That's the purpose of vocational education, not university education.
If that were actually believed to be the case, every public university in the country would have to close its doors for lack of funding. The only reason why public universities get non-grant related funding is because they are believed to improve the economic prospects of the students and the community.
Actually, there's a competing view that the purpose of education is to give you a broad background and teach you to think critically - and that those can do as much - or more - for the individual and the public than mere job training can.
Sure, companies want universities to teach people vocational skills, so that it can be done on someone else's dime.
But I read somewhere within the past few months (maybe here?) that some of the highest-paid non-managerial people in business and industry are people with degrees in the Liberal Arts, because they were trained in working with facts and ideas, in organizational skills, in communicating and supporting their arguments, etc., with the result that they can move into (or create) ad hoc positions that fill a company's needs for which no vocational training program exists.
I read somewhere, long ago, that the chief of national-scale logistics for one of the major players in WWII (USA or UK, IIRC), was educated in the ultra-traditional liberal arts - Greek and Latin, Aeschylus and Aristotle, kind of thing.
Heck, when I took Comp Sci 101 my freshman year in college, it was 1983 and there were no high school programming classes. I did fine. And if I hadn't.... isn't flunking an intro class usually a reliable sign that it's not a good subject for you?
Yeah, I think it would be folly to major in music if you didn't know anything about music when you started, but off hand I can't think of any other fields I would say that about.
One potential problem for CS is if the school deliberately pitches CS I for students with nontrivial background. In that case you would need to take some remedial classes, or maybe go to a different school.
Students with some existing knowledge/skills aren't entirely unproblematic either. Some need to un-learn some misconceptions and/or bad habits, which for some personality types can be harder than learning from square one. And of course, some self-professed hot-shots are just blowhard idiots -- same as in any other area of learning.
My idea of a good program would be to pitch CS I at noobs and provide a reasonable mechanism for placing out of it. Or shift everything by one semester, pitching CS I at non-noobs, and offering a "pre-CS" class to get noobs ready for it.
As for the view stated by various parties in this thread, that you should be a "good" programmer as a freshman, that's nonsense. You should be investing in life-long learning, so that in any year of your life you would say "I was a crappy programmer five years ago". For school-aged types, sophomores should think they were crappy programmers as freshmen. If they don't, they aren't learning anything.
For a lot of people the answer is because no other course will take them - or the entry requirements for the course they DO want is too high. Most universities don't have a great deal of competition for CS places, so they're willing to take pretty much anyone who can spell compooter.
Where are you getting these "facts"? CS programs still face *dreadfully* high attrition in the CS I classes.
It's no longer the calling or aspiration it was 20 or 30 years ago. These days, for most (not all. most. Not you: most. Most CS types haven't even heard of slashdot. You are not the norm) graduates, a CS qualification is merely an entry into a lowish level support job.
I've actually spoken to CS classes, and asked whether they read various Web sites, including Slashdot. In lower-division classes I find 50-80% are familiar with Slashdot, in upper-division it's always near 100%.
You obviously have no concept of any actual mathematics. (Learning to do calculus is different from learning about calculus). Computer Science is heavily Dependant upon mathematics...
Want to write a better algorithm? Abstract Algebra is your friend.
Calculus is only marginally relevant for general computer science. You do need to understand the log and exp functions for computational complexity theory, and IIRC those are usually introduced in calc or pre-calc. But there's no reason they couldn't be introduced in a math-for-CS class.
Other than that, continuous mathematics is not useful to general CS: you need discrete math and logic.
It's true that you need calc for some application areas, but you also need business math, genetics, phonetics, etc. for other application areas. It's not the job of CS (or any other degree) to teach you everything you need to know for any arbitrary specialization you might end up in when you get a job. CS programs should stop wasting students' time on calculus (except as an elective), and start them heavily into discrete math during their first semester.
