by in degrees laying on their side in water, slowly standing on end then floating seems something to nail with time-lapse photography. MP4 recording     MP3 recording -- -- Your browser does not support the audio element.
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  • New Scientist 24 Nov_4
    Another article that gives an unlikely theory a run for the sake of words. The sterile neutrino or fourth neutrino is really and exercise in wishful thinking. It was nice to hear some words from my old Physics tutor at Melbourne University I find paying for access to research papers really rather frustrating when I want to check things out. 2.5 million papers published a year is awe inspiring probably too many. MP4 recording     MP3 recording -- -- Your browser does not support the audio element.
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  • New Scientist 24 Nov_3
    The issue of disposable nappies being hard to actually dispose of as a civilization is discussed. I think it speaks to a larger issue of the overall inefficiency of non communal living. There are many issues I would like explained to me about the science of landfill, but that is just me. The human cell atlas article had lots of information but I felt missed out on some nice themes under the surface. It seems less pompous that the Human genome project but I would still like to know the more about the approach of the two women who appear to have got it going. I think there is real scandal underlying the demise of nuclear energy in Germany. The issue I see is that coal and fossil fuel have a much simpler business model and scale to make a quick buck. I could imagine powerful business interests melting into the Green lobby. It is one of those things we will only find out when the world is about to totally fry. MP4 recording     MP3 recording -- -- Your browser does not support the audio element.
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  • New Scientist 24 Nov_2
    The spread of tool technology is interesting in its own right. Beginning at 3 million years ago nothing much happened for 2 700 000 years then we get some real innovation happening. The photo in the article has some multi-views of the same tool and it gives it a mass produced look yet the repeats are just multiple images of the same tool. The key thing here is that our modern Homo sapiens are late comers to the innovation party. The article on termite mounds is actually quite amazing, to think an insect covering a size of land the area of the UK and not being able to find one central queen chamber. I would like it if they published a kmz of the area. The article on the ultra diffuse galaxy seems to be riddled with contradictions and is rather hard to follow. At 9500 light year span it is less than 10 percent the width of the Milky Way. The real story here, and the star of the show is European space telescope GIA which is just nailing all the distances using parallax. My concern is that the variable light distance estimates using variables require relative magnitudes that would be near impossible to pin down through the central fog of our galaxy. MP4 recording     MP3 recording -- -- Your browser does not support the audio element.
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  • New Scientist 24 Nov_1
    I must own to being skeptical about plant learning and memory. I am struggling on how I could adapt anything I know about these areas that could accommodate. The article on the end of the Prototype Kilogram really plunged me into a nightmare. Saying that plank's constant was the smallest unit of energy is part of the madness I encounter from teachers at school. This idea has even crept into the syllabus with thousands of kids learning that the energy of the atom is quantized. Then the use of kibble balance seems very poorly described. The article actually sucked a bit of hope out of me. MP4 recording     MP3 recording -- -- Your browser does not support the audio element.
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  • Deep Look at Schools
    There is a system in New South Wales of split school and statewide exams to generate an end of school mark. In a nutshell the intention is create the optimum application of human investment to generate the largest growth of human capital. A lot ultimately depends on getting the right people with right capabilities in the right spot. It might be first responders in a disaster, surgeons cutting you open, sensitive people with the insight to save a culture. Poor decisions now, contracts lost to more agile neighbouring country can all be traced back to what is happening in Education. The current formula means its all about getting the best team to sit the exam, and giving that group a edge at the expense of a broader education. I sense I have the ideas together on this but it is still away to go to make a cogent narrative. MP4 recording     MP3 recording -- -- Your browser does not support the audio element.
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  • Podomation Update - 29
    I am surprised that Podimation Updates have gone onto issue 29 and looking at the scale of the enterprise some more must surely follow. The story goes a bit like this. Isolated from work place rehabilitation I had to work on my craft , turning ideas into speech, no matter the conditions handed me. This is a key element of teaching, but by no means sufficient. However if you can't get the concept across you are sunk. On reflection it would be a wise idea to get the correct concept across while you were at it. On further reflection, if flawed concepts where in play but the scoring system was set up to entrench them ... hang on we are in for some serious podcasting. Now rehab, diet is not a workday Monday to Friday affair. It is total, always aiming higher, all skills sets one by one then integrated. Harking back to a lifetime ago as a soldier you had to navigate, eat, protect yourself from the sun, think as a team and this was before you do things people imagine. Being in training you not only get the principles but you embody them, that sense of urgency and drive gets ignited. So those in the game will understand the mix of Podcasting while walking. Listeners... they will sort themselves out. So first on the Mobile phone. Hang on here, I have to convert a Samsung file type to MP3. How does the Podcast mechanism work? To be honest for this last question I can see paying money is most advertised solution, and the rest is a bit murky. Also the rate and focus on cognitive rehab (recall, programming, putting in Apps that sort of thing) that is not what most of the market is at. It seems to be about making money to pay people that help you. Fine, it seems like some sort of Global Tupperware party where all the action is. My soul however is drawn into the Strategy wilderness, dimly lit, with the moon shining through on to peaks that in the gloom seem distant. So, no fuss no bother, while all around is falling into decay a happy National Instruments programming we will go. The art of the long program is to decorate with diagnostics. Then it is to build functional blocks with inputs and outputs so you can swap them in and out as you upgrade, or rather switch the upgrade on and off. Here is also the long journey of do it yourself or harness the force of open source. While the latter is always to the way to go, it is a big hairy beast to domesticate and it is not clear how it does what it does and what resources it takes to do it, the former, doing it yourself, educates and frustrates you on the process you are thinking off. Its like going to a shed company to buy just the right shed after you have struggled for years to build the shed of your dreams. I hope you can see where this is going. You start building a reconfigurable library of parts. Imagine setting up to build a motorcycle, then fool around a sedan car, station wagon, then bus then looking up aeronautics you start firing up jet engines. In real life I actually built a jet engine when I was 16, it was highly educational. It is not too emotional working through the technology but there is definitely a higher level that gives it a spirit and a life of its own. There are writers that capture the Zen of mechanization, but they are not in the popular stream, but I would also say the passion and vision exudes from the page. If I can be so crass as to quote my own paper: "Automation is our conceptualization of the future". The humble automatic supermarket door presupposes an enormity of cultural imaging and social choreography. Enter left field the Quiz. At its heart is ROSA reverse order synthetic answers. This means if you do things back ward you can trace up the decision tree without having to manage forks. Mathematically it is really clear, it is always a bit of struggle in the linguistic dimension. When the reverse order approach misses things you often find that there is some structure problem in the question. So you start the Quiz source podcast with explanations, then phase the
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About Peter Hill Explains

From the publisher's feed

You are welcome to listen in as I "explain things scientific". I have had great fun with lasers, robots and absorbing Quantum Physics. Now as a classroom teacher, laid low by heart surgery its time…