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Pure Science Becoming Less Popular Than CS
An Anonymous Reader writes "An article (free login required) in yesterday's New York Times (Business Section) says that the number of college students in the physical and biological science is decreasing because of the "easy money" available in the field of computers. It also says that the computer industry's growth will slow and that the next big boom of technology jobs will be in biotechnology. Interesting stuff. " Of course the real reason is Turing machines. We really just dig drawing out turing machines on chalk boards and arguing about NP problems.
I've been reading articles like this for years. Corporations want to encourage science and engineering grads so they'll always have a cheap supply. There are way too many chemists around and salaries are nice and low for those companies hiring chemists and yet I still see articles encouraging kids to get chemistry degrees.
worked for me oddly enough...perhaps someone recreated it?
Ah yes, it was when I was graduating HS 6 years ago and all my elders urged me to get into bio-tech. because it was the next big thing and CS was a dead end. Then came the web and the six digits... Who's laughing now? But seriously, the articles only mentions students that declare their majors, it doesn't mention the numbers of students that actually GRADUATE with a CS degree. If I am not mistaken, I read on slashdot a couple of months ago that the number of students that are graduating with ANY tech/sci degree has been on a steady decline for some years now. Which article do you believe? And this guy expressing that we don't need more HTML people in five years. Is HTML CS? While yes, HTML is the cornerstone of the web it has little to do with these two words Computer Science. I think the fundamental problem is not that these kids are chosing CS as a major, it is underlying philosophy of our educational system in our society. We educate our kids not to have them better themselves for the sake of education but, to fill a specific economic role. And whether it is CS or basket weaving, as long as our motives are money driven rather than the contiunued quest to gather more knowledge you will see this sort of major shifting time and time again.
Negroponte isn't a scientist. He's half marketing man, half aristocrat, whose job is to separate companies from their money in the name of trendy, hype laden "research".
Uh-oh, it looks like we've entered semantics hell. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
How is it that man is separated from the natural world?
Is linguistics an "engineering" study?
Wrong.
Linguistics is about the structure of Languages, which turns out to depend on the structure of the human brain. That's a natural physical structure. Read Chomsky for details.
CS is about number theory at root, Godel's theorem being the prime example. That's a relation between numbers which was unknown before Godel's proof, and in many ways Godels method was an experiment on the behaviour of numbers.
As you said, the numbers of atoms of the various elements in a molecule is static for a given molecule. Numbers are a primary fact about the universe, though characters that we humans use to represent them are inventions. Maths comes before Physics in describing the universe.
rcsteppat
My advice: go CS if you like math, too. Sink to the level of BCIS if you're stupid money-grubbing scum (i.e. don't do it).
'CS isn't a science, nor is linguistics'
Sorry, lost my misquote (I think you actually said both, but not together, and not in these words).
Wrong.
Linguistics is about the structure of Languages, which turns out to depend on the structure of the human brain. That's a natural physical structure. Read Chomsky for details.
CS is about number theory at root, Godel's theorem being the prime example. That's a relation between numbers which was unknown before Godel's proof, and in many ways Godels method was an experiment on the behaviour of numbers.
As you said, the numbers of atoms of the various elements in a molecule is static for a given molecule. Numbers are a primary fact about the universe, though characters that we humans use to represent them are inventions. Maths comes before Physics in describing the universe.
rcsteppat
Math isn't difficult (at least when I took it at the undergraduate level). Most proofs work like this:
Setup proof definitions
Rip-off some dead guy's neat trick that rearranges the definitions into proving your point
Conclude the proof. qed.
And most of the time, the tricky stuff was covered for a *week* by the prof.
I agree with the biochemistry part. But I find that you need to specify what you want to do in biotech. Do you want to do structural genomics? If so a good background in computers is essential.
But if you want to be a bench chemist then lab courses are going to help you out much more. However, courses can only teach you so much so it's important to do reserach as an undergraduate to help you learn what you didn't learn in class.
So to say biotech is somewhat vague, only when you specify what you want to do in biotech can you truely address the question you ask.
> To be completely honest, knowing how to reduce a Nondeterministic Automaton to a Deterministic
> Automaton is not going to help most CS majors in the type of work they will be performing upon
> graduation. True, there do exist positions in which such knowledge is applicable, but most
> graduations are not doing programming of that caliber.
Computer games is one such area. The breadth of knowledge needed to be a gaming guru is startling - AI, finite state machines, fuzzy logic, 3D math, integration, image processing, audio processing, multi-threading, I/O, language design, parsing, OOP, etcetera. The list is endless.
My question is, if all these CS Majors are spewing forth from the halls of academia, why is it so damn difficult to find good games programmers?
Beats me, and I've only been interviewing for the past four years.
- RGreen, Bullfrog, UK.
Math isn't difficult (at least when I took it at the undergraduate level). Most proofs work like this:
Setup proof definitions Rip-off some dead guy's neat trick that rearranges the definitions into proving your point
Conclude the proof. qed.
And most of the time, the tricky stuff was covered for a *week* by the prof.
Math isn't difficult (at least when I took it at the undergraduate level). Most proofs work like this:
Setup proof definitions
Rip-off some dead guy's neat trick that rearranges the definitions into proving your point
Conclude the proof. qed.
And most of the time, the tricky stuff was covered for a *week* by the prof.
Experimentation involves direct observation of physical phenomena.
Man, I can't believe you made that leap of non-logic.
Note to self - do not let the kids go to "Brockport".
Small request. Please remove Negroponte from your list and add him to the "Vapid Glory Hound" list.
Thank you.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Maybe that guy was right when he said CS was easy... they gave me a degree...
I know of a Physics PhD working for a large Consulting firm. Why he is working in the computer trenches and not doing experiments is beyone me. It seems like a real waste to spend all that time getting a PhD and then not using it. Personally, I'd tell the guy that he needs some counseling and to rethink his choice of careers.
Infinite recursion... stack overflow.
Unfortunately, these two events don't happen often, and usually start to really take place when one is doing post college work (grad school, industry). IOW, scientific gratification requires some patience.
What about you CS types? Do you have similar types of orgasmic experiences in your work? (and I don't mean that episode with the female plug on a RS-232:-)). Are there short-term, relatively quick and dirty, things that you do that give you a really high level of satisfaction?
When I write code (I know, this is not pure CS), I have three happy times: 1) when the code finally compiles, 2) when it stops core dumping, and 3) when it does what I want it to do. But the feeling is not as fullfilling to me as scientific discovery. However, for the types of programs that I tend to write, I get this positive feedback more often.
And all of that physics is covered in one semester (kinematics)!
In other words, CS != MIS . My university offered degrees in both. You didn't learn about Novell in the CS curriculum, and you didn't study the principle of mathematical induction (in three separate courses!) in the MIS curriculum. But have you read the classifieds lately? To most managers (MBA DEFINITELY != CS), a CS degree is a computer degree. I've seen jobs for NT admins, VB programmers (I am one, so don't get your knickers is a knot), HTML writers, and even tape monkeys, where one of the REQUIREMENTS for an interview was a CS degree.
I would also note that programming is not necessarily computer science, if you believe that CS is a scientific discipline. Most programming is more along the lines of engineering. You have to study physics to become a civil engineer, but building bridges does not make you a physicist. I don't think you're doing REAL computer science unless you're researching clever new algorithms in conjunction with others in the field who are studying the same kind of problem that the algorithm applies to. (I think the people who write 3-D engines for Quake etc. are doing computer science.) If you're writing a Visual Basic front end to an Access database, or even an HTML front-end for a Perl interface to a MySQL database, I don't care what your degree says; you're not dong computer science. At best, you're a computer scientist in the sense that all those waiters in LA are really actors.
I remember watching McGyver as a kid! Thinking back, the stuff he did was so improbable but it was soo cool how he fixed stuff just by knowing the chemical contents (now _how_ did he know chocolate would DO that??)
But I digress and you are totally on the spot. I loved chemistry the moment I was forced to figure out electron orbitals. It's true professors weed students out. I am experiencing it. My first year chemistry class had a packed lecture room, one of the largest in the school. Now in my third year chemistry there are around 20 students!
I guess professors don't purposely flunk kids out maliciously, but it's a sad fact that it just happens because many people lose interest.
People totally do not understand science at all. It is NOT boring. In fact, I found programming to be boring. As much as CS majors get excited about the newest algorithms discovered, true scientists enjoy solving problems and discovering answers or even new conundrums. TRUE CS majors get insanely obsessed over their theories and scientists love doing what they do and despite our poor rep and poor pay, we are what we are because science is da bomb.
I say, despite the hype, do what you want to do!
Because if you don't, you'll most likely end up miserable. Which is one reason why I dislike articles like this because it seems like society is telling kids to turn one way or another.
A lot of the top medical schools are more willing to accept chemistry/physics/CS/math/engineering majors than pre-med majors. They want to 1) be able to start from scratch, without having to "unlearn" the junk they got in pre-med, and 2) have well-rounded students who will later be able to do top-notch research. Who do you think invents the robots that help doctors do their surgeries? A pre-med major who became a doctor? Where did he learn the robotics? It is more likely that an engineering major who later became a doctor would be a pioneer in something like that.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Less than 6 months ago the New York Times had an article saying that there WEREN'T ENOUGH computer science majors: They all drop out because it was too hard or too boring. My freshman CS class started at >300 people, I just finished my sophomore year and it is 100 people.
"Computer science courses teach skills and techniques, but they don't teach critical thinking the way physics does,"
Now that's a great quote. It's probably true at some universities. At a certain university, there's lots of debate among undergrads about the "theoretical vs practical" teaching of computer science. Basically, there's complaining that, though the introductory classes teach component engineering, function specifications, algorithms &C, they should actually be teaching us how to use Visual Basic so that we can get internships the summer after our sophmore year.
Fortunitally, some students prefer to learn real computer science.
Also Ms. Corning comments later in the article point to something that was brought up 20(?) years ago in a book called Mindstorms (Pampert?) about the Logo programming language. This teacher(Ms. Corning) seems to think that computers are a fancy full-color chalk board. Mindstorms warned that we shouldn't try to use computers to program children (ie fit computers into the current education model, at least in the US) but when children learn to program computers, they'll learn geometry and other math at the same time.
"Computers can teach information, but they don't teach a way to ask questions or conduct experiments where you don't know the correct answer ahead of time,"
Again, what kind of computer use is this quote assuming? It's the same comment as above: Computers shouldn't program children. It takes a different kind of _teaching_ to integrate the really powerful uses of computers into the education of a child.
I'd argue that a computer can be used to learn basic scientific principals, or the scientific method. If children were encouraged to be creative with the computers, and to solve problems (as in LOGO) they would discover the scientific method with only a little bit of direction.
But as long as education is thought of as "the road to a career," students will go for easy money. That's what they had 12-16 years of school for, right?
Then again, I speak only from personal experience with education. Perhaps some of you out there have been encouraged to be creative and think for yourselves.
peace,
ijones
so does his illegitimate daughter, Turm Garten
:)
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Luckily, things like randomized algorithms have only been shown as useful under real experiments, so CS qualifies.
"Political Science" and "Library Science" do not. Neither does math.
Most people seem to think any field is a science if they use numbers, equations, computers or funny symbols.
We do enjoy it, but most people do not. That's where the sarcasm comes from.
So far, I think that everyone I know who's gone to college planning on getting a cs degree because thats the way they can make lots of money on it has given up somewhat quickly, because these people also seem to have gotten the notion that they can make lots of money without doing any work or expending any mental effort. I'm sure some do make it through, but at least at my university the weedout courses are pretty decent at weeding out people. Of course at least one of them is pure sadism and weeds out even people who are there because they like computers. But thats life.
I think there's a big distinction that needs to be made here. Right now there's alot of jobs in the computer industry but how many of them are really CS? Coding HTML is not CS. Getting your MCSE is not CS. Being a Unix sysadmin is not CS. Running an NT mailserver is not CS.
True CS involves alot more of a high level understanding of what's going on. True CS involves people who are solving problems at a very high level, who are re-thinking the norm and who are applying their background in math and science to solve a problem, not people who are rebooting servers when the pager goes off.
I know alot of people who work answering the pager and maintain unix/nt/cisco systems as their job. They're all really smart people, but what they're doing probably isnt CS. In fact most of them dont have a degree in CS if they have a degree at all. I'm not even sure if what I do really has all that much to do with pure computer science, but I'm pretty sure I have a solid background to fall back on if it were to come up, which is why I dont worry. What worries me is people coming out of assembly line CS programs who dont have any idea what real Computer Science is about, and just want to get paid.
-Rich
I doubt that this is truly the intention. But...
The professors teaching these courses (both faculty and grad students) would rather be doing research, or working on papers, or something else entirely.
Instead they are forced by the administration into nursing snivelling freshmen who are required to take the course, but the mojority of whom couldn't care less about the actual material.
After about a semester or two of this, they (teaching staff) give up and go through the grind, all the while taking their frustration out on the students. The few students who have potential and interest, suffer, and many turn away. The ones who didn't care to begin with, care even less.
Very few people make it through the meat grinder of introductory science courses with their spirits and interests intact. These go on to become graduate students, all the while remembering how the majority of their peers in the 100 level courses, didn't give a crap.
It's an unfortunate vicious cycle.
