If you are unable to attend any of our meetings you do not have to give up on learning about science and technology! You may wish to visit: Royal Institution Videos (https://www.youtube.com/user/TheRoyalInstitution) Here you will find a great many lectures on various science subjects all in a very easy to understand format. Just skip through any adverts that may come at the start of any lecture.

The Rutherford Appleton Laboratory has a range of free resources for science learning. Click here: RAL Resources for details and links. A list of their forthcoming events, including their fascinating free Talking Science talks, can be found here RAL Events.

OBJECTIVES OF THE GROUP

The objectives of the Science & Technology Group (the S&T Group) are:

• to cover a wide range of scientific and technical matters
• to appeal to members who have some scientific or technical qualification and/or experience, at whatever level
• to appeal to members who know nothing scientific or technical, but are willing to have their minds stretched and learn something new and different.

MEETING ARRANGEMENTS

The group meets at 10.00am on the 4th Wednesday of each month except December and (sometimes) August. Currently the group meets in the Radford room at the Methodist Church complex in High St. Witney. There is a break at about 11am for coffee and the meeting closes at around 12.15. After this some members go for a simple lunch locally. There is a charge of £5.00 to pay for the room but sometimes the meeting is "free" if sufficient funds have accumulated.

The group is open to all members of Witney U3A and ladies are especially invited to join in order to provide a more balanced membership and give different views on the topics discussed.

FORMAT OF MEETINGS

Normally the speaker is a member of the Group but once or twice each year it is usually possible to engage an outside speaker.

Once or twice each year there is a visit to a place of interest and members pay for a coach and an entrance fee if required.

PAST SUBJECTS

In the past year or two there have been presentations on such varied subjects as:

• Recent developments in Cancer Research
• Stealth aircraft and how they avoid radar detection
• Epigenetics
• Modern technology applied to brewing
• Exoplanets
• Gene editing

VISITS

Visits have been made to:

• Waste Water Treatment Site at Didcot
• The Bristol Aerospace museum
• Bletchley Park
• A satellite tracking station
• The BMW Mini plant at Cowley

PRESENTATION PLANNER

One of our members, has kindly written some excellent software to help with preparing a PowerPoint presentation.

The author is a retired Chartered Engineer having worked in the field of specialised computer systems, and designed both hardware and software. He has used macros, both professionally and at home, in Excel, and PowerPoint since the 1990’s. and developed an HCI Designer, ‘Walk’ Presenter and a multi games system; the former two being the basis for his Presentation Planner.

Suppose you have a large number of photos of a visit you made to some facility or a mixture of such photos and others. In essence the software automates the creation of a draft presentation without having to be a PowerPoint expert.

A description of the software can be found here: Presentation Planner and the author can be contacted here The Presentation Planner Author

Links

• The Presentation Planner
• RAL Events
• RAL Resources
• Royal Institution Videos
• Zooniverse web portal