Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
pages.cs.wisc.edu
pages.cs.wisc.edu
Anyone who has ever had a wristwatch of similar tech should know how hard it is to get anything like precision out of those things. It's a millimeter sized button with a millimeter depth of press and could easily need half a second of jabbing at it to get it to trigger. It's for measuring your mile times in minutes, not fractions of a second fall times.
Naturally, our data was total, utter crap. Any sensible analysis would have error bars that, if you treat the problem linearly, would have put 0 and negative numbers within our error bars. I dutifully crunched the numbers and determined that the gravitational constant was something like 6.8m/s^2 and turned it in.
Naturally, I got a failing grade, because that's not particularly close, and no matter how many times you are solemnly assured otherwise, you are never graded on whether you did your best and honestly report what you observe. From grade school on, you are graded on whether or not the grading authority likes the results you got. You might hope that there comes some point in your career where that stops being the case, but as near as I can tell, it literally never does. Right on up to professorships, this is how science really works.
The lesson is taught early and often. It often sort of baffles me when other people are baffled at how often this happens in science, because it more-or-less always happens. Science proceeds despite this, not because of it.
(But jerf, my teacher... Yes, you had a wonderful teacher who didn't only give you an A for the equivalent but called you out in class for your honesty and I dunno, flunked everyone who claimed they got the supposed "correct" answer to three significant digits because that was impossible. There are a few shining lights in the field and I would never dream of denying that. Now tell me how that idealism worked for you going forward the next several years.)
Even if you don't yet have formal statistical chops, it should be at least possible to show cumulative distribution function of results that will convey the story better than a single answer with overly optimistic implied precision.
You're certainly correct that the true value would have been in our error bars, and one of those good teachers I acknowledge the existence of in my large paragraph, sarcastic as it may be, could conceivably have had us run such a garbage experiment and shown that as bad as it was, our error bars still did contain the correct value for probably all but one student or something like that. There's some valuable truth in that result too. Cutting edge science is often in some sense equivalently the result of bodging together a lot of results that in 30 year's hindsight will also be recognized as garbage methodology and experiments, not because the cutting edge researchers are bad people but because they were the ones pushing the frontier and building the very tools that later people would use to do those precision experiments with later. I always try to remember the context of early experiments when reading about them decades later.
It would also have been interesting to combine all the data together and see what happened. There's a decent chance that would have been at least reasonably close to the real value despite all the garbage data, which again would have been an interesting and vivid lesson.
This is part of the reason this is something that stuck with me. There were so many better things to do than just fail someone for not lying about having gotten the "correct" result. I'm not emotional about anything done to me over 30 years ago, but I'm annoyed in the here and now that this is still endemic to the field and the educational process, and this is some small effort to help push that along to being fixed.
In fact one of the trickiest problems I had to resolve once was to show that the reason a piece of equipment couldn't accurately accumulate a volume from a very small flow was because of the fixed-point decimal place they chose. And part of how I did that was by optimizing a measurement device for the compliance of a fixed tube until I got really good, consistent results. Because I knew that those numbers were actually really good it came down to how we were doing math in the computer and then I just had to do an analysis of all of the accumulation and other math to determine what the accumulated error was. It turned out to be in really good agreement with what the device was doing.
All of that came from our initial recognition that the measured quantity was wrong for some reason.
Our class had some kind of device that would either punch a hole, or make a mark on paper at a regular time interval. We attached a narrow strip of paper to the ball, and let it pull through the marking device as it fell from the bench to the floor. We then measured the distance between each mark, noting that the distance increased with each interval, using this to calculate g. I don't recall anything more than that, or how I did on that lab. I received a 50 one marking period for lack of handing in labs, but had a 90+ average otherwise in the class.
Given that you're dragging the rope behind you, won't this number be zero?
Or there could be some air resistance if you used, like, ping-pong balls.
Sounds like there was more nuance to the story.
She did not update my score, she argued a while in front of class, and when she lost the argument, said I could take it up with her supervisor.
I declined (it was one question on a larger test)
Fortunately, this was closer to a one-off problem in an otherwise acceptable class rather than a systematic issue.
I took an exam in a high school science class where I answered a question with the textbook's definition exactly as presented in the textbook, complete with the page number the definition was found on. I knew a bit about the topic, so I then cited outside scientific sources that explained why the definition was incomplete. There wasn't enough room to complete my answer in the space provided, so I spiraled it out into the margins of the exam paper.
My teacher marked my answer wrong. Then crossed that out and marked it correct. Then crossed that out, and finally marked it wrong again. During parent-teacher conferences, the science teacher admitted that even though I answered the question with the exactly correct definition, my further exposition made him "mad" (his word), and because 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.
A teacher is a professional entrusted with the most important responsibility society can offer: training and educating the next generation. It must adhere to the highest of professional standards and expectations.
That we don't pay enough to require that without reserve is a statement on our societal priorities, and disconnected from the expectations that should hold.
EDIT: clarification/word choice
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 where they can excel. Poor performance does not justify endangering the livelihood of a person or their family but this fraudulent bs of being angry and marking something wrong. That’s just malice.
Also im not killing him. Just firing him. Find a new job and don’t do shit like that again.
"Look at how hurt the teacher would be by being fired, you are a bad person for suggesting that.
Setting aside the Ad-Hominems¹ like "Are you better than the teacher"?, this is a textbook example of the logical fallacy known as Appeal to Emotion².
Which is delightfully ironic given the numerous people accusing you of being overly emotional in the point you're making that a teacher who willfully breached trust and abused their authority over children shouldn't have such authority.
This says much more about the people criticizing you than they realize.
_____
To whom? Not to me. Please don't try to assert you know what someone else is feeling.
What they wrote wasn't angry.
>and willing to let that anger guide you to harming someone.
It's not anger that's guiding the call to fire the teacher that willfully mis-grades a correct answer because "they got mad" at the student for understanding the material at above-average level.
It's the compassion for their students.
>Are you so different from that teacher?
Yes. The teacher is given authority over children, and we trust them to be fair and just in their job.
They have violated the trust and abused the authority.
And what got them mad was the student doing what we expect the students to do very well — they learned.
The teacher got mad at their student for learning, and abused the student in retaliation.
The retaliation affected someone who didn't have a choice about being in that position, and who was required to be in that class (by law, among other things), and the consequences of bad grades have lifelong effects.
Meanwhile, the commentor you're responding to observed that the teacher has failed our trust and abused the authority, and deemed such harm to students unacceptable to an extent that warrants revoking this person privilege to teach.
Nobody here has authority over the teacher, nobody trusts us to treat the teacher fairly; the teacher is free to work elsewhere; and we're being displeased about the teacher not merely doing his job badly, but harming his students.
To think these two situations are comparable is a failure of critical thinking, as well as empathy.
>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?
Nobody said anything about making the teacher homeless.
His need of having a home doesn't grant him a right to hurt children.
If you're not happy about firing potentially leading to homelessness, you may advocate for things like housing guarantees, income guarantees, and so on.
The Soviet Union, where that was the case, had its merits after all. Saying this without sarcasm, as someone born in the USSR.
But you appear to be talking in bad faith here (or, at least, without thinking it through), because by your logic, one shouldn't say that anyone should be fired for doing a bad job, by equating firing to homelessness (something specific to the US, BTW).
People are called to be fired (and are fired) for much lesser offenses than willfully hurting children in retaliation.
Most US states are at-will employment states, where anyone can be fired for nearly any reason (the few exceptions are well known).
In light of that, your argument rings hollow.
>Don't be so quick to assume a teacher (at least in the us) has been able to accrue sufficient savings to endure a ruined livelihood.
As someone who's left academia, and has many friends teaching in college or high school: that teacher will likely be better off financially doing anything else anyway.
That said, the system where we pay shit to shitty teachers and justify harm to children by shit pay is shitty all around.
See, the real issue with your rhetoric is that you completely ignore what the teacher has done.
Which is, again, abusing the trust and authority over children (we trust grading to be fair, and a lot depends on it), willfully, in retaliation, for the student having learned a lot.
Whatever the offense was, though, your argument can be repeated verbatim, without any changes, and will be still consistent.
Replace mis-grading with sexual assault, and you can still ask all the same questions you did.
Think about that for a minute. Try it.
...Don't be so quick to assume a teacher (at least in the us) has been able to accrue sufficient savings to endure a ruined livelihood. Sounds very, very extreme to me....
>Might there be a more charitable interpretation of the words, might there be information that we don't have that would, say, humanize the human being you'd like to ruin?
Gee, I must've missed that line in the US Constitution where we're all guaranteed the right to pursuit of happiness, teaching high school classes, and harming students entrusted to our authority by willfully mis-grading them.
Unironically — wouldn't anyone please think of the children?
The teacher's potentially poor finances don't equate to having a right to abuse trust and authority over children.
He has abused that trust in a way that leaves very little hope for him changing his ways (if you think that teacher will ever be happy to see that his student learned more than the teacher knew, I have a bridge to sell to you).
Consequently, there's no reason to believe the teacher should continue having the privilege to have authority over children.
>Maybe we could take the time to understand these impulses in ourselves and be the example we want rather than reflecting the pain we hate to ever increasing magnitudes.
Maybe we could avoid writing empty platitudes and try understanding the points we're responding to.
By "we", I mean "you" (just as you did).
I, for one, have already taught my fair share of mathematics classes over my years in academia, and (imagine it!) not even once I felt the impulse to mis-grade a student for any reason — much less so for being exceptionally good.
The very few times I've had the pleasure to teach someone who I felt was better than I was in the subject that I was teaching, I felt genuinely happy to have such luck.
So I'm all set on being the example.
Now, your turn.
Try to understand what I'm saying here before responding (or otherwise emotionally reacting).
------
TL;DR: abuse of authority over children warrants revoking the privilege to have such authority.
Simple as.
That's one way to say "I'll add nothing of substance to the current conversation, and comment on the perceived tone"
I.e., we're back to reacting emotionally instead of talking about the subject of what to do with teachers who willfully abuse their authority.
To quote a wise person, "Fun stuff".
>longest comment
>emotions
You seem to be confusing the two (and/or are conflating the emotions you are experiencing as a reader with the ones I am experiencing and/or expressing as a writer).
Apropos, as a former instructor, I do enjoy pointing out hypocrisy, inconsistency, and logical fallacies in others' writing - and joy is an emotion, so I'll grant you that. I was channeling that emotion.
Unlike the teacher we are discussing, who's been made angry by the work they were evaluating. See?
