Your thoughts of tomorrows tech/engineering fields??

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ENS Audio

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Its obvious that most of us agree that tech/engineering is not going to be viable for the near future due to several reasons other than the "fallout" from recent events in the Banking/Financing industry....

We do know that industries emerging such as the Bio tech/Bio-Med Engineering and Nanotechnology will be more prominent especially now some research departments in major universities have received additional funding as a result of the stimulus package and the reversal of the stemcell research ban that was put in place on the behalf of the insane christian fundamentalists.

Anyways, other than the emerging industries mentioned above; what do you see in the next few years as far as people (like me) aspiring to pursue a career in the related fields??  Are there other opportunities out there? if not, then should I just go ahead anyway and start working on getting my Master's in Engineering??  Then after that I could take whatever post grad classes I need for having the education in the mentioned fields of Bio tech/Nanotechnology??  Now if thats my choice then I need to look into those "accelerated learning" college courses if they're reputable and accredited....now I'm rambling ???
 
Technology will always be around in some fashion.

What you learn in school falls into two categories. Classic fundamental knowledge, and modern application of that knowledge.

Decades from now nano technology and genetic engineering may be passe, but when you're working on the new space based solar power plant, you will still be using physics and calculus, to figure out how to get the solar components up there and the power back down here. ;D

So pay attention to getting a good foundation in the fundamentals, and learn how to learn about new stuff, because there always will be new stuff.  Maybe you can create some new stuff for us to learn about.

JR


 
JohnRoberts said:
Technology will always be around in some fashion.

What you learn in school falls into two categories. Classic fundamental knowledge, and modern application of that knowledge.

Decades from now nano technology and genetic engineering may be passe, but when you're working on the new space based solar power plant, you will still be using physics and calculus, to figure out how to get the solar components up there and the power back down here. ;D

So pay attention to getting a good foundation in the fundamentals, and learn how to learn about new stuff, because there always will be new stuff.  Maybe you can create some new stuff for us to learn about.

JR

I agree and have the same view of learning in school...but there seems to be some issues that seem to always be problematic, for starters it seems the old paradigm of learning may be undergoing a fundamental shift; for example, with the extreme rise in costs of college tuition and the rising of "online universities" it does seem that one needs to examine the current state of academia and where it will be in a number of years.

Of course its counterproductive to think in terms of the "future events"...BUT if one is going to spend quite a number of years in school, wouldn't be for ones best interest to examine what the student's environment will be like.  So what should one consider??  going with the traditional route in learning??  Or become apart of the new "post modern" era of learning....whatever it may be for I think in many ways most of us may not realize it or not...I can say we are ahead of the "pack" by some years if you really think about it. 

Now before rambling on about the next part of my jargon about accelerated learning, I am just curious to know if there are any people that believe maybe its time to reexamine the traditional paradigm of academia and how this change OR stay the same within this "post modern" era...or whatever the hell Im talking about ???

*waits for PRR to reply as well ;D
 
I am one. Few years back I helped set up a course and taught at it for about three years. Teaching is also a tradition in my family as both of my sisters are university lecturers and my aunts were all teachers. Not to mention that my great great grand fathers were scholars of their time but that was pretty long time ago.

I don't think it is counter productive to think of future events. That is why we advice young people about their future career. My nephew is now an Electrical Engineer. When he was at uni, everytime I went back to Istanbul I told him to take optional classes in programming and embedded electronics. He avoided them but now he says he wished he did.

However, when you say "traditional" I don't know what you mean but I heard a lot of young people making the same mistake by referring to the fundamentals as traditional. In other words "why are we showered with this fundamental stuff for years".

