Den lørdag den 14. december 2013 01.44.07 UTC+1 skrev snipped-for-privacy@attt.bizz:
nally got
o the
rads.
s any
the
ve much
wo of
the
up, and
to some degree yes, but at the presentation and the questioning afterwards I'm sure they usually knew who deserved what grade
The final semester was usually one or at most two
And each groups shared an "office" +8 hours a day so they ones that weren't pulling their weight were quickly singled out so no one wanted to team up with them on the infamous first day of each semester where we had to make the groups
Some years ago, a girl was trying to get her project working. Some kind of audio delay or echo. She tried a couple people. I finally got the thing wired up. Nothing but parts and jumpers on a protoboard. She graduated. I don't have a EE.
Tweny years ago maybe. Hereabouts the overwhelming majority of them are just button-pushing appliance - or keyboard - operators and very few know which end of a soldering iron to grab.
I never had a lab with more than two in a team. Big school, too. Maybe they increased the size of the teams, later, because it took six or eight to have one who knew anything.
An "office"? 8-hours a day? Undergrads?
When I was teaching I found out pretty fast that it wasn't so easy to tell who did what. There wasn't time to get too deeply into it, though the really bad ones knew nothing and their exams proved it. The other students didn't seem to care, either. The few good ones would rather do all the work anyway. The cute ones, not so much.
Five years ago, I was at UT Austin ECE dept, working towards my degree. I was amazed to find that the CS dept had started using Java as the programming language for the undergraduates - most probably the faculty members would have had heart attacks if they had to use C++. The young faculty members of the ECE dept, specially those with pure CS backgrounds were trying to force a change in the curriculum that would enable them to teach core programming classes as Data Structures in Java. A really funny incident occurred once when I was met one of these young faculty members (a Cambridge Univ. UK grad with PhD from MIT) for a TA position. He was glad I had been using for about a decade then, because he frankly admitted that he did not know C++. Later when I was working at the SMC Networks Austin office, I heard that Cisco Systems (office right across US 183) was bringing in 20 C programmers from China. So the present mess is entirely the doing of head in the cloud faculty members, and unless these imbeciles are forced to face reality, the situation will worsen.
How about the tube daze? One class test in college was an RLC series network across the 120V line; Measure current and all voltages,draw a vector diagram,explain the results. 1K/V meters were used. I went beyond the simple requirements and corrected each vector that was altered due to loading of the meter. Instructor asked "why?" and i said that one must know their instruments and make corrections to readings accordingly, including measurement error(s).
These daze, i would think that voltage would be off limits, 120V "impossible" to use ("johnny might kill himself"). Well, duh..then, there was a sort "safety" discussion and all jumped in with wires,meters, paper, and pencils. Never an oopsie.
Now days i guess, take an inductor pass around class in one direction, and a battery in the other direction. The guy that gets both will prolly kill himself.
"Give me a battery with 12V, a buzzer, and an ignition spark-coil, and I shall move the biggest jock on the football team".
-- The Modern Archimedes
Frank McKenney
--
In every age "the good old days" were a myth. No one ever thought
they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises
that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.
-- Brooks Atkinson / Once Around the Sun
Yes, that is true. But you won't be a longterm nerd because if just about anything you do fails to impress other nerds or blows up then the fun is out. There is a little bit of redneck in everyone ... "Hey y'all, watch this!".
Ok, may be different on the US west coast. At one client well over 50% of the engineers are hams (they encourage it) and these guys can design just about anything. Lots of weekends they get together again but not for work, then they build antennas and stuff. All they need for materials is the local hardware store and the supermarket for the barbecue goodies.
Den lørdag den 14. december 2013 04.48.43 UTC+1 skrev snipped-for-privacy@attt.bizz:
bizz:
finally got
s to the
E grads.
tics any
of the
have much
r two of
ly the
it up, and
an
or
ds
n't pulling their weight were quickly singled out so no one wanted to team up
e
yep, every group got an "office" for the semester, a few desks, lock on the door, a place for a coffee machine and if you were lucky someone had an old fridge for the beers
My 1970 college senior project didn't work. Well, it worked on paper, but not when it was built. It was mostly RTL. I was graduated anyway because various instructors and administrators wanted to get rid of me. I think I learned more fighting a design that didn't work, than one that might have worked.
These days, senior projects seem to have become cooperative efforts involving small teams. Officially, it's to help students learn how to work together, cooperate, collaborate, etc. It's a good thing, but the few that I watched evolved degenerated into one student getting almost the entire work load, while the others were at best marginally involved.
$13 on eBay: Just add your name.
Been there, done that. I find far too many specialists. For example, someone that really knows programming, and nothing else. Can't solder, doesn't know how the hardware works, has no test equipment, and can't figure out how to solder. Such people are quite useful within their area of expertise, but once outside in adjacent areas, they're lost. One reason they go to hackerspace meetings is to find someone with experience in these areas to help with some problem.
I was admiring a Velleman 3D printer. I mentioned to the owner that it might be improved with anti-backlash gears. I had to explain what they were, what they did, and why they might be useful on the printer. His first thought was that he could perform the same function in software. Sigh. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
We have 3 local radio clubs with a total of about 120 members. I would guess that maybe 30 members are technically competent with some phase of electronics, and only about 10 know anything about RF. My backlog of radios to repair should be a clue.
Geek, nerd, dork, dweeb, GNUnerd, hack, hacker, compupunk, robodork, etc. Probably others. Most such terms have more to do with ones appearance than job function. Most are 1960's surfing terms.
--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
You can do pretty good backlash compensation in software. I've written a few n/c compilers, for milling machines and one huge Whitney punch press (it shook the ground when it punched steel) and all included a backlash factor. Big machines have heavy-duty lead screws or recirculating ball screw things, and conventional anti-backlash gears don't work around those kinds of forces. They'd be fine in a
3D printer where the forces are low.
What surprised me is that I included a crude macro facility, "pat" for "pattern", in the compilers, and the machinists were soon using that to do very sophisticated programming structures.
--
John Larkin Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com
Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom timing and laser controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
I think so. The students select more of the easier CS/CE courses and can get an EE degree without knowing much about electronics, or even electricity. One we recently interviewed had done, as his project, a stereo headphone amp. It had a
56 ohm output resistor after the comp emitter followers, driving 60 ohm headphones. After some prompting, he was able to tell us that it lost half the signal voltage (he's intelligent, so he invoked symmetry) but he had no idea how much headphone power was lost by having that resistor. If we hire him, we'll have to teach him all about electronics.
On the other hand, Rob showed him a program with a bug, in a language he'd never seen, and he spotted the bug.
--
John Larkin Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com
Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom timing and laser controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
Or having a BSEE means that a person was eager to get out of school and start designing real stuff. Engineering academia has never been closely coupled to engineering real-life, or at least not since after WWII.
I haven't found that people with advanced degrees are predictably better EEs. Probably the opposite.
--
John Larkin Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com
Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom timing and laser controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.