IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

CVS Downspout - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

This is a success story.

Last winter, I noticed a newly completed repair project in front of our local CVS had resulted in a very dangerous safety hazard as follows.

I decided that to get past any CVS bureaucracy, I would contact our local town directly:

I received the following reply:

The next thing I knew, the drainage configuration had been revised to this:

Clearly, this was not an improvement. However, before I could compose another letter, the drainage arrangement was again reconfigured:

My guess is that I was not the only one to take notice of this thing. Someone else spoke up too and the original safety issue was properly addressed.

Since it appears that from the start there was an available dry well, the apparent decision to ignore that and thereby create the safety hazard cannot be excused. However, it does pay sometimes to notice when something wrong and to say so.

Pre-ChatGPT Cheating - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Well over ten years ago, my wife who taught high school gave her class an essay assignment about a particular historical person's place in history and their cultural effect.

One of her students entered that name into Google which led to a Wikipedia search result from which that student then found the name embedded in a particular paragraph. The student copied the text of that article and without actually reading it, pasted it into a Word file, printed that out and submitted it as their own personal work product.

The copied text had one mention of the name, but the topic of the text was in no way related to the assignment. Now we have ChatGPT which seems to offer the ability to cheat in that same way, perhaps with less transparency.

I was listening to an NPR interview just last night in which the interviewee, a college professor whose identity I didn't catch, saying if I understood him correctly, that ChatGPT will be used by some students to cheat, that occurrences of such cheating are inevitable and that he and others must be prepared to live with that fact.

One of his own coping mechanisms is to ask a student to reveal what question(s) had that student submitted to ChatGPT, not just the resultant essay itself. Clearly that is not a foolproof approach, but it's a start.

We see rampant cheating all around us. There are newspaper articles almost every day about someone's tax fraud, someone's Ponzi scheme, we see news items about car crashes as a result of extreme speeding and so on and so forth. As bad as these things are and as much as there are prohibitive laws, these things do occur.

With ChatGPT, the horse has left the barn.

Those who cheat using ChatGPT strike me as being more of the same and no, I did NOT use ChatGPT to prepare this essay..

Non-Educational Videos - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I've recently needed to traverse the learning curves for several different on-line tools. Some of those learning curves were more like brick walls. Trying to decipher the steps I needed to follow was often frustratingly beyond my ability so I tried watching a couple of video tutorials which were suggested for teaching and demonstrating what I needed to learn.

Such videos typically open with a lecturer's big smile of greeting followed by an opening monologue about the teaching goal(s) of the presentation. However, when the presenter finally gets around to showing a slide or a screen image, suddenly the pace of the presentation takes a radical shift.

Consider a simple recitation such as: 

"First move the cursor to 'File' and left-click it there to bring up the list of tools. Then select the option shown in the third line by moving the cursor down to that line and again left clicking the mouse."

What I hear is more like this:

"FirstmovthcursortoFilandlftclickthrtobringupthlistoftools.Thnslctthoptionshowninththirdlinbymovingthcursordowntothatlinandagainlftclickingthmous."

As this unintelligible string of sounds comes spewing forth without pause, the presenter's demonstration cursor goes sweeping all over the place at such high speed that I cannot visually track it. I have repeatedly played back some of those crucial video moments without being able to decipher them.

It is my fond wish that the creators of these videos would recognize that I have chosen to view their work because I do NOT know about the topic at hand and that their work is SUPPOSED to accommodate my need to acquire knowledge. Instead, the presented video seems to be more of a mnemonic memory aid for the presenter's own benefit and/or for a personal ego boost.

Sometimes this frustrating cycle gets repeated several times in one video. My word of advice to the presenter:  SLOW it down and always speak CLEARLY and distinctly.

When things finally come to an end, there is always an invitation to view other videos prepared by that same person.

Try to surmise my receptiveness.

Outdated Lyrics and Phrases - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I was listening to a local radio broadcast where a series of "hits from the past" were being aired and as the songs were played, it dawned on me that a lot of outdated colloquialisms were being presented.

Consider these for example:

Outside of the music realm, we used to hear things like this:

In another fifty or sixty years, I bet that some people won't be able to decode this stuff at all.

A Star Trek Question - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

From  https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Multitronics  we read the following text regarding a particular Star Trek episode entitled "The Ultimate Computer":

"Multitronics was a computer technology devised by Doctor Richard Daystrom in the mid-23rd century."

In that story, the Federation suffers the loss of several starships from the Multitronic computer installed on the Enterprise having run amok.

We then recall that Heathkits were once sold by a subsidiary of Daystrom, Inc.

Could we thus imply that the disastrous Multitronic computer was really a Heathkit?

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

I found this item on a shelf at a local grocery. The "Warning" printed on the package really astonished me. I actually stood there agape for several minutes.