Interestingly, everyone is also required to take Literature, History, and the like, where classes are much smaller due to the very interactive style of teaching that must be used. You'd think that the administration would have figured out the correlation between class size and student interest by now.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Hehe, sounds like somebody had an Automata theory class this summer! :-) While you might think CS is a lot of theory and abstract thought disassociated with actual coding, the fact still remains that CS is still an easier route than most other sciences. I have some friends who are math/comp sci. double majors. They find the advanced comp. sci. classes comical, since we comp sci's try to impress ourselves with attempting complex math (for automata theory, algorithm analysis, etc.), but the stuff we cs majors are tackling in our senior years, these math majors had nailed in their sophomore years. :)
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
On the other end, it also means we end up with lusers as fellow programmers. A Visual Basic developper once asked me what a DLL was. Eek!
I was in a class my last year of college with seniors in CS who didn't know what a hash table was. YOW! Fortunately for those of us with a real understanding of CS, these fools will always be stuck answering pagers and writing HTML while the rest of us move on.
-Rich
I'm sorry but I don't see how examining something like algorithms in finite groups(a course in the cs department at my university) is equivalent to "engineering functional paradigms."
If what you're saying is true then mathematics also fits into "engineering functional paradigms." I'm sure its news to joe-schmoe the algebraic topologist.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
"They" will define science to include themselfs. "They" always do. (yes "they" in quotes means something. It means those conventionally outside of the definition).
No matter how hard you argue it to me, I won't budge. Computers were man made. They will never be a science. And the recent invention of "natural science" vs. "science" is a nice way of saying "we screwed up the term, now we have to make 'natural science' mean what 'science' alone use to mean." Let me tell you, there isn't much "natural" about some of the best cutting edge chemistry or physics, yet, it's based in extending natural laws. Computers are manmade.
Define it how you want, but the study of computers (or the human THOUGHT process of the human mind for that matter) has always been seen as "outside of the field of science." (granted that linguistics is based in studying mans thought process, but, some will argue that mental processes of man are soo borderline, they are not science).
I frankly give up on these SlashDot types that want to prove to me Computer Science is a science, because someone in the computer field once postulated a theory that is difficult for all of them to grasp. I will once again state, "I can apply the scientific method to drinking beer. Theory, experiment, new therory, and on and on. That does NOT make drinking beer a science."
Frankly, linguistics is an art. And, of that, they should be proud. It's one of the most highly evolved, technical, elaborate, insightfull, and exciting of all forms of art. But none the less, it's an art, because it's primarly about _language_ which is NOT a science, it's something manmade.
And furthermore, to avoid potential "slippery slope" arguments, because there is something in the study that is "natural" no more makes it a science than the fact that I can build a chemical structure to form a work of art. Science is applying the scientific method to gain insight into the natural world.
Now, it's not like there is anything wrong with one field or another. It's just that someone has to make a distinct "line in the sand" and say study this and that's art, study that and it's engineering, study this other thing and it's science, study this next thing and it's medicine. So, why fight so hard to say your field is on over the line you want it to be?
I'll tell you why, It's because "science" has been portrayed by way to many people as the "elite" field of study. And frankly, it's NOT. I know many an artist I would rather work with in a chemitry lab than some so called "scientists." Someone has to take a step back and realize, without the ballance, there is no way for society as a whole to evolve. It took the artists, engineers, and all to evolve "science" to where it is today. And likewise for the other fields. Where would a great painter be without some "scientist" developing a better, longer lasting, more bright paint? Where would the scientist be without the tools the engineers have provided? Where would the engineers be without the principles that scientists layed out and the creativity that artists came to the table with? They would all still be back far beyond the uglyness of the Dark Ages.
Linguistics is about the structure of Languages, which turns out to depend on the structure of the human brain. That's a natural physical structure. Read Chomsky for details ..... Excuse me, but the human brain? Well, yea, it's natural, but would you say that everything that the human brain can come up with is "natural?" Well, if that is the case, then EVERYTHING is a science.
CS is about number theory at root, Godel's theorem being the prime example. That's a relation between numbers which was unknown before Godel's proof, and in many ways Godels method was an experiment on the behaviour of numbers. ..... Well, first of all, no one has proved that "math" itself is a science. Albiet arguable, I would probably be much more likely to call mathamatics itself a science. But the "Application" of math to something is clearly an application, and therefore engineering. Tell me, if the application of science to the "man made world" isn't engineering, what is engineering?
Why try so hard to make someone (me in this case) believe that Computers in any sence can be called a science? The only valid point you can make is that my "definition" of science is dated, and the word has evolved to mean anything that you can apply the scientific method to. If that is the case, then sure, Computer Science is a science, and so is just about everything else in that people study, including my study tonight on beer drinking. At least that argument you can win.
Frankly, I believe that by dilluting the meaning of words, and redefining them to suit your needs is the "de-evolution" of mankind. Because something is "hip" or "in" doesn't mean that we should make everything that way. That's the problem with the USA today, everyone wants "what's best for the majority" and "what the people want" because it's a democracy. And, you completely erase the premise of freedom by replacing it with democracy. Democracy is just a pretty way to say "mob rule" and does not by construct ensure freedom. Yet, people want to call everything under the sun "science," they want to call everything a pretty word, no more "wasp, fag, gay, whatever." Once apon a time, the words all had meanings to be proud of, and then people used them in inapproprate ways. Rather than dealing with the fact that there was a definition to the words, we in America either redefine them, or invent new ones to take thier place that haven't been used negitively. "Black" at one time was a way to distinguish race, now it's a "insult" and they are to be called "African-American," and you black only is a color you can buy a car in. "Gay" at one time meant happy, then it was a slam on the "partying good timeing homos" and now they are something else (who knows a "PC" term to call homosexuals today that doesn't imply a negitive sterotype?).
Call me a "Mick" and see if I care. Honestly. Call me a "Mick" to your hearts content. And I will only stand up and be proud. Call me a "scientist" and I will probably agree that I was educated as one in chemistry, but am much less likely to accept that label, because the work I do involves so much art (and flat out creativity), and management skills (which aren't a science), and I will say that label is misleading. I will say, "why yes, I am a Mick, if you think that makes me 'inferior' I can only hope to prove you wrong." Call me a "scientist" and I will say it's a broad label.
But if you want me to stand up and say "your right, next time I meet someone who writes computer code that has one time studied a 'theory' I will call him a 'scientist' not a programmer." I just can't accept that.
How many programmers or even computer engineers will stand up in public and say "Oh, I am a scientist?" That is not what scientists are, and they know that, and they understand that if they said they were scientists in public, the people they said that to would not expect them to be "programmers." The computer people who want to put the label "science" on their profession are doing themself a dis-service. They are saying to the world that "we are bound to natural principals in our work" rather than "we are creative and invent many things" like they could say if they called themselfs engineers or even if they said they are artists.
The day I meet a hacker that calls himself an artist is the day I find a whole new respect for the person saying it. That would emply not only are they "applying something that is manmade to a real world application as engineers do" but they are saying "I am taking it to a new level, somewhere that has no bounds, that's creative beyond conventional thinking, and something that will revolutionize the world like the renasaissance."
This reminds me of an old proverb. One which emplys that we all wish we could do something "greater" than we do at the present, but in the end, it's only a circle. It goes "Artists wish they were scientists. Scientists wish they were mathematicians. Mathematicatians wish they were artists.
A rash of these same stories 9 years ago helped me switch from cs to biocrapology. At the time it looked like biotech was going to be the NBT, and for years the number of cs grads had been rocketing upwards so it seemed yeah, switch to biochem, lose the competition, quit being so obsessive and have people think what your doing is cool instead of geekish... total win situation yeah? But no it's a total lose situation. US has more bio-science majors now than ever (percentage wise as well as obviously raw numberwise), the competition for even 36k/yr jobs is fierce and now I'm righ back in the obsessive programmer mode only it's called bio-informatics. Which by most accounts is the future of biotech. bio-informatics is a fancy name for writing perl scripts to parse the output of a few real programs for 11 months/yr and for 1 month you get to write a program that might do something new... Ack, grrr... if these idiots predicting massive job growth in biotech had ever worked in the field they might realize that A) the materials for bio-research are so damn expensive that no mere worker will make a decent salary. B) very very few companies make any money at all, most are just waiting to get bought out by one of the few massive pharma companies. C) we have a tremendous glut of bio-science grads D) the future of the industry is informatics, what to do with all this data being generated (and automated more and more) same old crap as 5 yrs ago, 10 yrs ago and 15 yrs ago, life sciences still suck as a workplace, if the science itself wasnt't so cool they wouldn't be able to keep anyone.
You must be joking, right? Or very naive. In the last year and a half I've had the misfortune to DELETE 30000 lines of crap code by idiots who have no right to call themselves 'programmers'. It's not a very pleasant experience although I must admit to a sense of satisfaction in delivering something that is robust, maintainable and works.
What did I do? I was a programmer who was brought in to fix projects that were going wrong. Often the only thing to do was shoot the existing programmers, delete all their code, do a proper design and implement it properly. Past tense. Now I'm working in R&D, working with a quality code base, quality team and loving it :)
No, there are far too many bullshit artists out there masquerading as programmers. They churn out unmaintainable, buggy horrors which end up costing their clients a lot more in the long (short?) run when the bleeding has to stop and have to redo the application. The world doesn't need more programmers - it needs more good programmers. Not bloody useless VB hacks.
-t.
and relevance to this discussion? I graduated in environmental science.
Why don't you try surveying a bio class and a EE course and compare? Last year I took a 3000 course in each. The results? bio class:65% female, class size ~90 EE class:1 female out of 24 students... she has since changed majors. I know that this is only one isolated instance, but I've heard many, many similar one's and no contradictory ones. But if any of you have been in any EE clases with over 50% females, by all means let me know... I'm curious.
I'm a gnu world man.
If you don't see how writing code or producing theory is equivalent to engineering functional paradigmns then please step away from the compiler before you hurt anyone dependent on your output...
a prophet on the burning shore
For some reason it seems to me that women are still coming out of school with a math phobia. Bio as a major requires a lot less maths than Physics for example. I was crusing the net a few months ago looking for a good statistics web site and ran into the required curriculum for Wellsley COllege. Wellsley is a elite school that has been almost always exclusively for women. They list ONE course 'quantitative reasoning' as a math-like requirement, and had the description for it full of all sorts of justifications as to why Wellsley required a course of this nature - One fluffed up math course, for crying out loud. Hell, as an engineer I had to have a humanities MINOR with all sorts of English comp, foreign language etc requirements. In our kind of society a school like Wellsley shoud require a technonlogy minor with at least a year of Calculus. Damn, these are bright people - they are perfectly capable of doing this. Criminy.
Now now, it's not nice to tease the fat pasty ones like that...
One problem with the hard sciences is that there are too many people chasing too few grants and real R&D jobs. YOu are doing people a favor by weeding. It's not like IT where any housewife can get a MS certification and a IT job; to keep a job in the hard sciences you really are facing some stiff competition.
> Certainly, CS is not a mere way to learn to program well.
;-) since CS is, as you mentioned, about the study of algorithms.
;-)
As a CS grad, I would have to agree. If you're lucky, you'll find little about becoming a better programmer in the few software engineering courses. Of course, the students that really were interested in the topics of CS and wanted to learn how to be a better program usually took it upon themselves to read up and learn on their own.
The nice thing about CS is that you don't really need a computer to do computer science (but it does help.
CS is really in a interesting position. Half-way between pure mathematics, and pure engineering.
Maybe the colleges/universities need to create a program for people who just want to use computers in the real world, without understanding the underlying structure. Oh wait, that was business computing
Than craming Prologue, completing NP (All I know is that I'm not NP complete), while spreading sugar in my cLisp, and figuring out how to make a date with Perl.
^ ~
Besides, who ever got into pure research for the money?
^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^^^~^^~~^~~~^~~
It seems to me that CS should be called Computational Mathematics instead. A science is generally specific to developing theoretical knowledge about natural phenomena, while mathematics is manipulation of symbols in a logical fashion that can be used in the modelling of various processes. CS is not really a science, but rather a branch of math...
I don't think a (good) CS program is nearly as vocational as you suggest. Lots of people would probably take offense at what you say; basically it's because CS != programming. Until those slackers trying to sail off of computers notice this, we're going to hear crap in the media (like this article).
i think we will see an integration and merging of traditionally seperate field in the next couple generations. right now we can see this happening in the field of biomechanics. hopefully once this happens more diversified training will ensue.
another point about hard science is the amount of time it takes to study up to the leading edge of fields like physics, chemistry and (most importantly, IMHO, astronomy). the study of science is a parabolic venture, the farther you get along the harder it is to discover new things.
signatures are for fools with hands
The problem is, science is just not an economically rational career choice.
In most fields of science, you have to get a PhD and do a post doc... by then you're pushing 30. And then, if you're "lucky" enough to get a job, you have maybe a decade of employability... Any scientists who find themselves unemployed and over 40 will never work in their field again, and there's no such thing as lifetime employment any more.
Scientists are the new "starving artists". A child who dreams of becoming a scientist is no different than a child who dreams of being a pro athlete, a pop star, or a movie star. A beautiful dream, but... most musicians can't quit their day job, most actors are waiting tables, and most college football or basketball stars end up sweeping floors at Burger King when they don't make the cut in the big leagues. Aspiring scientists take note...
