Do engineering magazines have actual engineers writing for them anymore?

[N2IXK]

Just got the "Daily Highlights" email from Electronic Products magazine and one of the "featured articles" was about some Russian guy who made a video about burning stuff with a microwave oven transformer.

http://www.electronicproducts.com/Power_Products/AC_DC_Power_Supplies/Guy_takes_apart_microwave_oven_to_create_a_microwave_cannon_then_blows_stuff_up_with_it.aspx

 OK, bad enough putting this kind of "Hold my beer and watch this!" crap in a publication supposedly aimed at electronics professionals, but they then go on to give the lawyer-mandated "don't try this at home!" warnings, and go completely off the high board into the stupid pool:

Microwaves are dangerous
Under no circumstances should this sheer volume of radiation EVER come into contact with a human being or it will cause massive amounts of damage, namely cancer, a weakened immune system, birth defects, cataracts, and death. Studies show that little more than 10 hertz of microwave radiation is enough to start damaging the human body, let alone the 2.45 billion hertz produced by the microwave’s magnetron.

So not only do RF fields cause cancer, and a 10 Hz signal now qualifies as microwave RF, but Hertz are apparently a unit of power! From a magazine aimed at engineers!

And just to top it all off, the video they embedded on their page doesn't even show the magnetron being used, just the 50 Hz power transformer....

The one they should have posted is over on YouTube:

[free_electron]

10 hertz ...  beam me up scotty , there is no intelligent life.

he probably ment 10 watts ...

no , those magazines are typically written by baaaarketing ... ( marketing sheep )

[Neilm]

I'm going to note the name of that magazine - just to remember NEVER to pay any attention to it.

[SeanB]

I like the Russian one better, though I would just cut the cavity out along with the magnetron. Microwaves are harmful, but are not ionising radiation. Nice with the dipole neon field indicators though.

[mrflibble]

bwahahaa. 

Studies show that little more than 10 Blorks of education is enough to start damaging some people's pretty little brain, let alone the 2.45 billion Blorks produced by the education cannon.

[wraper]

Those guys are from Luhansk, Ukraine. There is war zone now, but seems they don't give a shit as continue to upload new videos.
You can hear shooting on this video but they don't care. Also talk about that no many people left there, so streets are empty.

[westfw]

Do engineering magazines have actual engineers writing for them anymore?

Maybe.  But there is also an apparently growing trend to do the whole "buzzfeed" thing where they'll repost "interesting" articles/blog-entries/etc without much in the way of verification or thought.
The other "articles" on this site seem to be mostly awful as well.  Any number of blogs claiming to be aimed primarily at hobbyists do a much better job.

[Galenbo]

Do engineering magazines have actual engineers writing for them anymore?

There are errors in your sentence.

The link you gave, is no "engineering" magazine, but has to described as "technology products" magazine or "look at the techology society" magazine.

And even in Engineering magazines, it's no engineer who writes articles. It can be an engineer who writes a paper or an article, but it will be rewritten by someone else. Eventually re-read by an engineer to take the errors out.

[dfmischler]

Did they ever?

I remember seeing an article in (I think) Computer Design in the early 80's where the byline belonged to a young woman who I had met as a friend and classmate of my college girlfriend, who had been majoring in magazine journalism.  I'm sure that is how it usually works: hire people who can actually write and know how to edit, layout, and publish and let them get the gist from the geeks with the stories.  BTW - I was both surprised and pleased that she seemed to have gotten the details right.

EDIT: Googled her: she is still in journalism.  Features editor of a major daily newspaper and adjunct professor of journalism at a well-known university.

[amyk]

The only confirmed risk of microwave radiation is from the heat - in fact lower power doses have been used medically.

Also from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_burn

One such case involved a teenage babysitter who admitted to having placed a child in the microwave oven for approximately sixty seconds. The child suffered a third degree burn to the back, measuring 5 inches x 6 inches. The babysitter later took the child to the emergency department, where multiple skin grafts were placed on the back. There were no signs of lasting emotional, cognitive or physical effects. CT scan of the head was normal, and there were no cataracts

[SirNick]

OK, maybe it's time to stop equating tightly-wrapped younglings to "burritos".

I can't even imagine what train of thought led that person to believe this was a sound idea.

[poorchava]

Some of them do.

In Poland most widely known is "Elektronika Praktyczna" (eng. 'Practical Electronics'), which is aimed at hobbyists and proffesionals alike. They have lots of technical articles, writeups on commercial and hobby projects (quite detailed, with theory of operation, schematics, pcbs and so on) but also quite a share of marketing (ads from vari ous distributors and manufacturers, sponsored contests where you can win devboards and such). They actually have engineers working for them, but also pay hobbyists and independent designers for published articles. Not all hope is gone.