My point is that the "pedagogical technique" of 80-90% of US undergrad programs is worthless, for preparing people to code to a spec or any other purpose. CS classes are not alone in it. Arguing over the CS1 curricula is arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The whole system is fucked. As you say, the top schools are the only places left with value, and it's not as if the CS programs run like medical schools at MIT, Berkeley, RPI, CMU, etc. Yet all these schools generally cost the same (notwithstanding in-state tuition). As the victimization of young people by the non-top schools (200k in debt for 20k of value) is fully realized, many if not most of those schools will collapse, and we'll complete our journey back to the 19th century, where a few elite universities will cater to the children of the aristocracy, who are already lucky in having had a functional but expensive private primary and secondary education.
You don't inspire a lot of confidence that you have a clue what you're talking about. There's a CS program at the university where I live, probably third-tier if not fourth, tuition is vastly less than the big-name schools, and the graduates don't have any trouble finding jobs.
Worse than worthless. I was at a job where we routinely threw Masters and PhD CS resumes in the trash. The candidates are completely worthless at real-world tasks and are so arrogant as to believe that they don't need to know about CSV files or FTP, regardless of what the other side of the transaction wants.
The PhD is a research degree, so if they were applying for run-of-the-mill application development/maintenance jobs, the trash is where their CVs belonged.
OTOH, how long do you suppose it takes someone with a PhD in CS to learn everything they need to know about CSV files?
Also, you seem to be operating under the assumption that beneficial mutations haven't been observed in nature and in the petri dish. There have been cases where we can see *exactly* what mutation gave rise to resistance to our antibiotics or pesticides.
No, no, no. That's doesn't count. That's just micro-evolution and is completely different from Darwinism!!! I learned that from uncle, who lives in Texas, no joke. He's a lawyer and his daughter and son-in-law are both medical doctors...
Yeah, lots of creationists have already surrendered to the extent of recognizing microevolution. But they can't explain why millions of years of microevolution don't result in macroevolution.
Intelligent Design IS creationism with a global search and replace god with intelligent design. Those boobs that put out the paper for I.D. screwed up and didn't erase the metadata, so people dug into the edits and discovered that little gem.
To be more specific, it was a textbook (or draft, IIRC) that was revised to replace "creationism" with "intelligent design" right after the US Supreme Court ruled against creationism in public schools. But they did a sloppy job with the find-and-replace, which is why you get about 10,000 Google hits for the unlikely phrase "cdesign proponentsists" and various nearby misspellings. (I don't know what the actual spelling was.)
That revelation was the poleaxe that killed ID as a mechanism for sneaking creationism past the courts. You don't hear near as much about ID anymore, since that was the reason it was invented. Still got a lot of dead-enders clinging to it to validate their belief that creationism is "scientific", though.
Sure. You could be a creationist physicist, say. Just as long as your work had nothing to do with biology. Your colleagues would probably have a hard time taking you seriously though.
I deal with a number of scientists/professionals of various flavors, including a computer scientist who is almost certainly a creationist. But his computer science does get taken seriously, presumably because he doesn't try to mix proselyting with his research and teaching.
I've got no problem with someone holding religious beliefs, so long as they don't insist on them as the basis for public policy, or insist on using public institutions and tax money for proselytizing, and so long as the beliefs don't make them behave badly.
It is an absolute unrelated coincidence if a computer scientist ever discovers they are near or using a computer.
Depends on the field. Your references to mathematics seems to indicate that you equate "computer science" with theoretical computer science, such as computational complexity theory. However, other specializations rely on computers very much, such as operating systems (which uses lots of simulation) and machine learning (which is inherently experimental, though some theory does exist).
Supposedly the "creation science" movement of the 1980s was a genuine attempt at science-based creationism. Of course, science is ruled by the evidence, so it couldn't stay both creationism and science very long.
Great, now we have missionaries in science. Fight fire with fire?
Antibody response.
