I left my parent's basement 10 years ago. Throughout my extended college years and following professional years, I lived in a single room without a tele or cable.
I mainly survived by streaming things over the internet, which was the most economical option. I thought of subscribing cable many times in between; but the related monthly cost and the initial investment -- AKA giant-flat-screen-TV -- was too big for my student stipend.
I am not a soap-opera, series-drama kind of guy. I mostly watch documentaries (especially BBC ones). Since the invent of youtube, and especially in recent years; web is full of useful educational documentaries. Google's very own video search is a great way of finding them out.
On-and-off, I go down to the local pub to catch the Formula 1 and Footy action, which is a far better way of enjoying sport than sitting on a couch alone and watching with a bag of crisps & soda.
If the BBC opens up its great iPlayer service to the world, I will be subscribing that. This might require me to upgrade the broadband plan, but I think it is worth every penny!
I am residing in South-East Asia for the last decade or so. You must come here (even for a short holiday) to witness yourself how little natives over here care about English grammar and/or sentence structures. Apparently, there are local dialects such as Singlish (Singaporean English) and Manglish (Malaysian English). Give or take, both dialects are quite similar; and as far as the origins goes, it is direct word-to-word translation of Chinese phrases into English; though they have evolved over time with many more borrowed words and expressions.
Some interesting examples being:
English: "Would you like to join us for lunch now?" Singlish/Manglish: "You wanna go lunch or not?"
[in a situation you disagree/reject something] (E): "I do not agree with your suggestion" (S/M): "Cannot one!"
[giving a lift to your friend] (E): "I will come and pick you at the library, and drop you at the railway station" (M): "I fetch you from library, then fetch you back to the station"
Search youtube.. there are plenty of Singlish videos.
Though I find these dialects are an energy efficient way of speaking English, and somewhat amusing to listen; I must confess that I find them nothing more than a nuisance, especially in a professional working environment. I often have communication issues with colleagues who are proficient in these dialects. Most of the time, they do not understand what I am talking about, and gives me strange looks. Then, I happen to run into the problem of misunderstanding instructions from my bosses, now that was pretty bad and costly.
I am finding it difficult to tell natives "Your English sucks!" to their face. Partly because it is rude and such remarks could go down quite horribly. On the other end, they them selves have this high esteem that they speak proper English, since most of them spoken or studied in English medium since a very young age.
Though I admit I am not perfect (after all, English is still my second tongue), I always thrive to write grammatically correct English, even when I am sending a text message. All in all, getting the right message delivered is much important than anything else in any form of communication. It puzzles me why internet age kids do not pay much attention, nor put effort in proper communication skills these days.
1. Enter to a top college in either Electrical Engineering or Physics... or some other technical major 2. Do as many as possible CS courses while there 3. Do few internships in CS related field 4. Self-learn whenever you can, whatever you can find in CS field
I did Electrical Engineering in college. But half way through I realized that only thing I liked about that major was, digital logic and programming. So I enrolled into as many as possible CS related courses; did my senior year thesis something close to CS (communication protocol simulation using distributed network); and read/learned as many as possible CS related topics (mainly programming theory and parallel computing). Then I did my PhD in Electrical Engineering too. I managed to make my thesis much more CS related (machine learning + pattern recognition) and used much of my knowledge in algorithm, optimizations and distributed computing.
Just 2 weeks ago, I secured a web developer position at a software firm (somewhere in far east). Still I had to go through a written + oral technical examinations on programming, algorithm and puzzle solving. But the knowledge and experience came in handy. One added advantage I have, coming from Engineering background, is knowing everything from how the microprocessor, cache, memory works up to the level of how protocols at WWW level works. And when you start programming with "so-called ancient" multi-paradigm languages like C++ and some assembly in college (most microcontrollers still use C/C++ and/or ASM), it gives you a good foundation on whatever language you need to learn later on. Over the years, I've learned MATLAB, Python, JavaScript, SQL, C#... and now Ruby... but still, fundamentals concepts I understood while learning C/C++ was critical in most cases.
I am always surprised to see the heavy usage of blackboard at places like Stanford, MIT (check http://www.academicearth.org./ Even some of the later successes, like the Khan Academy or Paddy Hirsch's financial market mini-lectures, are primarily relying on blackboard centered teaching methods. One may disagree, but I still think analog-alike blackboard based teaching is still the best, compared to power-point based lectures.
Overall, I consider technology is merely "a tool" to get information faster and crunch numbers faster. Still, education or any other intellectual pursuit is down to heavy-use-of-brain, discipline, and hard work/perseverance. And yes, I do not deny, having good teachers is always a plus.
I think High Frequency Trading (HFT) is a good topic to talk about, considering the recent media attention on financial meltdown, new NYSE trading facility in NJ and occupy wallstreet and what not. It covers most CS topics like 'algorithms/math' to maximize profit, 'data mining' to beat the competition, 'IT infrastructure' to minimize latency, and 'global influence' in terms of market impact, fat-cat bankers and boom-bust economy (you may consider positive phrasing on last 2 points).
