Ok. "Very reasonable inference" is just hand waving. You're expressing an opinion, but not providing any evidence, let alone proof for it. "Require many generations to be solved or even to be proved unsolvable" is a type of difficulty, but there is no argument or evidence that it's the greatest possible difficulty. It's just saying "math is tough". I never said otherwise. Moreover there are many scientific problems that take generations to be solved. That situation is not unique to math.
The question of what "we" want is not a scientific question.
Strictly speaking you're right, but what I was referring to is whether there is objective evidence that we have a "shortage" of STEM graduates. Normally it's just assumed, or the evidence is the assertions of some very wealthy STEM dropouts with a vested interest. That's not a good enough starting point for a debate.
Now, you could make an economical argument about whether or not increasing the number of STEM graduates is useful to our economy. But I don't think that anybody trusts economical models at that level.
Forget the fancy models. Start with basic question of whether there is a "shortage" in the sense of rising prices. There isn't.
But I think that most people would find it believable that training people to address challenging problems quantitatively (which is really what all the STEM fields have in common) is going to be a good thing, and certainly isn't going to hurt.
Believable isn't the same thing as true, and "isn't going to hurt" is not a good enough argument for possibly spending a lot of money, and almost certainly expending a lot of effort. It wouldn't hurt if everybody learned the Klingon language either, but that's not much of an argument for encouraging it.
Damn, a comment on Slashdot that makes sense and isn't about tooting your own horn. Are you in the wrong place?
I agree. My experience in tutoring people in math is that mathophobes are thrown by the fact that they don't understand something the first time they see it. That's different from say, a history class. That's not knocking history, which also a very important subject (and a personal favorite), but it does mean that learning math is different. I always tell people that of course you don't understand it - you haven't learned it yet!
in japan, kids are taught to be able to do mental arithmetic at lightning speed. tests involve flashing up 6-digit sums for 1/3 of a second every couple of seconds
Let's teach our students to do something more difficult and more useful, like balance a ball on the end of their nose while clapping their flippers (err, hands). The ability to do some mental arithmetic is very useful, but the usefulness of doing 6 digit sums in your head was obviated by technologies like the abacus or pencil and paper. Go with the ball on your nose.
There has always been a question of where money and resources should be dedicated if we the number of STEM college graduates.
There's no point in even asking that question until it's been decided whether "we" want to increase the number of STEM graduates, and if so, why "we" want to. If that question was analyzed a tenth as scientifically as the question of where to allocate resources if "we" want to increase the number of STEM graduates, it would be a miracle. The assumption that "we" should want to is endlessly asserted and little questioned. Whose agenda does that promote?
How does this differ from the past? The article doesn't address that at all. In the past, did a smaller percentage of STEM students dropout or switch to non-STEM majors? In the past were STEM graduates a larger or a smaller percentage of college graduates, and were they a larger or smaller percentage of people of a given age? Is there any objective evidence that there is a shortage of STEM graduates?
Without that information, this article is the usual "OMG, crisis! American education sucks!" hysteria that we've been hearing for decades. Not that that jibes with American prowess in science and technology, but lets not worry about a little things like that. A variant of this garbage is that everyone should study STEM (ignoring demand). Look, the USSR launched a satellite before us! We're gonna loose the Cold War! That was the "crisis" in 1957, and the nonsense hasn't abated since.
Why does the WSJ hate American students? Technically I shouldn't jump to that conclusion, since it is phrased conditionally. FTA:
“If more science graduates are desired, the findings suggest the importance of policies at younger ages that lead students to enter college better prepared to study science,” the researchers write in the paper.
Why would we want more STEM graduates? There is no objective evidence that there is a shortage of them, and quite a few indications that, at least in some fields, we have a surplus. Moreover US policy is, and for many years has been, to import STEM students or graduates rather than get Americans interested in these fields. We know this policy is essential because Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and other very wealthy STEM dropouts tell us it is.
the US thrives because of smart people, so why not give incentive to the special ones to come over?
