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The Impatience of the Google Generation
profBill writes "As a fifty-something professor who teaches introductory computer science, I am very aware that the twenty-somethings in my class are much more at ease with computers than any other generation. However, does that mean they are more adept at using those computers? Apparently not, according to the researchers at University College London. Their research indicates that while more adept at conducting searches, younger users also show 'impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs'. Moreover, these traits 'are now becoming the norm for all age-groups, from younger pupils and undergraduates through to professors'. The panel makes two conclusions: That libraries (and I wonder what a library will become in the future, anyway) will have to adapt, and that the information processing skills of todays young people are lacking. Why are those skills lacking and, if they are, what can be done about it?"
Im an ex. teacher, now working in the industry instead, and I think I have an idea why they are like that - you know - incredibly impatient, demanding and everything has to be here and now! Its because they are used to it, with search engines like Google and others - not to mention modern computers with awesome search facilities gives them the power of instant knowledge, so who wants to wait given alternatives like that? We of the "older" generation are used to doing things by experience and heavy research into just about everything, and we have TRIED what they are doing now - therefor we know the difference between instant knowledge and well thought out and researched knowledge. There is a HUGE difference. But how do we change this? The truth is - we need to "tap into" that generation and show real life advantages, the young generation are far from stupid, they have aquire information differently because we have given them the oportunity to do so, and natural selection comes home.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
I feel like I'm more capable of absorbing large amounts of information from diverse sources than the last generation. I grew up with Google, though. Wikipedia has been around since I was about 15. Then there's IRC, Usenet, all of the forums filled with would-be experts and complete logs of conversations about more or less anything you can imagine...
The dewey decimal system is, by comparison, total bullshit. The whole notion of a physical library needs a bit of an overhaul. Integration with some sort of full-text search service (google books with a "reserve this book" feature, and drive-thru pickups at the library) could be cool, privacy implications aside. But still: that requires leaving my house. Let's face it, delivering plain text over the internet is way more efficient.
It doesn't make sense to compare libraries to computer searches because the two haven't been around for the same amount of time. Computer searches as a skill has only had maybe a decade or two to develop while the concept of a library has had generations to develop. Kids these days simply give up thinking the result isn't there if the search query they entered wasn't giving the result they expected. This is a very obvious scenario when you realize most people (including the 90's generation) doesn't really know correct search syntax. Western education has also not cought-up with a correct method of teaching this vital skill either. This is the result. It will fix itself with time.
i'd rtfa but that page is taking forever to load.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I'd write an insightful reply but I'm in a hurry.
An good exercise is a systematic literature review. You have to make sure that you don't just find some information about the topic you are interested in, but you find all of the available information, then you must critically assess each piece of literature and synthesise them properly. Each stage of the process must be justified and repeatable (so no Googling)
I'm in the middle of one of these and its really shown up my impatience to get answers. In my opinion something like this should be a part of the school curriculum, or at least a part of undergradute courses.
Why isn't there any comments to read? I WANT COMMENT NOW!
I'm concerned about the narrowm view of the world IT people and engineers
have these days. I think the problem starts at college -
There's a culture that somehow science is more rational and usefull
then the humanitities. Lecturers encourage students to joke about arts
students, and humilaite them whenever possible. This encourages
eliteism, and I for one am sick of it.
Let's tell it like it is. 'science' is just as much about opinion as
the humanities. Research simply follows the fad of the day. Take
dieticians for example. These men and woman believe that just because
they have degree in medical science that they are all knowing. Why,
what they recommend one day may kill you the next! (see the DDT story
for more information.) Science is 95% opinion then facts, lets face
it. What about astrology, the most rediculious of the sciences! But I
degress...
Another example is music. We know what sounds good. Everyone aggreed
that Valves for instance sound great. But knowitall engineers use
trensastors with inferious sound quality just to save a few bucks.
They argue with numbers. Hey, I don't want to do maths just to listen
to music. I know what I like. You cannot apply objective reasoning to
a subject which is intristically subjective. But try telling those
recent grads with their useless piece of paper that and they go all
mightier--then-thou.
The problem with you technical guys are that you are all so eliteist.
Whilst you want to trun collage into a trade school with yore narrow
minded views that collage should be a job training centre, humanities
are focused on making you a well rounded person who is auctually
interesting to be with, not a boring focuesed geek. Really, it makes
me so mad when people say "oh, he's doing a humanities degree, that's
easy". I have to read *3* *books* *a* *week* on average. Not picture
books either I assue you. It is a lot of work, but the upshot is
improved grammer and spelling skills that are lacking in the
technical. As for those that say "you will be working at mcdonalds" ,
I'm going on to so a PhD in socialolgy where I'll be line for tenure
where I have a much more rewarding job then beeing a science freak or
an engineer. Anyways, all I have to do to be a engineer wold be to get
my MSCE and how hard couyld that be? techincal stuff is simply
whatever fad the market thinks is hot at the moment, but all great
things were done by humanities.
You technical types are far to narrow minded and cynsical. You should
learn to enjoy life.
but the keyboard didn't work fast enough, and I really couldn't be assed....
I don't have the time or the patience to read this
$ man 1 perl | grep -1 virtues
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience,
and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
One of the major problems here is that students are used to being able to Google "mitigating factors in murder" and get a nice website with clean design which provides them with the history and current state of the topic, all in a single easy-to-use package.
In contrast, academic articles are usually much narrower in scope than your average webpage and require much more reading and time before an understanding of the subject can be cultivated. Of course, the benefit of using academic articles is that after having read a dozen of them, a student will have a much better and more balanced understanding of a subject than they would have if they'd just gone to Crazy Bob's Information Hut.
When I peer-review papers (I'm currently in law school), it's very obvious which students started their research with academic sources, and which started on Google. The problem can be quickly solved by professors taking the approach seen at my institution: students failing to have in-depth research on the topic get poor marks.
Why is it somehow better to have to go down to a local library and search through books for an answer, than a quick google search?
I'm doing my PhD, and pretty much everything that I need for my research is a google search away. In particular google scholar rocks.
I'd rather spend my time actually reading the info than trying to find it.
I don't feel myself to be a part of whatever generation the journalists want to refer to this week. I use Google, but I also read books. I use Facebook, but I also meet up with friends.
Can't we just use the technology available to us, without being branded with the [Insert Keyword] Generation tag?
xkcdsw: the unofficial archive of Making xkcd Slightly Worse
Actually, i think it's caused by an entire generation mashing F5 to get first post on the next story...
One of the biggest problems of being able to type in a question and have an answer (or sorts) fired back seconds later is that you become very used to dealing facts but are in danger of lacking understanding.
Back when we relied more on books, you'd often go through several books and many pages looking for something and along the way see all manner of peripheral information on the subject which over time builds in to a much broader grasp of the subject and a better basis for joining the dots and developing understanding.
I suspect that in the unlikely event that the web disappeared overnight, we'd have a whole generation or two of apparantly 'smart' people floundering badly.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Getting information from the internet is qualitatively different than getting it from a library since you get so much more of it so much faster. It shouldn't be surprising that the way people process this information is also qualitatively different. Things like "impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs" are a direct result of this. I don't see why this is necessarily bad; it's just different.
In general this isn't a problem, patience isn't always a virtue and sometimes impatience can lead to progress. However, there is a very serious danger that people will tend more and more to fall pray to something called "satisficing", which is a fancy word for being satisfied with the most quickly reached reasonable answer rather than spending more time and effort (and perhaps creativity) to find a better answer to a problem.
Kids may be much more at ease with computers than their parents, simply because they grew up with them, but they certainly aren't any more competent when it comes to using them. Most of my younger brother's friends (19-21 age range) struggle to do anything more than use email, Word, IM and MySpace/Facebook with a computer.
They like using computers, they're certainly not afraid of computers (like some people are), but they don't have any desire to learn how to use a computer beyond simple tasks (and they certainly don't have the patience to most of the time).
and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs
I thought we cure such children with Retalin these days...
Blogs, google-bombing advertisers, dead sites taken over by domain squatters, broken links, inaccurate wiki's... It's becoming increasingly more difficult to find good information online. Perhaps this is why the tolerance for delay and reliance on search engines is increasing across the board. (not just in them whipper-snappers!) With a lower signal to noise ratio you have to churn through more material to get what you want. That means investing less time in avenues that don't pay off fast and using search engines to avoid tedious mucking about with links that are broken as often as not. The evolution of search engines is about the only thing that is helping to combat the decreasing SNR of the web. Try searching for something specific and imagine what it would be like if you had to go back to using Lycos circa 1998!
That being said, ease of searching is just one of the many reasons why libraries should be digitizing their collections. How many times have you found a book that looked absolutely perfect for what you're doing, only to find that it's loaned out, damaged or defaced, returned but not reshelved, lost, etc.. Also, it's just plain more convenient to be able to pull up some text from the comfort of your couch rather than trekking into the library. That convenience adds up if it's something you access regularly. e.g. Who goes to the library to read paper journals these days?
and I wonder what a library will become in the future, anyway
Probably they will change into (back into) the original model provided by the great library of Alexandria. That institution held books (ok, scrolls), but was primarily a place of teaching, effectively its role was what we now see as the role of a university.
Libraries only became dull(yes, dull) with the advent of the new breed of privately funded library in the eighteenth century (I omit centuries of Islamic libraries, I know little of them, other then they were active and very full). Certainly this was the case in England, and I'm pretty sure the US has its share of privately initiated libraries. Those libraries were focused heavily on the collection of knowledge, and did indeed help many people learn new things, but the visitor was expected to remain solemnly quiet, to absorb the information and depart, not disturbing others engaged in the ritual of learning.
Pretty boring stuff for a great proportion of the population (not me, I like libraries, but I'm not talking about myself). Information does not do well sat in books, it needs to be experienced, talked about, it should 'live'. That was Micheal Faraday's idea, and he gave weekly science lectures as well as doing science, inspiring many to seek further knowledge. The Internet brings us some measure of liveness for our information as well, which stimulates interest, but for the most part its short term. You find what you want, or don't, and move on fast.
A library should include the Internet, and books, but also staff who teach, providing some means of focusing people on the knowledge that they have become however fleetingly interested in. Without that you're unlikely to have a library that does anything but collect dust and books.
But if you come by your lousy spelling honestly, then I certainly applaud your scholastic efforts, and would only add that it takes all types to turn the world --and that none of the types you mention need to be labeled with antagonism. Why on earth should there by any kind of war between the various classes of passion in the halls of learning?
-FL
Let us rejoice in the three virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris :) Seriously, I don't want to wait for computers and neither should you. And I don't want to wade through piles of junk to find good information. These are basic things. The only difference now is if people now have a little less tolerance for crap.
Studies like this always start out by assuming things about young people, only to find out they know nothing. How is that a surprise ? Gee, teenagers don't pay attention since when, 4000 BC ? Complaints about this were found on clay tablets from Babylon. I seriously doubt people are going to get a clue.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Being a few years shy of thirty, I can certainly relate to this. When I was a kid the only source of information was the library, and whatever books we had at home. I remember reading about subjects that interested me and having to do a lot of research and work until I finally got results.
These days I find myself being very annoyed if I can't find information that I need. Growing up as the web evolved sort of helps me see how I've changed myself. My work (R&D) depends on finding information quickly. At home I have very little free time (small kids), and I'm very annoyed whenever I fail to find the information I need. Don't even get me started on what happens when I have no internet connection at home...
Oddly, being netless is not much of a problem for me when I go to the summer cottage for example, I still seem to have the ability to detach properly. I suspect people 5-10 years younger than me may not do so well under similar circumstances.
.: Max Romantschuk
In particular google scholar rocks.
Amen to that, almost all of the bibliography in my thesis was found via Google scholar.
There is an entirely different method to conducting research that many people are taught in schools these days, It's all about trying to use time as efficiently as possible although there is a definite trade off when it comes to quality and reliability of information.
Find your chosen subject in wikipedia, open all of the sources and briefly scan them while following links to their sources. Within minutes you have a plethora of information at your fingertips. For many students this is enough to provide all they need on their chosen topic. For the more dedicated few it will provide references to books which they will go to the library to browse.
