About Ned

Ned is a rough acronym of my initials, the name that most of my friends and colleagues know me by.

I currently hold a lectureship in the Imperial College London, U.K. where I work on photovoltaic devices for highly efficient solar energy conversion. Previously, I lectured at the School of Physics at the University of Sydney in Australia. Before that I held a JSPS fellowship at the Toyota Technological Institute, Japan, working on advanced photovoltaic devices.

You can read about my research in solar energy and teaching activities.

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World at your Feet Mountains

A new classification scheme for the Mountains of the world.

World at your feet schematic Those who are familiar with Munro's Tables of mountains in Scotland over 3000ft, may be interested to learn about another classification that I devised, called world at you feet mountains. The idea being that there are certain points on the globe where the curvature of earth ensures that the world is literally at your feet. Together with Graham Veitch, we determined the most likely mountains in Scotland for which the world would be at your feet. The schematic diagram illustrates how a relatively low mountain, such as Ben Nevis in Scotland (1334m) can be a world at your feet mountain, providing that taller mountains, such as Mt.Everest (8848m) are located sufficiently far round the Earth.

Still interested? Have a look at the paper we wrote on the classification.

3D Stereo Sound

How come we can hear in three dimensions with only two ears?

The human ear uses different methods (or cues) for determining the direction of a sound. Differences in intensity and phase will result in an 2 dimensional illusion, commonly experienced with stereo recordings. The third dimension is determined by the outer ear (pinna) which modifies the high-frequency (7-10kHz) content of the sound differently depending on whether the sound is coming from in front, above, behind or below the listener. By artificially processing a sound, it is possible to fool a listener into thinking a sound is coming from behind, when in fact the speakers are located in front.

I explored this topic in 1994, during my final year as an undergraduate student at the University of St Andrews and attempted to construct a 3D sound processor as a senior honours project. I also wrote an essay on the topic, which may serve as an introduction for those interested in reading further. I have subsequently offered this project to undergraduate students at the University of Sydney, in conjunction with researchers from the Audio Research Laboratory and Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Sydney.