[HN Gopher] Electron band structure in germanium, my ass
___________________________________________________________________
Electron band structure in germanium, my ass
Author : tux3
Score : 671 points
Date : 2025-04-01 12:25 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pages.cs.wisc.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (pages.cs.wisc.edu)
| janandonly wrote:
| It takes a special kind of mind to appreciate this short post,
| not as fiction, but as truth and also as a jab at the physics
| sciences in general.
| viraptor wrote:
| More jabs available at
| https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/bio.html and
| https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar in general.
| ssivark wrote:
| Why is it a jab at physics? It's honest and beautiful -- I
| imagine this is exactly what an experience on the cutting edge
| of experiment is like! :D
|
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| Especially when the entire concept might seem absolutely
| absurd at the time.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| I mean if you didn't already know how to solder to Germanium
| crystals you would have had to spend months experimenting
| with the material before you could get leads to stick.
| robocat wrote:
| Google said (AI result): 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
|
| Also one of the search results implied etching first could
| help remove germanium oxide and used a different solder:
| https://www.researchgate.net/post/How-to-solder-germanium-
| wa...
|
| 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.
| qwezxcrty wrote:
| In most but the very richest physics research groups
| there are no such thing called technicians. Except for
| shared equipment in centralized managed facilities like
| the nanofabs, even there you need to tune your own
| recipe...
| syndicatedjelly wrote:
| I understood and appreciated it, and I'm not special
| blatantly wrote:
| I appreciate it just from reading enough HN and XKCD
| abhink wrote:
| I spent a good minute looking at the exponential in graph,
| ignoring all the actual data points, thinking to myself that the
| experiment does show an exponential relation. Where's the lie?
|
| Guess that's the power pictures have over words.
| nottorp wrote:
| There should be some more examples in how to lie with
| statistics?
| worthless-trash wrote:
| I believe this is commonly known as marketing.
| incognito124 wrote:
| Believe it or not, there's an entire book about it!
| nottorp wrote:
| Yes, it's called "How to lie with statistics" :)
| Supermancho wrote:
| > ignoring all the actual data points
|
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| (2000)
|
| (at most:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20001031193257/http://www.cs.wis...)
| mr_mitm wrote:
| https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/cv.html
|
| Looks like he went on get a PhD in CS and is now a staff SWE at
| Google, according to his LinkedIn. Guess he's rolling in cash
| after all.
| ALLTaken wrote:
| You're right, I looked up and he seems to work at Google as a
| SWE: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucas-kovar-185a3531
|
| Happy he made the leap and at least get's paid well now (I
| hope).
| robocat wrote:
| The last line seems strangly intelligent:
|
| > I still wouldn't have any women, but at least I'd be
| rolling in cash.
|
| Did they get a girlfriend?
| djmips wrote:
| Fear not, he's being paid well.
| blatantly wrote:
| That this is the chosen path says alot about how we as a
| society allocate money and value things.
| palmotea wrote:
| > (2000)
|
| 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.
|
| https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/bio.html
| randlet wrote:
| Yeah I want to say I remember this making the rounds
| (remember email forwards?) during my first year of undergrad
| ('99-'00) but I'm a bit fuzzy on the exact timing.
| Y_Y wrote:
| _A thing of beauty is a joy forever_ - John Keats
|
| 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
| )
| api wrote:
| Just physics is like this? Hero worship like this is pretty
| endemic.
|
| 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.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Fwiw I certainly didn't mean to say this is unique to
| physics, I'm just not qualified to comment on other fields.
| Furthermore you make a good point, the hero worship is
| fruitful. Anecdotally I'd say a full third of my undergrad
| cohort cited Feynman's auto-hagiography as part of their
| decision to study physics.
|
| (I also note that any double-edged polyhedral sword is
| necessarily degenerate.)
| russdill wrote:
| There's a single instance in Einstein's notebooks where he
| attempts to use numerical methods to come up with a result. He
| manually graphs some result of the cosmological constant and
| then integrates it by counting the squares under the curve.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| I find that hard to imagine, considering we're talking about
| coupled partial differential equations in four dimensions.
| Well, if that's true, it really goes to show his desperation,
| I guess.
| emmelaich wrote:
| An esteemed emeritus professor of engineering I know used to
| cut out the graph and weigh it on a sensitive scale to
| integrate. It was not an uncommon technique.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| There seems to be a bit of confusion about the Hilbert-Einstein
| controversy [1], and I believe consensus is that Hilbert
| derived the equations a few days before Einstein, but did not
| claim ownership of the research. But this is the first time I'm
| hearing that Hilbert made a mistake. (I mean, maybe he did, but
| he got the right result eventually.)
|
| [1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/56892/did-
| hilber...
| Y_Y wrote:
| I was about to link you what I thought was best coverage of
| the priority I knew about,
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.278.5341.1270 but
| now I see that's in the second edit of the accepted answer at
| your link.
|
| (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-2
| 004-1016...
| ajkjk wrote:
| I feel like forgetting to multiply by sqrt(-g) must have been a
| pretty easy mistake to make back then. This stuff was new!
| zyklu5 wrote:
| On the contrary, what is presented by the OP is one of the many
| reasons that worship of science's heroes, unfashionable for
| decades, a whiggish pablum, is justified. If great results were
| birthed fully-formed -- a view I've frankly never heard anyone
| profess who has bothered to consider such things even briefly
| -- they would hardly be any heroes. Even little children who
| reflexively chomp on every superhero film aeroplaned towards
| their face understand this.
| HiPHInch wrote:
| I took some effort to change my research interest from computer
| vision to DFT calculation in quantum chemistry.
|
| Honestly, I'm kind of frustrated now, too many work is close-
| source in this area. The research paper will tell you everything
| except how to reproduce this work in minimal effort, it's like
| they are hiding something.
|
| They also using a `Origin` to plot and MS Word to write paper,
| which is also non-free licensed, and made them harder to
| collaborate and reproduce.
| gaugefield wrote:
| This issue also bugged me for a while. It is more of cultural
| issue, and older the research group is, the less likely it is
| for research software to be open, in my experience.
|
| 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.
| qwezxcrty wrote:
| I miss OriginPro in my undergrad when we had campus licenses
| for, before moving to matplotlib for data visualization.
| matplotlib is simply too disappointing for making publication
| quality figures. The most recently encountered problem is how
| to plot with a broken x-axis, which is one of the most basic
| need in physical science but requires a non-trivial amount of
| hacking to get with matplotlib.
|
| 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.
| prennert wrote:
| Matplotlib is a bit painful. Often seaborn will work quicker,
| especially when using Pandas dataframes with proper column
| names and seaborn compatible layout.
|
| 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/s
| ubplots_axes_and_figu...
| qwezxcrty wrote:
| That link was what I referred to after Googling, but in my
| case I need the width of the left part and the right part
| to be different, which requires setting width_ratios in the
| subplots and adjusting the slope of the hacky lines used to
| draw the broken axis symbol. seaborn also would not help in
| this exact case.
|
| 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.
