Condensed concepts

I have a friend who works in a small college that offers Masters degrees in the humanities. In one program each student must do a thesis on a research topic over the course of a year. My friend spends a lot of time with the students, both individually and as a group, posing and refining a single question for each of their research projects. Last year while visiting I observed one of these sessions and also to have some discussions with individual students about their questions. The stages are roughly this. 1. The student picks a specific research topic. 2. The student proposes a specific question about the topic that they will aim to answer. 3. The student meets with their advisor to refine the question. Often this involves making it more specific and narrow so that it is manageable. 4. The student presents their question to the class (often about five students) who then discuss it and try and refine it further. 5. With this feedback the student again refines it. 6. The studen

When reflecting on the current state of an organisation (whether a university, a research group, an NGO, a funding agency, a state government department, a business, ...) it is natural to consider two questions. How did it get to where it is today? In particular, what is the origin of its current positive and negative properties? What can be done to move it in a positive direction in the future? Human organisations are complex and diverse, yet their evolution as they grow seem to exhibit certain universal features, that transcend both the purpose and the relative size of the organisation. There is a classic article, Evolution and Revolution as Organizations , by Larry E. Greiner, originally published by the Harvard Business Review in 1972. The article is summarised in the figure below. Greiner was solely concerned with businesses. However, this model has since been applied to other types of organisations. Aside: His article contains no data or references! Perhaps, his e

Two of my UQ colleagues have a nice preprint that brings together many fascinating subjects including strong electron correlations and MOF s. Again it highlights an ongoing theme of this blog, how chemically complex materials can exhibit interesting physics. A great appeal of MOFs is the possibility of using chemical "tuneability" to design materials with specific physical properties. A theory of the quantum spin liquid in the hyper-honeycomb metal-organic framework [(C2H5)3NH]2Cu2(C2O4)3 from first principles  A. C. Jacko, B. J. Powell What is a hyper-honeycomb lattice? It is a three-dimensional version of the honeycomb lattice. A simple tight-binding model on the lattice has Dirac cones, just like graphene. The preprint is a nice example how one can start with a structure that is chemically and structurally complex and then use calculations based on Density Functional Theory (DFT) to derive a "simple" effective Hamiltonian (in this case an antiferrroma

I have lots of experience giving talks, on a wide range of topics, and to a diverse range of audiences. Some people say I give nice talks. However, preparing good talks remains a struggle and requires a lot of work, particularly for a new topic and/or a new audience. This week I am give two such talks and have been getting some feedback on drafts. Here are the three questions I have to keep coming back to. Who is my audience? What is their background, interests, and prejudices? The talk MUST be tailored to my actual audience, not a different audience, including the audeince I might wish I had. What is the context of my talk? Why was I invited? Who is speaking before me and after me? When does my talk occur? A colleague recently told me to cut a lot of material/information from a draft simply because my talk  will occur on friday before lunch. The audience will be quite tired after five days of intense meetings, discussions, and presentations. This is quite different to givin