Kind of like the Gay Pride movement, which IMO was a response the the 1980s habit of social conservatives peaking into closets hoping to 'out' homosexuals. Well, now they're out, and the people who were outing them wish they were back in.
No, ID isn't a theory. It's a deliberate attempt to obfuscate the facts. Behe's "irreducible complexity" only shows that he doesn't understand evolution at the layman level (or perhaps that he does, and is merely being dishonest about it -- pick your poison). Dembski's bullshit about "specified complexity" and "no free lunch" is just that: bullshit. A crapload of misrepresentations to produce a number that lets him say "I can't believe that happened without God's help!".
Evolution, OTOH, is supported by craploads of evidence. Paleontological evidence. Genetic evidence. Behavioral evidence. Biogeographical evidence. A crapload of stuff few creationists even know exists.
Vortex, Your experiment is a very poor design, fatally flawed. What is your controlled source for mutations? As far as I can see, you have none. Thus this is not an experiment demonstrating evolution, which would require a source of beneficial mutations. You are simply redistributing existing genetic traits in descendant populations. This is nothing more than selective breeding, such as Man has done for millennia.
Bingo. Darwin figured out a century and a half ago that evolution *is* just selective breeding.
In reality, evolutionary "science" will never actually be a branch of science until we have the ability to conduct experiments testing Darwin's key hypothesis: that RANDOM MUTATIONS provide beneficial variations upon which natural selection can act. That appears to be dozens, if not hundreds, of yeas off.
If it's random, you'd expect some to be good and some to be bad.
I suspect that the better something is adapted to its environment, the less likely a mutation will be good - just a simple statistical matter of having to beat something that's already better than purely random. But environments change, or populations move into new environments, and suddenly they aren't as optimized as they were before, so the odds of a random mutation being beneficial improves.
Also, you seem to be operating under the assumption that beneficial mutations haven't been observed in nature and in the petri dish. There have been cases where we can see *exactly* what mutation gave rise to resistance to our antibiotics or pesticides.
For the casual reader, there was an example of the latter in the May Scientific American, in the article about superweeds.
Creationism is so obviously implausible that you can only believe it if you force your eyes shut and work hard at staying ignorant.
That's why creationists are so desperate to keep their kids from hearing about reality in school, and have a propensity for home schooling when they can't control the curriculum.
As the used to say on talk.origins, intelligent design is creationism with the serial number filed off.
Or creationism dressed up in a lab coat.
It has no purpose but to make the world safe for creationism, first, by filing the serial number off in hopes that the courts wouldn't recognize it for what it is, and second by putting it in a lab coat and casting it in big words, so that people who are eager to have their mythology validated can congratulate themselves that the boffins discovered that they were right all along.
On both those counts, it represents the ultimate surrender of creationism.
You know at least half the people over there had this thought cross their minds, "Shit, I hedged my bets wrong"
Hedging the bet was easy. I just hung around on the west side of a time zone division, watching to see whether anything happened on the east side. If people had started going up, I would have had an hour to get to church and get saved.
If the raptor comes, I don't think those he takes will simply disappear cleanly, probably very messy instead. How do you think the raptor actually gets to your soul?
I think the theory is that when all the raptees get to a certain altitude their bodies will decompress explosively, freeing their souls in the process.
Other than that, it's not clear what utility God finds in taking people up into the sky. Do these people think Heaven is "up there" somewhere?
Slashdot Mirror
That's the purpose of vocational education, not university education.
If that were actually believed to be the case, every public university in the country would have to close its doors for lack of funding. The only reason why public universities get non-grant related funding is because they are believed to improve the economic prospects of the students and the community.
Actually, there's a competing view that the purpose of education is to give you a broad background and teach you to think critically - and that those can do as much - or more - for the individual and the public than mere job training can.
Sure, companies want universities to teach people vocational skills, so that it can be done on someone else's dime.