And look at what happened in the former Soviet Union and Cuba when their economies collapsed... directors of research institutes in Russia driving cabs to make ends meet, female doctors in Cuba getting jobs in the tourist industry or prostitution. Thousands of former-Soviet scientists saw their hopes and dreams and life's work shipwrecked... no money for research, no money for survival.
The economy may be booming now... but if you're in your early 20s, the odds are you will see at least one or more major economic downturns or depressions in your lifetime. If it happens when you're in your 50s, how will cope... what will you do, with your ridiculously over-specialized science skills and knowledge that society doesn't give a damn about.... how will you live?
Me, I dropped out of a hard-science PhD program at a Top 10 US university (sorry, don't want to get more specific than that), worked as a computer programmer until I hit mid-30s and stopped getting interviews for any interesting jobs (doesn't help if your undergrad is in science rather than CS).
So to hell with all the large, clueless corporations run by PHBs, where all the internal activity amounts to a gigantic bureaucratic circle jerk and virtually none of that activity ever emerges in the form of added value that will make an ounce of difference in the life of any real customer...
Now, I make money from the Internet... figuring out ways to get filthy fscking rich is just a research project after all... right now pr0n is the biggest revenue generator, but mainstream is finally getting a clue.
So forget Einstein... here's to Hugh "many worlds" Everett, a hero for our times:
If you went into biotech for the money- you were screwed from the beginning. JOBS are available, just many/most of them are at companies not at universities. Trying to find qualified post docs takes awhile.
The computer field will always be bigger (#'s and salary wise)- as everybody needs computers- whereas only biotech companies/ universities need biotech people.
Gavin Fischer
do you need years of medical / biology experiance?
yes but you *deserve* to be discriminated against.
Granted, this is not going to be real popular with people who decide that if their code works it doesn't need to be coherent, but we all know their code is a bitch to maintain anyway. We also know that management is somehow going to decide that "we don't have the time or resources to train people like that" when in reality, they don't have the time or resources not to. I honestly think that most people can be taught to write clear code that doesn't have, say, global references where they don't need to be. It's that blind panic they get worked into which makes their work completely incoherent, in addition to lack of design....
All of which could be avoided if there were a decent mentoring system in place.
"[five years from now] we're going to need biotechnologists"
Damn. Exactly the time I'll be graduating with my degree in Computer Engineering. I knew I was born ten years too late.
-jay
p.s. I'm not stupid, just a double major.
Many former geophysics grad students have been tempted away into pure computer science. A Stanford professor wrote some career advice for his students: "There are many good opportunities [in comp sci] because the computer world is always changing, and that puts young people on an even footing with older people... Are you planning to stay young forever? Math, Engineering, and Geophysics have their eternal verities: Fourier analysis, Maxwell equations, elasticity, finite differences, operators, eigenvectors, adjoints, conjugate-gradient solvers, expectation and covariance, moveout corrections, acoustic imaging, the list goes on and on. Learn these things and learn them well, because they can serve you for a lifetime."
(Reality reasserts itself sooner or later.)
Cypherpunk/cypherpunk doesn't seem to wanna work. Am I getting stupider, or did NYT catch on?
I think computers and especially the internet are bringing about a revolution, a rennaissance of art and thought with an electronic brush. It's high time people start to see through the artificial barriers between disciplines and pursue whatever interests them, because that dynamic mixture is what drives innovation. Remember chaos theory? That came about simultaneously in such then-diverse fields as math, physics, and signal processing. No doubt computers will soon be integrated into all aspects of learning and working, and accelerate our development past being just dumb piles of meat. It's just another evolutionary step, just like we've all read in science fiction books. You just need to maintain a long-term, unlimited perspective on it.
a prophet on the burning shore
I think you have the right idea, do what you want to do, but depending on what school you attend, the CS degree might require a lot more esoteric applied math classes than you'd ever desire or need for teaching coding or applications. Go for the BCIS unless you want to brave the horrors of NP Complete.
a prophet on the burning shore
Some us like that.
Why would anyone want to take a science degree and then start over again in medical school? Or is there something I'm not getting here?
Nick
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
I don't think anyone should tell people what not to study. Everyone should go into college and study what they love doing, not what they think will be easy money...
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Not to worry, though - there are enough "weed out" courses in CS as in most majors. Just because the public sees big bucks in a computer field doesn't mean Joe Schmoe is cut out for the job. Let 'em waste two years and a few thousand bucks before they realize they did, after all, want a degree in Business.
(PS I'm slowly working on a Master's in Biology, so I don't feel threatened by any need for Biotech people anyway :)
Just out of curiosity, what classes are weedout classes at your school?
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Different case in the US. Time from graduation to job- 2 days. Wife now switches jobs from biotech company to biotech company whenever bored/money required. This with "only" a bachelors. now I am a grad student, and we get job offers a lot, none of us are going to get rich though....
Gavin Fischer
Not entirely true,
Just about any enterprising teen can cook up a batch of crystal meth in their sink. And if you get reasonably ood at it, the field can be quite profitable.
If a kid tries to learn about anatomy, he's likely to be put in protective custody, and told to "stop doing that". God forbid you try to dissect a dead animal out of curiosity: You're branded as morbid and taken to counseling - after all, Geoffrey Dahmer used to do just that as a kid.
An insightful kid, with an interest in how people think, is more likely to be seen as a wise-ass, and punished to being to prying, rather that encouraged to read up on Freud, Jung, Skinner and the rest.
An introspective, even brooding kid with the makings of a great writter or poet, is probably on drugs, or at least has emotional problems, and must be helped in 'dealing' with his 'issues'.
If you show an interest in physics as a child, you're likely to become an auto mechanic. Figuring out how things work, and rebuilding carbs, just doesn't impress the Dean of Admissions. Pity.
So all that's left is to dabble with computers, since while everyone thinks you're wasting time and playing games (like a normal kid), you're actually learning something useful, develop a love for it, and go to college to get the papers.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
When the Cold War was on, and the military was funding a LOT of defense related development, including much University research, was there not more demand for scientists ? I think it is all a matter of PHD's and MS's finding rewarding jobs after graduation, in their field of specialization. Are there not too many PHD's these days working as sysadmins and making more money than on basic physics research ? I think
it is a shame, there are still several unresolved problems that might lead to surprising breakthroughs, as in cold fusion, gravity-antigravity, advanced interstellar propulsion systems. Unfortunately, in peacetime politicians have a hard time justifying funding for such very long term projects.
Math is not based on the scientific method.
Therefore, math is not a science.
My neck is sore. I kept nodding my head saying "yes" while I read your post. :)
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
That is, until he realized that his hobby, fixing computers, could be a better career bet.
Bingo. I find this article, and others like it, interesting, because many people seem to act surprised that students may want to consider career opportunities in selecting a career. This shouldn't be surprising at all, because that's what American society is heavily slanted toward: money == happiness. Well, I don't think that's the case, and I'm glad that I stayed in school for a bit longer to earn a dual English/CS degree rather than just English...or just CS for that matter. But I'd be a liar if I said that the CS half of my degree was more important in the job market than the English half...or if I said that enough salary to live comfortably was never a consideration along the way.
So, ultimately, the paradox of post-secondary education, apparently (judging by the clamor in the article), is that that level of education is twofold in purpose: to widen and deepen oneself intellectually, and to greatly increase one's future earnings potential. Not many fields of study offer both of these, at least IMNSHO. I attended a large public university, where the two largest schools were the Liberal Arts College (which included the 'traditional' sciences) and the Engineering College (where Computer Engineering and Computer Science were taught, although CS degrees were awarded only by the Liberal Arts school). The vibe I got from a lot of the engineering students I attended classes with was that they were viewing university as a pricey trade school. (To be fair, I didn't get a vibe of intellectual expansion from all of the liberal arts students I ran into.) But the way the curricula were set up did little to counter this attitude. Get your degree, get your job, and get out. Where fault for that attitude lies, I cannot say.
But I can say that it disgusted me to be in a classroom where most people were seemingly interested in the piece of paper from the registrar's office than what it (ostensibly) represented.
Having said that, however, I think that one crucial angle that the article missed was that it's not necessary to work at a job that deals directly with one's favorite intellectual pursuits in order to have a satisfying life. To expect otherwise is ridiculous. That's what hobbies are for.
I didn't think there was a big difference between American and European colleges, but there seems to be.
Here we don't have 'majors' and 'minors', and don't cherrypick courses from around the college to put together enough points to get a degree. If you pick CS, all you do is CS. Generally, you don't do much science, certainly no chemistry or biology. Also, you almost never share classes with anyone outside your degree, at least in the non-arts degrees.
We also have the problem of jobs 'requiring' CS degrees. Even simple tech-support positions seem to require an in-depth discrete maths background, apparently. Naturally, they claim there aren't enough personnel... what do they expect? CS degrees are hard to get, and generally after getting one, you want an interesting job.
I WILL preview before posting, I WILL preview before posting, I WILL...next time.
Similar revolution the TV had on our society, too. Unfortunately, there are always good and bad points that come about because of it. Education? Only if you know what you are doing...I think its ironic how businesses now have to spend lots of time and money to train their employees how to use the software, and schools go waste money on computers that are worthless to the curriculum, while cutting back on programs like sports, art, music, and science.
However, the positive free flow of information is great-take this site for instance. It even has the "real" media (eg, TV stations) a little nervous. heh.
Zilfondel
Frankly, linguistics is an art. And, of that, they should be proud. It's one of the most highly evolved, technical, elaborate, insightfull, and exciting of all forms of art. But none the less, it's an art, because it's primarly about _language_ which is NOT a science, it's something manmade.
Human languages are no more manmade than human bladders are. Unless you can provide us with a credible account of how was it that people "made" language, you're on slippery ground here.
The syntactic structure of natural languages is quite simply completely independent from conscious choices by people made by people anytime, anywhere (in contrast to say, culture, which is shaped in a significant degree by such choices).
---
The physically most interesting primes correspond to primes near prime powers of two: at this stage not possible to explain why electron corresponds to Mersenne prime M_127 or intermediate gauge bosons correspond to M_89.
What does this mean? Well, aside from the fact that 89 is a bit more awkward for my NVM theory than I might like, I would suggest it means that there is less of a conflict between "computer science" and the study of nature than people might otherwise believe.
The core laws of von Neumann's quantum logic (e.g.: S' = T**-1 S T ) are presented by von Neumann as being based on a great deal of "physics". However, they have been shown by Tom Etter of the Alternative Natural Philosophy Association as being theorems of the relational calculus that have important engineering ramifications for quantum computing!
I don't know about you, but this is the sort of result that makes me glad I work with computers -- well -- at least glad that I've been investigating relational semantics as the proper foundation for programming environments since the early 80's rather than committing Occam's Chainsaw Massacre.
Seastead this.
I understand your point fully; however, I think we still have to appreciate that many of the usages of the word "science" that you are attacking follow a consistent pattern. That of developing a set of concepts that allow people to intervene in their environment, in order to achieve some desired effect.
BTW, many social scientists I know mean something like above when they call what they do "science".
My point is not to challenge the distinction you rightly make, but rather to point out that the term "science" I don't think is being used in an arbitrary manner in all cases, like your post may lead some to believe.
Which, anyway, reminds me that there is not that much tradition for the word "science". Up until some point in the 19th century, people would say "Natural Philosophy" or "Natural History".
I think I'm going to look up a bit on the history of the word "science" in the 19th century, I can't remember exactly what happened (although I suspect the positivist philosophers had a lot to do with the change).
Political Science is NOT a science...
In the sense I mention above, it is, as also Economics, and in fact most of the Social Sciences.
Linguistics are not sciences, and it doesn't mean communication isn't important.
Ah, now you're stepping on my turf :-). Linguistics is an interdisciplinary research field; and there are definitely many people on it who are doing work I'm sure you should classify under your concept of science. After all, isn't the attempt to make precise, testable theories about the structure of human languages science?
That being said, I don't mean to put any less value on the studies of Computer Science majors. I have a great deal of respect for (most) of them. But I don't think it fits the mold of what most people think of when they think about the word "science."
The last sentence I find a bit shocking. I don't really think you are somehow insulated from the popular understanding of the word "science". (I'm taking that when you say "most people", you are thinking of people in general.) Most people think Medicine and Pharmacology to be sciences, for instance. Which, BTW, fit in with the alternate definition of science I mentioned above.
By the way, I do agree with your point on several posts that many people in different professions are somewhat desperate to get the prestige born by the bearers of the word "science" in our society (hell, my former university had a "secretarial sciences" department!!!). But I don't think the short history of the modern usage of the word "science" is going to turn out to be favorable to you, in that it might possibly turn out to historically validate other senses of the word, like the one I mention above (it might turn out that the same group of people "invented" both natural and social science, for example). But, I _do_ have to look up some books, cause I can still be wrong on this.
---
Nick
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
I graduated a year and a half ago with a degree in Physics. When I started off college I was really planning the whole PhD track thing, and went very hardcore into my major. Somewhere arround junior year I learned perl to build some automated tools for the campus' helpdesk that I was then running.
:)
I realized after a couple of months that I was writing code, and reading programming books, to RELAX. Soon after that I realized that if I was going to do this stuff to relax anyway, I ought to maybe figure out a way to get paid for it. In this labor market, that is a pretty easy thing to do.
What I found back at school, as well as in the working world, is that the set of Hackers and the set of CS majors really have a very limitted intersection. (apologies to exceptions to my experience) The people back at school that would really could be classified as Hackers, were from majors like Bio, Physics, Earth Science, and Russian. Very few from CS.