There is no other way. Learning the fundamentals properly takes time and there is no way to shorten it, if it is what you mean by "accelerated". Yes there is a tendency by some politicians to "dillute" the educational system so that obtaining a university degree becomes easy. It looks good on statistics and gets them extra brownie points. And that is why we have all these micky-mouse courses and degrees. Believe or not I actually contacted one consultant guy for programming The guy's e-mail arrived with his name as Dr such and such. I thought wow doctorate in EE. After a few chat it turned out that this guy actually had doctorate in social studies but the programming was his hobby. Now he was probably a good programmer but using that title was completely misleading, and wrong.

Accelerated programs are for raising technicians, well focused on a subject matter but very narrow. The idea is to get them to a certain level quickly so that they can hold a soldering iron or a spanner. I agree to a certain degree that universities are not particularly giving satisfactory lab time to the students where they can improve their practical skills. But you need that "number of years" to absorb the fundamentals.

But you are wrong on the future viability of engineering. Yes the bio technology etc are receiving a lot of funding and seem to be the future but as John said you will still need the engineers to design the microscopes.





 
> one needs to examine the current state of academia and where it will be in a number of years.

I've worked at a brick and ivy old-skool for decades.

It's starting to smell a little like GM. The young kids want a different product. We are burdened with Tenure and Benefits. So far we are not slammed by the economy, but strange eddies in the economic winds may blow us down.

I been saying for years that the future is University Of Phoenix. Not that specific implementation, but systems like that. 

There are three stages in US higher education. Schools for ministers in the 1700s. The Land-Grant A&M movement of the 1800s. And Sputnik 1960. InnerWeb Learning will be about as big as any of these.

Which technology to study? If you could KNOW, you would not need a degree, you'd want a venture capitalist. I've seen two kinds of technology: stuff that has been "right around the corner" all my life, and stuff that just comes out of nowhere and makes life very different very quick.

Read your field. Subscribe to the trade-rags (read them on-line). 98% of the headlines are puff to fill space, but "out of nowhere" starts here.

BTW: the IT racket (messing with computers) has been VERY strong the last few months. Not everywhere in every subfield, but job-offers have not declined near as bad as in other fields.
 
PRR said:
> one needs to examine the current state of academia and where it will be in a number of years.

I've worked at a brick and ivy old-skool for decades.

It's starting to smell a little like GM. The young kids want a different product. We are burdened with Tenure and Benefits. So far we are not slammed by the economy, but strange eddies in the economic winds may blow us down.

I been saying for years that the future is University Of Phoenix. Not that specific implementation, but systems like that. 

There are three stages in US higher education. Schools for ministers in the 1700s. The Land-Grant A&M movement of the 1800s. And Sputnik 1960. InnerWeb Learning will be about as big as any of these.

Which technology to study? If you could KNOW, you would not need a degree, you'd want a venture capitalist. I've seen two kinds of technology: stuff that has been "right around the corner" all my life, and stuff that just comes out of nowhere and makes life very different very quick.

Read your field. Subscribe to the trade-rags (read them on-line). 98% of the headlines are puff to fill space, but "out of nowhere" starts here.

BTW: the IT racket (messing with computers) has been VERY strong the last few months. Not everywhere in every subfield, but job-offers have not declined near as bad as in other fields.


I do agree, but the issue about the IT sector seems to be from my ignorance that there are PLENTY of "senior level" jobs out there but where I see the problem is with the lack of "entry" level jobs and of the opportunity to have the chance to "volunteer" just for the sake of experience. 

It also seems that I have been "affected" by much cynicism that's with many people within this field and I was working in IT probably at the worst time IMO right after the "DOT com bust" so my judgment has been impaired.

Now to ramble into the next subject of academia and let me ask you PRR, what's your take on the rapid acceleration of technology which Ray Kurzweil has referred to as Moore's law??? 

I ask the question as someone that considers myself as a "lifelong" student, how do I and others (if possible) "keep up" with the rapid growth and the "merging" of Biology, Engineering and Nanotechnology??  Do we need to reexamine "how" we learn?? Will we need to refine or completely tear down the old paradigm of learning and examine the idea of "accelerated learning" and develop techniques to learn subjects in Math/Physics in half the time compared to the "conventional" means of learning??