But I read somewhere within the past few months (maybe here?) that some of the highest-paid non-managerial people in business and industry are people with degrees in the Liberal Arts, because they were trained in working with facts and ideas, in organizational skills, in communicating and supporting their arguments, etc., with the result that they can move into (or create) ad hoc positions that fill a company's needs for which no vocational training program exists.
I read somewhere, long ago, that the chief of national-scale logistics for one of the major players in WWII (USA or UK, IIRC), was educated in the ultra-traditional liberal arts - Greek and Latin, Aeschylus and Aristotle, kind of thing.
Heck, when I took Comp Sci 101 my freshman year in college, it was 1983 and there were no high school programming classes. I did fine. And if I hadn't.... isn't flunking an intro class usually a reliable sign that it's not a good subject for you?
Yeah, I think it would be folly to major in music if you didn't know anything about music when you started, but off hand I can't think of any other fields I would say that about.
One potential problem for CS is if the school deliberately pitches CS I for students with nontrivial background. In that case you would need to take some remedial classes, or maybe go to a different school.
Students with some existing knowledge/skills aren't entirely unproblematic either. Some need to un-learn some misconceptions and/or bad habits, which for some personality types can be harder than learning from square one. And of course, some self-professed hot-shots are just blowhard idiots -- same as in any other area of learning.
My idea of a good program would be to pitch CS I at noobs and provide a reasonable mechanism for placing out of it. Or shift everything by one semester, pitching CS I at non-noobs, and offering a "pre-CS" class to get noobs ready for it.
As for the view stated by various parties in this thread, that you should be a "good" programmer as a freshman, that's nonsense. You should be investing in life-long learning, so that in any year of your life you would say "I was a crappy programmer five years ago". For school-aged types, sophomores should think they were crappy programmers as freshmen. If they don't, they aren't learning anything.
For a lot of people the answer is because no other course will take them - or the entry requirements for the course they DO want is too high. Most universities don't have a great deal of competition for CS places, so they're willing to take pretty much anyone who can spell compooter.
Where are you getting these "facts"? CS programs still face *dreadfully* high attrition in the CS I classes.
It's no longer the calling or aspiration it was 20 or 30 years ago. These days, for most (not all. most. Not you: most. Most CS types haven't even heard of slashdot. You are not the norm) graduates, a CS qualification is merely an entry into a lowish level support job.
I've actually spoken to CS classes, and asked whether they read various Web sites, including Slashdot. In lower-division classes I find 50-80% are familiar with Slashdot, in upper-division it's always near 100%.
Calculus is irrelevant?
You obviously have no concept of any actual mathematics. (Learning to do calculus is different from learning about calculus). Computer Science is heavily Dependant upon mathematics...
Want to write a better algorithm? Abstract Algebra is your friend.
Calculus is only marginally relevant for general computer science. You do need to understand the log and exp functions for computational complexity theory, and IIRC those are usually introduced in calc or pre-calc. But there's no reason they couldn't be introduced in a math-for-CS class.
Other than that, continuous mathematics is not useful to general CS: you need discrete math and logic.
It's true that you need calc for some application areas, but you also need business math, genetics, phonetics, etc. for other application areas. It's not the job of CS (or any other degree) to teach you everything you need to know for any arbitrary specialization you might end up in when you get a job. CS programs should stop wasting students' time on calculus (except as an elective), and start them heavily into discrete math during their first semester.
My point is that the "pedagogical technique" of 80-90% of US undergrad programs is worthless, for preparing people to code to a spec or any other purpose. CS classes are not alone in it. Arguing over the CS1 curricula is arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The whole system is fucked. As you say, the top schools are the only places left with value, and it's not as if the CS programs run like medical schools at MIT, Berkeley, RPI, CMU, etc. Yet all these schools generally cost the same (notwithstanding in-state tuition). As the victimization of young people by the non-top schools (200k in debt for 20k of value) is fully realized, many if not most of those schools will collapse, and we'll complete our journey back to the 19th century, where a few elite universities will cater to the children of the aristocracy, who are already lucky in having had a functional but expensive private primary and secondary education.
