If this were true then the PhD should quit his job and work as a clerk. No one is forcing him to work as a postdoc.
Note that the clerk cannot do the PhD's job while the PhD, I assume, can do the clerk's job. Thus, there is probably a good reason why the PhD stays in his job.
In my own life I have seen enough evidence to believe in God and in his son Jesus. As part of that, I believe I am called to believe in Adam, Eve, the garden of Eden, etc.
Is that scientific evidence? You know, reproducible double-blind experiments?
If so, then you should write a paper about it. You would get a Nobel prize, hands down. Imagine that, actual evidence for the existance of a supernatural being. You would be the new Einstein!
More than likely, however, you believe because that is what your parents/teachers taught you, just like a billion or so muslims belive Mohammed is God and a billion or so Hindus believe in Shiba et.al.
Please, stop and think. Why do you believe? Do you really have any evidence aside from some old stories? Why is your "Religion" the "one true Religion"?
Our Senate candidate (Demint) said on an interview that he opposes having a gay person teach, or having a single pregnant mother teach. He also said on a debate that be thinks teaching students that people are the product of evolution is wrong.
This raised some ruckus, so on every subsequent debate he is now asked the same question and his pre-recorded answer is now "that is a question for the states to decide".
This would only, at best, stop the aging process. You could still die from a disease or accident. Of course, the possibility of a long productive life might make everyone unwilling to take even the slightest risk with their lifes, which might make life dull and not worth living, which might lead one to take unreasonable risks and die. I suppose there is a fixed-point solution to this.
You can (maybe) find them at your local mall bookstore next to the clip-on lights and bookmarks. They hold your book up at a comfortable angle. I bought some wire ones for $6 apiece about 5 years ago and still use them regularly.
They are sometimes hard to find. I guess they don't sell well. You can find a fancy model at www.levenger.com
The underlying tenet of this whole article is: "If X has not been proven and approved by the scientific community then you are a laughable ignoramus for believing it might be true."
Wrong! It is: "If X has not been proven and approved by the scientific community then you are a laughable ignoramus for believing it is true."
You are free to establish and try to prove any hypothesis you want-that is what the scientific method is all about. In fact, believing that unlikely hypothesis might be true is what most scientists do for a living!
The point is that there is no scientific evidence that alternative medicine (herbs, acupuncture, humming-a-lot) will heal you, while there are double-blind tests that show that ibuprofin will cure your headache.
As such, alternative medicine is as unproven as UFOs and ESP.
Of course, scientists are doing research into the effects of some of those methods. If any of them turn out to be true, then they will not be "alternative" anymore.
I think the problem was in the survey. If you ask the average person "Do you believe in alternative medicine" they will likely answer in the affirmative because almost everyone has at least one home remedy which they deeply believe in because it has worked for them in the past. On the other hand, if you ask the average person "if you wake up coughing up blood, do you go to the hospital or to your local accupuncturist?" the answer will be very different.
Im amazed that no one has proposed the obvious technical solutions to this specific problem. I, for one, am amazed that this did not happen earlier. In a distributed system no single agent should have too much power. Pilots of jumbo jets have too much distructive power. We need to fix that.
For example, if a plane diverges from its set flight-path a mechanism should kick-in which sets it on autopilot at x-thousand feet. This can only be overriden by ground control.
Or, how about a button that upon pressing locks the airplane on a fixed altitude and sounds the alarm. You know, like the safe in any convinence store.
> Now, high school kids can enter the programming world, and get jobs.
Yeah, I know tons of kids who can write an n-tier CORBA-based application in C++ with DCOM interoperability and published XML interfaces to support SOAP. Right! Only if you consider forty-year-olds kids (I wish:-)
I have always said that in the near future everyone will have to program. Just like now everyone has to write English. However, that does not mean that everyone is a writer in the same way that Stephen King (or, Neal Stephenson, if you prefer) is a writer. There is a big difference. In fact, programming will get harder for those who make a living from it. Software systems are only getting more complex in part because they have to appear simple to the casual user.
Myth - "Those with more interest in the hardware or architecture design aspects of
computers should be CE majors." This is a common misconception, since both CE and
CS degrees require a balance of software and hardware courses. In fact, CE is for
those wishing an engineering degree, and CS is for those preferring a more
science-oriented degree, or those preferring a computing degree within the context of a
liberal education.
from here.