What I have found at work is that the people that are really knowledgable, and adaptable, tend not to be CS majors at all. The two people that I respect the most at work are a high school graduate, and a dropped out phyics/engineering major.
Now I know that the huge burden of student loans taht I had to carry to get through school probably did nudge me towards a job where I could pay off those loans in a reasonable ammount of time. But I really do think that the love of writing good code and learning more about how the world works, is what brought me to my current job. Anyone coming to the computer industry just cause there is money in it, is not someone I want on my team.
All I think the modern need for computer skills is doing is bringing the hackers that used to be in physics/engineering and letting them apply their skills in the computer software industry, vs. just hardware hacks that they used to do. There will always be people that pick a career based on income, but those people will not really be happy after a few years, and really should be weeded out .
Now exuse me while I go back to my robotics book.
There is no silver bullet. Plus, werewolves make better neighbors than zombies or vampires anyway.
When a young clueless freshman comes and says, "I want a job with computers" I can ask them if they want it the hard way with more math and physics than they thought existed, or if they want it the easy way that will prep them for industry and make them just as much if not more money. When they say the easy way I kick them out the door. I would like to be the first to thank the people who founded Management Information Sciences, Computer Information Sciences, and trade schools. You have been a blessing to Computer Science Departments. You keep the idiots from coming back.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.
In the sense I mention above, it is, as also Economics, and in fact most of the Social Sciences.
The scientific method requires that physical phenomena be repeatable - political and economic behaviour are not purely repeatable.
There may be cycles, but that is vastly different than an electron acting the exact same way every time certain conditions are present.
The problem in the pure sciences and humanities isn't a financial entrance barrier. Rather, the problem is folks wind up starving their way out of their chosen field; or wind up having to spend all of their free time doing someone else's teaching or research. Some of the brightest folks I've met in Ecology & Environmental Biology just weren't able to finish their degrees because (despite trying and suffering and hanging on in there). Ditto for pure physics and the humanities for that matter.
There may be cycles, but that is vastly different than an electron acting the exact same way every time certain conditions are present.
Well, I made explicit in my post I was using a quite different sense of the word "science" at that point, one which I know many social scientists mean when they call what they do a "science". So I don't see what's the point of this response.
And, anyway, what about the following disciplines:
Is the evolution of a particular species a repeatable event? Is the forming of some layer of rock on the Earth's crust repeatable? Is the Big Bang repeatable?
---
Yes, but is this likely to do much within the next few years, or the next twenty? Most of the golden and silver aged computing pioneers didn't (monetarily) benefit from the boom.
That's not what he's saying (badly). What he means is that, in the BCIS, (MIS at my school) department, you won't learn how to think up cool answers to neat problems, which is the reason I got into computer science. Instead, the BCIS degree will show that you can do VB programming, maybe a little C++, but not that you can program.
What's the difference? Well, a real programmer, one who has been trained to think, can take any language, or even no language at all, and churn out exactly what he wants.
A BCIS major will be able to write front ends to databases, and maybe a few really simple, boring, apps.
. when in danger or in doubt, run in circles scream and shout --Robert Heinlein
r u talkin' about Cal by any chance ? :)
I agree. Anyone with adequate training can monitor servers, do web dev, write some C++, etc. Seriously, if they can teach Java to uninterested nobodies in high schools today . . . I mean, it's not that big a deal anymore.
But what about the people who simplify the mind-blowing concepts, find practical ways of doing things, and advance us further?
And for all those kids who made it through a nice school and think they're slick because they can code effectively in a few popular programming and teaching languages, go through Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming series.
And if anyone can go through the current set in less than a year and complete a good portion of the probelms (including at least one over a rating 45), I'd certainly love to hear about it.
I feel pity about guys who choose CS because of money. Real science is done for pure interest only.
We are living in a very special time right now, where the gap between the number of programmers needed and the number available means high salaries. This is not going to last long. (Ie it wouldn't surprise me if it's different in 5 years, very different in 10.) On the demand side, industry is going to wise up to the fact that it makes no sense to keep buying new apps based on "features", and having to deal with a constant new set of problems. Likewise it will generally come to be realized that each company rewriting its own code makes no sense---grab some source off the net and tailor it to your needs. This new way of doing things will creep in as Linux becomes more common. Moreover once the bull market ends and money becomes tighter, companies will start to think about these ways of hiring money---hard decisions that right now they can afford to avoid. On the source side, as the article says, many people are learning CS (or, let's get real, programming). What this means for you: I'm saving all my pennies for when the good times end, and I'd recommend any programmer do the same. As for all the people around me in Silicon Valley with their 30yr mortgages on their 750 000 dollar houses---I'd be very afraid if I were one of them. Even though we've all lived through change, no-one thinks it will happen again---especially if the change is detrimental to them. Few though inflation would occur, till it did, then few thought it would ever end. Few foresaw in the 80s the broader effects PCs would have for labor and commerce---the things we are seeing now. Getting a CS degree now, in the hopes it will make you rich, is like buying US stocks now in the hope they will make you rich. That ship sailed a few years ago. If you want to get ricj, figure out the NEXT big thing, not the current big thing. Will it be biotech? I happen to think yes, but biotech will happen much more gradually than PCs did, in part because it is a lot harder, in part because it takes a lot more people to make a difference, and in part because of regulatory issues. All of which means biotech is interesting, but it's a real, well-paid job, not a gusher of money. What else? Robotics. Again harder than CS---you have to learn all that pesky physics---but if you can get something to actually work, you will hit the money gusher. People want robots to do two things (they will admit to only one): + a robot maid to clean the house. (A very hard problem). + sex robots. (Probably a substantially easier problem.) Third thing: (This is what I would look at if I were already enrolled in CS and close to graduating). Mapping different people's looks onto video. What I mean by this is (a) (the easier case) video games where the game stores/computes all the vertex motion, but the user supplies the skin to be displayed. Rather than having Lara Croft look like she does right now, (and rather than just choosing between 5 pre-rendered Laras) you get to supply the pictures that are used to generate her---supply pictures of Katie Holmes, your girlfriend, that cute girl who you'd like to be your girlfriend etc. (b) (the more interesting case) Now we do the same thing all over again, but for generic video. You like watching _It's Like, You Know_ but you think that masseuse chick, AJ Langer, should really be Asian---no problem, scan in your Asian girl pictures and the TV will blend them in wherever necessary. Have fun.
Did any of the readings ever shout "FIRST POST"?
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Here's what you need to know about being a computer scientist in a biotech company:
1. It takes an army of chemists and biologists to do the wet work necessary to discover anything real. This leads to a very different culture from CS -- where the productivity difference between good hackers and average hackers can be orders of magnitude. The productivity difference between great chemists and bad ones is more like a constant factor. You need lots of them, and it's hard to see the effect of any one god-like chemist on the company's bottom line.
What this means for you: you will never have a significant equity stake in a biotech company. There are just too many other mouths with whom you have to share the pie,
2. Biotech companies are run by chemists and biologists.
What this means for you: There is a "pyrex ceiling" that will make it unnatural for the company to put you in charge of anything not purely CPU-bound. With a few exceptions, upper-level management isn't a realistic goal for you in biotech.
Compensation policies within biotech are also heavily influenced by the industry's tradition as an escape from the science post-doc treadmill. That means it's great for chemists and biologists, compared to what they see in academia -- but its a joke when compared with what you can do in a pure CS venture. You can certainly negotiate a competitive salary coming into one of these places, but your raises and bonuses will track the biotech sector rather than the CS sector, and you'll begin falling behind your peers immediately.
Summary: biotech badly needs good computer scientists, but doesn't yet deserve them.
-- welch@quietplease.com
Don't know how widely this is true, but where I went, pre-med was a third year commitment, up until which time, you studied general sciences.
So, in effect, pre-meds were in the same science classes as everyone else, through their second year, all the while getting their other electives (hist, engl, math) requirements out of the way, so they could hit the ground running in the pre-med classes junior year.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I think that one crucial angle that the article missed was that it's not necessary to work at a job that deals directly with one's favorite intellectual pursuits in order to have a satisfying life.
I must disagree with this statement, or at least amend it to read this way:
I think that one crucial angle that the article missed was that it's not always necessary to work at a job that deals directly with one's favorite intellectual pursuits in order to have a satisfying life.
That may be fine for some people, but given the choice, I'd ALWAYS search out a job that appealed to my intellectual pursuits. Otherwise, it's not worh doin', IMHO. (And living in the USA, I count myself as very lucky to be able to make this choice.)
-- Deputy Dan will find us no matter how far away we go.
Because alot of schools don't have a medicine major for undergraduates, so you get hoards of obnoxious premeds (note: not all people that go to medical school are obnoxious but all premeds are) flooding the natural science majors.
What would happen if fewer and fewer people took the hardcore sciences route, and the demand for CS jobs just continued to grow? Barring a change in our economy or technology, I don't see how this can be a positive thing. Isn't our whole society based upon the fruits of science (technology)? If the majority of people in our society do not understand science, I can only see the downfall of America. And with our financial institutions becoming world-wide organizations and stock markets moving towards existing completely online, we would lose the monopoly on finance. Japan already produces much more electronic devices than we do, India many more programmers. Europe, with their superior public educational system, possibly can surpass us in the technology department...and if that happens...I'm moving to Finland! Zilfondel
Double not true. There are a few good books out there with *really decent* experiments you (at any age that's likely to be able to read) can cook up and learn stuff about chemistry and physics.
As for bio, I grew up with a copy of grey's anatomy in the house (though my mom is a nurse, so this might be a little weird) and my sister actually got the coloring book version (lucky!) when she was sixish...
The only things you need to do to learn anything is 1. learn to read (this is really important, though I have heard of a well documented case where a person who was born deaf and never taught any language, signed or otherwise, taught himself math out of a textbook) 2. be resourceful
optionally 3. have supportive parents, but if your parents are as evile as that, you probably learned to keep the eleventh commandment young anyway (I did, the friends with whom I built explosives in high school did)
so the only valid point you have is about the animals...dissection, until you get fairly high up, is pretty unnecessary anyway...but if you *really* feel the need to dissect something, I imagine a trip to the local high school bio teacher might be helpful...
bleh.
Lets see... CS majors, I'd guess around 100/year from my university. Students in CS 142 who plan on being CS majors, I'd estimate about 700. No "weed out." No "You weren't accepted for the major." Just people say, "oh, this isn't the easy money I thought it would be."
EASY MONEY????
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
First we hear that there are not enough students going into CS and so we need to increase the number of visas for foreign tech workers, and now we hear that everyone is going into CS. So which is it? I guess it depends on your special interest.
We are living in a very special time right now, where the gap between the number of programmers needed and the number available means high salaries. This is not going to last long. (Ie it wouldn't surprise me if it's different in 5 years, very different in 10.)
On the demand side, industry is going to wise up to the fact that it makes no sense to keep buying new apps based on "features", and having to deal with a constant new set of problems. Likewise it will generally come to be realized that each company rewriting its own code makes no sense---grab some source off the net and tailor it to your needs.
This new way of doing things will creep in as Linux becomes more common. Moreover once the bull market ends and money becomes tighter, companies will start to think about these ways of hiring money---hard decisions that right now they can afford to avoid.
On the source side, as the article says, many people are learning CS (or, let's get real, programming).
What this means for you: I'm saving all my pennies for when the good times end, and I'd recommend any programmer do the same. As for all the people around me in Silicon Valley with their 30yr mortgages on their 750 000 dollar houses---I'd be very afraid if I were one of them.
Even though we've all lived through change, no-one thinks it will happen again---especially if the change is detrimental to them. Few though inflation would occur, till it did, then few thought it would ever end. Few foresaw in the 80s the broader effects PCs would have for labor and commerce---the things we are seeing now.
Getting a CS degree now, in the hopes it will make you rich, is like buying US stocks now in the hope they will make you rich. That ship sailed a few years ago. If you want to get ricj, figure out the NEXT big thing, not the current big thing.
Will it be biotech? I happen to think yes, but biotech will happen much more gradually than PCs did, in part because it is a lot harder, in part because it takes a lot more people to make a difference, and in part because of regulatory issues. All of which means biotech is interesting, but it's a real, well-paid job, not a gusher of money.
What else? Robotics. Again harder than CS---you have to learn all that pesky physics---but if you can get something to actually work, you will hit the money gusher. People want robots to do two things (they will admit to only one):
+ a robot maid to clean the house. (A very hard problem).
+ sex robots. (Probably a substantially easier problem.)
Third thing: (This is what I would look at if I were already enrolled in CS and close to graduating). Mapping different people's looks onto video. What I mean by this is
(a) (the easier case) video games where the game stores/computes all the vertex motion, but the user supplies the skin to be displayed. Rather than having Lara Croft look like she does right now, (and rather than just choosing between 5 pre-rendered Laras) you get to supply the pictures that are used to generate her---supply pictures of Katie Holmes, your girlfriend, that cute girl who you'd like to be your girlfriend etc.
(b) (the more interesting case) Now we do the same thing all over again, but for generic video. You like watching _It's Like, You Know_ but you think that masseuse chick, AJ Langer, should really be Asian---no problem, scan in your Asian girl pictures and the TV will blend them in wherever necessary.
Have fun.