You don't inspire a lot of confidence that you have a clue what you're talking about. There's a CS program at the university where I live, probably third-tier if not fourth, tuition is vastly less than the big-name schools, and the graduates don't have any trouble finding jobs.
Worse than worthless. I was at a job where we routinely threw Masters and PhD CS resumes in the trash. The candidates are completely worthless at real-world tasks and are so arrogant as to believe that they don't need to know about CSV files or FTP, regardless of what the other side of the transaction wants.
The PhD is a research degree, so if they were applying for run-of-the-mill application development/maintenance jobs, the trash is where their CVs belonged.
OTOH, how long do you suppose it takes someone with a PhD in CS to learn everything they need to know about CSV files?
Really computer programming , computer systems administration and computer security should all be separate degrees.
s/degrees/tradeschool programs/
If you're majoring in CS in order to learn one of those things, the problem isn't with the degree plan.
Well id be fucked because my high school didn't offer any programming besides "Web Programming".
From what I hear, NCLB doesn't specify testing on any CS topics, so high schools have virtually quit teaching it.
Also, you seem to be operating under the assumption that beneficial mutations haven't been observed in nature and in the petri dish. There have been cases where we can see *exactly* what mutation gave rise to resistance to our antibiotics or pesticides.
No, no, no. That's doesn't count. That's just micro-evolution and is completely different from Darwinism!!! I learned that from uncle, who lives in Texas, no joke. He's a lawyer and his daughter and son-in-law are both medical doctors...
Yeah, lots of creationists have already surrendered to the extent of recognizing microevolution. But they can't explain why millions of years of microevolution don't result in macroevolution.
Now that's funny - isn't it against political correctness to say that one point of view is right and another is wrong?
And Slashdot is the internet's bastion of political correctness, right?
Intelligent Design IS creationism with a global search and replace god with intelligent design.
Those boobs that put out the paper for I.D. screwed up and didn't erase the metadata, so people dug into the edits and discovered that little gem.
To be more specific, it was a textbook (or draft, IIRC) that was revised to replace "creationism" with "intelligent design" right after the US Supreme Court ruled against creationism in public schools. But they did a sloppy job with the find-and-replace, which is why you get about 10,000 Google hits for the unlikely phrase "cdesign proponentsists" and various nearby misspellings. (I don't know what the actual spelling was.)
That revelation was the poleaxe that killed ID as a mechanism for sneaking creationism past the courts. You don't hear near as much about ID anymore, since that was the reason it was invented. Still got a lot of dead-enders clinging to it to validate their belief that creationism is "scientific", though.
? Can you be an "creationist scientist"?
Sure. You could be a creationist physicist, say. Just as long as your work had nothing to do with biology. Your colleagues would probably have a hard time taking you seriously though.
I deal with a number of scientists/professionals of various flavors, including a computer scientist who is almost certainly a creationist. But his computer science does get taken seriously, presumably because he doesn't try to mix proselyting with his research and teaching.
I've got no problem with someone holding religious beliefs, so long as they don't insist on them as the basis for public policy, or insist on using public institutions and tax money for proselytizing, and so long as the beliefs don't make them behave badly.
It is an absolute unrelated coincidence if a computer scientist ever discovers they are near or using a computer.
Depends on the field. Your references to mathematics seems to indicate that you equate "computer science" with theoretical computer science, such as computational complexity theory. However, other specializations rely on computers very much, such as operating systems (which uses lots of simulation) and machine learning (which is inherently experimental, though some theory does exist).
Is creationism even considered "science"?
Supposedly the "creation science" movement of the 1980s was a genuine attempt at science-based creationism. Of course, science is ruled by the evidence, so it couldn't stay both creationism and science very long.
Great, now we have missionaries in science. Fight fire with fire?
Antibody response.
