This being 50 years since leaving school to go up to Uni to read electronics, I thought I'd mug up on more recent subject matter and forked out £60 for a textbook on Mechatronics only to find that after a 45 year career in real-time embedded software that there was very little in the book that I did not already know :-(
A disappointment, (There's nothing new under the Sun?), but, is £60 typical of the cost of textbooks to today's undergraduates?
50 years ago, I received the full student grant of £365 per annum, £1 for every day of the year, and fees were paid by Somerset County Council. Is it time to revert to student grants and for the salaries of lecturers to be paid from taxation just as are schoolteachers if a uni level of education is deemed to be of value to the nation? (Excepting of "course" those subjects which are only candy floss, such as sports or film studies in which there is no intellectual development, or those subjects which are merely trade training such as accountancy and nursing)
</WAFFLE>
"Gareth's was W7 now W10 Downstairs Computer" snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote in message news:qg741m$k1c$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me...
OTOH
I have a friend who has an occasional job invigilating school exams (which under current rules can no longer be done by local teachers)
and (despite him not being supposed to do this) during the long hours of boredom he took a peek at the Physics exam
And he reports that he didn't have a hope of answering any of the questions because they were all about atomic particles that hadn't been "invented" 50 years ago
Perhaps not too surprising. Most of the changes will be on the software side (although less 27C256 EPROMS!). The growth in off the shelf hardware modules for embedded applications (like Arduino etc) make it quite an interesting time to be able to cobble together some quite sophisticated solutions that not long ago would have taken bespoke development and custom hardware.
I usually expect £30/inch for technical books!
Its a different world, so different solutions may be needed. When you (or I) went, it was only a very small proportion of the population went to uni. Now the expectation is that at least half will go. Hence the expansion into less traditional academic subjects etc.
But, typically you need the current edition, and these hooks are updated every year or so, which means 1) You can?t sell your used textbook back, and 2) You can?t buy a used book. The price is probably higher for subjects where the student population is smaller (simple economics). The books are also WAY too big, and need to be ebooks now. If you want some of it in hardcopy you can print out a chapter or so.
I am not sure where you are coming from here. Firstly many of us of a certain age perhaps, never went to Uni at all, and some went on day release courses from work as apprentices. Of those of a similar age to me that I still know we did not do too badly at all working up through, as they say, the University of life. The problem recently, and when I say recently I mean since about the mid
90s or so is that recruitment would not consider you unless you had the magic bit of paper from a university. However from those who were hired using said paperwork and interview skills, many had no common sense or knew how to apply the knowledge they had to real world situations. As for the cost of text books, to some extent they have always been more expensive for a couple of reasons. 1, there is a limited number of people who will buy it, thank god for libraries and...
2, the info in them may change due to the ever changing rules and need of different angles on the particular speciality they are aimed at.This means a lot of books are out of date or constantly being re written. I personally think University education is now a money making racket for all sorts of people, probably not including the tutors though, somebody somewhere is getting fat on the proceeds, but its not entirely clear, who, or whether its just a very inefficient beaurocracy. Brian
Well, unfortunately though when they learn about that stuff unless they really are going into research or teaching its quite pointless more than the end result.
New fangled? Here's something I wrote a few years back to aid understanding ...
-----ooooo-----
SemiConductor Theory
-------------------- (c) 1997 by Gareth Alun Evans
A transistor is rather like the human alimentary canal, after the typical USA diet of burgers and chips; - it constipates, as do semiconductor diodes with no applied bias - the available holes get filled in and nothing can move. The base current is like a small application of laxative; some of the constipation passes through, until the effect of the laxative wears off. The total throughput depends upon the Mobility. By applying a continuous feed of laxative, then a continuous current passes through. Applying too much laxative results in saturation - ie, there is a limit to the maximum throughput, depending on the external circuit; in this case, the maximum rate at which you can feed in the burgers at one end. (If you are a customer of MacDonalds's, here in Chippenham, Wiltshire, UK then this rate is very low - I have been there twice, and both times, the service was *APPALLING*.) The difference between PNP and NPN is the direction. In the old days, PNP was used, whereby one injected from the rear end, using a sort of huge syringe - hence PNP - "Put-in Near Poo". More recently NPN is more common, where the laxative is entered via a carrier of some sort, usually chocolate and so we have NPN - "Now Pleasant Nutrient". Despite the adverse effects, the USA diet of burgers and chips carries on, and recourse has to be made once again to the chocolate. Now the ratio of the carriers of the constipation, the burgers and chips, is much higher than that of the chocolate. Thus they are referred to as the Majority Carriers and the Minority Carriers. If you indulge too much, you find that the vendor will provide you with a paper bag, known as an Excess Carrier. More recently, there are problems with impurities and you find that the opposite effect occurs. You have no time to reach home before diarrhoea takes over. You have no option but to stop the car and nip over a gate into a field. Hence the Field Effect Transistor. This time you have to inject something to STOP the flow. Now, assuming that there was a certain control over events; nothing happened until the Gate was encountered, you then became the Source of flow, and the field itself acted as the Drain. What was originally dirt, became grass, was consumed by the Cow, you ate it as a burger, and it has now returned to the topsoil, an effect known in the trade as Surface Recombination. (Incidentally, did you know that Diarrhoea is hereditary? Apparently it runs in the jeans.) Some of the impurities accumulate in your rear end, and no matter how valiently you try, you cannot rid yourself of them. Hence In-de-Bum is known as a Try-Valient Impurity. In the same way, Arse-nic, well known for its ill-effects and accumulation in the body tissues is known as a Pent-Up-Valient Impurity.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.