| foven wrote:
| Honestly, when it comes to hacking things together with
| matplotlib I outsource all of my thinking to chatgpt to do
| the 80% of doc hunting that is honestly not worth it since
| everything in matplotlib is labelled inconsistently.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| Honestly, if you're doing scientific work there is no reason
| not to output the data somewhere and plot in R with the
| standard lib (insanely good for science style plotting but
| hard to use) or ggplot (what matplotlib wished it was)
| BeetleB wrote:
| > The research paper will tell you everything except how to
| reproduce this work in minimal effort, it's like they are
| hiding something.
|
| 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.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Very true that they're hiding things. I actually wrote some
| code (that strung together other people's code) to complete a
| simulation pipeline for non adiabatic molecular dynamics. I was
| tasked with writing documentation to teach the group but was
| instructed to not release it anywhere publicly because other
| groups would simply take the method and move faster since they
| had more money and compute.
| russdill wrote:
| Anyone who did undergrad lab work around 2000ish might throw in
| some comment about lab view software and the number of times it
| crashes and loses all your data
| ptsneves wrote:
| 2000s? My university's wind tunnel instrumentation was mostly
| LabView.
| russdill wrote:
| It's been around a very long time and continues to be
| relevant. It's just a window in time where it was feasible to
| have a graphical application made on labview to be accessible
| to undergrads crossing over with such a thing being quite
| unstable.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Lmao my entire undergraduate physics program is still entirely
| labview instruments.
| ALLTaken wrote:
| hahaa, I love it! That's right there is engineering and true work
| and dedication. Can hear the frustration and it's 100% warranted.
|
| I wish universities were better equipped for what you pay. Where
| is all that money going anyways? Leaking like free electrons?
| abakker wrote:
| The gym, I think. Usually the brand new buildings, too.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| It's going to the salaries of a few elite people in the
| university system. It's not that far off from the wealth
| inequality of the real world.
| hermannj314 wrote:
| The 2023 education and general fund budget for Penn State
| allocated 5.7% to equipment and maintenance and repairs of
| approx $2.5 billion in use. I assume that would include thing
| other than just lab equipment.
|
| 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
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| A+, recommending for accelerated PhD program.
| fithisux wrote:
| Brilliant man.
| wigster wrote:
| so funny. i've read a few chapters of Discworld books that made
| me titter a lot less
| jerf wrote:
| One of my Core Memories when it comes to science, science
| education, and education in general was in my high school physics
| class, where we had to do an experiment to determine the
| gravitational acceleration of Earth. This was done via the
| following mechanism: Roll a ball off of a standard classroom
| table. Use a 1990s wristwatch's stopwatch mechanism to start the
| clock when the ball rolls of the table. Stop the stopwatch when
| the ball hits the floor.
|
| 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.)
| sobriquet9 wrote:
| I think if you showed not only the point estimate, but also
| some measure of uncertainty like standard deviation, it should
| have given you a passing grade. It's hard to say why an answer
| like 6.8 +- 5 is wrong.
|
| 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.
| jerf wrote:
| This is early high school. We didn't have error bars yet, we
| just took an average. I just used that as a convenient way to
| describe how erratic our numbers were. If 6.8 is the average
| you know we had some low numbers in there. And some nice high
| ones, too.
|
| 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.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| It's honestly kind of bullshit because the bedrock of a lot
| of my work is being realistic, and if I had such a piece of
| crap equipment I would have gladly reported the 6.8 meters
| per second squared and then turned around and identified
| all of the problems with my setup right down to
| characterizing the lag time on the stopwatch start.
|
| 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.
| hydrogen7800 wrote:
| >Roll a ball off of a standard classroom table. Use a 1990s
| wristwatch's stopwatch mechanism to start the clock when the
| ball rolls of the table. Stop the stopwatch when the ball hits
| the floor.
|
| 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.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| That's an interesting way to measure the passage of time --
| just use something that produces a "regular distance" and
| derive a way from kinematics to calculate the acceleration
| from the change in the distance.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| The way boats historically measured speed was by dragging a
| rope behind them. The rope has knots tied with exact
| spacing. You drop one end of the rope in the water, and
| count how many knots pass you in a given time. That's then
| your speed in knots.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Using this method repeatedly to guess how far you've
| moved over the course of days is, historically, a
| fantastic way to crash into the side of France in the
| middle of the night.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| Well the other problem is knowing where you are. The
| sun/stars can give you latitude. Longitude was nearly
| impossible until the advent of the marine chronometer in
| the latter part of the 18th century, and not "standard"
| on ships until the mid-1800s. There were earlier
| versions, which had poor accuracy and were not much
| better than dead reckoning
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > You drop one end of the rope in the water, and count
| how many knots pass you in a given time.
|
| Given that you're dragging the rope behind you, won't
| this number be zero?
| flir wrote:
| The rope has a mechanism for creating drag (a wooden
| board) at the end, and regularly spaced knots. You throw
| the board in the water, let the rope play out through
| your hands, and count the knots as they pass through your
| hands while watching a timer.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| ... like something that burns a hole in the paper with a
| spark or marks thermal paper with a burst of heat.
| flir wrote:
| Ticker tape timer. My class had the same thing for the same
| experiment.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| In the UK we called it ticket tape and it was terrible. The
| devices barely worked and they cause a bunch of friction so
| you end up calculating a value of 'g' that's off by like 30%.
| timthorn wrote:
| I think officially, we called it ticker tape, as in stock
| ticker - it was originally used to record stock prices
| transmit by telegraph.
| bee_rider wrote:
| That's pretty bad. On top of being unfair, it was a total
| missed opportunity to talk about the law of large numbers (I
| wonder if they could get a decent sample by combining
| everybody's measurements) or skew (maybe everybody is a couple
| milliseconds too low just based on reaction time).
|
| Or there could be some air resistance if you used, like, ping-
| pong balls.
| borgster wrote:
| Correct. Ask anyone who plays blitz/bullet chess online.
| Games are won and lost in the final second of gameplay.
| WhitneyLand wrote:
| So did you let this go without protest? Why not escalate it if
| it was clearly so unreasonable?
|
| Sounds like there was more nuance to the story.
| marc_io wrote:
| He was just a kid, man.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| "Escalating" in American high school is a good way to
| increase your consequences to no benefit.
| sejje wrote:
| I escalated a very similar thing with a college professor--
| in a social sciences class.
|
| 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)
| jerf wrote:
| Because my policy in childhood was to bend like the willow
| and not break like the oak. Not phrased in those words, and
| not quite as consciously chosen as it is now, but it was my
| policy, and for the most part I stand by it. Modern me,
| looking back with an engineer's rather cold cost/benefits
| analysis, sees way more cost than any possible benefit, so I
| might refine my past self's reasons but I'd still take the
| same actions.
|
| Fortunately, this was closer to a one-off problem in an
| otherwise acceptable class rather than a systematic issue.
| npongratz wrote:
| > From grade school on, you are graded on whether or not the
| grading authority likes the results you got.
|
| 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.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| > 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.
| tomrod wrote:
| And if you CAN'T terminate because of admitted emotional
| grading, the system is too tightly captured by outside
| interests to the detriment of the client: the student and
| society.
|
| 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
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| Agreed. Like this is fraud level bs that's happening and
| people are voting me down.