As I student I earned degrees in "Computer Science and Engineering" and, like most, always assumed that computer engineers were more into hardware and computer scientists were into software more.
However, that is completely wrong.
You see, if a university wants to give someone a degree with the word "Engineering" on it, the program has to be accredited by ABET. The accreditation makes sure that students are learning enough programming and, yes, that they know at least something about circuits, computer architectures, and signals and systems (about one class each is enough). Therefore, only departments that have been accredited by ABET can give "computer engineering" degrees.
If a University wants to give "Computer science" degrees then it can get accredited by CSAB. Their accreditation requirements are more "lenient" than ABET's since they require fewer "hardware" courses (if any).
Usually, the only difference is that a computer engineer has to take about three more classes (circuits, computer architecture, signals and systems) than a computer scientist in order to fulfill the degree requirements, but it depends on the school.
Note also that CSAB and ABET are integrating their CS and CE accreditation so in the future there probably will not be any difference.
I think you are missing the point. These students are there to learn about computing, and this is not their first class. Yet, they find themselves unable to use ftp to transfer files because they have not understood the concept of a "file".
As someone who also teaches (Im an assistant professor), I have had the same experience. The same GUIs that are meant to make work easier, actually make it much harder for students to learn what is actually happening.
You see, each GUI in the world actually presents a fiction to the user, e.g., files are "documents" that are stored in "folders" which can be "moved" to the "trash". This is usually OK if the fiction matches some world the user is familiar with, such as the real world. Unfortunately, that is not often the case. The main problems are:
1- The fiction has to be learned. e.g., right-clicking on a file to get a pop-up menu so I can then send it to the printer is NOT something I was born knowing.
2- Each GUI presents a slightly different fiction to the user, so I have to learn the MAC, Gnome, Windows, and KDE fictions.
3- Often, the fiction changes with each new version of the product, e.g. the meaning of drag-and-drop is drag X to Y and Z will happen, the set of X,Y,and Z are constantly under flux.
On the other hand, there is only one truth. If the students took the time to the learn the one truth (i.e. the way things REALLY work) then they could do as I, and most of us here, do and simply map the system's chosen fiction to the truth. This enables us to quickly learn to use whatever GUI we are presented with.
In the long run, learning the truth is much easier than learning the fictions. That is what I try to teach my students.
As someone who recently joined the educational world, I have been thinking a lot about the "threat" of online education.
If you want to survive in business, you must first understand what business you are in. For example, Ford is in the business of "individual transportation" NOT of making cars, since, if someone made a new machine that could transport people faster and cheaper than a car, then Ford would be out of business.
Universities are in the business of certification, NOT education. The primary goal of a University is to certify that all its graduate have learned a certain amount of stuff. A secondary goal is to help those students that need assistance in learning.
An MIT degree means something because we know MIT only gives degrees to those that have satisfied the many requirements.
Standarized tests can also be used to do some certification but they are (by neccessity) nowhere as effective predictors as, say, an MIT education.
So, these online universities are a great idea but in the end their product is completely worthless unless they find some way to keep tabs on the students' progress. For example, by giving them tests (which require grading), projects (which require assistance), interactions (which requires experts), etc. At which point you end up with a traditional university.
So, Im all for these free online universities! I would love to give my students a URL which has movies, text, and other fun stuff that deals with the class Im teaching. Still, I will need to give them tests/projects to make sure they have learned something and did not spend all their time reading slashdot. I will also need to be there for them when they have trouble understanding the material.
The way I see it, these online Universities are nothing more than a fancy (and, thankfully, free) textbook.
Also, the idea that famous profs will teach classes for free is silly. Sure, profs will give a lecture for free, a lecture that talks about the research they are doing, and points out how great their results are. But, to give a whole semester-long unbiased class on some topic, that, my friends, is a whole other story (and a lot of work).
We all remember the story of how a few Texas Instruments engineers went into a "clean room" and reversed engineered the IBM BIOS, which allowed them to produce their own PCs, start a small company called Compaq, and create the biggest industry of the century. (documented in, for example, "Accidental Empires").
If a law had prevented them from using what they had learned in the clean room to produce their own BIOS chips then we would not the vibrant PC industry that we have today.
Actually, I just checked in the book section and noticed that many of the books have links to fatbrain. I think they were originally amazon links. Nice.