The benefit of this is that assignments take much less time and a wider range of information is available, however there are many disadvantages. Patience is a valuable skill which is being eroded and much less is learned by just searching through a page for relevant words. When having to trawl through books or interviewing people there is much deeper context that it is almost impossible to ignore.
When someone can easily write a 4000 word essay on a subject they previously had almost no knowledge of in one night and still get an A, there is a big problem.
To be honest, the elitism of knowledge is falling apart.
/Of course/ this will draw a lot of trash from people who've spent their whole lives learning and studying the "old way".
Old profs that have taken a long degree, where half the time it wasn't really the understanding of the subject that made it hard - but simply gathering the information in the first place and then processing it; aren't too keen about all of it suddenly being as common knowledge as anything else.
A lot of people love (as an example) wikipedia. A lot of profs love wikipedia. Quite a few hate the fact that it's making knowledge less restricted, and less potentially "streamlined" into one 'channel' that everyone has to go through to get it.
It isn't really an issue.
People aren't learning less, they're learning more. They're not anymore impatient about it than any other generation that was faced with unecessarily increased "downtime" of any sort.
This, what we're seeing now, is essentially an evolutionary step in knowledge, learning and sharing.
The new generation simply isn't stuck with the same crap the elder generations were, and they're gonna be damned if they'll be forced to "slow down" when there is no need to.
Kids today, growing up, can learn pretty much anything about everything without ever having to expend a resource other than their time and their minds attention.
The first obvious note to make is that this is an article about how the behavior of students doing academic research, which is why the reference to google, besides being trendy, might be a little off the mark. I think a good deal of google searches are for simple pieces of data (the phone number of the nearest Chinese restaurant), not for serious research purpose. Even wikipedia is generally consulted for simple facts (what is the population of Montreal?) rather than research as such.
The main point is, I think that students naturally become impatient when dealing with data, because there is so much out there. I certainly do. But there is a big difference between how data and knowledge are gained. If I am dealing, say, with a glossy pdf full of buzzwords and generalities, I will gloss over it impatiently. If I find something that is full of actual knowledge, and concepts that aren't described in bullet points, I can be very patient while reading it.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
My wife is 50 and knows almost nothing about computers, yet she has come to expect near-instant network response. Whenever there's a delay in a web page coming up, she immediately calls out: "The computer isn't working - come fix it!"
Om
Looking for information is a skill in itself, and provides all kind of background information on the subject you are looking for; you may not be directly interested in all the information, but knowledge of it cannot hurt. With a simple Google search, you find much less complete information, because you are targeting way more your searches.
If I'm wrong, please correct me ; learning is better than being right.
Except your post contains none of the improved spelling skills you refer to, so that must be the impatience the article is talking about.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
So much is said about this or that technology and when it gets down to using it, its not what it was promoted to be.
Computer power has greatly increased over the years but the user experience does not parallel that, but instead pretty much stays the same,
More data is being transfered over the internet today and its increasing with the drive towards digital tv access. I recall when I was told that the phone line couldn't handle anything more than 96k baud rate. But today we have far faster dsl and can still make a phone call over teh same two wires.
And a lot of traffic is spam, phishing, advertising, etc.
For Example, Its difficult to find some things through google as you can be flooded with ads for things you are not interested in. I once tried to find specifications for an old laptop only to be presented with battery and power supply links of everybody and their brother selling these things for this laptop. And nothing regarding anything even close to information on this old laptop. The contradiction being....who the hell are they all selling these batteries and power supplies for this old laptop, too? Yet I still waded through that junk to find not what I was looking for.
When you are handed enough contradictions, and you begin to see through all the bull shit you are handed, and you and anyone else dealing with this awareness will begin to lose patience.
Programming is another contradiction, as programming is the act of automating some functionality in a manner that provides easier use and reuse, but programming really doesn't get easier as it
should be. Programming is being held in a state of elitism or at a level of complexity that is just beyond the typical user ability to deal with the idiosyncrasy of any programing language on this particular hardware in this particular use, etc... But it doesn't really need to be that way and people are beginning to see through this babel when they are told something they want can't be done, yet they see it being done elsewhere or a short time later. This tends to expose the source of contradictions, the computer industry itself. And there is a reason for it.
IS it really any wonder people are losing their patiences? When was the last time you told someone how easy it is to do something and failed to realize what base knowledge you must first have for such a thing to be so easy to do?
Lets not forget about the legal battles we all see in the news regarding something to do with computers.
All in all there is a level of frustration the general user, and even more advanced users experience on a regular basis and unlike most any other thing, outside of computing that they may want to do.
Even today there is yet to be an open, user friendly and fully user accessible system. All system today have such built in unnecessary user constraints in one way or another that contributes to unnecessary frustration. The usefulness of these constraints are only useful to those who want to make user need them so to sell more and more. If you give them all they need, teach them to fish, they won't need you to fish for them.
Lack of patience comes from recognizing contradiction, the distraction of junk information, and the failure to reach ones goals (can't get there from here regardless of how many times you are lead to believe you can) and this invariable leads to frustration. Its not the speed of computing but the human injection of trash between point A and target point B.
Their are efforts to improve education regarding computers but as long as its being taught, to use an analogy, in the mode of teaching roman numeral based math instead of the simpler and more powerful hindu-arabic decimal system mathematics, there will be frustration and resulting impatience.
This doesn't have to be this way, as there are plenty new markets to be discovered by removal of the unnecessary and false user constraints.
I guess these social scientist types derive their funding from trying to map distinctions upon each generation.
The next generation is still people, at least until the biochemists succeed in making substantial tweaks to the DNA.
OK, they're impatient. OK, they have some motor skill advantage from years of video games. Whoopee. Reality will temper the new generation far more than the generation tempers reality.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Finnish libraries are not dull. You can find a little bit of everything. Books, videos, music, etc. in mostly every category. Including not-so-agreeable stuff like sexology, weird-artsy works and so on. There are also computers for browsing the net and doing other work. Usage stats a pretty decent: "[Finland] has high usage of public libraries: 20,3 loans and 11.98 library visits per inhabitant in 2005" (http://kirjastoseura.kaapeli.fi/etusivu/apua/english). I can get any work sent to my local library for 0.5 €, all trough the net: http://www.helmet.fi/. With a system like this I don't mind paying for it with taxes.
.: Max Romantschuk
1) Young people have always been impatient.
2) The acceptable delay depends on expectations, which again depends on what the norm is.
When access to information becomes faster, people also expect access to information to be faster (duh!), and are thus less tolerant of delays, even if the delays are within what used to be the norm.
These changing norms affects younger people faster than older people, as younger people have less mental baggage to carry around.
Oh, and bonus point:
3) Books are technically obsolete for looking stuff up. They are still excellent for a more in depth study of a subject.
Well, I'm just doing my master, but for my work (International Relations), they both have their value. Let's say that you are writing about the Nixon's establishment of diplomatic relations with China. You can use google and wikipedia to get an overview of opinions on the subject in the initial stages of your research, and then for fact checking later (when did the Ping-Pong team return to the States again?). Indeed, the skill to do this kind of searching is wide both spread and indispensable in modern academia.
However, if you want to go beyond the superficial, the libraries (or more precisely, the slow, deliberate reading of credible sources that we generally associate with libraries) are essential. If you want to understand why things happened instead of establishing a simple chronology, you have to read Kissinger's books and memoirs, you have to read public records, you have to read contemporary journalism. It is also very helpful to read other scholars' interpretations, both in their books and journals.
Obviously, there is no reason that we can't digitize this information and stick on the internet, but simple availability and physical location of the documents is not where the problem here.
The problem this professor is pointing out is that people lack the ability to do this second part and go beyond the superficial because the nature of those works means that interpreting them is long and tedious and requires an attention span longer than 3 seconds. Even if digitized, you can't crtl+f for key words through a 200 page argument and understand it.
So, the GP is right, IMHO, we need both theses skill sets.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I see two roles for libraries in the future:
So I guess I'm predicting that libraries of the future will be like H. G. Wells' Time Machine: a beautiful utopian book-enjoying experience, where some unsuspecting fool is occasionally dragged down to the grungy basement to help tend the servers.
-Esme
In other words, Google searches are more efficient that looking it up in a book. Better targeting is a good thing. If you want general information about a topic, you look it up on Wikipedia, if you want specific information about a very precise topic, you Google it (using Google Scholar if appropriate). Books have their purposes, but finding an answer to a question isn't one of them - the net is much better for that.
The written word itself is probably an out-dated mode of data transfer for the modern human being and I wonder will we see it replaced.
The letters and words that we use in everyday communication were designed or more correctly evolved hundreds or thousands of years ago by people who needed a quick solution to a problem at hand - rather than a well considered and engineered mechanism for communication.
Maybe in the future someone might actually come up with the lettering solution that results in much high reading/comprehension speeds. (And I'm not talking about Esperanto which is just a hotch-potch of the original problem).
I often think that maybe dyslexics, rather than being disabled, are in fact people whose brains are too fast for the written word the rest of us use - and that's why they have problems reading. Every dyslexic person I know has no patience for information at all. (I'm no expert though - I'm not even dyslexic).
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
I've read translations of some of those tablets. It's only too true :D
In what way does impatience correlate directly to a lack of "information processing skills"?
This article makes some pretty ignorant generalizations, and none of the implications seem to be founded on anything but pure supposition. It is a typical older-generation-bashing-younger-generation-over-something-nonsensical piece.
tl;dr
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
It's self-imposed evolution. Mankind is capable of greater feats and faster answers now than ever before, and subsequent generations take this as the baseline, not the peak. Forward ever, backward never. Our kids will invent some nifty stuff in their day that will extend our five senses farther than we can imagine.
Holy cow...
/that's yo ass, I guess.
Eddie Murphy flashback!!! That's from, like, the FIRST album that nobody remembers!!
signat-url: http://www2.potsdam.edu/dctm/prescor/signat-url.h
Who ever wrote the article is obviously jealous of the fact that back in his day he had to hand write his plagiarisms and couldn't copy and paste.
I'm glad those pesky kids are impatient. They'll get off my lawn a little quicker.
There still are people who go the long way and read hard science stuff to understand it, and some of these people make posts writing about how they solved thier problem. Sure if we don't have google no one is ever going to read this stuff, but smart people will still exist.
What you are talking about is people who can solve things fast with just some searches on the internet, you can solve highly specialized problem with out almost no prior knowledge and no needs for smarts.
just because I am from the Google generation doesn't mean I am impat
DR
In other news, the CEO of the British Library was found drifting in a tear in the time/space continuum, disoriented and incapable of understanding that digitising shit in 2008 does not make one a pioneer.
Seriously, who writes this stuff? From the headline (Pioneering research shows 'Google Generation' is a myth) to the sponsor's announcement of the study (adopted the digital mindset), the study is so wrapped in hyperbole that I just can't take it seriously.
And reading it is bad enough - I'd rather poke my eye out with a sharpened stick than click on the audio link to the 'Launch Event'.
[17] Leary, T., White, C., Wood, P. R., Bhabha, W. D., and Wirth, N. Lambda calculus considered harmful. In Proceedings
Amen.
Clearly, once information becomes trivial to find, at least two things will arise:
To the first: as we read (and know), Google can't really help that; education is irreplaceable. But to the second: it will be assumed that everyone can know everything. But if this is assumed, nothing my work shows ignorance of can be excused. I cannot imagine a PhD defense in the future!
Young people are more impatient than older ones.
Deleted
Yes, Google Scholar is so good it feels like cheating.
http://scholar.google.com/
Skills are lacking because every available method is used to fill our realities with something interesting, which might lead to a purchase. The need for information doesn't diminish from the childhood, because the environment keeps the attention span short. This in turn makes us dependent on the information providers, because they control our perceptions. We become selectors rather than thinkers. If our needs are not met, we ultimately react with hostility... I think one part of the solution is to remember to breath once in a while... There is no need to fill every moment with everything just because it's possible; one ultimately gets lost, and becomes what is perceived rather than what one is.