I hope my ramblings make sense ??? Semantics is always problematic when trying to convey "new" or "useless" ideas ;D
 
In addition to the current discussion of "higher education" I feel its important to mention the issue of the so called "failure" of the public school system in the USA.  IMO I do feel that in comparison to the education systems found in many other parts of the word that we are behind of most Industrialized nations when it comes to this problem. 

Now some may say that I am full of BS when making these statements....BUT I can't get over the fact that in my life I have met people that have emigrated from places such as Venezuela and Trinidad/Tobago that went through the US public school system only for them to say:"is this a joke??"

Why is it that people to whom get an education from so called "3rd world nations" are much better educated than many of the failing students that we have in the US?? 

There seems to be a myth that was told growing up that the "USA leads the world in education!!!"but now I feel that it may be necessary to "reverse" the damage that's been done to me by the public school system and possibly have to "relearn" everything almost that I've learned over the years in school.

Am I wrong for believing this??  Please give me a counterargument to this observation.... ???


Thanks,
 
Trying not to repeat myself.. you don't need to learn faster, but you must learn new stuff constantly, not just during school or while training. Some people may need hand holding to get up to critical mass, but we all need to learn on our own.

Modern web technology brings the world to our fingertips so this is now more accessible as ever.  Perhaps a logical progression from recorded history and standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before, but so much cheaper and easier today.

For the record Moore's Law is from Gordon Moore and has to do with IC density and specifically progression of cost reduction per transistor or cell. Technology will continue to make computationally intensive work simpler and cheaper. There will still always be a need for people to create new better solutions to old problems.

Predictions about running out of things to invent have been made prematurely before.

JR 
 
ENS Audio said:
In addition to the current discussion of "higher education" I feel its important to mention the issue of the so called "failure" of the public school system in the USA.  IMO I do feel that in comparison to the education systems found in many other parts of the word that we are behind of most Industrialized nations when it comes to this problem. 

Now some may say that I am full of BS when making these statements....BUT I can't get over the fact that in my life I have met people that have emigrated from places such as Venezuela and Trinidad/Tobago that went through the US public school system only for them to say:"is this a joke??"

Why is it that people to whom get an education from so called "3rd world nations" are much better educated than many of the failing students that we have in the US?? 

There seems to be a myth that was told growing up that the "USA leads the world in education!!!"but now I feel that it may be necessary to "reverse" the damage that's been done to me by the public school system and possibly have to "relearn" everything almost that I've learned over the years in school.

Am I wrong for believing this??  Please give me a counterargument to this observation.... ???


Thanks,

The US leads the world in "opportunity". You still must do the work yourself.

Parents in most other countries appreciate the value of a good education and motivate their children to a much higher degree than in the US where many parents and children expect a golden future to be handed to them on a platter.

Maybe consider joining a union.  ::) Weren't auto workers retiring in their '40s?

The new administration is talking about education, but I am inclined to suspect this is code for rewarding teacher's unions and not really investing in our kids. The previous policy of increased standardized testing to measure and reward actual results strikes me as the more productive management approach. 

JR



 
ENS Audio said:
Do we need to reexamine "how" we learn?? Will we need to refine or completely tear down the old paradigm of learning and examine the idea of "accelerated learning" and develop techniques to learn subjects in Math/Physics in half the time compared to the "conventional" means of learning??


Here I will join John's comment "Modern web technology brings the world to our fingertips so this is now more accessible as ever.  Perhaps a logical progression from recorded history and standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before, but so much cheaper and easier today."

