New Software Helps Leverage the Paradigm

[Drew Danielson]

Re Bandwidth - actually my experience is that computer people (at least
the academic- and research-aligned ones) use bandwidth in the electrical
engineering sense, but 'dumb it down' for marketing and other
explanatory purposes.  It's easier for a doofus like me to understand
'bits per second' than to understand the electronic and material
technologies that go into the particulars of frequency transmission.

Also, in the engineering world that I work in, we tend to use technical
terms metaphorically.  "In the noise" and "off the radar" and other
signal processing metaphors are used as excuses when a person failed to
take care of some administrivia and missed a deadline, for example.
"Iterative" is used informally (without conscious reference to cogn.
sci.) to describe repetitive non-machine (read "human") learning and the
consequential process improvement.  "Cycling" is used to refer to the
inevitable process by which someone has too much to do sometimes, and
not enough other times.

The list goes on... maybe I'll try to document it a little better, out
of curiosity.  I know that technogeeks in other institutions use their
jargon similarly.  It might be interesting to try to look for
'dialects', and for examples of the metaphorical use of jargon being
influenced by the specific research interests of individual speakers and
discourse communities.

These terms also have a shibboleth quality to them.  An administrative
staff who thinks themselves incapable of understanding engineering is
out-grouped by engineers when they use these terms in conversation.  An
admin staff like me who can grab on to these terms and use correctly
them gets in-grouped a little.  But when I pull them out in conversation
with my humanities buddies, I often get the funny looks....



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Date:    Wed, 18 Jun 2003 16:08:34 EDT
From:    "James A. Landau" <JJJRLandau at AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: New Software Helps Leverage the Paradigm


bandwidth---a technical term from electrical engineering, referring to the
range of frequencies that a channel can carry.  In the US a telephone
can handle
a frequency range from 30 hertz to 3,000 hertz (which is why telephones
sound
so flat---they truncate all the higher harmonics), and hence is said to have
a bandwidth of slightly less than 3,000 "baud".  Used incorrectly by
computer
people (but the usage is hopelessly cast in concrete) to mean "bits per
second".


--
DREW DANIELSON   <andrew.danielson at cmu.edu>   http://pcdrew.ece.cmu.edu/
      Faculty Assistant for Professors Gabriel & Fedder and Dr. Mukherjee
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