Finally, I remember reading here in slashdot, a C++ native dev who writes algorithms for one of those HFT firms, who earns 1/2 million per annum. Now that is serious money right ?
I did a STEM degree abroad... and it is far beyond sitting in a lecture hall.
The biggest thing of all (at least for me) is, learning how to survive independently in a different country/environment. Also, how to live on a "shoe-string budget" was quite useful too.. especially last few months (yep, am unemployed).
ARM is relatively new to the pipeline and super-scalar architectures, and yet to see "out-of-order" execution. Assume it will take some more years to produce a highly efficient processor.
My guess why ARM didn't reach desktop yet, it can't handle complex multi tasking stuff. For an example, how about viewing 20 web pages, HD video playback, downloading multi-gig file at 1 Mbps, applying PS touches on batch mode, while compressing 1000+ files. My other guess is, ARM is yet to produce a CPU that can communicate with modern graphics cards, SSDs and other demanding I/Os. They require additional transistors/processor to get around it I guess.
People have got together and demonstrated, picketed and rioted long before the advent of social media. It is just that, communication is much more efficient and easier today. And surely, people will find ways to circumvent even if social media gets banned tomorrow.
I think UK PM is focusing on the wrong stuff -- social media -- to begin with. I mean, he should deeply analyze what are the root causes behind these massive riots. The reason (according to my understanding) is the youth who are denied a better future because of the greed of preceding generation(s).
Let's face the truth... we are living in a world of politicians, bankers, financiers, top shots who steal wealth from common people and run away without a scratch; while a poor teenager getting batton-down for stealing a pair of jeans. How fair is that ? isn't bankrupting entire nations and sending financial shock waves across the globe a criminal act?
Aren't they a culprit too in grade inflation debacle ???
I was a TA in a far east university in an Engineering department. Generally I consider my self a tough marker, as I expect students to arrive at answers with right logical reasoning. Having said that, I usually had a partial blind eye for students who has genuine drive towards studies -- post grad research types --, because their future shouldn't be eclipsed by a one bad grade. Also I highly control the grade distribution, such that only 5-10% of the class will get A-grade.
First time when I marked the maths assignments, the feedback was horrible. I was told off by the lecturer for marking strictly, and then he increased marks of everybody by some percentage. Then I was instructed "not to go through the workings" and "give full marks if you see the answer". Since then, more than half the class gets A-grade.
The problem here is, lecturers are evaluated every semester by handing out questionnaires to students (in that university). Bad feedback can kill lecturer's x-mas bonus to getting a promotion in the department. So him (and many others) end up pleasing students not to hurt his career as an academic.
On a separate note, most of engineering course work are now done in software level. As a consequence, hardly any hardware related experiments and report writing. Downside of all this is, it is impossible to catch plagiarism; as all experiments in a software produces same outcome, more or less. Unless all students get it wrong, everybody ends up getting A-grade.
In my time, all course work (labs, assignments) has to be submitted as a report. Highest I ever got was 8/10... mostly 7/10. In one assignment I submitted, marks were slashed for no zooming in a graph (still it covered 90% of the page). In another report, few marks were removed for not using a ruler to draw a circuit diagram. Having few bad grades eventually costed my first class, which became a major issue in my post-grad entry. Considering those days, I think college kids are having easy time now. In a way, I can understand why people in the working world pay little to no attention on college performance.
In a perfect world, everybody is entitled for their opinion... and everybody else (including the authorities) have to listen to them with an open attitude, regardless how mellifluous or harsh it is.Truth is.. we are in an *imperfect world*. Expressing an unpopular opinion could most often put you in a compromising position. And if you do it with your identity out in the wild.. you may consider writing your last will ASAP.
On the other hand, a proliferation of discrimination is imminent with such a move. As in, if lets say I choose my real name as my slashdot ID. You could easily guess which part of the world or even which country I am from. Once those details are in the wild, no longer there is level playing field on the Internet, in terms of expressing your ideas. Recently I moved to a country in the east looking for an employment. I hardly get interviews here, even with a graduate certificate, simply because my name is good enough to identify where I am from. AFAIK, most academic publication houses remove author/institution details prior to sending papers out to reviewers, just to avoid such discrimination.
If you have listened to Philip Zimbardo's 'The Secret Power of Time' lectures (here is the summary version:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg), he mentioned about students with 10,000 odd hours of video gaming having 'digitally wired brains'. Even though it sounds preposterous, as someone who worked as a TA for last 3 years, I have to agree with his thesis. I taught number of units ranging from computer-based lab classes to just paper-and-pencil math tutorials. Though students were doing alright in lab classes, they were paranoid in math tutorials. Simply they hated staring at a white-board. Their concentration levels dips in few minutes, ended up taking out their tablets, mobiles to rectify it (which mostly annoyed me and everybody else).