|
| I think it's because this kind of stuff is common. People
| have done fraudulent stuff and they don't agree it's a
| fireable offense. Understandable. I still would endanger
| someone's livelihood for this. Poor performance I would
| think twice and go through all measures possible to
| improve performance including putting them in a position
| 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.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| You seem very angry yourself, and willing to let that
| anger guide you to harming someone. Are you so different
| from that teacher? In fact, you might be worse, while he
| only gave a grade (one of many surely, likely to have no
| long term impact on life prospects or survival), you
| would have this man made homeless? Don't be so quick to
| assume a teacher (at least in the us) has been able to
| accrue sufficient savings to 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? 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.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| I would. Small things like this add up to overall
| corruption.
|
| Also im not killing him. Just firing him. Find a new job
| and don't do shit like that again.
| alwa wrote:
| It's one question on a school exam, friend...
|
| And at least the guy had the honesty to admit his
| irrationality when called on it. That, to me, reads more
| like coming to terms with his error in an edge case than
| it does a systematic campaign of maliciously frauding on
| the student
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| Nah. Admitting to murder doesn't spare you from the deed.
| I would fire his ass.
| rapatel0 wrote:
| Good watch -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_%22Superman%22
| cratermoon wrote:
| If you like watching right-wing educational propaganda,
| sure.
| tomrod wrote:
| It wasn't received as right-wing propaganda at the time.
| Endorsed by Bill Gates and others less-informed to
| education research with leanings towards the left.
|
| But it is definitely anti-education and proposes
| solutions that aren't justified, like the right-wing-
| aligned push for chartered schools (which tend to be
| religious in nature, hence the wholesale gobbling for it
| by the rightwing).
|
| Stanford studies in 2009 & 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.
| matthewowen wrote:
| > segregation (since poorer people both tend to be
| minorities and tend to not have capacity/time to jump
| through lottery hoops)
|
| charter schools tend to have _more_ minority students
| than public schools. eg in philadelphia, charter schools
| are 80% black/hispanic versus 71% for the public schools.
| nationwide they are 60% black/hispanic vs 42% for public
| schools (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-
| reads/2024/06/06/us-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.
| tomrod wrote:
| Aye. This is captured in the next sentence, perhaps the
| phrasing was not clear:
|
| > With careful planning and policy structure, perhaps
| good charter schools could overcome their entrance bias
|
| It is good when they do, and it is easy to go awry.
| Frederation wrote:
| Eh, both sides of the isle took issue with it.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| So wait, so you've decided a film by the director of An
| Inconvenient Truth, that was praised by everybody from
| Bill Gates to Oprah, has won awards and gotten a 90% on
| Rotten Tomatoes is "right wing propaganda"?
|
| You may want to recalibrate you sense of where the center
| is.
| tomrod wrote:
| Agreed, commentator is confused. My sibling comment to
| yours pointed it out. It's important to keep clear what
| is straight up a propaganda effort and what has been
| embraced by the propagandists as supporting them despite
| it not being a propaganda effort. Muddied waters helps no
| one.
| morgoths_bane wrote:
| Bill Gates and Oprah are both billionaires. Billionaires
| in general want solutions that defend capital. Privately
| run schools that receive government funding, in addition
| to tuition, while also being able to set their own
| curriculum free from the state is certainly within their
| collective class interest.
|
| 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.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| If you think _all_ of the Overton Window is "right of
| center" than you are surely miscallibrated (there's even
| a meme floating around that describes this exact
| conceptual error).
| grg0 wrote:
| His calibration is perfectly fine. There is no left left
| in the US, as is obvious from the crack down of unions
| and welfare and the privatization of all aspects of
| society. At best, you get center-right representation in
| Congress (who represent the elite, not the working
| class.)
| tomrod wrote:
| While you and I ape on hackernews, the American Left is
| currently filibustering in the Senate.
|
| The left is real, adapts to what can work, and learns.
| cratermoon wrote:
| It's a pro-school-choice anti-teachers union film. Make
| what you will of that.
| emmelaich wrote:
| These days,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_and_Deliver would be
| considered right wing propaganda.
|
| It's based on the true story of a mathematics teacher in
| east L.A.
| sio8ohPi wrote:
| There's a certain irony in your outrage at his failure to
| control his emotions, even as your own rage leads you to
| dream of hurting his family.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| Is it rage?
|
| If he murdered someone I would put him in jail and that
| will harm his family too.
|
| There is a fine line between justice and compassion and
| if you never cross the line to enforce justice then you
| have corruption because nothing can be enforced because
| inevitably all enforcement leads to harm.
| alterom wrote:
| _> 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._
|
| 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.
|
| -----
|
| 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.
| sio8ohPi wrote:
| Having been on the other side of the table... there's a
| tactic students will sometimes use, where they don't
| understand the question but will simply attempt to
| regurgitate everything written on their notecard that is
| related in hopes that they'll accidentally say the right
| words. Sounds like you did understand it, but the volume
| perhaps made it look like you were just dumping. It is indeed
| annoying to grade.
|
| 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."
| Ntrails wrote:
| I distinctly remember a student arguing with a teacher for
| a mark.
|
| "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."
| npongratz wrote:
| Sure, we could speculate about his true unstated reasons
| for marking wrong my answer.
|
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Good experience to prepare you for the rest of your
| academic and working life where your performance rating
| will often be strongly influenced the evaluator's current
| mood or biases. Or the police officer's mood when you get
| pulled over. Or most other authority figures' feelings
| when they're making decisions that affect you. It's
| unfairness all the way until we die.
| npongratz wrote:
| Authoritarianism, everywhere and in all forms, seeks to
| shut down curiosity and critical thinking.
| a_shoeboy wrote:
| I used to write my undergrad history essays in rhymed
| couplets because I figured the grad assistant doing the
| grading would be grateful for a break in the monotony and
| it was faster and easier than writing an actual good essay.
| Probably wouldn't work in the LLM era, but it was very
| effective in the 90's.
| veggieroll wrote:
| I can totally relate. I had the same experience in grade school
| science class, where the teacher assigned an experiment with a
| suggested solution and an invitation to come up with your own
| method.
|
| 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.
| tomxor wrote:
| The irony is that you learned something. Failure is a very
| useful learning opportunity in understanding what affects the
| success of an experiment, so long as you analyse it and
| demonstrate that, which arguably is where you should have
| been encouraged and graded. Compared to accidentally
| succeeding while following a standard procedure.
|
| 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.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Yes he learned to avoid physics. Good job teacher!
| tomxor wrote:
| Well, yes unfortunately, but the takeaway should be
| scepticism of the validity of learning institutions,
| something most of us aren't prepared to even consider at
| a younger age.
| veggieroll wrote:
| > scepticism of the validity of learning institutions
|
| 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.
| lukan wrote:
| We had the task of building a highly insulated small house.
| Big enough to hold a hot cup of tea (and meassure how good it
| holds its temperature inside).
|
| Our design was very, very good in that regard. (I used
| insulation building material from the house my family build
| at that time) But granted, it was not so pretty.
|
| But that was not a stated goal. But when it came to grades,
| suddenly design and subjective aesthetics 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.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| I mean, the other side of the coin is that engineering
| schools are a giant circle jerk that churn out thousands of
| graduates every year who if left to their own devices will
| design things that cannot be made out of inputs and using
| processes that are not appropriate.
|
| I'm not saying you gotta prioritize looks but you gotta
| think a few steps ahead and understand what the ancillary
| criteria that will make or break a 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.
