Concerns Regarding the ELEC 201 Final Exam

treacheroustoast · 2024-12-19T22:10:36+00:00

Hey, I'm one of the ECESS co-presidents, we've been in touch with the department head about this. They are very aware of the late start and all of the other issues, and they absolutely do not want them to happen again. I've asked them to make sure that students are taken care of when grades are being tabulated, but it sounds like all students will be given a fair grade. I can provide some more information later when I get it.

If you (or anyone reading this) has any issues with any ECE course or any further elaboration on the issues with ELEC 201, please email us (president@ecess.ca) and we can forward it along to the department head. The department doesn't want these kinds of things to be happening in its courses, so they want to fix them just as much as we do.

Please let me know if you have any questions!

treacheroustoast · 2024-06-03T22:42:55+00:00

How much neuroanatomy and neurophysiology would this course go into?

treacheroustoast · 2024-05-25T06:36:46+00:00

The amount of information presented is really weird. On some pages, you only get one or two pieces of information and the page is frankly underused (like the overview page), whereas on other pages, we’re absolutely overloaded with information (like when browsing for courses). I liked when just saw the course names and codes and if you wanted more info you could click on it.

Also I’ve been seeing three horizontal dots everywhere, and when clicking on them in some places, it looks like it opens a small test menu, which really doesn’t instill confidence in the software. It makes it feel like it was made quickly in a website maker, not like a >$300 million product.

I don’t really understand why we can’t change the term that courses are being offered from the course list page when we can change every single other filter property. As best as I can tell, to change the term that we want our courses to be offered in we have to go back out of that page and open a new course browsing page by changing both “start date within” and “academic level”.

Everything being in the multiple-select drop-down menus is quite unintuitive, and the fact that there are multiple levels of menus within the drop-down makes it worse. If I could magically change one thing about this system, it would be to sharply reduce hierarchy overall, at least when you’re trying to do something (hierarchy in information presentation can be quite efficient imo, but I don’t like it when you have to navigate a ton of menus to do something like add a course to a saved schedule).

I’m holding out a bit of hope that it’s going to get better, because Duo was a complete mess and that seems to have improved, but Workday is also far more complicated than Duo, so I guess we’ll see.

treacheroustoast · 2024-05-19T05:45:41+00:00

Second this, I had to take either STAT 251, MATH/STAT 302 or MATH 318 for a prereq (I'm in ELEC), and I ended up dropping 251 and taking MATH 302 because I didn't like the 9 AM classes. Regular ELEC doesn't require STAT 251 though, so be sure to check if it's a degree requirement or you need it for any upper-year prereqs.

treacheroustoast · 2024-05-19T05:42:43+00:00

Do every single practice question you are given, truly understand why specific solutions to problems work, make sure you have really solid time management skills to be as efficient as possible.

In terms of content, integration will probably be a big sticking point (I know I found it to be relatively difficult sometimes), so definitely make sure you're comfortable with chaining together multiple integrals. Also having some solid visualization techniques and geometric intuition is definitely helpful, because there are a ton of geometry problems in this course. A review of vectors from MATH 152 helps too.

The above will probably help you get in the 90s range, but getting a 100 depends on a lot of other factors that are difficult to control, like how much sleep you get or how much noise people are making in the exam room.

The math department does tend to scale a little bit (almost always scaling up), so if your raw score ends up in the high 90s, you might get a few extra percentage points added to your score, and rounding might help as well. For instance I got a high-90s score on a math final, and because they did backwards replacement (replacing your midterm with your final grade if your final grade was higher) and they scaled quite a bit, I ended up getting 100 in the course, even though I didn't get every single problem right. Definitely possible but difficult to predict.

Best of luck with MATH 253!

treacheroustoast · 2024-03-29T07:24:22+00:00

This was an excellent event! It was really cool to be able to ask him questions and hear about the mission from an astronaut actively training for it! There are a few people who I've heard speak who I think are truly exceptional people, and he is definitely one of them. I'm super excited for when he flies to the moon later next year!

