Soviet production of electronic components

[janoc]

Its unfair to say that "these Chinese students were almost always utterly lost unless told exactly what and how to do". You can't hold the smartest ones back by not nurturing their problem solving skills. It comes naturally to them. The people let down by excessive spoon feeding are the middling students.

Sorry but that is a rather oddball argument. Of course, the best of the best will prevail despite whatever screwball school system they were exposed to. However, what about the rest? Or those shouldn't have a chance at education because they aren't "good enough" and didn't manage to overcome the handicaps imposed on them by the school system? And that were not really their fault? (I have heard such views as well). Social arguments aside, even from a purely pragmatic point of view that would be a disastrous approach - we are sorely lacking engineers already - and 90% of those positions don't really need those best of the best, the "middling" ones would be fine.

I am not sure why do you think that what I have said was unfair. I have been speaking only about my own experience with my own students, not generalizing it to all Asian kids. However, I can tell you that even colleagues from places like Oxford had the same issues.

And finally - you are speaking about spoon feeding. That's not all what I have meant. For me spoon feeding is giving the student everything prepared on a silver plate so that they don't have to do anything themselves. I am not sure whether you have had any experience with Chinese students but I can tell you mine were certainly not "spoon fed" in the schools they were coming from.

What they had behind them were years of a hard drill - how do you think they got those math skills, for example? However, the problem with drill is that you don't get to learn how to actually solve any problems apart from those you were drilled on - and then have no idea what to do when faced with something new. What I meant is that these students were used to the teacher telling them - "draw this, calculate that". The decisions were made for them by someone of a "higher rank" and it wasn't up to them to question them, not that they were "spoon fed". There is a large cultural difference there - in Asia the teacher is a figure of authority and what they say is sacred.

One consequence of this is also that an Asian student will almost never tell you they didn't understand something - they will always say that yes, they understood everything, even though they have no clue whatsoever. It took me a while to figure this one out. The reason for it is that the teacher is a senior figure in their culture and saying that they didn't understand something would mean the teacher didn't do a good enough job - which would be disrespectful. So they will never say that. And you are left scratching your head about what is going on.

[coppice]

Its unfair to say that "these Chinese students were almost always utterly lost unless told exactly what and how to do". You can't hold the smartest ones back by not nurturing their problem solving skills. It comes naturally to them. The people let down by excessive spoon feeding are the middling students.

Sorry but that is a rather oddball argument. Of course, the best of the best will prevail despite whatever screwball school system they were exposed to. However, what about the rest? Or those shouldn't have a chance at education because they aren't "good enough" and didn't manage to overcome the handicaps imposed on them by the school system? And that were not really their fault? (I have heard such views as well). Social arguments aside, even from a purely pragmatic point of view that would be a disastrous approach - we are sorely lacking engineers already - and 90% of those positions don't really need those best of the best, the "middling" ones would be fine.

There are a lot of bright Asian students that their education system can't break too badly, so "almost always" is just hyperbole. Get a sense of proportion.

I am not sure why do you think that what I have said was unfair. I have been speaking only about my own experience with my own students, not generalizing it to all Asian kids. However, I can tell you that even colleagues from places like Oxford had the same issues.

And finally - you are speaking about spoon feeding. That's not all what I have meant. For me spoon feeding is giving the student everything prepared on a silver plate so that they don't have to do anything themselves. I am not sure whether you have had any experience with Chinese students but I can tell you mine were certainly not "spoon fed" in the schools they were coming from.

What they had behind them were years of a hard drill - how do you think they got those math skills, for example? However, the problem with drill is that you don't get to learn how to actually solve any problems apart from those you were drilled on - and then have no idea what to do when faced with something new. What I meant is that these students were used to the teacher telling them - "draw this, calculate that". The decisions were made for them by someone of a "higher rank" and it wasn't up to them to question them, not that they were "spoon fed". There is a large cultural difference there - in Asia the teacher is a figure of authority and what they say is sacred.