>holier-than-thou
That was the biggest¹ issue with the comment I was responding to, which I illustrated. Did you miss that?
Their last sentence was, quote:
>>Maybe we could take the time to understand these impulses in ourselves and be the example we want rather than reflecting the pain we hate to ever increasing magnitudes.
This is holier-than-thou. I was responding to it, in a manner that highlighted the issue.
Since you seem to have missed the holier-than-thou instances in "a couple of sentences" of the parent comment, let me point out a few more:
>>You seem very angry yourself, and willing to let that anger guide you to harming someone.
>>Might there be a more charitable interpretation of the words, might there be information that we don't have that would, say, humanize the human being you'd like to ruin?
>>Are you so different from that teacher? In fact, you might be worse
That's four holier-than-thous per 7 sentences (I counted, correct me if needs be).
The last one takes the cake though: and they went as far as calling the grandparent commenter worse than a someone who willfully wronged a child under their authority — all for saying that such abuse and breach of trust warrants a revocation of such a person's privilege of having authority over children.
So, a personal attack and ad hominem on top of all that holier-than-thou.
Note that I am not resorting to implications of that nature - those that say something about what the person I am responding to is (as opposed to discussing something they say or do).
>right before asking the person to not react emotionally
...and yet you boldly went ahead, and did precisely that, feeling piqued on the behalf of the person I was responding to.
There's a reason I asked that, and thank you for providing an illustration why it was necessary.
May I ask you to go back, and re-read the comment I wrote as textual analysis, and respond on substance, not tone? Thank you.
>Lots of condescension
So, let's be clear. Stuff like this:
>>Might there be a more charitable interpretation of the words, might there be information that we don't have that would, say, humanize the human being you'd like to ruin?
...is an example of condescension because it asserts that the person they were talking to was dehumanizing the teacher, and implies that they'd have a difficulty of "humanizing the human" without some extra help from the parent commentor.
I make no such assumptions or assertions about the person I am responding to, as I am commenting exclusively on text that they wrote.
Note how I always include the text I am responding to, to make it clear that my attitude is towards the thing being said, not the person.
The thing being said, in this case, was a piece of emotional drivel, exceptionally rich in logical fallacies and manipulative techniques.
The entire argument was an appeal to emotion: look at how hurt the teacher would be by being fired, you are a bad person for suggesting that.
(Again, did you happen to miss that? This was another reason I asked not to react emotionally).
I rightfully lampoon such rhetoric, whereas the parent commentor was condescending towards a person.
Compare and contrast.
>holier-than-thou
Oh, and I want to come back to that.
See, I taught mathematics for over a decade (as a tutor, grader, teaching assistant, lab instructor, and instructor of record in a class of 90 people).
I've had the grace of teaching a few students I considered brighter than myself, and I felt very happy to have had such privilege.
And not once in my decade of teaching did I feel the urge to mis-grade someone, or thought of defending someone who did so.
I've had children (and young adults) who've gone through such instructors in my classes. They were traumatized. Some cried in my office hours. Some went red in their faces, saying why didn't they show us this in high school.
So, while I am not "holier" than thou (or the parent commentor), I am absolutely more qualified to comment on whether the person we're discussing deserves to continue teaching than anyone here who hasn't had that experience (specifically - that of teaching people who've been traumatized by other instructors).
Please, I urge you to understand what I wrote above.
I am not ashamed to put my name under this statement:
I am saying this to provide a basis for my statements, to qualify them - not to engage in appendage measuring. My experience is what gives my words weight.
Please don't confuse expertise and experience with condescension; and note that I am expressing none towards you.
For all I know, you might be a professor with decades of teaching experience, far more accomplished than I am in everything.
But nobody - including you - is actually holy, much less "holier". We all make mistakes, and sometimes miss some context, or say something stupid.
And pointing those instances out isn't a sin either.
_______
¹Biggest issue aside from ascribing emotion to where there's none, that is, which is a common theme in this thread
>Please don't confuse expertise and experience with condescension
I'm not. Both of your comments are patronizing. You're sprinkling in rhetorical questions implying I can't read the comment I replied to, over-emphasizing parts of your sentences as if I'm a middle-schooler who is first encountering your fancy words, or claiming that I'm being emotional while you're just a beacon of logic.
I've had many experts explain stuff to me without doing any of that. I'm not confused. I even agree with a lot of the stuff you're saying about teachers! But your tone in these comments leaves a lot to be desired.
>But nobody - including you - is actually holy
Obviously. It's a saying, I wasn't being literal.
>Biggest issue aside from ascribing emotion to where there's none, that is, which is a common theme in this thread
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you're writing multiple thousands of words on a topic on a semi-obscure technology forum, in response to a total of like 8 sentences from random people you've never met, you've got some emotions and passion involved. Which is totally fine! Humans aren't meant to be completely devoid of emotion.
OK, so we agree on the substance. Excellent.
As for the tone (and discussing it) - we're getting into discussing the emotional response you're having to my writing.
And I firmly posit that most of that emotional response comes from your internal state, rather than my writing. To give a specific example:
>over-emphasizing parts of your sentences as if I'm a middle-schooler who is first encountering your fancy words
Here, you're ascribing intent and attitude to formatting; specifically, you are reading condescension in it.
There are more reasons to italicize words in sentences other than being mean to people.
One good reason is making this text more accessible to neurodivergent people¹.
It has nothing to do with you; such formatting makes people with ADHD have an easier time reading the text - and makes it easier for everyone else to scan the long passages of text fast by providing visual anchors for the key words.
Saying this as both someone with ADHD and a neurodivergence advocate². The formatting makes it easer for me to read (and re-read / proof-read) my own writing.
I'm also autistic.
My words aren't "fancy", and aren't chosen to intimidate - they are simply the words I find most precisely expressing the thoughts I want to communicate.
I assume you know them, otherwise I wouldn't be using them (or would provide an explanation).
Speaking in this manner is a very common autistic trait³, and - most importantly - has nothing to do with you. Yet you perceive an attitude (and/or emotions) towards you in that manner of speech alone.
>claiming that I'm being emotional while you're just a beacon of logic.
I've claimed neither. Can you quote the specific instance?
We all have emotions, as we've established. My point was that I am not basing my arguments on appeal to emotion, nor I am driven by emotions you described when writing this.
Passion for teaching (my special interest) - absolutely; joy of writing - you bet. Those are emotions.
They lead me to producing solid arguments, however (we do agree on the substance, right?). And if there are flaws in the points I'm making, I'm all ears.
And I am not claiming that you are emotional. I am pointing out that when you comment on my tone, and on my tone only, what you are doing is discussing your own emotional response (reaction to how I say things) rather than the content of my argument.
Note the difference between "you are emotional" and "what you are doing here is emotional".
>You're sprinkling in rhetorical questions implying I can't read the comment I replied to
The questions aren't rhetorical.
You went ahead and pointed out that my comment had multiple instances of "holier-than-thou" (where there were none, as I argued above) while saying nothing of the ones I the comment I was responding to.
What gives? I assume you are being fair, which implies you missed them. But I don't want to assume, so I ask.
Other than that - I don't imply that you "can't read" when I ask you to re-read what I wrote with a different lens.
I have provided more context in my response, and I believe my previous comments - which I don't expect anyone to remember! - would come out in a different light with the extra context.
Hence - please re-read them, bearing in mind what I say here.
By the way, this is another instance where you are reading an implication where there's none.
As I said already, I'm autistic, and I don't speak in implications.
Reading with the assumption that nothing is implied is another lens worth trying to see my writing with.
Looping back to the ADHD side of neurodivergence: I read and re-read everything I respond to multiple times because I assume that I'll miss something if I don't, and get myself in a pickle.
I am not asking you to do anything I am not doing myself.
>But your tone in these comments leaves a lot to be desired.
What we are both experiencing now is an example of the so-called Double Empathy problem.⁴
One one side, we have me and /user/ninetyninenine - I clearly have no issue with what they wrote; particularly - I don't have the issue that others have here. I see them as empathic.
The people who respond to them see /user/ninetyninenine as angry, and my defense of them as condescending.
This is a known phenomenon, and I'm sorry, but I am not going to go out of the way and adjust my writing style to protect the feelings of people who refuse to follow a simple request of taking my words literally, not ascribing emotions to me, and distinguish their emotional response from the content of my arguments.
Doing so has a cost⁵ to me that I can't afford to incur.
Again, this:
>I even agree with a lot of the stuff you're saying about teachers!
...this is the important part, to me.
That means I have communicated the ideas I wanted to bring to your attention.
Which I am not taking for granted - attention is a limited resource.
>I've had many experts explain stuff to me without doing any of that.
Kudos to them. To each their own.
>on a semi-obscure technology forum
An influential technology forum. And not obscure by far, judging by the traffic it brings to pages linked in either posts or discussions (including my website).
That aside, I simply enjoy writing. And the cool thing about copy-paste technology is that I can re-use this writing in another argument or a publication elsewhere.
To quote a meme: the IBM Model M keyboard goes brrrrrrrrrr.
>you've got some emotions and passion involved. Which is totally fine! Humans aren't meant to be completely devoid of emotion.
Sure, and I did say that. I am passionate about teaching, and I am interested in these discussions.
>>But nobody - including you - is actually holy
>It's a saying, I wasn't being literal.
See, this is a patronizing and a condescending thing to say.
Which also implies you have not actually read what I wrote, because I specifically went over what I believe are examples of "holier-than-thou" in the comment I was responding to.
What I wrote very clearly, beyond shadow of doubt, indicates that I am more than familiar with that saying.
I wrote that sentence that way because it's attention-grabbing, and it appears to have worked.
Sadly, it also appears that you glossed over entirety of the text that preceded it.
So, may I ask you to go back and re-read it, while keeping in mind the extra context I have provided in this comment?
Asking sincerely, because I think it would be great for both of us to bridge the evident communication gap.
I'll be eagerly waiting for your feedback - thank you in advance.
______
¹ https://medium.com/@katerinegeraa/5-tips-for-writing-neurodi...
³ https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/hc174z/why_do_peopl...
⁴ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_empathy_problem
⁵ https://tcf.org/content/commentary/the-economic-and-emotiona...
Thank you for asking!
I'm most curious in figuring out ways to bridge the communication gap that is manifesting in this discussion.
The gap is as follows: multiple people have objected to the remark of /user/ninetyninenine, in which they stated that, in their view, willfully mis-grading a paper is a fireable offense for a teacher.
I don't find this opinion problematic or exceptional; and I believe that, if stated in this form, it would not cause a stir.
