kids, math

Our public schools are hopelessly failed institutions and that's the root cause for this. That is why I strongly believe in charters, parochial and other better educations opportunities.

I saw this starting to happen years ago. At our church I am running the tech stuff a lot. Now that I am older I am looking for others who can take the baton. It's not too difficult to find younger people to run the projector computer or even the live-stream camera system. But the big

The real problem will be analog hardware design. I am often yanked back out of retirement because nobody else can be found to do RF or transistor-level stuff. Like this afternoon. When I am working with teams of other analog design engineers our average age is usually above

1. That can't be good. What will happen when us guys are in a care home or with Jesus?

We should have a voucher system, and let schools compete.

Right. Kids need more hands-on, more instincts.

I don't see why many people need calculus; almost nobody ever uses it. Kids should first be able to mark a board in thirds to saw it up, or figure out how many cans of paint to buy.

Jesus was a carpenter. I suspect he could divide a stick into thirds.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Exactly!

Also, like a friend of mine says, do not back student loans with taxpayer money but let the universities take care of that risk. Then they'd stop convincing people to spend such funds on degrees that will never result in truly gainful employment or self-employment.

Yep. Truth be told I was never a genius in math, didn't like it, and that showed in my grades. Just like I was never much into Maxwell's stuff. However, one has to acquire a gut feel for all this where you can make decisions based on what you think the results will likely be. And where the results then are like what you felt or at least close.

In Europe we were required to show proof of a minimum of six months of internships before our final exams, IIRC in four distinct stints with written reports signed off by a manager. They had to be at a few different companies and not all at just one. This is where we are actually designing product, working with production folks and all that. Now AFAIK they have done away with that requirement and IMO it's a huge mistake.

I made sure my stints had sizzle, like working on a oil rig in the middle of the North Sea with gale force winds and all.

Yes, and people say he probably would have driven and could have repaired a used Ford F250 if they had cars back then.

It's certainly a problem. I find myself asked to sort out misbehaving systems that are totally new to me, that nobody still around can diagnose. What works is to come at it using Physics to sort out the general principles of operation, then expressing this in mathematical form allowing one to explore expected behavior boundaries (often using Monte-Carlo methods), and so on. Very slow, but has yet to fail.

Joe

Ditto!

Familiar with being dragged out of retirement. At first it was sort of fun, but it got old.

It seems to be happening already to some extent: China. :-(

Ed

I had to read that at least twice before it was obvious that they are asking for the number which when added to 6 gives the same result as 7 + 2.

I'd probably have clarified it in words. What number, which when added to 6, produces the same answer as when

And in any case most students are used to seeing it as 7 + 2 = x + 6 Find x.

Try the following and ask the student to explain why, instead of just giving the AI answer:

What volume of material remains after a six inch long hole, centred on a diameter, is drilled through a sphere?

And if no-one can do "fractions" then maybe they weren't taught like this:

There's also a difference between what is taught and what is needed in a workplace. I could use a soldering iron when I got my degree, but most other graduates couldn't.

But it does create a nice "fun budget". For example, for buying a motorcycle. No sure yet whether I want to get into that hobby but seriously pondering.

Yeah, but the analog stuff developed there has never impressed me. So far.

However, they should recognize it in just the numbers and bracket notation. That is also crucial for developing a business mindset. Where a calculator has to constantly run alongside other thoughts in your head during someone's presentation of financial stuff. Where you could immediately raise your hand if something doesn't quite compute. BTDT and it has occasionally brought everything to a screeching halt.

Or make it more palatable: Drill a 1" hole through a 2" diameter metal ball. Slowly drop that into a full pint of beer. How much beer will you have left to drink after the spillage? :-)

The vast majority of EEs these days is completely unable to operate a simple oscilloscope. And when their car sputters to a stop in the middle of nowhere they are totally hosed. Especially when the cell phone shows zero bars and AAA can't be called.

Takes way too long. Nowadays we are talking about tacking a teeny wire to a 0201 size PIN diode for a temporary engineering test point so the scope could be hooked up. Or briefly lifting that 0201 part. That can take weeks to master.

Having to hand everything off to the tech pool and waiting until they get around to it slows down EE work. Most small companies do not have even a tech pool.

As an employer I would not want to have to spend time and their wages to teach someone stuff they should know. It's better to hire someone who already knows. Often times those folks have to be imported.

A EE (!) professor once told me "We do not train people for engineering but for science". That showed the problem right there.

A couple of my interview challenges:

I threw a simple one-stage RF amp schematic onto the white board. "What would you do to increase the bandwidth of this circuit?"

Other times I sat them in front of a mundane oscilloscope and asked them to probe and display the waveform on that collector node over yonder. Without pushing auto-set.

If they couldn't do it the interview would end rather quickly.

I'm bidding on a big-physics system upgrade. The existing electronics is totally undocumented and formal systems requirements/specifications don't exist either. All I have is some emails from a software sort of guy.

There must be a lot of cases like that.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I would have been horrified if my parents had ever suggested that they should attend a job interview with me.

Hmm I probably was promoted after 6 months in my first job. That's partly because that's what the organization did with new graduates but it's also partly because I could use a soldering iron and do plenty of other things I wasn't taught on a degree course. From a coding point of view I could not only code (mostly in assembler) but I had already seen many examples of how to do things. So when I had to get an 8051 to do 32-bit division and convert the result to decimal for a display it wasn't too hard.

As far as making a reliable solder joint is concerned I've seen many outcomes. This is from prototype testing not production. Here are some possible outcomes.

1. Perfect joint.

1. Perfect joint after being shown that keeping your wrist on the bench while you make the joint will keep your hand steady.

