IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

That First Impression - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

It's a cliché that "first impressions count", but there's truth to that old saw.

I was listening to the very last few broadcasting moments when AM radio station WNBC, 660 kHz, New York City, went off the air. The last thing they intentionally broadcast was the National Anthem which was followed by a moment of silence and then an open microphone accidentally captured a man's voice saying "It's over."

WFAN immediately came on the air with Don Imus doing an announcement that he had decided to convert to Judaism. Why?? The owner of WFAN at the time was Emmis Communications and since the Hebrew word for truth is אֶמֶת (eh-MEHT), Imus reasoned that the new owners must be Jewish, their name must mean "truth" and therefore he'd better convert if he wanted to stay employed.

A little later, a sports call-in program came on, hosted by someone whose voice seemed nasal and aggressively loud like "Loudmouth Charley" of the old Jackie Gleason TV show. The host took an incoming call from a listener.

The caller tried to make some statement with which the host disagreed and the host's response to that caller seemed astonishingly rude. "It don't mean squat. It don't mean SQUAT. The money's on the table! It don't mean SKWATT!!" getting more and more antagonistic with each repetition at which point, I wrote off that station for future listening.

Is it still like that on WFAN? I have no idea but first impressions do count. To this day many years later, I still pay no attention to WFAN.

Freeport Building Demolition - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I first moved to Baldwin, NY on Long Island in January 1969.  Freeport, NY is adjacent to Baldwin and on Sunrise Highway in that neighboring town, there was a building which if my memory is working, housed a branch office of Long Island Trust bank. That bank closed not too much later and the building that had held the Freeport branch went vacant. The building then stood empty and vacant for almost fifty years.

About a year ago, I tried out of curiosity to look up that building on Google maps and although there was a street photograph of it, there was nothing to identify the building by name. It seemed to be orphaned.

Sometime this past autumn, I saw a newspaper article that the future of this building was under debate with one side advocating its preservation as the last art deco structure in the area and the other side advocating its demolition.

Here's what happened next:

All gone.

I now read that the location where this building had stood will next support a car dealership.

I never had anything to do with this building, I had no financial or business interest in it, I was never a Freeport resident, but I always thought I'd like to see the building be resurrected, to see this building be put back into service somehow, some way, someday.

Now that resurrection is guaranteed to not happen, I can't help but to feel a distinct sense of loss.

Hanging Plant Rack - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

My wife and I attended a plant lecture a few days ago where the speaker had come in with samples of his artistry, some of which were hanging plants suspended from a frame he had constructed. That frame seemed quite clever to me so here's the gist of how he did it.

All of the materials are inexpensive and are readily found in hardware stores.

Coded Words - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I once saw this program on Public Broadcasting about ice cream. The program showed ice cream parlors all around the country, what they offered, how their businesses were run and so forth.

One particular ice cream shop had a secret code used by their male employees which was the phrase "Check Vanilla" which while it sounded like something related to their wares, was really meant to signal that a very pretty girl had just come in the door and all the guys should look up from whatever they were doing to see her.

I was in a local supermarket yesterday and I noticed this sign on a wall just outside the store's business office:

The next time you hear a store announcement that doesn't quite seem comprehensible, maybe that will be because it's coded.

Always Use All Four Digits - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I saw this admonition on line somewhere but when I went back to find it again, I couldn't find it. In any case though, it is worth repeating here.

If you are writing a date using slash bar shorthand, always use all four digits when putting down the year.

If you only write two digits to represent this year 2020, for whatever nefarious purposes, someone could add a "19" or a "21" and thereby change the apparent date.

Don't let that happen.

Two Damaging Old Chestnuts - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

There are two very damaging old chestnuts about education.

First chestnut: "A school should be run like a business."

A school is not a business, it's a school.

If you have a disruptive employee in a business, someone who acts and acts out against the best interests of his/her own self and of other persons (employees), that troublesome employee can be terminated.

The profit motive of a business demands it.

