Jan (Jack) Francis Beda's Home Page

About Research Projects Contact Archival

About

Hello hello! I am Jack Beda. I currently study MSc Mathematical Physics at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland in my 3rd year. I grew up in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada and attended high school at Kenner CVI in the IB program. Primarily, this website is a side project to help me learn HTML when I have little better to do, but you may find some useful information here regardless.

Outdooring

I have, for much of my life, had a keen interest in hiking/canoing/skiing/mountaineering/running/climbing and all sorts of things outside. In Canada I primarily enjoy the canoing in and past the lovely lakes and trees of Algonquin and the Kawartha Highlands. In the UK, where both fewer trees and fewer canoes are to be found, I enjoy climbing all of the various grassy, rocky, and snowy lumps around whenever I can.

Academics

Below is a list of all of the courses I have taken so far at the university of Edinburgh. Each course links to the relevant DPT (degree program table) at the university. Some of the DPT pages will gradually go out of date.

* Of note, if you also study at the university, you may notice that the courses here are a little strange. This is because I originally started in the Theoretical Phyisics degree and then moved to mathematical physics in second year, which was a bit of a pain, and definitely non standard. I don't include here a few of the courses I took "course only" into which I was enrolled for the switch to work. What I list here is only the courses to which I sat an exam and showed up to all the way through the semester.

My Research Projects

Here I detail all of the summer-research-project type activities I have undertaken so far.

Microscope Synchronisation with Raspberryi Pi Pico

Dr. Florian Ströhl's research requires synchronizing a sheet laser at high precision to a rolling-camera that sweeps through biological (or any) samples such that the laser illuminates a specific part of the sample only when the camera is exposing that specific line of the image. The camera outputs an electrical pulse signal when it is exposing (which drops to zero at the end of the frame). My project was to recieve as input this pulse signal to a raspberry pi pico, and produce as output using a DAC (digital to analogue converter) a voltage that steadily increases when the camera is exposing, and drops to zero when the camera is not exposing (almost like a sawtooth wave), so that a galvometer can be attached to scan the sheet laser across the sample. In this project I :


Birefringence of Packing Tape

Dr. Aaron Slepkov had at the time been studying the birefringence of various different household tapes (packing tape/cellotape/sticky tape), with the aim of collecting sufficient data on the tapes to predict the colours produced when the tapes are viewed between crossed polarizers. When viewed between crossed polarizers, birefringent objects, like the tapes, appear vividly coloured, and this phenomenon can be used to create pretty pictures (from Dr. Slepkov) among other applications. In this research project I assisted by re-taking large quantities of spectrometer measurements on the tapes, to verify the data previously gathered by Dr. Slepkov.

Related:
here is an article I wrote that was listed as the jIAPS (journal of the international association of physics students) article of the month

Contact Me

At the moment the best method of contact is probably by email or my UK cell. But I include all methods below:

Archival

This tab displays the original "jack.beda.ca" website, as made by my dad a long long time ago


The address for this page is <http://jack.beda.ca/>. Any other addresses may change without notice. Please bookmark and link appropriately.


There really is not anything here yet, except for links to photos that my parents have taken of me.


Here is my birth announcement:

		From: John 'Johann' and Rachel Beda <johann-st@beda.ca>
		Sent: Friday, September 19, 2003 3:17 PM
		To: John 'Johann' and Rachel Beda
		Cc: Rachel Wortis Beda
		Subject: Jan 'Jack' Francis Beda born September 19, 2003
		
		
			Avast ye maties!
		
			We are very pleased to announce the birth of our second son, 
		Jan Francis Beda (who we have been calling "Jack"), at 5:30 AM 
		on Friday, September 19, 2003. Weighing in at 8 lbs 1.2 oz 
		(3.665 kg) and a length of about 21.5" (55 cm).
		
			Rachel and Jack are doing very well. Johann is a bit sleepy 
		having gotten up at about 2:30 AM, and Robert is excitedly waiting 
		to visit Jack this afternoon for the first time.
		
			A very few photographs are on the web, but more will probably 
		follow fairly soon. Jack's email address and web pages should 
		be operational fairly soon.
		
		
		

Jack's Home Page - Robert's Home Page - Johann's Home Page - Rachel's Home Page

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jack-st@beda.ca