That makes it a real PITA to people who are good at book
learnin' and not so hot at motor skills.


Those are the same people who get As in Chemistry but Ds in Chem
Lab.....


Most colleges make Chem class 3 credits but Chem Lab 1 credit,
and some others just lump the two together for 4 credits.
and the grades are usually weighed so labs rate for about 25%
of the final grade.

Similar things happen with Calculus class, I learned how
to solve exam problems but never did figure out how to
actually USE calculus to solve a real world problem.

In undergraduate college, if it doesn't show on the tests,
there's no point in learning it (unless you find something
interesting on its own).

Mike Coslo wrote:
wrote:


. . . Is it possible that the woman
engineers I don't see out here are operating in academia instead??
Would not surprise me a bit if that's the case.

I work with 5 or so regularly.

I think you are probably correct regarding their increased presence in
academia, compared to industry.

My thoughts on why that is so are based on two ideas. First is that the
academic world is sensitive to gender issues, due to groups that bust on
them if they are not.

The Harvard guy . . . . Yee-haw! SPANK!

This leads to the second reason. That is that
until there are a lot more women graduating in the engineering fields,
the academic world will scap them up pretty quickly.

No particular comment here, I've been completely out of touch with the
innards of academia for years.

Some have noted that women tend to think differently than men, and may
not want to go into the engineering fields as a result of that
difference. (note that this is as a trend- not as the circumstances
regarding any one woman) I am not sure if the differences are
instinctual, or culture based. Time will tell. And it will probably be
quite a long time.

Certainly women think differently than men and it's good thing they do
in several respects. As far as the timing of the emergence of large
numbers of woman engineers goes. Hell, I know scads of women
contemporaries of mine whose parents never gave them a chance to go
into higher education "because the woman's place is in the home
barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen". Never mind support their
daughters desires to become engineers. Society has come a long way
since those days but it's gonna take a few more generations before this
thinking actually prevails.

Of course she had "problems" with this male chauvinist pig.
Finally got
down to me suggesting that instead of differentiating by the man/woman
thing we differtiate by using "X-Chromosone people" and "Y-Chromosone
people" instead. Only got me about ten seconds of peace before she
recovered and got all over me again.

Yoiks!

Yeah yoicks . . she drove me batty, you would not believe it. 15 years
later she glomed two degrees before she turned 21, has four kids, a big
home in a cushy neighborhood and votes Republican . . . I recently told
her 13-year-old son about his Mom riding with Warlocks when she was 14.
I dunno how I survived but I have so now it's payback time for Pop-pop.
Her two sisters weren't cakewalks either.


In fairness to the particular engineer, she is not particularly
obnoxious. Mostly just wants to get her work done.

- Mike KB3EIA -

w3rv

wrote in message
oups.com...

Dee Flint wrote:
wrote in message
. . .

encounters with woman engineers. Is it possible that the woman
engineers I don't see out here are operating in academia instead??
Would not surprise me a bit if that's the case.


I work out in the trenches of the automotive industry

Got it, misimpression on my part, I think you've mentioned "your
students" in the past and I assumed the rest.


Ham radio students.

Dee D. Flint, N8UZE

wrote:
wrote:

Which was in a much different regime than we have today. The Novice
license was a stick and carrot ticket with the emphasis on the stick.
We had 365 days from the date the license was issued to upgrade to a
13WPM General or get booted out of ham radio.

Or you could get a Technician ticket - but that had no HF and the
written
was the same as General.

The Tech ticket was next to useless in the mid-'50s because VHF/UHF ham
radio didn't exist for all practical purposes. There were a few far-end
experimenters on the air and a few hams using some commercial gear on
6M and some using WW2 surplus gear on 2M like the SCR-522 TX. Novices
had acess to 2M phone but Techs were restricted to freqs above 220Mhz.
It was a really scewball situation. The result was that probably 98% of
the Techs were Novices who took the test for the General and passed the
writtens but flunked the 13WPM code test.

Of the dozens of local
Novices I knew I don't recall of any who failed to upgrade or bitched
about the code tests.

Me neither. In my time the Novice was 2 years but the same one-shot
no renewal no second chance ticket.

Biggest cause of dropouts in those days was lack of gear.

I didn't see much of that. The norm then was to have a station already
up and running before one went for the test. The 365 day window of
opportunity was tough and wasting time by not being ready to roll when
the ticket arrived was not a good idea.

