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China Dominates In NSA-Backed Coding Contest
The Narrative Fallacy writes "With about 4,200 people participating in a US National Security Agency-supported international competition on everything from writing algorithms to designing components, 20 of the 70 finalists were from China, 10 from Russia, and 2 from the US. China's showing in the finals was helped by its large number of entrants, 894. India followed at 705, but none of its programmers was a finalist. Russia had 380 participants; the United States, 234; Poland, 214; Egypt, 145; and Ukraine, 128. Participants in the TopCoder Open was open to anyone, from student to professional; the contest proceeded through rounds of elimination that finished this month in Las Vegas. Rob Hughes, president and COO of TopCoder, says the strong finish by programmers from China, Russia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere is indicative of the importance those countries put on mathematics and science education. 'We do the same thing with athletics here that they do with mathematics and science there.'"
'We do the same thing with athletics here that they do with mathematics and science there.'
Thats nice, and I believe it's disgusting how athletics are held here, but the public has made it abundantly clear that's they way they want it. I, for one, would like to welcome our new Chinese overlords.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
What's that?
IMHO it's not that we (yeah, I'm from so called "Eastern Europe") focus on mathematics and hard science, it's just that, from what I see, athletes/etc. are put on a smaller pedestal
(perhaps partly because of economic considerations...celebrities here simply aren't worth that much as a product; means also that for larger percentage of "would-be celebrities" the only future is as a bouncer or whore, etc.)
But they are still put on a pedestal...
One that hath name thou can not otter
What's worse, the quote isn't even true.
We don't do the same thing with athletics here as they do with math and science over there. In fact, they do the same thing with athletics as they do with math and science.
That is, they consider athletics to be important and encourage every child to participate in at least one sport.
We, on the other hand, idolize a very small number of top achievers and encourage every child to watch them on TV.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
"We do the same thing with athletics here that they do with mathematics and science there....
The problem is that we are overpaying our teachers.
(but, seriously, we give math and science teachers a starvation wage and provide them with little respect. Meanwhile, we pay football coaches 6 figure salaries and revere them as Gods. Are we really that surprised that we fail at math?)
If you're serious: You're right, we should never tell children when they're wrong. That would never create preening, self-entitled idiots that never learned any actual hard facts and have no idea how to cope with a real world that doesn't care how "traumatic" being told "you're wrong" is.
If you're joking: God, don't scare me like that!
Maybe we should stop running schools like businesses and start running them like schools.
I would rather we start funding them like schools. I would also suggest that we suffer from a quantity vs. quality problem that the quotas in places like California, while good-intentioned, are worsening. Higher education needs to be cheap and available, but highly selective. While I'm being idealistic, I might as well also mention that we need to stop requiring college degrees for basically any middle class job. We've saturated the job market with highly educated people, while simultaneously diminishing the quality of that education. So now, as a society, we're paying inordinate sums for lowest common denominator education, that a large proportion of people don't need and won't ever use.