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Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)

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Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)

#181

Post by shadowgovt »

fluoridation wrote: post #163
shadowgovt wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be the process to do that? To aim 0 and 100 properly, you'd need a tool to calculate a 100:28 (25:7) ratio on an arbitrary distance, wouldn't you? One can build such a tool, but it's not a doubled-over piece of string.

Surely you can simply use a ruler and rotate it away from the parallel to achieve any arbitrary scale, right?

If you happen to have a good ruler (again, 1720s... Those also cost money or time to make). A ruler and a T-square would work. But still, it's more complicated and requires a lot more bench to secure things in place at angles than folding a piece of string in half.

Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)

#182

Post by mandevil »

Natsu wrote: post #141
don-code wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is, more or less, exactly what happened when I took Electronics I in college. The course was structured in such a way that you could not move on to the next lab assignment until you completed the one before it. You could complete the lab assignments at your own pace. If you failed the lab, you failed the class, regardless of your grade. The second or third lab had us characterize the response of a transistor in…

It's funny, because while that's a terrible educational experience, you actually learned some important lessons despite them. I remember the first time I found out that the software documentation I had been relying upon was simply and utterly wrong. It was so freeing to start looking at how things actually behaved instead of believing the utterly false documentation because the world finally made sense again.

I took and then TA'd a class where the semester long project was to control robots (it was a software engineering principles class, the actual code writing could be done in a single weekend, but you had to do all the other stuff of software engineering- requirements analysis and documentation etc).

We had a software simulator of the robots, and the first lab was everyone dutifully writing the code that worked great on the simulator, and only then did we unlock the real robots and give you 2-3 minutes with the real robot. And the robot never moved that first lab, because the simulator had a bug, and didn't actually behave like the real robot did. We didn't deliberately design the robot that way, it came like that, but in a decade of doing the class we never once tried to fix the simulator because that was an incredibly important lesson we wanted to teach the students: documentation lies. Simulators aren't quite right. Trust no one, not even your mentor/TA/Professor.

We did not actually grade anyone on their robot failing to move, no grade was given on that first lab experience because everyone failed to move the robot. But they still learned the lesson.

Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)

#183

Post by kkylin »

jerf wrote: post #27

One of my Core Memories when it comes to science, science education, and education in general was in my high school physics class, where we had to do an experiment to determine the gravitational acceleration of Earth. This was done via the following mechanism: Roll a ball off of a standard classroom table. Use a 1990s wristwatch's stopwatch mechanism to start the clock when the ball rolls of the table. Stop the stopw…

For typical distances (say the height of a table or a shelf) the time should be on the order of a fraction of a second. There's a couple hundred ms delay in the human auditory + motor system, which is a sizable fration of the time you're trying to measure and one would have to try to account for (but not all that easy, especially for a HS physics class).

Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)

#184

Post by tomrod »

matthewowen wrote: post #175
tomrod wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't received as right-wing propaganda at the time. Endorsed by Bill Gates and others less-informed to education research with leanings towards the left. But it is definitely anti-education and proposes solutions that aren't justified, like the right-wing-aligned push for chartered schools (which tend to be religious in nature, hence the wholesale gobbling for it by the rightwing). Stanford studies in 2009 & 201…

> segregation (since poorer people both tend to be minorities and tend to not have capacity/time to jump through lottery hoops) charter schools tend to have _more_ minority students than public schools. eg in philadelphia, charter schools are 80% black/hispanic versus 71% for the public schools. nationwide they are 60% black/hispanic vs 42% for public schools ( https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/06/06/us-pu…

Aye. This is captured in the next sentence, perhaps the phrasing was not clear:

> With careful planning and policy structure, perhaps good charter schools could overcome their entrance bias

It is good when they do, and it is easy to go awry.

Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)

#185

Post by ninetyninenine »

wholinator2 wrote: post #109
ninetyninenine wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Like this is fraud level bs that’s happening and people are voting me down. I think it’s because this kind of stuff is common. People have done fraudulent stuff and they don’t agree it’s a fireable offense. Understandable. I still would endanger someone’s livelihood for this. Poor performance I would think twice and go through all measures possible to improve performance including putting them in a position w…

You seem very angry yourself, and willing to let that anger guide you to harming someone. Are you so different from that teacher? In fact, you might be worse, while he only gave a grade (one of many surely, likely to have no long term impact on life prospects or survival), you would have this man made homeless? Don't be so quick to assume a teacher (at least in the us) has been able to accrue sufficient savings to en…

I would. Small things like this add up to overall corruption.

