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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

It's odd that even today, different disciplines are still silo'd. My son started a research cross-database search engine because different disciplies use different terms for nearly identical concepts. Even within medicine it's silo'd.

Trouble with that startup was, the medical folks with money don't use computer tools. And the students in training have no money.

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It's crazy that we talk about LLMs, AI/ML and what not but so many fields still don't use computation as much as we think they do simply because they cannot reliably keep up with the advancements happening almost everyday and people simply forgetting about backwards compatibility in their products

A researcher submitted a paper to the medical journal _Diabetes care_ in the nineties that basically redescribed integral calculus as a novel finding. How’s that for a silo?

For anyone else who is curious:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai%27s_model

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8137688/

This is really funny. A less extreme example is how much domain-specific terminology in Reinforcement Learning and Control Theory/Model Predictive Control refer to the same underlying phenomena, but we must translate between the two. I understand there are many unique concepts as well, but it would be so helpful if the overlap here used the same terminology and notation.

I still get IEEE Trans. on Control Theory, and it's all machine learning now. Except that the controls people are desperately trying to solidify the underpinnings of machine learning, so that control systems don't suddenly misbehave for some sets of inputs. Controls people want a guarantee that if it does something reasonable for inputs of 5.1 and 5.2, it doesn't do something completely unexpected for an input of 5.15.

Reminds me of my favorite abstract, from John Doyle's paper "Guaranteed Margins for LQG Regulators".

https://improbable.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ThereAreNo...

I always say knowledge is like a sweater. Pull a thread and the whole thing unravels. Everything is connected so if you start somewhere and never stop learning you'll end up in every discipline. There's also a good old Weezer song called Undone for this.

My minor required me to take Electricity & Magnetism from the physics department the same semester I had to take Fields & Waves from the electrical engineering department.

Yes, they were identical.

My crib note that I took into the later final exam was simply a conversion between terms in the two departments. Nothing else; I'd already crammed and aced the first exam.

Oddly enough, I got a physics degree, and then happened to teach the engineering course for one semester many years ago while in between jobs. I'm sure this varies from one college to the next. My impressions at the time were:

The physics version was much more mathematical, and did things like solving everything in spherical coordinates. It also kind of served as a preparation for solving corresponding problems in quantum mechanics.

The engineering version was more nuts-and-bolts, covering things like transformers, motors, and transmission lines. (Antennas were for a later course).

As a consequence, teaching the engineering course required me to quickly learn a whole bunch of stuff that we glossed over or ignored in the physics course. While also teaching it. Fortunately I was an experimental physicist and had also done some work in industry, so the topics weren't utterly unfamiliar.

Fortunately the professional teacher only has to be one lesson ahead of the student.

Is your son’s search engine somewhere available, please?

It was something like 'Rugobi'. I'll ask him if there's a demo still up.

HIs pubmed subscription expired.

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