Day 23

Today I actually did some stuff!

First, I did a read through and edits of a paper Jen Flegg has been writing that is all about engineering students' perceptions of the usefulness of their maths units to both their later studies and to their careers (as well as some other matters too). It's quite interesting to see that many of them seem to trust that it is relevant, but don't actually see it themselves. Our conclusion, or probably more of a suggestion for improvement of the situation, is that this implies more collaboration is required between mathematicians and engineering academics in the design of these service mathematics units.

Jen is doing the Graduate Certificate in Higher Education (you basically get a scholarship to do it if you are a new staff member at QUT) and each of the units I think allows/requires you to undertake an action research project like this. It's really great I think. So many positives: improving teaching, improving learning, increasing publications, opening up new research areas.

After lunch, Tim and Graeme and I had a beer-meeting (over a bottle of chimay). We had a chat about extending some of my hybrid CA-PDE models to the third dimension. Tim is providing some really useful input since he knows things about solving reaction diffusion equations in three dimensions quite quickly using fancy intel libraries or something or other. Sounds great. We also talked about some work on arteries and lipid deposits and such - this seems to be a problem Peter Johnston from Griffith is working on (Peter may also be known as "father of 2010 Maths Dean's scholar Stuart")...I'm not too clear on this yet, but it seems like at the early stages, blood flow can be ignored and we simply look at the movement of the lipids through the artery wall using a porous media style model.

We've been without internet here at home for 3 days now - it's like the dark ages. Oh, except for the fact that I can tether my android and use that (thank god).