Nice chart. Can't rule out the old null hypothesis eh!
Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
261–270 of 429 posts
Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
We had the task of building a highly insulated small house. Big enough to hold a hot cup of tea (and meassure how good it holds its temperature inside). Our design was very, very good in that regard. (I used insulation building material from the house my family build at that time) But granted, it was not so pretty. But that was not a stated goal. But when it came to grades, suddenly design and subjective aesthetics m…
I mean, the other side of the coin is that engineering schools are a giant circle jerk that churn out thousands of graduates every year who if left to their own devices will design things that cannot be made out of inputs and using processes that are not appropriate. I'm not saying you gotta prioritize looks but you gotta think a few steps ahead and understand what the ancillary criteria that will make or break a des…
The main design goals were:
- construct a house with good insulation
No word of it being pretty. Houses should look pretty, but it wasn't art class, but physics. And the physics teacher clearly said insulation is the goal (so we learn about the concept).
We had a funtional house (roof, walls, windows, door) with very good insulation. The winning house just looked pretty and its insulation was basically nonexistent.
Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
#263It takes a special kind of mind to appreciate this short post, not as fiction, but as truth and also as a jab at the physics sciences in general.
I appreciate it just from reading enough HN and XKCD
Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
#264(2000) (at most: https://web.archive.org/web/20001031193257/http://www.cs.wis... )
https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/cv.html Looks like he went on get a PhD in CS and is now a staff SWE at Google, according to his LinkedIn. Guess he's rolling in cash after all.
That this is the chosen path says alot about how we as a society allocate money and value things.
Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
The rope has a mechanism for creating drag (a wooden board) at the end, and regularly spaced knots. You throw the board in the water, let the rope play out through your hands, and count the knots as they pass through your hands while watching a timer.
Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
#266Anyone who did undergrad lab work around 2000ish might throw in some comment about lab view software and the number of times it crashes and loses all your data
2000s? My university's wind tunnel instrumentation was mostly LabView.
It's been around a very long time and continues to be relevant. It's just a window in time where it was feasible to have a graphical application made on labview to be accessible to undergrads crossing over with such a thing being quite unstable.
Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
#267Earlier 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…
For a college class grade, everyone is supposed to be tested on the same exercise. If all students were tested under the same scenario then it would be fair. For just one student to be tested under this scenario, but for all other students to get a free pass on the lab component identification diagnostic test, is not reasonable.
More to the point, the professor would be required to provide the same effort to every other student in the class.
Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
#268Looks like he didn't measure the temp correctly, who knows what the real temp was inside the crystal.
Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ri…
Depending on your environment, the above printf might print nothing at all, because there is no trailing newline.
Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
#270One 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…
'flunked everyone who claimed they got the supposed "correct" answer to three significant digits because that was impossible.' while I've never seen anyone flunked for this, I certainly have taken off substantial amounts of points, and seen others do the same, for 3 significant figures when 2 is the absolute highest reasonably possible (and realistically, one sig fig was what we actually wanted).
I've run the exact lab you're describing, and I think we gave full credit for anything between 5m/s^2 and 20 m/s^2 provided there was some acknowledgement that this was at odds with what was expected. We very often would check in halfway through class and either tell the kids what they were doing wrong, or even tell them to write something 'this is at odds with literally all known science and I think I don't trust this'. For this particular lab, I've never seen errors as large as the ones you've described, so your lab was likely very poorly set up.
In other cases, I've made extra time (and allow students to come in) in case their numbers were so weird as to be problematic; just depends on the lab. Any teacher worth their salt will do this. It's a shame the teachers you had were terrible and incentivized bad stuff.
If being in a lab has taught me anything, it's that doing good science is often morally difficult. Sticking by your guns is hard.
But you are right in some sense: there are definitely incentives to... misreport. The best we can do as teachers is to reduce those as much as possible and reward kids/students for being honest.