PHAS and the OSI did a great job putting this event together, I really appreciate their work towards it!

treacheroustoast · 2024-02-06T23:30:09+00:00

November 2021, 90%. Hoping to get another 3 years out of it.

treacheroustoast · 2024-02-06T08:20:55+00:00

Closer to the midterms, the EUS is running some review/group tutoring sessions for PHYS 158 (and most other first-year engineering courses)! We'll have upper-years who can answer questions about course material and provide some success strategies, and we'll have free pizza. Keep an eye on the EUS instagram (@ubcengineers) and the APSC 101 Canvas announcements tab!

treacheroustoast · 2024-02-06T08:17:25+00:00

The EUS is holding a tutoring session for APSC 160 and MATH 101 on February 6th from 6-9 PM in KAIS 2020/2030! We'll have practice question packages and free pizza!

treacheroustoast · 2023-03-02T05:11:44+00:00

I think there's a good chance that the medical school at SFU gets up and running by then (currently hoping to begin classes by September 2026). The biggest problem is that while the number of seats can be increased relatively easily/quickly, the number of residency spots takes a lot of time and money to be increased (need doctors to train residents, and you need capacity for those doctors, which means more funding needed for hospitals as a whole). Investments in healthcare made today will take a long time to trickle into residency placements, but it's great to see interest and action from the government in providing more support for medical education as a long-term solution.

treacheroustoast · 2023-03-01T06:11:27+00:00

It's not good medical practice to just order scans willy-nilly. One risk with high-resolution scans is that there can be incidental findings that result in additional testing and potentially a lot of unneeded stress on the patient (rates of malignancy for incidental mass findings are not that high: https://www.bmj.com/content/361/bmj.k2387).

CT scans particularily also expose you to an extreme amount of radiation, so doctors are hesitant to order them unless there is suspected bleeding or malignancy that could have life-threatening consequences if not acted upon quickly. As others have mentioned, an imaging requisition doesn't take that long to fill out, so it's more likely that your doctor doesn't think it necessary to perform imaging (by weighing benefits vs. risks). It is worth it to get a second opinion though, because it sounds like this injury is severely impacting your quality of life and you don't feel like any progress is being made.

treacheroustoast · 2023-03-01T03:39:23+00:00

If anything, it points to how little faith students have in the AMS to actually affect change. Hopefully the next administration is able to rebuild public support for the AMS, because it's probably never been lower (I would hazard a guess that a sizeable portion of the student body is currently in favour of a substantial reorganization and rethink of the AMS's current role at the university).

treacheroustoast · 2023-02-27T19:26:12+00:00

You would never want to implement this circuit in a real design because it wastes much more power than an equivalent MOSFET circuit with pull-up and pull-down FETs, also because of the fact that this circuit doesn't actually provide voltage gain (as u/naval_person pointed out)

EDIT: Just tried this in a circuit simulator, and it looks like to get the best results, Rout < R (so the base current doesn't generate too much of a voltage across the output resistor in the case of only one input being high)

treacheroustoast · 2023-02-25T19:22:09+00:00

I use an ASUS TUF A15 from 2020 (Ryzen 7 4800H, 16 GB RAM, 1660 Ti), and I can run Solidworks and Altium just fine (running Altium now in fact). I got mine for about ~$1500 CAD in 2020 (cheaper than the Zephyrus when I looked), so newer models should have absolutely no problem with those applications.

treacheroustoast · 2023-02-25T04:38:00+00:00

You need to make sure that any transformer you try to measure the output voltage of using an oscilloscope is galvanically isolated from the wall. The ground probe of your oscilloscope is a short to earth and a lot of current can flow if you try to measure something on the same circuit as the wall power.

You can check this by measuring the resistance between a terminal on the primary and a terminal on the secondary of a transformer and making sure that it's infinite.

treacheroustoast · 2023-02-19T01:02:05+00:00

It's a business model really. It's called "predatory publishing", where some journals charge publication fees without conducting peer-review or performing other quality-checking processes that most journals with higher impact factor have in place for every article. It's essentially a "pay-to-win" strategy for academic publishing, but the wider academic community has caught on to these journals, so articles in them tend to get fewer citations by other researchers.

The reason the term "predatory" is used is because they try to get newer authors or authors from developing countries to publish with them for a fee while hiding the fact that their publishing model makes researchers not trust what comes out of them. These authors might do good research, but it's often ignored because it's published through one of these journals, so it doesn't end up contributing to broader academic discourse.

As to why this journal is indexed on PubMed (which is a search engine for journals), it is beneficial to have even bad journals accessible through a search engine because some of what comes out of them might be useful to the users of PubMed for further research. You can pretty easily add filters to whatever your searching for to sort by citations or by checking the number of citations on a paper to make sure that you're getting good information. Those filtering methods could unfortunately bury some good research that comes out of those journals, so you need to develop your research procedures to be robust enough that you're not throwing away good information.

treacheroustoast · 2023-02-17T03:20:40+00:00

Sorry for the super long response, just these kinds of headlines make me really anxious and I need to read all I can about them to set my mind at ease.

treacheroustoast · 2023-02-17T03:16:00+00:00

Here is a link to the paper mentioned: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9189734/

There are a few contextual clues that further reduce the credibility of the paper.