| lukan wrote:
| The main design goals were:
|
| - construct a house with good insulation
|
| No word of it being pretty. Houses should look pretty,
| but it wasn't art class, but physics. And the physics
| teacher clearly said insulation is the goal (so we learn
| about the concept).
|
| We had a funtional house (roof, walls, windows, door)
| with very good insulation. The winning house just looked
| pretty and its insulation was basically nonexistent.
| morgoths_bane wrote:
| That's awful honestly, did you ever regain that interest in
| physics later in life?
| veggieroll wrote:
| No, indeed I found a way to skip physics in high school
| (though this wasn't really why). But, I was interested in
| Biology, taking almost enough for a minor in it in college.
|
| I'm a self-taught dev now. And, that fits really well for
| me, despite being completely unrelated to my college
| degrees. I work mostly with other self-taught, passionate
| about software people. And I'm loving that.
|
| But, I do have very strong opinions on institutions and
| pedagogy. I've gotten into some pretty epic arguments about
| it with my wife, who is a music teacher. And, her
| experience has been so completely opposite of mine.
|
| From the way she tells it, classical music seems to be the
| ultimate discipline where structured education is
| paramount. And, I have such a negative opinion of
| traditional methods that it's caused some friction.
| wavemode wrote:
| The worst is college science classes where sometimes the
| provided equipment and/or procedures aren't even correct, and
| the professor isn't around and you're dealing with a TA who is
| just as confused as you are.
|
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
|
| > 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.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| Interesting. If that is correct and you take OPs value, 6.8 /
| 5 * 7 = 9.5 which is pretty damn close. So his failed grade
| was for the only non-cheated result?
| huijzer wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| billti wrote:
| Having recently gotten into quantum and listening to a lot of
| audiobooks on the history of it, that's one of biggest
| takeaways for me. So many major advances in theory that
| languished for years because of the politics of the day of the
| personal opinions of their advisor, only for a physicist with
| greater standing to rediscover the same thing later and finally
| get it some attention. (Hugh Everett and David Bohm being two
| examples)
| BeetleB wrote:
| That's a poor way to measure _g_. In multiple schools I went
| to, the standard was to measure _g_ via a pendulum (I think
| measuring the period).
|
| 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.
| don-code wrote:
| This is, more or less, exactly what happened when I took
| Electronics I in college.
|
| The course was structured in such a way that you could not move
| on to the next lab assignment until you completed the one
| before it. You could complete the lab assignments at your own
| pace. If you failed the lab, you failed the class, regardless
| of your grade.
|
| The second or third lab had us characterize the response of a
| transistor in 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.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Honestly, you got more real-world electronics training out of
| that experience than you paid for. You are now qualified to
| deal with remarked or counterfeit Chinese parts and other
| inevitable supply hazards in the business. Be grateful!
| homeless_engi wrote:
| Yes, maybe true. But it's a pity that was not reflected in
| their final grade.
| freedomben wrote:
| That is enraging. I've seen similar things happen too and it
| blows my mind how ridiculous some of these teachers can be. I
| don't know if it's dehumanization of their students in their
| minds or an utter unwillingness to devote 30 seconds of
| directed attention to understanding the situation and making
| a reasonable judgment, but whatever the cause it is prolific.
| The only thing worse is when one of them will add something
| like, "life isn't fair, get over it" when it's fully in their
| power to make a reasonable determination.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Just wait until that teacher is your graduate advisor.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| I hear so many horror stories in the sciences, I have no
| idea why anyone would pursue an academic career in it.
| karel-3d wrote:
| Well in the industry you have the weekly JIRA humiliation
| rituals, bad things are everywhere
| concordDance wrote:
| What's this a reference to? Not familiar with JIRA
| humiliation rituals.
| MattSayar wrote:
| Scrum/Kanban ceremonies with assigning points to tasks
| etc. GP is being melodramatic
| yardie wrote:
| At this point it's the track to get a visa to work and
| live in the US. I've met so many graduate researchers who
| put up with way more bullshit than I would ever deal
| with. And why most grad programs are mostly immigrants.
| int_19h wrote:
| It's a general problem with large bureaucracies. If you're
| a cog in the machine, the safest way is to always stick to
| the rules, and avoid any situation where one has to
| exercise discretion, since any personal judgment comes with
| potential personal responsibility down the line.
| gsf_emergency_2 wrote:
| It bugs me that oftentimes there appear to be nothing
| _but_ cogs (e.g. Intel)
| ethbr1 wrote:
| The flip side of this is from the professor's perspective:
| some undergrad in every class will lie their ass off about
| why their assignment was delayed.
|
| Unfortunately, this reality produces no good options if you
| think someone is telling the truth: (1) make an exception,
| and be unfair to the rest of the class or (2) don't make an
| exception, and perpetuate unfairness for the impacted
| student.
| freedomben wrote:
| That's fair, but in this case it should be pretty easy to
| verify if the person is lying. The claim is highly
| reproducible and the instructor wouldn't even have to do
| it.
| orlp wrote:
| What I don't understand is why it took you 8 weeks to
| distinguish a timer from a transistor. That doesn't make your
| professor's reaction alright, I just find it puzzling.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| That would be like exposing a first year CS student to a
| situation where "it could be a compiler bug" is one of the
| potential explanations.
| vkou wrote:
| It's closer to exposing a first year CS student who has
| never touched a computer before to Windows, when the work
| is supposed to be done on Linux, and the TA is hemming
| and hawing, and insists that the reason the sudo command
| isn't working is because the student is not following the
| steps correctly.
|
| It's an program that's obvious to diagnose... If you
| already have passing familiarity with the material.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| I would assume that you don't have access to the lab(and
| diagnostic equipment) at all times and taking other
| classes.
|
| 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.
| don-code wrote:
| It's a good question! I didn't think to check the markings
| on the chip. The lab tech was convinced I was doing
| something wrong with my setup, and likewise he had me
| convinced it must be something wrong with my setup.
|
| 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.
| Isamu wrote:
| Same package. 555 is typically a DIP-8, transistor packages
| are available in the same. So you would have to examine the
| cryptic markings and compare them with the other students,
| and that's only if you suspected some fuckup on the part of
| the knowledgeable people.
| realo wrote:
| ALWAYS suspect some fuckup on the part of the
| knowledgeable people... especially them!
|
| Trust, but verify.
| nomel wrote:
| Yes, my strict adherence to "trust but verify" was born
| from literal tears. It's not worth trusting others if it
| takes a small fraction of the projects time to verify. It
| has saved me _incredible_ amounts of time in my
| professional life, and I've seen _months_ wasted, and
| projects delayed, by others who hadn't cried enough yet.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| I would love to hear some of your examples, if only to
| reinforce your lesson to myself.
| gopher_space wrote:
| "Is the box plugged in? Did you cycle the power?"
|
| I'll trust that you understand each of those words
| individually but later verify that the box is actually
| plugged in.
| mook wrote:
| That's why tech support has moved on to "unplug the
| thing, wait a minute, then plug it back in".
|
| It gives the capacitors to discharge; but more
| importantly, it gives an excuse to actually force the
| person to plug the thing in.
| kirubakaran wrote:
| "Trust, but verify" is just a polite (ie corporate) way
| of saying "Don't trust until you verify", right?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| No, it says that projects should _move forward_ without
| verifying that prerequisites have been fulfilled, but
| that the verification should take place anyway. It 's
| about the pace at which you can go.