Please take special note of the first two sentences of the first paragraph of the following excerpt from the URL of The National Cancer Institute:

https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/diet/acrylamide-fact-sheet

With my having a significant family history of cancers, I get a disquieting sense of having possibly learned a new definition of "insanity".

Check Washing - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

It's just an anatomical fact, but my hands have long fingers. When I was just a little kid, my dad used to say I would make a good burglar. Of course my career choice was not in that field of endeavor, but I decided one day to test the concept of check washing by which criminals have been known to "kite" checks often obtained by robbing Post Office drop boxes.

Please see: 

https://licn.typepad.com/my_weblog/2022/12/stolen-mail-and-the-post-office-john-dunn-consultant-ambertec-pe-pc.html

Using old checks from a long gone account, I wrote something on one check using a gel pen and something similar on a second check using an ordinary ball point pen. The I let the two checks soak overnight, each in their own soap and water mix, with the following results.

The gel pen check's writing as above didn't fade. In fact, the writing became even more visible than it had been at the start.

The ball point pen writing as above did fade. It didn't disappear, but maybe if I'd let the soaking go for a longer time the writing might have vanished.

The lesson, which has been written about before, is clear.

Always use a gel pen when writing any check or any other document that must not be vulnerable to alteration.

Bus Danger - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I almost saw someone get run over by a New York City bus the other day.  (No, it was not the bus in this picture.)

A bus passenger who had just descended to the street via the front bus doorway, someone who must have been in a great hurry, someone who must have had something very urgent in mind, someone who was NOT thinking too clearly at that exact moment, immediately ran in front of that bus and across the traffic lane in which the driver had already begun moving the bus forward.

Fortunately, the driver responded quickly and halted the bus in time to avoid a pedestrian calamity, but it was one very close call indeed.

That passenger never even noticed but I think my own heart rate took a surge at that moment.

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

Yul Brynner sang "A Puzzlement" in the 1956 movie of "The King and I". In that same vein, I seem to run into many puzzlements. I wish they'd stop coming up.

1) Consider the word "next":

When someone says to make a turn at the "next" light, to which of these two traffic lights would that be? I have had different people use that same word where one person meant nearer signal light and another meant the farther one.

If someone would say "No, not the first light, the second one.", that statement I could decipher.

2) Consider the phrase "user name":

When one of my doctor's office was first set up for electronic communication with patients and when I first encountered that electronic system, every time I tried to log in, something would go wrong.

When my log in efforts weren't working, I clicked on "Forgot your password?" and the following window appeared.  It asked for my "Username" and that became a new problem. Was my user name "John Dunn" or "JDunn" or "J Dunn" or "Dunn" or "johndunn" or was it "ambertec@ieee.org"?

I had no idea because none of the "Username" possibilities I could come up with would work. I simply couldn't think of any more variants that I might have somehow chosen and then mis-remembered.

This was a puzzlement and a matter of utter frustration, plain and simple.

3) Consider this magazine subscription renewal:

A few years ago, I got a notice that a magazine subscription was going to expire. but I couldn't be sure of the expiration date.

Both dates were possible, but it turned out that the expiration date was actually Dec. 14, 2015. (I don't remember how I eventually found that out.) The puzzlement was that I couldn't discern that fact when the question first arose.

Yes, I did renew the subscription.

4) Finally, consider holiday business hours:

On just this New Year's Day, I was trying to find the store hours for some local businesses when these two displays came up:

The first display made one business' holiday hours clear, but the second one conveyed no useful information whatever.

We went to the first one.

Stolen Mail and the Post Office - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

The local Patch news service sends e-mails here from time to time, usually of little import, but these two recent messages are very much of significance. Even if their links expire by the time you see this, please read the words of the links themselves.

https://patch.com/new-york/merrick/envelopes-stolen-merrick-post-office-drop-box-police 

https://patch.com/new-york/merrick/4th-person-arrested-stealing-merrick-post-office-report?utm_source=alert-breakingnews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert

The named post office is the one I've been using. I walked past it just after the first message came and I noticed that the drop boxes outside the building were the same ones that have been there for quite some while. (One gets to notice all the little nicks and dings in the paint.)

Now look at this excerpt taken from the first URL above:

The drop boxes showed no signs of physical damage, no signs of having ever been forced open.

If a drop box was "opened" without sustaining any visible damage, that means that the drop box was opened using a key which could only have been provided by a post office employee. Think of the term "inside job".

The lesson I personally draw from this is to NEVER post any mail using any drop box. I will ONLY deposit outgoing mail into the deposit slot inside of a post office building. One can never be totally sure that something bad won't happen anyway, but I figure that the chances of mail theft are at least diminished.