to Thee" as I drive through some awful weather and I do not have a clue what I will do if the car breaks down. But I get to the land of the Bluenosers and the student conference. The attendance numbers were pretty good with over a 100 students attending but my focus as a judge were the oral presentations. I was expected to take notes on all the 15 minute long student presentations and be ready to assess them in six categories with first , second and third prizes in each. The Powerpoint presentations are all pretty good but they keep coming every 15 minutes from 9 AM until 4 PM. To my eyes the biggest problem is trying to determine what work was done by the student and what work was "group work". The end of the conference and of course there would have to be a 2 hour meeting for an interprovincial / interuniversity organization that I am on the executive. Then and only then me and the car beat it home.
So I go to the car dealership and complain bitterly about the car and we work out a deal to get the car fixed and since I have to go to Cathedral City they lend me a car. It was this stylish number with an air scoop and and big wing on the back. And all that on a 2004 Rio that has a top highway speed of 120 km/hr. Oh, it's a headturner, everyone watches me drive by like I am some sort of idiot from the backwoods. At least it was free I keep telling myself. It got me there and back and that was all I needed.
Cathedral City is really looking better now that spring has finally made an appearance and the leaves are filling out. Kind of surprising considering it was just three weeks ago I made the first run. But now with the National Conference starting this weekend it has got to be about the research.
Cathedral City is really looking better now that spring has finally made an appearance and the leaves are filling out. Kind of surprising considering it was just three weeks ago I made the first run. But now with the National Conference starting this weekend it has got to be about the research.
So I am pushing together a presentation on the calculations that we have been doing. On one end of things the fact that we can do the study using simple calculations means that I can participate without access to any fancy cop equipment like they have on CSI but to me it seems like a sterile non-chemistry project. I guess you have to ride the horse that brought you. I will make my presentation and after the seminar the job will have to be to get the paper written and submitted. This first paper of my sabbatical probably does not deserve publication in the first rank journals but we think it will get into one of the second rank journals. It really doesn't matter since no one actually read s the journals any more and for the most part all journals are deposited with the majour online search engines so that any search of the journals online will result with a hit.
This first project is really quite simple. All first year students are taught about Born-Haber cycles to use to evaluate the thermodynamic aspects of chemical reactions. Our group was part of a new simplified calculation of a key component of the cycle called the lattice energy(essentially the force that holds a solid together). It was in fact my academic grandfather Neil Bartlett that had the insight first and then my academic father developed it with a British chemist so that the calculations were more general. It fell to me to find a way to use the calculations on an experimental problem and it worked out pretty good. Our calculations both explained what the pat term of reactivity that we observed in out system and also were predictive concerning what reactions would or would not work. But first, I have to get this presentation out of the way, so as much as I have been tortured by Powerpoint presentations in recent days here I am putting one together. I am trying to tell myself that I need to keep the slides simple, use colour sparingly and cut as much out as possible.
This first project is really quite simple. All first year students are taught about Born-Haber cycles to use to evaluate the thermodynamic aspects of chemical reactions. Our group was part of a new simplified calculation of a key component of the cycle called the lattice energy(essentially the force that holds a solid together). It was in fact my academic grandfather Neil Bartlett that had the insight first and then my academic father developed it with a British chemist so that the calculations were more general. It fell to me to find a way to use the calculations on an experimental problem and it worked out pretty good. Our calculations both explained what the pat term of reactivity that we observed in out system and also were predictive concerning what reactions would or would not work. But first, I have to get this presentation out of the way, so as much as I have been tortured by Powerpoint presentations in recent days here I am putting one together. I am trying to tell myself that I need to keep the slides simple, use colour sparingly and cut as much out as possible.
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