The way it was written is, in my view, very empathetic. Most people don't consider the livelihood of someone's family when they say "they should get fired for that".
Yet the objections to that comment seem to perceive the opposite — lack of empathy, and went to great length attacking both the opinion and the person who made it.
This reaction to the form of the comment over substance is something that I'm interested in combating.
The conversation with my "sparring partner" in this thread started with a point where me and the person I'm responding to see things differently: they perceived condescension in what I say, and don't appear to see any issue with the "few sentences" of the comment I wrote an "essay" in response to.
Notably, they said they agree with much of the substance of my comment, but find the tone objectionable.
I believe that their perception of my tone can be attributed to the Double Empathy problem¹, and that the same issue underlies the objections to the point user/ninetyninenine made.
I pose the following questions:
1. Is it possible to demonstrate the line between emotional reaction to the form of the comment and its substance — and persuade people to stick to the substance?
2. Can the Double Empathy problem be overcome by explaining how we think and express opinions (and, by that, helping others avoid misinterpreting or misattributing emotions)?
I believe that this conversation helps us all explore these two questions, even if it doesn't yield a conclusive answer to either.
Additionally, I hope this discussion brings attention to neurodivergence in general, and autistic traits in communication in particular, hoping to make people who disagree with our tone hear it differently.
Which is why I'm curious to hear the thoughts of my "sparring partner", as you called them.
I don't see the conversation as a sparring match, or a debate to be won; it's an exchange of ideas where, hopefully, everyone involved leaves with more than they came in with.
Ultimately, that is the goal — in this conversation, as well as all the others I take part in.
Thank you again for asking, glad to answer any other questions!
____
If that is your goal, you couldn't be doing a worse job of it.
Well this comment of yours doesn't help either.
Genuinely curious if you've read the rest of what I wrote, and have any thoughts (objections? agreeing with anything?) regarding specific things that I said - or you just stopped at that first sentence to write this (content-free) response.
Please let me know.
Thank you so much for this comment!
The "specific goal or outcome" then has already been reached :)
1. I am not sure the issue is double empathy
2. A group of people could see holding a performance standard as attacking livelihood. I believe this view ignores that the teacher chose to mis-grade a paper, so the jeopardy to livelihood is on the teacher themselves -- assuming the standard and expectation is fair. An organization needs to hire and be willing to fire based on its values.
3. Tone policing of text has a long history on the internet. Five years ago we'd accuse tone policing enforcers of expecting privilege where none should be expected if you seek a meeting of the minds. Tone policing is a weird mix of shibboleth and inability to simply state: "I disagree" and disengaging from a conversation.
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
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 & 2013 put the fork in superior performance claims -- no better and no worse than public schools on average. So the charter school miracle is really just cherrypicking with a side of encouraging (or, if malicious, enforcing) segregation (since poorer people both tend to be minorities and tend to not have capacity/time to jump through lottery hoops). With careful planning and policy structure, perhaps good charter schools could overcome their entrance bias (RIP college entrance for either economic class or historically disparaged category), but good luck getting anything like that from the political minds that brought you DOGE and the nonsensical trade war.
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-public...). they're also generally lower income than public schools.
this is not super surprising because families with money already get school selection within public systems by virtue of spending more to live in better catchments.
i don't really have an opinion on charter schools being good or bad, but at least from what i've seen their primary audience is lower income families (often minorities) who look at their local public school and decide it's not good enough.
> 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.
You may want to recalibrate you sense of where the center is.
Many seem to make the mistake of assuming that one’s allegiance to the US Democratic Party means that the individual is a leftist, that cannot be further from the truth. The most recent presidential election I hope would have dispelled such myths however I am not certain if that is the case. That said, the US Democratic Party is a right centrist party. I fail to see how a film with endorsements from Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey is convincing evidence to show that this film is not rightwing propaganda. All conversations within the Overton Window of acceptability within the US are going to be right of center inherently, including films like this one.
The left is real, adapts to what can work, and learns.
On Sep 15, 1917, U.S. Department of Justice agents made simultaneous raids on forty-eight IWW meeting halls across the country ... arresting, jailing and convicting 165 leaders.
Want more ... see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Raids
"a series of raids conducted in November 1919 and January 1920 by the United States Department of Justice under the administration of President Woodrow Wilson to capture and arrest suspected socialists, especially anarchists and communists, and deport them from the United States."
It's based on the true story of a mathematics teacher in east L.A.
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.
To answer your question, let's note that holding a job in general — more so, a job which involves authority and power, and doubly so when it's over children — isn't a right, but a special privilege, which is given under certain assumptions, one of which is that the children entrusted into the instructors' power are to be treated fairly.
Consider that children's livelihoods depend on this assumption when they grow up, as grades affect which college they get into, which scholarships they get, which career they get to follow, how much money they make.
The teacher has violated this fundamental assumption; consequently, his teaching privileges must be revoked.
The damage to his family is out of scope; employment isn't a right, so starting a family is a risk that people take willfully.
Further, the teacher might be better off doing something that doesn't drive him mad. It's more healthy.
There's no mercy or compassion in keeping someone where they are miserable.
Side note: I changed my graduate advisor on my 5th year of graduate school, after trying for 3 years under someone who simply "didn't have the heart" to kick me out when it should've been clear we're not a fit for each other — something they had the experience to see, and I did not.
All "giving me a chance" for 3 years did was take 3 years out of my life, drag me into deep depression, and push me to almost dropping out of the graduate program.
After I started working with another advisor, I graduated in two years, writing a thesis we both were happy with (and getting a couple of publications out of it). I didn't stay in academia, but it was an option (I'm not tough enough for it, frankly, but that's a whole another conversation).
My point is: tolerating, out of compassion, an instructor who gets mad because their student understands the material very well may be similar to the compassion my first advisor had for me — which did more harm than anything else.
Being pushed out of a job one is miserable at, but can't quit on their own for whatever reason is, too, an act of compassion.
And I posit that this is what this "teacher" needs (aside from therapy).
I don't see this teacher ever being happy or excited to see a student that is so interested in the subject they teach that they understood something better than the teacher did.
But that's a prerequisite for being a teacher. Merely tolerating your students' excellence isn't enough — it's something, hopefully, a teacher should strive for.
We hope that a child taking a physics class at least has a chance of becoming a great physicist, i.e. a better physicist than their physics teacher.
But the chances of that are diminishing greatly if their physics teacher doesn't wish the same — i.e. doesn't hope that their students would shine brighter than they did.
And if that possibility drives them mad... to an extent where they'll willfully wrong the student in retribution...
...I can't imagine what it would take for them to do a 180 turn and end up being happy the next time they find themselves in this scenario.
Firing them seems like a win-win for everyone.
Wow, what bad take.
Are you willfully misinterpreting the parent commenter, or would you need some help understanding it?
Assuming it's the latter, here it is.
First, there's no outrage or rage. That's something you ascribe to the parent comment, and that's unwarranted.
Second, there's no dreaming of hurting [the teacher's] family.
The message was: it is important that this person should be relieved of teaching duties, with the full understanding of the gravity of such an action, as being fired from one's job in the US puts the livelihood of the person being fired at risk.
See, the person you're responding to is empathetic, because they consider the impact of what they wish — the teacher being fired — on the teacher as well as others (the teacher's family), and don't take wishing something like that lightly.
Most people would stop at "bad job, fire him", without contemplating what it means for that person.
The parent commentor did, and is saying that, as grave as the consequences are for the teacher (and, potentially, his family, if the teacher is the sole breadwinner), it is still necessary to remove them from teaching because harm to children and violating the trust we put in instructors is unacceptable, and the damage they do in their position is far greater than the damage that would be done by firing them.
This is a compassionate and composed consideration.
Oh, and there'd be no irony about the parent's response even if they were raging, as they were not talking about the teacher's failure to control their emotions.
The issue is hurting children, which isn't something the parent commentor is decidedly NOT doing.
Hope this helps.
Agreeing with you as a former instructor (who left academia for greener fields after completing the PhD).
I've had people cry on me in office hours because they come out with — quite literally — PTSD from instructors like the one we're discussing.
It's nothing short of psychological abuse of children, and it leaves lifelong damage.
It's worse than no instruction at all. I've had to have college kids unlearn things before I could teach them.
We've got to draw a line somewhere. I draw the line at actively traumatizing children.
That person should not be allowed to teach, period. We'd do both their students as well as themselves a huge favor by removing them from teaching.
By all indications, they'd be a happier person doing something else, where they wouldn't be driven "mad" by seeing that they've done a good job — which, for a teacher, means their students being proficient in the subject they teach.
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TL;DR: this teacher was driven "mad" by seeing that he's done a good job, and one of his students was really good in the subject.
Spare them from this pain.
Grading is boring, tedious, and quickly wears down one's enthusiasm. The words of M Bison come to mind: "For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday."
"Look sir, here in the scrawl at the margins is the answer you just said was right"
"Yes Dylan, but this was a 1 mark question. Part of getting the mark involves putting the answer inside the space provided."
I highly doubt the science teacher marked me wrong for "dumping", though. He had every opportunity to explain that to me after I got my exam graded and I asked him about it. Then he had the opportunity to explain that face-to-face with my parents. He did not do so. He said that while I got the answer right, he was "mad", thus the mark against.
Besides, notecards were not allowed for any part of the exam, and I wrote my answer from memory. I think it was clear that I knew my stuff pretty well and was not "dumping" a bunch of bullshit onto the science teacher.
There was no indication before taking the exam that I would be punished for hurting his apparently-sensitive feelings while giving the correct answer (as he agreed I did). If there were, I certainly would have chosen a different medium for proving my command of the material.
I was the only person in class that chose to do my own method. And, it didn't work because I didn't account for an environmental difference between my house and the school classroom. And, he gave me a failing grade.
It really killed my interest in physics for a long time. I focused on biology from then through college.
Ultimately, the problem was that he didn't make clear that the only thing that we were being graded on was accuracy, not experimental methods or precision. (My solution was precise, but inaccurate; whereas the standard solution was accurate but imprecise) Also, it's possible everyone else in class knew the culture of the school, and I didn't because it was my first year there. So, I didn't realize that they didn't value creativity in the way I was used to.
I write learning software, and this is an interesting pedagogical weakness we've become aware of when giving feedback (the asymmetry of learning opportunity in correct vs incorrect). It can be improved through overall design, and in a digital context there are also other opportunities.
Can confirm, this is solidly wedged into my opinions now. There were a lot of other experiences after this to compound that feeling.
