Ups and Downs

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This is a collection of pages that detail some episodes from my personal, working, and family history. I’m writing these as and when I can, so there are many gaps. All being well, I’ll gradually fill those in later on. But I hope some of the following will be of interest...

As a prologue to my own story...

1904 to the early 1920’s - My Father, recollecting his early life in the East End of London and in the Army.
A series of audio recordings of my Father recalling events in his life from the 1900's to after WW2.

The first pages deal with the period when I was a young child and I lived in Stratford, West Ham, in London. They include photos and maps of an area that was largely demolished over 40 years ago when the local community was broken up as the price of moving people out of old ‘slums’ and into better housing. It also covers my unusual ‘education’ during my school years. The period covered is up to the mid 1960s.

The next pages deal with the time when I was a research student at Queen Mary College (QMC) – now called Queen Mary, University of London. At that time I worked on instrumentation for astronomy, etc, which gave me my first chance to travel, wear climbing boots, go up mountains, etc.

The following page deals with the time when I worked for Armstrong, a Hi-Fi company.

1975-8 - Armstrong and a Jubilee.

I then went back into University research at QMC to work on millimetre-wave systems. My climbing boots started to be used again.

At the end of 1983 I moved from QMC in London to the University of St Andrews in Scotland. The story now continues with what happened once I'd settled there...

More to follow...

Information and Measurement. In 1995 the Institute of Physics published a book I wrote on this topic. The book uses examples like the Audio CD system and Enigma codes to illustrate the uses of Information Theory. It also covers how measurement systems form the basis of information gathering, as well as communications. An updated edition was published as a paperback a few years later.

The book has long been out of print, and I regained the copyright when IoP ceased book publication. I have now made a free Adobe PDF version available which you are now welcome to obtain and use. Click here or on the image if you wish obtain a copy.

If you wish to contact me about these pages please use the email address at the bottom of the webpage this links to.

Jim Lesurf

29th March 2018