Literally, modern day class room is too 'analog' for the 'digitally wired brains' coming into study. I don't know the solution. But education as a whole should address this issue. Perhaps we should put up LCD screens instead of white boards.
(side note: I am still impressed how big univ like Stanford, MIT manage to survive with blackboards alone.)
2. Student attitude
About 10% of a class population is genuinely interested and enthusiastic about their learning (DISCLAIMER: just my rough observation). Rest just want to get through the unit, possibly with higher grade if possible. And the latter group are the usual troublemakers, who push the assessments to be more "tick-point-like", and line up at your office door pushing you to give higher marks (and some of them go to admin and lodge complains even).
It is an idealistic dream to bring everyone in a class to the same level of maths or physics or . If the student has the desire to learn, he/she will soldier on. Others will find their own way. I had one math student under me, pretty average student, and he took his 2nd year off to go tour with his metal rock band (he is bloody good at playing the guitar). My thoughts and wishes are with him on this, and I repeatedly asked him to drop out from college and work on his band. Simply because, he will be average in a classroom, while top in his game at a live stage.
3. Institution's attitude
I worked in a private institution. I think they are moving from 'educational institute' model to 'business company' model. Institution I attached to introduced a massive 'performance monitoring' exercise, where each department is rewarded based on their performances. It went down to the insane level, where you as a lecturer will get x-mas bonus only if your students' feedback is positive.
This led to a sea change in teaching attitudes. Instead of teaching, lecturers were giving away high grades generously while pampering them in classrooms. As a math TA, I always marked assignments giving high priority towards methodology and logical reasoning. It takes 4-5 days to mark 160 scripts. Eventually, the math lecturer accused me of marking them strict and insisted me to "just give marks if you see the final answer" in the next round of assignments (voila!, I marked the next batch in just one afternoon, and half the class got A+).
I think any educational institute (be it school, college, university) shouldn't run like private companies who are desperate to make profit to show off to their investors. Such attitudes certainly kills the "education" aspect of the institute, and becomes more like "degree issuing factories for a fixed price".
(similarly, there were dodgy practices in research dept as a consequence of institution's attitude)
As somebody said , "degrees kills education". So might well as close all the schools, or get rid of grades. (kidding!)
I had to leave grad school at the three year milestone, as funding wasn't there to continue even a semester more. So if you do not generate enough results to back up your thesis, you are toasted, you have just wasted 3 years of your life (if lucky, you will graduate with a Masters). I really wanted to produce a prototype/demo version of what I did (or at least clean up the code removing all the scaffoldings and debug junk). But time was just enough to write up my thesis.
Also remember, researchers do not do coding all the time.. they have so many other activities to engage, such as finding relevant research material, reading books, learning new topics, work with collaborators, reverse engineer code written by others, write papers, peer-review other's work etc etc. So coding is just a minor task of the whole research experience; and you can't possibly expect them to write production level code, which professional coders get 100% of their work time to engage in.
Blackberry PlayBook is... how should I put it... hmmm... cramming in a roll-cage and bucket-seats into a family saloon.
Certainly, any digital toy can escape the hands of its owner. But mobile phones being with us for good decade or so, we rarely misplace it. On the the contrary, tablets being the new toy in our life, and PlayBook is in a smaller form factor; chances of misplacing is rather high. So it is somewhat justifiable to include the "bridging" feature. Then again, it kills the usability as a standalone device.
Personally I like the PlayBook. Recently I went to a mobile retailer, where they had both ipad and playbook demo units. I wanted to check some details on the internet. So I went to the big screen ipad... Alas! website I wanted to access was a flash site. Then I switched to a PlayBook, voila... accessed the site without an issue!
Good luck PlayBook!... hate to say this, but it will have a painful future with other competitors..
I doubt this is the end of Google generating cool ideas/apps. As long as they keep on hiring new guys with brilliant imagination, they are safe. But this announcement sounds like they are moving towards more big corporate style work flow, where all cool ideas are channeled towards an existing product. I see some similarities with Microsoft here, where most research is geared towards an existing product.
Potential downfall is, some ideas/apps/products are better off alone. For an example, whole Xbox Kinect was exceptional as a hardware device. But as it was bundled with the gaming console, we missed out all the other cool stuff it can do (hacks we saw on youtube). Quite lucky they released a SDK. Sometimes, I wish they released Kinect as an separate ubiquitous hardware.
1. isn't the laptop now more "luggagable", rather being "portable? 2. if the CPU and RAM specs are bad, then having extra screen is not productive at all!
I spent last 3 years without having any sort of access to Internet at home, as an measure to save my limited post-graduate student stipend.