In High School, I started looking aggressively for a less traditional path and fortunately found one. It really saved me, because I was forced back into the traditional environment in Senior year of high school, and my grades tanked from top-of-class to "you might need summer school to graduate" level
Things got a lot better in college, because that experience (among others) helped me effectively navigate the institution, jump directly into more advanced coursework, and earn more freedom to study things that were interesting to me.
I did get a job in my field out of college. So, my college pedigree was useful practically (though not really any knowledge I got there). But, I'm self-taught dev now, which is an amazing fit for my experience and attitude.
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 mattered and a pretty house, but useless in terms of insulation won. And we did not failed, but got kind of a bad result and I stopped believing in that teachers fairness.
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 design all else being equal, or nearly equal are or what the unstated assumptions of the party evaluating your work (e.g won't look like ass, can be made in volume, etc.) are.
- 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.
So you debate with yourself between writing down the effect you got (and trusting that you will be rewarded for integrity and effort and rigor), or simply writing down what you know the effect was supposed to be.
Most people (smartly) do the latter.
Don't expect the same choices to make sense if you go somewhere people actually care, that would make you a bad student.
> Then I held up the elementary physics textbook they were using.
> There are no experimental results mentioned anywhere in this book, except in one place where there is a ball, rolling down an inclined plane, in which it says how far the ball got after one second, two seconds, three seconds, and so on.
> The numbers have ‘errors’ in them – that is, if you look at them, you think you’re looking at experimental results, because the numbers are a little above, or a little below, the theoretical values. The book even talks about having to correct the experimental errors – very fine.
> The trouble is, when you calculate the value of the acceleration constant from these values, you get the right answer.
> But a ball rolling down an inclined plane, if it is actually done, has an inertia to get it to turn, and will, if you do the experiment, produce five-sevenths of the right answer, because of the extra energy needed to go into the rotation of the ball.
> Therefore this single example of experimental ‘results’ is obtained from a fake experiment.
> Nobody had rolled such a ball, or they would never have gotten those results!
Reading your post, I now realize education is dysfunctional in the entire world, not just in my country. Small comfort.
I feel like this is one I'm going to have to try at home.
I think we should definitely not learn from this that science still works despite those things. Because then it's easy to just say it is what it is. I think it's much more helpful to be critical of the scientific process (scientific policies in particular) and see how it can be improved. As I said many times before here on Hacker News, basically nothing in science has changed since papers like Why Most Published Research Findings Are False by Ioannidis have come out. I think we as civilians should demand more from science than a bunch of false papers behind paywalls.
I measured a 9.86[1] :-) Mostly dumb luck. But most people in the class would get decently close (9-10.5).
[1] The correct value is closer to 9.81.
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 a DIP-8 package, which was provided to us. If you blew it up, you got a slap on the wrist. That DIP-8 was otherwise yours for the class.
I could _never_ get anything resembling linear output out of my transistor. 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.
Eight (!) weeks into that ten week class, I found the problem: the DIP was not, in fact, just a transistor. It was a 555 timer that had somehow been mixed in with the transistors.
I went and showed the lab technician. He gave me another one. At this point, I had two weeks to complete eight weeks of lab work, which was borderline impossible. So I made an appointment to see the professor, and his suggestion to me was to drop the class and take it again. Which, of course, would've affected my graduation date.
I chose to take a horrible but passing grade in the lab, finished the class with a C- (which was unusual for me), and went on to pretend that the whole thing never happened.
Parent is the comment you're replying to, GrandParent is the comment above that, OP is the original poster.
This is the dark side of scale.
There's a shorter interview with him (in podcast form, includes a well-made transcript) going into these ideas at https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/dan-davies-or...
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.
For the next semester, a good prof would have a QA step or a harnass that turns on a green light if you plug in a working-as-expected package. I can see how the lab assistant job gets plenty to do in a well-run course, and also how unlikely it is to be happening in real life. There aren't enough incentives.
In this case, I'd have a harness that ensures the parts they were given work as advertised, and make it the students' responsibility to report within the first 3 days if it is not working.
If more of these cases crop up then you should get suspicious, but you also need to consider the impact of giving a student the wrong chip and expecting them to succeed! I think Blackstone's Ratio should apply here personally
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/behavioral-neuroscience...
“Aggression has an adaptive significance for most animal species and is critical for acquiring and protecting territory, food, reproductive mates, and offspring. In animals with hierarchical societies, aggressive behavior is thought to help individuals gain and maintain higher social status (Box 2). It has been shown that aggressive behavior, especially the experience of winning, has rewarding properties in animals and repeated aggressive experience may lead to compulsive, pathological aggression that is highly reinforcing (Fish et al., 2002; Falkner et al., 2016; Golden et al., 2016, 2017).”
It's a problem that's obvious to diagnose... If you already have passing familiarity with the material. Most people do not have passing familiarity with electronic components when they step into an engineering program.
Also him being a student, having the wrong component was probably not in his mental troubleshooting tree. I would guess that it was not in the lab assistant's troubleshooting tree either.
Also once you start down the road of troubleshooting, a false trail can lead you far into the woods.
Coincidentally, I've been knee-deep in some problems that I've applied the Cynefin framework to. I'd call this problem "chaotic", where throwing things at the wall might be _more_ effective than working down a suggested or tried-and-true path from an expert. I was pleasantly surprised just a few weeks ago where one of the more junior engineers on my team suggested updating a library - something I hadn't considered at all - to fix an issue we were having. (That library has no changelog; it's proprietary / closed source with no public bug tracker.) Surely enough, they were right, and the problem went away immediately - but I was convinced this was a problem with the data (it was a sporadic type error), not a library problem.
After getting befuddling answers, would it not have been natural to check the base assumptions, starting with do I have the correct part? That is true as much in the "real engineering" world, as in school.
You say "It could _never_ be the equipment's fault" as if it was, but it wasn't. The test equipment gave you correct answers, your device under test was wrong.
Maybe? Although it seems more like it's actually #5:
> 5. Change one thing at a time: Isolate the key factor, grab the brass bar with both hands (understand what's wrong before fixing), change one test at a time, compare it with a good one, and determine what you changed since the last time it worked.
where in my imagined scenario, a student that just finished the lab successfully could pull out their DIP-8 device and swap in the author's to validate that it was possible to make it work in a known good environment.
> In my experience, the most pernicious temptation is to take the buggy, non-working code you have now and to try to modify it with "fixes" until the code works. In my experience, you often cannot get broken code to become working code because there are too many possible changes to make. In my view, it is much easier to break working code than it is to fix broken code.
I will justify my interpretation because saying "first" primed me to expect a list and the linked comment (and portion quoted) only suggests rewriting, while the article at the link mentions 9 rules to keep in mind during debugging.
Trust, but verify.
I’ll trust that you understand each of those words individually but later verify that the box is actually plugged in.
It gives the capacitors to discharge; but more importantly, it gives an excuse to actually force the person to plug the thing in.
I don't care, of course. But they'll happily do that, where if I ask them to verify if the cable is properly plugged in, 99% of them will just say yes without so much as glancing in the cables' direction.
"Is it plugged in and switched on?" A: Yes, to a powerboard.
"Is the powerboard plugged in and switched on?" A: Yes.
I did the onsite visit and found the powerboard plugged into itself.
Normally I would facepalm and curse the idiocy but... it was a care respite facility and they had more pressing issues to deal with that I wouldn't want to deal with - their role is heroic I feel.
And an easy win already makes my day so I sorted it, told them it was fixed with a smile, and continued on.
Trust-free:
Ensure that step A can go off without a hitch.
Begin step A.
Ensure that step B can go off without a hitch.
Begin step B.
Ensure that step C can go off without a hitch.
Begin step C.
Begin step A.
Begin step B. Check that you have whatever you need for step A.
Begin step C. Check that you have whatever you need for step B.
Check that you have whatever you need for step C.
e.g. you might assume that a sorting library from an internal developer at your company will put things in order but you might want to verify that it has reasonable worst-case performance for your use case. A no-trust situation might lead you to scrutinise everything about it - does it work at all, does it have horrendous performance in every case, is it a supply-chain attack with disguised errors leading to deliberate exploit holes.
In this case, "trust but verify" might mean assuming the Professor and TA are doing an experiment they have done before, which basically works, but might have made a mistake or missed something while setting it up, writing the slides, or explaining it to you. "Don't trust" might mean the TA got the experiment from ChatGPT, hates OP for being on a scholarship and is trying to sabotage their success, and the whole thing isn't an Electronics course it's really the Professor's practical joke/psychology experiment about stressing students.
To play devil's advocate, just imagine the previous posters Story at a company, i.e. a junior engineer not being able to make some simple tasks work and telling their supervisor "it doesn't work" and it turns out after 8 weeks they grabbed some wrong part. Should they have expected their supervisor to check all the parts? 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 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.
This is a huge failure in mentorship that wouldn't be ignored at a company that actually cares about these things.
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.
A student is far from an engineer.
> Again _never_ the equipment's fault?
The exact words the failed mentor used are not what matters here.
> In my experience this does not get accepted in industry.
This being the entire situation or the actions of the improperly used junior employee? Blaming the non-expert that was refused help is scapegoating.
> Simply saying "it wasn't my fault because I had a wrong part" shouldn't just give you an A.
It should give you more time.
Let's not move the goal posts, please. If you're going to use a hypothetical situation as an analogy, make sure it's actually analogous. Yes, an engineer who puts together a circuit has that responsibility, because they're an engineer. They went through the required training that makes them an engineer and not just an engineering student.
> 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.
And therein lies the problem. You "find it hard to believe" that the lab tech could have been that unhelpful, just like the lab tech found it hard to believe that the student wasn't doing something wrong. Both you and the lab tech are behaving in a way that is inappropriate for a senior mentoring a junior.
In my experience mentoring others, the first assumption should not be that the person you're mentoring simply didn't do enough and that they should try to do better. Yes, that might end up being the case, but most of the time there's also something else that could have been done better. Maybe the documentation is not clear enough, maybe the process didn't help catch the mistake, maybe the expectations I set weren't clear enough, maybe I didn't communicate well enough.
"Go check your work again" is rarely helpful, even in the extremely rare cases where that's the only thing that needed to be done and no other improvements exist. If you're really convinced that they merely need to check their work again, guide them to it.
That's why they are junior and you are senior, because they need more guidance than you do. They will not develop the necessary insights and instincts without that guidance.
> 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...)
And in turn, you're arguing that the mentor should merely throw their hands up and say "go check your work yourself". Again, even that can be said differently: "Can you explain what you have checked so far and how you've checked it?"