Im convinced that events in the future will prove us right. Today we
have a "bloat the numbers at any cost" game which is doomed to backfire
eventually. The big question is how badly it will backfire and how much
damage will have been be done before it happens. The history of this
country over last couple decades is chock full of eamples of backing
away from failed giveaways. It's only a matter of time until ham radio
gets it's turn.

We're seeing it already. The restructuring of 2000 reduced both the
code
*and written* test requirements. Net result was a short-term peak in
numbers followed by a drop to below where we were in 2000 or even 1997.

Maybe FCC sees that - they could have dropped Element 1 back in 2003,
or any
time since, but they haven't seen fit to do so.

The longer they sit on the upcoming NPRM . . . !


A local oldster was inquiring as to when his license expired, because
he couldn't find his F.C.C. Wallpaper. We help him figure it out. We
need to keep the geezers on the air. I love talking to them. I hope
someone is looking out for me when I'm 91!

They're all treasures we have a responsibilty to protect. Often from
themselves. Heh.

Yep.

Is 'CNP online or should I use regular mail?

QRZ.com doesn't show an e-mail address for him. On the other hand that
info could be 'way out of date. I wouldn't mess with snail mail, he's a
local, I'd look up his phone number and call him then take it from
there. All he should need is the hard-copy renewal package which you
can order for him via e-mail or phone.


73 de Jim, N2EY
w3rv

w3rv

wrote:
Mike Coslo wrote:
wrote:




Certainly women think differently than men and it's good thing they do
in several respects. As far as the timing of the emergence of large
numbers of woman engineers goes. Hell, I know scads of women
contemporaries of mine whose parents never gave them a chance to go
into higher education "because the woman's place is in the home
barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen". Never mind support their
daughters desires to become engineers. Society has come a long way
since those days but it's gonna take a few more generations before this
thinking actually prevails.

Arrrgh! Change "prevails" to "dies out"!

wrote:

Please continue to praise the military morse ops, ,
especially those of the USN. The USN is NOT a branch of the
military you were in. Indeed, you weren't in ANY branch of the
military. You "served in other ways."

The Amateur Radio Service is not something in which you are a
participant. Perhaps you served in other ways.


Dave K8MN

John Smith wrote:
... the young person of today has a much great education than his/her
counterpart of even twenty years ago...

Yeah, some of 'em can't even make change without an electronic cash
register. Many of them read below the high school level. They have
little in the way of cultural literacy. Most are woefully inadequate in
geography. They're all sharp.

Dave K8MN

Cmd Buzz Corey wrote:
Top Posting John Smith wrote:

You know, Buzz, I wonder why he top posts when everyone
else here in rrap does the interactive thing.

Kelly:

Yep. I think you are unaware that some of us out here have
our licenses,
got our radios fired up, tune the bands--and it is nothing
but the same old, same old...

Obviously only tunes the 'phone subbands...

We do see all the rag chews, boring rants, same operators,
same gripes,
same rants, same little groups, same ideas, same
conversations as
yesterday--day, after day, after day...

So what do you want them to talk about? I thought hams could
converse
about whatever pleases them. I don't see anything in the FCC
regulations
that says hams can only talk about this and can't talk about
that. Do you?

Actually there are a few limitations. Hams are not
allowed to use amateur radio to discuss:

- Anything of "pecuniary interest", meaning something that
would result in a monetary profit for those in the discussion.
(K1MAN got into hot water
with that recently - he kept mentioning his website and
stuff that could be bought there.)

- Anything that could aid in the violation of local, state, or
federal laws. (Discussing ways to jumper your electric meter
in order to reduce your bill, for example, is prohibited.)

- Anything that meets FCC's legal definition of obscenity.

I don't recall any other subjects that hams aren't allowed to
discuss on the ham bands.

I am sure a lot of 'em are sitting there waiting for us
poor ignorant
ops to "get with it" and "come to the realization" of
just how vital and
interesting this all is and SHOULD BE to us..

If you aren't interested no one is holding a gun
to your head to make
you listen. Have enough sense to either change to another
frequency/band
or turn the damn radio off and find something else to do.

I think you're missing an important point, Buzz.

John is complaining about the content of what he hears on
the ham bands (actually the 'phone subbands) but doesn't tell
us what *he* would find interesting to talk about. Nor does
he seem to be setting an example.

Well I am one which does not and cannot appreciate it...
if the fault
lies with me and my interests and views--so be it...

Thank goodness not everyone has to share your views or
interests.