Yes the internet is also full of junk but the amount of information available is so vast and intuitive that, in my view one can obtain the same level of, say electrical engineering without actually going to the university. My father was one of the very first certified electricians in Turkey and he used to say that when he was an apprentice his master used to turn his back on him while he was wiring things so that my father wouldn't learn. Now that may well sound like long time ago and in a diferent culture but up until about 10-15 years ago the things that would be considered as "professional secrecy" in the west are now given free on the internet. Start from the master's of this forum, notably PRR. Under differet circumstances it would take years and years to get to the level of information he casually chucks in, or the other guys, for that matter. So I am looking at what you are saying and kind of thinking how much more can we accelerate learning?

You may have a point in your own thinking but on the other hand you should also consider that today's students have also become lazy because the availability of information is now very easy. Googling for a "quick" answer has replaced the sitting down and spending considerable amount of time to absorb the information properly. This is not my observation alone, my sister has been lecturing in architecture for 25 years and I have few senior lecturer friends here in Glasgow. They all complain of the same.



ENS Audio said:
Why is it that people to whom get an education from so called "3rd world nations" are much better educated than many of the failing students that we have in the US?? 


Because they need it desperately.

 
> There seems to be a myth that was told growing up that the "USA leads the world in education!!!"

Where did you hear that rubbish?

I feel reasonably well-served by my K-12 schools, but never real stimulated.

I dropped out of college because I was not learning -anything-. That's not a general indictment of US higher ed... it was a unique time and place and I'm an atypical learner. But in general I felt that the college was not serving the students as good as it could, and I felt that in some small way the students could be better served with me working for the college.

> comparison to the education systems found in many other parts of the word

Any middle-class US child who does not fall into the gutter will probably get "some" middle-class job and life. It has been argued that the main function of US higher-ed is to keep the wild animals off the street until they grow-up enough to hold a serious job.

In Trinidad, they know they need GOOD education (not just math but also deportment) to have any hope of a middle-class lifestyle. School is not a parking lot, it is the path to the EXIT.

We don't have to educate seriously. They do.

> the IT sector

I see jobs that need 7 years experience in fields that started 5 years ago (idiot HR re-writes), or in fields I have never heard of. Can you automate an entire national trucking operation?

But there's also the 2-brain-cell jobs in Customer Support. Yes, some of this has gone to India, though some came back. Yes, they like applicants with certificates and experience; but some shops are in need of any warm body. True, some phone-support jobs pay so little that they can't expect good help like you.

I see whole retail streets empty this month. Compared to that catastrophe, IT is not doing so bad.

Perhaps because some of the over-expectations in IT got damped-out in that dot.com bust. And perhaps transferred into over-expectation in speculative derivatives backed by 'safe' mortgages. Which, instead of undercutting a fledgling industry, has undercut all economic activity.

> the rapid acceleration of technology which Ray Kurzweil has referred to as Moore's law???

Ray, like Toffler and McLuhan, is an attention-hound. Read that stuff for trends, but don't believe the path and pace they predict is sure to happen. They don't know; but given a choice between a dull and an exciting prediction, they know which to put in the book.

It has also been argued that the "pace of technology" has really been fairly constant for centuries; just that we discount the shock of change which has passed while being overwhelmed by the change we are going through.

And what is our yardstick? Is a nano-bot more revolutionary than a superhet? Nonobots won't really happen until they can be put-together from available parts. In 1905, you could not put-together a coil and a tube, in 1925 it could be done, in 1935 it was a cottage industry using stock parts. Today I can't buy a nano-machine, but I see where the techniques to do so are coming down from dreams to tabletop tools. Maybe in 2040 I'll buy a bottle of n'bots, a software library, add a few lines of code, drink the bottle, and have my name glow on my forehead. Well, not me, but all the kids will be doing it when they should be studying. And their little sister will think it is so old-hat and boring.

> how do I and others (if possible) "keep up" with the rapid growth

This is NOT a problem. Growth is not forced upon us. Growth happens BECAUSE it is easy. In 1750 it was hard for two thinkers to get together. Changes in agriculture and sanitation allowed the growth of dense cities, and ideas got cross-fertilized. Steel, wire. Transport and telephone. Look at a telephone network fact: if you double the number of phones, you have FOUR times the possible connections. The ten-fold growth in communication due to dense cities and telephones meant 100 times better chance that a partial idea would run into its missing piece. The internet has opened some new ways that ideas can get around. But what is really happening is that complexity has got easier. You put in the same "keep up" effort, and you get further.