I have spent the last 25 years living and working in East Asia with the engineers that come out of their education systems. What you describe is exactly what they term spoon feeding, and what many of them are unhappy about with their education. Hard drilling on narrowly focussed problems, not always gaining much depth of understanding, or development of their ability to break a high level problem down into pieces and solve those pieces. A whole lot of drilling on page after page of fairly similar questions, until they can just spot the patterns in the exams and rapidly churn out the answers. Anything that doesn't fit the patterns makes them step back, because they haven't had their ability to deal with arbitrary problems nurtured in their classes. The brightest are just thrown for a moment. The less able can get badly stuck.

One consequence of this is also that an Asian student will almost never tell you they didn't understand something - they will always say that yes, they understood everything, even though they have no clue whatsoever. It took me a while to figure this one out. The reason for it is that the teacher is a senior figure in their culture and saying that they didn't understand something would mean the teacher didn't do a good enough job - which would be disrespectful. So they will never say that. And you are left scratching your head about what is going on.

Yeah, I can relate to that. The healthy respect for education and educators in Asia is certainly a good thing, though. Its a pity there isn't more of that in the west. The downside is their referring to degree certificates as sandpaper. I doubt that term needs explanation.

[CatalinaWOW]

A bit off topic, but Soviet military products kept up with western products (or were superior) at least partly due to different approaches.  One obvious and widely reported example was ICBMs.  Soviets had superior rocket engines, thus more throw weight, and less need to miniaturize.  Another fairly widely report difference was Soviet superiority in many types of math.  Rather than needing a super computer to simulate or numerically solve a system a direct solution was developed.  When microprocessors took off the advantage for that approach was too great.  There are many examples of this sort of thing. 

While some claim some inherent superiority in one system or another, often it is more a matter of chance.  The winner is the one that picked the right horse initially.  When IC's started out their widespread impact wasn't widely understood, if at all.  By the time the difference was obvious (a decade or two later) it was impossible to catch up on the investment in all of the varied infrastructure.

[rstofer]

The Americans (us) spent a lot of time and money developing a ball-point pen that would work in zero gravity.  In essence, we had to invent the Parker T-Ball Jotter at .gov expense.  It worked very well!  The space program was saved!

The Russians used pencils.

[ataradov]

The Russians used pencils.

This is such a horrible urban legend. Nobody used pencils in space (for longer than was absolutely necessary), they leave floating graphite, and you don't want that stuff around.

[Cerebus]

There are a lot of bright Asian students that their education system can't break too badly, so "almost always" is just hyperbole. Get a sense of proportion.

He's just reporting his direct experience and appears to be trying to do so fairly. If it differs from yours, say so politely. Get a sense of respect for other people's experience^*.

^*See what I did there? Feel nice to be talked at like that?

[Cerebus]

The Russians used pencils.

This is such a horrible urban legend. Nobody used pencils in space (for longer than was absolutely necessary), they leave floating graphite, and you don't want that stuff around.

It's such a good story that it'll never die, no matter how little truth it actually embodies.

[basinstreetdesign]

Now its China who demonstrates it does not have the IQ to create anything much, just copy and steal, without a conscience.

Read this, white pig*.

https://iq-research.info/en/page/average-iq-by-country

Macau is too small to acquire useful statistics and North Korea keeps to itself too much, otherwise greater China and Japan and greater Korea will take top 6 of the list.

*: to the particular individual. I don't have a beef to the general white population.

To my jaundiced eye there seems to be some small correlation of higher IQ to those people who are in the habit of applying themselves to difficult (probably technical) problems.

Also notice on that map that Canada is just slightly bluer than the good ol' USA.

[raptor1956]

Not having the brains to be innovative, Russian scum copied most IC's that US companies invented - even Intel ICs. Now its China who demonstrates it does not have the IQ to create anything much, just copy and steal, without a conscience. The USA should always be honoured for its great technological leadership in electronics. No-one can deny America's contribution to electronics and technological innovation - past, present and future.