The reason people are weeded out is the simple fact that you cannot do very much useful if you cannot get your head around certain basics in physics. This is a fact of life---there are no employers crying out for people who kinda-sorta get the feeling of Newton's laws of motion but don't understand enough calculus to actually calculate the trajectory of a spinning moving extended object. The first problem is that so many people enter college with a minimal knowledge of math, and without the self-discipline to read a lot and work through a lot of problems. Blame the US educational system. The second problem is simply that physics is BIG---and you're only really useful once you've digested a lot of that bigness. What's a normal schedule going to be? Something like 1st year: intro 2nd year: EM and thermodynamics 3rd year: QM, stat mech, hamiltonian mech 4th year: inro solid state, simple discussion of particles. Now you're at grad school and you still know nothing about Quantum Field Theory, or General Relativity, fields that were initiated 80 years ago, not to mention all the solid state one needs to know.
I really like Computer Science. But after 20 years in the world of actual software practice I have to admit that CS has very little to do with the actual world of programming. Mostly I won't even dignify it by calling it "software engineering". We need another term. Maybe "slash and burn hacking"? Seriously. Most companies I've been in want sellable applications yesterday and could care less about building the necessary software infrastructure to improve future products. Put it out first, dazzle the consumers, scare your competitors and hope you can squeeze out the next release before too many customers yell too loudly.
Ever wonder why we manage to automate everyone else's work but our own? Many of our basic tools are antique technology that hasn't fundamentally changed much in a decade or two. Where are the good reverse engineering tools or libraries of software components or software analysis tools and repositories or excellent development environments? Answer: no startup can make money of these things fast enough to appease venture capital. So it doesn't happen.
Do I sound a bit jaded?
People think computer science and they immediantly think "easy money!" So now we have thousands of people who might normally make good doctors, chemists, etc becoming CS majors.
Here's an example - I'm a CSE (comp sci engineering) major at the University of Texas @ Arlington. All CSE majors are required to take an "intro to CSE" class...in this class they're asked to prove basic computer proficiencies (using MS word, MS excel, etc...which I find rather funny, since all the CSE labs use *NIX systems and we never touch word, etc). Because of all these people coming from other sciences, there are now CS majors who can't even use a word processor!
I guess the point is a lot of people are saying "who cares" about this or "the more the merrier", but all these morons (who would actually do quite well in other sciences I'm sure) are diluting CS...
A Visual Basic developper once asked me what a DLL was.
"Know what a shared object is?"
"Uh, no?"
"Same difference..."
The article claims we'll need many more biotech people in five or ten years and so people should be training now? Meanwhile, I am one of hundreds of young hard science PhD's I know who have abandoned science because we were not provided anywhere near the career opportunities that could be had with our intelligence, skills and experience in other fields, from software development to investment banking and management consulting. The solution is simple - raise the salaries and make many more hard science jobs available - but of course nobody griping about this actually has the money to do that. New PhD's should be making $70-80,000 to be competitive, not $25-30,000 (or sometimes less).
And obviously the reason the money isn't there is that either the supply is too large (and so the decline in science students is a good thing) or there just isn't the demand they claim there should be. If demand does pick up in the biosciences, we still have a huge backlog of ex-scientists like myself who would be happy to jump back in if the price was right. Plus of course there are hundreds of thousands of qualified people outside this country - I really don't see what's wrong with having former Russians or Indians or Chinese people filling science jobs in this country - isn't it all to the good if we have more bright people helping things along here?
Of course I'm most familiar with the situation for PhD's; that's where the supply/demand equation has the longest time lag and so the largest imbalances are likely. If demand for Bachelor's level science graduates grows rapidly it would only take a couple of years for undergraduates to start filling those pipes again. But either way, none of these articles shows evidence of much serious analysis, it's just gloom and doom, ignoring the perfectly rational economic decisions each of us has to make in our lives.
Energy: time to change the picture.
Everything that you said tracks exactly with my recollection of my undergraduate days. However, most of the idiots at the university I attended could get away with taking "calculus for business majors" and "baby bio" to fulfill their math and science distribution requirements. The premed weed out courses were chemistry and physics, and the number of cut-throat premed students that you describe was astounding. My reaction was to flee to engineering, where the students were less grade-driven (by necessity -- the course work was so incredibly hard), the classes smaller, and the atmosphere more collegial. I was able to concentrate on learning the material, and enjoying the utter coolness of figuring out not only how the physical world really works, but how to use that knowledge to make it do what I wanted. Even though I don't do engineering now, I wouldn't trade this background for any (god forbid) liberal arts degree in the world.
Computational Science is a viable option if u like both pure science and computing. The best part is, you get to apply both in tandem. And
you get to use the coolest hardware. Due to the nature of the problems you have to solve you get to use something like 10 21164s concurrently to compute. The drawback is, you would not be studying CS subjects as detailed as a CS major, since the enphasis is on computation, ie, numerical methods and algorithms.
They [...] just can't do some of the very very basic math. [...] we already know 1/3 of them are (pardon the expression) idiots, what about the other 1/2rds?
:-)
Umm, you were saying?...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Another point that may well be behind the mysterious supply/demand market forces: a lot of the way science is currently performed involves incredible drudgery. Mixing chemicals, tracking hundreds of small animals, putting together large pieces of equipment, going through tedious and complex mathematical calculations, etc. IF we had some of the things CS has been promising for years (reasonably useful robots, for example) science could be considerably more productive. Of course computers have been heavily used by scientists for years for various kinds of data analysis and computations, but I believe a lot more could be done. So maybe it makes sense that society is investing now in computer infrastructure development (including Open Source) to reap great rewards later in improved productivity both in science and other areas. But that only makes the computer infrastructure MORE important to everything in the future, and we'll continue to need more computer scientists and software engineers, and maybe still not that many scientists.
Energy: time to change the picture.
I have to share one more bio story, and I swear it's true. One of my friends finished his first year as a biology undergraduate at a state school. Got a reasonably interesting summer job as a lab assistant making about $8 an hour. One of his partners, a POSTDOCTORATE biologist, made THE SAME AMOUNT OF MONEY! Absolutely the truth. Maybe he was an idiot, I don't know. But there's a difference between being "money grubbing" and simply wanting a reasonably comfortable lifestyle (after one year of undergrad CS, I was making more than double what the postdoc made, hmm....). Supply and demand, baby. --JRZ
right after I hit "submit" I saw that. Typo, should have been 1/3rd. Happerns wherein yoy try to tpye too fast. ;-)
Well, here at the University of Saskatchewan, computer science is found in the College of Arts and Science, not the College of Engineering.
Kinda like the Internet was supposed to be the Next Big Thing in the late 90's?
;-)
subject
Most people who design power pc chips are EE not CS (well maybe CE.) I don't think you can get a degree in electric (or even computer engineering) w/o basic chemistry at some point. Plus there is a lot of chemistry and physics in those little guys. I should know, I am taking my qualifiers to get a PHD in EE. Well, time to study again!
I was dissapointed with Computer Science, and then I finally realized that what I wanted was Software Engineering. I wonder how many others will have a similar experience. Most CS course I have seen were Applied Math (and no, not just the number crunching kind of courses) in drag.
My $.02
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I'm currently a freshman in college, taking the basic core classes and trying to decide if I should go for CS or BCIS (Bus. Computer Inf. Systems).. IF you have any suggestions, let me know.
Either way, though, I'm doing this because I love it. I can program reasonably well (fragging C++... need to get the time to learn that really well), but I also like hardware, networking and making things go. I'm not a big fan of physical sciences (except Chemistry), so I'm in computers, not because of the money, but because I like them.
And, yes, I can truly say I'm not in it for the money.. Why? Because my minor is *education*! Yes, that's right, I'd actually like to teach computers or business. Why? Again, because I love it.
Don't fret about what the hot jobs will be 5-10-15 years down the road. Worry about what *YOU* want to do, and if you have enough desire, you'll be able to do it.
In fact, people who do true CS could still do their job without writing a line of code.
True CS:_________Not True CS:
Knuth..........................Me
Negroponte.................CmdrTaco
Dijkstra.......................Gates
Date.............................Jobs
Turing..........................Torvalds
...
Still not sure where the likes of Kernighan and Ritchie come in, but I'd give all of the Ancient Gods the benefit of the doubt, and say that they're as close to True CS as Programming can get.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I wouldn't say that there are too many Life Sciences Ph. D.'s, but rather that the number exceeds the number of grants funded by the U. S. Government and academic institutions.
Over the past ten years, Big Science projects have been funded, while Little Science projects haven't been funded. It used to be the case that funding was granted in response to 30% of Life Science grant proposals.
Around five years ago, I spoke with a researcher who served on a panel that reviewed such proposals and allocated the money, and learned that the percentage of proposals that received funding was down to twelve. So, we have the Human Genome Project instead of more numerous smaller projects -- and fund fewer people and fewer approaches to the Life Sciences.
Another cause of the excess of supply is the number of people hired during the Fifties who haven't died or retired. The U. S. Government, in a panic over Sputnik, funded so many researchers that there aren't jobs for the current generation -- there are still bodies available to do the work.
I've been seeing more and more of these lately.
An extreme example is a fellow I interviewed last month for a senior developer position at my company: he has just completed a PhD in theoretical physics (at a world-renowned institution no less), and wants a career as a programmer. I'm not sure what to make of that, possibly because I was a physics major before I dropped out of college.
spawn_of_yog_sothoth
True for "pure theory" CS, but many pratical applications DO use empirical investigatinos to investigate algorithm/system performance in cases where theoretical analysis would be unwieldy, like hashing algorithms. I consider CS to be the confluence of math, engineering and science, but to simply call it "not a science" is falacious.
I live in Northern Virginia (home of UUNet, AOL, etc.) and every other day I see another news story lamenting the incredible lack of talented computer/engineering professionals. All these studies also say that we're simply not graduating people fast enough from credible colleges, and many of the jobs out there can't be filled by people with technical institute degrees (though many also can).
Yet here comes the National Science Teachers' federation, or whoever, telling us that we need FEWER computer specialists? Maybe they've been working with those chemicals a little too long, but I know a decent number of people in physics, and they are FRIGHTENED by the prospects out there for a PhD physicist. Research in some pure sciences has become so esoteric and so expensive, that only a few top institutions can do really cool stuff. Of course, it ain't easy to get a job at one of those spots. So should we wonder why people enjoy CS, where you can tackle the coolest, most cutting-edge problems from the comfort of your own workstation anywhere in the world?
I especially loved the comment that "CS simply doesn't teach the kind of critical thinking that you learn from physics." What a blatant lie! Computer Science students will generally be exposed to deep mathematical theory (abstract reasoning), algorithms (abstract problem solving), hardware (hands-on learning), research techniques and methodology, and systems/applications programming (applied problem solving). What critical thinking was not covered there? I find even the most mundane of these topics (say, debugging, which we all hate) to be a lot more stimulating than titrations! (no offense to the chemists)
Academia is like that, as is any large bureaucracy. Everyone needs to preserve his own little niche by convincing the world that comparative Middle Eastern philosophical history, or whatever, is the most important subject in the world.
--JRZ
Also mentioned in the article was how many public high schools are dropping sciences curriculum.
This is bad, as young students that go to these schools will have no opportunity to pursue their interests in the sciences. They are being channeled into "popular" money-making fields (CS).
If you do not have any background in the sciences, it sure makes it a heck of a lot harder to get started in a career in it. College, IMO, is a little late. Same goes for learning foreign languages-the earlier, the better.
Our country is filled with tons of inadequately funded public schools, many do not even have enough money for technology, art, or music departments (mine had none of those).
Our country is based entirely upon technology, which is a byproduct of science. We need huge numbers of skilled, intelligent people with background in the sciences to run our infrastructure. Such as: oil drilling, mining, engineering (structural, civil, etc), geology (to name a very few). I don't know anyone who is any of those, bar engineering.
We may not notice the immediate effects of fewer people pursuing the sciences, because there are older people in these positions, but what about 20 years down the road? Will we have reestablished the necessary numbers of people in these positions to run our country smoothly? Or will we have to hire people from outside-Europe, Japan, etc, to do it for us?
One last point: I don't know about you, but it seems that fewer and fewer of the mainstream populace can even understand basic scientific ideas/principles. I bring up the Galileo mission, and they look at me funny. Benjamin Franklin wrote how science and democracy go hand in hand (got this out of Science as a Candle in the Dark: by Carl Sagan). Large populations cannot possibly make logical decisions about their world in a democratic nation if they don't even grasp the fundamentals of what makes everything tick! If someone doesn't understand the harmful effects of pollution, are they going to vote for environmental legislation, or are they going to listen to the lobbying/advertising efforts of corporations such as DOW Chemical?
Food for Thought.
Zilfondel
Are they made of flesh and bone or of polygons?
I know math grad student who had graduated with an A in every single math course he ever took from MIT. I gave him the problem of determing what language a fairly simple Push Down Automata generated(PDA). Now there is no textbook method to do this. He couldn't do it.
Speaking as a white male, that smacks of genderism. It's about as descriminatory as saying that only girls take home-ec, and only boys take shop, which is untrue. Besides, the trophy-wives can always major in Philosophy. That way they can be assured of sitting on a couch and eating bon-bons for the rest of their life. [duck, run and hide... just joking folks]
:)
Programming, in this day and age, certainly makes it possible to stay home while still bringing home the bacon. Best of both worlds.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
This is very interesting to read about, but I am of the opinion that you can't make people into scientists by giving them classes. It's just not going to happen.
