w/c 15th Feb: Metaphorical Noodles

It struck me this week that a good analogy for this time of year is noodles. As in, long and thin – not wet and floppy. Bear with me and I’ll try to explain.
Academia isn’t so much a feast or famine job, more feast or very well fed: there’s always more you could be doing, but some periods are more chocabloc than others. This is one such season.  That means there are lots of little jobs that need doing, and there is no chance you can free up a day or half day to work on one thing. Everything has to be tackled piece by piece. Each day (apart from delivering teaching, supervising PhD students, attending meetings and helping out with Open Days), I have an assignment to mark, a foot force rig to make, an upate to FATKAT to implement, two theses to examine, two of my own students whose theses need feedback and the WHISPER prototypes to build. That’s eight things to juggle.

That means that each day, I spend some time reading my students’ theses; some time making a prototype; and some time reading theses to examine. This also means that each thing takes a long time: I’ve the least three weeks working on all eight things in parallel. You’ll note that papers and proposals have been dropped entirely. The rigs and prototypes are the priority right now, for if they aren’t ready in the current window of opportunity, then that’s it: all papers and grant applications that would follow from them blink abruptly out of existence. So it’s short term pain for long term gain. You have to play the long game.

Of course, this means a period of the classic “doing much but getting nothing done”. You work for little, but none of these things are completed. Of course, the smart time manager breaks their tasks into smaller goals. Design it; make it; test it; calibrate it; read this chapter. All of which is a long-winded way of saying that this week was more of the same. Not very interesting for a blog, but hey – that’s life. In the coming week or so, we hopefully have a Stuart Murray seminar on Johnny Mnemonic and post humanism; an IMPRESS workshop on foecal incontinence; and the first WHISPER focus group.

So if you’re thinking: I wish he’d shut up about all the interesting things he’s working on and get to some actual results – your wish will soon be granted. Except for the shutting up bit. :op

w/c 8th Feb: Exhibitions and Open Days

February is one of our busiest times of the year. Open days are in full swing, coursework from the end of last semester needs marking (noting that Semester 1 ends at the end of the January exam period - not Christmas), and new coursework is being set. And teaching needs to be delivered and research and papers and admin, of course. And the undergraduate projects are in full swing now: and this week it was exhibition time. The level 3 Product Design students had their interim exhibition on Thursday, which meant seven solid hours of viva and marking; the level 4 team projects were demonstrating their progress.

All busy times, but also the point where projects become very real: moving from theory to prototype. It's a satisfying point. Had I thought more about it, I'd have taken some photos to share. But I was so busy marking it totally slipped my mind - there's a lesson for next year!

What else this week? Sixteen hours of teaching, seven of marking, five of reading theses and four of applicant day didn't leave a lot of spare time. I did, however manage to attend a presentation by the IMechE's Denis Healy on getting registered for CEng. It's been on my mind for a while now: I'll have been graduated 15 years this summer. It's about time I put myself forward, or I never will.

And WHISPER, of course. I've finalised the design of the Wearable Haptic Assessment Toolkit (WHAT - I couldn't resist it). I just need to get the parts and build them now. Exciting times!

w/c 1st Feb: A FATKAT milestone

If I were to adopt a catchphrase, it would probably end up being: "It's been a funny old week...". That's the phrase with which I nearly always start the drafts of these posts: I try to remove it, just to avoid starting every post the same way.

It's true, though: one of the blessings and curses of academia is that there is no "normal". By their nature, teaching and research change constantly, and you never really do the same thing twice. The job is always fresh.

This has been a busy week: an Applicant Day, nine hours' teaching, an assignment in for marking, two theses to read for examination and one to read as it readies resubmission following corrections, a paper to finish reviewing, getting further to grips with prototyping for WHISPER. Oh, and a must-see presentation from Professor Gordon Marshall, who heads up the Leverhulme Trust (funders of Together Through Play, you may recall).

But when I wasn't doing all that, there was just one thing on my mind: getting the latest iteration of FATKAT installed for Will Shaw to start data gathering. This took a bit of doing. A lot of the changes have focused on usability: batch processing (so you don't need to process a day's work one file at a time), more robust calibration (so you can't inadvertently ruin everything by mistyping a file name) and allowing user-definition of input channels (so if wiring changes, you don't need to dig into the code and change gravity offsets manually). 

Also installing the new manipulandums. They feel a slightly retrograde step, since they're made of Lego (like the original version from two years ago!), but they offer so many benefits over the more complex 3D printed version we were using.