Forum Clutter - Students (and others) posting in this forum 3

[human909]

Hi

Maybe it has become worse. Or maybe I'm just getting older. But there seems to be an increasing number of student or very inadequately trained engineers posting in this forum. Occasionally such posts can tangent to useful discussion but most of the time it is just clutter. Kootk posted quite strongly on this topic recently in one of the many threads posted by a student or severely inadequately trained engineer.

IMO the solutions is in our hands. Either;

• REPORT the thread and rely on admin to remove it and/or;
• have a strong direct reply and a strong request that nobody else replies so the thread dies a natural death or;
• do nothing as a fix isn't needed.

At present many of these threads are kept alive but questions and answers that got in circles or by people who add to the replies telling them to post elsewhere. (I perpetuated this today.) I believe content could be improved if we all made a better effort to ignore such threads. The "Truss" thread I initially ignored as I wanted to let it die, then after multiple replies from others I perpetuated it by replying.

Any thoughts? A useful discussion? Or will this thread die quickly....

Personally I think a combination of the first two solutions could readily shut down poor quality threads. The second only works if people listen and agree that the thread is better off dead. I believe it would work a reasonable percentage of the time.

 

[milkshakelake]

In the catfishing thread, I could feel myself drifting into a hybrid of Robert McNamara and Jack Nicholson's character in A Few Good Men.

Lol sorry it was draining. I didn't expect that to happen or drama to start, otherwise I wouldn't have commented. For what it's worth, it was a similar draining experience for me. Clash of personalities or generations or something.

I came around to your point of view and that thread got a lot of eyeballs exposing that character, so hopefully it was worth it for you. I think it was, because I'm sure some people wouldn't have changed their minds if there wasn't a good cop/bad cop dynamic going on (debatable about who was good cop/bad cop in that scenario).

 

[XR250]

Curious, are you of the opinion that your motorcycle ever travels in any direction other than that which the front wheel points?

Yes for a short time. I believe when I initiate a right turn by pushing with my right hand, the front wheel momentarily turns left until the bike leans over and then it follows back to the right. Take the front wheel of your bicycle and hold the axle between your hands and spin the rim. Try to turn it left and watch/feel its path. Report back. Hopefully i am correct.

 

[Ron247]

Here are my thoughts on the issue of posting (not bicycles). When I was 15 I learned a car striking your motorcycle from the right will make you go left. Even though I knew how to countersteer, the force from the right was far more effective. Amazingly, I road another 50 years without having to re-certify on that and how to treat road-rash.

1. Students do need to post on the Student area. It benefits all of them and they should be discouraged from posting here.
2. The poorly trained engineer, belongs here. They need the help and to some degree, I feel I should try to help better train them. I will not help them if they appear lazy, unmotivated, argumentative and basically the worst enemy our profession has. If they do appear to be our worst enemy, maybe they should be reported.
3. In the student forum, I see experienced engineers who I think have forgotten what they did and did not know while in college, and shortly upon graduation. It is one of the hardest things about mentoring, accurately remembering what we really were capable of. I do think, we easily remember how motivated and willing we were, and our memory fools us.
4. It would be good for one of us to start a thread on the student site about what we experienced engineers expect from one of their posts such as:
   1. What they are trying to learn specifically.
   2. Whether they are really going to play engineer that we all frown on or is it make believe for purposes of learning.
   3. Learning to clearly think out their request before posting. How many times do we have to ask for basic info they did not include? This is skill they need to start working on now, not later.
   4. We are not here to solve their homework problem and will not help them start being unethical so early in their career.
5. You can see from some of my previous responses to other posts, I firmly do not think everyone gets a good mentor their first time out of the chute. Many of us were lucky.
6. Even experienced engineers need mentoring in topics that are new to them.

 

[KootK]

Take the front wheel of your bicycle and hold the axle between your hands and spin the rim. Try to turn it left and watch/feel its path. Report back.

Yes, the pushing against the gyroscope thing. I'm hoping that's in opposition to @human909's thing and it can finally be my turn to get some popcorn. Goodness knows enough popcorn has been consumed at my expense around here.