2. Good effort but here's how to remove grime and oxide film from the resistor's legs before you solder it.

1. Deliberately poor joint because "I shouldn't have to do this".

Sure but if student's aren't learning during their college years then they are likely to think that that's how it will always be.

I remember being asked how I would add numbers together at 10 MHz. After giving my answer the interviewer told me that most people would say use a microprocessor. (Not possible with a cpu back then even if you could clock the thing at 10 MHz.)

Well you don't seem to be able to buy a simple SC/MP board and solder it together yourself any more.

Learn how to learn is fine but today's students do seem to have difficulty solving problems. Even when, these days, the answer would be in their face if they did a bit of online research.

None. But plenty of present day students seem to have to have a job as well as school. In my case I did partially have a job while at school because although my father didn't specifically offer equipment repair to people off the street, I would often find a non functional piece of electronics waiting for me to find out what was wrong with it.

I can remember picking up plenty from magazines. Including the cordic algorithm. Sorting out useful information from nonsense seems to be harder on the Internet.

I've had to rewrite a few software messes so that they actually worked with the hardware.

Will we forget how to make anything electronic 50 years from now? Or is it the plan for AI to take over by then?

Much of the useful additional knowledge I had before starting work was not learned in a do the homework and pass the test environment but rather it was learned in a solve the problem and provide the result environment. When I did start work I'd want to find the best solution to a problem, which often wasn't the one I'd thought of myself.

Sounds like fun. Learning should be fun but often isn't.

For what? The problem with education is that if it done well it makes the kids uppity and likely to disagree with their parents.

If the schools are competing to make the parents happy, they won't educate the kids all that well.

It's a quality control problem, and when the desired product - kids who can think for themselves - isn't one the customer parents actually want, the free market option isn't attractive

Mostly just typing doesn't make programming qualitative. You have think about what the code you are typing will make the machine do, and that's quantitative

I wouldn't have. Working out what each of the 24-channels actually did would have taken time, and getting the level of familiarity that would have let me boost the right channel to the right extent fast enough not to disrupt the service would have taken quite a bit more.

Or have difficulty dumbing down the explanation of what is going on to a level that you can follow, without dumbing it done so far that you feel you are being insulted.

There's not a lot of analog design required any more, and there are still quite a lot of under-employed analog designers left over from the time when more of it was needed. People know who they were.

Instincts are inherited. Hand-ons just gives practiced responses.

It pays to practice skills you can sell, and analog expertise isn't striking me as all that saleable at the moment.

You only use it when you need it, but it is invalualbe when you do need it.

That they should learn at primary school.

He could probably trisect angle. Mathematicians can't - or not at least with a compass and a straight-edge.

The problem with university education is the drop-out rate.

About 40% of students dropped out without getting a degree when I was a university student. This hasn't improved in recent years.

There's not a lot of correlation between success at university and subsequent career success.

The universities should probably spend a lot more time and effort on their university entrance procedures, but the problem is that anything that would make a serious difference would probably take days of interviews and in-depth testing, and probably wouldn't work all that much better - the human brain doesn't finally mature until about age 25, and testing at age 17 would be a bit premature.

The problem is that we need more university graduates then we could get by only letting the cream of the secondary school crop into universities, and we probably should encourage too many people to take the risk in order to get enough survivors to do the work that needs to be done. Saddling the losers with the cost of their tertiary education is inequitable.

You don't have to like math to be able to use it.

I've worked for some truly terrible managers - never for very long because they didn't last - but they would have put off any sane intern.

It's performance art.

One of my better bosses asked all potential employees if they maintained their own cars. Happily, I did. He was English and had trained as an apprentice engineer, but at the Royal Radar Establishment under Peter Baxandall (at Olympus under one of the gods) . Not ostentatiously mathematical, but he knew why negative temperature coefficient resistors weren't intrinsically safe, and had a lab demonstration of the point which put about an amp through a hot channel in a 10k carbon film resistor without blowing it up. The resistor even showed 10k resistance after the hot channel had cooled off.

Then public education mostly works like Mary Kay, they manage out the struggling students to keep the numbers up. Then "good schools" are just ones that are better at dumping "bad students" on "bad schools."

Public education in Soviet Russia worked a lot like that and was also sink or swim in practice, though they of course didn't call it a "free market."

Which degrees are those? Over 2/3rds of US undegrads are in some permutation of business, finance/accounting, healthcare/nursing, education, IT, engineering, and comp sci.

The much-derided liberal arts major is at a whopping 0.73%. Kids are acutely aware what pays and what doesn't, and have been for some time. Unfortunately the list seems to only go down by the day.

Relevant to this thread, mathematics isn't even in the top 25, shows about how useful US citizens regard studying math problems day and night to be some math expert is towards making money in 2025. I never saw anyone write anyone a $5000 check to do an integral, that's for sure.

Conservatives live in the past. Worse yet it tends to be a past that never existed in the first place..

If the hole diameter can be regarded as small compared with the sphere diameter, the curvature at the ends can be neglected . The calculation method will depend on the relative dimensions and the degree of accuracy required, so that should sort out the engineers from the theoretical mathematicians.

It is also possible to get a negative answer if the hole is bigger than the sphere - which should sort out the accountants.

For many years the Philips organisation had a policy of taking on people who had shown great ability in one specialism and allowing them to train themselves in a different specialism which the company required. It seemed to work well as a long-term strategy and there were many discoveries and inventions attributable to it.

Most companies can't afford to think long-term any more.

If the sphere is as big as the earth then you'll find plenty of people who don't get how you could theoretically drill a six inch long hole through it and still be left with the same volume as for any other sphere bigger than six inches in diameter.