Well, like it or not, textbook publishers' pockets are so perversely deep that they can actually afford to pay the writers of their flagship books a fair sum. Most professors I've talked to believe it's had a non-negligible effect on the books' quality. Until the open source movement really takes off we won't really know if that's true or not—but they certainly seem to be too scared to find out, given that they've started throwing lawsuits around.
I am completely and totally in support of everything you just said, yes. Textbook companies are far too parasitic to pass as the well-behaved symbiotes they ought to be.
There are plenty of cases in which a long drawn-out explanation of the material is beneficial: the teacher could indeed be lazy, or they could be too busy, or the student may not grasp the teacher's approach, or they went too quickly... when you add up all of the reasons, I would argue that you go from the majority of teachers down to a small minority of them. In addition, you have students missing class and students studying for the exam. And actually, all of that is beside the point: the ideal teaching style for these textbooks is for the student to read a section the night before it's covered in the class. Both hearing and seeing the same content within 24 hours can greatly improve retention.
As far as I can tell, language courses in particular have been crippled for many years due to a general absence of background knowledge in linguistics. I definitely can't make any apologies for them; that's how I ended up with all of those old textbooks in the first place.
I believe the attitude there is to provide backup in case the professor fails to do an adequate job in lecture, the student misses lecture, or something in between. I've seen a lot of classes where the recommended approach is to read the material that will be covered in the lecture the night before; this exploits a facet of human memory that significantly improves retention by ensuring the student is exposed to it twice. If students actually bothered to do the readings (I, for one, didn't), it would be a significant boon to student performance; better than a naked reference for most people and situations during the normal course of the semester. (That being said, reference works are still indispensable. I have a Greek book from the 1880s where the latter half of it is nothing but a list of rules; over a thousand in all. It can tell you pretty much anything.)
To each his or her own, I guess, but keep in mind that you're probably an exception in saying that. Improved teaching methods do not necessarily need to coincide with lazier students; that's more of a result of anti-intellectualism than anything else. There are, also, some very good reasons for not knowing as much: some material simply isn't relevant to the students' vocation, and the reduction in mental clutter for people in many mentally-intensive professions has made it easier for them to focus on that field itself. (I don't have a citation for this, but I hope it's apparent.) The most prominent example would be the removal of Greek and Latin from the standard curriculum over the course of the 20th century, and a success story of the idea of streamlining people for specific tasks might be Grigori Perelman.
Oh, speaking of limits: up until the 20th century they weren't used in teaching Calculus whatsoever. Infinitesimals (the idea that a number could have a smallest possible value) were, instead. Another example of how things have changed.
Classics and Math. I've also looked at 60s-70s Biochemistry and compared it with current stuff, and while the content is different, the difference is also huge in teaching style.
It's an absolutely silly statement. Teaching methodology has changed enormously just in the last fifty years. I've had the luxury of comparing 19th century textbooks to present ones—it's not something you'd want to be stuck with; they're more like reference texts with a few questions (or even a separate question book) if you're lucky. The didactic power has, quite simply, vastly improved.
We walked in, sat down. Ann came in with the RP06 disk pack with the
27000 pages with the comments and the -READ-.-THIS- files and a two
liter coffee mug, sat down. Esther Felix comes in says "All rise", we
stood up, Ann stood up with the 27000 page RP06 pack, and Dave Clark
comes in with an IBM PC. He sits down, we sit down, Ann looks at the
IBM PC. Then at the 27000 page RP06 pack, then at the IBM PC, then at
the 27000 page RP06 pack, and began to cry, because Ann had come to
the realization that it was a typical case of 36 % 8 == 4 and that
there was no way to display those last four bits, and that Dave wasn't
gonna look at the 27000 pages of core dumps and photo files on the
RP06 pack with the comments and -READ-.-THIS- files explaining what
each one was to be used as evidence against us.
I think this really depends on the company and industry. While cutthroat management is certainly effective and no doubt accounts for the majority of successful businesses, it's not the only way. Especially in higher-ranking scientific, consulting, or product development work, the value that an individual person brings to the job becomes quite important. This can even happen in IT at sufficiently senior positions in smaller organizations.
Don't worry, I know.:) I had the luxury of cutting my teeth predominantly on QBASIC, a decade and a half after its time in the sun was long passed (for reference, I'm only 23.) While certainly many young people who grew up to be computer scientists and professional programmers would have learned on 8-bit boxes, I was thinking about graduate students who had learned programming on the job in order to run biological analyses—and it seems they'd be more likely to have access to a mouldy departmental minicomputer than the family micro. Maybe my estimated age range was a bit low.
Five zorkmids says it's a function of how many Secret Saxton gifts they've given. (No, Valve, I'm not cynical about your monetization strategies at all!)
...actually, the LibreOffice code base is only a year or two younger than the Word codebase; StarOffice 1.0 was released in the mid-eighties. Like Linux, there are also a lot of paid contributors. Of course, you're a half-hearted troll, and half of your other points are crap, but it's pertinent trivia.
