General > General Technical Chat
Admit your Brain lock
IanB:
--- Quote from: coppice on April 04, 2024, 05:45:27 pm ---There can ALWAYS be greater clarity in the workings. There is ALWAYS the possibility of an insightful way to speed up the derivation of an answer that would deserve an extra mark or two. 100% says nothing could be better. I award you 0%, must try harder.
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I think you are simply wrong about this. When we consider public exams like GCSE or A-levels, there is a defined marking scheme, and every examiner is supposed to follow the scheme consistently. There are cross-checks and adjudication procedures to ensure all exam candidates get equal and fair treatment. There is no opportunity for a person marking a paper to allocate extra marks for creativity outside the marking scheme. This would be heavily frowned upon and may get the examiner removed from their job.
coppice:
--- Quote from: IanB on April 04, 2024, 07:05:44 pm ---
--- Quote from: coppice on April 04, 2024, 05:49:13 pm ---Unicode is certainly a security nightmare. Between all the bugs in the character set (e.g. Chinese characters split into 2 separate ones that aren't actually different), the ability to express the same string in multiple ways, and other complexities, its nearly impossible to do a simple comparison between two pieces of text in Unicode. IBM produced a massive normalisation library in the late 90s, to try to make strings comparable, but its far from a complete answer, and isn't that widely used anyway.
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Bear in mind we are talking about text documents and communication. How are there security problems arising from the text in a technical paper or a book?
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Think things like URLs. Two strings are identical as text on the screen. The actual string of bytes isn't. So, you don't know which web site you are actually going to. There have been exploits based on this. Its probably a big part of the reason non-ASCII domain names have not been a huge success.
coppice:
--- Quote from: IanB on April 04, 2024, 07:10:22 pm ---
--- Quote from: coppice on April 04, 2024, 05:45:27 pm ---There can ALWAYS be greater clarity in the workings. There is ALWAYS the possibility of an insightful way to speed up the derivation of an answer that would deserve an extra mark or two. 100% says nothing could be better. I award you 0%, must try harder.
--- End quote ---
I think you are simply wrong about this. When we consider public exams like GCSE or A-levels, there is a defined marking scheme, and every examiner is supposed to follow the scheme consistently. There are cross-checks and adjudication procedures to ensure all exam candidates get equal and fair treatment. There is no opportunity for a person marking a paper to allocate extra marks for creativity outside the marking scheme. This would be heavily frowned upon and may get the examiner removed from their job.
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These days this is true for most public exams. However, they have been massively dumbed down compared to the past. I had a maths and a physics teacher who marked O-level and A-level papers in the early 70s. They had to attend a training course to try to maximum the consistency of marking between the various people marking the same papers, and the marking was expected to be quite brutal back then.
tggzzz:
--- Quote from: IanB on April 04, 2024, 07:03:37 pm ---
--- Quote from: Zero999 on April 04, 2024, 06:31:23 pm ---I'm not in favour of long variable names or even the complete elimination of non-Latin glyphs, but a happy medium. There's no reason to use lower case v and upper case V and similar looking glyphs ϵ and E in the same formula. Far from making it easier to write down, it introduces more room for error and confusion.
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I'm sorry, but I think you are alone with this viewpoint.
There really is a reason to use different versions of letters in formulas. For example, \$v\$ can represent velocity while \$V\$ can represent volume, and both can appear in the same formula. If you tried to use the same letter \$v\$ for both, it would be hopelessly confusing. Similarly, we would typically have \$\epsilon\$ for an error, or for a small change, while \$E\$ would represent energy. Using symbols in a clear and consistent way like this aids communication and reduces ambiguity.
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As I noted earlier, there are other reasons too...
Frequently lower/upper case is used to convey information, by conventions. For example, in my first week at university my "Senturia and Wedlock" textbook section 2.3.4 is "Notation Conventions" indicates these conventions are in widespread use...
General network variable: vA, iC
DC component of a waveform: VCC, IB
Peak amplitude of a sinusoid: Va, Ic
Incremental component of a waveform: va, ic
Yes, those differences can be important, e.g. when discussing how small signal behaviour varies as bias points are changed.
Tation:
For me it is stochastic processes, ergodicity and related topics. Maybe it is that I have never needed them during my career.
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