On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 05:26:11PM +0100, David Kastrup wrote: > Graham Percival <[email protected]> writes: > > That was about the failure rate in the Theoretical Electrotechnics and > the Electronic Parts exams. ... > Parts of the process > were ridiculous, and sort of a competition in ugliness among professors > where each considered their course the most important of the whole > study, of course expecting the students to work much harder than for any > other course.
That's what I expected electrical engineering to be. > > 100% of the fourth-year students would fail, and the department > > would fire me. I don't think I can make you understand just how > > much of a difference there is between UK engineering students in > > 2012 and German engineering students 20-30 years ago. > > It is not the students. That's like saying that the average human > nowadays is bred worse for sports than those from a century ago. It's > the conditions. I totally agree that it's the conditions! I'm not going to single out any one of them -- low standards in high schools, ease of distactions, general cultural disinterest in math+science, quality of parenting, etc -- but they combine into a mess. > > [1] telling us "that's impossible due to the Shannon-Nyquist > > theorem" was bonus marks. BONUS MARKS. We then asked those > > students to solve it for 5000 Hz instead, still giving poles at > > 1/2 and 3/2 pi. > > Uh, it's impossible not due to Shannon-Nyquist, but because a sampled > signal is not a sine wave, period. If your reconstruction filter is a > lowpass at 10000Hz, you get a sine of 5000Hz out. If your > reconstruction filter is a bandpass admitting 10000Hz to 20000Hz, you > get a sine of 15000Hz out. That is not just hypothetical: quadrature > mirror filters (?) work partly by subsampling signals above the Nyquist > frequency of the subsampling. Nyquist just limits the _bandwidth_ of > what you can sample, not the absolute frequencies. Fair point. If a student had discussed _that_ in the oral exam, I would have been overjoyed to give them bonus marks. :) > > If anything, it's worse -- universities are > > increasingly being run as businesses, and it doesn't make business > > sense to turn away customers, right? > > The definition of a customer for me is a person receiving something > valuable. A person merely believing to receive something valuable is a > sucker instead. Oh, they *are* receiving something valuable. They're receiving an engineering university degree from a 500+-year-old university. This gives them additional social standing and job opportunities. They gain a _bit_ of knowledge, but at first guess I'd say that their entire four-year degree is equal to one year at a German university. > Engineering and "hard sciences" are > going that way today, and the damage is quite more direct. > > We first lost sight of the goals of living. Now we are losing sight of > the means of living. I hate to sound like a grumpy old man -- no wait, who am I kidding, I love being a curmudgeon :) -- but I agree. There are some people who do amazing stuff these days: spaceX, machine learning at google, the plummeting cost of DNA analysis, etc. But there seems to be a growing rift between the top scientists+engineers and everybody else. Anyway, this is rather far afield from getting help for casual contributors to lilypond. :) - Graham _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