You have a good point in that searching through books can help you to learn all sorts of new and slightly related things on the way to your endpoint. However, society is progressing to the point where precise targetting is far preferred to generalization. We've got entire fields that require 4+ years of intense focus on just one or two small spheres of knowledge.
If you're looking to learn all encompassingly about a subject then a book is a great way to do so. However if instead you're looking to research just one particular topic within a subject or get a refresher a book is rather inefficient. Targetting allows very quick knowledge acquisition which allows us to become more efficient to focus on other tasks. Researching being faster just means you can get more work done, in essence.
The issue is that these kids know what computers are capable of and they've seen and used web apps that exhibit good design. i'm nearly 50 myself and i have the same impatience w/ craptastic programming myself. If i'm using an app and ask it to do a simple 2 dimensional search or other simple task i wanna see an immediate response. no excuse for long delays if i'm not rendering the next 3-D blockbuster. I'm doubly frustrated and angered when i'm using an app to perform a common task and have to click 5, 6, or more times to get to where i need to be. HEY, APP DESIGNERS: one, two clicks tops for common tasks. no more than 3 for everything else. I'm using the app to get somehting done, not to click around my desktop like a f'ing monkey.
The point is, we're constantly reminded that little gadgets we pick up at the 7-11 checkout counters now have more processing power than an Apollo moon mission. It follows then that those big honkin' boxes under the desk should be capable of much more than the crap they give us today. If these kids are impatient w/ crap they have every right to be.
> Why is it somehow better to have to go down to a local library
> and search through books for an answer, than a quick google search?
> I'm doing my PhD, and pretty much everything that I need for my
> research is a google search away. In particular google scholar rocks.
"Doing your PhD" is still school, which is an artificially protected environment for the student in some ways. In school, the problems you are asked to solve in your classes are almost always problems someone else has solved, and you can -research- the solution.
In the larger scope of the working world, many people find themselves tasked with solving real problems, that -no one has ever solved before-. You find yourself dealing with frustrating unknowns that cannot be dealt with using search engines in 10 minutes, or -ever-. The solutions are not there to find.
Many of us in the working world deal with people who -can't- do anything other than "look it up on Google". Junior programmers, especially, who can't solve a problem unless they can swipe a code snippet from the web. Some of these eventually learn to poke randomly at the code till they find something that "sorta works".
But they lack the patience and the mental disciplines needed to sit down and really work out a problem. And this isn't just in the computer tech fields. It's at all levels of business, management, and science.
I've spoken to nurses and doctors who say the same things about some younger medical professionals; many of them lack the mential disciplines to diagnose problems. They're reduced to trying to look things up on Google and Wikipedia, and eventually give drugs randomly to trusting human patients.
> I'd rather spend my time actually reading the info than trying to find it.
Fine; but what do you do when the information -needs- to be found; not by searching musty stacks of books, but by dissection of the problem and analysis of the elements that compose it?
It is not a matter of the generation. Searching for something and getting no results back is frustrating. Database search could still learn a lot from Google, whether the search is in news media, online shops, libraries or when searching for a song in iTunes.
The problem is that they have never seen an instance where they have needed to do what you describe. Just like most of folks have never needed to know how to skin and clean game any more.
Aside from my liberal arts classes in college, I never have used those skills in the 15 years I've been in the workplace.
The ability to find stuff very quickly on search engines is something that I need on a day-to-day basis and has had the president of my company come into my office with requests for me to find something for him.
Virtually any new business problem can be researched, overviewed, found in a highly rated book that describes the topic, one-click on Amazon with over night shipping, and read through the chapter that details how to do what you need to do.
The ability to determine the accuracy of that information, digest that research, mold it to the problem at hand, and write it effectively into proposals, designs, and code is what is useful in my job.
Unfortunately, colleges are just spitting out kids who have never really learned how to work together on a project, reuse code, or share information out of the fear that they will be called a plagiarist by some automated tool. At best their experience is limited to a "software engineering" class or internship.
The skill of being able to find things quickly is paramount in getting them up to speed in that area, because once you let them know they don't have to code EVERYTHING from scratch, they are more than happy to search code libraries for what they need.
I look forward to the day when we have coded better search engines that can search on some of the meta-properties of text rather than just the words or patterns.
Ok, but can you be quick about it?
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
Well I think it will take a while to get to that level. I think people will be very guarded in what they say in their thesis papers. I also think that the professors judging them will be stricter about minutia that can be found on google. There will also be an understanding that one simply cannot google every small fact in a large body of work. Also, don't you constantly meet with your advising professor when doing a thesis? Isn't there a constant review going on that would catch these things in the same manner as typos?
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Have tried google? No honestly - the guttenburg project for example has a lot of old books. Probably far more books than any library.
Bah.. You're doing it the hard way; almost all my thesis was written^W found via Ask Slashdot.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
Is the information they are exposed to accurate? I would hate to be impatient for getting false information.
nice post. better said than i would.
to add... Many times it's not enough to know what the answer is but WHY it is.
This aids in troubleshooting and diagnosis.
I'm one of the dinosaurs in systems here. I give answers all day to people that wont take the time to learn what they are working on.
When a new product is implemented I can figure out how to use it with minimal pain. They can rarely do more than what's presented in a knowledge item or the training class.
It's going to be like the scene at the hospital in the movie "Idiocracy" very soon.
Who run Barter Town?
title sound interesting, can sombdy pls summarize that for me?
i want patience and I want it NOW.
A man spends the first half of his life accumulating stuff, the second trying to get rid of it all.
Google is nice but it's results are totally skewed, as are all search engines since the results change over time, there are constantly people looking to increase their page ranks by using assorted, (some might call cheating) SEO tricks. Yes, I agree, Dewey Decimal system is a bit outdated... but Library of Congress method is awesome. I worked in as a library aide during every semester I was in college. Sure, this was a little while back, (I graduated in December, 1999)... but the internet did live back then too... actually the top story of the library was about 1/3 taken up by a computer lab, and the second story had a multimedia lab. Believe it or not, my first intro to photoshop was version 3.
What's so cool about Library of Congress is once you figure out which Letter a subject has, you can go there and just start yanking tons of books off the shelves, and educate yourself on loads of stuff right there. Plus, you don't have to sit in front of a computer to do it. You can just take the books and go wherever... check them out and go sit cross legged in the middle of the quad, go sit in a cafeteria reading without having to worry about trying to find a wifi signal with a laptop or worrying someone is going to steal your laptop. I have many fond memories of sitting in dorm computer labs pulling all nighters with literally 30 book or so stacked up all around me that I was yanking info out of to complete papers. It's awesome. Search engines can give you some info, but most websites with really in depth info take a lot of digging or reading a multitude of pages to get the info. With a book you can just glance at the index in the back and find your info, usually a lot quicker than it will take you to find the right keyword in google, yahoo, or any other search engine. Actually, after you do some book research, you could go back online and look up more keywords that you fond in the physical book that actually will put you in the right direction. Another problem with online stuff is that you'll find a lot of hits for amazon books for sale, ebay junk, etc. instead of just good scholarly info sometimes. Google Scholar is good as an add on to a library search, but it's no real replacement.
Who knew?
Let me get my permanent marker. I have to right that one down for posterity.
I bet, if enough research was done, we'd find out they're horny, too.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I am just at the edge of "twenty-something" range. 29 year old programmer and DB admin to be more specific. I completely agree that we are impatient. I can only speak for myself of course but the reason I am impatient with searching or, for that matter, computers in general is simple. I know that computers CAN give me instant and accurate results for anything I ask for. I know for a fact they can and that means they always SHOULD. When they don't do something I know they should be able to, I get frustrated. Inefficient programming, poor AI, or just slow hardware you can choose your reason. They all make me frustrated. At least that is my story.
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
Another aspect of the research vs. Google debate is being played out within the Federal government. Real research is expensive and easy to cut out of the budget, especially now as new workers used to relying on Lexus/Nexus for their research come into the USG. What will happen in a few years, when these new hires are managing programs and making budgetary and policy decisions based on info returned by a search engine?
That's just it 99% of the time you don't need to know all that extra information. It's like trekkies who know every little detail about Star Trek ships and how they "work". Only a small percentage of people actually need to know that information. libraries are good that way, and if you wanted to know more about nixon you can always read up on him, but the question becomes why?
Most people don't need to know why, they only learn when they need to know. If I need o know more about something I will look it up fully. If I only need to fact check a few items then I can only fact check a few items.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
So, the publications of the ACM and IEEE as well as the vast databases of print journals that have been digitized that most schools and universities have access to are all superficial?
Looking for information is a skill in itself, and provides all kind of background information on the subject you are looking for; you may not be directly interested in all the information, but knowledge of it cannot hurt. With a simple Google search, you find much less complete information, because you are targeting way more your searches.
By that standard, then we should also throw out the card catalog, because it might be too efficient at helping me find what I'm looking for. Let's go back to the old system I call "throw all the books on the floor and pick one at random". I bet you find all kinds of interesting information you don't need.
Others have said it, but I'll repeat it: there's a difference between the skill of searching and the search medium. Google (or another more field-apropriate search engine), used well, is a starting point - it will be much better than non-online searches. Once you find something promising, following references in the article you're reading will probably be more fruitful. Just like in the old times.
If the cranky old farts who are complaining had bothered to ask younger but somewhat accomplished researchers how they work, I bet that would be the usual system. It's what I do. I'm 30 and am in the age group that spanned the digitization of search - I'm familiar with traditional search methods. For the most part, they suck. I also have pretty good Google-fu skills, and I know that playing keyword soup all day only gets you so far. I use search engines to find a useful paper, and then use its references to find others. This method did just fine for my Ph.D. research, and now it's working for me as a professional.
I don't think this is any different from those boatloads of people that always say "I am not able to ..." without even bothering to try it. "I'm too stupid for that" etc. Those people assume they're doing the wrong thing anyway and therefore simply refuse to spend much time on it. It's a self confidence thing.
It's just that Google makes this utter refusal to actually try anything you don't already know how to do very visible, but it's nothing new. 99% of humanity act like their skills and knowledge are some fixed given. And that's not that strange since that's what they are taught in school: "you know shit, we know everything and don't even bother to claim otherwise or you'll be spending the rest of the afternoon in detention.".
This has nothing to do with Google, it's just that Google once again shows us how utterly lazy and without self-confidence mankind is taught to be.
0x or or snor perron?!
Don't forget that many google searches lead to a book.
What needs to be taught is good research skills. Google is a good first step in well-researching something, and dependent upon someone's needs it may be the only step required.
In some ways google makes things harder to teach good research skills because google really is that good. Thus a teacher wanting to make a student do hard research must give that student a more difficult assignment to make them go off of google.
Maybe you are. Do you also feel you are able to reflect on that information as thoroughly as "the last generation"? The way that you seem to mistake information for knowledge indicates otherwise.
Ah, you must be going for one of these degree programs:
BS - Bullshit
MS - More Shit
PhD - Piled High and Deep
Sadly, this is a typical example of the thinking and writing processes of a Social Worker. I'm the sysadmin in a nonprofit, these essays are what they produce. And they go to 4 hour meetings where they talk about sports, their kids, their feelings, the decision making process, and then break for a lunch meeting.
They wouldn't know a systematic literature review from group therapy. No fooling.
... as if millions of marketing managers suddenly cried out in terror.
The fear that I have is that Google will attain a level of acceptance such that if something is not on Google, it is effectively invisible to the world. This would give them outrageous control beyond that wielded by any oppressive government of the past.
Hopefully there will be a competitive search engine or two around to keep them honest.
Cheap shot at the parent's PhD: if all your research can be done on Google in a few minutes, what value are you adding?
It sounds like "Introductory Computer Science" should be renamed to "Introductory Google". Do you still make your students sit through a lecture on Charles Babbage and Ada Byron?
In US universities, a PhD is typically a hybrid degree, where the first two years involve taking classes, but after this and in non-US institutions (which often don't include the taught part) the candidate is expected to write a thesis documenting their own research. The first chapter of two of this might be a literature review documenting other people's contributions to the area but all of the rest is expected to be their own solutions to whatever problem they are tackling.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Just poke those sharpened sticks into you ears and click away.