Even most Americans with a little knowledge of history will tell you America was a technologically somewhat backward country at the end of the second world war. The reason they did so well in that war was their size gave them enormous production capacity. They didn't do well through their technological edge. After the second world war the cold war made America open to importing talent from any place it could find it, and build a technological edge in as many fields as they could. This worked rather well. Walk through an engineering department in the US, and you'll find a lot of the smartest and most respected members of the team come from those countries you think lack talent.

Someone coming to the table late is going to be at a disadvantage, endlessly trying to catch up with those who arrived first. China knew that, and has done a lot to absorb technology and catch up over the last 40 years. Now many of its major technology companies are on par with western ones, they are increasingly funding original research. Expect to see interesting things from them in the coming decades.

Now this is exactly the kind of comment I was hoping to get -- very interesting indeed.


Brian

[raptor1956]

Not having the brains to be innovative, Russian scum copied most IC's that US companies invented - even Intel ICs. Now its China who demonstrates it does not have the IQ to create anything much, just copy and steal, without a conscience. The USA should always be honoured for its great technological leadership in electronics. No-one can deny America's contribution to electronics and technological innovation - past, present and future.

Even most Americans with a little knowledge of history will tell you America was a technologically somewhat backward country at the end of the second world war. The reason they did so well in that war was their size gave them enormous production capacity. They didn't do well through their technological edge. After the second world war the cold war made America open to importing talent from any place it could find it, and build a technological edge in as many fields as they could. This worked rather well. Walk through an engineering department in the US, and you'll find a lot of the smartest and most respected members of the team come from those countries you think lack talent.

Someone coming to the table late is going to be at a disadvantage, endlessly trying to catch up with those who arrived first. China knew that, and has done a lot to absorb technology and catch up over the last 40 years. Now many of its major technology companies are on par with western ones, they are increasingly funding original research. Expect to see interesting things from them in the coming decades.

Well, the US was not the backwater prior to WWII that some make it out to be and the role the US played as the arsenal of democracy, as it was called, can hardly be ignored.  To be sure it was behind Britain and Germany but not by that much.  The powered airplane and automotive assembly line were pioneered in the USA long before WWII.

I agree, however, that for many things the east, that is China, has largely caught up at the consumer level but much of that is down to the fact that they now produce most of the worlds consumer goods.  Apple may design the iPhone etc in the USA, but most of it is made, or more accurately assembled, in China.  The other eastern nations were on par with the west sooner -- think South Korea, Taiwan and of course, Japan.  At the cutting edge, however, the west still leads the east though even there the gap is closing.

Sadly, with all the talent at there disposal, Russia has lagged behind with the singular exception of military hardware where they are pretty near on par with the west.  One has to wonder what Putin thinks about there situation vis-a-vis China -- at the beginning of 1990 China wasn't even in the top 10 of world economies and within two decades they became number 2.  Russia has focused so much on the west they hardly noticed as the southern neighbor eclipsed them economically and, by reasonable projections, militarily within a decade or so.  Of course, if the current trend continues China will become the dominant economy, supplanting the USA, by about 2040 and perhaps sooner. 


Brian

[VK3DRB]

To my jaundiced eye there seems to be some small correlation of higher IQ to those people who are in the habit of applying themselves to difficult (probably technical) problems.

I was attacking VK3DRB's IQ point. But to your point, your are correct, higher IQ doesn't mean better problem solving.
My general experience is Chinese students, before having their first job, generally suck at solving real engineering problems.
That's why still in many Chinese companies, they have the apprentice system.
Many young Chinese college graduates know their math, but have no experience on how real life works.
If let them to design a board, they will literally spend hours calculating how much decoupling they need near an IC, rather than just sprinkle some 0.1uF dust around.
This usually gets much better after a few years learning from a master, then the apprentice goes to a higher job, starting doing some low-level designs on his or her own.