|
| 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.
|
| Trust, but verify: 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.
|
| You can't finish step B until you have all the
| prerequisites, but you can _start_ it.
| cycomanic wrote:
| But that's the thing that both students and often the
| teachers forget. We don't run labs to go smoothly, we run
| labs because you'll have to troubleshoot. There is no
| learning experience in a lab that works without issues,
| in fact IMO if lab instructions are of the step by step
| type, they should always have some deliberate errors in
| it to get students to troubleshoot.
|
| To play devil's advocate, just imagine the 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?
| CodeMage wrote:
| > 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.
| cycomanic wrote:
| > They should expect that particular incident to not
| affect their performance evaluation, since it was very
| much not their fault.
|
| What do you mean not their fault? I've seen wrong parts
| delivered by suppliers, so yes responsibility of an
| engineer who puts together a circuit is definitely
| checking that the parts are correct.
|
| > In your hypothetical scenario, your hypothetical junior
| engineer went to the senior engineer repeatedly for
| advice, and the senior engineer did not do their job
| properly:
|
| >> The lab tech was unhelpful, insisting that it must be
| something with how I had it wired, encouraging me to re-
| draw my schematic, check my wires, and so on. It could
| _never_ be the equipment's fault.
|
| Again _never_ the equipment's fault? It wasn't the
| equipment it was a part. So maybe it was an issue of
| miscommunication? I find it hard to believe that the lab
| tech said it could never be the parts, considering how
| those things are handled in student labs, small parts
| break all the time.
|
| Maybe, it's true and it was a crappy lab tech, maybe they
| could not imagine the part being broken, but I've seen
| the other side of the equation as well, when things don't
| work students often just throw their hands up and say "it
| doesn't work" without any of their own troubleshooting
| expecting the tutor/lab tech/professor to do the
| troubleshooting for them (quite literally, can you check
| that we wired everything correctly...).
|
| In my experience this does not get accepted in industry.
| I acknowledge though what the other poster said,
| generally in industry incentives are different and
| someone would have intervened if a project gets held up
| for 8 weeks by a single person.
|
| Regarding the story, I wonder what would have been an
| acceptable solution (apart from the lab tech possibly
| being more helpful?), I as a teacher would have excepted
| a report which would have given a detailed account of the
| troubleshooting steps etc. (but it needs to show that a
| real effort to find the cause, simply saying the lab tech
| couldn't help is not sufficient). Simply saying "it
| wasn't my fault because I had a wrong part" shouldn't
| just give you an A.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| CodeMage wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| don-code wrote:
| If after eight weeks a junior engineer is still toiling
| on their story, I'd ask why someone more senior didn't
| get involved.
|
| 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.
| rlpb wrote:
| For a college class grade, everyone is supposed to be
| tested on the same exercise. If all students were tested
| under the same scenario then it would be fair. For just
| one student to be tested under this scenario, but for all
| other students to get a free pass on the lab component
| identification diagnostic test, is not reasonable.
| gopher_space wrote:
| More to the point, the professor would be required to
| provide the same effort to every other student in the
| class.
| gblargg wrote:
| While it's ridiculous to expect a student to have the
| skills of a professional, even a student needs to develop
| assertive skills to demand a replacement part. This is a
| basic skill for debugging hardware problems: see if
| problem manifests on more than one unit. Here it would be
| demanding another chip to try, early-on. Chips can be
| marked correctly but damaged or defective.
| arijo wrote:
| You can create a timer with one transistor and an LC
| feedback loop.
| dudinax wrote:
| relatively cheap lesson in the importance of knowing your
| hardware.
| entropyie wrote:
| I ran labs in my university in Europe, in the early 2000s,
| and I'd like to think this would not have happened. We were
| selected as tutors due to our proficiency and dedication to
| the subject. Maybe it was a fluke, I've heard similar stories
| recently about local Unis.
| Natsu wrote:
| It's funny, because while that's a terrible educational
| experience, you actually learned some important lessons
| despite them.
|
| I remember the first time I found out that the software
| documentation I had been relying upon was simply and utterly
| wrong. It was so freeing to start looking at how things
| actually behaved instead of believing the utterly false
| documentation because the world finally made sense again.
| euroderf wrote:
| Proving the truism that incorrect documentation is worse
| than no documentation.
| don-code wrote:
| Sometimes it's not even rare that documentation is wrong.
| The documentation for a vendor who I won't name - but might
| be at Series J and worth north or $50 billion - seems to be
| wrong more often than it's right.
|
| We frequently say, don't blame the tools, it's you. That
| pushes "blame the tools" outside of the Overton window, and
| when we need to blame a tool, we're looked at like we have
| five heads.
|
| Ten years ago, I was 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.
| Eduard wrote:
| > 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.
| Natsu wrote:
| In my case, it was egregiously bad, because someone had
| cribbed docs from an entirely separate scripting language
| that did almost the same things. Most of the same
| features were there, but the docs were utter lies, and
| failures were silent. So you'd go down the wrong branch
| of an if statement because it wasn't checking the
| conditions it claimed to check.
|
| 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.
| mandevil wrote:
| I took and then TA'd a class where the semester long
| project was to control robots (it was a software
| engineering principles class, the actual code writing could
| be done in a single weekend, but you had to do all the
| other stuff of software engineering- requirements analysis
| and documentation etc).
|
| We had a software simulator of the robots, and the first
| lab was everyone dutifully writing the code that worked
| great on the simulator, and only then did we unlock the
| real robots and give you 2-3 minutes with the real robot.
| And the robot never moved that first lab, because the
| simulator had a bug, and didn't actually behave like the
| real robot did. We didn't deliberately design the robot
| that way, it came like that, but in a decade of doing the
| class we never once tried to fix the simulator because that
| was an incredibly important lesson we wanted to teach the
| students: documentation lies. Simulators aren't quite
| right. Trust no one, not even your mentor/TA/Professor.
|
| We did not actually grade anyone on their robot failing to
| move, no grade was given on that first lab experience
| because everyone failed to move the robot. But they still
| learned the lesson.
| don-code wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, were you up-front after the fact
| that this was part of the exercise?
|
| 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.
| mandevil wrote:
| If someone complained to us TAs during or after the lab
| that the simulators were incorrect, we were quite open
| that indeed they were, and that was not our doing, but we
| were okay with it because lying documentation was a part
| of the real world.
|
| 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.
| hermitdev wrote:
| > because the simulator had a bug
|
| 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.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >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.
|
| 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"
| don-code wrote:
| Indeed it could have. I was on a fairly prestigious
| scholarship; luckily, my marks were good enough that this
| was a low-risk decision.
|
| 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.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Message for engineering undergraduates: when you have an
| opportunity to trade great grades for good grades and
| increased immediate career prospects, take it.
|
| 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)
| kelnos wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not going to say that undergrad doesn't matter,
| but your grades are not exactly an indication of whether
| or not you're getting useful life and professional skills
| out of it. I was a straight-A high school student, but
| finished university a semester late with a 2.975 GPA.
| I've since had a wildly successful career in software
| development (my degree is in electrical engineering), and
| my college years toiling about in labs are but a dim
| memory.