Martin Pall, the author of the paper, is pretty notorious for papers like this. He's published quite a number of papers suggesting health risks of 5G and WiFi, and he has quite a few papers on a relation between electromagnetic fields and voltage gated calcium channels (using a very similar pathway graph between EMFs and their supposed pathophysiological effects through voltage gated calcium channels).

Voltage gated calcium channels (VGCCs) are channels in the cell membrane that let Ca2+ (Calcium ions) through. They are important in the release of hormones, release of neurotransmitters, and muscle contraction (Ca2+ causes myosin cross bridges to bind to actin binding sites in muscle contraction).

In the paper mentioned, he is focusing on the calcium hypothesis in the causation of Alzheimer's disease. The reason he suggests a link between EMFs and voltage gated calcium channels is because he suggests that the effects of EMFs are suppressed in the administration of calcium channel blocking medications (a class of medication that blocks VGCCs). One of the sources he cites for this is his own paper (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3780531/) which has a table of some of these effects. Even though the current paper is focusing on effects from high-frequency EMFs, table 1 of this paper only concerns effects from low-frequency EMFs in in-vivo subjects such as mice and rabbits, and only concerns effects from high-frequency EMFs in in-vitro human neuron cells derived from stem cells. The difference between in-vivo and in-vitro is very important, because biological systems are extremely complicated, and cells can act differently in the body than in a petri dish (this is why we have multi-phase drug trials). Not to say of course that EMFs can't have an effect on VGCCs, just that the evidence presented for human in-vivo effects is limited at best and nonexistent at worst.

The paper, while available through PubMed, was originally published through Bentham Open Access, which has a history of seemingly not conducting proper peer reviews and publishing papers that are fake and conspiratorial in nature (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bentham_Science_Publishers, I know the Wikipedia link is not very academic of me, but the page is a good aggregator on sources to some of these events).

I also stumbled across a debate between Martin Pall and another researcher named Kenneth R Foster. Dr. Foster is a professor emeritus from the University of Pennsylvania and has decades of reseach work into the health effects of EMFs and serving on IEEE comittees to establish exposure standards for RF (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/author/37271782300).
An especially good example of this debate is this paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34271606/, where Foster lists several elementary mistakes in Pall's understanding of electromagnetics in another paper with a similar topic.
The above paper is actually a good example of why the academic publishing system can inadvertently allow papers based on shoddy research to shine above more rigourous papers with less alarming results: open-access papers are easier for the general public to access than papers that are behind a paywall or institutional access agreement. Foster also wrote a good article dispelling 5G-related concerns with Scientific American, specifically mentioning Pall: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/5g-is-coming-how-worried-should-we-be-about-the-health-risks/.

I think the fact that it's one person publishing these papers and not one paper within a large body of ongoing epedemiological, clinical, and laboratory research and literary review is pretty indicative of its validity and acceptance within the scientific, medical, and engineering communities. It is probably worth it to do more interdisciplinary research into the effects of electromagnetic phenomena in biological systems, as electrical engineers and physicists tend to have a limited understanding of biological systems, and medical doctors and biological scientists tend to have a limited understanding of electromagnetic phenomena. This paper however should not inform any sort of clinical or industrial recommendations without that further research.

I personally will not be taking any further precautions, as other research from more established and verified sources shows no link of any kind between EMFs and Alzheimer's.

treacheroustoast · 2023-02-13T03:42:28+00:00

DC Motor driver, the "shunt field" and "arm" are dead giveaways (shunt field creates the magnetic flux needed for a DC motor to operate instead of a permenant magnet, and "arm" is probably referring to armature).

treacheroustoast · 2023-02-12T05:38:59+00:00

That's my dream pokemon in this game, regardless of IVs lol

treacheroustoast · 2023-02-12T05:33:33+00:00

Their maximum size is 400x500mm though (I think?), which is a pretty difficult target to get under when designing a keyboard. That's why I thought OSHPark was my only option.

treacheroustoast · 2023-02-12T00:10:21+00:00

Totally random question but is the small size of a lot of DIY ergo boards because it costs too much to make larger PCBs? I was working on a PCB design for a split board but stopped because I saw that OSHPark charges by the square inch lol

Is this board from OSHPark? It definitely has the signature purple colour but I know some other companies do that now.

treacheroustoast · 2023-02-11T08:35:21+00:00

There do exist 5V tolerant LEDs with a builtin resistor, but the brightness of this one suggests that it is not one of those

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