Made for each other: liquid nitrogen and 1,500 ping-pong balls It's the rare scientific mind that has the pure intellectual chutzpah to tackle a problem that has troubled boffinry since the discovery of cryogenics – namely, "What happens if you combine liquid nitrogen with 1,500 ping-pong balls?" C'mon, don't tell The Reg that question hasn't crossed your mind. It hasn't? Well, then you …
This trick is very very old one for folks trained in the field of Low Temperature Physics. I remember seeing this done in the 1970's while in graduate school, and the person who did it was in his 60's and claimed to have first seen it when he was in graduate school.
More. Look carefully at the audience. Zoom into fullscreen if you have to. You will see that these are not the 9k paying students you are looking for.
This looks like a circus run for the entertainment of candidate foreign students during an open day tour. If memory serves me right you are allowed to charge these more than the base 9k fee which locals have to pay.
The kids paying the £9k/year (that a lot of these kids still don't seem to have realised they only pay back long AFTER they use the service) who get the direct benefit of the education and increased lifetime financial earnings makes more sense to me than a cleaner on £15k/year struggling to make ends meet paying their £9k for them.
Sure, if you want 10% of the population to go to Uni society can afford it. At 50%, it's not sustainable, and those who benefit should pay more of a contribution.
I'm sorry if I can't bring myself to weep for these kids.
No, you can't bring yourself to weep for these kids. You're rich enough for your kids to be able to go whaterver the fee and it's the only the plebs and chavs that will be put off going by the 9 grand a year price tag.
An educated workforce obviously does nothing for the economy as a whole, and the last thing we need is a group of working class oiks getting above themselves because they have an "education"....
The way these new rules actually work means that many of them will never actually pay back as much as I will, as I was under the original Labour rules which were "You WILL pay the whole lot back unless you die first. And no, you still owe us the money even if you're bankrupt."
Thus the boundaries and repayment rates meant that some student would be paying the interest on the student loan for their entire life.
It got changed a couple of years later to "We'll write off the remainder after 25 years", but the boundaries still meant that many would pay back more than the original loan amount.
The new rules are writing off after 30 years, but now the boundaries are such that the national average pays back £33k total on a loan of £27k, and most of those below average earnings will have paid back less than they borrowed before the write-off.*
So how exactly does that loan put them off?
Unless of course it's because they can't do the maths, in which case they probably shouldn't be doing a science, maths or engineering degree anyway, so job done at promoting those!
* Source: BBC Student Finance
Yep, just been working this out myself. For each student that doesn't become a "high earner", i.e. 60K (*) plus before they are 40, the government (thats us) will end up spending more than they (we) would by paying the fees up-front. Mind you the private companies involved will do quite well out of it, so thats nice.
(*) excl inflation
Already happening at my work place. They come straight out of Uni and end up same place I am working as there isn't any other jobs. But once here they seem to think they are better because they have a bit of paper, I make sure I put them back in their place quick smart. Not only are they lazy and weak but can't even do basic problem solving on the job. People must realise we can't all be doctors otherwise everything we have in society will crumble. Uni is just a sham to take people's money and keep it looking like governments are doing something. What is the bet there will probably be uni degrees for cleaning sooner or later! Laugh all you like now but there are already uni courses for topics that clearly don't need it.
Here is just a sample of some of the most rediculous, But there are many many others.
http://www.toptenz.net/to-10-useless-college-classes-degrees.php
The problem with your argument is how you go from 50% to 10%. You seem to think that the way to restrict the numbers is to make sure that only the rich can afford to go to university. I would argue that it's more important to encourage the less well off to get a degree, as their prospects are often worse.
" You seem to think that the way to restrict the numbers is to make sure that only the rich can afford to go to university."
I feel I have to butt in here and say that didn't get that sentiment from the OP. On the contrary, they seemed to be bemoaning the fact that we had gone from 10 to 50 and *as a consequence* had to ditch the previous system.
just my 2p worth....
It used to anoy the hell out of me that in the past, when kids who's parents were on low incomes and all the tuition fees were paid for by the state and recived grants to live on for the time they were at uni, only to piss off overseas and take on well paid jobs and not paying uk tax repaying the investment the state made in them.....
with student loans, at least they are investing in their own futures.
The student loan system will if anything stop the masses of people doing nonsense courses that never leave to a job, but they see it as better than getting a job in the first place.
If anything, I think the state should write off a % of the loan for each year they are paying tax in the UK so that people can be out of debt for their studies sooner.