The answer to this really depends on the depth of the information that you are looking for. Google is indispensable to my work. Quite often when I'm pushing the envelope, and software isn't working the way its supposed to be, a quick Google search often exposes the fact that someone else wrestled with the same problem, and often, their solution is also documented in the near vicinity of the search hit.
But on the other hand, if I were trying to learn a new technique, like Aspect Oriented Programming, or ray tracing techniques, then finding individual pieces of information via search hits is a poor solution. One has to sit and piece together an entire area of thought and fit it into a coherent whole. A book, where the author has already done this for you, is indispensable in such situations.
The other situation is where the field of knowledge that you're interested in is completely new. In that case, no one has put it all together before. In such situations, you have to go to the source documents. Google can be a help in identifying them there, but it would be a fatal mistake to rely on Google for this. Because, your ultimate objective is the truth, and not Google's page rank algorithm's version of it.
These days, I find that with the pervasiveness of Wikipedia, people tend to think that all their collaboration needs will be met by organizational wiki's. This is again a fallacy - a search-oriented navigational system is inferior to a content / content classification oriented navigational system when one needs information in depth. A wiki will help with the quick stuff - how to get the linker to cooperate when building a particular arcane piece of software. But its not going to help you figure out what you need to be in compliance with your organizations SEI level 3 compliance policies.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
I agree with you, but want to add the obvious that impatience is not restricted to young people. I'm a first-level manager at work (I'm 28). I've been working in IT for about 7 years now (and yes, TheGoogle is all the library I need). I find that the people above me, generally in their 40s and 50s, want major changes, significant development or infrastructure changes, to happen within a week. When I tell them it isn't possible, they seem to think it's because I'm lazy or something.
I think the point is that nobody likes to wait for what they want, but they tend to get less frustrated when they know there's no faster way to get it. Quite the opposite when they know they could have the information in three seconds without leaving their chair, but instead they need to devote the afternoon in the dead tree forest.
The trick is to make people realize that one is not a substitute for the other, when each is appropriate, and how to tell when an internet site or a book is not trustworthy. (Remember that crackpots write books too -- it's not solely a problem for the internet.) When people realize that these two methods supplement each other, they'll tend to be much more patient because they'll understand *why* they have to find a dead tree version, and why the Internet information is insufficient.
The other point is that there's no reason that medium really makes a difference. If the dead-tree version has been digitized, then there's no shame in getting it from the internet instead of the library. Can I find out who assassinated Kennedy from someone's blogs? No, but I might be able to find relevant clues in a digitized version of Jackie O's memoirs.
When I was going through my computer science degree at U.T Texas in 1996 I used to visit the library at least once a week. The LBJ library, the Perry Castaneda library and the fancy shmanzy UT Law School library with it's cushy leather plush chairs and Lexis Nexis terminal. But I wasn't going to the library looking for information. If I needed to know something I did not have time to go through th dumbass Dewey numbering looking for some book that may or may not be there. I would get my info from the net. So what was I doing at the library then? I was reading books at random. I would pick up a floor at random, then an aisle, then a shelf, and voila! I had a book in my hands. It was fun! It could be a book about Texas law, or Rain Forest fauna or Anthropology studies of the Andes people. The fact that I did not need that information and that I could seat at leisure there to browse and read with no goal in mind was the best. And get a kick of this, when I was done, I did not have to return the book to the shelf. They had someone hired to go around and pick up the books to put them back on the shelf. What a job! But you know, I did returned the books back to the shelf because I never checked out a book and I want it to be right there if I I wanted to keep reading it. The LBJ library had books in Spanish so It was a great place to seat in solitude reading Neruda or Ortega Gasset. If I felt otherwise (looking for company) I would go to the Fine Arts Library which enjoyed a bit more equitable male/female ratio and I was able to strike a conversation with a young student holding a catalog of Chagall or Gustav Klimt (grrrr). Perhaps I should have stayed longer in the basement plugged to the IBM's learning my memory blocks and processes and I would have obtained a more decent GPA. But I digress, during my college years I could not afford going to some arcane library to find out the best search algorithm for some abstract data type, yet, all and all, now that I don't live in a college town and the best book in my town's High School library is Calvin and Hobbes, I really miss college libraries.
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
Well, as long as people are motivated by this "impatience" to continually improve processes and procedures in order to make them more effecient I don't see what the big deal is. If you haven't noticed that is generally the direction that tech and progress is headed anyway. If some old farts can't get used to it, tough.
Exactly. Throw some curveballs that require deeper research than just a precursory Google search, and maybe we'll get somewhere. This is a wonderful time to be training a young researcher -- because of the wealth of information out there, and how quickly so much of it can be acquired, the bar can be raised higher than ever before. Weren't computers supposed to be making us smarter, anyway? For me, at least, most of my college papers could be written with Google Scholar, except for one particular professor I had, who made his assignments so damn hard I actually had to Google and (GASP!) read some books. For that, I'm eternally grateful.
Also, I'm mad as hell someone already took my "tldr" line.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
It's funny how hard it is to recognize that you've gone from being a Young Turk to and Old Fogey.
It'll happen to you too some day. These damned kids and their neural interfaces. In my day you needed to know you wanted to know something before you knew it.
Usually the new ways are better, sometimes they are not. Even when the new ways are better, it doesn't mean something isn't lost. Calculators are better than slide rules, but slide rules trained numerical intuition in a ways calculators don't.
Take self-esteem. I'm all for self-esteem, but people raised on a steady diet of self-esteem can be irritating. When I started work, there was the concept of paying your dues; young people today want to have interesting, stimulating and responsible work right out of school. Now here I am, with decades of success and accomplishments, a track record of creative and effective solutions, and some wet behind the ears kid just out of school thinks his opinion should count for as much as mine.
Of course the the juvenile little bastard is right, but dammit I want a little of the respect we used to have to pay our elders, no matter how senile or useless they were.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
When you perform very well at work, you set expectation levels for your managers. Then when you or others don't meet those expectations they are disappointed.
When you go out to eat at a restaurant and it is very good, then the next time not so good, you are disappointed. It did not meet your expectations.
Young people have different expectations about how long it should take to complete certain tasks than older people.
When I search the internet, most people, especially those significantly older than me, cannot even keep up with what I am doing when they watch me. When I am finished, if I did not find anything (or exactly what they want), they can't imagine that I am done. They instead think that I must have given up out of "impatience". In fact I am done. Their expectations are that searching for things take a very long time, one because they are still not used to the internet, and 2 because they are slower with computers in general.
The fact that it takes young people a shorter amount of time to come to the same conclusion or do the same task does not mean that we are impatient. It means we are efficient.
Well the research is for finding what other people are doing in the field, finding how much work fits in etc. Finding such materials is faster via google, but reading it takes just as long of course.
I am not sure that I agree with the premise here that "lack of patience" equals "lack of processing skills". If we were to simplify this argument regarding quantity of processing and time - one would conclude that a 286 processor in fact had better processing skills a Pentium Core2Duo seeing as it takes more time to process the same amount of information.
Perhaps the issue is the "valuation skill". And that many younger individuals might not value the task at hand that has been given. Such does not necessarily reflect a lack of skill simply disinterest.
Which I can understand, one of the classes which was the hardest to remain interested in was an entry level intro to computers class required for all students. (Okay, here I was taking Novell Netware and C++ and I'm stuck a class that requires me to bold text, italicize it, underline, add a page break. Find a website. And you expect me not to fool around and use the computer for something other than said task. You have to be kidding me...I'd have died of boredom.
- The Saj
PS - makes me wonder if intellectuals had the same issue regarding the printing press. Exclaiming that it was better to actually write out the books then simply have them pressed and then read them. That you learned much more in the writing of the book. Probably....but in hindsight, I think the printing press was the right idea. Don't you?
I've recently experienced this myself. Having been sent to do some research for work, I found the variety and scope of potential solutions to the problem too wide for a 'quick, definitive' answer - something PHBs are known to like, rish and all.
I found myself feeling presure to find the answer quick, and in my frustration realized that I was discovering things, unrelated to the specific problem at hand, that may be extremely valuable and provide us new and better services.
I also found, many years ago when I first stopped being a car-owner, there's an entire world of things missed when you move a lot faster and along the beaten path.
This is particularly instructive regarding the IT profession and "millennials" (18- to 31-year-olds) and "Generation X" (32- to 42-year-olds).
Discussion System prefs link: http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=editcomm
I'm wondering what rock profBill has been hiding under for the last quarter century? All that time empty-v has been blamed for impatience. That one makes sense, since the music videos empty-v used to play were all three minute movies with two second scenes.
How would Google make people impatient? It makes no sense at all. Plus, he says it's not just the computer generation but everyone.
I think this is a case of the professor not seeing what's in front of him: different speeds. When I'm at work on the shared T-1, navigating the internet is annoyingly slow ocmpared to my cablemodem at home, and worse, the sppeds vary greatly.
If the study was done in a crowded library on an overloaded T-1, then the impatience people are showing isn't due to Google, but due to the fact that they're used to seeeing a new screen instantly when they click a link, and having to wait at what often seems slower than dialup when at the library.
This is, to me, a big DUH!!!
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
First google match for 'aspect oriented programming' is the wikipedia article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect-oriented_programming
It seems pretty complete. What exactly is lacking?
For your last example, are you honestly saying that you can't find what is required for SEI level 3 compliance on google?
A quick google search brings up plenty about it.
Apparently, you were not an English teacher.
http://xkcd.com/386/
The cool thing about Google Scholar is that it lets me find citations fast (for me, it's especially useful when I know part of the info needed for the citation but need enough for a full bib entry) and in some very obscure journals indeed. I can then either use those to find the article or, often, click on a link that lets me read a digitized copy of the journal article directly from my local academic library's collection. It doesn't mean that it's doing your research for you at all; often it's just pointing out the articles that you'd want to read anyway.
And if you're doing this at the start of your research (as opposed to when writing up) then it sure beats waiting a month for an inter-library loan just to find out that the requested book isn't relevant anyway.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Gaming has often outstripped other computing activities. If there are insights to be had, then that is where I would look.
You often cannot apprieciate the qualities of a good mae - they just seem to work because the good design has become invisible. So, let's think of bad games. These suffer from two sorts of frustrations: being too straightforward (you need 50 wolf skins to buy a sword) or too hard (you have been eaten by a grue). A good game slowly ramps up the challenges as your skills develop, so there is always the right amount of challenge.
Now consider patent research. I have done a fair bit of this for my own patents, and to attack others. There are patent databases. You can easily easch these by keyword. However, this only gives you the patents that can be found where you expect to find them. If you have an opponent, then they will be able to find these. The real paydirt often lies where you don't expect to find it. Sometimes you can find other words, or look though everything in an encouraging patent class of the right age. But this is hard and slow: nothing like your original datagasm with five good hits in the top 20. Then you suspect that the real stuff you are looking for isn't in patent databases at all. You Google the history of the subject, and maybe you find a forgotten branch of technology, and you are zooming along again. Sometimes, what you are looking for is too old to be digitized, so you have to get yourself to a paper library, and start again.
Here is a real example. I got quite excited about the possibility of making a CRT without a shadow mask. It is not hard to hit a target the size of a bit of phosphor with an electron beam by dead reckonong. Electron microscopes do it all the time. If you collect the secondary electrons, then you ought to be able to 'see' the phosphor dots like a scanning electron microscope does. A quick computer search showed up nothing. A quick expeiment with a scanning electron microscope, and a bit of screen separated from an old TV with a lump hammer showed it might work. I went to a library to do some research - and there I found a book from 1960 "Modern Television Technology": this had a pile of completely forgotten ideas from the days when RCA had a complete grip on colour television technology, and other people were prepared to try anything to get an alternative. There was even some guy that was desparate enough to try and pick up the soft X-rays within the tube, even though he could only detect one or two per line. And there was my idea, and it was called 'beam indexing'. Beam indexing? I tried the computer on that, and sure enough, it - 'it' was probably Alta Vista back then - knew all about the Zebra tube, the Apple tube (not that apple), and all sorts of other stuff.
