Photodiode transimpedance amplifier for slowly changing signal

And grandchildren.

Our oldest, a granddaughter, graduated in December from the University of Arizona, with a degree in Psychology... a full semester early, when the usual trend is to need an extra year.

Over the weekend I found out that she's already employed !!

One usually thinks such a degree is not marketable in a job market such as we are in.

She's been employed by the Catholic Adoption Agency (she's not Catholic... she's "non-religious"), as an adoption counselor/court ombudsman.

She has to appear regularly in adoption court, of which she has no fear... she has several years of mock trial experience, both prosecution and defense (her father is a prosecutor :-)

And they'll pay for her pursuing her Master's, on "company" time. ...Jim Thompson

ay,

ng

u'd

o hoo!

to

.net

But my point is they really ream the US student regarding the price of books, but sell the books cheaply outside the US. Now I suspect the legit vendors started to sell book cheaply abroad to counter the Chinese copies. A good strategy I suppose, but that leaves the US student paying retail and subsidizing the so-called competition.

It is much like the pharmaceutical industry. They charge a fortune in the US because we can pay it. I know it is unrealistic to expect some person in a poor country to pay the US price, but this is really getting out of hand. Worse yet, much of the raw material for drugs these days is sourced from India. My attitude is if I can't sue their asses, I rather buy elsewhere.

My other beef is with the IEEE. In the day when you had to actually publish an article in a physical journal, then fees made sense, even if there was way too much emphasis on the I part of IEEE. I had a boss on one of the committees and I would peer review articles. Clearly a good way to get advance info, though that never turned out to be the case. So he would do this for free, I'd do it for free, and oh, the person publishing the document paid the IEEE. Then the IEEE charges for the article? Now something is wrong with this picture.

I came across a nice clean used copy of Huelsman and Allen "Introduction to the Theory and Design of Active Filters,: I was tempted to replace my ratty broken spine copy, but decided mine had character.

Even way back when I was in college, several of my professors found creative ways to avoid the huge textbook ripoff.

1. Wrote their own ORIGINAL stack of material and the campus copy shop charges per set of these professors notes for the class.
2. Bought 4 actual textbooks and placed them in the reserve section of the campus library so students can sit down and read them at the library but not check them out.
3. Professors notes on the statewide college computer network for students (before internet). Now I see professors author or use web pages on internet.

I don't buy a lot of books new, and when I've bought international editions I've usually regretted it...the ones I've seen have been very cheaply made and printed on toilet paper. (My sample is pretty limited--those were computer books from Addison-Wesley.)

It's worth a lot to me to have books that last. OTOH if the overseas ones are as good, why not?

And the real racket in textbooks is that they publish 27 editions of exactly the same thing, with different pagination and rephrased problems, precisely in order to destroy the used market.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs