Foreign Perspectives

A small wheelbarrow for the football trophies…

Arnold — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 01:29:06 PDT

Disappointingly we’ve been the only parents who’ve been there during the football coaching sessions this week but we’ve been well rewarded with a week long series of excellent football skills by everyone from the 6 year olds through to the 10 year olds taking part.

Our little guy has really taken to the game and managed to clock up 6 goals in one of the matches and he’s been picking up various prizes during the week with at least three trophies to be picked up this afternoon including both individual and team wins. Unfortunately, his big brother doesn’t seem to have accumulated quite so many so there’s a bit of disappointment in store when they start comparing trophy counts. We’re not sure how many are coming their way as there were just an amazing number of opportunities to pick things up during the course of the week and there’s a final tournament this morning before the prize giving in the afternoon.

The weather has been almost perfect for the week so far with just the right mix of cloud and sun so that nobody collapsed with heatstroke nor were we freezing. Supposedly it’s going to be pouring today so they’re relocating to the gym.

Good progress on the SXR270 ECA

Arnold — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 01:04:54 PDT

I finally got around to making a start on the ECA this morning and, surprisingly, have all three of the short questions finished.

I say surprisingly because when I first looked at them as I was travelling home from the course they looked more like long questions than short ones. I’ll not say a whole lot about them as the second two groups haven’t seen them yet but they’re basically variants of questions that have already been asked during the three themes of the course which I guess is as you’d expect. I only needed to look up one thing in the theme briefing notes which, hopefully, goes to show that I was paying attention during the week.

Next up is the write-up of the experiment. In principle that’s fairly easy but they’ve individual word counts for each section of the write-up which makes it harder. Some of those seem very tight too eg the maximum of 10 words for the title.

All being well, I’m hoping to get a complete first draft of everything tomorrow which is pretty good and will take away my excuse for putting off the astronomy assignment.

A bit of a surprise at Decathlon

Arnold — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 01:46:09 PDT

We’ve had a Decathlon card since our time living in France but since we’re into our second year back here we’ve obviously not used it for a while. Almost two years in fact.

Anyway, Belfast happens to be one of the first places that Decathlon has opened a UK store so we thought we’d pop in. It’s very much a French Decathlon that happens to be in Belfast with seemingly all the same products and even the very same trollies which, of course, can’t be used as they need a euro in them rather than a pound. Even the prices seem much the same which makes it one of the more expensive stores around unless you pick something up on one of their 60%+ off opening offers.

Amazingly it’s even French to the point of being able to use my French Decathlon card which is a level of internationalisation that’s very, very rarely seen which is quite a surprise. The website isn’t 100% in English yet but I managed to change the address of the card to here which is also something that’s rarely considered when a company goes international.

Sort-of settled on the big courses, but what about the little ones?

Arnold — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 09:10:41 PDT

Barring more changes from the OU (always possible these days), I’m pretty much settled on doing the main biology course (S204) along with the plants summer school (SXR375) next year.

However, that leaves a few options in terms of short courses that would be nice to fit in around those and in preparation for the plants and chemistry courses. What I don’t want to do is to finish up with the TMA overload that happened in March this year!

I figure that the plants short course would be nice preparation for the residential as I gather that I may not have reached the plants section of S204 before starting the residential. Similarly, it seems like an idea to get my chemistry back up to speed by way of the chemistry short course before I start on the main chemistry course in October next year. The game plan for both of those is to go for the lower workload rate so there’d be five months to do each of them. Sadly that means that I’d not be able to fit in the fossils course which is on its last run this November and sounds both easy and really interesting.

Investigative Biology (SXR270) day 7 – the final day!

Arnold — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:32:00 PDT

The disco last night took it’s toll on several people although surprisingly everyone in our group was in by 9.10am.

The final session on plants was the session with by far the most scientific feel about it as we were using all kinds of different techniques and equipment with it. Very much the culmination to the week in every way.

What we were doing was comparing the response of chlorophyll to various types and levels of light. To do that we first had to obtain the chlorophyll which started life as spinach from the local Tesco. We converted this to a liquid by way of mixing with assorted liquids and centrifuging the mixtures. Measurements were taken via a colorimeter after exposing a number of poisoned samples to the various types and levels of light for up to 3 minutes. As usual with the plant experiments this one didn’t produce the perfect results that you might expect but we not only looked the part but felt like scientists for this one.

