Thanks to the US Department of State, I was flown to New Orleans with dozens of Fulbright Scholars from around the world to discuss Global challenges, local solutions: Climate change and environmental sustainability. We were featured in the local rag, The Times Picayune, whilst volunteering at The Green Project repurposing landfill to help rebuild houses post Katrina. My group also took the award for Best Environmental Solution and Presentation!
We’ve taken out second place in the Best Illusion of the Year Contest, 2012! Like many interesting scientific discoveries, this one was an accident. Sean Murphy, an undergraduate student, was working alone in the lab on a set of faces for one of his experiments. He aligned a set of faces at the eyes and started to skim through them. After a few seconds, he noticed that some of the faces began to appear highly deformed and grotesque. He looked at the especially ugly faces individually, but each of them appeared normal or even attractive. We called it the “Flashed Face Distortion Effect” and wanted to share it with the world, so we put it on YouTube. Click for more.
As a prelude to the Australia-New Zealand Final of the Three Minute Thesis Competition I was interviewed on 720 ABC Radio Perth on “Drive” with Russell Woolf.
After winning the Three Minute Thesis, Ryan Stafford (runner-up) and I were asked to “appear” on 612 ABC Radio with Steve Austin. It was great fun.
Here’s an article entitled, “Figuring Out Fingerprints” that appeared in the August edition of Security Management Magazine. I was interviewed by Laura Spadanuta, Associate Editor, on the human side of fingerprint identification. [PDF] Click for more.
