MIT genuises with lightbulb

[Lionel Mandrake]

Last edited Wed Jan 4, 2012, 12:04 AM - Edit history (1)

The speaker at the graduation ceremony says, "We are the premier engineering and science institution in the world." The audience cheers. The graduating seniors are beaming in their caps and gowns.

Then someone interviews them with a simple question about electricity.

As a physicist, I can't believe what I just saw on this clip.

Some of the excuses are priceless, e.g., "I'm a mechanical engineer."

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. If MIT's students can't do this simple experiment...

How fucked are WE?

Very.

I'm neither physicist or engineer, but *I* knew immediately what to do here.

[Lionel Mandrake]

2. I dunno.

Engineers in a big company don't usually get their hands dirty. Technicians do that. If a technician couldn't get a flashlight bulb to light, then we'd be truly fucked.

What do engineers do, you may ask.

Mostly, they make presentations to management, who pass those presentations (or parts of them) up the chain of command to their management.

[kentauros]

30. I think that the idea of what engineers do may also depend

upon what type of work is being done. All I've ever done as a draftsman/designer is work in the petro-chemical industry (a few other non-oil bidness work, but none of those were engineering firms, either.) Every engineer I worked with knew a little bit about drafting, enough to either get them in trouble in AutoCAD or well enough that they would hand over a decent sketch of what they wanted done.

They may not have been able to do any engineering drafting, but the drawings we gave back to them had to be understood well enough to further the design process on their end. I know they were often in meetings, but I also saw the results of those meetings (drawing changes, design changes, et cetera.)

Project Engineers are the management ones (also called "Project Managers".) The rest do the design work, we draw it up for them, it gets presented to the Project Manager and then upper management makes whatever decisions on it all that they do. Usually in my field (pipeline design) the people "above" the Project Manager(s) are the clients, which all too often consists of engineers, too. They have to know what they're looking at as well

As for these recent MIT graduates, I would guess that if they had asked the same question of the people doing robotic design, they'd have gotten a better sampling and positive results.

Oh, one other thing I wanted to comment on: we're already "fucked" because high schools across the nation are dumping the vocational "arts" in favor of their misguided emphasis on "science and math". Like you say, engineers and scientists don't like to get their hands dirty with the menial work of us vocational types. Well then, so much for getting any prototypes built in the US...

[Lionel Mandrake]

33. Yes, it all depends

upon what type of work is being done. Engineers fill a variety of roles, and my glib generalization doesn't apply to all of them.

It's not so much that engineers don't like to get their hands dirty. Most of them would like to, but their jobs don't call for it.

Studies have shown that students who have taken calculus-based physics courses understand the light bulb circuit better than students who have taken algebra-based physics courses, and that the latter do better than those who have taken courses that don't even involve algebra. I would guess that virtually all physics majors and electrical engineers would be able to make the bulb light up, but I don't have any evidence to back this up.

I agree that it is a mistake for high schools to dump vocational classes. Those classes are just right for students who have no intention of going to a university. It will be up to community colleges to fill the gap in vocational education, at a cost in terms of the extra two years (or more) it takes for someone to prepare for a career.

[kentauros]

34. I can't dispute your study quote.

I failed calculus, though I did just fine in Applied Trigonometry (later used in Topographic Drafting.) And, having had a class in Electrical Drafting, I was exposed to electrical circuit design and the principles behind it all. Can't remember much of it now, but at least when I look at some of Tesla's patents, I can figure out some of what's going on

I don't know what it's going to take for us to get away from the "test-score teaching" model, but I really wish we could make it a federal mandate to dump that and take up the Finnish schooling model. Of course, that would mean we would be actually educating our populace, and we know there are some types in power that see that as a bad thing...

[1monster]

9. My son did this in the fifth grade as part of his Science Fair project. But I think he used TWO

wires rather than one, and the battery was a six volt, not a C cell...

[rug]

3. What do I click to make it play?

[Lionel Mandrake]

5. Click the triangle in the middle of the picture.

Then abandon all hope.

[blackbart99]

19. Exactly...rug...

This new generation may be all tech savvy with a computer but the basics are a total loss.

I wonder if Cmdr. LaForge would be able to light the bulb.

Geordi....can you do it...or if it has nothing to do with a warp engine are you lost?

[kentauros]

31. If Spock can access his TriColor with vacuum tube technology,

then Geordi could build a light bulb from bearskins and stone knives, and make it work, too

[Ikonoklast]

4. Oh, sure, you got a Hahvaaaaad guy picking on 'those mechanics' from down the river.

This goes on all the time.

[Lionel Mandrake]

6. As if the Hahvahd guys were any smarter.

I've visited both campuses, and I like MIT better. It's a friendlier place, and there are no armed guards in the library.

[Ikonoklast]

7. MIT doesn't care how rich your great-grandaddy was.

[Lionel Mandrake]

8. At MIT, they want to know what you are capable of.

For example, can you walk all the way down an infinitely long hallway?

[Ikonoklast]

24. Since Space/Time is curved, with an infinite amount of Time,

one can assume that one would end up exactly where one started from; so, by remaining at the starting point, would you be considered to have already accomplished that which you never actually started out to do, since the results are identical?

[Lionel Mandrake]

27. I may have exaggerated a bit.

The "infinite corridor" at MIT is actually finite; it just seems endless when you are walking along it.

[csziggy]

10. Well, here is where they ask Harvard grads why there are seasons

They get it totally wrong.

