I never said I didn't understand that example from my original text. What I did say is it reflected the authors' overall approach to accessibility. Some of the later topics involving adiabatic transitions, isobaric and isothermic transitions, mixture quality, etc.—all things that we don't necessarily have a ready mental model of beforehand—it gets to be much slower going.
When I go back and read the text now, it doesn't seem too bad. But, I've had a few years for the material to sink in, and I did get a refresher when I helped my girlfriend when she was learning it. It would have helped to have a more accessible text when I was taking that course in parallel with 12 other credit hours of solid engineering, and learning lots of new material on every front.
Here's an example homework question from later in the book:
Steam enters the first turbine stage of a vapor power cycle with reheat and regeneration at 32 MPA, 600 deg. C, and expands to 8 MPa. A portion of the flow is diverted to a closed feedwater heater at 8 MPa, and the remainder is reheated to 560 deg C before entering the second turbine stage. Expansion through the second turbine stage occurs to 1 MPa, where another portion of the flow is diverted to a second closed feedwater heater at 1 MPa. The remainder of the flow expands through the third turbine stage to 0.15 MPa, where a portion of the flow is diverted to an open feedwater heater operating at 0.15 MPa, and the rest expands through the fourth turbine stage to the condenser pressure of 6 kPa. Condensate leaves each closed feedwater heater as saturated liquid at the respective extraction pressure. The condensate streams from the closed heaters each pass through traps into the next lower pressure feedwater heater. Saturated liquid exiting the open heater is pumped to the steam generator pressure. For ientropic operation of the turbine stages and pumps,
sketch the layout of the cycle and number the principal state points.
determine the thermal efficiency of the cycle.
calculate the mass flow rate into the first turbine stage, in kg/h, for a net power output of 500 MW.
Not too bad, but getting to the point where you understand all the terms involved does take a bit of work, and I'd rather spend my energy working the problems rather than working to understand what was asked. Like I said, I did still manage to get a B in that class, so I'm not exactly a moron. I just know where I'd rather spend my time.
Apparently there's a memory leak that affects GMail. If you leave GMail open, it'll slowly leak memory. The memory gets reclaimed when you close the GMail tab. I find that closing GMail once a day works pretty well to avoid too much memory leakage. Often the browser will freeze for a couple moments when I close it, which I presume is due to GC cleaning up the mess. I also hear this is fixed in Fx 3.
Now, you say you're seeing this large footprint with only one tab open. I will say this: When I close GMail, I don't see the resident size go down immediately. Apparently all that freed up memory is freed up within Firefox, but not released to the system. That said, periodically closing GMail does seem to prevent Firefox from marching its way to a gigabyte. This current browser window has around 400MB resident and has been up for 4 days. (I also have about 50 tabs open across 4 windows) Before I started nuking GMail daily, it'd probably be at around 800-900MB by now the way I typically use it.
Actually, it could be the rent-a-cops, or a disgruntled admin assistant. We had one admin assistant get terminated, and after she was gone, there was a lot of hardware that had been under her management that couldn't be accounted for, including a laptop I had ordered and supposedly "arrived," but I had never received. (In that particular case, Receiving wasn't supposed to even deliver it to me, but rather to Workstation Support, so that brings the Receiving Dock folks under suspicion too.)
So, yeah, I don't like to point default blame without evidence.
I've heard anecdotes (from two different people independently) that English is the only "level 6" language, but I don't know on what scale this is measured and I can't find a reference offhand.
It's kinda like a Sloppy Joe, except without the sauce. It's basically a ground beef sandwich! I think it has some light seasoning in the meat, but not much.
I just think it's somewhat shocking that over 90% of our cleaning and cafeteria crews are Hispanic, and over 90% of our security guards are African American. That in and of itself seems like some sort of unnatural self-selection.
My approach, especially since there's a security officer near the entrance where I work anyway, is to say "I'll have security buzz you in." I guess your worksite doesn't work that way?
We had a rash of laptop and electronics thefts from locked offices at where I work, too. I suspect it was one bad apple with access to keys, because I haven't heard much about it before or since. That said, they've asked us to lock up our laptops if we leave them overnight anyway.
