They may not have the same expenses as an American. Let us suppose two hypothetical workers with very similar qualifications: one an American (A), and one from some place like India or Bangladesh (B). Assuming that A and B are both single, then you are correct---they have similar expenses. Now suppose that both workers have families to support. Worker A has to support their family in the United States at the going rate here, whereas Worker B may send remittences back to their family in their country of origin, where the cost of living may be significantly less. Hence it is quite possible that a foreign worker and the American worker both want to be paid well enough to support their families. The foreign worker has the advantage of needing much less in order to do so.
CS should not be considered engineering. Programming, which might be considered "applied computer science" might qualify as an engineering exercise, but a decent computer science program is going to be about formal logic, discrete mathematics, and algorithms (among other things). CS is about the theory of computation, not the hands-on of programming. As such, CS should be considered a branch of mathematics (in fact, until the 90s, most CS degrees were awarded by mathematics departments).
I am honestly very confused about what your point is. In response to another poster, Coryoth rebutted that the college was supposed to be about education, not vocational training. You incorrectly assumed that s/he was arguing that college was about creating well-rounded people. I responded that creating well-rounded people was not the point and that requiring students to take classes outside of their major was perhaps a historical anachronism (among other reasons, which are highlighted in, for instance, the article I linked above). You are the only person in the entire thread to have brought up the "well-rounded person" trope, and that was only to dismiss it. The only reason I replied was to point out that the well-rounded person argument isn't one that anyone with a clue seriously makes.
Who, specifically, is making that argument? I don't think I have ever seen anyone argue that the primary goal of a college education was to create well-rounded people. Not even Coryoth, the person to whom you originally replied, made that argument. I often see it as a justification for requiring non-major classes, but I have never seen anyone claim that this is the primary goal. See, for instance, the The Chronicle of Higher Education'scompilation of answers to the question. Most of the respondents argue that higher education is about learning critical thinking skills, building a foundation of knowledge for future work, and providing students with the necessary information to choose a career-path that is of interest to them.
My original point still stands: universities were first established to foster research. Students went to college to become academics and to make contributions to human knowledge. Over time, the emphasis has shifted towards more vocational or professional training though much of the curriculum remains the same (possibly due to institutional inertia). At no time was the primary goal of a college education to become a "well-rounded" person.
To be clear, I am not arguing that there is no merit to the observation that a liberal education produces well-rounded people, and I am not arguing that this is a bad (or good) thing. I am merely attempting to point out that the primary goal of higher education is not simply to produce such people, nor has it ever been.
Yes, goals have changed, but I maintain that the goal of the higher education system has never been to create well-rounded people. In the early days, it was about training academics. Even today, many faculty and administrators at universities will claim that this is the goal of a university education. As I noted above, the university curriculum is still structured around the 400+ year old ideal of scholarship. In large part, students are required to take classes outside of their majors because that is the way it has always been done and because this system has produced pretty good results for a fairly long time.
Moreover, if you want to argue that there has been some period in time that people went to universities in order to become well-rounded people, I would invite you to describe that period. My understanding of the history of such institutions is that they emphasized training academics until the mid-20th century. In the post-War period during the coldest parts of the Cold War, a great deal of funding was put towards training engineers and physicists to design weapons and such, and as time passed people in industry began to realize that trained academics made pretty good employees, which is how we get to the modern idea that higher education should be a kind of vocational training. Do you dispute this history, or do you feel that I am missing something? When was the goal of higher education ever to produce well-rounded people?
Does this guy actually have evidence of anyone seriously making the point he is refuting ?
Kun is responding fairly explicitly to Sarah Mei's post Programming Is Not Math, as evidenced by the link in the third paragraph of his post, as well as the copious quotes that he reproduces and replies to. Having also taken the time to read Mei's post, it would appear that (a) Kun is not misrepresenting her point of view, and (b) she is sincere in her opinion. So yes, I would say that Kun has evidence that at least one person is seriously making the point that he is refuting.