Define "special". I don't know anyone who objects to allowing genuinely exceptional or gifted people to come to the US based on their abilities and/or accomplishments (see 'O' series visas for example). However, that doesn't describe the vast majority of H-1B's, who may be competent, but have skills that can readily be found amongst citizens. It's a good way to drive down compensation though.
In my experience most of the attention in public school goes to those that are ultimately ineducable.
Define "ineducable".
Gifted students are just expected to be fine without help.
As they should be. If you're bright enough you should be able to learn it by yourself. If you can't, then you're not as clever as you think. Genuinely gifted students, or even just the "pretty bright" (top few percentile) should be cheap to educate. There's the library, it includes computers and Internet access if your family can't afford them, they'll be an exam on the following material next Thursday. Attend the lectures if you want.
Question: how much practice or training does a team do (analogous to how athletic teams practice and train before a meet or game)?
Quoting PP in full because it shouldn't linger at score 0:
Yeah, those grapes are sour. I competed in this competition and one year my team was very close to getting into the international final. Your criticism reads as something coming from a person who has no idea what these competitions are really about. I'll even help you out and give you a real criticism. These competitions test the ability to solve very difficult algorithm problems and the ability to implement those algorithms very quickly with zero bugs. The main limitation is that whatever the solution is, it has to be implementable by a very fast coder in a few hours. So the stress is not on managing complexity in very large programs, which is a very important programming skill, since you can't write a very large program in a few hours.
However, your criticism is way off. The focus of the competition is exactly on performance, scalability and correctness. If your program has any bugs, it is exceedingly likely that the automated test suite (that you don't get to see) will find it, and then you get zero points for that submission plus a penalty for submitting something wrong. No bugs are accepted. The main challenge with these competitions is that they will give your program large inputs and your program has to solve them within tight limits on computation time and memory use. If you break those limits, you also get zero points. So it turns out that the entire focus of the competition is exactly those points that you think are not tested by such contests.
If you had tried doing a competition like this for a while, you'd also realize that complex incomprehensible code is not a good way to go. The problem is that you have to write entirely bug-free code, and if you don't keep it simple, you won't be able to get the bugs out in time. Your 2 other team mates also won't be able to help you track down bugs if your code is incomprehensible. This is a team competition with 3 people per team and only 1 computer. So for debugging you have to print out the code and find the bug by reading the source code on paper - because the 2 other people on the team need time to input their solutions too. So you cannot rely on a debugger showing you where things went wrong. Which again means that you have to keep the complexity low. These competitions are far harder than normal programming, except, as I said, on the question of managing complexity in a large program.
But yeah, those grapes that you know nothing about must be sour. That's it.
Companies don't offshore the code monkeys, they offshore entire experienced teams, including their leadership and creative talent.
I hear that claimed, but from what I've seen delivered it's hard to believe it's true. Regardless, it doesn't completely eliminate the need for, as I said, "on-site, meeting face-to-face, and understanding more about a customer". If it did then you wouldn't see vast numbers of people working, for example, for Infosys in the US (mostly H-1B, B-1 and L-1 of course).
India is an extreme, but other locations like South America and Eatern Europe are much more in tune culturally, or time-zone wise.
The amount of outsourcing to India is vastly greater than to South America or Eastern Europe.
I was trying to explain that people outside learns and becomes really good
Try harder next time. I was making fun of the fact that your way of stating it was unclear (to be very charitable) or just outright nonsensical. I believe current Slashdot practice requires me to write "whoosh" at this point. BTW, in English your rebuttal would read "outside people learn and become really good".
I worked in plenty of companies making products for the US market, and the industry is huge.
Was that in dispute? The question here is whether that's desirable for Americans.
You are afraid of something you don't understand, that's from outside your territory
What is it that I don't understand? Can you explain why the delivered product is usually so poor?
you used pejoratives such as crap against it. That, my buddy, is a book example of xenophobia.
Saying that a product delivered from a particular place is crap is xenophobia? If I find an imported product to be of poor quality that means I'm afraid of foreigners? That makes no sense whatsoever. I also prefer California figs to Turkish figs. Does that mean I'm afraid of Turks?
There has been a war on the white male since the signing of Hart Celler by LBJ in 1965.