If I am wrong and all these young guys just can't wait
to get a license
and startup a QSO so they hear these old guys fart
and rant--well, that
is just a short coming of mine--and, those young dynamic guys who are
running the world right now and providing new ideas, designs and methods
are probably on the way here right now to find the old
farts.... I'll
just sit here and wait for 'em, I need a change... maybe I can chat
with one or two of 'em--if they can quit their hero worship
of you guys
long enough... grin

John

Sure sounds like ham radio isn't for you. Maybe you should go
back to cb and the 'freeband'.

Sounds like ageism to me.

73 de Jim, N2EY

Dave Heil wrote:
wrote:

Please continue to praise the military morse ops, ,
especially those of the USN. The USN is NOT a branch of the
military you were in. Indeed, you weren't in ANY branch of the
military. You "served in other ways."


The Amateur Radio Service is not something in which you are a
participant. Perhaps you served in other ways.

game, set, match!

- Mike KB3EIA -

wrote:
Phil Kane wrote:
On 15 Jun 2005 17:01:18 -0700, wrote:

In all my 43 years in engineering I've met a grand total of four woman
engineers, two MEs, one EE and a Chem E.

In my 50 years in engineering I've =dated= more women engineers than
you seem to have met, was engaged to one (nuclear engineer) and
married another (EE). In my wife's office alone there are more than
4 =PEs= on her floor, including the chief of the structural engineering
section (imagine that, a lady tower engineer). Had my wife gone
through the paperwork as she talked about twenty years ago she, too,
would have been a PE.

Our contesting club alone has
three female members, an old girlfriend is a ham and I met W3CUL. Out
of Lord only knows how many engineers and hams I've met over the years.

In our club, the largest radio club in the state if not in the
Pacific Northwest, about 1/3 of the hams are women, and of them,
about half are active on the air in some fashion or other.

This topic is getting interesting, I'd like to take it a bit further.
I'm at a complete loss to understand why there's such an obvious
disparity in the numbers of woman hams & engineers in this part of the
country vs. in your part of the country.

Me too!

With respect to the socioeconomicpolitical mindsets Oregon is well
known for marching to it's own occasionally quirky liberal drummer
while PA is a typical old-form mid-Atlantic centrist sort of place. I
'spose there are some of the usual left coast / right coast differences
which sort of favor left coast women and might explain part of it. But
good grief, we're not talking Albania and Sweden here.

But there are other differences. Population density in BosWash is
much higher than in the Pacific Northwest. Things like telephones
and TV were here sooner, particularly in terms of "most people have
them". And most of this area has been "settled" by non-Native Americans
for 300+ years.

I've mulled the matter off and on for a few hours and it occurs to me
that maybe, just maybe our exposures to women engineers in
particular
have been quite different. As in where you've churned your coin vs.
where I've gotten mine over the years. I've only spent a total of ten
years working for large entities, six as a Navy employee back
when
woman engineers simply didn't exist for all practical purposes, then
much later I did four with the DuPont central engineering
center in the
mid-1980s. Three of the four woman engineers I've met and cited were
DuPont employees, the fourth was a short-time part timer I ran into on
a specific small-biz project whose real job was with some large firm or
another.

Another factor is which engineering disciplines and sub-disciplines you
encounter. There may be a lot more female
ChemEs than MechEs. Etc.

My class of 33 at Penn (1976, Moore School of Electrical Engineering)
graduated 3 women - all specializing in computers. I don't think Towne
School graduated any female engineers that year.

Of course that's ancient history compared to today's ratios, but
it shows a starting point almost 30 years ago.

Except for the six I did with the Navy, a gig I loved and was enormous
fun I've spent most of the rest of my career in smokestack small-medium
size busineses. I have allergic reactions to huge employers for a
number of reasons and generally avoid them. I despise
corporate beige with a purple passion

If I have it right you spent most of your career with the FCC, another
huge entity. Is it possible that women in engineering tend to
gravitate
in large numbers to major entities where fair employment
practices are
actually practiced and you've gotten involved with more of them than I've ever managed to meet?

Perhaps not so much "gravitate" as in "are forced by circumstances"?

All of which is and has been changing. But it takes a long
time for such trends to make their way through the workforce.

--
73 de K2ASP - Phil Kane

From a Clearing in the Silicon Forest
Beaverton (Washington County) Oregon

w3rv

Out here in the smokestacks of Delaware County PA

Ditto if you can say Radnor has smokestacks.

73 de Jim, N2EY