Why is EE education mainly glorified math?

Electrical Fields - Gauss I think !

Never a truer word spoken certainly no div wrote this, possibly a grad with a bit of curl.

Nice one Bill

Metal Basher

in article _fALb.267$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfep1-win.server.ntli.net, Chimera at snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com wrote on 1/9/04 8:10 AM:

Although I am not certain, I think the wording of your last sentence indicates that you have little use for negative frequencies. That attitude is short-sited at best.

Many models of electical theory use negative frequencies, at least in a mathematical sense. Fourier series using complex exponentials beat using sine and cosines even though they are equivalent. One model of a single phase induction motor represents the magnetic field oscillating in amplitude as two counter rotating fields. The rotor, once it starts rotating, couples more strongly to one of these rotations than to the other. It is very convenient to consider one field as positive frequency while the other is negative frequency.

If you believe that asking an EE to extend his mind to consider more and more abstract thoughts is asking too much, do not study mathematics.

Bill

How Policy is Made:

Put 5 monkeys in a room with a banana suspended from the ceiling accessible only by a small staircase. As each monkey climbs the stairs to reach the banana, spray the other four with ice-water. Monkeys hate cold water so after some time they learn that if one of them tries for the banana, the others get sprayed. Its not long before they begin to attack any monkey climbing the stairs to prevent being sprayed with the ice water.

Now replace one of the monkeys and forget about the ice water. As the new monkey climbs the stair for the bananas, he's attacked by the other four. He doesn't know anything about the ice water, but the other four do. Eventually he learns that if he climbs the stairs he gets attacked.

Now remove another of the original monkeys and replace it with another new one. He too learns the "attacked for being on the stairs" lesson and like the others, he begins to do the same thing.

Eventually you will have replaced all the original monkeys. They all know nothing about the ice water but they will vigorously attack any monkey that climbs the stairs. They don't know why, that's just the way its always been.....and THAT my friends, is called POLICY.

Then too, if your school is worth its salt, it should easily meet the ABET accrediation criteria. Take a look at what it consists.

Others have already commented on the problems universities face today in teaching EE to students who, in contrast to earlier years, have had little previous exposure to engineering technology. That is, an increasing percentage of the entering class were neither ham radio entusiasts, electronics experimenters, or who had already learned the basic concepts to a level enablying them to perform electronic device repairs. You have to contrast to earlier years (the 60s, 70s, and early 80s) where a majority of EE applicants held ham radio or FCC commercial radiotelephone licenses, and had been repairing TV sets and building their own equipment since they were 13 or 14 years-old.

How are colleges and universities expected to deal with this fundament and practical knoledge shortfall, except maybe to add an extra hour at the beginning of the day to teach this basic, technicial level material. After all, most of the major universities have been doing this for at least 30 years to largely technology and science students having deficiencies in spoken and written english.

Why not do the same thing for those students deprived of a technician level knowledge of electronics before attending college?

I believe that such a programs would make a great deal of sense.

Harry C.

in article snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com, EEng at snipped-for-privacy@budget.net wrote on 1/9/04 2:54 PM:

This sure makes a good story. Do you know of anyone who actually ran an experiment and reported it? I doubt it. You should have added a smiley.

Bill

in article snipped-for-privacy@posting.google.com, Harry Conover at snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote on 1/9/04 7:00 PM:

If you think the situation is bad for EE, you should look at chemistry. It is almost impossible for a run of the mill Joe to get chemicals these days. Even equipment such as a pH meter can be a hassle.

Bill

The actual experiment was in fact performed in 1988 at Stanford Research Institute in their Psych Dept. One of the students used it for his thesis on mob mentality and how society conforms to an established action without necessarily understanding the reason why.

The story was good enough that it doesn't need a smiley :)

You have just made the same classic mistake as Airy.

Just because a field is rotating in the other direction does not mean it has a negative frequency. It still takes time to rotate and the frequency is

1/time for one rotation.

The fact that there are two fields, one clockwise and one anticlockwise, is neither here nor there. If they are rotating at the same !angulur rate! then they take the same time (+time) to complete one complete rotation. This time is the period T and the frequency is 1/T.

The "negative frequency" is an artifact of the model no more, no less.

If I had a £1 for everytime I've seem this error....................

Any last requests before I get my gun?

Chimera

The "negative frequency" is an artefact of the model no more, no less. In the same way the "Positive frequency" is an artefact of the model no more, no less. Yes all absolute frequencies are positive, but then so is absolute temperature but it was still -3degrees this Christmas. Cannot see the point of the argument if it disappears at the end of calculation then it's a valid tool to get the answer if negative means it's anticlockwise then good. Purely dismissing a tool would be foolish. The only fools would be ones that do not understand the answers (it is a 'positive' frequency in a certain direction).

Zoo TV

Ps Never shoot some one over an argument unless you have a closed mind.

