Peter Jamieson: Electrical engineering professor and hockey referee
Miami University faculty speaks about his time teaching, researching, and acting as a hockey referee — and provides a puzzle for readers to solve
Peter Jamieson: Electrical engineering professor and hockey referee
Miami University faculty speaks about his time teaching, researching, and acting as a hockey referee — and provides a puzzle for readers to solve
Can you solve the hidden message puzzle at the bottom of this article?
Scroll down to see the hidden message puzzle created by Peter Jamieson. Instructions are at the bottom of this page.
Hockey games are full of chaos. Between the cheers, spilled drinks, overlapping voices, and blur of players moving across the ice, it can be difficult to notice all the details of a game, to track small interactions between players when there are twelve people skating at once. Hockey referees have to chase every detail.
Peter Jamieson, College of Engineering and Computing faculty, manages this every time he enters a game as a referee. He began refereeing because of his son.
“My son’s in [hockey], and he wants to be a ref,” Jamieson said. “I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll go figure out the system for you.’”
He specifically works with youth levels 12 and 10U, and in this position he focuses on making games fair and safe. At times, this can be more difficult than it sounds.
While refereeing, Jaimeson has to consider players’ and parents’ emotions, while also managing to watch twelve children at the same time, which is a very different perspective than spectators’ and even coaches’ viewpoints. This human element adds an additional layer of complexity to an already intricate game.
His love for the game and its complexities stems from his past experiences with hockey.
“I played hockey for a long time,” Jamieson said. “I came from Canada, so I played until checking started happening, which a lot of people who don’t know about hockey perceive as hitting. I didn’t like hitting, so I left the sport and came back afterwards.”
Jamieson came to Miami University around sixteen years ago, looking for an engineering school to teach at that had strong ties to hockey.
“My filtering was I wasn’t going to schools without arenas, because I wanted to continue playing hockey,” he said.
At Miami, Jamieson was able to continue playing hockey, work in an engineering school, conduct research, and build relationships with students, making it the perfect place for him to grow as an educator and engineer.
As an associate professor, Jamieson teaches computer engineering classes in CEC. In his classes he enjoys working with students to expand their thinking.
“I don’t know if there’s such a thing as teaching,” he said. “It’s trying to get a mind, a learner, to get from one space to another space in understanding some piece of [a] story. All stories are super complex, right? So, I just teach that early in the 200 level.”
The care and attention Miami devotes towards teaching undergraduates was part of what drew Jamieson to the university. Miami uses the teacher-scholar model, which allows faculty to teach and conduct research, both of which are passions of Jamieson’s. While working at other universities, he’s found that many schools use this model, but not all of them genuinely care about teaching undergraduates. Miami puts more intentional effort into teaching students than any other place he has worked at.
“[Miami] is the closest place I’ve been to that allows me to do both [research and teaching], but actually still does a lot of the teaching,” he said.
Along with teaching, Jamieson spends much time researching. Within the research process, he enjoys the curiosity the studies prompt. He’s generally drawn to a subject because of an interesting problem or a random idea. This leads to a long path of pursuing questions.
“It’s fun if you’re curious and you have at least enough drive to want to answer that question and to go through all the pain of answering, and then at the end realizing that you’ve answered a little bit of the question,” he said. “There are many, many more questions afterwards.”
Hidden Message Puzzle
To encourage others to partake in their own challenges and embrace curiosity, Associate Professor of Computer and Electrical Engineering Peter Jamieson has provided a puzzle to solve. Follow the instructions below!
A secret message has been concealed inside the above image using steganography. The message is hidden in the least significant bit (LSB) of one of the color channels. The image is an 8-bit RGB PNG file. Solving this puzzle requires 4 steps. You can email your solution to jamiespa@MiamiOH.edu to see if you are correct.
Hints:
- Each pixel has three 8-bit channels: R, G, and B.
- Only one channel carries the hidden data in the LSb.