Lunch was a little complicated as my usual addition to the meal of a couple of bottles of water wasn’t a runner when I was off to the plane so instead sweeties for the kids needed to be used to reach the magical £7. We’d a somewhat hurried lunch as the final lecture was to start as soon as we’d all sat down in the lecture theatre (yeah, we could all have gone down the take-away route, but nobody thought of it!).

The wind-down lecture concentrated on the ECA for the course which was handed out to us at the end. As expected it’s a write-up of one of the experiments (I’m going for the differences in respiration rate of brain and skin from Wednesday morning) and one short question from each of the themes. Well, they are titled short but some of them look relatively long to me but I’ve done little more than glance at them so who knows. Some of them look a little scary at the moment but then a lot of TMA questions can look scary at first glance.

Quite why they don’t hand the ECA out in advance is something of a mystery. We all knew that there was going to be a research write-up plus three questions before this week. Similarly we knew that we’d have to choose one of the nine possible experiments or rather eight as there’s one that doesn’t really work as a write-up. Likewise we knew that there’d be a short question on each theme and, really, it wouldn’t matter for the week if you did know what they were (I’m not going to say though or I’ll get told off… again).

Unsurprisingly we didn’t use Practical Biology today so we’ve all been lugging it around all week for nothing. I don’t even think that it’ll be needed for the ECA either. More annoyingly, some people appear to have incurred excess baggage charges thanks to bringing it along (as would I had BMIBaby weighed the case).

Useful to know is that Lenton Cabs (0115 9 781 781) only charge students £19 for the airport run vs the £35 of the airport taxis (and, yes, they can pick up from the airport for the same charge). Oh well, something to bear in mind when I’m doing the level 3 residential next year.

On that level 3 residential, it would appear that the majority of people are doing both of them next year rather than splitting them between 2011 and 2012. The reasoning for most seems to be that since 2012 will be the final year there’ll be a combination of a winding down feel in 2012 and a very high chance of the courses filling up extremely early. In terms of recommended pre-requisites, SXR375 (the plants one) requires S204 so that’s OK for me in 2011 but SXR376 (the human disease one) requires S377 which I can’t do ’til 2012 so that’s the best year for the second residential for me.

As usual, post-residential I’m exhausted.

Investigative Biology (SXR270) day 6

Arnold — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11:47:54 PDT

It was on to plants this morning which I know nothing about other than what was in the background reading material.

First off we were given an overall briefing on what we’ll be doing over the three sessions before we broke up into our two subgroups.

We were looking at how carbon fixing in plant leaves is affected by a range of conditions which we selected. We chose to look at the differences between the upper and lower surface of tobacco leaves and set about drilling 10 holes in a leaf for each of the two surfaces. Since we didn’t want carbon to sneak in the other side we’d to put a layer of vaseline on the filter paper we were using. Then it was off to the tutor so she could add the mixture to create our radioactive carbon dioxide.

Although it looked like it would be incredibly fiddly to do it worked out well and after tea we set about testing the various samples that we’d created by way of the Geiger counter. As always, the whole process took longer than I’d have expected at the off so it was quite a late lunch today.

With the statistics involved I thought at one point that we might need the big green book but we didn’t as all the necessary information was in the handouts. So I’ve been lugging it around for no reason at all.

After lunch we were joined up in one 24-strong group to do an experiment on the stomata of a plant. The reason why we were operating as a large group became very clear when the results were ready. They were all over the place with next to no consistency between groups. Basically an experiment that doesn’t work too well and the only total failure (so far) for the week.

For some reason plant experiments take even longer so we didn’t get away ’til after 5pm this evening which doesn’t bode well for tomorrow when I really have to get away on time.

Investigative biology (SXR270) day 5

Arnold — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 13:50:17 PDT

The morning started with a bit of a delay whilst we waited for the tissue samples to be prepared and brought round but after that it was a fairly intensive session through to noon. Everyone was doing a different experiment which we’d devised in the final session last night which made for something of a whirlwind of activity. I’d say this was the most interesting session so far as we weren’t following directions but rather working through our very own experiment.

As an experiment I thought that I’d get exactly the same meal as yesterday to see if the total came to the same. It did so it would appear that everyones’ initial impression that the cashiers were making up the prices on the spot is unfounded.

