Found this through a BBC news article where some German Professors were arguing that the dominance of English in scientific discussion could be as detrimental as that of Latin a few centuries ago.
My personal experience, although German can be challenging and mine is not particularly strong hence why I try to watch Die Sendung mit Der Maus ( the kids science programme) every week to improve it, is that knowing even a small bit has benefits – particularly outside of formal education (such as on hobby electronics and engineering/science websites) as well as computer security blogs, there is much better in depth content to be found in German – the complexity of the language itself makes “dumbing down” impossible.
As an example reading a booklet from Siemens about electric distribution networks and the apprentices training manual from Die DBP-Telekom from the 1980s helped me finally crack the mystery of why one site at work is particularly plagued by electromagnetic inteference and how this could be mitigated as part of new building works…
Last year Ofcom UK warned folk “the cheap China fairy lights and LED lamps might cause your wifi to act up” and added a few paragraphs of non specific info.
Today I was reading two blogs from German speaking radioamateurs; who found some of the various new eco friendly lamps made a rough noise on their shortwave receivers.
Two of them (one in DE, the other in CH) painstakingly set up an experimental lab complete with monitoring antennas and spectrum analysers; and posted up their results (showing QRM (interference) into VHF frequencies (including those used by DAB radio) and a critique on the LED driver circuit (which when used on a TN-C-S electricity network with combined neutral and protective earth is likely to upset all radio reception throughout the entire building where such lamps are used…
EDIT: the Philips lamps are in fact better types than other brands (although there are plenty of cheap unbranded energy saving lamps which do create bad interference); and one of the chaps involved turns out to be a Professor who works in a lab that tests equipment for EMC compliance as his day job…
Startseite | ADAWIS: Arbeitskreis Deutsch als Wissenschaftssprache e.V.
