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From: robert bristow-johnson on 30 Dec 2009 01:50 On Dec 30, 1:06 am, HardySpicer <gyansor...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On Dec 30, 4:22 pm, robert bristow-johnson <r...(a)audioimagination.com> > wrote: > > > On Dec 29, 2:17 pm, HardySpicer <gyansor...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > > For all that though, the academic system - peer-reviewed > > > system is the best we have to date. > > > i actually think that the academic system that preceded the present > > one, say ca. 1930, was better as a system. PhDs should be very rare > > and very special. no one should be getting a PhD unless they > > contribute to the body of knowledge stuff that is *novel*, > > *significant*, and *relevant* (besides the obvious, like accurate, > > and honest). > > I think you have rose tinted idea of the 1930s. well, i don't think the Great Depression was so great. nor the politics in Germany (just like this large minority in the US in 2000, a lot of Germans were duped into supporting someone at least as bad as W). the death penalty was even *more* widely practiced in the US (or in Europe) than is now. i wouldn't have liked the 30s. i'm only refuting the notion that the present academic system is the *best* academic system we have to date. it is not. and it's getting worse, to the point that it may collapse under its own weight. > Of course there were > great Ph.Ds about then and there still are. > There are Ph.Ds that do incremental work (esp in Chemistry) and others > which are more revolutionary. Sometimes the good work happens several > years after the Ph.D. Many people look back and don't boast much about > their Ph.D. It's what you have done since that matters. As somebody > else pointed out, the Ph.D is just the starting point in an academic > career. that's the problem (or part of the problem). first of all, the academic career should begin much earlier and the PhD is not a decisive indicator of who is (or should be) and is not a scholar. to limit the community of scholars to only those who hold PhDs is foolish. even more so in engineering. secondly, we *all* do incremental work and some do revolutionary work. we're not digging ditches here or bussing dishes or waiting tables. i'm not degrading those vocations, but for those of us who do *creative* work (we create things, algorithms, code, designs, systems, devices, products, etc.), we discover knowledge also. much of it is not worthy of publication, but some of it is. and much of that is not published because of the need, in a commercial and competitive environment, for trade secrecy (that's a shame, but that's the way it is outside of socialism). but the point is, the discovery of knowledge; research and scholarship, is not something limited to PhDs to do. there is not a lot of statistical coupling of the occurrence of the credential to the actual act of scholarship. but academics and the institutions they are part of act as if they believe they are the sole priests of scholarship, and they are not. and sometimes they are impostors as Martin Anderson alludes to in his book title. > Look at the discovery of DNA. This is a good example that took > place in the early part of the last century. The fitting together of a > jigsaw puzzle. The person who did the real science was a woman who got > hardly any credit till now. She did the basic lab work on x-ray > crystallography. She didn't fit all the pieces together. Crick and > Watson did. Does anybody know what any one of the 3 did their Ph.Ds > on? I don't and I bet it wasn't that brilliant either. Ditto for the > inventors of the transistor. The Ph.D provided the basic foundation > for them to carry on and do better work. that's the problem (or part thereof). > Likewise for engineers in > industry. A great many may well have scraped by and just passed but > gone on to be brilliant engineers. (some may not!). you mean PhD engineers or those of lessor education? i guess it's true in either case, but doesn't affect the argument. > There were some good things about that time however. Not so much > pressure to produce endless publications. Quality rather than quantity > counted. that's primary. > Less people went to University then - was that a good thing? no. but that's not what i'm addressing. it's degree inflation and then the subsequent relying upon such diluted credential for admission to the community of scholars. > I don't > think so. Often people with money were the ones who went to Uni and > the very best with Scholarships. The rest could whistle. So much more > could have been accomplished - maybe those people who never made it to > Uni could have done great things. i agree. and it is completely consistent with recognizing the scholarly contribution of those who never got the PhD but went on to do "great things". but since "great things" is an inflation of semantic, i would "dumb it down" and say those who have and do discover knowledge and are skilled in the transmission of knowledge and have the temperament for it (i.e. those who can teach). > Things happen fast nowadays. You have to have the paper "camera ready" > and submitted on-line. No typing with golf-ball typwriters and the > like and mailing your paper abroad. okay. fine. doesn't change the fact that although there may be a legitimate coupling (a dependent probability) of the PhD credential to one's ability to search, discover, and transmit knowledge, it is not a covariance of 100%. but it's treated as such by this self-absorbed and self-serving industry that preaches the opposite values. > by the way - Widrow was an academic who has achieved great things in > DSP. He even invented the basis for the Neural net. Great man and an > American too. i know who Widrow is. seen him lecture at an AES convention in the 90s in SF once. he illustrated a neat application of LMS to cancel 60 Hz hum (maybe it's 50 Hz for some) plaguing ECG measurements. it suggests a method to eliminate ambient noise in audio apps. r b-j
