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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)

#241

Post by cycomanic »

CodeMage wrote: post #220
cycomanic wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's the thing that both students and often the teachers forget. We don't run labs to go smoothly, we run labs because you'll have to troubleshoot. There is no learning experience in a lab that works without issues, in fact IMO if lab instructions are of the step by step type, they should always have some deliberate errors in it to get students to troubleshoot. To play devil's advocate, just imagine the previou…

> Should they expect a good performance evaluation? They should expect that particular incident to not affect their performance evaluation, since it was very much not their fault. In your hypothetical scenario, your hypothetical junior engineer went to the senior engineer repeatedly for advice, and the senior engineer did not do their job properly: The lab tech was unhelpful, insisting that it must be something with…

> They should expect that particular incident to not affect their performance evaluation, since it was very much not their fault.

What do you mean not their fault? I've seen wrong parts delivered by suppliers, so yes responsibility of an engineer who puts together a circuit is definitely checking that the parts are correct.

> In your hypothetical scenario, your hypothetical junior engineer went to the senior engineer repeatedly for advice, and the senior engineer did not do their job properly:

>> The lab tech was unhelpful, insisting that it must be something with how I had it wired, encouraging me to re-draw my schematic, check my wires, and so on. It could _never_ be the equipment's fault.

Again _never_ the equipment's fault? It wasn't the equipment it was a part. So maybe it was an issue of miscommunication? I find it hard to believe that the lab tech said it could never be the parts, considering how those things are handled in student labs, small parts break all the time.

Maybe, it's true and it was a crappy lab tech, maybe they could not imagine the part being broken, but I've seen the other side of the equation as well, when things don't work students often just throw their hands up and say "it doesn't work" without any of their own troubleshooting expecting the tutor/lab tech/professor to do the troubleshooting for them (quite literally, can you check that we wired everything correctly...).

In my experience this does not get accepted in industry. I acknowledge though what the other poster said, generally in industry incentives are different and someone would have intervened if a project gets held up for 8 weeks by a single person.

Regarding the story, I wonder what would have been an acceptable solution (apart from the lab tech possibly being more helpful?), I as a teacher would have excepted a report which would have given a detailed account of the troubleshooting steps etc. (but it needs to show that a real effort to find the cause, simply saying the lab tech couldn't help is not sufficient). Simply saying "it wasn't my fault because I had a wrong part" shouldn't just give you an A.

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

#242

Post by thaumasiotes »

mystified5016 wrote: post #48
throwway120385 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting way to measure the passage of time -- just use something that produces a "regular distance" and derive a way from kinematics to calculate the acceleration from the change in the distance.

The way boats historically measured speed was by dragging a rope behind them. The rope has knots tied with exact spacing. You drop one end of the rope in the water, and count how many knots pass you in a given time. That's then your speed in knots.

> You drop one end of the rope in the water, and count how many knots pass you in a given time.

Given that you're dragging the rope behind you, won't this number be zero?

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

#243

Post by tomrod »

grg0 wrote: post #216
MarkusQ wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think _all_ of the Overton Window is "right of center" than you are surely miscallibrated (there's even a meme floating around that describes this exact conceptual error).

His calibration is perfectly fine. There is no left left in the US, as is obvious from the crack down of unions and welfare and the privatization of all aspects of society. At best, you get center-right representation in Congress (who represent the elite, not the working class.)

While you and I ape on hackernews, the American Left is currently filibustering in the Senate.

The left is real, adapts to what can work, and learns.

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

#244

Post by plank »

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…

Have a complete different experience. As a physical major, did a famous Millikan's oil drop experiment. Am a terrible experimentalist (went on to do my PhD in theoretical physics), so we got a charge of about 1/3 of the charge of an electron. Now, as I did not get a Nobel prize, I did not actually measure the charge of a single quark, but still got good enough grades for this study.

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

#245

Post by don-code »

michaelsbradley wrote: post #174
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…

I was in honors freshman chemistry at university. Tough class, all homework (lots of it) graded rigorously, but only the midterm and final counted toward the course grade. So if you wanted an A you had to get an A on both exams. After midterm, during every other lecture at least, the professor would sound a refrain: “An orbital is not a house! An electron does not live in a house!” Final exam had a small number of co…

I agree this seems overly principled to me.

I recall a DSP class where there was an exam with a question like (not exactly this):

> What does the following code print?

> `printf("Hello, world!");`

If you responded with:

> Hello, world!

...which - of course - the whole class did, you got the question wrong.

If you responded with:

> "Hello, world!"

...which is actually not what that would print, you got the question right.

A small band of us went to the professor and noted that, in fact, `printf("Hello, world!")` does not print the quotes. But he wanted us to show that it printed a string, and we denote strings by quotes.

This was something that we learned to do just for him - all strings had to be enclosed by quotes, to denote that they were strings. As far as I'm concerned, it served no practical purpose; we never had to differentiate strings like "Hello" from ['H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', 0] or other representations.

A better example of how this could go - and not one that had anywhere near the same stakes - was a question on the entrance exam for my college radio station:

> What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

I got this question right by answering, "Ni!"

(edit: formatting)

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

#246

Post by AnimalMuppet »

michaelsbradley wrote: post #174
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…

I was in honors freshman chemistry at university. Tough class, all homework (lots of it) graded rigorously, but only the midterm and final counted toward the course grade. So if you wanted an A you had to get an A on both exams. After midterm, during every other lecture at least, the professor would sound a refrain: “An orbital is not a house! An electron does not live in a house!” Final exam had a small number of co…

Yeah? What "life lesson" does the dean think you're going to learn from that? That authority figures cannot be trusted because they will hurt you with bureaucratic stupidity. Does the dean, as an authority figure, really want that to be the lesson you learn?

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

#247

Post by kabdib »

don-code wrote: post #87
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…

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…

this happens in "real life" as well

i spent a bunch of time trying to figure out why my 74LS20 wasn't being a dual 4-input NAND gate

turns out that was a date code, and it was some other chip entirely

1974 was a terrible year for 74xx series TTL chips

yes, i am old :-)

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

#248

Post by CamperBob2 »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #169
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…

I only took two electronics classes, but in the later one I was the class hero for just buying a bunch of potentiometers on amazon so that we didn't have to waste all of that expensive time sitting around waiting for our turn with the only good one left. It cost me like $10

Literal example of "bias for action." A+

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

#249

Post by ethbr1 »

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…

The flip side of this is from the professor's perspective: some undergrad in every class will lie their ass off about why their assignment was delayed.

Unfortunately, this reality produces no good options if you think someone is telling the truth: (1) make an exception, and be unfair to the rest of the class or (2) don't make an exception, and perpetuate unfairness for the impacted student.

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

#250

Post by [deleted] »

HiPHInch wrote: post #11

I took some effort to change my research interest from computer vision to DFT calculation in quantum chemistry. Honestly, I'm kind of frustrated now, too many work is close-source in this area. The research paper will tell you everything except how to reproduce this work in minimal effort, it's like they are hiding something. They also using a `Origin` to plot and MS Word to write paper, which is also non-free licens…

[deleted]
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