There is a capstone project before graduation a Chinese university, but usually the project is simple, and is a team project. As long as one in a 3 person team knows what to do, the rest 2 are literally doing nothing, maybe some documentation or purchasing.
I can complain all day on how average Chinese university graduates suck, but that has nothing with IQ. When you choose to spoon feed them with math, you are taking away their capability of sensing the world with their own sense, and replacing it with cold, hard numbers.

Hey, I was talking about technological IQ of the country, not of individuals. Japan had a low tech IQ until after the war. William Demming started it all. From dumb copiers to smart innovators. There are exceptions of course. Japanese invention produced the blue LED, hence why the inventors were awarded the Novel Prize for Physics. The Shinkansen, VHS and Beta, and Flash memory are a few other examples of Japanese innvoation.

As for IP, if a patent has expired, there is no issue - copy it until the cows come home. That is why we can buy Roundup cheaply rather than paying Monsanto a fortune. But until the expiry, Monsanto deserved every penny a a reward for their R & D and innovation, producing a great product. But stealing intellectual property or copyright should not be tolerated. Talent and innovation should be rewarded and protected.

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/are-chinese-hackers-stealing-trade-secrets-from/5469020.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-24/chinese-firm-sinovel-convicted-in-u-s-of-trade-secret-theft.

The USA is clean but not squeaky clean. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/04/how-the-aussie-government-invented-wifi-and-sued-its-way-to-430-million/
But we can thank the USA for its outstanding contribution to electronics over the years, unequalled by no other country. It will be this way for many years to come.

Who invented TV? Before the Scots lay claim to it they should check out the work of Vladimir Zworykin. In any case, it was the American innovation that made it a commercial reality that we all benefit from today.

[raptor1956]

The Russians used pencils.

This is such a horrible urban legend. Nobody used pencils in space (for longer than was absolutely necessary), they leave floating graphite, and you don't want that stuff around.

Thanks Alex, you beat me to it.  A US company developed a 'space pen' on the own with there own money and no long after NASA went with it so did the Soviets.


Brian

[raptor1956]

To my jaundiced eye there seems to be some small correlation of higher IQ to those people who are in the habit of applying themselves to difficult (probably technical) problems.

I was attacking VK3DRB's IQ point. But to your point, your are correct, higher IQ doesn't mean better problem solving.
My general experience is Chinese students, before having their first job, generally suck at solving real engineering problems.
That's why still in many Chinese companies, they have the apprentice system.
Many young Chinese college graduates know their math, but have no experience on how real life works.
If let them to design a board, they will literally spend hours calculating how much decoupling they need near an IC, rather than just sprinkle some 0.1uF dust around.
This usually gets much better after a few years learning from a master, then the apprentice goes to a higher job, starting doing some low-level designs on his or her own.

There is a capstone project before graduation a Chinese university, but usually the project is simple, and is a team project. As long as one in a 3 person team knows what to do, the rest 2 are literally doing nothing, maybe some documentation or purchasing.
I can complain all day on how average Chinese university graduates suck, but that has nothing with IQ. When you choose to spoon feed them with math, you are taking away their capability of sensing the world with their own sense, and replacing it with cold, hard numbers.

It would be quite useful for some engineers to spend time working with top technicians in the field they are hired to work in so they can learn the crap the techs have to deal with that could be made better if the engineers had some skin in working on it.   In fact, it would probably be a good idea to have engineers do this periodically so they never forget the crap they tend to make without having skin in it. 


Brian

[VK3DRB]

I've been mad for fucking years, absolutely years... I've always been mad, I know I've been mad, like the most of us are. It's very hard to explain why you're mad, even if you're not mad.