So, what do I see? When I search, I have long periods of unrewarding work. I would give up, but often it is important, and I get results by being a bit more autistic than some others. Then we get a new lead, and excitement flares up again. Then it goes all dull. Perhaps the problem (if it is a problem) with Google is that the datagasm flood of leads burns out so quickly, and the drugery of a genuine search where people haven't been before you seems that mich duller by contrast. I hope that more abstract search tools with richer interfaces - things like the citations index that can display networks of related bits of data as graphs - will allow people to go smoothly from the basic search of indexed data to the mining of the less known stuff, and then to the unindexed, and then to the undigitized. And, as you go, your trail can be used to lead others.
It's going to be fun.
modern computers with awesome search facilities
I've never seen any computer with even non-annoying search facilities, let alone awesome ones. Attention MindPrison, YOU'RE BUSTED! We know you're a time traveller. Unfortunately you got the year wrong this trip. The awesome search facilities haven't showed up yet.
Can I have a few samples of your transparent aluminum, Mr. Scott? Oh and BTW, you don't talk into it, you move it around the table.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
"Can't we just use the technology available to us, without being branded with the [Insert Keyword] Generation tag?"
...quoting Frank Zappa: "Most rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read."
I guess the above observation applies to more than rock journalism nowadays. To be fair, some journalists rely on over-used buzz-words and catch-phrases more than others.
"Master" implies male. "Mistress" would imply female.
Being able to find information is all well and good. But being able to communicate it effectively has always been a major shortcoming of every generation--yours included. I hate to say this, but your writing is fairly incoherent. I was able to make sense of it after reading through it a few times, but it would behoove you to learn to construct proper sentences.
Wow - what a tired and old joke! I guess you sitcom writers need something to do with the writer's strike going on.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I still have nightmares about manually going through the Chemical Abstracts looking for articles that might have been appropriate to my research. I dreaded and hated that process. And after doing that, one would have to pour through the articles themselves searching out the journals, and if they weren't ghere getting them loaned from another library, sometimes hundreds of kilometres away. Oh, and then there was searching the citation index looking for articles of greatest interest (google itself is really not much more than a citation index). What a farkin' nightmare, and it probably added about a year to the review for my research all spent wading through journal articles, 90% of which I never even ended up using or referencing.
I missed the boat by 30 years, if I could do it all over again using google I'd be there in an instant.
Salut,
Jacques
Wow - thanks, Mr. Comedy, for your valid input!
I actually got 60% through reading the /. comments and closed the tab because I was bored, not before rolling the mouse wheel south a few turns and seeing nothing that was magically grabbing my attention.
I just had to come back and comment after I realized what I did.
The problem with this approach is that you can't predict the future. You don't know if some piece of your education could come in handy in the future, and by the time realization hits it could be far too late. Having a narrow understanding of the topics you're interested in makes you 1) very reliant on your source of information, 2) unable to solve permutations of problems that you've solved before. The good side of this is that you're able to pick up new things quickly.
That 1% of the time when you *do* need to know? That's when natural selection really kicks in. That 40 year old guy that you make fun of for writing checks instead of using a debit card? He's going to outperform you 10 to 1 in an unpredictable environment, because he's self reliant. He'll get paid more, have better sex, and survive more tough situations because he can adapt to what life throws at him.
I'm not sure it isn't presumptuous to call this "impatience". Does it necessarily even mean these students lack the ability to go in depth? Maybe what they are seeing is modern students process information faster. So while the researchers were still trying to determine the content of the page - the student had already assessed it was *not* the information sought and moved on.
For people who grew up without cars, learning to drive in middle age was a terrifying prospect and not everyone became proficient at it. For people who grew up with cars, the learning came young and now people are thoroughly acclimated to cars. That does not mean that they are using good driving practices, they could well be a danger to themselves and others. And God help the poor car owned by someone who gives a blank stare when you use the words "oil change." But for the most part, they can use a car as it is needed in modern society. But there's still a tremendous support industry for the cars and there are lots of people who make their living at it.
I think as us geeks age we'll see the new kids coming in with far greater familiarity with computers but there will be surprising gulfs of ignorance for a lot of users. Yes, they'll understand the idea of email and some of them may type quickly but only a few will be genuine power users. I think we'll see roughly the same proportions as today. If anything, we'll probably see more politically sticky situations where some high-powered management type insists he knows computers and isn't an idiot and support is left explaining "Nevertheless, sir, only an idiot would do what you just did." Ignorance is dangerous but a little knowledge can be disastrous.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Why is it somehow better to have to go down to a local library and search through books for an answer, than a quick google search?
You have to be very careful. It's easy to imagine a situation where there are two opposing views, but only one of them is put on the web. So you only get to read that view. So now your research echos that view, and it's put on the web too. Now the next person who comes along reads your view and the original. You get the idea.
The same thing can happen in a world without any computers at all. One book is published in volume and every library has it. Another book is rare. So this problem isn't a unique internet phenomenon. But you asked, "why is it better to go to the library" and this is my answer: because it's important to you find that opposing view that nobody has yet bothered to put on the web.
You are demonstrating the problem with search. The referenced Wikipedia article is good enough to help you fake things at a casual level. It is not good enough for you to do real work with it. There is no discussion in depth of the kind of problems that these techniques are used to solve. If you are working on a problem and trying to apply these techniques, and you run into a show-stopper because you can't figure it out, there isn't enough information in the article to help you figure out whether the technique is inapplicable to your problem, or whether you just need to work on the problem a bit more, perhaps with a different approach. There is no discussion about how tools interact with these techniques. I could go on and on, but thats the point: an expert in the technique who is writing a book on the topic will flesh out all the relevant topics that you would need to know about. As opposed to person searching, who would not even know what they need.
Your comment about the SEI compliance, I'm afraid, demonstrates your naivete. Unless you live and breathe SEI, you don't get to define compliance policies for your organization. Someone else will have defined it for you. And in any organization of respectable size, there will be a huge amount of information to process - something you will never be able to piece together with searches. In practice, most organizations recognize that even a compendium of the relevant policies wont do the trick, and deploy SEI via in person training, and then make the compendium available somewhere in a fashion that lets you find things by content classification. Search may be enabled, but you will rarely use it on documents like these, because when you are going through any one section, you are interested in _everything_ in that section.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
Folks this is NOT a problem with the youth of the world... it is a problem with the world affecting the youth. This goes along the same lines as ADD --- claiming that the youth need to pay attentions to a barrage of:
-Governments
-Guidelines
-Regulations
-Laws
-Cultures
-News Reports
-Textbooks
-TV shows
-Billboards
-Logos
-Jingles
-Commercials
-Songs
-Movies
-Games
-Teachers
-The Internet
-Tabloids
-Religions
-Opinions
-Politicians
-Media formats
-Computers
-Dollars and sense
The list goes on and on. Never before has mankind had so much USELESS information to "pay attention" to!
This is the root cause for Attention Deficit Disorder - Information Overload - Teen Depression & Teen Suicide - Mild Schizophrenia - Paranoia etc.
Stop blaming people for the modern problems this "modern" world has created for them to cope with.
Dj fuQ [url="http://djfuq.org"]djfuq urges you to listen to the beats[/url] [url="http://djfuq.org"]http://djfuq.org[
You are welcome, sir or ma'am.
Yep, we're all people and I really don't think it's news that young people are impatient, and the same could be said about many species of animals.
I am 48 and I'm impatient with crap on the net because over many years as a software developer I have learnt what "crap on the net" looks like.
I'm also impatient with people who knock on my door to tell me about thier favorite politician or diety, or call me up at dinner time to sell me something. That's because over many years I know what crap on my doorstep/phone looks/sounds like.
I'm impatient with web sites that want registration, stores that want phone numbers, checkout queues, voice menus, my microwave that beeps every few minutes until I get up and open it's door, answering "are you sure you want to..." dialogs. All these busy-body, fail-safe, look-at-me "customer relationship tools" that won't let you wind past the FBI crap **IN AUSTRALIA** are just wasting what years I have left.
OTOH: I am much more patient than I was at 21, IMHO having your own kids surpass that age gives you (as a friend once put it), a new level of calm.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Let me get my permanent marker. I have to right that one down for posterity.
Do you want to "right" that or "write" that? Or maybe since we are talking about the younger generation it should be "rite", "r1t3" or some other perverse variation like that.some of the data you find with google is incorrect and /or unsupported. A monkey could have written 1/2 the stuff you find out there. Valid research is published in books or scientific journals.
I feel your pain ... I would rant about articles published before 1990 not being indexed, but my 10 years stint in the "not currently available on the shelf" hell was over when I decided I'm not going to lose more time chasing after books, begging for access to sources and pretending to be a hot-shot research historian.
TFA whines about the "new generation" not having patience to go through the dumb procedures set up 100 years ago, when a research library might have bought a maximum of a couple of hundreds of books each month, had a collection of about 2000 to 5000 books and journal volumes, and serviced under 20 people, most of whom could afford to buy most of those books or the journals themselves. Now a librarian has to deal with hosts of full time researchers, research assistants, graduate students, undergrads and amateurs with enough connections to get them access to the library. Now librarians has to get info on thousands of titles each month, so they won't upset some of the "elders" with an oversight when they submit the list of books to the acquisition committee (books that the acquisition committee won't approve, since they are the scientists and they know better, but you have to show you tried), then negotiate budgets for paper clips to RAID arrays, deal with evaluation committees and inventories, prepare reports for the beancounters, prepare reports for the administrative management, prepare reports for the various departments, track down and negotiate with the privileged lenders (those permitted to take books home), meet and appease donors, socialize with donors, socialize with the management etc. It used to be that the librarian in a research or university library had to be a scholar: now it must be in the same time a scholar, an accountant, a debt recovery officer and a PR agent. Large libraries hire different people for these jobs. Small research libraries (~ 100k items), such as the one I worked for for a few month before being promoted to a more glamorous "research" position for administrative merits, have only a couple librarians, since that's what was mentioned in the charter drawn a gazillion of years back, and there are no money to spare for folks that just "sit at the desk the whole day".
The result is that the trouble of getting an item from the "block X storage area" which is a few hours away by trolley cart speed discourages the "new generation", which has to prove itself fast. Oh, they don't want to take the pains of tracking down the last extant copy of "Labor force composition report", published in 1899 ? It certainly means they are no-good-spoiled-brats. It definitely does not mean that they are under pressure to deliver a paper tomorrow, so they choose to write about whatever they can find with the help of Google Scholar and the free access shelves in the library.
The mystical "good library nearby" so many people talk about probably refers to some Ivy League university library, and "nearby" means within a circle with the radius of 5000 miles. 95% of the public or research libraries are dumpsters for Harry-Potter-style of (scientific) literature, since there is so much relevant stuff published that they cannot even get informed about it, and even less buy it. What gets bought is general stuff and the spillover from the latest fad with the accidental gem for which there were enough votes in the acquisition committee.
Oh, the youth these days ... they want to have it easy ... during the good old days you had to dig for clay, prepare the tablets, sharpen the sticks, bake the written tablets, QA the baked tablets, chop the trees, fashion the shelves etc. Those were times fit for scholarship. Nowadays its all about these papyri and scrolls and texts where the words are marked by spaces and punctuation that we hear about but would not get into since they are cold and dehumanizing ... these spoiled brats are to lazy to find time to sit down and meditate while the tablets bake in the oven.
When I use the library these days, 95% of time time that means using the library's resources online; I might occasionally have to physically go to the place to get something that I can't find online, in which case I go in, find what I want, check it out, and read it elsewhere.
If I weren't impatient, I wouldn't steal others code and tell my employer I wrote it. I think Larry Wall said it best: "Three great virtues of programming are laziness, impatience, and hubris."
-
You are taking my statement out of context.
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You are using that misquote to build a straw man argument.
Allow me to explain:The words those three dots replace entirely change the meaning of that sentence. Look at what those three dots replace: or more precisely, the slow, deliberate reading of credible sources that we generally associate with libraries Clearly, I am not talking about the libraries per se, I am talking about the ability to read and understand complex and credible sources.