As we all know, RMS defends the freedom of information on a purely moral basis. He started the FSF because he did not feel it was right for a company to prevent him from giving his neighbor a copy of the software he created.
The morality of "intellectual property" is a subtle isse.
For example, right now BristolMeyersSquib (a giant pharmaceutical company) holds patents to drugs that can save the life of millions in third world countries. Right now there are drug manufacturing plants in Africa that could produce these drugs and sell them for a price which the local population can afford. Right now the executives at BMS do not allow them to do this because they have have the patents and want to preserve the fat profit margins they have on these drugs.
In effect, right now executives at BMS are choosing to let millions die just so they can keep their fat profit margins.
In their defense, the executives claim that without these fat profit margins the drug would have never been invented.
Is that true? I don't know. All I know is that I would not want to be the one who has to make that kind of decision.
As we all know, RMS defends the freedom of information on a purely moral basis. He started the FSF because he did not feel it was right for a company to prevent him from giving his neighbor a copy of the software he created. The morality of "intellectual property" is a subtle isse. For example, right now BristolMeyersSquib (a giant pharmaceutical company) holds patents to drugs that can save the life of millions in third world countries. Right now there are drug manufacturing plants in Africa that could produce these drugs and sell them for a price which the local population can afford. Right now the executives at BMS do not allow them to do this because they have have the patents and want to preserve the fat profit margins they have on these drugs. In effect, right now executives at BMS are choosing to let millions die just so they can keep their fat profit margins. In their defense, the executives claim that without these fat profit margins the drug would have never been invented. Is that true? I don't know. All I know is that I would not want to be the one who has to make that kind of decision.
I agree that open review should happen, in fact, I think its inevitable. The Internet IS bringing more power to the individual. No longer should we expect to see so many top-down pre-established hierachies of power, we should get used to the bottom-up emergent organization fostered by the massive connectivity of the Net.
Examples of publishing include the already mentioned physics archive and JAIR which is published online. It is still reviewed in a traditional manner but has plans for an open review process.
Also see the Interactive Paper Project for some technology that already allows open review (I think its a better approach than slashdot for papers) Another option would be that company that allows user to "post" messages to websites.
My point is that the only real barrier is the established publish-or-perish publishing-house culture and, like any culture, it is just a matter of time before it evolves to match the available technology.
--Books used to be only for monks, then came the printing press--
Of course, I have no idea how long it will take. Soon, I hope.
It is hard to believe, especially since the 1999 Taulbee Survey shows how enrollement doubled between 1995 and 1997, staying put for 1998. Perhaps they are taking longer to graduate?
Slashdot Mirror
Can't we say that the same reasons behind the constitutional right to bear arms can be applied to a right to use encryption?
Isn't encryption already considered a "weapon" by the Pentagon?
If this were true then the PhD should quit his job and work as a clerk. No one is forcing him to work as a postdoc.
Note that the clerk cannot do the PhD's job while the PhD, I assume, can do the clerk's job. Thus, there is probably a good reason why the PhD stays in his job.
In my own life I have seen enough evidence to believe in God and in his son Jesus. As part of that, I believe I am called to believe in Adam, Eve, the garden of Eden, etc.
Is that scientific evidence? You know, reproducible double-blind experiments?
If so, then you should write a paper about it. You would get a Nobel prize, hands down. Imagine that, actual evidence for the existance of a supernatural being. You would be the new Einstein!
More than likely, however, you believe because that is what your parents/teachers taught you, just like a billion or so muslims belive Mohammed is God and a billion or so Hindus believe in Shiba et.al.
Please, stop and think. Why do you believe? Do you really have any evidence aside from some old stories? Why is your "Religion" the "one true Religion"?
What the world needs now is more atheists.
It is still used that way.
Our Senate candidate (Demint) said on an interview that he opposes having a gay person teach, or having a single pregnant mother teach. He also said on a debate that be thinks teaching students that people are the product of evolution is wrong.
This raised some ruckus, so on every subsequent debate he is now asked the same question and his pre-recorded answer is now "that is a question for the states to decide".
More evidence that good programs are short programs.
This would only, at best, stop the aging process. You could still die from a disease or accident. Of course, the possibility of a long productive life might make everyone unwilling to take even the slightest risk with their lifes, which might make life dull and not worth living, which might lead one to take unreasonable risks and die. I suppose there is a fixed-point solution to this.