> Simply saying "it wasn't my fault because I had a wrong part" shouldn't just give you an A.
You are drawing a lot of your own conclusions from what hasn't been said. In this comment thread, you have repeatedly and consistently shown bias through your assumptions. Yes, what you're saying could have been the case, but I see no evidence of it and no reason to simply assume it without at least inquiring about it.
There are lots of reasons - maybe the senior engineers are overburdened with other work (or don't care), maybe the project manager or team lead wasn't asking if the junior needed help, or maybe the junior was lying about their progress.
Either way, a story that goes for eight weeks feels excessive. Much, to your point, taking eight weeks to figure out that there was a bad part feels excessive. My counterpoint is that teams don't typically operate like labs. In a college lab, the objective is for you, specifically, to succeed. In an engineering team, the objective is for the entire team to succeed. That means the more senior engineers are expected to help the more junior engineers. They might directly coach, or they might write better documentation. I don't believe that dynamic is present in a lab setting.
Hands up everyone who remembers being taught that labs were supposed to go wrong and you were doing them because you will have to troubleshoot?
... anyone?
... anyone?
... Bueller?
Or is this just the typical internet John Galt like that other guy "no offense but why didn't you just already know everything and create an apple pie by creating the universe like I would have?"
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.
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 dealing with a bizarre problem in RHEL where we'd stand up an EC2 instance with 4GB of memory, have 4.4GB of memory reported to the system, and be able to use 3.6GB of it. I spent _a long_ time trying to figure out what was going on. (This was around the time we started using Node.js at that company, and needed 4GB of RAM just for Jenkins to run Webpack, and we couldn't justify the expensive of 8GB nodes.)
I did a deep dive into how the BIOS advertises memory to the system, how Linux maps it, and so forth, before finally filing a bug with Red Hat. 36 hours later, they identified a commit in the upstream kernel, which they forgot to cherry-pick into the RHEL kernel.
That's a very human mistake, and not one I dreamed the humans at Red Hat - the ones far smarter than me, making far more money than me - could ever make! 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.
Once I started actually testing the scripts against the docs and rewriting them, life got so much better. The worst part is that it had been that way for years and somehow nobody noticed because the people using that horrible scripting language mostly weren't programmers and they'd just tweak things until they could happy path just enough to kinda-sorta work.
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.
We had a first-semester freshman year course that all incoming students were required to take. The first assignment in that class was an essay, pretty typical stuff, I don't even remember what about.
A day after handing it in, roughly half of the class would be given a formal academic citation for plagiarism. That half of the class hadn't cited their sources. "This one time only", the citation could be removed if the students re-submitted an essay with a bibliography.
While it was obvious, in hindsight, that the point of the exercise was to get you to understand that the university took plagiarism seriously, especially with the "this one time only" string attached, it felt dishonest in that nobody ever came out and said so. I luckily wasn't on the receiving end of one of those citations, but I can only imagine the panic of a typical first-semester freshman being formally accused of plagiarism.
The professor had been doing the class with those robots for several years when I took the class the first time, but I don't know if he acquired that brand of robots because their simulator was broken or if that was just a happy accident that he took advantage of.
The lesson certainly has stuck with me- this was one lab in a class I took almost a quarter-century ago and I vividly remember both the frustration of not moving the robot and the frustration of everyone in the sections that I TA'd.
I had something similar happen when I was taking microcomputers (a HW/SW codesign class at my school). We had hand-built (as in everything was wire wrapped) 68k computers we were using and could only download our code over a 1200-baud serial line. Needless to say, it was slow as hell, even for the day (early 2000s). So, we used a 68k emulator to do most of our development work and testing.
Late one night (it was seriously like 1 or 2 am), our prof happened by the lab as we were working and asked to see how it was going. I was project lead and had been keeping him apprised and was confident we were almost complete. After waiting the 20 minutes to download our code (it was seriously only a couple dozen kb of code), it immediately failed, yet we could show it worked on the simulator. We single-stepped through the code (the only "debugger" we had available was a toggle switch for the clock and an LED hex readout of the 16-bit data bus). I had spent enough time staring at the bus over the course of the semester that I'd gotten quite good at decoding the instructions in my head. I immediately saw that we were doing a word-compare (16-bit) instead of a long-compare (32-bit) on an address. The simulator treated all address compares are 32-bit, regardless of the actual instruction. The real hardware, of course, did not. It was a simple fix. Literally one-bit. Did it in-memory on the computer instead of going through the 20-minute download again. Everything magically worked. Professor was impressed, too.
This sentence could have also ended "my gpa dipped below the threshold for some bullshit mark it up to mark it down exercise masquerading as a scholarship and I had to re-take the class for a better grade anyway"
That said...
I graduated with a 3.2 GPA, after being the stereotypical "gifted" student up through high school. A 3.2 is, apparently, still decent. However, I did feel a bit of a twinge seeing my peers walk at graduation with with cords, bents, and other regalia, where I just had my standard-issue black robe.
It had less to do with my grade in this particular class, and more to do with the fact that I had a part-time engineering job - 10-20 hours a week - and was making money. When you've spent a couple of years being broke, having an extra few hundred dollars per month was a big deal. Enough so that I didn't really care about putting the extra effort in for A's - that extra time was time better spent working. B's were fine if I could afford to take my girlfriend out to dinner every month.
In the years since then, it seems like this was a good decision. That job became full-time after college, and I stayed there six years. At the end of six years, nobody really cared about my college GPA. At the end of nine years (when I next looked for a job), I didn't even bother listing it on my resume.
Your internship / prospective employer cares way more about the job you're doing for them than +0.5 GPA.
(If you're heading right to grad school, obviously different weighting)
Certainly the name of the school on my resume helped me interview for my first job, and I did learn a bunch about how computers worked and how to design CPUs, and that was useful early in my career when I worked on embedded software (like actually embedded, weak-ass MIPS machines with a handful of MB of RAM, and no MMU or memory protection[0]; not the tiny supercomputers that count as "embedded" these days). But my grades, and most of the getting-my-coursework-done drama? Irrelevant.
[0] And I'm sure some folks here will consider what I had to work with a luxury.
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 complex problems to work out with pen and paper, tough stuff, lots of calculus. But the last question ended with “where does the electron live?”
That final problem, if you ignored the end wording, was super easy, something almost trivial to do with Helium iirc. The class had about 25 students in it; about 5 of us independently had the same thought: “this is a trick question, ‘the orbital is not a house in which the electron lives!’” And, independently, that’s how we five answered.
And we got marked wrong, all our course grades dropped to B+/- because of that one damn question.
Over a lunch or whatever, we discovered our shared experience and approached the professor as a group. He listened patiently and said: “Ah, right, I did insist on that idea, it’s understandable why you would think it’s a trick question and answer that way. But I still consider your answers wrong, grades stay as they are.” Some in the group even went to the dean and, to my understanding, he said it’s best to consider it a life lesson and move on.
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)
But... it does not print a string, a string goes into it but what comes out of the function is not that programmatic feature we call a string in any way shape or form, what comes out depends on the output device specified, it may be ink on paper, lit phosphors, or a stream of bytes. none of which can you use in your program as a string.
sprintf being a notable exception of course. there you do get a string out of it.
Update: language is weird and the more I read my statement the weirder it gets, all I can do is add this cryptic note. "When you print a string it does not produce a string", this usually means I am wrong about something.
Double quotes are a syntax sugar for string literals in source code, in a particular language, to avoid writing `string.from_byte_array([97, 98, 99])` or `new String({97, 98, 99});` or whatever. Strings are single quoted not double quoted in Dyalog APL, there's several different strings in SWI Prolog depending on using double quotes or backticks and how the flags are set.
stdout is an untyped byte stream which could go to a printer or Braille terminal or anything as you say, but could be terminal control codes, image data, or whatever. The OS doesn't tend to have a 'string type' ... but in PowerShell `write-output "a"` will write a .NET System.String to the output stream, but it won't use "printf()".
Your statement makes no sense in the context you're answering to.
Lectures that came straight from the book I could have read, recitations and problem reviews done by grad students, and tests that were little more than variations on homework problems of varying difficulty.
Maybe they were getting paid for research, but I dunno. At the liberal arts college, I actually received an education instead of bootstrapping it myself from a syllabus.
And I would assume for pedalogical purposes a bare transistor would be preferred rather than the '2008 with its extra diodes and base resistor.
I change details when I tell stories, both to prevent eyes glazing, and because the details don't matter that much. If I told this story to a neighbor it wouldn't involve the words "dip-8", 555, or "transistor".
For instance I had a professor that just did not like me. I did all the work, the papers, but the second paper assigned was about bioethics and at the time there was a lot of negative press about that subject and I went really deep into a subject I had never heard of before. Well the prof was a bioethicist, and on some bioethics committee, and did not like my prose. I barely passed that class that semester. I think they knew they couldn't fail me because, as I said, I did the work; but they certainly made me not want to continue college, that's for sure.
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 :-)
I had lecturers give me bonus marks above 100% because I noticed issues like this and thanked me for helping to improve the course material!
These lecturers, when merely overhearing a curious "huh?" conversation between students would spend hours of their own time scouring the library for relevant information and just "leave" photocopies for students to find the next day.
Major bummer that others have had differing experiences from me, here.
I would have been tempted to ask him to write me a check for the extra semester of tuition, but I'm sure that wouldn't have made the situation any better (and maybe would have made him more likely to grade strictly).
First part of a project was running PCR on a particular plasmid that we were going to use to transfer a gene into Drosophila. But for some reason the PCR didn't work, and I spent almost all of my time trying to get the damn thing to run.
Everyone naturally assumed I was just doing something wrong, being an undergrad with little lab experience. After about ten weeks, it turned out that the lab tech had written up the protocol wrong and I was using the wrong primers. No wonder it didn't work.
Was one of the experiences that made me realise that working in a lab really wasn't for me...
After weeks of trying to make an appointment with the lecturer to discuss it (and being told "you failed, get over it"). I got an email from the lecturer, admitting that they'd forgotten to add my exam score to my overall score. And from this point, it took months further to get my official grade corrected.
This same lecturer also once emailed out grades by opening their whole-course grading spreadsheet, deleting all the rows except for that student's grade, and then saving it as a new file.
With 'track changes' turned on.
Reminds me of Feynman's "Cargo Cult Science" essay[1]
One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment
with falling oil drops and got an answer which we now know not to be
quite right. It’s a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value
for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history
of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you
plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger
than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that,
and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they
settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn’t they discover that the new number was higher right away?