It's not like this is a terribly insecure site, either. We have constant security patrols, radio badges to get in and out, cameras in all the main hallways, etc. But, you wouldn't look out of place carrying a laptop out of the building either, regardless of whether it's yours or not.
I started out saying "cleaning crew," but that's maybe a bit presumptuous, and could easily be viewed as prejudice. Of course, most of the regular employees make enough (we're engineers) that stealing a laptop and risking a career doing so makes very little sense. I'm not sure how closely the Rent-a-Cops are scrutinized. One hopes they are. Laying default blame in any direction without evidence is could easily be mistaken for racism, sadly. Cleaning crew and cafeteria staff? Almost exclusively Hispanic. The Rent-a-Cops? Almost exclusively African American. The engineering staff? It's the most diverse, but mostly Caucasian, East Indian, Asian.
In your case, you said "They were usually caught," which means you've got evidence. I don't, which is why I can't and won't lay default blame.
I used that example because it was a simple example that came easily to mind. Non-engineers can look at it and know immediately that the two are talking about the same thing, but still see that the two approaches to describing the material are completely different. The second law itself isn't too surprising, and the example is familiar, so the likelihood a random person can map the first text to an example is still pretty high. What happens, though, when you get to a topic that is less intuitive?
Most of us have a model for "hot things in a room-temp room cool down" and "cold things in a room-temp room warm up." My coffee cools and my ice cream melts. But what about topics for which we might not have a pre-existing model? I know when I first went into the course, I had just an under-developed notion of what entropy was about from physics class, and no clue what enthalpy was all about, for instance. Heap on there all sorts of other new terminology, and it gets pretty overwhelming. I did learn it, but it took quite some work. Looking back at the text, it doesn't look quite so thick now. But it still wasn't nearly as approachable as it might be. I think the only reason I got a B in that course is that I did have pre-existing models for some things, and that I put a lot of effort into at least somewhat understanding the rest.
In my VLSI class, I ended up sticking around in the class just long enough to learn a few basic concepts—how to decompose a logic function into transistors, how to ratio inverters to drive large loads, and what design rules are all about—and I taught myself the rest. I never bought the textbook, skipped most of the lectures, and pretty much taught myself the rest of what I needed to know. Why? The book was over-priced and about the length of a greeting card. The professor himself couldn't answer questions that weren't in his notes. So I did teach myself. As a result, I had one of the few working projects in the class. That said, I wonder how much more I might've gotten out of the class had it been run a bit more competently?
I won't even touch diff-eq texts. Mine was ok, but I've seen some that had all of 3 words in them and the rest were symbols. My textbook for Prolog was similar. Since I'm not well versed in mathematical symbology, to me it's effectively hieroglyphics.
In the end, I agree with you that a big part of engineering school is learning how to learn. I've told that to countless people, including the aforementioned girlfriend when she was at the peak of questioning her switch from journalism to ME. (She did graduate magna cum laude as an ME.) I use only a fraction of the actual topics I learned in my engineering degree program. But, I also learned what it takes for me to tackle a large, ill defined problem, including organizing my thoughts, researching the relevant fields, and building up a solution. I don't expect to be spoonfed anything, but I do get frustrated at unnecessary road blocks. I ended up with a 3.6 engineering GPA, and I'm pretty certain that wasn't due to grade inflation, judging by the number of folks that dropped out. (~120 students in EE 101, but ~35 at graduation.) It would have been higher if I didn't dick around my first two years.:-)
Another class that I did very well in was my technical writing class. I think this is what informs my rant the most. It's possible to take a complex topic and express it clearly, with minimal forward references, to an audience which is unfamiliar with the topic. It's possible to do this without loss of fidelity. But, it takes considerable time and skill on the part of the presenter. It's also possible to take a simple topic and express it unclearly, making it seem incomprehensible to all but those who take the time to decipher what you've written. When you've got 14 to 17 credit hours of solid engineering curricula, much of this text get
I avoided "top schools" that earn their reputation through research. My uncle had told me all the crap he went through dealing with courses taught by TAs, etc. and professors more interested in research than in their students. That had nothing to do with engineering, though—he was a psych major. I went to a smaller teaching-focused institution, and that went a long way to making up for crummy texts. Although, even at that school, in the special hell that is thermo, I got a double whammy: The crappy text quoted above, and an enthusiastic, well meaning, but ineffective part-time assistant professor. Nice guy, but wasn't up to the task of explaining thermo to EEs.