Ah, "codes!" The great shibboleth of traditionally-bred scientific computing.:) Strangely, in four years of courses, I only heard the plural form uttered once in person.
Your language selection is pretty close—but it's MATLAB, not Mathematica that gets used. Mathematica just doesn't have the toolboxes for complex analyses on large datasets, which is pretty much what most of bioinformatics tends to be.
I think a significant part of the sad truth is that a lot of programmers that actually hail directly from biology are self-taught, or acquired their knowledge from reverse-engineering a mentor's work. This means that anyone in the field over the age of forty or so would have most likely learned to program on cheap, memory-constrained minicomputers (PDP-8s, and so on) that had a severe preference for terseness; possibly even BASIC. I've seen this first-hand; a couple of years ago I helped one of my physiology professors update his cache of VB3 demos to VB6 because his Windows 7 laptop wouldn't tolerate Win16 binaries. All of his algorithms came from a book that probably dated to 1979, and had been targeted at—lo and behold—OS/8 BASIC.
Still, that doesn't quite explain some of the WTFs that I've seen in more sophisticated code. One of my current mentors, who spends most of his time in Python—a younger professor—is characteristically a sociable, conscientious netizen who can effortlessly write good code, but the C++ his thesis supervisor wrote looks like linguine. (And I'm still trying to figure out how you introduce a bug that outputs unwanted buffer padding to a file.) I think a big part of the problem is that, unlike physicists such as yourself, biologists are used to perceiving mathematics as a black box that generates desirable results, rather than an end in itself; all the curriculum expects us to do is grasp the concepts behind what things like integrals and progressive component analysis do. We don't even cover complex numbers. I've complained to a few lecturers (and an undergraduate chair) about this general sort of shortcoming, and they were all too happy to point the blame at each other.
There was an article here a while ago about scientists viewing a program as an extension of themselves, rather than an external object, and I think the article must have meant to imply wet-lab scientists. Jedwiz's quip about it being evolved rather than designed is just so terrifyingly true it's hard to ignore.
Slashdot Mirror
It's okay! I already have a few. :)
They're as easy to come by as anything else on the Internet.
Well, like it or not, textbook publishers' pockets are so perversely deep that they can actually afford to pay the writers of their flagship books a fair sum. Most professors I've talked to believe it's had a non-negligible effect on the books' quality. Until the open source movement really takes off we won't really know if that's true or not—but they certainly seem to be too scared to find out, given that they've started throwing lawsuits around.
I am completely and totally in support of everything you just said, yes. Textbook companies are far too parasitic to pass as the well-behaved symbiotes they ought to be.
There are plenty of cases in which a long drawn-out explanation of the material is beneficial: the teacher could indeed be lazy, or they could be too busy, or the student may not grasp the teacher's approach, or they went too quickly... when you add up all of the reasons, I would argue that you go from the majority of teachers down to a small minority of them. In addition, you have students missing class and students studying for the exam. And actually, all of that is beside the point: the ideal teaching style for these textbooks is for the student to read a section the night before it's covered in the class. Both hearing and seeing the same content within 24 hours can greatly improve retention.
As far as I can tell, language courses in particular have been crippled for many years due to a general absence of background knowledge in linguistics. I definitely can't make any apologies for them; that's how I ended up with all of those old textbooks in the first place.
I believe the attitude there is to provide backup in case the professor fails to do an adequate job in lecture, the student misses lecture, or something in between. I've seen a lot of classes where the recommended approach is to read the material that will be covered in the lecture the night before; this exploits a facet of human memory that significantly improves retention by ensuring the student is exposed to it twice. If students actually bothered to do the readings (I, for one, didn't), it would be a significant boon to student performance; better than a naked reference for most people and situations during the normal course of the semester. (That being said, reference works are still indispensable. I have a Greek book from the 1880s where the latter half of it is nothing but a list of rules; over a thousand in all. It can tell you pretty much anything.)
To each his or her own, I guess, but keep in mind that you're probably an exception in saying that. Improved teaching methods do not necessarily need to coincide with lazier students; that's more of a result of anti-intellectualism than anything else. There are, also, some very good reasons for not knowing as much: some material simply isn't relevant to the students' vocation, and the reduction in mental clutter for people in many mentally-intensive professions has made it easier for them to focus on that field itself. (I don't have a citation for this, but I hope it's apparent.) The most prominent example would be the removal of Greek and Latin from the standard curriculum over the course of the 20th century, and a success story of the idea of streamlining people for specific tasks might be Grigori Perelman.
Oh, speaking of limits: up until the 20th century they weren't used in teaching Calculus whatsoever. Infinitesimals (the idea that a number could have a smallest possible value) were, instead. Another example of how things have changed.
Classics and Math. I've also looked at 60s-70s Biochemistry and compared it with current stuff, and while the content is different, the difference is also huge in teaching style.