Or the typical physics teacher response that bicycles rely on the gyroscopic effect for stability.

I don't buy the gyro business with bicycles. There is a gyroscope effect, of course, but I feel that it is far too minor to push against and expect responsive steering. Rather, I feel that bicycles are primarily steered -- and balanced -- by steering the bike out from beneath the combined bike-rider center of gravity.

In support of that, I offer this: if front wheel gyroscopic effects where significant enough that you could lean the bike over by pushing against it, surely that resistance would also manifest itself as detrimental resistance to front wheel turning in general.

To some extent, I feel the same argument applies to motorcycles as well. That get's murkier for me though, since a motorcylce wheel and tire are much heavier and turning much, much faster.

 

[KootK]

RE bikes, how about we leave it at this:

1) If you support a bike thread, please "LIKE" the post where I proposed it. If you do, I'll summon you when the time comes.

2) If you do not support a bike thread, anonymously downvote the post where I proposed it. Finally, a valid application for that stupid up/down business.

I don't want to excessively clutter @human909's thread on clutter.

 

[Ron247]

You can add contractors and engineers from other arenas trying to get free structural engineering to the list of undesirable posts. In return, I solemnly promise not to go to their area and ask for free electrical, chemical, mechanical etc. final designs.

 

[KootK]

Bear with me, this will circle back to @human909's thang.

This forum was the brainchild of a guy named Dave who founded it in the 90s. He set the initial policies etc.

Whenever modifications to this site (or alternatives to it) are considered, the question always arises: just what is/was the secret sauce that made ET so successful for so long?

You know, because if you make changes all willy nilly, you risk throwing out the baby with the bath water.

I think that we can all agree that, historically, technological superiority was not the lynch pin of ET's success. This was probably the ugliest website in cyberspace for the better part of twenty years. But, still, I think it undeniable that this has been a pretty special place for a very long time.

The prevalent thinking amongst the folks that think about this has been that the secret sauce has really been Dave's policies. The policies you ask?!? How can that be given that nobody reads the policies and they are rarely enforced? Ridiculous!

It's because all of the policies were/are really off shoots of a single, over arching vision for the forum. That vision was/is this:

Eng-Tips is meant to be a place where real professional engineers exchange information with other, real professional engineers.

Pro's only. And the vision has been loosely enforced by the community, even if the offshoot policies mostly have not. When you see senior people stepping in to deal with bad actors, this is what it's about.

Everything about students, homeowners, and the rest has all been in service to that over arching vision.

How does it work? Like this:

1) You'll have a vibrant community here if you have all the world's mentees knocking at the door. And peers.

2) All the world's mentees will come knocking if they know that the world's best mentors are here.

3) The world's best mentors will be here if Dave's vision is held sacred and this remains a place where real engineers exchange information with other, real engineers. Because that's what the best mentors want in exchange for their time and energy. They want to have invested that time in energy in mentees fundamentally worthy of the investment.

This is what I was getting at in the PrettyGirl thread when I alluded ET being a beautiful garden in need of occasion weeding.

Let the garden get all fugged up with crap and you may lose the great mentors. Then you'll loose the huge community of mentees that come for those great mentors. Then the vibrant community dies. It's the secret sauce in reverse.

Or so the thinking goes. Do we really know that Dave's vision has been the secret sauce? We don't. This has, after all, been an N=1 experiment. But, man, is it ever scary taking risks with the health of such a beautiful garden.

 

[Tomfh]

Given that, it's a miracle that children ever figure out how to ride bicycles. The percentage of parents that give their children accurate instruction on how, actually, to turn a bike has to be pretty close to zero. It's a testament to physical intuition I suppose.

Yep. Very few people actually understand the physics of it, I certainly don’t. You just ride. As a kid, I read in a physics book that the wheels act like gyroscopes and that’s what keeps the bike stable. I didn’t realise that was basically rubbish until I was about 30

 

[GregLocock]

Gyroscopic expt http://www3.eng.cam.ac.uk/~hemh1/gyrobike.htm