I've always had an amazing shock of recognition when reading stories about scientists like Conway (inventor of the cellular automata Life) and the value systems of these people. It amazes me that there are so many people who _don't_ want to sit around thinking about interesting things- that there are so many people more interested in answers than questions.
I'm designing a game- been working on aspects of it for years now. It'll have to happen at its own pace, there's too much of it to rush and I cannot simply opensource it and expect anything useful to happen- most people want quick fixes, not real answers. I _do_ intend to release the result under the GPL, I just don't think open source is going to magically be _creative_ for me.
In designing this game, I have often had to soak up lots of information from various places. A form of player-codable AI in it (halfcompleted) derives from assembly language, but in a bizarre way tailored (CS) to allow as many AIs running simultaneously as possible, and to face people with realworld consequences behind buzzwords- for instance, you could get the AIs to preemptively multitask, but as they are for embedded (imaginary) systems, there are arguments for doing a cooperative arrangement and handling timeslicing on a routine-by-routine basis. Genetic algorithms could (and will) be used to devise different sorts of AIs- which imposes its own constraints on the design of the AI. I've even downloaded and printed (in 4-up tinyprint) a massive online textbook on astronomy and cosmology just to get my game-universe convincingly plausible- and at the same time, CS fights with this to strike a balance between that which would satisfy scientific accuracy (for instance, spiral galaxies) and that which would execute fast enough to make all this reasonable to attempt (simple spherical galaxies, power-of-two divides) in the particular way it's being attempted.
A lot of people wouldn't even bother, and a lot of commercial developers would never have the opportunity to fart around playing with galaxy distribution. To some extent, science is about truth over convenience- and it's very easy to cheat and shortchange truth. There's even a level where it's like artistic truth- subjective, but recognizable.
I only know that I've always devoured scientific information just for fun, out of curiosity- and that it has affected the way I implement things. It's sort of like buzzword compliance versus really pulling things together- my secret weapon in this (besides having the time to do it, and being willing to _take_ the time to do it right) is that implementing well is just plain better- it's like well-crafted art- having a scientific backing (or learning enough of one to cover for your lack) can make a project like my game a hit rather than a failure. It's a lot of work, but when enough goes right, untutored users begin getting a sense of rightness even when they don't understand what they are seeing.
Science is worth it, but it's like being a (benevolent) hacker: it's not something you take classes in, a lot of people wouldn't even want to. Those who want that have a _hunger_ that can't be deflected even by lack of schooling- give them information and stand back.
I agree with this post. I am actually interested in the science of computing, but I feel sorry for all the people in my classes who have no interest in theory. I think CS should split into Software Science (classical CS stuff like theory, algorithms, compilers, OSes, etc.) and Software Engineering (OO design, programming, etc.). And of course if you just want to be a sysadmin/netadmin/DBA, you probably don't even need to go to college.
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Does this mean that there will be more women pursuing the CS fields? This would be good news indeed, given the current dearth of women in the field, especially in the undergraduate levels.
this nobel prize winning chemist went to Berkeley for grad school in the 1930's; he quickly realized he wasn't the smartest person there, so he decided the only advantage he would have is to work harder than everyone else.
The result will be that all the mediocre programmers/admins/webd00dz will be relegated to the status that Cobol programmers have today. Not needed. Only the brightest will continue to have jobs, and these will be the architect types (you know who you are)....the type of people who got Math, Physics or ancient history degrees.
I know when you are a kid, technology is a fun toy to immerse yourself in and to escape from whatever it is you want to escape from. And now you even get paid to do it and can feel studly. But take it from an old guy, do yourself a favor. Forget about money. Go to college and concentrate on making your mind as efficient and flexible as it can be. Learn how to learn. Learn how to keep your mind open wide. Just pick a subject you like and see how far you can go in it. Don't listen to people who insist that you know in advance how you are going to find your path to money=happiness. Theres always backdoors and exceptions to any rules. Often it's easier and more fun to take an alternate route. Someday later on you can train for a vocational skill. This will be the very best thing you can do to ensure economic security in the future. Take it from an old guy.
1. Knowledge; knowledge of principles and causes; ascertained truth of facts.
5. Art, skill, or expertness, regarded as the result of knowledge of laws and principles.
Note: Science is applied or pure.
The mathematical and physical sciences are called the exact sciences.
--Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.
If everyone gets a degree in CS then soon the money will be in pure sciences. And since I have a degree in physics that will mean more money for me. Also whenever slashdot posts a science article, you can look at the comments posted by CS people to determine how clueless CS people are about the physical sciences.
Maybe, that pure science is becoming less popular
than CS in the moment, but as long as mankind is
dealing in which way ever with matter, people are
needed, who can deal with matter -> scientists!
Who else will develop quantum computers,
starships and nanomachines?
Go for physics if you LIKE it. I see too many students in med school or law school because they want 'big bucks'. These people are depressing to be around. They hate their life and the world. What a sham they are living, making big money doing what they hate to do everyday until they die. Sad. I didn't graduate in CS because I wanted big $$$, I did it because IT'S FUN! I LIKE going to work everyday. I may not make what a lawyer makes, but I'm happy with my life and make enough to live well. And isn't 'hapiness and living well', what it's all about?
I have just consulted my crystal ball and it suggests that natural sciences have nothing to worry about. It showed me the future, a future filled with people who are very knowledgable about computers, and across the board, musicians, engineers, chemists, biologists, artists, all of them, using computers (and programming) them to help evolve their work. Certainly the trend now is to "work in computers" to "make the big bucks" but that will change as software evolves and the Microsoft monopoly on computer mindshare decreases. Indeed in the future software will suplement our tasks, it will aid us in whatever course we choose instead of filling our lives with constant maintenance and upgrades. As computer programming languages get simpler they will reach the masses, everybody will be able to use them to customize their computer related tasks. Computers will be much more useful. Or maybe not, maybe we /all/ will just turn into computer scientists and end up dieing from no sleep and starvation while trying to hack that last line of code for our fliogenic maximator compiler.
I'm sorry, I can't help but rant on this article. Here goes:
I don't know what kinda whacked out school Montville High School is, but in my High School (also in New Jersey), I was required to take one year each of Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. And, also, this kid is a business major. We all know what that means. They're not exactly the brightest lights on the board, and the classes they take aren't always the most demanding. Business major programs are where Pointy Haired Bosses come from. At the university I attend, I major in Computer Science. As such, I am required to take one term each of a chemistry course, a biology course, and a physics course, plus two additional terms of either chem, bio, or physics. The 'Hard Sciences' aren't exactly being weed out.
According to the Toy Manufacturers of America, some 10 million scientific toys -- Chem Craft sets and such -- were sold in both 1997 and 1998. Some 32 million electronic toys -- computer games and such -- were sold last year, up from 28 million in 1997.
OK, I think someone needed to clarify this paragraph a lot more. Because it sounds to me like they're comparing "Junior Chemist" kits to Quake 2. I don't care how much you play Quake 2, you just aren't going to learn about NAND gates.
The Dow Chemical Company recently sent a road show, made up of professional actors and run by a professional director, around to junior and senior high schools to "educate children on the importance of science in a fun MTV, singing-dancing-game-show way"
I remember these sort of things in High School. They used to cram us into an auditorium and put on some sick musical, while some asshole behind me kept kicking my seat. I hate the old days.
Richard Frost
That sounds right-on.
I wasn't that fast on the uptake, but I did inquire if he had gotten past the advanced chapter on "Hello, world!" programming...
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Everyone could come up with (or invent) some counter example to any piece of common sense. Your argument and supposed "example" holds no water. Particularly since you embelish it with the "fact" that he was an A student from MIT. Yeah right.
I was mostly being facetious, but point well taken.
However, being a knowledgable kid, with an interest in science, still carries with it the stigma of GEEK!, while computers are actually the COOL thing to be into these days...
Before my girlfriend got to know me, and what I do, she would (without knowing any better at the time) ask "can you hack?"... You really could see the italics, too.. It was like some secret thing that I could do, that was ooooh-so-scary and impressive.
Knowledge of computers is no longer a 'geek thing' in the derogatory sense, but playing with a chemistry set still is - unfortunatelly. We here know better, but we here are a minority.
We're sort of like the first black sports stars. The first black running backs and batters. We're respected for our skills and talents, but we're still part of a discriminated against minority.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I go to a large university with a very good cs program. In order to be accepted into the cs major(take 300+ level classes) we had to take 2 quarters of physics, 3 quarters of math, and 2 quarters of c++ programming. The students with the highest GPAs in these classes were accepted. The cuttoff usually ended up being 3.5 and up. So if the class average in these classes was about a C, guess how many actually got into the program... not many.
Be carefull about what you say. The University of Michigan has setup higher standards for students entering EE/Comp.E and Mech.E because there are so many students who want to go into those fields.
I didn't mind the weeder classes. They better prepared me for the much more difficult classes that I had to take later. They were also able to get rid of the students who really didn't want to be there in the first place, which made later classes smaller and the professor more accessible. If anything we required more atention from the prof than before, because we wanted to be there and had an interest in the material.
I got my Berkeley Ph.D. in chemistry last year. I spent most of my years in graduate school working with lasers and chemicals. It was fun. But when I spent a few months writing code for a data acquisition system, I knew I was in the wrong field. Hacking code is just too much fun. I would have switched fields in school but I was too close to graduating so I went ahead and finished the degree. I wasn't alone either. Several of my classmates, especially the ones addicted to Linux, expressed how they were not satisfied with their career prospects in the hard sciences and wished they had gone into CS or CE. My office mate dropped out after he passed his qualifying exams when he got a nice job offer from Apple. Through a fortuitous string of contacts and interviews, I was able to secure a postdoc as computational physicist in a national (USA) research lab where I spend most of the day working on algorithm developement and programming. And on my Linux box no less. The pay is competitive with industry and outstrips what I could have made as a chemist. I'm in heaven. What's really cool is that the lab wants me to become more CS savvy so they're going to pay me to go and get an MS in CS.
This may be true, but this summer I (a Junior Bio/CS major) interned in bioinformatics at Cold Spring Harbor Biological Labs (one of the birthplaces of modern molecular biology) and found it BORING! now don't get me wrong, I know it's important work, but I just didn't like it myself. I worked with Dr. Andrew Neuwald in integrating several protein sequence search programs (BLAST, Pfam/HMMER) and parsing their output in Perl (heh. I was actually LEARNING Perl while I did this!) I was working in the same lab as Dr. Lincoln Stein (who does a lot of genome on-line work and does a lot of perl cgi). I guess it's just that the areas of CS that I'm interested in (AI, Visualization, Robotics, VR, Graphics and Simulation) just aren't as important to bioinformatics...that's why I'm looking at Cog Sci. or computational neuroscience!
Respectfully,
Kevin Christie
kwchri@maila.wm.edu
121 is an easy sounding intro to programming that I took the equivelent of in high school but manages to get rid of an amazing amount of people
187 is more or less data structures, they do some simple recursion too
201 is the evil one, architecture and assembly language..something like 50% failure rate
287 is the last course that anyone thinks of as a weedout one, though it doesnt sound much like it to me...I think its theory of computation or something, is taught in scheme, which I guess would be the challenging element to people who's first real introduction to cs occured in 121
after getting by 201 most people seem to be all set
can we not set up some generic username / password combo for these password protected sites and post it with the story, i must have registered with the nytimes like 3 times for some lame story...
stty erase ^H
Graduated in biology. Cleaned toilets for 2 months. Went back to start over in engineering. The engineering classes have 1/4 as many students as the biology classes. What's decreasing is men taking biology classes. Only people who have a choice in breadwinning or staying home flock to biology.
All I know is that my university seems to work pretty hard at lowering the number of people who end up in the hard sciences. Seems like a lot of first year science courses are geared to "weed out" undesirables, undesirables in this case often being people who would be perfectly capable of pursuing the degree, just not at the pace and depth at which the first class is taught, often in huge lectures with little access to useful assistance. A number of people that I have talked to have seen this to be the case, especially at large schools. People who, if attending a different college, could go on to become, if not nobel prize winners, at least useful members of industry, are shuttled into social sciences or the liberal arts. The impression that at least one person who I know got was that professors are interested in the top precentage of students, those who can assist them in their research and who will require the least attention. Sure, you produce more outstanding research assistants and super scientists that way, but odds are you're going to loose some very good people too. Combine this mentality with the fabled high pay and recent publicity of the computer field, and it's no wonder universities are hurting for geophysicists and mechanical engineers.
While I have few friends who are studying sciences in order to become a (research) "scientist"... I do have many friends studying the sciences in order to become a doctor.
Money driven? A lot of them.
I think computer science has replaced a lot of the traditional sciences for many people because here is a field where you do not need to get a master's or a Phd in order to enter the work force in their desired field. Plus (right now), the pay is a lot better.
I know plenty of people who started out as chem or physics majors in college, and either switched to computer Science half-way through (it was more interesting and easy for them), *or* ended up working in a computer related field because they simply could not find a job as a traditional scientist.
Eventually it will even out... but I definitely have not noticed a decline in those people wanted to become doctors.
