IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

The Teaching Experience - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

My mother was a math teacher whose last position was at a private business school. When a family emergency arose and she had to travel to the mid-west for two weeks, I took over her two classes, one in "Business Arithmetic" and the other in "Remedial Arithmetic". Each class was one hour long and they were in quick succession in the course of the day, one right after the other.

There were no discipline problems because the students were all mature adults. There was no lesson planning problem because Mom had prepared everything in advance. All I had to do was take the attendance, follow her lesson plan directions and grade the homeworks in the evening. I didn't have to write any exams or administer them or grade them or do anything else that teachers have to do on their own time, for hours and hours on end, unpaid. Oh yes, I had it easy!

Perils of Intuition - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Follow the instructions immediately below. Do as instructed.

Point to the upper case letters in the words below: 

 

Now point to the green letters in the words below. 

Wanted: One Neophyte - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

From a recent e-mail seeking a power supply engineer: 

Is NIST Getting Better? - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Remember the old saw that "Practice makes perfect."?  

I wonder if these two frames from http://www.time.gov/timezone.cgi?Eastern/d/-5/java  are any kind of evidence of that: 

Oh, what a difference seven years makes. Maybe by the year 2018, we'll see an accuracy measured in milliseconds

Medical Misdeeds - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

At this writing on November 7, 2011, a conviction of Dr. Conrad Murray has just been rendered in the death of Michael Jackson.

Sadly, the death of Michael Jackson seems likely to me to be not the only case of its kind, only the most high profile one, so please consider the following.

I was listening to a radio interview program one morning in which there was this man, in my view, this horrifying medical fraudster, being interviewed by a sympathetic radio host. The interviewee was claiming to be a medical doctor with a specialty in "prostrate cancer".

Ghoti - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

My son once bemoaned how difficult he found it was to spell words properly. I had to sympathasize with him. After all, the words "soap" and "hope" could have been "sope" and "hoap".

Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, once addressed this issue with a cartoon of a hoodlum with an apparent head cold pushing a plowshare through a massive bowl of cookie dough with the caption "The tough coughs as he ploughs the dough."  with all of those "...ough" words having different pronunciations.

Belt Driven Lathes - John Dunn, Consultant Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I took a trip down Memory Lane the other day. The journey began at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebDMh6pAlN8&feature=related

and continued at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sSXPC2AL_o  

which is where these belt driven lathe images came from:  

Bubba Meisah - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Ever hear of the term Bubba Meisah (bubba meye-seh)? It means in Yiddish a "grandmother's story," or and old wives' tale.

Somebody once suggested looking for a particular vitamin supplement in this one particular store, so I and my wife went over there. As my wife was reading the vitamin bottle labels, I noticed a clerk who was lecturing a customer at great length about herbal supplements, holistic health care, the synergistic interactions of particular foods, the proper way to achieve a healthy life style and on and on and on and on....... while the customer stood there listening and going "I see. Uh-huh. Really! Oh, I didn't know that. and on and on and on........."

Death Sentence - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

My father was a foreman in the Bridge Department of the City of New York.

He told me the story of having worked in that department starting in 1940. Then, in 1942, then Mayor LaGuardia made it official city policy that all city bridges would be put on a deferred maintenance status. My dad, who having just gotten married, got laid off and had to leave New York and his new bride behind to spend two years away working in Harrisburg, PA.

During those two years, the New York City bridges received essentially no attention. They were allowed to rot to the point where collapse was imminent for several of them.

DZIF: HOW IT RELATES TO ILOD-----Carl Schwab

The ZIF portion of DZIF refers to “Zero Intermediate Frequency” and it is just my favorite abbreviation for homodyne or synchrodyne. They all mean the same and are technologies that evolved in parallel with the superheterodyne around the 1920-1930 period. The  “D” part of DZIF refers to double conversion meaning that a high IF is used in addition to the ZIF.

In the hobby industry, the double conversion receiver had become standard and the usual design employed a 10.7 MHz FIRST IF and 455 KHz SECOND IF and the modulation most times was PPM FM. This design(S) evolved from about 1980 up to and beyond 2000. From a mechanical damage standpoint the 455 KHz transformers were the weak link. Also there were design missteps in gain distribution between the FIRST IF and the 455 KHz second IF.