You then use that misquote to suggest that my argument is that all digital sources are superficial, which is obviously an untenable position (the straw man). That is not my argument, which is clear from the rest of the post. I mentioned later regarding digitizing information: there is no reason that we can't digitize this information and stick on the internet,but simple availability and physical location of the documents is not where the problem [is] here.
...you can't crtl+f for key words through a 200 page argument and understand it. To clarify, obviously whether you read on a screen or a dead tree is irrelevant beyond personal preference. Digitizing can in fact really help the diffusion of information. However, the ability to actually read the material is what is at stake here and that is the skill I am talking about. I still maintain that this is necessary to go beyond the superficial.
Anyway, have a good one.
-mat
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
The short answer is, you are capable of absorbing a lot of information. I expect I was when I was 21 too - at least, they let me have a degree. However, what you are not yet capable of doing is systematically organising and arranging that information so as to draw conclusions from it. If you do a PhD, you will learn how to do that, but you will then need years of practice.
Now I'm in my 50s, my IQ is 15 points lower than when I was 20, down to 145. But I'm better at designing things, because to be a successful designer you need to keep a lot of related information in your head, and that's what I have learned to do. There is a reason why a friend of mine designs whole light railways while mechanical engineers with first class degrees in their 20s design bits of machinery.
When you have learned to structure your knowledge, you will understand why Dewey. It is not just about how clever you are. It is not just about how many facts you know. It is about seeing the entire building as a whole, not just a collection of bricks.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
...but I'll comment anyway. Who says our generation is so impatient? That is the most ridiculous thing I've ever
"Know but never fear the consequences of your actions."
Serendipity, Baby! And completeness, and obscure, older references...
ZP
We only can learn from our mistakes.
I did find what appears to have been a fleeting initiative known as the "Journal of Universal Peer Review" which sounds a bit like a pre-wiki-puberty wet dream.
http://listserv.tulsa.cc.ok.us/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind9605&L=okpsystu&P=310 The Journal of Universal Peer Review (JUPR) has been created to satisfy two needs of information dissemination in this age of Computer Mediated Communication. The first is a more rapid dissemination of information while assuring the quality of that information. Even the most recent print journal reflects the thinking and work of an author that was written two years ago. JUPR will publish article abstracts along with the comments of reviewers and the article will be discussed in a public forum. JUPR-DIS is that public forum. Within a month of the original dissemination, the article will have been reviewed, evaluated and its worth established in an open debate.
This leads directly into the second need satisfied by JUPR. In the current peer review system, the decision with respect to the quality of any scientific work is in the hands of anonymous reviewers from whom there is no real appeal. Many new ideas are rejected because they go against traditional thought or are out of the zeitgeist. JUPR will give voice to authors and the whole readership and who will have the opportunity to discuss the critiques of reviewers.
I wish I had handy the literature on the psychology of initiation rights: that which makes you suffer needlessly is most vigorously defended once the in-group status is bestowed of dutiful, uncomplaining survivorship.
I tend to visualize peer review as a vise on the end of a sturdy bench, with a long line of men (and women) with damaged fingernails smocked in black hoods awaiting their turn at the crank.
Plead in Latin if you must, but bear in mind that the Romans didn't devote much of their language to escaping unscathed.
Isn't impatience and lack of appreciation something that EVERY generation attributes to the next?
Vital papers will demonstrate their vitality by moving to where you can't find them.
There are 4 stages to understanding something:
If you're at stage 2-4, then it can be extremely frustring to run into someone at stage 1, because usually such people are like a cup that's completely full. No room for anything.
Do you really think a prof (probably at stage 2-4) is afraid that they'll be made redundent by google, or is more like they're annoyed by idiots at stage 1 who think they've got everything worked out already.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
The researchers appear to have taken this concept into account, as they can compare the answers that different groups retrieve (and I'm pretty sure their methodology must have included comparisons of validity in searching).
Of course, the article description doesn't at all adequately report what the researchers said. Contrary to the blurb here, the researchers stated that they don't believe that the evidence supports the idea that the "younger generation" is impatient with search results.
:P
If you read the actual article, the researchers came to the conclusion that the whole idea that the "google generation" is more impatient with results and expects no delay was not actually backed up with evidence (p. 17 of the pdf).
Digitization of actual content came later. When I started graduate school in 1998, I can still remember going to the old, crusty "bowels" of the health sciences library and looking up academic journals by hand -- it was really a royal PITA because the amount of journal articles you'd have to look up was quite astronomical, and you'd have to take several trips between your table/desk in the library and the shelf, to work on a given problem. But we found the information we needed.
By the time I graduated however, it got much better! The ACS put their entire archives since the 1800s online, and several other publishers got into that game as well. So now, you could search online and find the info you needed as well. The problem (that still remains, unfortunately), is that publishers are still clinging to their old, archaic copyright policies, and if your institution doesn't have access, you get a page asking you to pay. And the fees, for single articles, are astronomically effing ridiculous -- $50 or so for a single article!!!! Who in the h*ll is going to pay for that?!?! I understand that publishers do need to make a certain amount of money, within reason. Although I don't buy their justification of publishing costs -- these days, the typesetting is all done in desktop word processing, by the authors! And authors are asked more and more to do actual editorial tasks. Peer review doesn't even cost as much, since the experts don't get paid to do it. So the journals asking for $50 or so for a single article are just extorting people for far too much than they should actually be charging! Fortunately, it looks like the academic publishing market is slowly moving more in the direction of open access.
Yes, and just like horse-riding or many other skills, the number of people who need that skill is significantly reduced by advances in technology.
If the cost of that knowledge is time and you aren't interested in having that knowledge, then yes, it does hurt.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Did you happen to find this degree-granting institution on the back of a match book? I was under the impression PhD meant ORIGINAL research. If it's in Google, it's not original. (Unless Goggle is the subject of your reseach.)
Well, we could start by teaching them critical thinking skills so they'll know the difference between credible sources and complete garbage. Then it won't matter whether they do their research on Google or in the microfilm archives at the library -- they'll discard any rubbish they find in either place.
Then maybe the next step (once the ability to separate the cream from the crap has developed) could be teaching how to find information in other than the most obvious ways.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
s/initiation rights/initiation rites
Had a spelling mistake flashback on my way to the coffee maker. There's some deeply rooted psychological instinct not to incite a knife fight with your fly unzipped, connected to the neurological Jerry McGuire.
Is that an 8 or 16-port hubris?
AT&ROFLMAO
I was told that if you know what "masakatsu agatsu" mean you know the truth and rather than learning Japanese and translating it myself I used google. Oh well... I would have forgotten the phrase long before mastering Japanese anyway.
Maybe because it would not have survived the peer-review process. None of those 'facts' are true. Most journals now peer-review and publish within six months (electronically at least, print may take a year) , often much sooner. All journals have a 'rapid review' process for articles that are felt to be urgent. The peer review process does have an appeals system, authors can argue, editors can weigh up opinions, and in the ultimate form of appeal, authors can send work to a different journal.
Many journals now publish the reviewers comments, and reviewers for many journals are no longer anonymous.
The peer-review process is important to prevent the spread of the kind of mis-information exemplified by the above quote.
Perhaps the peer review system has issues with self critique.You obviously didn't look very hard. The peer-review process is heavily self critical. Do a Google Scholar search on 'peer review'. There's lots of critical articles published in all kinds of medical and social science journals.
Are we suggesting that the average baby boomer once had an attention span large enough to compile compelling research and formulate a well-thought out essay?
Because I don't think that was the case either. Across the board, I think the "average" person tends to be undisciplined and there is a minority of individuals in any generation who are disciplined enough to make advances that move humanity forward.
I don't think Google should be evidence that people are lazy. I think Google should be evidence that 10 years ago, there was a need to be able to get information quickly and easily and a pair of highly disciplined individuals figured out a way to do it.
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
Let me get this straight. Imagine someone looking for specific documented information regarding their . They search google. They visit a site. They quickly scan the site. They don't see clues that specific information is located on that site (for right now, assume it is). The user leaves the site, goes back to google, and looks at the next promising linked site.
So explain to me why is this the fault of the user for abandoning the site? Sounds to me like the kids have it right on. Don't make excuses for websites. Not for their navigation, taxonomy, folksonomy, whatever. Especially so when there are millions of other sites trying to serve me that same content.
Note: Bonus points goes to people that understands that not making excuses for systems is the meta answer
I am also an ex-teacher, working in the IT industry. I think a portion of the problem described in the article is due to poor web programming, and insufficient attention to design and scaling problems. (Ways to avoid Slashdotting bringing down a site have already been discussed on Slashdot.) Ignoring what would happen if one's site suddenly got popular is just lazy design. Very nice to have all sorts of things on a website, and have it be pretty, etc., but paying attention to speed in design is quite important. I forget the exact number of seconds that a website has to respond before most people click elsewhere, but many people still don't pay attention to that. One might consider the younger students impatient, uninterested, and incapable of information processing, however, most often the problem is that the older professors are willing to put up with technically poor websites, while the younger students have higher standards! Ironic, isn't it?
The truth is, we live in an age of convenience. I mean, there is so little to worry about in terms of survival that we can put time into doing virtual things for fun. Back in the day, I used to play catch with my dad inside the house (to the chargrin of my mom). Nowadays, I see kids hooking up each other's GBA's or DS's, or just plain sitting in front of the TV or computer because physical activity requires too much work.
/.'s new discussion display system (keyword bindings and all) sucks big ones. Not only is it annoying to have to click on the damn "more" button 10 times to load up 400 more comments, but it also takes forever to load. And, if I accidentally click away from the page afterwards, like to reply or to read a long comment, I'll have to go through clicking the "more" button 10 times again just to pick up where I left off. And, it's buggy as hell, so that if I expand an abbreviated comment and then close it, its replies get hidden. Hidden! I can't even see the replies anymore. I have to expand the parent or click the "x replies have been hidden" message to see the replies again. I didn't hide the reply. I don't want to hide the reply. I want to click on the reply after shrinking the parent. But I can't expand the reply without yet another layer of clicking. And, even after I shrink the parent, it leaves a large blank space right below it, with a branch indicating a reply going into that perfectly empty white space. This is absolutely the most retarded discussion UI I've ever seen, far worse than the unthreaded message boards that became popular at around the turn of the millenium. I don't know why it's not still hidden away in a corner somewhere for beta testing by volunteers. I know I wasn't one such volunteer.
/. logged in, and when I don't, I always see the new discussion interface.
People pay for convenience. They pay for mundane things like cleaning or cooking, and then occupy that unused time with "luxury" pursuits that in the end are largely meaningless. They pay someone to watch their bratty children while they go out for some drinks and a dinner. And so when things become inconvenient, become truly difficult and challenging, instead of sucking it up and getting it over with, they throw their hands up in the air, sit down, and wait for someone else to take care of the problem. Or maybe wait to find a person they could pay to do it. And if neither scenario presents itself, they shut down and cease to continue functioning normally.
And we wonder why people have started to feel that their lives are empty.
Case in point:
And no, despite the sarcasm, I'm actually being tongue-in-cheek. I don't surf
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Maybe it's just that more people are going to these universities that simply wouldn't cut it 20 years ago? I know that many universities are continuously trying to boost their numbers; it's a sort of pride thing. I know plenty of people who have the patience to go through and scour information. I also know plenty of people who don't, and am left confused as to how the people who don't have the patience have made it as far as they have.
"I'd rather spend my time actually reading the info than trying to find it."
I agree also, the fact is copyright has a lot to do with why all books are not online (the fear factor). I'm glad more and more books are coming online and are in e-book format. But relevancy vs. time becomes an issue when you have so much data, even when using google.
Wow, thanks Mr. Commentator, for you acerbic wit and keen skills of observation! //Now someone get me!