It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because
it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number
that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be
wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be
wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan’s value they didn’t
look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off,
and did other things like that. We’ve learned those tricks nowadays,
and now we don’t have that kind of a disease.
[1] https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment
Assuming Feynmann's statement is true, I find it even more remarkable that Millikan's electron charge research was published in Science AND won him a Nobel Prize without anyone noticing the very apparent mistake of using an incorrect value for the viscosity of air.
The actual history is a bit more complex and certainly is not reflected accurately in Feynmans retelling (maybe he was affected by confirmation bias?). See this stackoverflow discussion: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/44092/is-feynma...
It turned out the TA had sabotaged the experiment by putting alcohol in the bottom of the (dark glass) measurement bottle, so the measurement would be of the constant of “air with a fair amount of alcohol vapor in it”, which would give a different constant. And if you actually did the exercise, you'd get that “wrong” number, and that would be the only way to get the lab approved.
I'm all for exposing students to something unknown, but telling them they're doing X when it's really Y for anything longer than a single lecture ain't it.
I do agree this is a good point; trust is not something that should be simply squandered. Nevertheless, this is still a lesson that needs to be taught and so often students make it to the end without a single teacher that did.
I lived a very similar experience:
My 4th year computer science professor in software engineering assigned us a four-phase programming assignment for the semester.
My teammate and I spent several sleepless days on the first assignment, and felt some of the requirements were contradictory. Finally we reached out to the professor, and he formally clarified the requirements. We asked him, "well OK, if requirements are unclear, what are we as students supposed to DO?!?" and he answered - exactly what you did; ask the user/client for clarification. "OK, but what if we hadn't, what if we just made assumptions and built on those??". And his eyes twinkled in a gentle smile.
My team mate and I had worked in the industry as summer students at this point, and felt this was the best most realistic course university has offered - not the least because after every phase, you had to switch code with a different team and complete next phase on somebody else's (shoddy, broken, undocumented) code. This course was EXACTLY what "real world" was like - but rest of the class was trained on "Assignment 1, question 1, subquestion A", and wrote a letter of complaint to the Dean.
I understood their perspective, but boy, were they in for a surprise when they joined the workforce :)
I teach students sometimes. I briefly considered whenever I should give them such important lesson. Very briefly: my job is to teach students my specialty, not give them life lessons. Why would I deal with potentially angry students for doing something that's not obvious I'm allowed to do? Hell, it's not even obvious it that would be a "good" (career advancing) lesson.
This is generally considered a "soft skill", but it really should be a recurring part of any technical curriculum.
There are generalizations of the concept- tailoring your message to your audience in public speaking, or charitable interpretation and seeing from another's perspective in debate, but the narrow case of "interpret these requirements and identify problems with them" is a good way to demonstrate an understanding of the domain.
I just say, even with good intentions, the incentives are not aligned with teachers going too far out of line.
The rumour was that the previous years class had one engine where the ignition rotor arm wire had been replaced by section of coloured plastic which was covered in the usual grease and crap in the housing.
The instructor was looking for persistence and elimination of possibilities rather than actually solving it. But one team did. As long as you solved the others that was enough to complete the class.
One cannot argue that this is fair on the basis that it's the "real world", because all that does is reward the sloppier (middle) approach. It filters the very lazy from the average, but at the expense of the excellent.
Yet in my class we still had results as low as 7 and as high as 12. We all got passing grades. But the protocol for these lab assignments was always such that you had to have your "measurements sheet" signed by the professor, and you turned it in with your report later.
Our results were close enough that we could still easily determine the phenotype and genotype of the parent and grandparent Fruit Flies (red/black eyes), but it was kind of a bummer to be punished in a highly error prone experiment (flies dying from too much ether, flies flying away, flies getting stuck in food and dying, etc).
It did teach me to be more careful when running experiments but I probably would have given myself a C, not a D
I'm convinced 60% of the class faked results or copied many results from previous year's students.
Math and some sciences have the aura of definitive right and wrong, so even though by college everyone knows the expression "give the answer the teacher wants to hear", they just think in those subjects the teacher has access to absolute answers.
The primary thing taught by our schooling system (and 2nd place isn't even close) is bureaucracy obedience. This has the obvious effects, but one of the subtler ones is deference to "science" as an authority requiring obedience rather than the process of figuring shit out.
I don't recall ever being marked down for failing to obtain the "correct" result the impression I came away with was so long as you were thorough in your discussion and analysis the exact result was less important.
I can remember my second year thermodynamics class had a fairly complicated lab which involved taking measurements from inflow and outflow of various heat exchangers in a variety of configurations (Counter flow, Cross flow etc) then computing the efficiency of each configuration. I recall getting into minutiae in the report about assumed friction factors and suggested methods to asses the smoothness of the pvc pipes etc. to improve the accuracy of calculations etc.
One of these. https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/the-history-of-ticker-...
The inevitable happened, after the years of classroom abuse the timer provided enough friction that the falling object swung on the paper like a pendulum and slowly made its way to the ground over the course of about 5 seconds.
We analysed the meaningless dots on the paper and wrote up a calculation of gravity of 9.6m/s^2 attributing the 0.2ish to 'possible friction or accuracy of the timer'
This taught me more about science than I care to think about.
In my case it was a slide on an air cushioned aluminum beam.
And the interesting part was that for some reason, if we pulled it up towards the top, behind some point it used shorter time to travel across the whole beam.
I put quite some effort into figuring out why, repeating it again and again, studied the beam to see if there was any irregularities, brainstormed on why this happened.
My physics teacher really liked that at least some of his students had dug into it (I think we weren't the only group) and made it very clear in the feedback (he did not mention who had gotten it wrong, just that some had observed this and looked into it instead of covering it up or throwing away the data we didn't like).
Didn't exactly enjoy school, but people like him made it a lot better.
Why I am making my exit from academia and research entirely as soon as I finish my PhD. The system is filled with wonderful, intelligent people but sadly simultaneously rotten to the core. It in fact, did not get better as I moved from undergrad to grad school.
I remember being really consistent with the stopwatch in one exercise, so sadly the spread of measurements (implying a natural uncertainty) was small. That was bad!
This, so much this. I disliked any lab work in my science classes (in HS/College) for this exact reason. I can't tell you how many numbers I fudged because I wasn't getting the "right" results and there was no time/appetite/interest in figuring out why it was wrong, my options were lie and get a good grade or report what I saw and get a bad grade.
And yes, in college specifically, the equipment we were working was rough. There was so much of "let's ask the other 2 groups near us and we will all shave our numbers a bit to match/make sense".
She had planned on teaching a lab on gravity and acceleration that day, but she was having trouble getting the right experimental results. Now, this story is not going to reflect well on her, so I want to say up front that she was already taking physics education at my high school to unprecedented heights by 1) trying out the lab on her own before trying to teach it, and 2) actually giving a shit about the results. I doubt the coach who had previously taught physics ever bothered to do any of the experiments himself, and I'm guessing everyone who ever turned in a lab report to him got an A regardless of the contents.
So there I am, a future physics major walking into a physics classroom for the first time in my academic career. I'm nervous because I have a reputation as a smart kid, and specifically as a smart science and math kid, but I was better with math and theory than with machines and measurements. I'm excited about getting to look smart in front of the other kids, but I'm also sweating bullets that there might be something about the equipment that I might not be able to figure out. So I ask her to show me what the experiment is and how she's doing it.
The experimental setup is a small but heavy piece of metal attached to a long, thin strip of the kind of paper used for carbon copies. (Or carbonless copies maybe. You know the paper where you write on one sheet, and there's a pressure-sensitive sheet underneath that creates a copy? It was a long strip of that pressure-sensitive paper.) The final piece of the experimental setup was a loud clacking thing that the strip of paper fed through. When it was turned on, a little hammer inside it slammed down every 1/4 of a second. The idea was, as the paper traveled through, the hammer left a mark every 1/4 of a second, and you could measure how far the paper traveled in each interval between the hammer strikes. Much more precise than a stopwatch!
You have already figured out how the experiment works. You hold the clacker at a fixed height against the wall or some other high fixed point, thread the weight end of the paper through it, turn the clacker on, drop the weight, and the clacker leaves marks on the paper that let you calculate g.
The teacher understood this, to an extent. But she decided that it would be less of a logistical hassle if the students did the experiment at their lab tables, by holding the clacker on the table and pulling the weight horizontally across the table with their hand. She tried this quite a few times herself, plotted the numbers, and could not get the plot to look like a parabola like in the textbook. I explained to her, "We're measuring gravity, so gravity has to do the work. If we move it with our hands, we're just measuring our hands. If gravity moves it, we'll measure gravity." We tried it, it worked, and she sent me back to whatever class I had been in when she sent for me.
The teacher had us using a stopwatch on our phones. We would repeat the experiment several times and average the result, because manually doing a stopwatch was terrible- multiple samples kinda helped.
My group figured out we could get things way more accurate if we videoed the experiment in slow-motion with a phone, keeping a digital stopwatch in frame. It took an extra step of math, subtracting out the start time, but in slow motion we could be accurate to 1/120th of a second. Our results were easily the most precise in the class. Equipment can make a huge difference, and slow motion video was considerably more accurate than “Mike trying to time it right”
I got called up in front of class and punished for cheating on a length estimation assignment.
They told everyone I was a cheater that used a ruler :P
Besides contributing to the sob stories, my point is maybe some of those kids got lucky with a good measurement/timer. Sorry you had a really bad teacher.
1. Most students don't want to have to think. As a student I was always annoyed that we'd be given exact instructions with an exactly know result to reproduce, while this is generally not how real experiments work. So when I designed an experiment I wrote instructions that reflected more the real life experience, I.e. instead of "place the lens A 10mm from object B" it was "place the lens one focal length away from the object, to know the focal length of your lens you can use a light source at Infinity (far away)." after I left my university the instructions were reverted back because students complained that they didn't get step by step instructions.
2. Students dutifully write down a measurements that is of several orders of magnitude with absolutely no acknowledgement/discussion. I have seen speed of light barely faster than a car and mass of a small piece material in 100s of kg (usually because students forget a nano or giga in a calculation), without any discussion that the result is nonsensical.
3. Similar they make a fit like the one in the OP and don't even discuss the error bars. Or (and that's already the better students) they make a fit with tiny error bars, but get the wrong result (typically due to some mistake like above) and in the discussion say the difference to an expected error is due to measurement error.