|
| 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.
| coderenegade wrote:
| I probably learned more in my first year of working than
| I did in my degree. Not just technical skills and gaps
| that had been glossed over during study, but also about
| myself as an individual. You made the right choice, and
| it's one I wish I had the foresight and maturity to have
| made at that point in my life.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I only took two electronics classes, but in the later one I
| was the class hero for just buying a bunch of potentiometers
| on amazon so that we didn't have to waste all of that
| expensive time sitting around waiting for our turn with the
| only good one left. It cost me like $10
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Literal example of "bias for action." A+
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| I was in honors freshman chemistry at university. Tough
| class, all homework (lots of it) graded rigorously, but only
| the midterm and final counted toward the course grade. So if
| you wanted an A you had to get an A on both exams.
|
| After midterm, during every other lecture at least, the
| professor would sound a refrain: "An orbital is not a house!
| An electron does not live in a house!"
|
| Final exam had a small number of 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.
| don-code wrote:
| I agree this seems overly principled to me.
|
| I recall a DSP class where there was an exam with a
| question like (not exactly this):
|
| > What does the following code print?
|
| > `printf("Hello, world!");`
|
| If you responded with:
|
| > Hello, world!
|
| ...which - of course - the whole class did, you got the
| question wrong.
|
| If you responded with:
|
| > "Hello, world!"
|
| ...which is actually not what that would print, you got the
| question right.
|
| A small band of us went to the professor and noted that, in
| fact, `printf("Hello, world!")` does not print the quotes.
| But he wanted us to show that it printed a string, and we
| denote strings by quotes.
|
| This was something that we learned to do just for him - all
| strings had to be enclosed by quotes, to denote that they
| were strings. As far as I'm concerned, it served no
| practical purpose; we never had to differentiate strings
| like "Hello" from ['H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', 0] or other
| representations.
|
| A better example of how this could go - and not one that
| had anywhere near the same stakes - was a question on the
| entrance exam for my college radio station:
|
| > What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
|
| I got this question right by answering, "Ni!"
|
| (edit: formatting)
| microtherion wrote:
| Depending on your environment, the above printf might
| print nothing at all, because there is no trailing
| newline.
| dudinax wrote:
| The kind of prof who never coded a useful program in his
| life.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Yeah? What "life lesson" does the dean think you're going
| to learn from that? That authority figures cannot be
| trusted because they will hurt you with bureaucratic
| stupidity. Does the dean, as an authority figure, _really_
| want that to be the lesson you learn?
| vkou wrote:
| That sometimes you can do everything right and still
| lose.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Having gone both to a liberal arts institution and a large
| public university, it is not clear to me what the
| professors in the latter were actually doing vis a vis
| their teaching responsibilities that actually provided
| value.
|
| 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.
| butlike wrote:
| you should have gotten an A for being a real engineer
| fulladder wrote:
| That's a tragic story. However, I'm surprised that the
| transistor was supposed to come in a DIP package. Usually
| through-hole discrete transistors come in a three-lead
| package like TO-92. Of course, that would not have helped you
| since yours looked like every other student's except the for
| the markings.
| ZiiS wrote:
| Probably Darlington transistors like ULN2003
| markrages wrote:
| ULN2003 is not DIP8
|
| And I would assume for pedalogical purposes a bare
| transistor would be preferred rather than the '2008 with
| its extra diodes and base resistor.
| kabdib wrote:
| this happens in "real life" as well
|
| i spent a bunch of time trying to figure out why my 74LS20
| wasn't being a dual 4-input NAND gate
|
| turns out that was a date code, and it was some other chip
| entirely
|
| 1974 was a terrible year for 74xx series TTL chips
|
| yes, i am old :-)
| jiggawatts wrote:
| This makes me incredibly grateful for my physics lecturers,
| all of whom would bend over backwards to assist their
| students' journeys towards learning any time any stumbled or
| showed a spark of curiosity that needed fanning into a raging
| fire.
|
| 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.
| thelaxiankey wrote:
| This is crazy to me because when I've run labs in the past,
| there were equipment failures literally all of the time. When
| you teach lots of people, shit breaks. Quite often if
| something didn't work, I'd just have one student swap
| equipment with another student to help diagnose this sort of
| thing.
|
| Major bummer that others have had differing experiences from
| me, here.
| interroboink wrote:
| > Right on up to professorships, this is how science really
| works.
|
| 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.
|
| Yeah, not sure I'm 100% agreed on that last statement (:
|
| [1] https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
| Eduard wrote:
| context :
|
| 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.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I would take Feynmans stories with a grain of salt, he was
| sometimes quite liberal with the facts when trying to make a
| point (in particular he liked to give the impression that he
| was the only smart guy in the room).
|
| 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...
| Sesse__ wrote:
| My physics professor told us once about a lab he had to do when
| he was a student himself, about measuring the adiabatic gas
| constant of air. The workload at that point was immense, so
| lots of students would just write a report and give the
| textbook answer--and be marked wrong.
|
| It turned out the TA had sabotaged the experiment by putting
| alcohol in the bottom of the (dark glass) measurement bottle,
| so the measurement 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.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| As bad as the prior story is, I don't know if intentionally
| misleading the students is the right way either-- what if one
| had realized the contamination and acting in good faith had
| cleaned out the bottle? What if they did this afterward and
| ended up redoing the experiment only to be told they had
| cheated?
|
| I'm all for exposing students to something unknown, but
| telling them they're doing X when it's really Y for anything
| longer than a single lecture ain't it.
| jerf wrote:
| You can square that circle by announcing at the beginning
| of the course that there is going to be some assignment
| like that, but I'm not telling you which, because the real
| world doesn't.
|
| 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.
| foldr wrote:
| This is ambitious. I once had a college class where the
| students were very upset because I decided to change the
| number of in-class quizzes from 5 to 4 a few weeks into
| the course. (The quizzes made up 10% of the overall
| grade.) Students hate it when you do anything even
| remotely weird or unexpected with assessments. Telling
| them that there is going to be a mystery trick assessment
| will just make them anxious and grumpy.
| Sesse__ wrote:
| Given that a report is supposed to tell what you did and
| then your calculations and conclusions, you'd better
| include something as dramatic as "we washed the equipment
| after getting the wrong results and detecting
| contamination"...