You're quite right. I built my first short wave receiver when I was 15. I had my son soldering when he was 10. He is now a computer engineer and has a great intuitive feel for what is right and wrong that complements his math skills.

He, gasp, even repaired the tiles in his shower in his condo and saved himself $750 in the process.

Al

That in itself should be a strong hint that bad things were coming. Most successful takeovers keep the successful management in place, at least for some time.

Sure. There is no guarantee that a good engineer will make a good manager. We have a saying, something along the lines of: They don't promote the good engineers into management, rather the rotten ones. There is nothing about a rotten engineer that makes a better manager, but at least you don't lose a good engineer. ;-)

Yeah, that's past time to leave.

A agree completely, however it is the individual's responsibility to act in his interest. If it's not happening, it's time to move.

Yep. We can't spend a dime right now (third year) if we found it on the street (have to buy my own batteries for my mouse). Sucks! In previous years I'd take courses wherever I wanted.

Sounds like you have a keeper.

ROTFLMAO. Good one!

That explains a lot.

I guess so!

I don't see an ethical problem at all. If they're going to mishandle their business (and thus your career), you have no responsibility past doing your job and only as long as you're paid. In this case your responsibility should end after the two week notice.

Absolutely! However, if the company doesn't do the right thing, it's the employee's responsibility to fine one that will.

That's a rather stupid executive suite! Policies from the top should be minimal and reviewed often.

in article k6QLb.32$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfep1-win.server.ntli.net, Chimera at snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com wrote on 1/10/04 2:12 AM:

The comparison is an insult.:=(

There are many phenomena in physics that are best explained by entities that are not directly observed. You can think of them in various level of abstraction. Have you ever seen a pole in a four pole network? If I can explain things easier invoking negative frequencies, and there is no inconsistency in doing so, then negative frequencies exist for me even if they do not for you. I am not going to give up good formulations because you have a hangup.

It turns out, and you can read Feynman's explanations, that advanced potentials solve E&M probles just as well as do retarded potentials even though at virst that seems to violate causality. Explain that one.

If you truly believe that, so is positive frequency.

Scan to the bottom of this for a summary of 'The Dilbert Principle':

[snip]

You'd be surprised at the influence a pretty presentation has. I used to work in a very large organization that, among other things, did some advanced technology research. One guy was famous for coming up with a proposal and then to get authorization and funding, he did the following:

He sat down with a publishing program and put together a page which looked a lot like a viewfoil from an executive level meeting agenda. He put a couple of high level items on it (something likely to be discussed by company presidents, VPs, etc.) and he included his project as a 'bullet item'. Something like "Progress on the XYZ research effort".

He then printed it and took it to the copy machine. By making copies of copies and adding penciled notes in the margins, it looked like something that had made its way down through the chain of command unofficially. He then dropped the final product in the in-basket of our chief engineer when nobody was looking. Pretty soon, the chief would come out of his office with a concerned look on his face and ask, "Who knows anything about XYZ?". My co-worker would find his proposal funded very well and quite rapidly.

yes, and to say nothing of the teachers who have a problem speaking english..... sammmm

I still do, and yes, I've done some "chartsmanship" in a former life. No, I don't see executive management buying into a spiffy Freelance presentation, sans content. ...OTOH, I've seen some stupid things.

Perhaps. Funding boondoggles, perhaps. Funding a pet project isn't the same thing as miring a company down in useless corporate policies. This stupidity takes more than an "engineer" more versed in Freelance than Spice.

Sure. I've done similar. I used to pull together all the capital spending for the organization and push the justifications through the counters-of-beans. It was easy to hide my $100K toys under piles of $1M+ systems. I still didn't change corporate policy. I may have fooled some stupid wannabees. BTW, the only time I got in trouble was turning back in $100K (or so) because the project was killed. The stupid CoB's wanted me to spend the money, else make *them* look "bad". Eh?

Sure. Old "tricks". Long before the PC, I did my capital justification on a "computer" (really just a $10M text editor). I had view graphs in large fonts (Orator, primarily) for the CoB's and handouts in multiple fonts (mostly Courier). Computers don't lie, and all that... I still didn't modify corporate policy and *certainly* had no influence on the "culture". Policy isn't dictated by a random memo circulating the coffee klatchs.

And the laws of physics cannot be described in school mathematics, except for trivially simple subsets using single-dimensional linear models not involving calculus.

I have not gone wrong with negative frequency. It is a very useful concept, especially when it comes to sideband cancellation used in the very latest direct-conversion GSM phones.

It is also an important concept in the derivation of the exponential form of the Fourier (and then subsequently Laplace) Transform.

Without the concept of negative frequencey, you are unable to present either magnitude or phase on a single line; the point at which the separate exponentials from the complex identities in the expansion of sine and cosine are merged into a single exponential continuum.

engineering