I fail to see how this is a problem. Everyone decries the lack of attention span and impatience in the 'younger generation' but so what? My speech coach always said when making a speech you have to make your point quickly and succinctly or people will stop listening. This wasn't tragic - it was appropriate. Everyone's time is money and no one has the right to any more of it than they can justify. No one has the right to demand you listen to their useless words until they deign to get around to the point. This has been the case FOREVER, not just recently. With respect to finding information Google has spoiled us by DOING THINGS RIGHT. There is no reason nowadays that information should be hard to find - it signals laziness or stubbornness on the part of the person with access to the information. Look at realty. Your realtor does a lot of good things, but what he or she SHOULDN'T do is search databases endlessly for a house, trying minutely different queries and guessing what certain phrases mean and calling people to get the 'real' information. If the people selling a house want to put it in a database but then 'tweak' the listing so a professional has to read it to make any sense of it and fool people into thinking the house is better than it is, that's wrong. Plain and simple. The amount of information we deal with on a daily basis is quickly balooning out of human scope. We NEED computers to do the work for us and the technology is here. It is laziness to not implement these features with the TOOLS ALREADY AT HAND. Bottom line: Nowadays if information isn't indexed, searchable and quickly at hand then it's not right to fault the people whose time is wasted for being 'impatient' and 'demanding'. The technology is here: use it.
http://angryee.blogspot.com
If they say they're a man, they're a man; if they say they're a woman, they're a man; if they say they're a teenager, they're a cop.
It seems to me that the skill they lack most is patience. It is a skill, something that has to be learned, and it is valuable. I can't see that we have to change society to accomodate people that demand instant gratification - on the contrary, impatience lies behing many of the modern ailments. We can't wait for a dinner that takes an hour to cook by hand, so we eat fast food and snacks and get obese. And rather than learning the dreary and boring patience skill, we have renamed impatience - it is now 'ambition'.
But actually, true ambition requires a lot of patience. If you want to make it to anything, learn patience.
What total nonsense. I'm only at the MA level at the moment, but I can tell you that if my thesis only contains other people's solutions to problems, I'll never be allowed to get to the PhD level. This is the rule, not the exception, in the humanities.
As for the GP post, it makes me pretty nervous to hear that there might be PhD programs where it's possible to get by without having to use other tools than Google Scholar. Maybe some fields are different, but there're thousands upon thousands of journal articles in humanities subjects that will never show up there...
I just did a biography on E.A. Poe, and it wouldn't have been nearly as good if I didn't have a decent dead-tree version of his life story and access to other writing through EBSCO and Lexis Academic. There is a LOT of digital content available to researchers online, you just have to pay for it.
I'm lucky in that my IT fee at my local comm. college includes access to Medline, pubmed, ebsco and about 30 other online repositories. Google can't match that.
Who knew?
Let me get my permanent marker. I have to right that one down for posterity. you might add use-of-language challenged...
While Tapscott is essentially, correct a more recent study From ECAR (Salaway et al., 2006) shows that this is not quite nuanced enough. At present, only about a third of the current crop of students are full-blown N-Genners. About a third or more are more moderate technology users and a third or less is technologically disadvantaged. However, for your purposes, most of the true N-Genners tend to be male and in engineering or business, so you pretty much are dealing with full-blown N-Genners in your classes.
Tapscott gives the following set of eight shifts educators have identified in regard to the N-Gen students. Their learning should move: 1. From linear to hypermedia learning; 2. From instruction to construction and discovery; 3. From teacher-centred to learner-centred education; 4. From absorbing material to learning how to navigate and how to learn; 5. From schooling to lifelong learning; 6. From one-size-fits-all to customized learning; 7. From learning as torture to learning as fun; and 8. From the teacher as transmitter to the teacher as facilitator.
As to libraries, Eastbrook (2007) found: "Those who do turn to libraries have success, and they appreciate all the resources available at libraries, especially access to computers and the internet. And those in Generation Y (age 18-30) were the most likely to turn to libraries for problem-solving information." (p. v, original emphasis). Further:
The N-Gen are among the largest users of libraries, but libraries are now resources providing information in many forms, not just books.
In sum, the Net Generation is not 'lacking skills' so much as their brains are wired differently than those of previous generations, and while this is not yet wholly homogeneous among the population, it will increasingly be so. Education has to change to accommodate this. I've got a webcast about this available at: http://breeze.uliveandlearn.com/p11443785/
References:
Philip, D. N. (2007). The Knowledge Building Paradigm: A Model of Learning for Net Generation Students [Webcast]. Cyberspace: Innovate Live.
Salaway, G., Katz, R. N., Caruso, J. B., Kvavik, R. B., & Nelson, M. R. (2006). The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2006: Educause Center for Applied Research.
Sterling, B. (2002). Tomorrow Now. Envisioning the next fifty years. New York: Random House.
Tapscott, D. (1998). Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation. New York: McGraw-Hill.
As one from this younger generation I would stand to argue that the impatience is driven by the sheer exponential overload of information that we are bombarded with. This additionally, with the rate at which research and advancements that take place necessitate the need for faster methods of searching, retrieval and categorization. Granted the signal to noise ratio is lower on the internet but google provides the ability to more effectivly discover relivant information.
This isn't to say there is an issue with the lack of persistence and patience in a task. I live in a small town south of Omaha, NE and when I'm not at work I'm training horses with my wife. The contrast from the daily IT work to training a horse is immense. Training takes patience, understanding and consistency measured in months and not hours and days as with most IT tasks.
Beetle B.
You're doing your doctoral research via...Google. *Deep breath* Please tell me that you are using Google to access verifiable primary sources, with page numbers that can be cited, and not random postings on, say, Slashdot. I'd find that acceptable. What I do not find acceptable is the notion that surfing the web is somehow a substitute for scholarship, because it isn't. Not only is there all kinds of crap on the web, but there is no way to cite said crap. A URL is not citation, because it is ephemeral. If I read your dissertation 20 years from now, I'm not likely to find the web page you cited, even if what you cited wasn't complete drivel to start with.
Your reference to Google Scholar hints that you are indeed doing the right thing, but the notion that web surfing is equivalent to scholarship is so widespread and so pernicious that you ought to clarify. What field, by the way?
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
If its on TV, its true [ 30 years ago ].
i think the argument here is probably more so that paid databases are superior to google searches (even scholar.google.com) and the method of consuming said information is fundamentally different in a way we do not fully understand yet. like the difference between nytimes.com and a hardcopy. you read different parts, retain different information, and spend a different amount of time. try it. its interesting, and i doubt any relevant data is out on it yet. hell several years of qualitative sociology research is probably necessary before anyone will be willing to write greek around such a nebulous concept.
You insensitive clod! Don't you realize that all your hot grits covered base are belong to us (and our various newly welcomed overlords from Soviet Russia).
I use books to get an idea for an area (usually several books) and the internet mainly for reference. Even when doing research on 'the internet', I many times go to established journals (work at a uni, so got access to many of them :)
No, what's really ridiculous is that we think a human can do a better job diagnosing than a computer. Yes, a human will have to mediate the program but an expert system can be built (and regularly updated) with the knowledge of the best people in medicine. Human doctors have limited bandwidth and throughput, a distributed system can be expanded as required.
Wake up everyone, the next generation IS changing! We are Borging it up and developing a hive mind where our memory stores are external to our heads. Nothing wrong with it, it is just fundamentally different than what previous generations are used to.
That's fine if all you need to do is synthesize existing information. If you need to distill new knowledge from something which hasn't yet been digitized, patience is generally necessary.
I believe the original was:
BS - BullShit
MS - More of the Same
PhD - Piled Higher and Deeper...
...they are like that - you know - incredibly impatient, demanding and everything has to be here and now! ...and they have the attention span of a gnat. Must be those years of Ritalin.
___
And google can search a lot of books and scientific journals and patents.
I still flinch whenever I make a mistake like that.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Peer review is a functional meritopoly. The people inside the system argue it this way: peer review is the only possible seal of expert approval. Outsiders view it as a social institution bent on stomping into the ground prospective competition. In the middle ground, you have people who concede that peer review is a flawed system, but also defend it as a system we have long had, that has brought us this far (a hereditary meritopoly).
This is the advantage of youth. Youth is less easily fooled. In my generation, it was IBM that was failing to fool anyone, aside from the university administration, which was lapping up discounts on IBM facilities we the students universally despised. (Some of us had the notion the PC would not prove to be a short-lived fad.)
The old people were entirely right: it was a spectacular waste of time and energy to work within the confines of such a hopelessly constrained and misbegotten contraption. The great thing about youth is that they couldn't fussing care less. Liberation is not powered by convenience or short term utility.
In my mind it is not possible that the younger generation will sprout their wings under the ultraviolet Google grow lamp and not beat a retreat from stodgy formal journals like midges from a puddle of turpentine. A few dutiful brown-nosers will fall for the ruse of progress-within. That faint rustling sound that haunts their sleep at night is their less dutiful peers munching their way through the rafters of stone age sweat lodges; the pink and grey eminents within are just beginning to notice some chill eddies.
There are other dimensions to the meritopoly: you can only access the journals if you merit access. The primary form of merit is to belong to a subscribing institution. JSTOR believes they are doing me a favour by offering me the chance to pay $30 to skim a ten page paper to determine that the authors had precious little to say.
How does the majority of my own generation fail to get this? There is so much information in the "new world" that just stopping to consider whether a journal paper is worth a $30 transaction, you've already fallen behind. In hockey, the cardinal sin is skating without moving your feet. In chess, the cardinal sin is relinquishing tempi. In the new world, agility matters more than hidebound (and outright mythical) notions of quality (witness deconstructionist criticism, landscape cosmology, clinical pharmacology).
What remains useful about peer review is its potential to function as the supreme court when disputes escalate. The supreme court is the arbiter of last recourse, not the fountain of first sip. Ultimately you do need a revered forum to shout down the mythomanes. Worthy, but not central.
Consider the legendary interview from "A Thin Blue Line". This is interesting because Judge Metcalfe is supposed to number among the upholders of truth and justice, yet he is as delusional as any Wikipedian sock puppet keyboarding half naked in a purple bath robe.
Wellington Film Society -- knows the word "mythomane", but not the name of the judge he's criticizing
Pace Law Review -- knows the name of the judge, but soft pedals his stupidity
Why is it somehow better to have to go down to a local library and search through books for an answer, than a quick google search?
You might find information that isn't already on the Internet. The early SIGGRAPH papers (early 1970's - eg. Bill Reeves paper on "shadows" for flood-filling areas with pattern) were never published in journals - but they were photocopied, microfilmed and distributed across the libraries. On a free afternoon between lectures, it would be fun to go down to the library and surf through these archives.
But I certainly agree with the parent - it is a lot easier now that it was even just ten or fifteen years ago. In the past, if you wanted a hard to find a research paper that wasn't available locally, you had to fill in a form quoting every name and title down to every dot and comma, otherwise the request would come back "no such title", and you've wasted three days waiting. Another problem was that some university departments took pride in having a library filled with the original research papers unavailable anywhere else. Unfortunately, students would play shenanigans with those papers referenced for exams by returning them somewhere other that the expected index position.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Correction: If they say they're a man, they're a twelve year old boy.
Twelve year old boys do this because they know teh intarwebs has predators that like to do bad things to twelve year old boys (unlike meatspace where everyone is civilized) and that the child molesters won't bother them if they think they're a big hairy man.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
...the information processing skills of todays young people are lacking
The ability to parse through ridiculous amounts of fluff and filler is dying out. The reason for this is that it is not needed anymore. This is because we are developing the skills to parse dense, and data rich text, learn what we need, and then move on to absorb the next chunk of information. I see this as a good thing.
First post-Doc?
31705
Although I'm sympathetic to this argument, it seems unpleasantly reminiscent of the ones that are trotted out in response to any new technology: “Sure, you may get results your way, but my way gets results differently. Since I turned out OK, my way must be better.” These arguments seem not to allow for different people's (even different generations') styles of learning—and also make one wonder if, when ease of access is regarded as a bad thing, we should move the physical libraries farther away
A big part of the problem is that schools, for the most part, encourage and reward recitation of facts and rarely bother to ask students of think about what they've learned or apply it to something new. When I was in high school one of our teachers used to give homework that amounted to copying sentences out of an encyclopedia or two and whiteing out various names and dates which we then had to fill in. About all we learned from that class was how to effeciently divide the work up and share our answers. As long as all you ask for are facts, all you'll get are Google searches.