The reason for the manic session on posters on Monday evening became clear after lunch. On Monday we were given a really bad write-up of an experiment which we (in groups of 2 to 6) had to convert into a fairly sensible scientific poster over the course of an hour or so. That session gave us loads of ideas from what others had done in the time which we were to put to use this afternoon. At the start we all thought that an hour would be more than enough to prepare the poster but it took almost everyone the full two hours to get it completed and even then there was all kinds of compromises.

I was finished relatively early and so managed to get over to the small shopping centre in the Portland Building. The Students’ Union shop there is basically a small supermarket but had the Nottingham University teddy bear that I’d been looking for. As well as that there’s Boots (almost exclusively a chemist branch), a hairdresser, fairly large bookshop and food court (that’s closed outside of term-time though). The shops close at 5.30pm so stocking up at them would have been doable if I’d known where they were. Still, no harm done there for me though I gather that some people have been regular customers over the last few days.

After dinner in Cripps we’d to trek back down to the “poster room” in the main hospital to fill in a reflection form on how our own poster stacked up against the others. On the whole I think that our group seemed to do a more scientific style of poster in comparison to the other two groups where the tendency seemed to lean towards a more populist approach to design. I also ran across the tutor blogging about this course.

With an early finish (8pm) I managed to get into the resources centre to have a glance at some of the course texts for things that I’ll be doing over the next year or two. Both S204 and S320 seemed remarkably readable with a number of familiar diagrams as I flicked through the pages which is reassuring.

It’s looking pretty much certain that we won’t be using that big lump of a book which they tell you that you have to bring along. To be fair that’s partly because I read through the recommended reading sections in the course guide but even if I hadn’t I’d not have missed it (apart from the weight that is). Supposedly we’ll need it for the ECA but I’d not be surprised if we didn’t.

Investigative biology (SXR270) day 4

Arnold — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 09:34:25 PDT

We’re on to a much less talkative theme tutor now which means that we don’t end up talking for ages but as he’s pretty much at the other end of the extreme we need to ask questions more often.

The morning session was based around the tobacco moth and we were split up to cover quite a number of different investigations. Most of us were looking into the conductivity of different sections of the gut, others where looking at electronmicrographs of it and a couple of us were investigating the pH. Quite an interesting theme overall and one that added to lab experience in a big way. In the afternoon it was on to consider the respiration of liver which was very much a hands on affair.

For the first time today we really needed to consider properly the health & safety aspects as we were working with a range of poisons and proper hypodermic syringes too which obviously ain’t a good combination considering that a couple of the experiments used cyanide.

Tomorrow is a split day with the morning in the lab on the final energy session whilst the afternoon will be the poster exhibition.

Nearly forgot: I managed to get a gold star for hitting the £7 for lunch!

Investigative Biology (SXR270) day 3

Arnold — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 09:21:49 PDT

Monday makes quite a difference in the life of the medical school and rather than having the place largely to ourselves we’d to queue at tea-breaks and lunch.

Respiration was the final theme 1 topic and we spent the morning in experiments with Douglas bags, oxygen and carbon dioxide measurement devices. Quite an intensive morning of experiments all-round.

That finished the experimentation phase of theme 1 and the afternoon went in preparing and making a presentation on one of the three experiments that we’d done over the three sessions.

This evening sees the first of the briefings on theme 2 (energy) and another on the poster session that we’ll be doing at the end of that theme.

Investigative Biology (SXR270) day 2

Arnold — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 09:22:51 PDT

The breakfast was a pretty basic two sausages, egg and tomato with a selection of cereals plus tea/coffee/chocolate, juices and toast which is fine for a residential as you just end up putting on weight with the big meals.

The morning went in pipetting samples of plasma to determine the glucose levels. With 42 samples to work through that took quite a while and then we’d to measure the glucose levels and plot the results. All that took us up to lunch time and seemed mainly designed to get us used to working in a laboratory.

Lunch was in the staff canteen and had quite a wide selection. The £7 voucher was enough to pay for a main meal, dessert and two drinks which worked out at pretty good value.

After lunch it was into a new laboratory and we went through a range of tests for blood pressure and pulse rate which took an awful lot longer to do than we’d expected. No white coats this time as there weren’t any chemicals involved.

The evening sessions are to be looking at what we did earlier in the day and what we’ll be doing tomorrow (which is split between the first and second themes).