Moore's Law does have legs. And has been true longer than legs have existed. Drop a bacteria in a drop of sugar-water. It sees "infinite" food, grows, splits. Its child sees infinite food and grows. Each generation grows at maximum rate..... until the colony hits the edge of the drop. That last generation faces shortage and famine. Reproduction switches from budding to gene-swaps, because that increases the chance of some child prospering somewhere else.

Steel used to be VERY expensive. The guys in Damascus needed a month to hammer a sword out of red dirt, say $20K/pound. Later puddled-iron processes got the cost down to $20/pound, so it could be used for hinges and tools. Growth of tools and population opened-up demand and thus development capital. Guys in Birmingham and Pittsburgh would do headstands to make iron a buck cheaper than the other guy, price-war. It went down quick to like $0.20/pound, which is pretty-much the floor for the amount of effort needed to make steel. And like bacteria, steelmakers had to change their ways, from price-war to price-fixing.

Moore, apparently on his own, observed that chip density was doubling, with a generation-rate near 18 months. Looking back, performance/cost of tubes and transistors did a similar thing, and maybe similar rate: in 1928 a loud-speaking radio was $400, in 1938 you could get one for $10.

Such a trend can not continue to infinity (in a universe as we know it). However it sure can fall down many-many decades of cost/density/population before hitting the edge of the drop. And a lot of smart people have under-estimated the changes which become "easy" when density increases by an order of magnitude in a few years. My old mind would boggle if I knew all that happens inside an iPhone... but thanks to increased cross-fertilization, "anybody" can find the tools to make a machine that complicated. Pop a linux live-CD in a $300 PC. Making a machine that compact is a bit tougher, but you can easily find shops to work on your design, and they can easily find sources of the smallest parts and shops who fabricate small gizmos.
 
Its sometimes easy to forget that most people who make the money don't stay with the course of education...Bill Gates dropped OUT of college...and if I am not mistaken HUGE fortunes were made in the most dire of economic times by people who saw opportunity...Rockefeller comes to mind...

So you can follow education and hope for stability or follow risk and hope for money.

Nothing is guaranteed except death and taxes.

Since nothing is promised follow your passion, you'll be happier regardless of what happens.

No one seems to regret doing what they love...everyone regrets NOT doing what they love.
 
I appreciate the comments from you folks; being that most of you have been at DIY and electronics longer than I've been alive and for me to have the chance to get your input is really a humbling experience.

Always before I establish my "take" on any issue, it's a must for me to get "pros" and "cons" along with applying a healthy dose of skepticism before drawing conclusions.
 
"...the rapid acceleration of technology which Ray Kurzweil has referred to as Moore's law???

”Ray, like Toffler and McLuhan, is an attention-hound. Read that stuff for trends, but don't believe the path and pace they predict is sure to happen. They don't know; but given a choice between a dull and an exciting prediction, they know which to put in the book.”

Oh how true.

“Since nothing is promised follow your passion, you'll be happier regardless of what happens.”

I agree---but

This reminds me of a standup comic’s routine about his wife’s response to reading the book Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow.  He said she now spends most of her time shopping and masturbating.
 
ENS Audio said:
I appreciate the comments from you folks; being that most of you have been at DIY and electronics longer than I've been alive...

Perhaps---but I'm also reminded of when I made some remark about how old some of us were to PRR and he retorted "I'm not that old!"

In a chat room associated with an online DJ show on Stickam the other day, I revealed to a woman how old I was.  Her response was "You're as old as MUD!"

I agreed---but responded (aficionados of Firesign Theater will recall the reference) "But that's some GREAT mud!"
 
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