You can (maybe) find them at your local mall bookstore next to the clip-on lights and bookmarks. They hold your book up at a comfortable angle. I bought some wire ones for $6 apiece about 5 years ago and still use them regularly.
They are sometimes hard to find. I guess they don't sell well. You can find a fancy model at www.levenger.com
If pictures were more powerfull than text then I would be drawing a you a picture of this argument instead of writing it.
I challenge you to draw a picture of this argument.
Wrong! It is: "If X has not been proven and approved by the scientific community then you are a laughable ignoramus for believing it is true."
You are free to establish and try to prove any hypothesis you want-that is what the scientific method is all about. In fact, believing that unlikely hypothesis might be true is what most scientists do for a living!
The point is that there is no scientific evidence that alternative medicine (herbs, acupuncture, humming-a-lot) will heal you, while there are double-blind tests that show that ibuprofin will cure your headache.
As such, alternative medicine is as unproven as UFOs and ESP.
Of course, scientists are doing research into the effects of some of those methods. If any of them turn out to be true, then they will not be "alternative" anymore.
I think the problem was in the survey. If you ask the average person "Do you believe in alternative medicine" they will likely answer in the affirmative because almost everyone has at least one home remedy which they deeply believe in because it has worked for them in the past. On the other hand, if you ask the average person "if you wake up coughing up blood, do you go to the hospital or to your local accupuncturist?" the answer will be very different.
For example, if a plane diverges from its set flight-path a mechanism should kick-in which sets it on autopilot at x-thousand feet. This can only be overriden by ground control.
Or, how about a button that upon pressing locks the airplane on a fixed altitude and sounds the alarm. You know, like the safe in any convinence store.
Submit your own idea.
Yeah, I know tons of kids who can write an n-tier CORBA-based application in C++ with DCOM interoperability and published XML interfaces to support SOAP. Right! Only if you consider forty-year-olds kids (I wish :-)
I have always said that in the near future everyone will have to program. Just like now everyone has to write English. However, that does not mean that everyone is a writer in the same way that Stephen King (or, Neal Stephenson, if you prefer) is a writer. There is a big difference. In fact, programming will get harder for those who make a living from it. Software systems are only getting more complex in part because they have to appear simple to the casual user.
Myth - "Those with more interest in the hardware or architecture design aspects of computers should be CE majors." This is a common misconception, since both CE and CS degrees require a balance of software and hardware courses. In fact, CE is for those wishing an engineering degree, and CS is for those preferring a more science-oriented degree, or those preferring a computing degree within the context of a liberal education. from here.
However, that is completely wrong.
You see, if a university wants to give someone a degree with the word "Engineering" on it, the program has to be accredited by ABET. The accreditation makes sure that students are learning enough programming and, yes, that they know at least something about circuits, computer architectures, and signals and systems (about one class each is enough). Therefore, only departments that have been accredited by ABET can give "computer engineering" degrees.
If a University wants to give "Computer science" degrees then it can get accredited by CSAB. Their accreditation requirements are more "lenient" than ABET's since they require fewer "hardware" courses (if any).
Usually, the only difference is that a computer engineer has to take about three more classes (circuits, computer architecture, signals and systems) than a computer scientist in order to fulfill the degree requirements, but it depends on the school.
Note also that CSAB and ABET are integrating their CS and CE accreditation so in the future there probably will not be any difference.
The U. Michigan has a good FAQ on the subject.
I know this because almost every singly student I advise asks me about it.
I think you are missing the point. These students are there to learn about computing, and this is not their first class. Yet, they find themselves unable to use ftp to transfer files because they have not understood the concept of a "file".
As someone who also teaches (Im an assistant professor), I have had the same experience. The same GUIs that are meant to make work easier, actually make it much harder for students to learn what is actually happening.
You see, each GUI in the world actually presents a fiction to the user, e.g., files are "documents" that are stored in "folders" which can be "moved" to the "trash". This is usually OK if the fiction matches some world the user is familiar with, such as the real world. Unfortunately, that is not often the case. The main problems are:
1- The fiction has to be learned. e.g., right-clicking on a file to get a pop-up menu so I can then send it to the printer is NOT something I was born knowing.
