Re: Deyan's list of concept names

On Sun, Jul 2, 2023 at 6:13 PM Paul Libbrecht <paul@hoplahup.net> wrote:

> Hello Deyan and all,
>
>
Hi Paul,


> I’m a bit puzzled.
> “Electrical Engineering” is not a specialty I’d expect within K12. You
> become electrical engineering after choosing after k12. Am I wrong?
>

First, let me mention that this question is a bit of a red herring. I gave
the "i vs j" as an example, but I wasn't constructing a K12-contained realm
in that email reply.
Note both the original topic of the email thread, and my own personal focus
(and my mentioning the Open list as often as I can :-)).
In the case where a document had a lowercase <mi> i </mi> variable, a
highschool teacher may want to make clear if this is the imaginary unit, or
an index, an integer, an electric current, or... I'll let ChatGPT expand
more:
https://chat.openai.com/share/d24c530f-ea7a-4849-bc12-a1607e5dcaad

That said, to your question - yes, there are K12 examples of electrical
engineering specialties.
For an example that is in my general vicinity, see "High Technology High
School" in New Jersey:
http://www.hths.mcvsd.org/courses
which offers 8 different courses under Engineering/Technology.

Electrical engineering (usually called "electronics" at the highschool
level) is also a traditional topic for profiled/professional highschools in
Eastern Europe.
A typical example would be the Sofia "Vocational High School of
Electronics".
Although I have never surveyed the exact physics notations they have
decided to use, and the level to which they develop the subjects.

So, the differentiatiation between i and j is not k12.
>

I'm afraid the retreat to simplicity is a lost cause, Paul. I see different
group members try it at different times, but it strikes me as similar to
the story of "the little dutch boy who saved Holland":
https://drboli.wordpress.com/2009/03/06/the-little-dutch-boy-who-saved-holland/

Too many holes to plug, eventually we get overrun. If one is working on a
general automated tool for emitting MathML Intent, it is much better to
work with the assumption of ambiguity being possible, rather than to invest
in ever taller dikes guarding the "unambiguous core".

In my mind, unless we can make the claim that the letter "i" is *always*
used for the imaginary unit in K12 materials, we have *some* ambiguity at
hand.
In which case an author *may* want to make it clear what was meant by that
"i". So they'd have reason to use the ":imaginary-unit" property for an
accessible description.
And if they also wanted that concept spoken in place of the simple letter,
they would drop the semicolon and directly use the "imaginary-unit" intent.
But again, these are preliminary thoughts on my part, I think some details
remain to be clarified in such examples.

12th year is kind of an advanced period anyways. We did have complex
> numbers and an amount of other advanced topics such as linear algebra or
> differential geometry but we did not have the named electrostatic
> constants.  It appears that almost all differential geometry we had is no
> more in normal standards but probability and statistics now are (even going
> as low as 4th grades, 10y old!).
>

Right, some materials get shuffled around the grades, some get removed,
others added. We did a lot more highschool calculus in the 1980s in
Bulgaria than we do today. And I think statistics and probability theory
have started to get a firmer foothold in recent years.
But if the materials taught in each grade can get shuffled in a 20 year
span, they can change again by 2050. Who knows what K12 will imply exactly
in a couple of decades?


> It’ll be impossible to not be partial as an expert. I think.
> And we should accept this.
>

I agree, it is easy to get fooled into thinking that the materials one is
used to are representative.
I try to be careful when accepting a bias as a given, without first
examining it in detail. Sadly, that is especially hard to do with my own
biases - much easier with the biases of others :-)

Deyan


>
> Paul
>
>
> On 2 Jul 2023, at 19:06, Deyan Ginev wrote:
>
> > Btw, in case anyone is wondering, the permittivity-of-vacuum[1] and
> permeability-of-vacuum[2] concepts are quickly detected in grade 12 physics
> education in India, via a classic search that appends "khan academy" to
> them. Which is just my expedient heuristic to check if something is
> ubiquitous in educational materials. So while it is quite hard to
> meaningfully compare if they are more or less common than "mean" and
> "median" (and to whom? an electrical engineer may have a different answer),
> at least they fit the K-12 designation. Another point is that since they
> have natural self-voicing speech, it is possible they fit better as
> ":property" annotations. But I think that is still an open question - they
> should likely get the same treatment that the imaginary-unit (i vs j) would
> get, whichever direction we decide that.
> >
> > [1]
> https://www.khanacademy.org/science/in-in-class-12th-physics-india/in-in-electrostatic-potential-and-capacitance/x51bd77206da864f3:capacitance-parallel-plate-capacitors/a/capacitors-article
> >
> > [2]
> https://www.khanacademy.org/science/physics/magnetic-forces-and-magnetic-fields/magnetic-field-current-carrying-wire/a/what-are-magnetic-fields
>