Of course the reality is that you don't need any of those subjects. Those subjects can, however, be very useful to you as a programmer. So yes you can certainly be a programmer, and even a very successful and productive one without any knowledge of calculus, or graph theory say. On the other hand, there may well be times when graph theory, or calculus, or statistics could prove very useful. what it comes down to is whether you are inclined to think that way -- and if so it can be a benefit; if not it won't be the way you think about the problem anyway.
Which is almost exactly the point that the author of the linked article makes:
Not every programmer deals with these [mathematical] questions regularly (which is why I don’t think math is necessary to be a programmer), but if you want to be a great programmer you had better bet you’ll need it.
It isn't even about creating well-rounded people, and never really was---the point of a college education was to become an academic. You went to college because your end-goal was research. Of course, at that point in history the alternative was likely monastic life because your older brother was going to get the farm... That being said, it wasn't really until the middle of the 20th century that college was seen as a way of advancing a career outside of academia. Whether or not you believe that the role of universities *should* be vocational training, the curriculum and organization of institutions of higher education---particularly research universities---is still geared toward that Enlightenment ideal of academia.
The notion of a closely held corporation is well defined. Under this decision, Walmart could be considered a closely held corporation. According to (the oh so reliable) Wikipedia, the Waltons currently own more than 50% of Walmart.
How narrow is the ruling, really? SCOTUS declared that any closely held business has the right to refuse to pay for insurance that covers contraception if the owners have a religious objection. This may account for about half of private sector employment in the US [citation; there is a linked pdf from the Stern School in the third paragraph]. My Google-fu is not terribly good, and I am having trouble pinning down exactly what proportion of the total America workforce this represents---recent employment reports from BLS seem to indicate something on the order of 70% of the workforce is in the private sector. Assuming that this number is correct, something like 35% of the workforce is employed by closely held businesses. So while the jurisprudence may appear narrow, the effect is potentially quite large.
I think that we substantially agree. There are people that live in the city and need to get around within the city and there are people commute in. If one is going to completely eliminate downtown parking, then public transit needs to be good enough to provide for the people that live downtown. Personally, I would love it if transit were that good---I hate driving, especially in any traffic. However, I think that it is unrealistic to expect that public transit will ever be that good in all but a very few American cities (at least, not any time soon). In the meantime, if public transit is good enough to keep the tourists and commuters from gobbling up too much parking downtown, the problem is ameliorated to some degree.
In any event, thank you for the clarification and the lack of snark. It is unusual to meet rational people on the internet, and I apologize for whatever snark I may have snuck into my previous post.
What does any of that have to do with what I posted? You stated that the public transit system must be good enough to completely eliminate the need for downtown residents to own a car. My counter is that downtown residents are not the biggest problem, but that tourists and commuters are. Public transportation does not need to be good enough to completely replace the cars of downtown residents (which seems to be your claim, unless I am badly misunderstanding the comment to which I originally replied), but rather it needs to be good enough to encourage non-residents to park away from the core and hop onto a bus or train for the last couple of miles.
Most of the people parking in downtown SF do not live in downtown SF. The transit system does not need to be good enough to allow people to not own a car, it simply needs to be good enough to encourage people to use it instead of driving into the city. Personally, I think that public transit in SF is pretty close to this goal (though maybe not entirely there fore the daily commuter)---when my wife and I visit the Bay, we generally park at one of the BART stations in Berkerly or Oakland (where parking is available and not too expensive), then take the train into the city. From there, SF is mostly walkable or busable.
Just to ensure that we are on the same page (since the term "adjunct" means slightly different things in different places): adjuncts are contract workers who are generally paid by the credit hour to teach. They are not researchers, they don't have committee assignments, and they are not on the tenure track. They tend to have very little involvement in the day-to-day running of the department. The fact that adjunct faculty contribute very little to a department is why so many tenured faculty would rather hire professors onto the tenure track.
It varies a lot from field to field. In my field (mathematics), authors generally seem to be listed in alphabetical order. Anecdotally, I have been lead to understand that in anthropology and sociology, authors are generally listed in order of seniority; and that in neurology the first author is assumed to be the head of the primary lab at University A, the second author the graduate student running that lab, the last author is the head of the secondary lab at University B, and the second to last author is the grad student running the secondary lab.
