The Ivory Tower

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Ébe Isaac

5:33 AM

Brevity is the soul of wit. Personally, I like things consise.

11 hours later…

Massimo Ortolano

4:31 PM

Monday poll: if you had classes on physics, circuit theory or basics electronics, did they teach you that a phasor is a rotating vector?

2 hours later…

ff524

6:17 PM

@MassimoOrtolano I don't think I learned this at all in my courses. When I taught a wireless course, I tried to teach this and it was not a familiar concept to my class (of MS students).

I tried using this video to give the intuition: not sure how much it helped

#171: IQ Signals Part II: AM and FM phasor diagrams, SSB phasing method

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Massimo Ortolano

6:45 PM

@ff524 This is another sign of how much academia varies, also in the chiice of topics ;-) Did you teach also the analytic signal representation and the complex envelope?

ff524

@MassimoOrtolano well, I tried ;)

Basically I was hoping to teach wireless signal processing to students who already knew about complex signals. But then I discovered that I had overestimated my audience

Meta Academia

7:28 PM

Q: What can be done by the moderators to address provocative behavior by OP

Regarding: Am I being a "mean" instructor, denying an extension on a take home exam Discussion has been extensive and the tone has been ramping up. But that's not what motivates my Meta question. Rather, I am writing because I see several red flags suggesting the OP is behaving like a provocat...

2 hours later…

StrongBad

9:32 PM

Why is this question still open: academia.stackexchange.com/questions/80951/…

"Am I mean" is not a good question. The main point summary does not seem to contain a question. It seems like a discussion point.

1 hour later…

Massimo Ortolano

10:41 PM

@ff524 Well, one of the mistakes that I frequently make is to base my lectures on the expected knowledge for the year when I was a student, before the Bologna process. After the Bologna process the distribution of the topics changed a lot, and I sometimes find myself saying to third year students things like: "as you all know this is the complex envelo..." just to find 50 faces staring at me completely clueless.

ff524

@MassimoOrtolano As a student, I was constantly struggling to overcome my poor preparation from high school, so I don't have that problem. I assume that my students are all better prepared than I was ;)

Massimo Ortolano

10:54 PM

@ff524 In my university most of the most successful students in engineering come from a type of high school, called liceo classico (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liceo_classico), which is all about literature, old languages like latin and greek and nothing about technical or mathematical stuff. But they learned how to study, and that's the most important thing ;-)

And you probably learned how to study ;-)

1 hour later…

Meta Academia

11:57 PM

Q: Has Academia Being Featured in Hot Network Questions Improved the Community?

Stemming partially from this meta thread: Why are we challenging the premise rather than answering the question (question on potential sexist remarks)? And especially this comment by @Wrzlprmft: "@Fomite: For whatever it’s worth, most of the problematic comments and answers come from user...