Unless the radiation is from I-131 which has a half-life of 8 days. In that case it won't be there at all in a couple of months. Since the IAEA folks that are monitoring in Japan are only seeing I-131 in dangerous amounts, 1.6 uSv/hr is the official highest measured value with levels of Strontium being very low, your calculation for a year is a bit off. Also the 1.6 uSv/hr that has been measured, by people trained to do these measurements with callibrated and well understood equipment as opposed to reporters, is more like 14-15 mSv for a total annual dosage. That's two to three times background depending on where you live. It's on the low end of the scale of radiation a smoker gets from a pack a day habit. As long as the folks in the one village where the 1.6 uSv/hr was measured take their iodine tablets and keep the water and milk away from the babies for the next month, the effect on their life expectancy will be immeasurably small.
If you aren't going to teach your students computational physics, don't waste your time teaching them. Computation is so pervasive in science that if they can't translate their ideas/equations into computational algorithms, they will simply not be competitive. Computers are to science what chalkboards and pencils used to be. They are essential tools to performing research.
I'm not just talking about Excel or even Matlab either. I'm talking High Performance Computing. During their careers, today's science graduate students will be forced to run their codes on compute clusters with thousands of processors (and that's just in the near term). You, as their professor, need to make sure they have the tools they will need. Things like basic knowledge of languages like C/C++, F90, and python/perl; MPI programming techniques (and probably OpenMP which may be making a comeback); parallel application debugging; and supercomputer hardware architectures (including parallel filesystems). They don't have to be guru's, but they do need enough exposure to give them a starting point. Not giving them some basic skills in HPC is like not teaching them calculus.
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Unless the radiation is from I-131 which has a half-life of 8 days. In that case it won't be there at all in a couple of months. Since the IAEA folks that are monitoring in Japan are only seeing I-131 in dangerous amounts, 1.6 uSv/hr is the official highest measured value with levels of Strontium being very low, your calculation for a year is a bit off. Also the 1.6 uSv/hr that has been measured, by people trained to do these measurements with callibrated and well understood equipment as opposed to reporters, is more like 14-15 mSv for a total annual dosage. That's two to three times background depending on where you live. It's on the low end of the scale of radiation a smoker gets from a pack a day habit. As long as the folks in the one village where the 1.6 uSv/hr was measured take their iodine tablets and keep the water and milk away from the babies for the next month, the effect on their life expectancy will be immeasurably small.
If you aren't going to teach your students computational physics, don't waste your time teaching them. Computation is so pervasive in science that if they can't translate their ideas/equations into computational algorithms, they will simply not be competitive. Computers are to science what chalkboards and pencils used to be. They are essential tools to performing research. I'm not just talking about Excel or even Matlab either. I'm talking High Performance Computing. During their careers, today's science graduate students will be forced to run their codes on compute clusters with thousands of processors (and that's just in the near term). You, as their professor, need to make sure they have the tools they will need. Things like basic knowledge of languages like C/C++, F90, and python/perl; MPI programming techniques (and probably OpenMP which may be making a comeback); parallel application debugging; and supercomputer hardware architectures (including parallel filesystems). They don't have to be guru's, but they do need enough exposure to give them a starting point. Not giving them some basic skills in HPC is like not teaching them calculus.