There are good engineers and there are good engineering professors. You have to have the right attitude, though, to really make something of it, and sit through the droll ones to get to the good ones. Often, it takes learning the material on your own, outside class. It sounds like you were happier going elsewhere. For me, it wasn't until my 3rd year (when the course load switches to nearly 100% engineering) that I really felt engaged and enthusiastic about my schooling. Junior year was probably one of the most challenging, productive and educational years of my life.:-) I don't think it's a coincidence that it's also the year that converts the most aspiring EE majors into CS majors.;-)
Ah yes, home of the Great Yellow God (Cat), the perpetual stale beer smell and more bowling alleys per capita than anywhere else in the US (or, at least, that was the lore at the time I was there).
I attended MIT and a state school. Most courses, especially on the bottom rungs, were taught much better at the state school. MIT, like many engineering schools, focuses on its professors' research more than their teaching skills.
Yeah. I attended Bradley's EE program for just these reasons. It was a small enough school where class sizes were moderate (~25 students in most courses, except for the occasional freshman-level survey course), and all the courses are taught directly by professors rather than TAs. Professors got to know all the students individually. And, while some of the professors had pet research interests, it isn't a research-driven school. It's an undergrad teaching-focused institution. I loved it.
I did briefly consider MIT for undergrad, and probably could have gotten scholarships to afford it. (That's how I afforded Bradley.) I went to one of their "open houses" that was near me, that featured local alumi of MIT. Based on their stories, I decided against it for undergrad. It seems more like it'd be appropriate for grad school. In the end, undergrad was all I needed and I've had a happy 12 year career as an engineer since!
I echo the "two year mark" sentiment. My GPA shot markedly upwards once I got to the two year mark and all the actual engineering kicked in. I loved it. This was my experience at Bradley University.
As for 6 figures being paltry, and staring at 7 figure slackers? I think that's a California thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Here come all the flashbacks involving flashes of lights and boxcars moving at 0.9c. Thanks.
I never said I didn't understand that example from my original text. What I did say is it reflected the authors' overall approach to accessibility. Some of the later topics involving adiabatic transitions, isobaric and isothermic transitions, mixture quality, etc.—all things that we don't necessarily have a ready mental model of beforehand—it gets to be much slower going.
When I go back and read the text now, it doesn't seem too bad. But, I've had a few years for the material to sink in, and I did get a refresher when I helped my girlfriend when she was learning it. It would have helped to have a more accessible text when I was taking that course in parallel with 12 other credit hours of solid engineering, and learning lots of new material on every front.
Here's an example homework question from later in the book:
Not too bad, but getting to the point where you understand all the terms involved does take a bit of work, and I'd rather spend my energy working the problems rather than working to understand what was asked. Like I said, I did still manage to get a B in that class, so I'm not exactly a moron. I just know where I'd rather spend my time.
Heh... desktop:
$ uptime 20:52:28 up 143 days, 23:33, 9 users, load average: 0.14, 0.16, 0.16
and... webserver:
$ uptime 8:54pm up 175 days, 4:18, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Apparently there's a memory leak that affects GMail. If you leave GMail open, it'll slowly leak memory. The memory gets reclaimed when you close the GMail tab. I find that closing GMail once a day works pretty well to avoid too much memory leakage. Often the browser will freeze for a couple moments when I close it, which I presume is due to GC cleaning up the mess. I also hear this is fixed in Fx 3.
Now, you say you're seeing this large footprint with only one tab open. I will say this: When I close GMail, I don't see the resident size go down immediately. Apparently all that freed up memory is freed up within Firefox, but not released to the system. That said, periodically closing GMail does seem to prevent Firefox from marching its way to a gigabyte. This current browser window has around 400MB resident and has been up for 4 days. (I also have about 50 tabs open across 4 windows) Before I started nuking GMail daily, it'd probably be at around 800-900MB by now the way I typically use it.