Also im not killing him. Just firing him. Find a new job and don’t do shit like that again.

Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)

#186

Post by Sesse__ »

mikepurvis wrote: post #116
Sesse__ wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My physics professor told us once about a lab he had to do when he was a student himself, about measuring the adiabatic gas constant of air. The workload at that point was immense, so lots of students would just write a report and give the textbook answer—and be marked wrong. It turned out the TA had sabotaged the experiment by putting alcohol in the bottom of the (dark glass) measurement bottle, so the measurement w…

As bad as the prior story is, I don't know if intentionally misleading the students is the right way either— what if one had realized the contamination and acting in good faith had cleaned out the bottle? What if they did this afterward and ended up redoing the experiment only to be told they had cheated? I'm all for exposing students to something unknown, but telling them they're doing X when it's really Y for anyth…

Given that a report is supposed to tell what you did and then your calculations and conclusions, you'd better include something as dramatic as “we washed the equipment after getting the wrong results and detecting contamination”…

Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)

#187

Post by int_19h »

freedomben wrote: post #97
don-code wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is, more or less, exactly what happened when I took Electronics I in college. The course was structured in such a way that you could not move on to the next lab assignment until you completed the one before it. You could complete the lab assignments at your own pace. If you failed the lab, you failed the class, regardless of your grade. The second or third lab had us characterize the response of a transistor in…

That is enraging. I've seen similar things happen too and it blows my mind how ridiculous some of these teachers can be. I don't know if it's dehumanization of their students in their minds or an utter unwillingness to devote 30 seconds of directed attention to understanding the situation and making a reasonable judgment, but whatever the cause it is prolific. The only thing worse is when one of them will add somethi…

It's a general problem with large bureaucracies. If you're a cog in the machine, the safest way is to always stick to the rules, and avoid any situation where one has to exercise discretion, since any personal judgment comes with potential personal responsibility down the line.

Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)

#188

Post by Eduard »

don-code wrote: post #161
Natsu wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny, because while that's a terrible educational experience, you actually learned some important lessons despite them. I remember the first time I found out that the software documentation I had been relying upon was simply and utterly wrong. It was so freeing to start looking at how things actually behaved instead of believing the utterly false documentation because the world finally made sense again.

Sometimes it's not even rare that documentation is wrong. The documentation for a vendor who I won't name - but might be at Series J and worth north or $50 billion - seems to be wrong more often than it's right. We frequently say, don't blame the tools, it's you. That pushes "blame the tools" outside of the Overton window, and when we need to blame a tool, we're looked at like we have five heads. Ten years ago, I was…

> Yet here we were, and I'd wasted a bunch of time convinced that a support ticket was not the right way to go.

From my experiences with public issue trackers for big projects, it's very reasonable to postpone creating a new issue, and rather follow my own hypothesis/solution first:

* creating a new issue takes significant effort to be concise, provide examples, add annotated screenshots, follow the reporting template, etc., in hopes of convincing the project members that the issue is worth their time.

Failing to do so often results in project members not understanding or misunderstanding the problem, and all too often leads to them directly closing the issue.

And even when reporting a well-written issue, it can still just be ignored/stall, and be autoclosed by GitHubBot.

Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)

#189

Post by ninetyninenine »

sio8ohPi wrote: post #86
ninetyninenine wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he was angry, he marked it wrong. That’s grounds for termination to me. Seriously. I would put this man out of a job and endanger the livelihood of him and his family for this kind of shit.

There's a certain irony in your outrage at his failure to control his emotions, even as your own rage leads you to dream of hurting his family.

Is it rage?

If he murdered someone I would put him in jail and that will harm his family too.

There is a fine line between justice and compassion and if you never cross the line to enforce justice then you have corruption because nothing can be enforced because inevitably all enforcement leads to harm.

Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)

#190

Post by ninetyninenine »

alwa wrote: post #117
ninetyninenine wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Like this is fraud level bs that’s happening and people are voting me down. I think it’s because this kind of stuff is common. People have done fraudulent stuff and they don’t agree it’s a fireable offense. Understandable. I still would endanger someone’s livelihood for this. Poor performance I would think twice and go through all measures possible to improve performance including putting them in a position w…

It’s one question on a school exam, friend… And at least the guy had the honesty to admit his irrationality when called on it. That, to me, reads more like coming to terms with his error in an edge case than it does a systematic campaign of maliciously frauding on the student

Nah. Admitting to murder doesn’t spare you from the deed. I would fire his ass.
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