As a white American man who has been around since the civil rights era, I must say I've never noticed that. If they're waging war against me, they're sure doing a lousy job.
The deeper question is "Why is it OK for the rest of the world to be xenophobic when the same is disallowed for the Anglosphere?"
There is no such deeper question because xenophobia, by or against whomever, has nothing to do with this subject. It's about economics. It's the H-1B proponents who frame it as a xenophobia issue, and thus try to distract from what's really at stake.
BTW, it's not clear how excessive guest workers in a particular field targets white males. It targets Americans in the 99%. Last time I checked though, not all Americans are white, and they're not all male. Get your categories straight.
I've, however, noticed that they can form work teams/groups in which there are no non-indian members (or no non-indian lead developers).... I've also noticed, in my conversations with them, that they feel that non-indian developers are not as smart as indian developers.... When those India developers form a team/group, they can get to a state where they don't feel a non-indian developer is good enough to join them.... I don't think the minority non-indian developer in majority indian group will not get the same opportunities as the indian members.
What you're describing is prejudice and discrimination, plain and simple. Were a white American man to even hint at doing something like that, he'd have his head handed to him (and deservedly so). I think such a standard of conduct should apply to everyone.
Hopefully the soldiers will be on our side in the forthcoming revolution.
Funny you should mention that. Pay in arrears is much of what fomented the Newburgh Conspiracy, and this time we don't have a George Washington to defuse the situation.
Slashdot Mirror
But that is not a hyperbole.
Ok. "Very reasonable inference" is just hand waving. You're expressing an opinion, but not providing any evidence, let alone proof for it. "Require many generations to be solved or even to be proved unsolvable" is a type of difficulty, but there is no argument or evidence that it's the greatest possible difficulty. It's just saying "math is tough". I never said otherwise. Moreover there are many scientific problems that take generations to be solved. That situation is not unique to math.
Engineers want to be physicists.
Physicists want to be mathematicians.
Mathematicians want to be God.
God is an engineer.
Those are examples, not a proof :)
Maybe math really is the hardest subject.
See, math isn't so hard. You just have to know how to choose the right axioms.
I can assure you that no company can hire enough programmers.
Your assurance is not sufficient. If there was that much of a demand, there would be almost no unemployment and salaries would be climbing.
The question of what "we" want is not a scientific question.
Strictly speaking you're right, but what I was referring to is whether there is objective evidence that we have a "shortage" of STEM graduates. Normally it's just assumed, or the evidence is the assertions of some very wealthy STEM dropouts with a vested interest. That's not a good enough starting point for a debate.
Now, you could make an economical argument about whether or not increasing the number of STEM graduates is useful to our economy. But I don't think that anybody trusts economical models at that level.
Forget the fancy models. Start with basic question of whether there is a "shortage" in the sense of rising prices. There isn't.
But I think that most people would find it believable that training people to address challenging problems quantitatively (which is really what all the STEM fields have in common) is going to be a good thing, and certainly isn't going to hurt.
Believable isn't the same thing as true, and "isn't going to hurt" is not a good enough argument for possibly spending a lot of money, and almost certainly expending a lot of effort. It wouldn't hurt if everybody learned the Klingon language either, but that's not much of an argument for encouraging it.
That is proof enough of the hardships.
I never said math was easy, but you asserted that "math is the most difficult subject known by humankind".
Ok, I'm busting chops, and that was likely hyperbole. But this is Slashdot!
I guess technically he needs to provide a proof.
Starting with what set of axioms :)
Well, there aren't many fields with well-defined problems that have solutions which can't be found without many human generations of effort.
Does the fact that the problems are well defined mean that the subject is easier or harder?
Damn, a comment on Slashdot that makes sense and isn't about tooting your own horn. Are you in the wrong place?
