I taught in a college for three years a couple of decades ago. I once asked the dean if I'd get the degree (MIS, at the time) if I taught all the courses. That was the last semester I taught there. I was profitable for them too. They paid me about the same, per credit hour, as each student paid.
He doesn't know how to play the game... apply for a government grant ;-) ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
"Somebody had to build the ceiling...
before Michelangelo could go to work."
- John Ratzenberger
http://analog-innovations.com/SED/Somebody_had_to_build_the_ceiling.pdf
In message , Artemus writes
Heh, reminds me of one of my trainees, he went through two boxes of fuses with a multimeter before someone was kind enough to point it out to him. Of course the rotten git who told him the fuse was shorted was sat there laughing.
-- Clint Sharp
Ahhum, he has the grant :-)
Steve
Some do, but my impression is that it's much less common than in the past.
Years ago, the only way for kids to gain access to electronics (and the corresponding "wow factor") was to do as you've said - jump in and start experimenting and building stuff. My own introduction was a crystal-radio kit given to me as a 10th-birthday present by my grandfather. Highly addictive.
These days, kids can stroll into a mall store, drop a week's allowance on the counter, and buy an electronic gizmo that does far more than anything they could build themselves (and is probably designed for a saturation-level bells-and-whistles-and-WOW! neatness factor).
The thrill is gone, I'm afraid. Or, rather, access to the thrill is much more widely distributed. Individual learning and experimentation isn't the only path to playing with high-tech goodies available to kids any more.
It's a shame, in a way.
It's not just electronics, either... whole aspects of self-directed learning and experience seem to have atrophied, perhaps for similar reasons. A few months ago I asked a school-teacher I'd just met, how many of her middle-school students read books independently, for pleasure.
Her response was to hold up thumb and forefinger, forming a "zero".
She then amended her response, saying "Well, there may be one or two."
--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!
Add to this the fact that hardly any electronic devices are built so they can be repaired. You can't even get some of them apart! When you can, there are specialized parts that cost more, (when you can find them), than a new appliance.
I just opened a microwave oven. All the expensive parts, (transformer, magnetron,etc.) were OK. The little control pc was bad. The replacement part included the front panel and display and cost $72. I bought the oven 3 years ago for $99.
It's easier for them to watch TV.
-- Virg Wall, P.E. (I had an Amateur radio license, 1st Class Radiotelephone, 2nd Class Radiotelegraph and four years of Army Signal Corps experience and a BSEE before I passed the P.E. exam.)
One of my all-time favorite PhDs was an EE first. he famously says "I have never worked a day in my life." ( he's a very good teacher, textbook writer and chair of the CS department whence I gradulated ). Good prof. His textbooks are all about 3/8" thick, lean and full.
-- Les Cargill
So why don't he just go ahead with it? Publish it in the form of a working product.
-- Les Cargill
Organizations that perpetuate themselves outlast those that don't.
-- Les Cargill
Those IEEE papers are vetted before being published. I don't think it would be a good idea to publish a paper without some sort of peer review. [And still look what they publish!]
There is some whack job in South Africa that writes papers as if they were publications. The theories he espouses are just plain scientifically without merit.
I think self publication has merit if you have some trusted engineers to review the paper. You generally need this anyway since what is obvious to you may not be clear to someone reading the paper without your background.
Incidentally, any paper that have "novel" in the title is highly suspect.
Why would they? I caught the tail end of that. Once the market became better at serving the desires of electronics consumers, the money part of it no longer favored DIY.
I had the great fortune of relatives bringing me broken kit to fix, under supervision. So can you do that with an iPod?
I had these great Radio Shack kits, where one would trap discrete components under springs to make circuits. These were designed to make electronics feel like anything but deferred gratification.
Odd, saying this makes me feel spoilt. Privleged.
I remember the shock at the first Japanese solid state rig they sent me. Nothing made sense. I could make neither hide nor hair of it. It was optiomized for something I could not visually disentangle. It wasn't built like a series of Wisconsin dairy farms, with PS over here, preamp over here, power section there. It was , as is the wont of island cultures, optimized for the use of materials and it used hack beyond my ken.
So beyond that point, I stopped doing it. About the age of 15. There was a death in the family that shifted the balance of power to where that didn't happen any more. And I had other interests.
But there was a span of time where I would tell my father "Dad, I need to use your orange stick" and that meant I needed to use that and the meter and the whole schmeer. It was a ritual of acculturation, an invite into the recesses of the family that really meant something. People that got away from Hank Williams and Steinbeck with a slide rule and perspiration.
I threw all that away and became a Software Weenie. As I remain to this day. But I still know how to use an orange stick. If you can't find one, a corn dog stick is pretty good. If you're really hard up, a chopstick will do. 90% of WTF? problems are microphonic.
-- Les Cargill
Not really, there are just far too many cooler distractions for kids these days. Before you had consumer computers, the internet, video games, mobile phones etc etc if you had "the knack" or interest in technical stuff then hobby electronics was the obvious natural progression. Now it's not obvious any more and is obscured by all the other techo things kids can take up instead.
But surprisingly it's making a comeback of sorts through the so called "hackers" and "makers", perpetuated by Make magazine and various hcked gadget forums and the like. 5-10 years ago this area didn't really exist, but now it's cool again to hack stuff, a good lot of it electronics oriented.
Dave.
-- ================================================ Check out my Electronics Engineering Video Blog & Podcast: http://www.eevblog.com
It certainly isn't a formal requirement. Organising your message into the right format, and tying it back to earlier, relevant, published work does require that you've read a few scientific papers and understand why they are put together in the way that they are. It took me a while to get it right, and - thinking back about the training I got during my Ph.D. - I could have used more training in that area.
Tell me more - I've got academic friends, and non-academic friends who publish in peer-reviewed journals. One of us might be able to help.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
It would be if it were true.
Getting the format right is tricky. In the - limited - refereeing I've done for "Measurement Science and Technology" I've run into a lot of graduate student and post-docs who haven't remotely mastered the format - the content was mostly unimpressive as well, so it might just have been a side-effect of stupidity.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
t
nk
sMichael A. Terrell, brown-beaking for for all he is worth (which isn't much).
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
Jim-out-of-touch-with-reality-Thompson strikes again. I'm actually a useful odd-jobs man, and do carpentry, plumbing, and the odd bit of household wiring. I am left-handed, and do understand differential screws.
If Jim had the wits left to let him think, he might wonder how a guy with a Ph.D. in chemistry got to know enough electronics to have a couple of patents and cited publications in the area.
But Jim really is away with the fairies.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
Hi Jim,
"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...
Nice!
Here's one dude who's teaching it:
Several people at work here have taken Besser classes:
---Joel
In Massachusetts, epitome of the church-police state, no less ;-)
Reminds me... back then, 1958+, it was illegal to sell prophylactics. However a discrete inquiry at a drug store got me an offer for a good price on a gross ;-)
So it looks like the basics are already covered.
I've contemplated, more for amusement than anything else, selling "A Week with the Master", look over my shoulder while I do a real design, but I'm sure there'd be no takers ;-)
It would take a student already with some I/C design experience to keep up. But, from what I note of the lurkers, the handful who know I/C design are already experts themselves.
(And the rest are mouthy know-nothings ;-) ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
With Half My Brain Tied Behind My Back
Still More Clever Than Mr.Prissy Pants
Perhaps not as "well" -- clearly the average kid isn't going to have anything approaching the means to, e.g., swap a BGA component -- but there's still some opportunity for learning in replacing broken headphone jacks, cracked LCD modules, dead hard drives from being dropped, etc.
Similar items are still around, e.g.,
---Joel
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