But that's not the really sad thing. The really sad thing, to me, is that there are people out there who, because "financial security is increasingly a do-it-yourself affair", can't afford to go to college. The price of higher education in the U.S. is a scandal. The state university I graduated from costs $6000 a year for in-state tuition! In Europe, even private colleges don't cost that much. You can argue all you want about merit scholarships, but the damn fact is that some people still fall through the cracks because they can't scrape together the tuition and living expenses for college (or aren't willing to go deep in debt when their families are already shit-poor). There's no guarantee of financial support. Meanwhile, mediocre students with well-off parents go to college, waste four years, and come out ready for secretarial and middle-management jobs. Nowhere is this more evident than IU, which has one of the biggest business schools and (perhaps not coincidentally) the biggest infestations of kegger-throwing, BMW-driving frat pricks in the nation.
If things keep up this way, we Americans will be living in a two-tier society straight out of Virtual Light or Snow Crash. Next election, vote socialist!
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
yeah, i remember that; around 1983-1986 everyone wanted to be a lawyer. then when i graduated in 1987 the new "in thing" was to be an investment banker...
Following the money in this case is quite beneficial for society.
Business school, engineering, and compsci are going to attract more and more students as people realize a plain ol BA or BS doesn't put a lock on a job in a world where financial security is increasingly a do-it-yourself affair.
All of this is fine. In the last twenty years, far too many people have enrolled in universities who really have no business being there and would benefit society better by pumping gas. If at the very least they pick up something like programming, they can actually use their education to benefit society, instead of being yet another philosphy or biology student working the till at the Gap.
He's got a Master's degree...IN SCIENCE!
Although, based on grammer and spelling, I would have failed "slashdot 101" about 100 times over. I guess I never have got the hang of "proof reading." Plus, I'll be the first to admit, I frequently hit "submit" and never hit "preview" because I to have been influanced by the "get a lower post number" thing. The spillover thing if there are more than 30 posts, I hate being on the "second page" because. K, yea, I am not that far away from a "first post" idiot. Seeing as how this time it caught up with me I will make this promise:
After this post, I will TRY to remember to do a preview before I do a submit, and not worry about being "down on the second or third page."
It would be cool if Malda hacked ispell into the preview feature, wouldn't it? ;-)
I am starting at Drexel University this year in Computer Science. I have been working with computers since I was 10. However, I notice one big problem about most of my fellow students taking CS. They don't know the first damn thing. They are all momma's boys/girls who don't appreciate computer science and are there because mom and dad said thats where the money is. Its really bad here. There are only 4-6 people that I know in my class that are actually there because its what they do, and not what their parents said they should do.
Learning how to operate a maintain a network does not require a degree in CS. Most small business realize its often better to outsource their administration, and train one or two people with enough of the basics so that simple problems can be resolved without bringing in the service tech. This is often far cheaper than maintaining in-house personnel for administrative tasks. The same can often be applied for web site and software development.
As much as many of us would like it to be, most small businesses don't run *BSD, Linux, Solaris, insert favorite UNIX flavor or clone here. Many run something based along BackOffice SBE, Netware, or Lotus Notes on a relatively simple Ethernet or Token Ring network. Clients are generally Windows9X or NT with popular application suites such as Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes, Symantec ACT!, ACCPAC or Great Plains, and so on. Something that can be managed by selected employees until something serious occurs
Small and even medium businesses don't want to worry about building their servers to be adequate for 2-3 years with maximum uptime, they leave that to their reseller. They don't worry about software and network problems, they leave that to techs that come in every now and then to check up on things and when they're paged for emergencies. They don't worry about building and hosting complex web sites, they hire firms to do that for them.
Even a business as large as 200 people may not require a single employee with a CS minor or major.
People needing computer science? No. People needing computer literacy and maybe a seminar or two? Yes! (80% of new employees where I work can't operate an e-mail application without tutoring!) This is what high schools are currently placing a large emphasis on. Teaching kids how to use commonplace productivity programs saves IT Managers like myself from the headache of training employees how to use applications.
Do we still need CS majors out there though? Hell yeah! There are many small and medium businesses that have very complex and successful IT plans that need certainly need competent staff members to handle complex networks, rollouts of a myriad of NOSes, and custom application development (no, not VB). At a recent meeting I met with a business whose MIS Manager was only in his 3rd year of high school, yet had successfully managed and designed several complex projects and had a major, positive impact on company productivity and revenue.
I think my point has been made. I'm rambling yet again. SIGKILL.
Science has historically been attempting to understand _nature_ or something that is already there by applying a "scientific method" of theory, test the theory, new theory.
If anything, Computer Science is more Engineering, it's just "data engineering" insted of manipulating something physical.
I think that you might be "over valuing" the "science" label. Political Science is NOT a science... But it doens't mean that politics are not important in the world. Linguistics are not sciences, and it doesn't mean communication isn't important.
Just because the "powers at be" choose to label it science, doesn't make it a science in the traditional sence. If anything, what it shows is that they are redefining the term science, not that the study of computers fits traditionally know methods of science.
That being said, I don't mean to put any less value on the studies of Computer Science majors. I have a great deal of respect for (most) of them. But I don't think it fits the mold of what most people think of when they think about the word "science." Computers weren't "always there" and then at one point mankind decided to study them and try to understand how they work. They were engineered. And, as as much, I would agree that "Software Engineer" is probably a good term.
The labels "Software Engineer" and "Computer Engineer" might be better to more accurately reflect people who develop software and develop hardware respectivly.
Why fight it, engineers make more money in general anyway. Which, in fact, also seems to be something the CS community has more in common with Engineers than Scientists.
There are a couple of main issues here.
First, some background. I just graduated from the (or one of the) top CS schools in the nation, with a dual degree in CS and ECE. (And I busted my ass to do so, so please forgive any cockiness that develops, it's a pride thing). Around a hundred graduated this year, with the CS department as their home department.
How many double majors were there for CS/ECE? 1. CS and Mathmatics? 15. What about double majors in CS and Chem? 5. CS and Bio? 6. There was even one guy who in three years managed to pull a CS degree, a Pysch degree and a hard science degree.
And how many of the rest of the graduating class had a hard science as a minor? I know quite a few CS people who have entered into biotech based upon the merits of their minor degree. You wouldn't believe the number of *art*majors* with a CS minor.
My roomate was a physics major. Granted it was a small department, but he was the only one not to go on to grad school. Why? He realized that he was a better computer scientist than a physicist. More power to him.
What does this mean? I think that it means that the really bright *scientists* realize that having a full knowledge of CS will greatly aid them in their research.
I do not feel that biotech and other hard science research will be suffering by this movement. Why? Because the real scientists, the ones that are bright enough to make the breakthroughs in for things like nonotech livers and curing AIDS, WILL STILL BE IN THE FIELD. All they may have done is increased their knowledge, and by doing so are better suited to achieve their original goals.
Does it really matter if Joe Schmoe got-an-A-in-high-school-bio picks CS over Bio or Chem? Would he really have made a difference in the field anyways?
So there's a glut of CS majors. Fine. The people who enter CS for the purpose of learning CS will have better skills and understanding of what is going on. They will always be able to design and implement faster, smaller algorithms. They'll get the sexier work.
Sig:
Barbeque is a noun. Not a verb.
Meanwhile the non-CS folk in the job world are dumbfounded and pissed off that we get paid a lot when all we do is "play" with computers. "Anyone can do that", they think.
I came out of math grad school a decade ago. I basically decided that too many people who were better than me at math were having too much trouble getting jobs, and I liked programming better.
At the time, I was part of a 'trend' being lamented the same way this one was - all the good math people were leaving for better pay to CS, woe was us.
Doesn't look that much different to me now. Just something for the press to chew on when things are a little slow. Also a nice back to school story.
Yawn
"Oh, Senator, you're so gullible!" - Buckaroo Banzaii
Hasn't something like this always been happening?
Wasn't there a big shift into Law during the eighties, and away from medicine?
I could be wrong. I was much to busy watching the smurfs, transformers, and airwolf at the time. Not to mention Manimal.
Sig:
Barbeque is a noun. Not a verb.
.
With a hard science major, you need a PhD to have any chance of a decent job. Spend forever in grad school working as a serf under some prof. That prof makes a living skimming funds from the grant revenue you generate and therefore has a financial disincentive to graduate you. Best to dangle that PhD in front of your nose as long as possible to keep you slaving away.
Get a BS in CS or engineering, and you can go straight to industry, no grad school required, and make as much as a PhD in hard science, without spending so many years in the dignified poverty of grad school. Go to grad school in CS, and the prof knows you can bail at any time for industry, so there's less of a power disparity.
Hard science in high school is needed for those who will be doctors (chemistry) and engineers (physics). OK, so it's a generalization, but the fact is that most people who take chemistry in HS are never going to be employed as chemists, and most of the people who take physics in HS are never going to work as physicists. It's not just that CS pays better; it's that the jobs exist! Wherever you live, even if you live in Los Alamos, there are probably more people employed as programmers than as chemists or physicists.
My observation is that the computer industry hires a lot of physical scientists, since they are capable of the sort of thinking needed in programmers, who remain in short supply, and in system administrators and network administrators, who are very much needed but not produced by the educational system (trade schools are changing that, but the best and brightest generally don't go to trade schools). If it weren't for the computer industry, it would be much more obvious how few people trained in science actually work in their fields.
Science teachers want to increase the number of students interested in science in order to provide job security to themselves. Chemistry, physics, English, history, physical education: if you like the subject in high school, and you major in it in college, you'll probably never work in that field unless you teach high school.
Of course you can become a perfectly brilliant programmer with any degree, or with none, but lets face it you're the exception not the rule.
You don't need a CS degree for this. That's like saying you need a BS in biology to be a dog groomer.
I completely agree with everyone on the lack of public knowledge of the difference between CS and just programming.
The problem, however, is that many colleges and universities ALSO don't know the difference! I go to a school that does recognize the difference, and often it gets frustrating. They want to teach theory and invite students to participate in research using computers (which, in my mind is the goal of CS: "the development of computers as a tool" -- which entails a lot of programming, but is by no means defined as programming).
Those of us who just want to get a degree and move into the workplace (not as programmers, but as hardware designers and such) are starting to see the light and move towards EE or CE.
On a side note, I find it odd that CS is in the "engineering" group of departments at most schools, when it in itself certainly doesn't seem as much like engineering as, say, building a bridge, planning a city, designing an artifical heart or coming up with a robot.
-Chris
(who forgets where he was going when he started this post)
Exactly. I have a PhD in microbiology, and I probably could have gotten a job in that field - if I wanted to move, earn 20K/year and have no benefits. After a few years postdoc-ing, I could have fought for an academic position ... A postdoc in my lab has applied for over 100 jobs (and he has a good publication and teaching record), which is depressing. There are just too many qualified PhDs for a handful of (good) jobs.
On the other hand, with a couple of programming courses (and a lot of reading and playing with computers in my spare time), I was able to get a permanent developing job that pays at least twice what a normal postdoc earns, with excellent benefits. I wouldn't have switched careers if I hadn't enjoyed programming, but from a practical point of view, it was the logical choice for me.
I do not encourage someone to go into biology unless they absolutely love research ... the extrinsic rewards are not there, and it can be a tough life.
YS"Arrr! The laws of science be a harsh mistress." -- Bender
I did my undergrad degree in physics. 105 people enrolled in the 'top level' course that year, a significant fraction nominally intending to major in physics. 35 people ended up taking the final, and (I think) 23 of those passed. maybe 13 ended up getting the degree. Numbers for the front-line engineering disciplines (Engineering Physics and Applied Math) were similar though less dramatic. So, certanly the 'weed them out early' is a real effect, but I dispute the notion that there is an evil agenda attached. I really believe that it is usually an honest process of setting expectations - being a nice guy and trying hard is only so valuable, and preserving the illusion that you can be successful in advanced research (the point of pure science, after all) for a couple years until you finally bail out too late to switch disciplines doesn't help anyone. I cruised through first year with A's, but struggled somewhat to get my degree. Advanced 'hard' science is truly a very difficult pursuit, particularly considering that getting an undergrad degree in these fields is of questionable value in itself - you pretty much have to go for the PhD to get anywhere. Do you not think it's better to divert people who might struggle to a c+ degree in physics (or something), (at which point they're screwed because nobody wants a mediocre undergrad physicist) towards being an A student in CompSci? (happened to me and to many of my friends, who had no regrets) I'm sure we all run into people every day in the course of our lives (usurally our bosses) that are in way over their heads and are completely unsuited for their jobs. How do you react to it, particularly when you have to explain something to them for the zillionth time, or have to cover for their mistakes? Do you see how there might have been a benefit if they had been subject to a similar weeding out?
The reason why kids are so interested in computers is because of the opportunities that have in learning about them while still young. You dont learn anything useful about physics or chemistry until college. I was already programming computer games that my friends and I would play when I was in sixth grade. But now im a sophmore in college and I still am not allowed to do anything on my own. You cant just dabble with chemistry in your room like you can with computers. If you could we would have alot of dead potential chemistry majors. (oops, i spilled sulfiric acid on my shirt. oh well, ill clean it up later)
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
I graduated in Molecular Genetics in Biotechnology. Could I get a job, no! I have just finished an MSc in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems.
That biotech boom is not here yet, and won't be for quite a few years.
Bitter and twisted, DON'T ever FORGET the TWISTED
At least now when I surf the web, I do it for work. :) What would you rather get paid for? Watch electroscope readings or read Slashdot?