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| If you detect it and think it's relevant, that might be
| worth a note. But "reset and start over" is something
| that could reasonably be thought of as outside the scope
| of the report. You're reporting on the experiment, not
| logging your entire time in the lab.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| That would be a very valuable lab, _IF_ students hadn 't been
| explicitly trained in opposite behaviour for a decade by
| then.
|
| 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 :)
| poincaredisk wrote:
| >That would be a very valuable lab, IF students hadn't been
| explicitly trained in opposite behaviour for a decade by
| then.
|
| 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.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Being in a professional field means being the expert in
| the room for your area of responsibility. That means
| being able to translate information into, and out of, the
| terms of art in your profession.
|
| 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.
| poincaredisk wrote:
| I agree, that's a valuable skill. But do I, an expert in
| a narrow (very far removed from any soft skills) field,
| am the person who should teach it? When some students
| raise a complaint, how will I explain to the University
| management that this twist, even though completely
| unrelated to what I am supposed to teach, was actually a
| good idea?
|
| I just say, even with good intentions, the incentives are
| not aligned with teachers going too far out of line.
| stoneman24 wrote:
| In one class I took, we were examining a range of car engines
| for faults and the task was to get it running.
|
| 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.
| jerf wrote:
| Even as I rather vigorously grumble at the status quo, let it
| be noted that I celebrate those iconoclasts fighting the good
| fight all the more for the fact that they are going against
| the status quo to do so. May their tenacity and creativity
| ultimately prevail.
| rlpb wrote:
| The trouble with these kinds of games is that they put the
| more diligent students at a disadvantage. For example,
| someone might compare their experimental result against the
| textbook constant, realise it's wrong, and spend much more
| time trying to identify their "mistake", not realising
| they've been sabotaged. This puts further pressure on their
| other work.
|
| 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.
| Sesse__ wrote:
| Given that the labs were with TAs present, at that point,
| you'd just go to the TA and they'd tell you to write down
| the number even if it didn't match.
| margalabargala wrote:
| Not only that, but an appropriately diligent student might
| notice with their eyeballs or nose that their bottle
| contained alcohol, and clean/dry it before performing the
| experiment.
| grishka wrote:
| In my university we had a more precise setup for that. It was
| some sort of weight on a rail at a known incline, and a digital
| timer with two sensors known distance apart that start and stop
| it.
|
| 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.
| _0ffh wrote:
| Similar here. What the teachers where actually looking at was
| if the calculations and error analysis were done right.
| sciencejerk wrote:
| I got a D in a highschool Biology Genetics Lab working with
| Fruit Flies because our Chi Squared p-value was a little less
| than the common significance value of 0.05.
|
| 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
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| I used to teach math to 5th graders about angles. I let them
| draw a triangle and measure the angles with a protractor, then
| calculate the sum. The sum is usually around 177 or 178
| degrees.
| emmelaich wrote:
| I had a similar experience in Physics 101 and Chemistry 101.
| The labs were chaotic and had limited time. If you were even a
| little bit unlucky it would be impossible to even finish them
| let alone get remotely decent results.
|
| I'm convinced 60% of the class faked results or copied many
| results from previous year's students.
| ryandrake wrote:
| This is how I remember my own undergrad physics and chemistry
| labs: Terrible equipment and no time. The students who turned
| in faked but plausible data that looked like what the
| professor expected to see would get A's and the students who
| actually did the experiments and reported the crap they
| measured got lower grades. Everyone just learned the wrong
| lesson: Figure out what the data _should_ look like and fake
| it.
| finnthehuman wrote:
| >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,
|
| 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.
| bigger_cheese wrote:
| I studied Engineering rather that physics. In our lab reports
| we were expected to include a discussion of the results and
| the experimental method. It was basically expected that the
| report should include associated commentary around potential
| sources of error and modifications to improve the
| experimental accuracy.
|
| 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.
| Lerc wrote:
| I had a similar experience measuring gravity in high school.
| Our method was using a ticker timer.
|
| 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.
| eitland wrote:
| Brings back memories!
|
| 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.
| stanford_labrat wrote:
| > Right on up to professorships, this is how science really
| works.
|
| 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.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| When I did the mandatory lab exercises in physics, there was a
| more benign variant of that problem: the conventional value had
| to fall inside the error interval. However, it was allowed to
| add additional errors with a good explanation (...some
| creativity). I really didn't like to increase the estimated
| errors to make the result work, and I think the (unimportant)
| grades were reduced for doing it.
|
| 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!
| joshstrange wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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".
| dkarl wrote:
| At my high school, somehow physics was the dumb jock science
| course. I think it was because the head football coach taught
| physics for decades before retiring my sophomore year. Anyway,
| as a kid who was doing well in school and was headed for
| college, it was a natural decision for me to not bother taking
| physics and study for the AP test on my own. But one day a kid
| showed up in one of my classes with a hall pass for me to go to
| the physics classroom. The new teacher needed my help.
|
| 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.
| rlpb wrote:
| Now I feel lucky to have gone to a school where universally
| the teachers actually understood the material they were
| teaching. The only poor teaching I had to face was on the
| teaching aspects, and this was only from a minority of
| teachers.
| snailmailman wrote:
| I had a physics class in my high school. 2014? 2015? Around
| then.
|
| 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"
| jessekv wrote:
| In the first grade I knew exactly where on my fingers the width
| was an inch or a cm.
|
| 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.
| kkylin wrote:
| For typical distances (say the height of a table or a shelf)
| the time should be on the order of a fraction of a second.
| There's a couple hundred ms delay in the human auditory + motor
| system, which is a sizable fration of the time you're trying to
| measure and one would have to try to account for (but not all
| that easy, especially for a HS physics class).
| cycomanic wrote:
| On the other hand my experience as both a graduate and
| professor teaching students are equally discouraging.
|
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _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._
|
| 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.)
| jerf wrote:
| Well, on the flip side, I had a couple of classes in which we
| were supposed to "critique" papers, for the laudable purpose
| of learning critical thinking skills and how to evaluate
| papers.
|
| 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.
| torginus wrote:
| On a side note, one thing every single one of my peers who have
| pursued a creative degree have echoed, be it architecture,
| literature, graphic design, industial design etc. - is that the
| only way to get a good grade is to find out what your
| professors personal preferences and opinions are and be in
| total and utter agreement with them.
|
| 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.
| zvorygin wrote:
| In my high school, without naming any names, the teacher told
| us all that anyone who changed their results to 9.81m/s^2 was
| doing science incorrectly. And we were graded on our analysis
| of the experimental procedure, or something like that.
| plank wrote:
| Have a complete different experience. As a physical major, did
| a famous Millikan's oil drop experiment. Am a terrible
| experimentalist (went on to do my PhD in theoretical physics),
| so we got a charge of about 1/3 of the charge of an electron.
| Now, as I did not get a Nobel prize, I did not actually measure
| the charge of a single quark, but still got good enough grades
| for this study.
| thelaxiankey wrote:
| 'flunked everyone who claimed they got the supposed "correct"
| answer to three significant digits because that was
| impossible.' while I've never seen anyone flunked for this, I
| certainly have taken off substantial amounts of points, and
| seen others do the same, for 3 significant figures when 2 is
| the absolute highest reasonably possible (and realistically,
| one sig fig was what we actually wanted).
|
| I've run the exact lab you're describing, and I think we gave
| full credit for anything between 5m/s^2 and 20 m/s^2 provided
| there was some acknowledgement that this was at odds with what
| was expected. We very often would check in halfway through
| class and either tell the kids what they were doing wrong, or
| even tell them to write something 'this is at odds with
| literally all known science and I think I don't trust this'.
| For this particular lab, I've never seen errors as large as the
| ones you've described, so your lab was likely very poorly set
| up.
|
| In other cases, I've made extra time (and allow students to
| come in) in case their numbers were so weird as to be
| problematic; just depends on the lab. Any teacher worth their
| salt will do this. It's a shame the teachers you had were
| terrible and incentivized bad stuff.
|
| If being in a lab has taught me anything, it's that doing good
| science is often morally difficult. Sticking by your guns is
| hard.
|
| But you are right in some sense: there are definitely
| incentives to... misreport. The best we can do as teachers is
| to reduce those as much as possible and reward kids/students
| for being honest.