GOOD part of that experiment was, it was calm and relaxing to be back home. No more e-mails or IMs to disturb you once you are at home. So I did enjoy lot of the other activities from reading, watching television, playing old games, freelance writing etc.
UGLY side of this experiment was, you are going to waste quite a lot of your working hours to do the things you should've done at your leisure hours. For an example, I had to skype my parents, write personal e-mails, update my FB, read news/blogs/slashdot at work. On top of that, if I want to go somewhere during the weekend or do something at home, I had to download all the information (be it maps, guides, etc) well in advance. All these eats up considerable amount of productive hours at office. So I resorted to two strategies: a) stay at office late, b) go to office during weekends, both were bad in their own ways.
During emergencies, I had the luxury of accessing WiFi of a coffee shops near by. But it is pointless unless you have a smartphone or a netbook equivalent (I had neither; remember, I was a poor post-grad). Then the internet cafe near my house was reasonable in terms of hourly charges, but aren't they an extincting breed of cafes ?
My advice if you are STOPPING internet at home: 1. Make sure you have a digital repository of everything you need, which can be a dictionary/thesauraus software or list of fast-food-delivery/taxi phone numbers. 2. Buy a large enough USB flash drive/HDD and download a syncing software (on Windows platforms, SyncToy is good). This way you can manage files you need to carry back-and-forth between home and office. 3. Buy a smartphone or a netbook equivalent, and locate nearby free WiFi hotpots, for emergencies.
My PREFERRED solution: 1. Subscribe a basic broadband connection (say 30GB a month, 2Mbps downlink). Which is just good enough to do regular emails, web browsing and bit of youtubing. But you can't do much as bandwidth is restricted (no 1080p video watching). So just enough. 2. Get rid of unnecessary internet memberships/accounts. Slashdot is the last forum I am actively participating. FB is the only social media site I am in. Soon, I will stop reading gizmodo and stick to ARStechnica. I am geared towards simplifying my internet life as much as possible. As it can save quite a lot of time and energy. 3. Think internet as a tool that make possible other experiences (e.g. FB messaging to invite friends for a cup of tea + chat), not the be-all-end-all destination where your life should revolve around.
EEE major here... but I did few programming modules in my undergrads. I abhor cheating, plagiarism, collusion and any form of illegal activities. But at the end of the day, we have to have allies within the class especially when big group projects come along. As a result, sometimes I had to give away my codes to others and change my own code to avoid getting caught. It was appalling, but given the circumstances, I didn't have much choice.
And now as a Graduate TA, I don't need a sophisticated plagiarism detection system to spot who is cheating and who is not. Moment you start talking with the particular student or read their code, it is quite visible who is breaking the rules. (One time I marked down a student, because he managed to get the code running and obtain the result. But before the official demo, he requested me to explain what's happening inside the code. Obvious right! However, later he complained to the lecturer and I was forced to give him full marks under the grounds "he did finish the lab assignment and got the right answer". I deliberately avoid TA-ing that class after that incident).
Also I agree that plagiarism detection systems are NOT "bullet proof". They can be mislead as well and all depends on the threshold you choose.
Despite all this frustration, I think I have a solution. Why not make the assignments darn-super-hard ? My 2nd year C-programming unit had this horrible 4 page long assignments. Essentially, the lecturer wanted us to write a fully functional MIPS emulator using C/C++, which can take in machine-code and churn out the results. It was a tough assignment (especially when you haven't ever used C/C++ before). But that assignment had two major merits, 1) you will try all possible tricks in C/C++.. hence a good hands on programming experience, 2) you will learn processor architecture pretty well. I completed the advanced version of that course in the final year, which required us to introduce memory heirarchies and pipelining to the existing code base.
When you are given such a massive assignment, only handful can finish the assignment. Rest have to fall-back halfway through.. as the assignment is not all about programming. Underneath there is lot more (in the above case, processor architecture) you must know to finish the assignment. On top of that, massive assignment enable student to learn more things than a small ones. And most of all, it is the most fair system for all the hard working honest students!
It all started in a naive internet security incident (Gmail accounts getting hacked) and now it has gone to the extent of "free internet", "free speech". I don't see much connection between them.
In anyway, when British opium business was banned by then Chinese emperor, opium lords lobbied in British parliament to send the gun boats and take back the market. That's how HK became a British colony. Now that was 18th century!
Even though Hillary Clinton called for a probe on cyber attacks, so far US government didn't take any serious action to forcefully defend the search market in China for Google (or any other tech company) like British government did in opium war. I don't know Obama will take up this issue as Health Care is settling now.
But what I am wondering is... has the gun-boat diplomacy finally reached its end of road ?? With this Google vs. China incident, it seems like that.
Slashdot Mirror
I left my parent's basement 10 years ago. Throughout my extended college years and following professional years, I lived in a single room without a tele or cable.
I mainly survived by streaming things over the internet, which was the most economical option. I thought of subscribing cable many times in between; but the related monthly cost and the initial investment -- AKA giant-flat-screen-TV -- was too big for my student stipend.
