Many years ago, I had a poster that I bought when I visited North Cape in Norway where in summer the sun never sets.  The poster was a time-series of 24 photographs taken at hourly intervals showing the height of the sun in the sky during a summer day at North Cape, similar to the thumbnail.  We can plot the height of the sun as a function of time of day with time on the horizontal axis and…

Jigsaw puzzling without a picture

A350 XWB passes Maximum Wing Bending test Research sometimes feels like putting together a jigsaw puzzle without the picture or being sure you have all of the pieces.  The pieces we are trying to fit together at the moment are (i) image decomposition of strain fields [see ‘Recognising strain’ on October 28th 2015] that allows fields containing millions of data values to be represented by a…

From strain measurements to assessing El Niño events all in a single paper published last week

One of the exciting aspects of leading a university research group is that you can never be quite sure where the research is going next.  We published a nice example of this unpredictability last week in Royal Society Open Science in a paper called ‘Transformation of measurement uncertainties into low-dimensional feature space‘ [1].  While the title is an accurate description of the contents, it…

‘All models are wrong, but some are useful’ is a quote, usually attributed to George Box, that is often cited in the context of computer models and simulations.  Working out which models are useful can be difficult and it is essential to get it right when a model is to be used to design an aircraft, support the safety case for a nuclear power station or inform regulatory risk assessment on a new…