(1) It is common for comments on articles about scientific results to include anecdotes of the form "The result is clearly wrong, because I experienced the exact opposite." This kind of response is so common, in fact, that the phrase "the plural of anecdote is not data" has become a shorthand way of noting that the anecdotal evidence of one person does not disprove a statistical aggregate based on a much larger set of data. Indeed, a quick search would make that clear. Even if it were the only thing that I had written, I would hope that the meaning would be clear from the large cultural context. As it is, I provided greater context with the second and third sentences of my post, which I would invite you to re-read before concluding that I don't know what the word "data" means.
(B) That being said, if you are going to be pedantic (as it seems you are insisting upon), the plural of "anecdote" is "anecdotes." The plural of "datum" is "data". From the point of view of a grammatical pedant, I am entirely correct.
I had it at 25. It wasn't that bad. Mild fever for about a day. Itched like hell though.
The plural of "anecdote" is "anecdotes," not "data." Yes, it is possible to be an adult, become infected with chicken pox, and not become terribly ill or suffer life-altering damage. However, the *probability* of suffering major complications as an adult is much, much greater.
Not necessarily. While I can't speak to the AC's experience, I hold a BA and an MS in Mathematics. At my undergraduate institution, the difference between the BA and BS was a foreign language. To earn a BA, one needed to take four semesters of a foreign language (or equivalent), while a BS required two semesters of computer science. While I did both, I opted for the A rather than the S (for no particular reason).
Slashdot Mirror
You think you get a degree in Mathematics and then go to the mathematics factory and churn out maths?
That was totally my plan. Unfortunately, it turns out that the mathematics factories aren't hiring. :(
They may not have the same expenses as an American. Let us suppose two hypothetical workers with very similar qualifications: one an American (A), and one from some place like India or Bangladesh (B). Assuming that A and B are both single, then you are correct---they have similar expenses. Now suppose that both workers have families to support. Worker A has to support their family in the United States at the going rate here, whereas Worker B may send remittences back to their family in their country of origin, where the cost of living may be significantly less. Hence it is quite possible that a foreign worker and the American worker both want to be paid well enough to support their families. The foreign worker has the advantage of needing much less in order to do so.
CS should not be considered engineering. Programming, which might be considered "applied computer science" might qualify as an engineering exercise, but a decent computer science program is going to be about formal logic, discrete mathematics, and algorithms (among other things). CS is about the theory of computation, not the hands-on of programming. As such, CS should be considered a branch of mathematics (in fact, until the 90s, most CS degrees were awarded by mathematics departments).
I am honestly very confused about what your point is. In response to another poster, Coryoth rebutted that the college was supposed to be about education, not vocational training. You incorrectly assumed that s/he was arguing that college was about creating well-rounded people. I responded that creating well-rounded people was not the point and that requiring students to take classes outside of their major was perhaps a historical anachronism (among other reasons, which are highlighted in, for instance, the article I linked above). You are the only person in the entire thread to have brought up the "well-rounded person" trope, and that was only to dismiss it. The only reason I replied was to point out that the well-rounded person argument isn't one that anyone with a clue seriously makes.
Who, specifically, is making that argument? I don't think I have ever seen anyone argue that the primary goal of a college education was to create well-rounded people. Not even Coryoth, the person to whom you originally replied, made that argument. I often see it as a justification for requiring non-major classes, but I have never seen anyone claim that this is the primary goal. See, for instance, the The Chronicle of Higher Education's compilation of answers to the question. Most of the respondents argue that higher education is about learning critical thinking skills, building a foundation of knowledge for future work, and providing students with the necessary information to choose a career-path that is of interest to them.
My original point still stands: universities were first established to foster research. Students went to college to become academics and to make contributions to human knowledge. Over time, the emphasis has shifted towards more vocational or professional training though much of the curriculum remains the same (possibly due to institutional inertia). At no time was the primary goal of a college education to become a "well-rounded" person.