I am not a soap-opera, series-drama kind of guy. I mostly watch documentaries (especially BBC ones). Since the invent of youtube, and especially in recent years; web is full of useful educational documentaries. Google's very own video search is a great way of finding them out.
On-and-off, I go down to the local pub to catch the Formula 1 and Footy action, which is a far better way of enjoying sport than sitting on a couch alone and watching with a bag of crisps & soda.
If the BBC opens up its great iPlayer service to the world, I will be subscribing that. This might require me to upgrade the broadband plan, but I think it is worth every penny!
I truly and greatly appreciate your correction !
I am residing in South-East Asia for the last decade or so. You must come here (even for a short holiday) to witness yourself how little natives over here care about English grammar and/or sentence structures. Apparently, there are local dialects such as Singlish (Singaporean English) and Manglish (Malaysian English). Give or take, both dialects are quite similar; and as far as the origins goes, it is direct word-to-word translation of Chinese phrases into English; though they have evolved over time with many more borrowed words and expressions.
Some interesting examples being:
English: "Would you like to join us for lunch now?"
Singlish/Manglish: "You wanna go lunch or not?"
[in a situation you disagree/reject something]
(E): "I do not agree with your suggestion"
(S/M): "Cannot one!"
[giving a lift to your friend]
(E): "I will come and pick you at the library, and drop you at the railway station"
(M): "I fetch you from library, then fetch you back to the station"
Search youtube.. there are plenty of Singlish videos.
Though I find these dialects are an energy efficient way of speaking English, and somewhat amusing to listen; I must confess that I find them nothing more than a nuisance, especially in a professional working environment. I often have communication issues with colleagues who are proficient in these dialects. Most of the time, they do not understand what I am talking about, and gives me strange looks. Then, I happen to run into the problem of misunderstanding instructions from my bosses, now that was pretty bad and costly.
I am finding it difficult to tell natives "Your English sucks!" to their face. Partly because it is rude and such remarks could go down quite horribly. On the other end, they them selves have this high esteem that they speak proper English, since most of them spoken or studied in English medium since a very young age.
Though I admit I am not perfect (after all, English is still my second tongue), I always thrive to write grammatically correct English, even when I am sending a text message. All in all, getting the right message delivered is much important than anything else in any form of communication. It puzzles me why internet age kids do not pay much attention, nor put effort in proper communication skills these days.
Phew.. that was close !!!
one liner is more than enough for any OS....
>> shutdown
Just my 2 cents....
1. Enter to a top college in either Electrical Engineering or Physics... or some other technical major
2. Do as many as possible CS courses while there
3. Do few internships in CS related field
4. Self-learn whenever you can, whatever you can find in CS field
I did Electrical Engineering in college. But half way through I realized that only thing I liked about that major was, digital logic and programming. So I enrolled into as many as possible CS related courses; did my senior year thesis something close to CS (communication protocol simulation using distributed network); and read/learned as many as possible CS related topics (mainly programming theory and parallel computing). Then I did my PhD in Electrical Engineering too. I managed to make my thesis much more CS related (machine learning + pattern recognition) and used much of my knowledge in algorithm, optimizations and distributed computing.
Just 2 weeks ago, I secured a web developer position at a software firm (somewhere in far east). Still I had to go through a written + oral technical examinations on programming, algorithm and puzzle solving. But the knowledge and experience came in handy. One added advantage I have, coming from Engineering background, is knowing everything from how the microprocessor, cache, memory works up to the level of how protocols at WWW level works. And when you start programming with "so-called ancient" multi-paradigm languages like C++ and some assembly in college (most microcontrollers still use C/C++ and/or ASM), it gives you a good foundation on whatever language you need to learn later on. Over the years, I've learned MATLAB, Python, JavaScript, SQL, C#... and now Ruby... but still, fundamentals concepts I understood while learning C/C++ was critical in most cases.
Gordan Gekko from The Wallstreet............. Greed (to suck up) is good !!!
I am always surprised to see the heavy usage of blackboard at places like Stanford, MIT (check http://www.academicearth.org./ Even some of the later successes, like the Khan Academy or Paddy Hirsch's financial market mini-lectures, are primarily relying on blackboard centered teaching methods. One may disagree, but I still think analog-alike blackboard based teaching is still the best, compared to power-point based lectures.
Overall, I consider technology is merely "a tool" to get information faster and crunch numbers faster. Still, education or any other intellectual pursuit is down to heavy-use-of-brain, discipline, and hard work/perseverance. And yes, I do not deny, having good teachers is always a plus.
I think High Frequency Trading (HFT) is a good topic to talk about, considering the recent media attention on financial meltdown, new NYSE trading facility in NJ and occupy wallstreet and what not. It covers most CS topics like 'algorithms/math' to maximize profit, 'data mining' to beat the competition, 'IT infrastructure' to minimize latency, and 'global influence' in terms of market impact, fat-cat bankers and boom-bust economy (you may consider positive phrasing on last 2 points).