Now I also know that there are crappy graduate students who teach because they are teaching the "only get the correct result" but it's often very difficult to improve teaching because students will immediately complain that they have to adjust to changes.
Wouldnt've helped me before late high school, but that "whether or not the grading authority likes the results you got" part cuts both ways. That is, if you put some extra effort into presentation, you can get at least some of authorities to recognize your effort. Or, if you're really good, you can even bullshit wrong results past them, as long as you give a strong impression of competence.
Or at least that's what undergrad studies taught me; for random reason I went into overkill for some assignments, and I quickly discovered this worked regardless of the validity of my results.
I guess a big part of it is that most other people a) don't really put in much effort, and b) don't see any importance of the work in larger context. So I found that if I showed (or faked) either, I was set; show both, even better.
(Though it didn't work 100% well. I distinctly remember spending a lot of time figuring out how to simulate lexical scope and lambdas with strings & eval in Lotus notes. My professor was impressed, even suggesting I write the details up, but then she proceeded to fail me on the exercise anyway, because I didn't actually do half of the boring things I was supposed to.)
(It also taught me to recognize when someone else's deploying smokescreens of competence to pass lazy or bad results.)
We also were supposed to read the greatest papers in the field to learn about the field from the primary sources, also a laudable purpose.
Unfortunately, these two things were put together, and we were expected to produce "critiques" of the greatest papers in the field.
Now, I've told this story a couple of times, and always some anklebiter jumps up from the replies to point out that even the greatest papers can have mistakes or be improved or whatever. Which is in principle true. But when Einstein comes up to you and for the first time in world history explicates his new theory of relativity, you aren't doing him, yourself, or the world a favor by "critiquing" his choice of variable names, quibbling about his phrasing, or criticizing him for not immediately knowing how to explain it the way physicists will explain it after over 120 years of chewing on it.
In practice, there is no practical way to "critique" these papers. They are the ones that have slugged it out with hundreds of thousands of other papers to be getting recommended to undergraduate students 20-40 years later. There is no reason to believe that anything a college junior, even one from decades down the line, is going to give any suggestions that can improve such papers.
So what I learned is that I can just deploy a formula: 1. Summarize the paper quickly, ideally with some tidbit in it that proves you really read it 2. Use my decades of foresight to complain that the author didn't do in this paper something the field built on it later, quite possibly led by the same author (I dunno, I didn't check of course, I'm just complaining) 3. Say "more research is needed"... it's a cliche for a reason -> Get an A every single time, despite putting no real cognitive effort into the critique.
I did at least read the papers for real, and that was fine, but my "critique" was 100% presentation, 100% genuflection of the ritual words of science, knowingly shorn of meaning. Heck, even now I don't think I feel bad about that; I just delivered what was asked for, after raising the objection once. At least we read some of the literature, and that is a skill that has served me for real, in real life, even though I did not go into academia proper.
Any amount of critical views tends to result in your work torn to pieces and you getting a shitty grade.
Your architecture professor likes turrets? Then better put them even on the chicken coop - that way he'll no you're one of the students who gets it.
Your lit professor loves a certain philosopher? - better not point out that you find his arguments circular, ponderous and betraying a lack of broad perspective.
This has been utterly weird to me considering I have encountered way less (but not zero) of this thing in engineering, and art is supposed to be about developing your self-expression, but I've heard this criticism so many times from so many places and formulated so strongly. I've had many people flat out leave their educations because of this, with others just quietly powering through.
This in of itself has changed my view of art education, and I've told many people to stay away from these places not because of the usual 'it's useless and you'll starve to death arguments' but because of this.
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.
But... there's a point in one's development as a science student, where science becomes more nuanced than "doing your best and honestly reporting what you observe." Those things will always be there of course. But in an experimental science, doing an experiment and getting accurate results is a vital skill, or you'll never make progress.
Naturally you have no standard for checking a measurement whose result is truly unknown, but you can insert the equivalent of breakpoints where you make sure that the same data do reproduce known results. Ironically for the discussion here, those are called "gravity tests." Students need to know at some point if they're going to like the experimental side of science. Getting things right is part of it. Some people don't belong in the lab.
I happen to be stuck at the "gravity test" level in my day job. My experiment produced a calibration that's reproducible, and that I could use, but it doesn't make sense. I'm not going to move forward until it does.
The problem with a lot of teaching is that the purpose of the lesson is never explained, and the nuanced view is never spelled out.
I'm sure nowadays the experiment would just be one slow-mo video on your phone.
https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v056n06_...
We got good grades.
Is it like 5 people doing real science and everybody copying their homework? I mean, we've got technology to prove that a lot of natural science must be right in some way, so somebody is doing real discovery and real experiments. Right?
You always got partial credit even if you made a mistake as long as the following results were achieved using the correct method and with the correct calculations despite one of the inputs being wrong due to a previous error.
In Belgium (Gent to be more specific) where I'm from, there is a high cultural degree of critical thinking, and if I handed in a report like that, with the accompanying numbers, our teacher would not have given it a failing grade. Especially if the report was accompanied with either a written or verbal disclaimer mentioning the limitations of the measuring equipment and that the results didn't match your expectations.
His lectures were full of incorrect facts. He would ask the class questions and give us wrong answers. I’ve never seen a man so confidently incorrect.
He wrote a book about the fourth industrial revolution in which he used the introduction to brag about all the places he used for writing his book. Including his home in a upper class neighborhood, his home abroad, cafes around the world, etc. His book also contained errors that a simple google search would’ve helped him correct.
A lot of the stuff he taught were interesting. But all the contents of the course could’ve been covered in a video or two.
In my final paper I wrote about how the popularity of new tech can regress even though the tech gets up to great quality. He had stated that you wouldn’t see a computer science student using a laptop after 5 years (this was 10 years ago). They would all be programming on their ipads because the touch screens had become so good. As well as how everyone in their fields were replacing their interfaces with touch screens. I wrote about how mechanical keyboards and physical midi controllers had never been as popular in many fields like audio and video production.
Needless to say. I failed the class. I was just supposed to regurgitate his blogs and opinions.
This was not the only thing to make me lose most all my confidence in any higher education at a time. I went from critical thinking to skeptical thinking. And it was not solely because of my opinions about this teacher. It was because of the opinions of his peers and in how high regard he was kept in the academic society.
I learned that schools are not institutions of science. They’re more like a Church of Science or at the very best, Science’s weird fan club with a weird internal popularity power struggle.
Edit: A word.
I took my physics/chem labs at a not particularly good university, and got points for having valid calculations, whether or not they matched the correct values. I felt that the labs themselves were a little bit patronizing and a waste of time, but at least they were designed in the direction of making us perform experiments and do measurements.
The closing sentence is also prescient; the author pivoted to CS, ultimately completing his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison
I'm glad he's doing well.
Here, this is the first sodium chloride MSDS I googled up: https://www.fishersci.com/store/msds?partNumber=S64010&produ...
I thought all of this was obvious from my comment.
[0] https://www.michaels.com/product/armour-etch-glass-etching-c... [1] https://www.jacksonsart.com/media/pdf/armour_etch_sds.pdf
This is both hilarious and more common than you might think. In my field of expertise (ultrafast condensed matter physics), lots of noisy garbage was rationalized through "curve-fitting", without presenting the (I assume horrifyingly skewed) residuals, or any other goodness-of-fit test.
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 licensed, and made them harder to collaborate and reproduce.
In the area of deep learning based simulations, one good example of an open software is netket. The researcher their is pretty active in terms of github/gitlab/huggingface ecosystem.
Open source tool or not, I don't care at all as I get the science right. I have already enough frustration dealing with my samples, so I simply want the least frustration from the software I use to plot.
Its annoying that you cannot create a broken axis out-of-the box, but I am sure you can wrap this to make your own convenience function: https://matplotlib.org/stable/gallery/subplots_axes_and_figu...
There is a package by some nice guy: https://github.com/bendichter/brokenaxes just to do the broken axis. But not being built-in in Anaconda is already an annoyance, and in my case it generates a figure with a ugly x-label.
I ended up letting ChatGPT generate the code for me with the two required hacks. I simply need the figure in the minimal amount of time and with the least mental bandwidth, so I can focus on the science and catch the conference deadline. Origin is a very "over-engineered" piece of software, but hey getting a broken axis is so simple (https://www.originlab.com/doc/Origin-Help/AxesRef-Breaks ). Sometimes the "over-engineering" is necessary to minimize users' pain.
They are. I used to work in an adjacent field. Everyone was open about doing it - they're competing with others for grants, and worry that if they reveal the secret sauce, others will move faster than they can.
You can say you performed a DFT calculation to get the result, but anyone who's studied these types of simulations/calculations knows that it's highly nontrivial to implement, with lots of coding and numerical tricks involved. So it's extremely hard to reproduce if you don't have detailed access to the algorithms.
Saying "I used DFT" is like saying "I used a computer", its nowhere near enough info to reproduce the work
Particularly, if one using ASE or other higher level wrapper of calculators(like quacc), he can share all the params in just one python script.
If not, just share the INCARs and POSCARs using a github link or whatsoever.
Making this measurement (an ancient discovery) with latest equipment is easy, but imagine what it might have been like for the people who actually discovered this property of germanium. Our tools/probes cannot advance much faster than our understanding of a (related) subject -- we are constantly inventing/improvising tools using cutting edge scientific knowledge from a related field.
Soldering a lead to a germanium crystal typically involves using a gold-germanium solder alloy (like 88% gold, 12% germanium) due to its compatibility and good bonding properties
Plus you'd need to decide how to get a good thermal connection to set the temperature of the crystal - maybe via one big lead?
Being in the future makes some things simpler?
The little experience I've had with lab physicists showed they needed a good ability to build, debug and maintain their own equipment. You can't always rely on technicians.
I've been wrestling with a cantankerous experiment for a couple of weeks. It produces reproducible results, but they don't make sense, and the work is not in a domain where discovering new physics by accident is likely.
> Ph.D. Computer Science, November 2004 > University of Wisconsin, Madison
> M.S. Computer Science, May 2001 University of Wisconsin, Madison
> B.S. Physics, June 1999 Stanford University
[1] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/cv.html
EDIT:
Went on to work at IL&M for 5 years and has been at Google for 14 [2]. My guy did indeed end up rolling in cash haha
(at most: https://web.archive.org/web/20001031193257/http://www.cs.wis...)
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.
Happy he made the leap and at least get's paid well now (I hope).
> I still wouldn't have any women, but at least I'd be rolling in cash.