--JoeIt's called foreshadowing. Cue the organist!
I'm told it's silent, which makes my username here even funnier.
Actually, it could be the rent-a-cops, or a disgruntled admin assistant. We had one admin assistant get terminated, and after she was gone, there was a lot of hardware that had been under her management that couldn't be accounted for, including a laptop I had ordered and supposedly "arrived," but I had never received. (In that particular case, Receiving wasn't supposed to even deliver it to me, but rather to Workstation Support, so that brings the Receiving Dock folks under suspicion too.)
So, yeah, I don't like to point default blame without evidence.
But that begs the question: Should you use those constructions for all intensive purposes? I could care less.
(ow, that hurt my brain.)
I'm still trying to figure out the correct pronunciation of my own name!
The jump to Cyrillic is already too big a jump for me. :-)
You might get a chuckle outta this.
I've heard anecdotes (from two different people independently) that English is the only "level 6" language, but I don't know on what scale this is measured and I can't find a reference offhand.
Stack overflow averted. *whew*
It's kinda like a Sloppy Joe, except without the sauce. It's basically a ground beef sandwich! I think it has some light seasoning in the meat, but not much.
If the box is screwed to the desk (with screws that are inaccessible when it is locked), then that ups the ante further. You gotta take the desk.
At some point the deterrent factor becomes large enough. Then again, there are those who try to steal whole ATMs.
I just think it's somewhat shocking that over 90% of our cleaning and cafeteria crews are Hispanic, and over 90% of our security guards are African American. That in and of itself seems like some sort of unnatural self-selection.
Maybe it was a Maid Rite sandwich?
HIPPA maybe?
My approach, especially since there's a security officer near the entrance where I work anyway, is to say "I'll have security buzz you in." I guess your worksite doesn't work that way?
We had a rash of laptop and electronics thefts from locked offices at where I work, too. I suspect it was one bad apple with access to keys, because I haven't heard much about it before or since. That said, they've asked us to lock up our laptops if we leave them overnight anyway.
It's not like this is a terribly insecure site, either. We have constant security patrols, radio badges to get in and out, cameras in all the main hallways, etc. But, you wouldn't look out of place carrying a laptop out of the building either, regardless of whether it's yours or not.
I started out saying "cleaning crew," but that's maybe a bit presumptuous, and could easily be viewed as prejudice. Of course, most of the regular employees make enough (we're engineers) that stealing a laptop and risking a career doing so makes very little sense. I'm not sure how closely the Rent-a-Cops are scrutinized. One hopes they are. Laying default blame in any direction without evidence is could easily be mistaken for racism, sadly. Cleaning crew and cafeteria staff? Almost exclusively Hispanic. The Rent-a-Cops? Almost exclusively African American. The engineering staff? It's the most diverse, but mostly Caucasian, East Indian, Asian.
In your case, you said "They were usually caught," which means you've got evidence. I don't, which is why I can't and won't lay default blame.
--JoeWho knows? I know she doubted her abilities far more than I did. It's too bad she's an ex. I still count her among my friends though.
I used that example because it was a simple example that came easily to mind. Non-engineers can look at it and know immediately that the two are talking about the same thing, but still see that the two approaches to describing the material are completely different. The second law itself isn't too surprising, and the example is familiar, so the likelihood a random person can map the first text to an example is still pretty high. What happens, though, when you get to a topic that is less intuitive?
Most of us have a model for "hot things in a room-temp room cool down" and "cold things in a room-temp room warm up." My coffee cools and my ice cream melts. But what about topics for which we might not have a pre-existing model? I know when I first went into the course, I had just an under-developed notion of what entropy was about from physics class, and no clue what enthalpy was all about, for instance. Heap on there all sorts of other new terminology, and it gets pretty overwhelming. I did learn it, but it took quite some work. Looking back at the text, it doesn't look quite so thick now. But it still wasn't nearly as approachable as it might be. I think the only reason I got a B in that course is that I did have pre-existing models for some things, and that I put a lot of effort into at least somewhat understanding the rest.
