facultynews

Council awards outstanding dissertation to math professor

The Philippine Council for Advanced Science and Technology Research and Development (PCASTRD) awarded the second prize for outstanding dissertation in advanced science and technology for the year 2001 to Dr. Ederlina Ganatuin-Nocon, vice chair of the Mathematics Department. Her winning dissertation is titled “On Type II Codes over Z4 X Z4.”

The awards are given in recognition of scholarly work that contribute significantly to the development of science and technology in the country.
The main results of Ganatuin-Nocon’s paper tackled the link between binary self-dual and Type II codes and the conversion of codes over Z4 X Z4 to binary codes and vice versa.

This paper aims to find its way to show the application of these codes to data security (encryption), disk space saving, and cheaper, faster, and more efficient transfer of information.

3 profs join international confab on IT in physics education

Three professors who are actively involved in physics education attended the International Conference on Computer and Information Technology in Physics Education at the University of the Philippines - National Institute for Science and Mathematics Education Development (UP-NISMED) on December 4-6. More than 300 physics educators from different parts of the world participated in this conference.

From the College of Science, Dr. Gil Nonato Santos, chair of the Physics Department, presented a paper on “Teaching Physics with e-measure,” while Br. Joseph Scheiter, FSC, presented a paper on “Voltage of Local Commercial Electric Power: A Student Experiment.”
Dr. Bee Ching Ong of the Science Education under the College of Education served as member of the National Organizing Committee and also as member of the Committee on Abstracts and Committee on Finance.

The objectives of the international conference are to share experiences and researches on the use of computers and information technology in teaching physics at all levels and to establish linkages among schools, universities, and industries.
Activities included in the conference were plenary sessions, parallel sessions on paper presentations, workshops, video conferencing with experts in Japan, and competition on multimedia software and computer-based experiments.

The conference was organized by UP-NISMED and sponsored by the International Commission on Physics Education of the International Union for Applied Physics and Science Education Institute of the Department of Science and Technology of the Philippines.