Tag: Physics

Drew University Physics Softball

I am reminiscing about days that "have long gone by". I downloaded these from the Society of Physics Students website.

When I attended Drew University in the 1980s working on my Bachelor of Art in Physics, the Physics department had an annual softball picnic for faculty and students majoring in physics. I attended my first picnic in my sophomore year. It was also the first time I had ever played baseball,l, and although baseball isn’t a sport I enjoy, I did have fun figuring out how to hit the ball. Coming from the British West Indies, I grew up playing cricket, a sport that is also played with a bat, but is dissimilar to baseball. Nothing alike.

I don’t know the names of all the people in the photographs. Some were seniors and sophomores. Some became good but not close friends. Bhavna and I met at Drew, and our 30-year (C’90) college reunion is June 2020. Hopefully, I can reconnect with some of these Physics majors.

Drew University Physics Softball Circa 1988
Drew University Physics Softball Circa 1988

Risks of Trusting the Physics of Sensors

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Risks of Trusting the Physics of Sensors By Kevin Fu and Wenyuan Xu Communications of the ACM, Vol. 61 No. 2, Pages 20-23

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Kevin Fu is Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan.

Wenyuan Xu is Professor and Chair of the Department of Systems Science and Engineering at Zhejiang University.

And I love this:

Security is a system property. Thus, design of a sensor-driven, safety-critical system deserves supervision by a systems engineer with broad knowledge of computer security risks. Team leaders for such systems will need to master skills from physics, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering to computer science, information science, public policy, and ethics.
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The notion of interdisciplinary education is not new to computer science. In the 1990s, the software engineering community debated a shift toward interdisciplinary education beyond the confines of computer science.10,11 Similarly, a good engineer for embedded security will not simply be a good computer scientist or a good programmer. Interdisciplinary education and teamwork is key to ensuring security of sensor-driven, safety-critical systems.