| analog31 wrote:
| I'm certainly not going to defend your teacher or your
| experience, especially at the high school level. That's too
| soon. And I also remember being indignant for a similar
| experience in analytical chemistry.
|
| 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. 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 is 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.
| cosmic_quanta wrote:
| > (...) the apparent legitimacy is enhanced by the fact that I
| used a complicated computer program to make the fit. I understand
| this is the same process by which the top quark was discovered.
|
| 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.
| giacomoforte wrote:
| I also regret studying physics, lol, although in my case I
| thought fiddling with algebra would be the best job ever, until I
| got bored of using my mind as a compiler.
| roadbuster wrote:
| I read this in 1999 when entering university. It was so
| refreshing hearing a student provide a glimpse into the boots-on-
| the-ground reality of undergrad life at these world-renowned
| institution.
|
| The closing sentence is also prescient; the author pivoted to CS,
| ultimately completing his doctorate at the University of
| Wisconsin at Madison
|
| https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/
| madcaptenor wrote:
| LinkedIn has him as Staff Software Engineer at Google:
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucas-kovar-185a3531/
| perlgeek wrote:
| I'm pretty sure he's rolling in cash now :-)
| moffkalast wrote:
| But still doesn't have any women ;)
| djmips wrote:
| Not so fast... You might be surprised.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Seriously I wish more science writing resembled this
| jpm_sd wrote:
| A classic I will never not upvote.
|
| 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.
| jpmattia wrote:
| While the post is amusing, somebody needs to say it: Band
| structure and the theory of solids is some of the most beautiful
| physics out there. The fact that it has completely altered
| society as we know it is merely secondary. :)
| est wrote:
| maybe related?
|
| Cracks in the Nuclear Model: Surprising Evidence for Structure
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qynSxOS_HFc
| cynewulf wrote:
| If anyone is wondering what the author is up to these days,
| apparently he's a staff engineer at Google according to his
| LinkedIn.
| credit_guy wrote:
| But that so-called best fit line is not an exponential.
| Exponential functions are convex, that line is concave.
|
| I'm afraid you'll have to repeat the experiment.
| klysm wrote:
| It's not literally a pure exponential function but it might
| have exponential terms as opposed to polynomial or linear terms
| shadowgovt wrote:
| This reminds me of how the Fahrenheit scale came about.
|
| 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.
| oddmiral wrote:
| 100 + 28 degrees are not harder to mark than 64, and then aim 0
| and 100 properly. :-/
| shadowgovt wrote:
| What would be the process to do that? To aim 0 and 100
| properly, you'd need a tool to calculate a 100:28 (25:7)
| ratio on an arbitrary distance, wouldn't you?
|
| One can build such a tool, but it's not a doubled-over piece
| of string.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Surely you can simply use a ruler and rotate it away from
| the parallel to achieve any arbitrary scale, right?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| If you happen to have a good ruler (again, 1720s... Those
| also cost money or time to make). A ruler and a T-square
| would work. But still, it's more complicated and requires
| a lot more bench to secure things in place at angles than
| folding a piece of string in half.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Well... Yeah. It costs money and/or time to make things.
| That's as much true now as it was back then, but I don't
| think a ruler would have been particularly difficult to
| make, even with 18th century technology.
| oddmiral wrote:
| Make marks on the thermometer at 0 and 100 degrees C, then
| project light from a candle to a wall to see these marks
| with say 5x magnification. Now project marks from the 128
| mark ruler to the same wall and align marks from both, then
| place marks on the thermometer with 5x better accuracy.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Sounds doable, but again, you're comparing that approach
| to:
|
| - 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.
| chrysander wrote:
| Very much my undergrad lab education experience...
|
| 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.
| sevensor wrote:
| I TAd a semiconductor fabrication lab class 20-odd years ago.
| Mostly it was about making sure the students had the absolute
| fear of God put into them about working with HF, but there was
| also a bit at the end where you actually got to do a voltage
| sweep and characterize your transistor. If in fact you had made a
| transistor rather than a needlessly complicated resistor. The
| other TAs and I passed this paper around and thought it was just
| hilarious.
| dvh wrote:
| And then there are Etsy moms making frosted shot glass
| sevensor wrote:
| I would make them reread the MSDS.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Oh, BTW, the whole "Friction is directly proportional to the
| normal force": My Ass!
|
| 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.
| mizzao wrote:
| Is this possibly because you need to use additional force to
| horizontally stabilize it in one direction (perpendicular to
| the spine) but not the other?
| mercutio2 wrote:
| I was about to say exactly this.
|
| 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.
| FacelessJim wrote:
| The "proportionality constant" is doing a lot of work in that
| claim. A lot of "constant" parameters are swept under the rug.
| If you fix enough stuff that claim is indeed correct, although
| I agree a bit simplistic
| emmelaich wrote:
| Yep, cars can accelerate at over 1g.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Friction _is_ proportional to the normal force, more
| specifically, it is the normal force times the coefficient of
| friction.
|
| 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.)
| klysm wrote:
| Not true in practice for a lot of materials
| myfonj wrote:
| Not that it is important, just spotted that the page's HTTP
| headers report impressive Last-Modified: Sun,
| 26 May 2002 22:33:04 GMT
|
| (And the HTML code structure matches that era perfectly.)
| mrguyorama wrote:
| This should be a reminder that more than you would expect, "the
| results didn't replicate" is really a statement of how difficult
| science is to do well.
| vegadw wrote:
| For me, it wasn't the subpar equipment, it was the subpar
| instruction. I will never forget trying to explain to the
| graduate TA leading my circuits 1 lab, that, no, you can not use
| a multimeter to measure impedance of an element in a circuit
| while the circuit is live, and that that is dumb for multiple
| layers of reasons.
|
| 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
| DylanDmitri wrote:
| We went to school together :) I would agree with Prof Sayood's
| "Signals and Systems" was a great class. I would agree that
| many TAs, including myself when I was a TA, were confused
| and/or overwhelmed.
| dvh wrote:
| >Do you have any idea how hard it is to solder wires to
| germanium?
|
| I've just soldered SOT-723 onto SOT-23 adapter board, I can
| solder anything to anything
| titizali wrote:
| > I should've declared CS. I still wouldn't have any women, but
| at least I'd be rolling in cash.
|
| Should we tell him?
| huqedato wrote:
| Nobel prize, quick!
| aledalgrande wrote:
| ROTFL at the abstract
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I'll repeat the same comment I made to the same article when it
| posted here about a year ago:
|
| 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...
| blatantly wrote:
| Nice chart. Can't rule out the old null hypothesis eh!
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Looks like he didn't measure the temp correctly, who knows what
| the real temp was inside the crystal.
| rvba wrote:
| > Do you have any idea how hard it is to solder wires to
| germanium?
|
| Has science gone too far? :D
| trelane wrote:
| Ah, a perennial favorite.
|
| Previously:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16360479
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23494243
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37026780
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2513293
| aramattamara wrote:
| Try faking your data next time, dude! You will be famous for some
| time. Do you even know how hard it is to make data points that
| seem natural but follow some clear pattern you want it to follow?
| I spent a good half of a day looking for that proper inverse
| formula.
| tomcam wrote:
| Can we agree that this is one of the greatest abstracts of all
| time?
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