Electronic Engineering Errors

Here’s the @sheffunilife twitter account. It’s one of those that get passed from person to person each week, allowing for a different perspective of life at Sheffield University:

This week: Ian Wraith, Electronics Technician @TUoSEEE.

TUoSEEE being The University of Sheffield Electronic and Electrical Engineering Department.

And his account of some odd electrical noise problems:

Noise issues can cause us real problems with parts of the dept researching very small signals.

Here’s the tale:

Oops! But beagle-eyed readers will recognise this artifact-based-erroneous-results-in-scientific-experimentation phenomenon from another time… Remember those Peryton Problems, when we were forced to ask: Just where do perytons come from?
Exactly.

Just for reference, we do occasionally get this sort of thing in the microbiology lab as well, but it’s mainly associated with someone sneezing while inoculating a plate.

None of your tram or microwave problems here.