To be clear, I am not arguing that there is no merit to the observation that a liberal education produces well-rounded people, and I am not arguing that this is a bad (or good) thing. I am merely attempting to point out that the primary goal of higher education is not simply to produce such people, nor has it ever been.
Yes, goals have changed, but I maintain that the goal of the higher education system has never been to create well-rounded people. In the early days, it was about training academics. Even today, many faculty and administrators at universities will claim that this is the goal of a university education. As I noted above, the university curriculum is still structured around the 400+ year old ideal of scholarship. In large part, students are required to take classes outside of their majors because that is the way it has always been done and because this system has produced pretty good results for a fairly long time.
Moreover, if you want to argue that there has been some period in time that people went to universities in order to become well-rounded people, I would invite you to describe that period. My understanding of the history of such institutions is that they emphasized training academics until the mid-20th century. In the post-War period during the coldest parts of the Cold War, a great deal of funding was put towards training engineers and physicists to design weapons and such, and as time passed people in industry began to realize that trained academics made pretty good employees, which is how we get to the modern idea that higher education should be a kind of vocational training. Do you dispute this history, or do you feel that I am missing something? When was the goal of higher education ever to produce well-rounded people?
Not 400 years ago when the modern university system got started.
The point was to create academics, not well-rounded people. The fact that being well-rounded leads to success in academia is a pleasant side-effect.
Colleges are basically turning into poor imitations of vocational schools. The same is true for some universities. You get the worst of both worlds.
Indeed. I just didn't want to go too far off-topic on that particular hobby horse of mine.
Does this guy actually have evidence of anyone seriously making the point he is refuting ?
Kun is responding fairly explicitly to Sarah Mei's post Programming Is Not Math, as evidenced by the link in the third paragraph of his post, as well as the copious quotes that he reproduces and replies to. Having also taken the time to read Mei's post, it would appear that (a) Kun is not misrepresenting her point of view, and (b) she is sincere in her opinion. So yes, I would say that Kun has evidence that at least one person is seriously making the point that he is refuting.
Of course the reality is that you don't need any of those subjects. Those subjects can, however, be very useful to you as a programmer. So yes you can certainly be a programmer, and even a very successful and productive one without any knowledge of calculus, or graph theory say. On the other hand, there may well be times when graph theory, or calculus, or statistics could prove very useful. what it comes down to is whether you are inclined to think that way -- and if so it can be a benefit; if not it won't be the way you think about the problem anyway.
Which is almost exactly the point that the author of the linked article makes:
Not every programmer deals with these [mathematical] questions regularly (which is why I don’t think math is necessary to be a programmer), but if you want to be a great programmer you had better bet you’ll need it.
It isn't even about creating well-rounded people, and never really was---the point of a college education was to become an academic. You went to college because your end-goal was research. Of course, at that point in history the alternative was likely monastic life because your older brother was going to get the farm... That being said, it wasn't really until the middle of the 20th century that college was seen as a way of advancing a career outside of academia. Whether or not you believe that the role of universities *should* be vocational training, the curriculum and organization of institutions of higher education---particularly research universities---is still geared toward that Enlightenment ideal of academia.
The notion of a closely held corporation is well defined. Under this decision, Walmart could be considered a closely held corporation. According to (the oh so reliable) Wikipedia, the Waltons currently own more than 50% of Walmart.
How narrow is the ruling, really? SCOTUS declared that any closely held business has the right to refuse to pay for insurance that covers contraception if the owners have a religious objection. This may account for about half of private sector employment in the US [citation; there is a linked pdf from the Stern School in the third paragraph]. My Google-fu is not terribly good, and I am having trouble pinning down exactly what proportion of the total America workforce this represents---recent employment reports from BLS seem to indicate something on the order of 70% of the workforce is in the private sector. Assuming that this number is correct, something like 35% of the workforce is employed by closely held businesses. So while the jurisprudence may appear narrow, the effect is potentially quite large.