Finally, I remember reading here in slashdot, a C++ native dev who writes algorithms for one of those HFT firms, who earns 1/2 million per annum. Now that is serious money right ?
I did a STEM degree abroad... and it is far beyond sitting in a lecture hall.
The biggest thing of all (at least for me) is, learning how to survive independently in a different country/environment.
Also, how to live on a "shoe-string budget" was quite useful too.. especially last few months (yep, am unemployed).
ARM is relatively new to the pipeline and super-scalar architectures, and yet to see "out-of-order" execution. Assume it will take some more years to produce a highly efficient processor.
My guess why ARM didn't reach desktop yet, it can't handle complex multi tasking stuff. For an example, how about viewing 20 web pages, HD video playback, downloading multi-gig file at 1 Mbps, applying PS touches on batch mode, while compressing 1000+ files. My other guess is, ARM is yet to produce a CPU that can communicate with modern graphics cards, SSDs and other demanding I/Os. They require additional transistors/processor to get around it I guess.
People have got together and demonstrated, picketed and rioted long before the advent of social media. It is just that, communication is much more efficient and easier today. And surely, people will find ways to circumvent even if social media gets banned tomorrow.
I think UK PM is focusing on the wrong stuff -- social media -- to begin with. I mean, he should deeply analyze what are the root causes behind these massive riots. The reason (according to my understanding) is the youth who are denied a better future because of the greed of preceding generation(s).
Let's face the truth... we are living in a world of politicians, bankers, financiers, top shots who steal wealth from common people and run away without a scratch; while a poor teenager getting batton-down for stealing a pair of jeans. How fair is that ? isn't bankrupting entire nations and sending financial shock waves across the globe a criminal act?
Aren't they a culprit too in grade inflation debacle ???
I was a TA in a far east university in an Engineering department. Generally I consider my self a tough marker, as I expect students to arrive at answers with right logical reasoning. Having said that, I usually had a partial blind eye for students who has genuine drive towards studies -- post grad research types --, because their future shouldn't be eclipsed by a one bad grade. Also I highly control the grade distribution, such that only 5-10% of the class will get A-grade.
First time when I marked the maths assignments, the feedback was horrible. I was told off by the lecturer for marking strictly, and then he increased marks of everybody by some percentage. Then I was instructed "not to go through the workings" and "give full marks if you see the answer". Since then, more than half the class gets A-grade.
The problem here is, lecturers are evaluated every semester by handing out questionnaires to students (in that university). Bad feedback can kill lecturer's x-mas bonus to getting a promotion in the department. So him (and many others) end up pleasing students not to hurt his career as an academic.
On a separate note, most of engineering course work are now done in software level. As a consequence, hardly any hardware related experiments and report writing. Downside of all this is, it is impossible to catch plagiarism; as all experiments in a software produces same outcome, more or less. Unless all students get it wrong, everybody ends up getting A-grade.
In my time, all course work (labs, assignments) has to be submitted as a report. Highest I ever got was 8/10... mostly 7/10. In one assignment I submitted, marks were slashed for no zooming in a graph (still it covered 90% of the page). In another report, few marks were removed for not using a ruler to draw a circuit diagram. Having few bad grades eventually costed my first class, which became a major issue in my post-grad entry. Considering those days, I think college kids are having easy time now. In a way, I can understand why people in the working world pay little to no attention on college performance.
Thought of sending this to Top Gear... too bad as a human was driving it.
Hope the robot called 911 after the crash...
In a perfect world, everybody is entitled for their opinion... and everybody else (including the authorities) have to listen to them with an open attitude, regardless how mellifluous or harsh it is.Truth is.. we are in an *imperfect world*. Expressing an unpopular opinion could most often put you in a compromising position. And if you do it with your identity out in the wild.. you may consider writing your last will ASAP.
On the other hand, a proliferation of discrimination is imminent with such a move. As in, if lets say I choose my real name as my slashdot ID. You could easily guess which part of the world or even which country I am from. Once those details are in the wild, no longer there is level playing field on the Internet, in terms of expressing your ideas. Recently I moved to a country in the east looking for an employment. I hardly get interviews here, even with a graduate certificate, simply because my name is good enough to identify where I am from. AFAIK, most academic publication houses remove author/institution details prior to sending papers out to reviewers, just to avoid such discrimination.
Also from this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Edge
1. Digitally wired brains
If you have listened to Philip Zimbardo's 'The Secret Power of Time' lectures (here is the summary version:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg), he mentioned about students with 10,000 odd hours of video gaming having 'digitally wired brains'. Even though it sounds preposterous, as someone who worked as a TA for last 3 years, I have to agree with his thesis. I taught number of units ranging from computer-based lab classes to just paper-and-pencil math tutorials. Though students were doing alright in lab classes, they were paranoid in math tutorials. Simply they hated staring at a white-board. Their concentration levels dips in few minutes, ended up taking out their tablets, mobiles to rectify it (which mostly annoyed me and everybody else).