[struggle4progress]

13. whoa. we learned the right answer to this in, like, first and second grade

when i was a youngster

[Lionel Mandrake]

14. The answers given by the people in those ridiculous medieval costumes are not entirely wrong.

The effect they mentioned is real, and it makes the seasons slightly more extreme in the Southern hemisphere, and slightly less so in the Northern hemisphere.

But the main effect, as every schoolchild should know, is due to the "obliquity of the ecliptic", i.e., the tilt of the plane of the Earth's equator with respect to the plane of its orbit around the sun.

[Denninmi]

15. Ah, none of this is going to matter.

We'll all die hideous deaths shortly anyway, as the earth grinds to a halt in its daily rotation. One side will bake, one will freeze, kind of like on Mercury.

It seems that someone forgot to feed the giant hamster inside the earth that keeps us rotating.

It's probably too late already, but perhaps someone could shovel a load of seeds and hay down Mt. Etna to try to stave off catastrophe?

Well, at least I didn't forget what I learned in skool.

[caraher]

18. But they share one glaring flaw

On their account, summer and winter should happen at the same time in the northern and southern hemispheres. So it's really an utter failure as an explanation, despite the nugget of truth (that being nearer the sun does have a warming effect).

[MrScorpio]

11. Wow!

No McGivers in that group

[Denninmi]

16. No.

But I sense a whole crop of future McGrubers.

[progressoid]

12. Holy crap.

I used to do that in grade school.

This makes me sad.

[Historic NY]

17. I guess they never played with a flashlight............

oh my how silly my new gizmo phone has a flashlight app built in. My theory is everything is built on a computer model if you don't have a computer you can do it. Just wait until they find out telephones can still function with a couple of attached wires.

[originalpckelly]

20. What the huh?

I mean really, dude, give me a break. I used to play with science toys when I was a kid and did just this. You know these geeks had the same kind of toys, what's their malfunction?

[Lionel Mandrake]

22. What's their malfunction?

Good question. Even if they didn't play with the same kind of toys as children, the engineering students must have taken a calculus-based course in electricity and magnetism, including laboratory experiments. I ask myself how is it possible that any of them can't make the bulb light up.

I don't have an answer.

BTW, students at other schools besides MIT have been diagnosed with the same malfunction.

[Yavin4]

21. Today, Academic Achievement is Based on Performance on Standardized Tests

If you master the art of taking standardized tests, then you are passed through elite schools, even though you may lack rudimentary application of common knowledge.

I work in the legal field, and you would be shocked at how little about the actual practice of law that Yale and Harvard law grads actually know, and then you'd be stunned at how much money they get paid right out of college. Suffice to say, right out of law school, few of them could represent you in small claims court.

[BobbyBoring]

23. Is this why they want to get rid of the Dept. of Ed?????????????

You would think people would be getting smarter. NOT!

[Lionel Mandrake]

26. Who wants to get rid of the Dept. of Ed.?

By the way, there is some evidence that people are, indeed, getting smarter:

"The Flynn effect is the name given to a substantial and long-sustained increase in intelligence test scores measured in many parts of the world. When intelligence quotient (IQ) tests are initially standardized using a sample of test-takers, by convention the average of the test results is set to 100 and their standard deviation is set to 15 or 16 IQ points. When IQ tests are revised they are again standardized using a new sample of test-takers, usually born more recently than the first. Again, the average result is set to 100. However, when the new test subjects take the older tests, in almost every case their average scores are significantly above 100."

Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

[MindMover]

25. Everything is built upon basic ideas in our political system that are inane and corrupt.....nt

[PuffedMica]

28. Fester Addams - Honorary graduate of MIT

[CreekDog]

29. i take issue with the idea that knowing the answer to one particular question

is a proper way to judge anything or anybody's education or intelligence or the quality of an educational institution.

(i'd also like to add that this is a manipulative video, providing little, out of context fragments of sentences from the students, professor and the speaker and uses that in a biased way to say, essentially, "my god MIT is a sucky engineering school, look at those dummies they can't even do the light bulb wire thingy".)



(no, actually it's a full university with lots of specialties that are not science)

[Lionel Mandrake]

32. You raised several issues. I will try deal with each of them.

1. The idea that knowing the answer to one particular question is a proper way to judge ... anybody's education or intelligence or the quality of an educational institution.

The interviewer asked: "Do you think you could light a bulb with a battery and wire?" The students all answered this question correctly, i.e., they all thought they could.

A question is one thing; an experiment is something else. The inability of some students to perform the experiment does not imply that they are stupid or that MIT is a "sucky engineering school", but it does demonstrate a significant gap in their understanding of electrical circuits. This is a problem for physics professors to deal with.

2. The video is manipulative ...

The video is certainly slick. It looks like a segment for a TV news program. Such segments are always manipulative in the sense that they tell a story that is not inherent in the raw footage.

Why do you suppose they picked on MIT? My guess is that they picked on MIT precisely because it is arguably the best engineering school in the country.

If the camera crew had interviewed graduates of a less well known school, people might conclude that it was a lousy school. With MIT, the conclusion has to be something else. It would surprise me, and I think most people, if students at any other school did better than MIT students on this experiment.

3. Actually MIT is a full university with lots of specialties that are not science. Of course it is.

[Duppers]

36. omg! Even I can do this

with only one wire and I'm a housewife! Sheesh!





'Course my physicist hubby taught me how decades ago.