ageing out of tech

According to JL, who interviews new EE graduates, their grasp of electronics is extremely poor (beggars belief some of the stuff he reports back on here). What do they learn in college nowadays? I guess most of the syllabus is taken up by "sensitivity training" like "how not to upset wimmin, gays, blacks and snowflakes" and leaves no time left for anything actually useful.

An EE education should teach fundamantals: physics, mechanics, circuit theory, signals-and-systems, control theory, communications theory. It should have a healthy dose of examples and labs to reinforce the theory and develop some instincts. We took engineering drawing and electrical machinery, which were good too.

College is almost too late to learn some of the fundamentals.

I think that Spice is a good tool for acquiring circuit instincts, to complement the theory and math.

Is a 2-resistor voltage divider too much to expect? I make it easy: 10 volts and 1K and 9K.

College is too late to learn the fundamentals? How about too late for those who pioneered the fundamentals? What 15 year olds were those. Maxwell, heaviside?

Not every kid is a genius. And those guys didn't get introduced to their equations in college: they discovered them.

There's a private college-prep high school near here, annual tuition $47K. Electronics, machining, and welding are mandatory courses.

When you get to college, already having some instincts for electricity really illuminates the math. It's too easy to learn the equations, pass the tests, and forget it all.

A lot of what they teach is the right stuff, but not taught the right way. And some isn't relevant to what each student will do.

For people to absorb knowledge they need to relate on-paper stuff to real l ife, otherwise they do't get it & don't remember it. We got very little rea l life connection in my/our course. They also need to explore it, none of w hich happened.

Also students enter with a wide range of knowledge levels, yet are all taug ht the same stuff the same way. IMHO there's a major need to move to comput er delivered teaching so each student can learn what they need & find out b its of missing knowledge when they need. Without that the education experie nce is far poorer. This shift is way overdue, and is a huge lost opportunit y so far.

NT

We did that at Cambridge Instruments in the electron beam tester back in 19

2. It took until 1991 for us to find out that the person who implemented the r ight shifts hadn't extend the high order digit when he down shifted, so tha t all our negative numbers stopped being negative(twos complement arithmeti c).

It took half a day to fix it (if only for small shifts) when we did find it . The person who was managing the project in 1988 and early 1989 regarded d esign reviews as a waste of time, and routinely moved stuff along as soon a s he could get his hands on it, which got him moved to another project in m id-1989, but not before he'd done quite a lot of damage.

That particular bug was the last one we had to find (and fix) to get the ma chine working.

The more usual description of "parochial specialisation" is "pig ignorance".

That's what my uni did, 40 years ago. And still does, as I found out when I went to their open day last year.

I've only slowly come to realise how much I knew what I wanted and needed /before/ I went to uni, and so was able to distinguish a good course from the bad. Most other people, apparently, weren't like that.

Yup.

All progress in maths is made by those under 22yo. In physics that is extended to 25yo. Engineers have a longer productive life.

Yes, that is an exaggeration to make the point, but not much of an exaggeration.

I've run into a couple of characters who got Nobel prizes.

was one of them.

didn't get to share the Noble prize for getting the structure of diborane (B2H6) right, but he was a whole lot cleverer.

Cursitor Doom posts crap more or less non-stop. Tom Gardner is one of the more sensible posters around here, and can recognise when Cursitor Doom is posting crap, and has been known to comment to that effect.

Cursitor Doom doesn't enjoy being shown up as twit, and kill-files people who expose him to that experience.

thread is that older people get left behind. I have lived that fear perso nally for the last 10 or 15 years. I have read books and watched videos on line to stay relevent. And yet the attitude here seems to be... oh that is easy...I knew everything since I was 15 years old. Don't you realize that the "I am brilliant" folks are the ones who get RIFFED? The ones who alre ady have arrived and have nothing left to learn because they knew it all at age 15 are the very ones that should get their asses laid off?

lly understood it. I know, most here will say how they comprehended linear algebra at age 16 (because they are so damn smart). I want to use MATLAB. Matlab stands for Matrix algebra. If you do not really understand linear algebra then how can you be a master of matlab?

am very aware of the fact that I do not know it.

't know something when you don't know that that something even exists?

introduces the student to a vast ocean of stuff that you only know exists when you graduate from college. And after 4 years of 65% on college exams, you come out realizing that you have actually not arrived but that you hav e a lifetime of learning , just to grasp the fundamentals.

Some people can keep on learning in later life. John Larkin seems to be one of them.

There's non-verbal learning which produces behaviour that may look instinct ive, but isn't. It's a useful exercise to try to verbalise what's going on. Natural language is a rather specialised tool, and math extends it no end.

Posing a question like that is essentially telling the candidate that John Larkin thinks that he is an idiot. I have found it difficult to put up with interviewers like that.

It

. And some isn't relevant to what each student will do.

life, otherwise they do't get it & don't remember it.

Seeing the relationships to real life does take imagination. Some people do n't seem to have much of that.

to explore it, none of which happened.

ught the same stuff the same way.

Many universities back up the lecture course with tutorials, which do provi de a route to filling in individual deficiencies in background knowledge, a nd there is always the library.

student can learn what they need & find out bits of missing knowledge when they need. Without that the education experience is far poorer. This shift is way overdue, and is a huge lost opportunity so far.

So how does a computer delivered teaching program detect missing background knowledge?

The shape of the missing area may not line up with the way the lecturer/pro gram constructor has learned to think about the material being taught. That structure is what shapes the lectures/instruction modules.

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and accumulate and FPGAs DSP slices

FPGA's lend themselves rather better to parallel processing than microproce ssors, though if you've got enough microprocessors working in parallel it b ecomes an academic distinction.

If I had the power I'd sack *all* the teachers and have the kids educated by the great communicators, the best tutors on YT. They can really get the concepts across *way* better than some dipshit who keeps repeating Cultural Marxist dogma to brainwash the students. Put each child in their own booth and just have one security guard at the door to stop any monkey business. Those who want to learn can learn; those that don't can watch anything they want that keeps them quiet.

A terrifying prospect.

Sadly, even the best communicators can't get direct feedback via YouTube. One-on-one interaction is important to detect and correct isolated (but potentially devastating) misconceptions.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Cursitor Doom fall into the next category down, who want to teach other people about teaching. He suffers from the devastating misconception that he has something useful to say.

It's not binary. You can be jack of many trades and master of some. If your crystal ball is any good, you can evolve from one master to the next big thing before it's too late.