Literally, modern day class room is too 'analog' for the 'digitally wired brains' coming into study. I don't know the solution. But education as a whole should address this issue. Perhaps we should put up LCD screens instead of white boards.
(side note: I am still impressed how big univ like Stanford, MIT manage to survive with blackboards alone.)
2. Student attitude
About 10% of a class population is genuinely interested and enthusiastic about their learning (DISCLAIMER: just my rough observation). Rest just want to get through the unit, possibly with higher grade if possible. And the latter group are the usual troublemakers, who push the assessments to be more "tick-point-like", and line up at your office door pushing you to give higher marks (and some of them go to admin and lodge complains even).
It is an idealistic dream to bring everyone in a class to the same level of maths or physics or . If the student has the desire to learn, he/she will soldier on. Others will find their own way. I had one math student under me, pretty average student, and he took his 2nd year off to go tour with his metal rock band (he is bloody good at playing the guitar). My thoughts and wishes are with him on this, and I repeatedly asked him to drop out from college and work on his band. Simply because, he will be average in a classroom, while top in his game at a live stage.
3. Institution's attitude
I worked in a private institution. I think they are moving from 'educational institute' model to 'business company' model. Institution I attached to introduced a massive 'performance monitoring' exercise, where each department is rewarded based on their performances. It went down to the insane level, where you as a lecturer will get x-mas bonus only if your students' feedback is positive.
This led to a sea change in teaching attitudes. Instead of teaching, lecturers were giving away high grades generously while pampering them in classrooms. As a math TA, I always marked assignments giving high priority towards methodology and logical reasoning. It takes 4-5 days to mark 160 scripts. Eventually, the math lecturer accused me of marking them strict and insisted me to "just give marks if you see the final answer" in the next round of assignments (voila!, I marked the next batch in just one afternoon, and half the class got A+).
I think any educational institute (be it school, college, university) shouldn't run like private companies who are desperate to make profit to show off to their investors. Such attitudes certainly kills the "education" aspect of the institute, and becomes more like "degree issuing factories for a fixed price".
(similarly, there were dodgy practices in research dept as a consequence of institution's attitude)
As somebody said , "degrees kills education". So might well as close all the schools, or get rid of grades. (kidding!)
agree for the most part....
I had to leave grad school at the three year milestone, as funding wasn't there to continue even a semester more. So if you do not generate enough results to back up your thesis, you are toasted, you have just wasted 3 years of your life (if lucky, you will graduate with a Masters). I really wanted to produce a prototype/demo version of what I did (or at least clean up the code removing all the scaffoldings and debug junk). But time was just enough to write up my thesis.
Also remember, researchers do not do coding all the time.. they have so many other activities to engage, such as finding relevant research material, reading books, learning new topics, work with collaborators, reverse engineer code written by others, write papers, peer-review other's work etc etc. So coding is just a minor task of the whole research experience; and you can't possibly expect them to write production level code, which professional coders get 100% of their work time to engage in.
Blackberry PlayBook is... how should I put it... hmmm... cramming in a roll-cage and bucket-seats into a family saloon.
Certainly, any digital toy can escape the hands of its owner. But mobile phones being with us for good decade or so, we rarely misplace it. On the the contrary, tablets being the new toy in our life, and PlayBook is in a smaller form factor; chances of misplacing is rather high. So it is somewhat justifiable to include the "bridging" feature. Then again, it kills the usability as a standalone device.
Personally I like the PlayBook. Recently I went to a mobile retailer, where they had both ipad and playbook demo units. I wanted to check some details on the internet. So I went to the big screen ipad... Alas! website I wanted to access was a flash site. Then I switched to a PlayBook, voila... accessed the site without an issue!
Good luck PlayBook! ... hate to say this, but it will have a painful future with other competitors..
Linux ME gonna rock in 7 years time !!!!
I doubt this is the end of Google generating cool ideas/apps. As long as they keep on hiring new guys with brilliant imagination, they are safe. But this announcement sounds like they are moving towards more big corporate style work flow, where all cool ideas are channeled towards an existing product. I see some similarities with Microsoft here, where most research is geared towards an existing product.
Potential downfall is, some ideas/apps/products are better off alone. For an example, whole Xbox Kinect was exceptional as a hardware device. But as it was bundled with the gaming console, we missed out all the other cool stuff it can do (hacks we saw on youtube). Quite lucky they released a SDK. Sometimes, I wish they released Kinect as an separate ubiquitous hardware.
1. isn't the laptop now more "luggagable", rather being "portable?
2. if the CPU and RAM specs are bad, then having extra screen is not productive at all!