It is a quote for Dark Side of the Moon, and you clearly don't understand it and probably have never heard of it. It is recorded by a British rock band called Pink Floyd. Dark Side only spent a world record 736 weeks in Billboard's Top 200 listing. That world record set in July 1988 has never been broken by anyone. In my opinion, that sort of innovation in the music scene, we don't see much anymore.

Pink Floyd pioneered the use of the EMS VCS 3 which is used extensively in Dark Side. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMS_VCS_3 A British innovation. No surprise, the music synthesiser itself was also invented in the USA, as was the electric organ, as was the Moog. Oh yes, Country and Western was invented in the USA. As was Disco. As was the Blues. As was Rap. As was Rock and Roll.

And who is the most prolific recording artists ever? Elvis? No. Michael Jackson? No. Queen? No. Bieber? Definitely not. The most prolific recording artists in history is The Funk Brothers from the USA. Never heard of them either, have you.

[raptor1956]

It would be quite useful for some engineers to spend time working with top technicians in the field they are hired to work in so they can learn the crap the techs have to deal with that could be made better if the engineers had some skin in working on it.

Unfortunately this is not happening. China is a highly discriminative country with strict social hierarchy. The invisible walls between social levels are very hard to break. Not many engineers will give a shit what a technician says, and no technician will dare to challenge an engineer.
When people talk about sending their kids to a technician school, they get nothing but despise from their coworkers, and the general education system considers technician training a place to dump failed students.
Despite the government's every effort to make technician a respected job, and the massive amount of money poured to technician education (China desperately needs good technicians, not math nerds), the social hierarchy formed thousands of years can't be changed in short amount of time. After all, Chinese culture is all about competition.

It's not just Chinese culture that works that way, many other Asian nations in the east are also that way though perhaps not as rigorously so.  I worked for many years for a Japanese Automation company and I saw some of that with them as well. 


Brian

[Stray Electron]

And to fly an ICBM on target you don't need a supercomputer - especially if the thing carries a nuke that will flatten a city of several millions of people. Then you really don't really care if it has an "accuracy" of several kilometers ...

   You're absolutely dead wrong about that.  To take out a hardened missile silo (which is the goal of a first strike or a first retaliatory strike) you have to strike within 50 yards of the silo.  Taking the accuracy probably into account, you have to use multiple warheads or your warhead has to have much smaller Circular Error of Probability to ensure that every silo is destroyed and can't fire back.  The Russian's missiles never had that kind of accuracy, our's did.  That fact is what lead the Russians to negotiate the SALT treaties on the ballistic missiles.  They probably didn't know it at the time but we already had highly accurate cruise missiles in development and starting to go into production so loss of the ballistic missiles such as the Pershing II was not significant to American offense or defense.

   Destroying cities was never the goal of the American nuclear forces, their first goal was to destroy an enemy's capacity to launch nuclear missiles and/or nuclear bombers that could threaten America.  If necessary, enemy cities could have then been destroyed at leisure once an enemy's offensive capability was destroyed.

[gildasd]

Back in the early 2000’s I was taking photography classes in Madrid.

One day, a student brought in a Zenith camera, those were a dime a dozen back then, had good optics but poor light sensors,
To prove the point that it was not worth the trouble, a teacher tested it... And it aced the test! It performed as good as a hand meter but at a distance.

Upon research, it was a model specific for border guards. We attached no particular value to this info at the time believing he had just been lucky.
Reading this thread all theses years later, I now understand that it was not an outlier, but better, military issue, electronics.

[abyrvalg]

A few random "Homo Sovieticus" memories:

- wide use of Germanium diodes/transistors in "high" frequency RF
- loose transistor specs (mentioned here already). It was typical to see "you need to select a matched pair of transistors for this circuit" recommendations
- limited access to test gear. Find a friend in some state-owned lab (I had one in nearby airport's avionics repair department) or, if you are really cool, make your own (something like TV-based scope)
- soviet Z80 wasn't a dumb mask clone, it has optimized LDIR/LDDR instruction cycling detectable with SW trick
- KP1801BMxx 16-bit CPUs, first ones were custom arch, later were PDP-11 compatible. These were used in civil things too, I've seen them in cash register machines.
- Elbrus CPU project - a "cool" custom arch that made lots of noise but was never manufactured
- a piece of gear that was a dream in our early PC era: ArVid tape streamer - an ISA card interfacing to a VHS VCR allowing to store huge 2 GB of data on a 180min VHS cassette

The ArVid is an excellent example of those days attitude: make something from almost nothing.