I agree. My experience in tutoring people in math is that mathophobes are thrown by the fact that they don't understand something the first time they see it. That's different from say, a history class. That's not knocking history, which also a very important subject (and a personal favorite), but it does mean that learning math is different. I always tell people that of course you don't understand it - you haven't learned it yet!
in japan, kids are taught to be able to do mental arithmetic at lightning speed. tests involve flashing up 6-digit sums for 1/3 of a second every couple of seconds
Let's teach our students to do something more difficult and more useful, like balance a ball on the end of their nose while clapping their flippers (err, hands). The ability to do some mental arithmetic is very useful, but the usefulness of doing 6 digit sums in your head was obviated by technologies like the abacus or pencil and paper. Go with the ball on your nose.
There has always been a question of where money and resources should be dedicated if we the number of STEM college graduates.
There's no point in even asking that question until it's been decided whether "we" want to increase the number of STEM graduates, and if so, why "we" want to. If that question was analyzed a tenth as scientifically as the question of where to allocate resources if "we" want to increase the number of STEM graduates, it would be a miracle. The assumption that "we" should want to is endlessly asserted and little questioned. Whose agenda does that promote?
Math is the most difficult subject known by humankind.
Care to offer some evidence for that assertion?
How does this differ from the past? The article doesn't address that at all. In the past, did a smaller percentage of STEM students dropout or switch to non-STEM majors? In the past were STEM graduates a larger or a smaller percentage of college graduates, and were they a larger or smaller percentage of people of a given age? Is there any objective evidence that there is a shortage of STEM graduates?
Without that information, this article is the usual "OMG, crisis! American education sucks!" hysteria that we've been hearing for decades. Not that that jibes with American prowess in science and technology, but lets not worry about a little things like that. A variant of this garbage is that everyone should study STEM (ignoring demand). Look, the USSR launched a satellite before us! We're gonna loose the Cold War! That was the "crisis" in 1957, and the nonsense hasn't abated since.
Why does the WSJ hate American students? Technically I shouldn't jump to that conclusion, since it is phrased conditionally. FTA:
“If more science graduates are desired, the findings suggest the importance of policies at younger ages that lead students to enter college better prepared to study science,” the researchers write in the paper.
Why would we want more STEM graduates? There is no objective evidence that there is a shortage of them, and quite a few indications that, at least in some fields, we have a surplus. Moreover US policy is, and for many years has been, to import STEM students or graduates rather than get Americans interested in these fields. We know this policy is essential because Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and other very wealthy STEM dropouts tell us it is.
the US thrives because of smart people, so why not give incentive to the special ones to come over?
Define "special". I don't know anyone who objects to allowing genuinely exceptional or gifted people to come to the US based on their abilities and/or accomplishments (see 'O' series visas for example). However, that doesn't describe the vast majority of H-1B's, who may be competent, but have skills that can readily be found amongst citizens. It's a good way to drive down compensation though.
In my experience most of the attention in public school goes to those that are ultimately ineducable.
Define "ineducable".
Gifted students are just expected to be fine without help.
As they should be. If you're bright enough you should be able to learn it by yourself. If you can't, then you're not as clever as you think. Genuinely gifted students, or even just the "pretty bright" (top few percentile) should be cheap to educate. There's the library, it includes computers and Internet access if your family can't afford them, they'll be an exam on the following material next Thursday. Attend the lectures if you want.
Question: how much practice or training does a team do (analogous to how athletic teams practice and train before a meet or game)?
Quoting PP in full because it shouldn't linger at score 0:
Yeah, those grapes are sour. I competed in this competition and one year my team was very close to getting into the international final. Your criticism reads as something coming from a person who has no idea what these competitions are really about. I'll even help you out and give you a real criticism. These competitions test the ability to solve very difficult algorithm problems and the ability to implement those algorithms very quickly with zero bugs. The main limitation is that whatever the solution is, it has to be implementable by a very fast coder in a few hours. So the stress is not on managing complexity in very large programs, which is a very important programming skill, since you can't write a very large program in a few hours.
However, your criticism is way off. The focus of the competition is exactly on performance, scalability and correctness. If your program has any bugs, it is exceedingly likely that the automated test suite (that you don't get to see) will find it, and then you get zero points for that submission plus a penalty for submitting something wrong. No bugs are accepted. The main challenge with these competitions is that they will give your program large inputs and your program has to solve them within tight limits on computation time and memory use. If you break those limits, you also get zero points. So it turns out that the entire focus of the competition is exactly those points that you think are not tested by such contests.