Did they get a girlfriend?
It was probably actually written sometime prior to June 1999, because that's when the author got his Physics BS at Stanford (https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/cv.html).
I kinda want to know more of the backstory around this. What grade did he get? Or was this a private venting exercise he later put up on his webpage, once he was well clear of the course?
The author did eventually go into CS, I wonder if this project was his actual breaking point.
Last-Modified: Sun, 26 May 2002 22:33:04 GMT
For all its flaws, Fahrenheit was based on some good ideas and firmly grounded in what you could easily measure in the 1720s. A brine solution and body heat are two things you can measure without risking burning or freezing the observer. Even the gradations were intentional: in the original scale, the reference temperatures mapped to 32 and 96, and since those are 64 units apart, you could mark the rest of the thermometer with a bit of string and some halving geometry. Marking a Celsius scale from 0 to 100 accurately? Hope you have a good pair of calipers to divide a range into five evenly-spaced divisions...
Nowadays, we have machines capable of doing proper calibration of such mundane temperature ranges to far higher accuracy than the needle or alcohol-mix can even show, but back then, when scientists had to craft their own thermometers? Ease of manufacture mattered a lot.
One can build such a tool, but it's not a doubled-over piece of string.
- get some string
- measure a length between your low and high points
- fold it in half
- make a mark at the halfway point of the string
- fold it in half again, etc.
No candles, projection, transparent or slotted ruler, wall, or carefully moving one's hand back and forth under projected magnification needed. Just some string.
I don't see how you're going to use this system to effect repeatable markings on glass tubes.
Try it: it's easy. Use a flashlight from your phone instead of a candle, then project light to a wall, then put your palm in the front of the light.
Also Celsius, for whatever reason, originally put boiling at 0 and freezing at 100. Maybe Sweden is just that cold.
Jame's Burke's "Connections" series covered this in series 3 episode 10. Here's that clip:
Maybe the frustrations of undergrad lab work would be easier to swallow if they were better situated in historical context. This kind of result should give the experimenter some sympathy for the folks who originally made these discoveries, with less knowledge and worse equipment. But I don't think it's usually explained that way.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250311184956/https://pages.cs....
Summary:
``` The author sets out to investigate the temperature-dependent resistivity of germanium, a classic topic in solid-state physics. However, they quickly become disillusioned with both the theory (which they find overly abstract and nonsensical) and the practice (plagued by faulty equipment, uncooperative materials, and lack of support). Their experimental setup involves a precariously mounted crystal, unreliable tools, and a leaking thermos of liquid nitrogen.
Despite their intense effort, the data collected fails to demonstrate the expected exponential relationship. In frustration, the author draws a curve "through the noise" hoping it will look convincing enough to pass. Ultimately, they conclude the project—and their choice to study physics—was a total waste of time and regret not choosing computer science instead, where at least they'd be making money, if still unlucky in love. ```
Also, you don't need to solder wires to the sample. But if you want to measure the hall resistance of a thin film of a semiconductor, you can solder a glob of indium on to four corners of a 1 cm x 1 cm wafer, put it in a magnetic field, and then do basically the same measurement as four point probe, except not inline.
I currently write my master's thesis in experimental quantum computing - the platform is similar to what Google published in December, just with less qubits. A lot of it just comes down to how much money the lab can spend to get the best equipment and how good your fabrication is.
You can have the best minds in experimental physics, but without the right equipment the grad students are just busy trying to make things work somehow and waste months if not years away.
I could never reproduce it well in the lab, because it's really not true. Take a heavy cube the shape of a book. Orient it so that the spine is on the floor. It's a lot more friction to move it in one direction than in the transverse direction. Yet the normal force is the same. Any kid knows this, and I feel dumb it never occurred to me till someone pointed it out to me.
Applying force directly to the center of gravity with one finger is hard.
You end up applying torque plus adjustments in response to that torque. And that is heavily dependent on your moment of inertia, unlike the normal force.
But I do agree that explanations of friction are right up there with “how do airfoils work” where poor instructors are liable to get long past the edge of their knowledge and just make shit up.
What you are describing (if the normal force is actually the same) is a contact situation where the coefficient of friction is different in different directions (anisotropic friction.)
We can do this with any pair of values, such as current and voltage, but it's useful when the graph between current and voltage is close enough to linear, which means the corresponding coefficient is approximately constant. Well, is it? You have to show that with experiment. Once your data shows a line then you can calculate the slope of the line. If your data shows a parabola, you can calculate the quadratic equivalent of slope - don't calculate the actual slope and then declare that to be the result.
Sometimes you see people trying to measure the resistance of diodes, or worse, incorporating the resistance of diodes into calculations. What's the voltage across the diode? The current times the resistance, of course...
Guess that's the power pictures have over words.
Well that's your problem.
The line is the predicted, not actual. How would you derive that line from plot of noise?
>> I drew an exponential through my noise.
The issue is that there was supposed to be a curve according to his reading, but the actual had no measurable trend. It's possible that the data was measured on the wrong scale. If you zoom out, those noise plots become a line segment. Then again, the predictable line is on the same scale (and we're assuming that it's correct according to his reading or the best he could fit) so zooming out would probably be a different form of lying with statistics via overfitting.
It was a competition sponsored by National Instruments, so the code was supposed to be in LabVIEW. Another person wanted to write it as a C plugin, but I thought that was cheating.
There's A* built into LabVIEW, but it's for completely generic graphs so it takes a lot longer to run. The rewrite brought it from about 10 seconds to compute a path, down to about 0.5 seconds.
404 error now, perhaps some admins took it down due to traffic?
The user's directory is still linked from the listing [0] though.
I wish universities were better equipped for what you pay. Where is all that money going anyways? Leaking like free electrons?
Overwhelmingly, most education fund use goes to salary, benefits and student aid (~$2 billion, 81%).
Interestingly the amount of money raised by tuition and fees almost exactly matches the amount spent on salaries, benefits and student aid. So one way of viewing it is that things like lab equipment are basically funded by grants, gifts, and state appropriations.
I assume this would be similar at Wisconsin in the late 90s, I doubt universities have changed much.
Maybe research budgets offer more flexibility and better equipment but I doubt the undergrads get to touch that stuff.
Source: budgetandfinance.psu.edu
No. What amount (if any) is being pocketed is not apparent from such data. Perhaps contrary to your expectation, it's basically impossible to pocket money allocated for salaries (people would complain they don't get what they're owed). It's much easier to pocket equipment. In any case, the referenced data is quite independent of that.
Instead, it shows that the universities do not allocate money on equipment (because that's what grants are for). Of course, spending grant money on lab equipment for undergrads directly competes with equipment for research, which puts a group at a competitive disadvantage in their field of research.
Should we tell him?
Honestly, physics is so full of pretension and hero worship. Even among seasoned lecturers there's a tendency to mythologise the progress of the art by making it sound like all the great results we rely on were birthed fully-formed by the giants who kindly lend us their divine shoulders.
Ironically there's a kind of Gell-Mann amnesia here, working scientists know that must of your work will consist of stumbling down blind alleys in the dark and looking for needles under lampposts that aren't even near the haystack.
I'm reminded of an anecdote which I can't currently source, but as I remember it Hilbert was trying to derive the Einstein Field Equations by a variational method. He correctly took the Ricci curvature R as the Lagrangian, but then neglected to multiply by the tensor density, sqrt(-g). This is kind of a rookie mistake, but made by one of the history's greatest mathematical physicists.
Anyway I love this article, it's a breath of fresh air and rightly beloved by undergrads.
(edit: for a counterpoint to this work please see another classic: "The physics is the life" -http://i.imgur.com/eQuqp.png )
It’s weird because on one hand it promotes this disempowering mythology that all progress comes from a vanishingly tiny fraction of humanity, but on the other hand people find it inspiring because if heroes exist then it means people (and maybe you!) can do amazing things. It’s a weird double edged sword.
(I also note that any double-edged polyhedral sword is necessarily degenerate.)
[1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/56892/did-hilber...
(I certainly count myself among the confused, but I don't think there's any real dispute to answer.)
See also: this work alleging some foul play in the historical record - https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/zna-2004-1016...
He got pissed off at me for questioning his authority, I told the class "Uh, guys, why don't we all wait until [GTA's name] and I talk this out to proceeded, unless ya'll want to be replacing fuses in the multimeters" that REALLY pissed him off.
He was yelling. He told me I needed to talk to him in the hallway. I informed him that if I was wrong, this would be a great lesson for the class, and that, no, I will not being going somewhere to be yelled at in private, anything he had to say could be said there. That really did it. He yelled more. I was laughing at his tantrum. He took me up to the lab lead (not the prof overseeing the class - not 100% sure of how this person fit into the the hierarchy), intending to get me kicked out of the class for disrespect. He goes on to this guy about how I'm the worst, and I just stand there, smiling.
Finally, lab lead guy has gotten tired of the second hand yelling, and asks for my side - He wasn't oblivious to the fact that I'm sitting there fiddling with my 12AX7 necklace while leaning on my longboard I burnt with high voltage. I oozed the hardware hacker ethos very visibly - and I respond simply "He told the class to measure impedance, with an ohmmeter, while the circuit was live"
It was at that moment I learned it was this lab lead's role to repair equipment (or at least replace fuses) when things like this happen.
Watching that GTA have to tell the class "I was wrong" after he was yelling at me in front of everyone had to be the best.
---
Fast forward a year, and I got to deal with even more mind numbing stupidity: https://opguides.info/posts/whydidipay/#8---senior-spring-20
I’m afraid you’ll have to repeat the experiment.
As an odd coincidence, I did the same experiment on a shoestring budget with substandard equipment also. I too used a fancy computer algorithm to get a best fit. Except that I managed to get four significant decimal places in the result — an improvement over the (also outdated) textbook.
The author of the angry rant had a life-defining experience of overwhelming frustration.
The same scenario resulted in a positive life-defining experience for me
It’s funny how unpredictably things pan out even in identical circumstances…
I've just soldered SOT-723 onto SOT-23 adapter board, I can solder anything to anything
Common solder is, of course, designed to stick really well to copper. Which it does. To solder more exotic things, you probably need a completely different alloy.
One of the most devious analytic chemistry labs I had was the one where the spectroscope was ancient, its tray was less transparent and more milky white, and the fluid to analyze was some sort of expired flavored water. The attempt vs result chart looked exactly like that figure.
A really eye-opening experience in many ways.
Has science gone too far? :D
Cracks in the Nuclear Model: Surprising Evidence for Structure