If you have a disruptive student in a classroom, someone who acts and acts out against the best interests of his/her own self and of other persons (classmates), that troublesome student can NOT be terminated. Instead, it is demanded that the teacher somehow deal with that situation while at the same time, teaching everyone to some high standard.

There is no profit motive in a school.

Second chestnut: "You can't control what you can't measure." 

In a business, you can measure productivity. You can tally up how many new accounts did this or that salesman land this year, how many new products got developed this year, how much profit did the business make this year and so forth. With plenty of measurements, you can guide your business decisions and at least have some chance of being in control.

In a school however, if you seek to measure a teacher's performance with a tally of class grades, the numbers you get can be a very poor measure of the teacher's "merit".

When my wife was teaching High School Art, I often saw her assigned to two classes in the same subject, Oil Painting for example, with one class getting very high grades and making all kinds of marvelous achievements including many students receiving "Golden Key" awards for their paintings while the other class got lower grades and where every lesson became a struggle for control of the room. This was with having the same course materials, the same curriculum, the same lessons, the same daily schedule, the same classroom resources, the same teacher and yet there could be two widely differing sets of results.

By which class might one have made a judgment of merit?

Similar variability can also be seen from term to term and from year to year. So, why is that so??

The answer is that no matter how skilled, how well trained, how perceptive, how astute, how insightful, how competent any teacher is, the teacher's traits or "merit" are only part of what yields student performance results. With a classroom of all cooperative students, results will very likely be sterling, but get just one difficult student in there, one student who won't shut-up during a lecture, one student who won't stay in his/her seat and there will be some detrimental effect on the entire student body of that class. Get several like that and the classroom situation can very easily be dragged down to mediocrity.

That part of the situation will be reflected in test scores, but those scores have nothing in them that can be separated out by analysis as a reliable gauge of teacher "merit".

New and Old - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Artifacts from my late father-in-law are still emerging after quite a few years. One such came to light just this evening, a never used, pristine, but very old leather wallet.

This wallet came with paper inserts on which one was supposed to write one's personal information including one's social security number.

It was a different era, wasn't it. Was it a simpler time? I don't think so, but maybe there was a certain naiveté.

Popular Electronics, April 1959 - John Dunn, Consutant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I was wandering through some websites when I came across this URL.

https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Poptronics/50s/59/Pop-1959-04.pdf

It's the April 1959 issue of Popular Electronics magazine. My eyes lit up when I discovered it because I knew what I would find in there, to wit, the following:

It was sixty years ago as a teenager that I got a one-transistor radio circuit published in the Transistor Topics section of the magazne, the editor being Lou Garner.

The part number for CR1 isn't shown but I remember that it was a 1N64 germanium diode. Also, CR1 may have been drawn backwards because in the direction shown, it would have been in the opposite polarity of the base to emitter junction of the CK722.

 On the other hand, maybe I made the error, but I guess I'll never know.

Red Poison Ivy - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

We were taking a walk a little while ago and came across some poison ivy that looked like this.

With the arrival of autumn, poison ivy changes its color but it is every bit as toxic as it was during the summer. Do NOT touch it!!!

As before, the key trait to look for as identification is that the leaves are scalloped only on one side. Never mind that old line "three leaves on a stem" because leaves can break off.   

Out of Focus - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

We went to a movie some while ago and right in the middle of the showing, look at what happened:

The theater's digital projection system kept fuzzy things going for quite some time while the audience started calling out to the unoccupied projection booth that something had gone wrong.

It took a few minutes for a projectionist to arrive up there and to get to the electronic projector to set the focus to rights. Unfortunately, the machine soon went out of focus again and once more the fine hand of a human being was needed. The projectionist then set the movie back about five minutes to a point before the focus problem arose and the rest of the showing went smoothly.

For all the technical wizardry with which we are bombarded each day, time and time again I see issues where human intervention becomes necessary.

Coming soon (we are told): "Autonomous" self-driving automobiles.