People are turning to CS because it's cooler, it's hip, the pay's good, the market is booming.
On the other end, it also means we end up with lusers as fellow programmers. A Visual Basic developper once asked me what a DLL was. Eek!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Being a grad student in biotech, that's great to hear. But I'm not sure I follow the prediction that computer jobs are going to decline under biotechnology jobs. Biotech is a very specialized field, whereas computers are a tool, that can be applied to many fields..... (just my .02)
-- Moondog
A lot of the boost in CS is the fact that companies need people to run these computer networks that their older workers don't have any clue about. Since right now there are not enough of these computer science people to go around so they get paid a lot. The combo of the money and the fact that many teens just love the idea of "playing" with computers for a living draws people in. If you have a parent in a business that wants to expand there networking and such you have it made since the companies need system admins that they can trust not to leave backdoors and other stuff, who better to hire that the son of one of the upper level execs (this is happening to many of my friends).
More biotech, more posts for Hemos.
I'm eletronic engineer and a system analyst and tradicionaly I would dislike bio but for me it was allways easy.
I've never had to study to any exam because it was natural for me.
I think people liking bio as they like CS: for a question of ego find.
People that don't like so much don't grew in theirs jobs so much.
The way it works now is that you slave away at a bio phd only to end up in a post-doctoral fellowship which will only pay 20k-25k/year. These last another several years, at which time you _might_ get an appointment at a university as an assisstant professor, but you'll be competing with hundreds of candidates for each spot.
I can see how the prospect of that just is not appealing, anymore. On the other hand, those with BS or graduate degrees from top universities in CS or EE can find a good job right away that pays much more than someone with a bio or physics PhD and a few years of experience.
Honestly, I think it's good that these potential science majors are able to find other options rather than accept indentured servitude in a flooded market.
-Dean
When I was eight, my mom bought a Xerox 8086 to type up her English PhD thesis on. Besides learning WP5.1 (I still use it to this day, heh), I had fun playing games, and learning how to move around in DOS (3.1, I think). This is the machine that started me on computers.
At the end of the eighth grade, I bought a 2400bps modem for the old 8086, and started dialing BBSs, as well as using my friend's brother's dialup shell account at the U of S. At 13, I was introduced to the glory of the online world and of Unix.
Midway through the ninth grade, I noticed QBasic on my school's Netware network. After a friend taught me a few commands (PRINT and IF-THEN), I taught myself the remainder of the language over the rest of the school year. Having no previous programming experience, I found it thrilling to think that I could actually, in some way, tell the computer what to do.
Because of this, I signed up for all the comp sci classes available over the rest of high school. I learned BASIC, Pascal and some C; the languages weren't important, it was the sense of wonderment behind programming that held me. I could create. And if I had lots of error, it was my fault, not the fact that we weren't at STP.
Am I doing it for the money? Of course not. If I can make some money this way, it would be nice, but the reason I'm doing this is because I love programming, I love the feeling I get, and I love the sense of community and fellowship that can often be found in communities of programmers.
And that, friends, is why I chose to major in computer science. I'm doing it because I enjoy it, not because of the opportunities.
I have also observed that scientists that have very good computer skills are not in the unemployment lines. In some fields, including bio-tech, there seems to be an increase in the demand for ppl with both scientific training and computer skills.
The worst off that you could be if you have this combo is to work as a slave the ex-Military officers and politically connected douche-bags that run SAIC, TASC, or Mitre; the whore-houses of science and technology. Okay, maybe one of these companies is really a place with loose bed springs. Can you name this company?
Deciding on a major is always been a hard choice for college students. There are other forces (i.e. parents, teachers) who would love to see you successful for whatever reason. I "briefly" considered switching to CS/engineering but decided not to because it would be for the wrong reasons, even though I know I'd probably be financially better off in the end. Not that I dislike computers, I think they're wonderful tools. But no matter how good the pay, I couldn't see myself coding/debugging/writing compilers..etc for a living. Some have the passion for it, some don't. You can't force yourself to do something you don't like. Everyone knows there's no money in science. Most scientists I know are scientists because they have real passion for it. But even my professors make pitifully little considering the years of schooling they had to go through. But that doesn't lessen the field in any way. Sure I'll probably make less than quarter of what CS majors will make (if I'm lucky) but then, if you're a chem major, you usually don't strive to be rich anyways. Cheers.
CS grads have actually been declining for a while now. This is part of the reason why the H1-B visa limit was increased.
When I was a little kid, I had a couple of chemistry books, and some electrical books (we didn't have a computer yet). I did lots of experiments with the chemistry book-you know, soda/vinegar cannons, that sort of stuff that isn't dangerous. I even developed some electrical circuits for my race car track so I could see who won. =]
That was some pretty fun stuff...oh, I also had a telescope and a microscope, althought the latter eventually broke. =[
Zilfondel
I was reading that article yesterday and I was just disgusted by one of the quotes in it. The Executive director of The National Science Teachers Association was quoted saying, "Computer science courses teach skills and techniques, but they don't teach critical thinking the way physics does."
I was extremely angered by his quote, so I quickly looked up their website and my e-mail with response is below (my e-mail is below his response naturally).
Benjamin,
That's for your thoughts. I agree with your assessment of the kind of thinking associated with computer programming. I'll have to get the article and read it. My thought at the moment I was talking to the reporter was based on some of the high school computer courses I had seen over the past decade and, in those classes, there was much less critical thinking going on. You're right, my "image" was more the basic applications courses.
My point is that there is something fundamentally different between a high school science course and a computer science course in terms of preparing a
student to deal with today's issues. I goofed in my response. Thanks for taking the time to bringing it to my attention.
Gerry Wheeler
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Benjamin Tatterson [mailto:ben1@psu.edu]
> Sent: Thursday, September 02, 1999 9:39 PM
> To: gwheeler@nsta.org
> Subject: New York Times Quote
>
>
> Dear Mr. Wheeler,
>
> Today, I read your quote in the New York Times, "Computer science courses teach skills and techniques, but they don't teach critical thinking the way physics does." I am a former computer science major at Penn State and I hold heartedly disagree with your statement. Writing a computer program is much like answering a physics problem. In each, there are inputs, and you must determine an output using a formula/algorithm. The amount of critical thinking that is required in a computer science programming course is equivalent to a physics course. Using the C++ programming language, is neither a skill nor a technique, it is applied math. Maybe your statement is true when compared to a basic applications course but when compared to an introductory level college computer science course, your statement is false.
> Please respond.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Benjamin Tatterson
> ben1@psu.edu
>
The "weed out" effect comes in two basic forms, from what I have observed, but it's definately there. Here's what I have seen.
The first form is the "wakeup call" where students get in over thier heads. Quite frankly, there is a historical trend that only 2/3rds of the students pass, and 1/3rd don't. No matter who is teaching, no matter how "hard" or "easy" they try to make the class, 1/3rd end up not completeing the course (some drop, some flat out fail). I believe they just don't come in prepared. I spend about 75% of my time in Chemistry labs teaching students basic Algebra, not chemistry. They usually have the dexterity to do the experiments, but just can't do some of the very very basic math. In this case, I think the blame is clearly to be placed on the High School from which they graduated. And, when they are screwing up the math, in general, they don't have the basic "logic" skills to understand the science behind the math. I mean, how hard is it to add up the molecular weight of Methane? Carbon=12, you have one. Hydrogen=1, you have 4. What's the weight of the full molecule. Uh... (12x1)+(1X4)=___. When they can't handle that, how do they expect to get anywhere? If you make it apples and oranges, they can do fine. For some reason, it's so ingrained in thier minds that "Chemistry is Hard" that when you replace apples and oranges with elements, suddendly they can't do Algebra!
There is no big "push" from the university to make us fail students. There is a push to make us "pass" students. In this vain, most Chemistry departments around the country have a "Chemistry Lite" class now, where they avoid math at all costs.
The second reason that students fail, or the other second part of the "weed out effect" comes from the medical school. They don't want people making it 4 years as a pre-med student, and not being able to handle medical school. And, a very large portion of the students in the basic sciences are pre-medical students. So, here is a class full of 250 students, we already know 1/3 of them are (pardon the expression) idiots, what about the other 1/2rds? Well, they contain the most mercenary students on campus. The type of kids who will give others the wrong answers to "make themselfs sit higher on the curve." They resent having to be in the class completely, because they are still believing "I'll never have to use this stuff" so they just want a grade.
It's not like we have a lot to work with there. One way or another, none of them want to be in the class to start with. Believe me when I say, the professors do thier best to "sell" how much fun the sciences can be. But when they clearly see that a BS in Biology won't get them a job, but a BS in computer science can get them $40,000 to start, how do you expect them to feel? Then, throw them into a group where 1/3 of the people they are with can't to basic math, and another large percentage are as arrogent as can be, and they get disgusted with the class after the first week.
Solution? I don't know, bring McGyver back on TV ;-) The media never portrays science as "fun" anyway. Sure, you complain that "hackers" don't get a fair portral in the movies or on the news, but at least they get some media attention. Scientists usually get made out to be evil, completely over the top "maddness-genius" types, or just plain boring.
If anyone out there is reading this and is looking at a carrer in science, I'll tell you flat out, "we need you." Qualifications are not the sterotypes. We need people with strong math skills, that's true, but more that that, we need people who are "artists" at heart, and can dream up the future, and make it happen. You have to be able to think "outside the box" and be very creative. To solve new problems, it really takes an artist that can apply logic to his work.
Exactly! I started out in 1991 for a degree in Genetics. Ended up in Economics, so it makes perfect sense that I ended up as a programmer! Bio seems rather drab unless you get into the upper levels(plus you need advanced degrees). YOu can do tons of stuff teaching yourself in CS that you can't do in Bio->means more $ shelled out to the Edu-Gov't-Industrial Complex.
Is there someone who would like to share their login data with me I have received at least two of these stupid things and they keep invalidating them I guess due to timeout or something.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Come on... Am I the only one who remembers that biotech was supposed to be the Next Big Thing in the early 90s?
--
Matt Singerman
Matt Singerman
http://matt.vegan.net/
Right now the field is pretty hot -- companies and labs are desperate for biologists who can code and techies who have a basic mol. bio background.
We even have our own Open Source projects to play around with :) Take a look at http://bio.perl.org.
Two words: geek groupies.
All three of 'em.
*sigh*
I don't think it is any harder now at the front lines of scientific research than it was before. The only difference is that now, there's more foundational knowledge to learn than there was, say, a hundred years ago. The methods and means of learning unknown facets of the Natural World, however, remain unchanged from whence they were when Galilleo turned his telescope to the stars.
Perhaps it is but a parabolic adventure, but the rewards at the end of the parabola are more than worth the effort to climb the steep slope. I just finished a Masters in Quantum Chemistry. It was incredibly hard work, but to actually understand what makes the universe work is a thrilling experience. Moreover, some of the most fascinating people in the world are in Academia. While most of us can't hope to match them, just having known them and having worked with them is a pleasure worth the effort of the study.
I knew a German at the University I attended who fits this mold. He was a great guy, and was also tremendously intelligent. He had a PhD in mathematics and was concluding his second post-doctorate. He was working on various projetcts with phycists, and doing some neat stuff with the EE department.
I had the good fortune to spend time with this fellow in the capacity of a student. He was doing me the good favor of tutoring me with my Quantum Mechanics, as I was struggling. On his own initiative, he went out and bought the textbook we were studying, and in three weeks covered the same material which the classs had spent the last three months trying to slog through. Then with infinite patience, he explained each concept to me until I understood it. Not only was he tremendously intelligent, but he was a fabulous teacher.
My expereiences with this fine mathematician, and the other people I knew at graduate school, showed me the marvelous way in which mathetmatics, physics, and chemistry entwine together. In no other environment could I have recieved such insight into the physical world, and how it works.
The foundation laid by the five years I spent studying chemistry for my B.S. were equally enlightening in their own right. There is no other way for most people to truly understand the Scientific Method. One can look it up, and learn what people say it is, but until you have a problem to apply it to, which will take possibly years of hard work in research, you will never truly understand it.
However, after all my experiences, I am now in an IT job. I am quite happy, but I would not trade my physical science background for the world. With my experience in Theoretical Chemistry (Quantum) I can now do theoretical research on Linux boxes. Thankfully enough, my switch from Academia to Coorporate has not ended my forays into the remarkable world of Chemsitry. As for the work I do now, it is challenging, and I've always had a passion for computers. But my true love has always been, and always will be, science. For it is in science that we may learn some of the most basic truths of the world which we have found ourselves. It is within science where we may find absolute truth.
Certainly, CS is not a mere way to learn to program well. Nor is it intended as preparation for an easy-money job (though all too often it is). CS is centered around mathematical fields, and concerns itself more with algorithms than with coding.
To be completely honest, knowing how to reduce a Nondeterministic Automaton to a Deterministic Automaton is not going to help most CS majors in the type of work they will be performing upon graduation. True, there do exist positions in which such knowledge is applicable, but most graduations are not doing programming of that caliber. Industry seems to be under the illusion that Computer Science trains people to work with computers. Will a CS education really help someone set up an NT service, or get Oracle running on Solaris? These are the jobs that await many CS majors. It is sad, but it is the truth. Is this a result of all the hype surrounding CS, that has made it appear to be the golden ticket to success that has attracted people who would otherwise have no interest in the field?