That doesn't follow at all. By saying that the more information there is, the less complete the information returned, you're basically making the same logical problem as: the more cheese at the grocery store, the less likly I am to find blu cheese.
Information isn't like Hollywood movies; depending on the source, the signal:noise ratio is pretty damn high. A good searcher can find an answer to -almost- anything, or determine whether there even is an answer for the question. And, if they're just trying to find non-specific information - ie, research - it's pretty easy to do provided you're generally educated as to the topic (which can typically be done, again, with some research). That all takes quite a lot of time, whether with a book or with the Internet.
No, on most topics, it's infrequently the case that any one page has the answer. That's why it's called research. But to suppose that books are inherrently better for research than the Internet?
Let's say I had to research, say, the science behind the fermentation project to do... something.
And no, I fully realize there are some topics which are simply not available online in any depth or quality. But, the same can be said for certain topics in books (sometimes the same topics).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Getting annoyed by contact with people at level 1 is like getting angry at the law of gravity (or more poignantly, evolution). If a professor is surprised, annoyed, and frustrated everytime s/he meets one of the large group of people at that level, then the prof still has some learning and adjustment to do -- and is still at a sort of level 1 of his/her own.
Even that is the hard way!
You can get a degree based on your accumulated life experience. No studying, no classes, no writing papers or a thesis, and no exams. Just send in a little processing fee, and your shiney new diploma will be delivered within a few days.
You don't even need google search at all. They already know you qualify for a diploma and the link to get it will automatically appear in your email inbox.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I've always preferred it:
...the women are, too... and little girls are FBI agents."
"Ah, the internet; where the men are men!
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Just be careful and practice safe search!
Are you trying to say you can't do original research online through Google or any other online service? That's silly. Google can be used rightly or wrongly--if used rightly, it serves the same purpose as a library, which facilitates original research. Google may not be linked up with as many resources as a typical library, but that in no way affects the ability for a PhD candidate to do original research through its service. "If it's in Google, it's not original." This is also silly. You can just as easily say, "If it's in the library, it's not original." Original research doesn't just appear out of thin air. It's built upon the research of other scholars. You take what you find in the library--research that is not yours and is thus unoriginal--and use it to further your own original research.
Because kids are lame. They don't seek knowledge, they seek gratification of baser wants. And each generation of kids are lamer than the last. The food they eat is lame. The clothes they wre are lame. The way they socialize is lame. The music they listen to (if you wish to call it that) is lame. Their reasons for owning something like a cell phone or a computer are lame. I watched a film recently, where the IQ of the country continued to drop for couple hundred years until a couple (a prostitute, and an Army reject) thawed from cryogenic freeze to find that the entire country was as stupid as cows, and the Army reject was not the smartest man in the country. I sense that this is occurring as I type this, and it alarms me greatly. If the government could institute some sort of manditory birth control for any couple with less than a combined IQ of 250, stop importing smart bastards from other nations, cull the herd (add a little chlorine to the gene pool), and shut down the wellfare system, our country might still have a chance.
Impatience and being unhappy with the state of things on computers is a huge driver for hacking better solutions. It is also a driver for investment to satisfy that itch. I don't see how this particular characteristic in any way implies a lack of computer skills. I hope people become even more impatient with clunky software and systems.
[...] the number of people who need that skill is significantly reduced by advances in technology.
I agree with that, but I keep in mind that it is a skill that can always be useful, internet is not yet everywhere and will probably never be.If the cost of that knowledge is time and you aren't interested in having that knowledge, then yes, it does hurt.
I disagree with this, knowledge in itself cannot hurt, acquiring it may, but having it cannot, you never know when a particular piece of knowledge will be useful.If I'm wrong, please correct me ; learning is better than being right.
I'm not denying the usefulness of Google search, I'm only pointing out that the "old ways" still have an interest, and that it might be useful to still teach them, you never know when things like that might come in handy.
If I'm wrong, please correct me ; learning is better than being right.
Why is it somehow better to have to go down to a local library and search through books for an answer, than a quick google search?
I'm doing my PhD, and pretty much everything that I need for my research is a google search away. In particular google scholar rocks.
Who said using the library meant going down there and searching through books for an answer? Most libraries pay for access to electronic databases nowadays. You can probably access them from home with your library card.
If you're finding everything you need for PhD research via Google, I'm interested in seeing what your research is on and comparing its quality to what can be found using both Google and library-financed resources. There are a lot of things published in academic journals that could very well be applicable to your research. A college or university-affiliated library is your best bet to have access to those through online databases. Google doesn't.
Using Windows is the #1 symptom of not really caring how, when, or why things happen on a computer.
Why are old people so complacent about brain-dead, arbitrary rules, needless delays and shaky or false information? Why do they tolerate it instead of demanding change or fixing it themselves? Why do they say "ho-hum" and become part of the problem instead of finding a solution? Why is tradition - the mindless repetition of the past - such a valued quality?
Quick case in point that comes to mind due to a email I recently received: Fox News lied and "reported" that Obama is a Muslim who went to a terrorist training camp and repeated this dozens of times for a 24-hour news cycle, at 5AM they retracted it once and then lied and said Clinton was the source of that first lie, and then their favorite pundit called Edwards a "faggot" and they are STILL the most popular "news" network. Oh, and they didn't understand why the Dems didn't want to go to their debate.
If they have their way, Google will be able to beat that eventually... if the information wants to be free, that is...
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
TV commercial: "Is today's hectic lifestyle making you tense and impatient?..."
Bender: "Shut up and get to the point!"
You probably have never been in a scientific consultancy company.
First of all, you need to distinguish between indices and electronic subscriptions. Most indices, e.g. pubmed, provide a way to search for scholarly articles, but do not imply access to the full text itself. The index is a search mechanism. Your institution must separately subscribe to the appropriate journals. (If you want to drive a university librarian nuts, keep asking them why there are articles in the index to which you can't get full-text access.) Many article databases also provide a search mechanism and index, but these articles are generally covered in a broader index anyway. For example, I use a lot of articles available on IEEExplore (an article database with search interface), but I generally search from an index with broad coverage in my domain, such as INSPEC and Web of Knowledge.
Google Scholar is an index and covers many of the major journal publishers. If you're institution doesn't subscribe to a specific publication, the link takes you to an abstract page for the article, and the full text will remain unaccessable. For many universities, the links from Google Scholar will automatically take into account the institution's subscriptions. Certainly I can find ieee articles through Google Scholar quite easily, but I wouldn't be able to access the articles without my institution's subscription.
Honestly, Google Scholar is *very* good. It covers a very large percentage of the content covered by Web of Knowledge (which in turn covers a very high percentage of the science literature). I'd bet that any resource you've used is indexed by Google Scholar. GS's citation search is a little less reliable than Web of Knowledge, but it covers web resources that are often not readily covered in WoS (such as theses and online books). You need to be a bit more savvy in checking the source of the articles you find because GS will include articles that someone slapped up on their home page beside articles that appear in peer review journals, and that to me seems to be the greatest challenge. Librarians are also irritated that the the search interface tends to promote plain old keyword searching rather than searching over fields, but that's a weakness that is inherited from how Google mines the data. Advanced search allows dates and authors, but no subjects. But subjects turn up pretty well in GS keyword searches.
There's not much to complain about with Google Scholar, so long as you understand what it actually is and the tradeoffs you adopt by using it. (Many people don't). An increasing number of respectable academic libraries are linking to it along with there other indices as a way to search for scholarly articles.
(BTW, I'm married to a science librarian from a major U.S. university.)
Looking for information is a skill in itself
I generally ask interview candidates what their information search path is. I often get either: 1) Google. (end of discussion apparently, that's their one and only source of information) or, 2) My teachers (more proding) my TA's (more proding) uhh, other students.
A few folks have heard of books. It's rare though. I've seen this over a few different age groups, too.
You must be talking about stage 5, where you are perfectly at ease with morons while they try to shot themselves in the foot and take everybody else down with them.
I'm not denying the usefulness of Google search, I'm only pointing out that the "old ways" still have an interest, and that it might be useful to still teach them, you never know when things like that might come in handy.
My point is that it's not a new vs. old thing. Like good programming skills are language-agnostic, good research skills are largely independent of the medium. Ultimately, people doing good research with new tools are generally doing the same thing as in the old days; they just get the information they need faster.
Your right. Truth is there is no good reason to have long drown out investigations. With computers we have the ability to make a large amount of data accessible for use in an instant. However there is another side to this. And that is on how to learn something. When did you or anyone else here ever learn how to learn? The question may sound stupid but perhaps that is the problem. Do you know how to learn anything, anything at all? What to do to be able to learn anything, even subjects that have no real background already done? Sure you may know how to learn something, but do you really know all that you need to be able to anything without question? I tend to think that a lack of such a think in education may be the reason why people will so easily accept trash as fact. Have you ever seen a complaint about stupid people being common in our world today? Did you ever think it may be because we don't teach people how to think correctly? How to learn and think for themselves? They see a tabloid and it says that "X" is a fact. Can they tell the difference? Did they ever learn how to think at all and break it down into facts or fiction, did they ever learn how to say "That makes no sense"? Perhaps if they did, they would not make such mistakes.
Only then do you start doing web searches so that you can find quotes from books that you can reference that fit the answers that you've found else where but are shunned as acceptable references.
As a last resort you search the university library website and on line journals. Face it if you actually physically need to visit the university library in person and use an actual dead tree book, either your are in the wrong century or the subject you are studying is a dead as the book it is in ;).
Come on people just a little bit less sucking up to the proctologists of the internet, 'google the web' is really just being a sock puppet of the marketdroids.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
There is something important missing. The young of today never learned how to learn. They get spoon fed facts and we say they are smart if they grasp it. But what if the data is not already on a spoon for feeding? Do they know how to find the facts for themselves? Have you ever run across some guy with crazy mixed up ideas who has clearly accepted unreal ideas and believes them to his core even when he should be able to see the problems right in front of him? What is wrong is not that the person is "stupid", it is that he does not know how to think and thus spot the truly relevant facts. We may call them stupid for not having sorted out the facts, but perhaps they would have if they just know how. Perhaps all the many people running around with crazy misconceptions would have sorted them out if they just learned how to learn and sort things out for themselves.
If anyone wondered why I included clinical pharmacology alongside landscape cosmology and deconstructionist criticism, the NY Times was kind to oblige me in a story from yesterday I had yet to read.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/health/17depress.html?em&ex=1200805200&en=c0e173e23c1db9a8&ei=5087
I think you're correct; but the extreme access to information these days differentiates the current situation. My example is "a website I know about" [cough-mine-cough] where newbies expect to be given all the information needed to be an xpert. Nevermind that they don't even know what to do with the information or fully understand it.
Totally agree. I work as a research analyst for a financial company. I couldn't do my job if it weren't for Google. (Well, I could, but I would be ridiculously less effective than I am now.)
"The reason for this is not understandable to the human mind." - IT helpdesk assistant
Worst. Nitpick. Evar. Er if you read it in context it's a valid nitpick, as the OP was suggesting "school" doesn't involve anything truly original, while my point is that a PhD does.
See, that would be useful. Especially if decent abstracts are provided of copywritten items. I'd happy use a per-pay system if I can at least get some idea of what I'm buying. That's what I like about Safari Books online so much.
Google Scholar with EBSCO, etc... great.
I'm unfamiliar with Google Scholar; I was speaking of Google in general, and it specifically was less useful that my university resources. I apologize if I confused you, and thanks for the info!
Ship High In Transit
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
but I didn't fight in a global war to overthrow a power-mad, genocide-happy dictator, who was bent on conquering half the planet. If the people who do that aren't the greatest heroes of our time, who are?
Godwin's Law says that by mentioning said dictator I've just lost the argument. So I guess I'll have to hand it to you.
It used to take months to cross the Atlantic a century ago. Now that airplanes are more common, passengers are becoming increasingly impatient if their flights are an hour late.