From: glen herrmannsfeldt on 30 Dec 2009 02:19 HardySpicer <gyansorova(a)gmail.com> wrote: (snip, I wrote) >> I am not so sure how it works in EE, but in physics there are >> theoretical and experimental physicists. ?Many good theoretical >> physicists aren't very good at lab work. ?There is the well known >> "Pauli effect" ?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_effect > Engineers haven't realised this yet. The industry ones bleat on and > one about how they are the only ones that can solve real problems and > the academics bleat on and on about the limitations of industry. There > is little respect of one wrt the other as you can see. As far as respect, in physics each has many good stories and jokes about the other. Personally, I remember a party for a new theoretical physics Ph.D. including a bottle of champagne. While I believe any experimental physicist could figure out how to open a bottle, this Ph.D theoretical physicist could not get it open. -- glen
From: steveu on 30 Dec 2009 03:00 >i'm only >refuting the notion that the present academic system is the *best* >academic system we have to date. it is not. and it's getting worse, >to the point that it may collapse under its own weight. I don't know of a country that has an academic system any more. Education industries have replaced them, from kindergarten up to doctorate level. When I was at college someone else footed the bills. They could throw me out without a thought. Now students are paying heavily from their own pockets in many countries, and colleges will only throw someone out under the most extreme circumstances. You fail poor students, but you don't fail customers. Have you looked at the high pressure advertising they use to get people into high paying MBA courses? They've degraded the original MBA (which wasn't of much academic value) so much they've now rebranded some of them as EMBA (Enhanced MBA) courses. Branding for degrees? What is the world coming to? Steve
From: Randy Yates on 30 Dec 2009 08:33 Jerry Avins <jya(a)ieee.org> writes: > [...] > Randy Yates wrote: >> [...] >> Assuming the center is 1 foot radius, the little lip is 0.1 feet and the >> big lip is 0.5 feet, and the lip thickness is 1/2 the center, we'd come >> up with a ratio of 1.625/1.105, or 47 percent heavier. If I did my math >> right... > [...] > Assuming that radius implies roundness, any size lip is adequate. Yes, wrong word - substitute width for radius here. -- Randy Yates % "She tells me that she likes me very much, Digital Signal Labs % but when I try to touch, she makes it mailto://yates(a)ieee.org % all too clear." http://www.digitalsignallabs.com % 'Yours Truly, 2095', *Time*, ELO
From: Randy Yates on 30 Dec 2009 08:42
Jerry Avins <jya(a)ieee.org> writes: > Randy Yates wrote: >> Randy Yates <yates(a)ieee.org> writes: >> >>> John Monro <johnmonro(a)optusnet.com.au> writes: >>> >>>> Randy Yates wrote: >>>>> "steveu" <steveu(a)coppice.org> writes: >>>>>> [...] >>>>>> Any sufficiently large object is not going to fall down a small hole. I >>>>>> think reasonableness of size is implicit in the argument. >>>>> A two-foot diameter would require a lip size of about 5 inches. Is that >>>>> unreasonably large? It doesn't seem all that unreasonable to me. >>>> It makes the cover twice as heavy. >>> Well, not TWICE as heavy, is it? First, there must be some lip, so we >>> should be comparing the difference between minimal lip and big lip. >>> Second, it wouldn't be the same thickness as the center portion. >>> >>> Assuming the center is 1 foot radius, the little lip is 0.1 feet and the >>> big lip is 0.5 feet, and the lip thickness is 1/2 the center, we'd come >>> up with a ratio of 1.625/1.105, or 47 percent heavier. If I did my math >>> right... >>> >>> Yeah, that's significantly heavier, but it's not the slam dunk Steve >>> was making it out to be, in my estimation. >>> >>> Anyway, this seems ever more so to support my point that it is weight >>> (and material and cost), not geometry, that decides this. >> >> I should say, "..., not hole-fall-through-ability"... > > Let's ask the guy down in the hole how important it is that the cover > not fall through. :-) I can't tell if you're serious or joking ("Many a truth are said in jest"). Logically, if we let A be "the manhole cover is not able to fall through its own hole" and B be "the manhole cover is round", then if A then B is false. In other words, either geometry supports the "requirement" that it not fall down the hole. What is true is if C then B, where C is "we use the least amount of weight to create a cover that can't fall through its own hole." And now that I've spent about an hour discussing something so obvious it's silly, I'm going to get back to some real work! -- Randy Yates % "The dreamer, the unwoken fool - Digital Signal Labs % in dreams, no pain will kiss the brow..." mailto://yates(a)ieee.org % http://www.digitalsignallabs.com % 'Eldorado Overture', *Eldorado*, ELO |