EMRFD Message Archive 4887

Message Date From Subject
4887 2010-08-11 09:29:10 iq_rx ~campbell web page
The material is public, but incomplete without the lectures and other reference material. Some of the examples were chosen specifically to illustrate subtle but classic design errors. They may appear to be "ham projects" but they often exhibit insidious behavior that only the brightest students discover after frustrating weeks in the lab. Without the accompanying lectures, textbook, and 6 months of struggle in the laboratory, this material is not very useful. I believe that discussing it on this forum is a waste of time at best. You are all most welcome to look at it--you might find some of it entertaining. But out of context, these pages provide only a little knowledge. A dangerous thing.

For nearly a decade I have observed that students who view my web pages but skip lectures do remarkably poorly on exams and seldom get anything to work in the lab. That is at the heart of my comments here.

On the topic of access: The language we use for discussing public information on the web is imprecise. I should have said "blessing" instead of "permission." Just because something is publicly available doesn't mean that it should be brought up as a topic for discussion. At first glance, this material appears useful, but it would be a disservice to the community for these incomplete topics and circuit descriptions to become part of the lore. Wes's home lab description slides were followed by an hour long question and answer period that included much of the actual hardware for examination. The slides were designed to generate hands-on questions in that forum--not this one.

One last point. My policy at PSU is that nearly everything I generate is immediately posted to the web site. Much of the material on the ~campbell pages was assembled and posted quickly, in the hours before class. Errors were corrected in class, but not on the web page. I used that as an informal way to find out who was skipping lectures. The material on these pages is largely unedited, and some of the errors created considerable confusion before being corrected in class. Without the lectures, you are on your own, and God help you.

This is almost the exact opposite of the approach we used when writing EMRFD, where every circuit was tried, tested, extensively referenced, and explained to the limits of our writing talent in the text. We try to foster discussion, track down and post errata, and be as helpful as possible on this web page, perhaps out of a sense of guilt over our limited writing and explaining ability.

Enjoy the experiments, keep looking for tidbits on the web, and when you find one, it is courteous to quickly jot off a note to the author before posting a link from a web page.

Best Regards,

Rick
4888 2010-08-11 10:09:21 Sam Morgan Re: ~campbell web page
4889 2010-08-11 10:56:10 Andy Re: ~campbell web page
> now back to the fact that attempting to send email to you iq_rx@yahoo.com
> comes back bouncing:

The webpage that started all this, has a contact email address for him
at the university, maybe you can try that.
4891 2010-08-11 16:57:36 ajparent1 Re: ~campbell web page
4894 2010-08-12 08:13:48 Tim Re: ~campbell web page