I think that we substantially agree. There are people that live in the city and need to get around within the city and there are people commute in. If one is going to completely eliminate downtown parking, then public transit needs to be good enough to provide for the people that live downtown. Personally, I would love it if transit were that good---I hate driving, especially in any traffic. However, I think that it is unrealistic to expect that public transit will ever be that good in all but a very few American cities (at least, not any time soon). In the meantime, if public transit is good enough to keep the tourists and commuters from gobbling up too much parking downtown, the problem is ameliorated to some degree.
In any event, thank you for the clarification and the lack of snark. It is unusual to meet rational people on the internet, and I apologize for whatever snark I may have snuck into my previous post.
What does any of that have to do with what I posted? You stated that the public transit system must be good enough to completely eliminate the need for downtown residents to own a car. My counter is that downtown residents are not the biggest problem, but that tourists and commuters are. Public transportation does not need to be good enough to completely replace the cars of downtown residents (which seems to be your claim, unless I am badly misunderstanding the comment to which I originally replied), but rather it needs to be good enough to encourage non-residents to park away from the core and hop onto a bus or train for the last couple of miles.
Most of the people parking in downtown SF do not live in downtown SF. The transit system does not need to be good enough to allow people to not own a car, it simply needs to be good enough to encourage people to use it instead of driving into the city. Personally, I think that public transit in SF is pretty close to this goal (though maybe not entirely there fore the daily commuter)---when my wife and I visit the Bay, we generally park at one of the BART stations in Berkerly or Oakland (where parking is available and not too expensive), then take the train into the city. From there, SF is mostly walkable or busable.
The only people who think it is are ones who don't really understand CS (or computers) very well.
Including at least half of the sophomore level wannabe CS majors that show up in my calculus classes...
Just to ensure that we are on the same page (since the term "adjunct" means slightly different things in different places): adjuncts are contract workers who are generally paid by the credit hour to teach. They are not researchers, they don't have committee assignments, and they are not on the tenure track. They tend to have very little involvement in the day-to-day running of the department. The fact that adjunct faculty contribute very little to a department is why so many tenured faculty would rather hire professors onto the tenure track.
It varies a lot from field to field. In my field (mathematics), authors generally seem to be listed in alphabetical order. Anecdotally, I have been lead to understand that in anthropology and sociology, authors are generally listed in order of seniority; and that in neurology the first author is assumed to be the head of the primary lab at University A, the second author the graduate student running that lab, the last author is the head of the secondary lab at University B, and the second to last author is the grad student running the secondary lab.
Two comments in reply:
(1) It is common for comments on articles about scientific results to include anecdotes of the form "The result is clearly wrong, because I experienced the exact opposite." This kind of response is so common, in fact, that the phrase "the plural of anecdote is not data" has become a shorthand way of noting that the anecdotal evidence of one person does not disprove a statistical aggregate based on a much larger set of data. Indeed, a quick search would make that clear. Even if it were the only thing that I had written, I would hope that the meaning would be clear from the large cultural context. As it is, I provided greater context with the second and third sentences of my post, which I would invite you to re-read before concluding that I don't know what the word "data" means.
(B) That being said, if you are going to be pedantic (as it seems you are insisting upon), the plural of "anecdote" is "anecdotes." The plural of "datum" is "data". From the point of view of a grammatical pedant, I am entirely correct.
I had it at 25. It wasn't that bad. Mild fever for about a day. Itched like hell though.
The plural of "anecdote" is "anecdotes," not "data." Yes, it is possible to be an adult, become infected with chicken pox, and not become terribly ill or suffer life-altering damage. However, the *probability* of suffering major complications as an adult is much, much greater.
Given that I now hold an MA and am working on a Ph.D., I don't think that it has mattered much.
Not necessarily. While I can't speak to the AC's experience, I hold a BA and an MS in Mathematics. At my undergraduate institution, the difference between the BA and BS was a foreign language. To earn a BA, one needed to take four semesters of a foreign language (or equivalent), while a BS required two semesters of computer science. While I did both, I opted for the A rather than the S (for no particular reason).
Why do you hate America?