It does not bother me or my daughter that she is likely to be 40k+in debt by the time she finishes uni. she will be well qualified as a dentist and be earning more than that each year
I would have thought that the most scholastically gifted would be the best ones to go through University.
It should have nothing to do with how rich daddy is.
Having a bunch of rich knuckleheads coasting through a soft arts degree on daddies dollar is no better or worse than having a bunch of poor knuckleheads coasting through a soft arts degree on the taxpayers dollar, except for the fact that I don't have to pay for daddies little princess I guess.
What you need to do is educated everyone to a level, then subsides University courses that produce graduates in a needed fields.
i.e. take medicine or engineering and the course is free - take media studies, sport science or drama charge £15k a year. Then when you have enough engineers and doctors start raising the fees. But the chances are you'll never have enough doctors an engineers; the rich will still send their kids to University to do History and modern art but we wont be subsiding muppet's who are just putting off working in a call center for another 3-4 years so they can piss it up.
"Sure, if you want 10% of the population to go to Uni society can afford it. At 50%, it's not sustainable, and those who benefit should pay more of a contribution."
I'd rather we as taxpayers paid for that 10% to go to university assuming that they go on merit alone (which I'd admit is hard to enforce). The current system of churning out tens of thousands of rubbish graduates that can barely spell their own names and have zero interest in their subjects is no use.
While I do think that learning should not be dreary, and neither accompanied by whipping and memorizing, I also am unconvinced that a 5 minute-stunt at an expense, even a relatively low one, is anything but a stunt, a marketing exercise by this good university.
Instruction this is not. Explanations given immediately before, seemingly to unprepared students, no calculation done. Is this the tertiary education of the nouveau rich; entertainment to get them kids off their iPhone5 for some minutes with a bang? Silly laughter, exit, and the assistants cleaning the floor nicely from glass debris and collecting 1500 ping-pong balls. Thank you.
Lets see some of what the experiment demonstrated:
Liquid / gas transition. materials strength, thermodynamics, Newtonian physics and much more.
That one demonstration can provide hours of lectures across multiple fields. Instead of dreary diagrams trying to get a point across they can refer directly to the demonstration, something that the students will vividly remember and something that takes it out of the realms of classroom theory into a real world example.
You are also confusing laboratory work with a demonstration. If this was laboratory work then the students themselves would be setting up the experiment and the instruments to take the measurements. Thinking about it, there's another lecture for you. He can ask the students how they would set it up as an experiment, what they would measure and how, what it would tell them etc...
It is pity that your lack of imagination and your obvious prejudices limit you so much.
There are some studies that point out that the dreary approach (rote memorization and lengthy practice drills) actually yields better long-term results. I don't know why, but I think it's because that combined with a very high competitive bar (I think they were comparing Japan in this case, which tends to foster mutual competition) tends to make the students focus, and focused learning tends to stick better because there's a motivation behind it..
I think you'll find it is useful in demonstrating the amount of force that can be generated by a liquid evaporating (albeit one that does so at -196C). Most would not have realised that this level could occur from such a small amount of liquid. That bin bounces a long way up.
Perhaps you don't know of the Purdue University "Light a barbecue with liquid oxygen" video which went viral on the early public Internet? It's said it significantly increased applicants for science courses at Purdue. This is a good example of low-cost marketing. True. But whoever said that universities don't need to do it?
I went to completely the wrong university for what I wanted to do (Cambridge, as it happened) because in my day there was too little information about different universities and different courses. With so much information nowadays, stunts like this may cause students to read up on a university they would not otherwise have considered, that may be better suited to their interests and needs. So don't knock it.
Learning how to learn is the most important lesson, sometimes you can do this with a bang rather than a book, if everybody was the same then teachers would only need to teach one way.
We are not all the same, this experiment may well have enthralled one student enough to study physics, if this is the case that's *enough* to make the whole exercise it, maybe it's those cool things which excites people enough to ask "what if".
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Not in our classes they weren't. One of the chemistry teachers was fond of making water by lighting balloons filled with a 2:1 mixture of hydrogen and oxygen. Used to wake up those sleeping through maths in the classrooms below the lab.
We had accidental ones too though. Mine involved a probable toluene residue from the previous day in a test tube used for a nitration experiment. Oops :)
This stuff has a long history. I have a 1910 chemistry textbook which describes and experiment in which a long lead tube is filled with a mixture of carbon monoxide and oxygen. At one end is a boiling tube in a large shield. The other end is sealed and a spark generated. Of course it has a serious purpose: to show the speed of flame propagation in a gas/oxygen mixture. The reduction of the boiling tube to sand grains is just a little added flourish.
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