Why rEEsearch?

Here are this years EE students and for the first time ever (I don't have such a good memory so this might not be true) all of them have finished ahead of time. Supervising an EE can be a real headache or it can be easy, it depends on the student and whether they can cope with their chosen research question. This year has been easy :-)
In our next staff meeting we are going to discuss whether there should be a cap on the number of EEs one teacher can supervise. 5 is the suggested number. Personally I think the number is irrelevant, it totally depends on how well organised the students are.

Last class they gave a short introduction to their research to the rest of the class, I think I will make this an annual event. This years EEs were on the following topics:

• The relationship between the frequency of a singing wine glass and the density of liquid (not wine) in the glass.
• An investigation into the role of refraction in the pen in a bottle trick.
• The relationship between finger spacing and the drag force experienced by a swimmers hand.
• Measuring the drag coefficient for different car design using a home made wind tunnel.
• The relationship between the refractive index of water and temperature.
• The relationship between the magnitude of acceleration of a body of water and angle of its surface.
• The relationship between the roughness of the surface of a spinning cylinder and the Magnus force.

In a recent lesson Ismar questioned why on Earth Sir David Brewster bothered to carry out experiments to determine the angle that gives full polarisation of reflected light. That was from someone who has spent the past month measuring the angle of a water surface accelerating across the lab. The irony was not wasted.