If you had tried doing a competition like this for a while, you'd also realize that complex incomprehensible code is not a good way to go. The problem is that you have to write entirely bug-free code, and if you don't keep it simple, you won't be able to get the bugs out in time. Your 2 other team mates also won't be able to help you track down bugs if your code is incomprehensible. This is a team competition with 3 people per team and only 1 computer. So for debugging you have to print out the code and find the bug by reading the source code on paper - because the 2 other people on the team need time to input their solutions too. So you cannot rely on a debugger showing you where things went wrong. Which again means that you have to keep the complexity low. These competitions are far harder than normal programming, except, as I said, on the question of managing complexity in a large program.
But yeah, those grapes that you know nothing about must be sour. That's it.
Maybe you missed some history.
Maybe you missed the joke.
Companies don't offshore the code monkeys, they offshore entire experienced teams, including their leadership and creative talent.
I hear that claimed, but from what I've seen delivered it's hard to believe it's true. Regardless, it doesn't completely eliminate the need for, as I said, "on-site, meeting face-to-face, and understanding more about a customer". If it did then you wouldn't see vast numbers of people working, for example, for Infosys in the US (mostly H-1B, B-1 and L-1 of course).
India is an extreme, but other locations like South America and Eatern Europe are much more in tune culturally, or time-zone wise.
The amount of outsourcing to India is vastly greater than to South America or Eastern Europe.
I was trying to explain that people outside learns and becomes really good
Try harder next time. I was making fun of the fact that your way of stating it was unclear (to be very charitable) or just outright nonsensical. I believe current Slashdot practice requires me to write "whoosh" at this point. BTW, in English your rebuttal would read "outside people learn and become really good".
I worked in plenty of companies making products for the US market, and the industry is huge.
Was that in dispute? The question here is whether that's desirable for Americans.
You are afraid of something you don't understand, that's from outside your territory
What is it that I don't understand? Can you explain why the delivered product is usually so poor?
you used pejoratives such as crap against it. That, my buddy, is a book example of xenophobia.
Saying that a product delivered from a particular place is crap is xenophobia? If I find an imported product to be of poor quality that means I'm afraid of foreigners? That makes no sense whatsoever. I also prefer California figs to Turkish figs. Does that mean I'm afraid of Turks?
BTW, the idiom is "a textbook example".
Wrong navy, but ask the British how they handle their payroll.
We are cheap labor just like 18th century's Chinese railroad worker ..
Nonsense. At least railroad construction can't be outsourced.
There has been a war on the white male since the signing of Hart Celler by LBJ in 1965.
As a white American man who has been around since the civil rights era, I must say I've never noticed that. If they're waging war against me, they're sure doing a lousy job.
The deeper question is "Why is it OK for the rest of the world to be xenophobic when the same is disallowed for the Anglosphere?"
There is no such deeper question because xenophobia, by or against whomever, has nothing to do with this subject. It's about economics. It's the H-1B proponents who frame it as a xenophobia issue, and thus try to distract from what's really at stake.
BTW, it's not clear how excessive guest workers in a particular field targets white males. It targets Americans in the 99%. Last time I checked though, not all Americans are white, and they're not all male. Get your categories straight.
I've, however, noticed that they can form work teams/groups in which there are no non-indian members (or no non-indian lead developers). ... I've also noticed, in my conversations with them, that they feel that non-indian developers are not as smart as indian developers. ... When those India developers form a team/group, they can get to a state where they don't feel a non-indian developer is good enough to join them. ... I don't think the minority non-indian developer in majority indian group will not get the same opportunities as the indian members.
What you're describing is prejudice and discrimination, plain and simple. Were a white American man to even hint at doing something like that, he'd have his head handed to him (and deservedly so). I think such a standard of conduct should apply to everyone.
Hopefully the soldiers will be on our side in the forthcoming revolution.
Funny you should mention that. Pay in arrears is much of what fomented the Newburgh Conspiracy, and this time we don't have a George Washington to defuse the situation.