One of my labmates has a presentation this weekend in Korea and tonight he did a mock presentation to me and the assistant professor this evening. His presntation was on "At-Cut Quartz actuated resonators using plasma activated bonding." His presntation is still a work in progress but the professor had decided that he should practice tonight.
I sat through the presentation, it lack a clear defination of the objective and a clear picture of where "plasma activated bonding" fitted into the picture of the fabrication of this device. Dispite being here for a year, I still feel that my knowledge of material processing methods is rather limited. After the presentation, I decided to hold a mock question period where I popped the question "what is plasma activated bonding?" My friend, Takahashi looked back blankly... he started to try and formulate an answer... something about surface energy of a material being increased by application of a plasma, then he gave up to tell me "I really don't know and the mechanisms aren't well understood."
Why is it hard for people to admit what they don't know? One thing that annoys me the most is people pretending to know, because it's a waste of time. If there is one thing that annoys me even more, is watching 2 people that pretend to know something argue against each other (this is especially true in politics).
The simplest test of knowledge is the following... ask the person how do they know what they know. Drop'em like a sack of potatoes if they can't give a straight answer (and aren't willing to admit it) because there isn't a point continuing the conversation.
Fortunately Takahashi was able to admit it.
No comments:
Post a Comment