Kind of like the Gay Pride movement, which IMO was a response the the 1980s habit of social conservatives peaking into closets hoping to 'out' homosexuals. Well, now they're out, and the people who were outing them wish they were back in.
Law of unintended consequences, etc.
No, ID isn't a theory. It's a deliberate attempt to obfuscate the facts. Behe's "irreducible complexity" only shows that he doesn't understand evolution at the layman level (or perhaps that he does, and is merely being dishonest about it -- pick your poison). Dembski's bullshit about "specified complexity" and "no free lunch" is just that: bullshit. A crapload of misrepresentations to produce a number that lets him say "I can't believe that happened without God's help!".
Evolution, OTOH, is supported by craploads of evidence. Paleontological evidence. Genetic evidence. Behavioral evidence. Biogeographical evidence. A crapload of stuff few creationists even know exists.
Vortex, Your experiment is a very poor design, fatally flawed. What is your controlled source for mutations? As far as I can see, you have none. Thus this is not an experiment demonstrating evolution, which would require a source of beneficial mutations. You are simply redistributing existing genetic traits in descendant populations. This is nothing more than selective breeding, such as Man has done for millennia.
Bingo. Darwin figured out a century and a half ago that evolution *is* just selective breeding.
In reality, evolutionary "science" will never actually be a branch of science until we have the ability to conduct experiments testing Darwin's key hypothesis: that RANDOM MUTATIONS provide beneficial variations upon which natural selection can act. That appears to be dozens, if not hundreds, of yeas off.
If it's random, you'd expect some to be good and some to be bad.
I suspect that the better something is adapted to its environment, the less likely a mutation will be good - just a simple statistical matter of having to beat something that's already better than purely random. But environments change, or populations move into new environments, and suddenly they aren't as optimized as they were before, so the odds of a random mutation being beneficial improves.
Also, you seem to be operating under the assumption that beneficial mutations haven't been observed in nature and in the petri dish. There have been cases where we can see *exactly* what mutation gave rise to resistance to our antibiotics or pesticides.
For the casual reader, there was an example of the latter in the May Scientific American, in the article about superweeds.
Creationism is so obviously implausible that you can only believe it if you force your eyes shut and work hard at staying ignorant.
That's why creationists are so desperate to keep their kids from hearing about reality in school, and have a propensity for home schooling when they can't control the curriculum.
As the used to say on talk.origins, intelligent design is creationism with the serial number filed off.
Or creationism dressed up in a lab coat.
It has no purpose but to make the world safe for creationism, first, by filing the serial number off in hopes that the courts wouldn't recognize it for what it is, and second by putting it in a lab coat and casting it in big words, so that people who are eager to have their mythology validated can congratulate themselves that the boffins discovered that they were right all along.
On both those counts, it represents the ultimate surrender of creationism.
You know at least half the people over there had this thought cross their minds, "Shit, I hedged my bets wrong"
Hedging the bet was easy. I just hung around on the west side of a time zone division, watching to see whether anything happened on the east side. If people had started going up, I would have had an hour to get to church and get saved.
Even though this is purely coincidentally, all the believers of the May 21 "rapture" are going to cite this as evidence.
Umm, if they're still 'here' after May 21st, all the evidence in the world isn't going to be very persuasive.
You can bet that some will cite this as evidence that they had the date right, but God decided to let us off with a mild warning.
Has there or has there not been an increase in weather
We've always had a constant amount of weather; it's just the quality that changes.
If by Slavic you mean North Germanic, then yes.
Isn't Iceland part of Scandislavia?
Actually, the summary reads like an April Fool's joke about Windows95.
If the raptor comes, I don't think those he takes will simply disappear cleanly, probably very messy instead. How do you think the raptor actually gets to your soul?
I think the theory is that when all the raptees get to a certain altitude their bodies will decompress explosively, freeing their souls in the process.
Other than that, it's not clear what utility God finds in taking people up into the sky. Do these people think Heaven is "up there" somewhere?