[nctnico]

6. Education. Unlike the western education system which focuses on "useless" things like creativity, freedom and religion, Chinese education system is solely focusing on scientific education. We were brainwashed from childhood to F the god and believe nothing but math and physics. This education system massively produces engineers. Since the science part is either open to the public or can be stolen easily, a country with massive amount of engineers has a lot of power to reduce ideas to practice.

I doubt that is an advantage. It is the creativity which gets to new ideas, solve problems in a different way and which in turn gets you ahead of the competition.

[Bud]

  Destroying cities was never the goal of the American nuclear forces, their first goal was to destroy an enemy's capacity to launch nuclear missiles and/or nuclear bombers that could threaten America.  If necessary, enemy cities could have then been destroyed at leisure once an enemy's offensive capability was destroyed.

Ehhhm.....Hiroshima ? Heard of it?

[SeanB]

Both were manufacturing bases, thus a legitimate target. That the original targets were not found due to cloud cover and thus the secondary targets were used instead, with poor bomb aiming, as they had no real practise in dropping something from that high up onto a target, along with the constraints for speeds and clearances.

[nctnico]

Both were manufacturing bases, thus a legitimate target. That the original targets were not found due to cloud cover and thus the secondary targets were used instead, with poor bomb aiming, as they had no real practise in dropping something from that high up onto a target, along with the constraints for speeds and clearances.

From the TV documentary I've seen the crew of the bombers which dropped the nukes on Japan during WW-II did a lot of training using dummies with the same size & weight. AFAIK the bombs landed very near the spots that where targeted.

[Cerebus]

Both were manufacturing bases, thus a legitimate target. That the original targets were not found due to cloud cover and thus the secondary targets were used instead, with poor bomb aiming, as they had no real practise in dropping something from that high up onto a target, along with the constraints for speeds and clearances.

Eh? Hiroshima was a primary target and was bombed. Nagasaki was a secondary target with Kokura as the primary. The justification worked up for bombing Hiroshima was that it was a "purely military" target, which was not true.

By pure coincidence, I recently tripped across an essay by Alex Wellerstein (the originator of the Nuclear weapons effect mapping tool) at "A “purely military” target? Truman’s changing language about Hiroshima" which is an excellent piece of original historical research, working from primary documents such as Truman's draft speeches, about what was known beforehand about the targets and the mix of military and civilians at Hiroshima. (TLDR; it was clear that Truman knew they would cause mass civilian fatalities and casualties and was preparing to spin it in a fashion not dissimilar to the spin put on the Iraq invasion by both British and American politicians - nothing changes.)

[helius]

Considering the death toll on Okinawa (most of whom were civilians killed by their own countrymen to prevent them falling into the hands of Americans), Japan may have avoided a greater bloodbath by having Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and surrender compared to an invasion of the main island.

[glarsson]

  Destroying cities was never the goal of the American nuclear forces, their first goal was to destroy an enemy's capacity to launch nuclear missiles and/or nuclear bombers that could threaten America.  If necessary, enemy cities could have then been destroyed at leisure once an enemy's offensive capability was destroyed.

Ehhhm.....Hiroshima ? Heard of it?

They had already destroyed Japans offensive capability and was now aiming to destroy their defensive capability and defensive will.
Btw, the tactical considerations are quite different when you are the first to drop an A bomb compared to when you stand up against someone with ICBMs loaded with A bombs.