In my VLSI class, I ended up sticking around in the class just long enough to learn a few basic concepts—how to decompose a logic function into transistors, how to ratio inverters to drive large loads, and what design rules are all about—and I taught myself the rest. I never bought the textbook, skipped most of the lectures, and pretty much taught myself the rest of what I needed to know. Why? The book was over-priced and about the length of a greeting card. The professor himself couldn't answer questions that weren't in his notes. So I did teach myself. As a result, I had one of the few working projects in the class. That said, I wonder how much more I might've gotten out of the class had it been run a bit more competently?
I won't even touch diff-eq texts. Mine was ok, but I've seen some that had all of 3 words in them and the rest were symbols. My textbook for Prolog was similar. Since I'm not well versed in mathematical symbology, to me it's effectively hieroglyphics.
In the end, I agree with you that a big part of engineering school is learning how to learn. I've told that to countless people, including the aforementioned girlfriend when she was at the peak of questioning her switch from journalism to ME. (She did graduate magna cum laude as an ME.) I use only a fraction of the actual topics I learned in my engineering degree program. But, I also learned what it takes for me to tackle a large, ill defined problem, including organizing my thoughts, researching the relevant fields, and building up a solution. I don't expect to be spoonfed anything, but I do get frustrated at unnecessary road blocks. I ended up with a 3.6 engineering GPA, and I'm pretty certain that wasn't due to grade inflation, judging by the number of folks that dropped out. (~120 students in EE 101, but ~35 at graduation.) It would have been higher if I didn't dick around my first two years. :-)
Another class that I did very well in was my technical writing class. I think this is what informs my rant the most. It's possible to take a complex topic and express it clearly, with minimal forward references, to an audience which is unfamiliar with the topic. It's possible to do this without loss of fidelity. But, it takes considerable time and skill on the part of the presenter. It's also possible to take a simple topic and express it unclearly, making it seem incomprehensible to all but those who take the time to decipher what you've written. When you've got 14 to 17 credit hours of solid engineering curricula, much of this text get
I avoided "top schools" that earn their reputation through research. My uncle had told me all the crap he went through dealing with courses taught by TAs, etc. and professors more interested in research than in their students. That had nothing to do with engineering, though—he was a psych major. I went to a smaller teaching-focused institution, and that went a long way to making up for crummy texts. Although, even at that school, in the special hell that is thermo, I got a double whammy: The crappy text quoted above, and an enthusiastic, well meaning, but ineffective part-time assistant professor. Nice guy, but wasn't up to the task of explaining thermo to EEs.
There are good engineers and there are good engineering professors. You have to have the right attitude, though, to really make something of it, and sit through the droll ones to get to the good ones. Often, it takes learning the material on your own, outside class. It sounds like you were happier going elsewhere. For me, it wasn't until my 3rd year (when the course load switches to nearly 100% engineering) that I really felt engaged and enthusiastic about my schooling. Junior year was probably one of the most challenging, productive and educational years of my life. :-) I don't think it's a coincidence that it's also the year that converts the most aspiring EE majors into CS majors. ;-)
--JoeAh yes, home of the Great Yellow God (Cat), the perpetual stale beer smell and more bowling alleys per capita than anywhere else in the US (or, at least, that was the lore at the time I was there).
Yeah. I attended Bradley's EE program for just these reasons. It was a small enough school where class sizes were moderate (~25 students in most courses, except for the occasional freshman-level survey course), and all the courses are taught directly by professors rather than TAs. Professors got to know all the students individually. And, while some of the professors had pet research interests, it isn't a research-driven school. It's an undergrad teaching-focused institution. I loved it.
I did briefly consider MIT for undergrad, and probably could have gotten scholarships to afford it. (That's how I afforded Bradley.) I went to one of their "open houses" that was near me, that featured local alumi of MIT. Based on their stories, I decided against it for undergrad. It seems more like it'd be appropriate for grad school. In the end, undergrad was all I needed and I've had a happy 12 year career as an engineer since!
I echo the "two year mark" sentiment. My GPA shot markedly upwards once I got to the two year mark and all the actual engineering kicked in. I loved it. This was my experience at Bradley University.
As for 6 figures being paltry, and staring at 7 figure slackers? I think that's a California thing.