It's an absolutely silly statement. Teaching methodology has changed enormously just in the last fifty years. I've had the luxury of comparing 19th century textbooks to present ones—it's not something you'd want to be stuck with; they're more like reference texts with a few questions (or even a separate question book) if you're lucky. The didactic power has, quite simply, vastly improved.
We walked in, sat down. Ann came in with the RP06 disk pack with the 27000 pages with the comments and the -READ-.-THIS- files and a two liter coffee mug, sat down. Esther Felix comes in says "All rise", we stood up, Ann stood up with the 27000 page RP06 pack, and Dave Clark comes in with an IBM PC. He sits down, we sit down, Ann looks at the IBM PC. Then at the 27000 page RP06 pack, then at the IBM PC, then at the 27000 page RP06 pack, and began to cry, because Ann had come to the realization that it was a typical case of 36 % 8 == 4 and that there was no way to display those last four bits, and that Dave wasn't gonna look at the 27000 pages of core dumps and photo files on the RP06 pack with the comments and -READ-.-THIS- files explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us.
They could be trying to emulate the iPad. Keep in mind that it's done pretty well without features as strong as those on Windows.
I think this really depends on the company and industry. While cutthroat management is certainly effective and no doubt accounts for the majority of successful businesses, it's not the only way. Especially in higher-ranking scientific, consulting, or product development work, the value that an individual person brings to the job becomes quite important. This can even happen in IT at sufficiently senior positions in smaller organizations.
If it helps any, I, for one, understood what you meant right off the bat. It was very ... clear.
The "n" was promoted last week, to Senior Vice Manager of Golf.
Don't worry, I know. :) I had the luxury of cutting my teeth predominantly on QBASIC, a decade and a half after its time in the sun was long passed (for reference, I'm only 23.) While certainly many young people who grew up to be computer scientists and professional programmers would have learned on 8-bit boxes, I was thinking about graduate students who had learned programming on the job in order to run biological analyses—and it seems they'd be more likely to have access to a mouldy departmental minicomputer than the family micro. Maybe my estimated age range was a bit low.
Kiddie porn, you say? Well, that's a new law entirely. Maybe the Desdinova–Scarlet Law?
That sounds like something a communist sympathizer would say!
It is. Right now. I'm calling it Desdinova's Law.
Five zorkmids says it's a function of how many Secret Saxton gifts they've given. (No, Valve, I'm not cynical about your monetization strategies at all!)
And the worst part is, it's white! Surely there are buildings that have been painted with a more green tinge than this. At least a subtle seafoam?
...actually, the LibreOffice code base is only a year or two younger than the Word codebase; StarOffice 1.0 was released in the mid-eighties. Like Linux, there are also a lot of paid contributors. Of course, you're a half-hearted troll, and half of your other points are crap, but it's pertinent trivia.
Office 2010 lets you customize the ribbon exhaustively, actually.
Ah, "codes!" The great shibboleth of traditionally-bred scientific computing. :) Strangely, in four years of courses, I only heard the plural form uttered once in person.
Your language selection is pretty close—but it's MATLAB, not Mathematica that gets used. Mathematica just doesn't have the toolboxes for complex analyses on large datasets, which is pretty much what most of bioinformatics tends to be.
I think a significant part of the sad truth is that a lot of programmers that actually hail directly from biology are self-taught, or acquired their knowledge from reverse-engineering a mentor's work. This means that anyone in the field over the age of forty or so would have most likely learned to program on cheap, memory-constrained minicomputers (PDP-8s, and so on) that had a severe preference for terseness; possibly even BASIC. I've seen this first-hand; a couple of years ago I helped one of my physiology professors update his cache of VB3 demos to VB6 because his Windows 7 laptop wouldn't tolerate Win16 binaries. All of his algorithms came from a book that probably dated to 1979, and had been targeted at—lo and behold—OS/8 BASIC.
Still, that doesn't quite explain some of the WTFs that I've seen in more sophisticated code. One of my current mentors, who spends most of his time in Python—a younger professor—is characteristically a sociable, conscientious netizen who can effortlessly write good code, but the C++ his thesis supervisor wrote looks like linguine. (And I'm still trying to figure out how you introduce a bug that outputs unwanted buffer padding to a file.) I think a big part of the problem is that, unlike physicists such as yourself, biologists are used to perceiving mathematics as a black box that generates desirable results, rather than an end in itself; all the curriculum expects us to do is grasp the concepts behind what things like integrals and progressive component analysis do. We don't even cover complex numbers. I've complained to a few lecturers (and an undergraduate chair) about this general sort of shortcoming, and they were all too happy to point the blame at each other.
There was an article here a while ago about scientists viewing a program as an extension of themselves, rather than an external object, and I think the article must have meant to imply wet-lab scientists. Jedwiz's quip about it being evolved rather than designed is just so terrifyingly true it's hard to ignore.