I spent last 3 years without having any sort of access to Internet at home, as an measure to save my limited post-graduate student stipend.
GOOD part of that experiment was, it was calm and relaxing to be back home. No more e-mails or IMs to disturb you once you are at home. So I did enjoy lot of the other activities from reading, watching television, playing old games, freelance writing etc.
UGLY side of this experiment was, you are going to waste quite a lot of your working hours to do the things you should've done at your leisure hours. For an example, I had to skype my parents, write personal e-mails, update my FB, read news/blogs/slashdot at work. On top of that, if I want to go somewhere during the weekend or do something at home, I had to download all the information (be it maps, guides, etc) well in advance. All these eats up considerable amount of productive hours at office. So I resorted to two strategies: a) stay at office late, b) go to office during weekends, both were bad in their own ways.
During emergencies, I had the luxury of accessing WiFi of a coffee shops near by. But it is pointless unless you have a smartphone or a netbook equivalent (I had neither; remember, I was a poor post-grad). Then the internet cafe near my house was reasonable in terms of hourly charges, but aren't they an extincting breed of cafes ?
My advice if you are STOPPING internet at home:
1. Make sure you have a digital repository of everything you need, which can be a dictionary/thesauraus software or list of fast-food-delivery/taxi phone numbers.
2. Buy a large enough USB flash drive/HDD and download a syncing software (on Windows platforms, SyncToy is good). This way you can manage files you need to carry back-and-forth between home and office.
3. Buy a smartphone or a netbook equivalent, and locate nearby free WiFi hotpots, for emergencies.
My PREFERRED solution:
1. Subscribe a basic broadband connection (say 30GB a month, 2Mbps downlink). Which is just good enough to do regular emails, web browsing and bit of youtubing. But you can't do much as bandwidth is restricted (no 1080p video watching). So just enough.
2. Get rid of unnecessary internet memberships/accounts. Slashdot is the last forum I am actively participating. FB is the only social media site I am in. Soon, I will stop reading gizmodo and stick to ARStechnica. I am geared towards simplifying my internet life as much as possible. As it can save quite a lot of time and energy.
3. Think internet as a tool that make possible other experiences (e.g. FB messaging to invite friends for a cup of tea + chat), not the be-all-end-all destination where your life should revolve around.
Wishing you good luck!
EEE major here... but I did few programming modules in my undergrads. I abhor cheating, plagiarism, collusion and any form of illegal activities. But at the end of the day, we have to have allies within the class especially when big group projects come along. As a result, sometimes I had to give away my codes to others and change my own code to avoid getting caught. It was appalling, but given the circumstances, I didn't have much choice.
And now as a Graduate TA, I don't need a sophisticated plagiarism detection system to spot who is cheating and who is not. Moment you start talking with the particular student or read their code, it is quite visible who is breaking the rules. (One time I marked down a student, because he managed to get the code running and obtain the result. But before the official demo, he requested me to explain what's happening inside the code. Obvious right! However, later he complained to the lecturer and I was forced to give him full marks under the grounds "he did finish the lab assignment and got the right answer". I deliberately avoid TA-ing that class after that incident).
Also I agree that plagiarism detection systems are NOT "bullet proof". They can be mislead as well and all depends on the threshold you choose.
Despite all this frustration, I think I have a solution. Why not make the assignments darn-super-hard ? My 2nd year C-programming unit had this horrible 4 page long assignments. Essentially, the lecturer wanted us to write a fully functional MIPS emulator using C/C++, which can take in machine-code and churn out the results. It was a tough assignment (especially when you haven't ever used C/C++ before). But that assignment had two major merits, 1) you will try all possible tricks in C/C++.. hence a good hands on programming experience, 2) you will learn processor architecture pretty well. I completed the advanced version of that course in the final year, which required us to introduce memory heirarchies and pipelining to the existing code base.
When you are given such a massive assignment, only handful can finish the assignment. Rest have to fall-back halfway through.. as the assignment is not all about programming. Underneath there is lot more (in the above case, processor architecture) you must know to finish the assignment. On top of that, massive assignment enable student to learn more things than a small ones. And most of all, it is the most fair system for all the hard working honest students!
It all started in a naive internet security incident (Gmail accounts getting hacked) and now it has gone to the extent of "free internet", "free speech". I don't see much connection between them.
In anyway, when British opium business was banned by then Chinese emperor, opium lords lobbied in British parliament to send the gun boats and take back the market. That's how HK became a British colony. Now that was 18th century!
Even though Hillary Clinton called for a probe on cyber attacks, so far US government didn't take any serious action to forcefully defend the search market in China for Google (or any other tech company) like British government did in opium war. I don't know Obama will take up this issue as Health Care is settling now.
But what I am wondering is... has the gun-boat diplomacy finally reached its end of road ?? With this Google vs. China incident, it seems like that.