2- Each GUI presents a slightly different fiction to the user, so I have to learn the MAC, Gnome, Windows, and KDE fictions.
3- Often, the fiction changes with each new version of the product, e.g. the meaning of drag-and-drop is drag X to Y and Z will happen, the set of X,Y,and Z are constantly under flux.
On the other hand, there is only one truth. If the students took the time to the learn the one truth (i.e. the way things REALLY work) then they could do as I, and most of us here, do and simply map the system's chosen fiction to the truth. This enables us to quickly learn to use whatever GUI we are presented with.
In the long run, learning the truth is much easier than learning the fictions. That is what I try to teach my students.
As someone who recently joined the educational world, I have been thinking a lot about the "threat" of online education.
If you want to survive in business, you must first understand what business you are in. For example, Ford is in the business of "individual transportation" NOT of making cars, since, if someone made a new machine that could transport people faster and cheaper than a car, then Ford would be out of business.
Universities are in the business of certification, NOT education. The primary goal of a University is to certify that all its graduate have learned a certain amount of stuff. A secondary goal is to help those students that need assistance in learning.
An MIT degree means something because we know MIT only gives degrees to those that have satisfied the many requirements.
Standarized tests can also be used to do some certification but they are (by neccessity) nowhere as effective predictors as, say, an MIT education.
So, these online universities are a great idea but in the end their product is completely worthless unless they find some way to keep tabs on the students' progress. For example, by giving them tests (which require grading), projects (which require assistance), interactions (which requires experts), etc. At which point you end up with a traditional university.
So, Im all for these free online universities! I would love to give my students a URL which has movies, text, and other fun stuff that deals with the class Im teaching. Still, I will need to give them tests/projects to make sure they have learned something and did not spend all their time reading slashdot. I will also need to be there for them when they have trouble understanding the material.
The way I see it, these online Universities are nothing more than a fancy (and, thankfully, free) textbook.
Also, the idea that famous profs will teach classes for free is silly. Sure, profs will give a lecture for free, a lecture that talks about the research they are doing, and points out how great their results are. But, to give a whole semester-long unbiased class on some topic, that, my friends, is a whole other story (and a lot of work).
We all remember the story of how a few Texas Instruments engineers went into a "clean room" and reversed engineered the IBM BIOS, which allowed them to produce their own PCs, start a small company called Compaq, and create the biggest industry of the century. (documented in, for example, "Accidental Empires").
If a law had prevented them from using what they had learned in the clean room to produce their own BIOS chips then we would not the vibrant PC industry that we have today.
Actually, I just checked in the book section and noticed that many of the books have links to fatbrain. I think they were originally amazon links. Nice.
The morality of "intellectual property" is a subtle isse.
For example, right now BristolMeyersSquib (a giant pharmaceutical company) holds patents to drugs that can save the life of millions in third world countries. Right now there are drug manufacturing plants in Africa that could produce these drugs and sell them for a price which the local population can afford. Right now the executives at BMS do not allow them to do this because they have have the patents and want to preserve the fat profit margins they have on these drugs.
In effect, right now executives at BMS are choosing to let millions die just so they can keep their fat profit margins.
In their defense, the executives claim that without these fat profit margins the drug would have never been invented.
Is that true? I don't know. All I know is that I would not want to be the one who has to make that kind of decision.
As we all know, RMS defends the freedom of information on a purely moral basis. He started the FSF because he did not feel it was right for a company to prevent him from giving his neighbor a copy of the software he created. The morality of "intellectual property" is a subtle isse. For example, right now BristolMeyersSquib (a giant pharmaceutical company) holds patents to drugs that can save the life of millions in third world countries. Right now there are drug manufacturing plants in Africa that could produce these drugs and sell them for a price which the local population can afford. Right now the executives at BMS do not allow them to do this because they have have the patents and want to preserve the fat profit margins they have on these drugs. In effect, right now executives at BMS are choosing to let millions die just so they can keep their fat profit margins. In their defense, the executives claim that without these fat profit margins the drug would have never been invented. Is that true? I don't know. All I know is that I would not want to be the one who has to make that kind of decision.
I havent used it much, but its a start.
and "shuffling between websites with the ease of a speeding gazelle" is just hilarious.
Watch me as a I click that Submit button with the ease of a speeding gazelle.
I agree that open review should happen, in fact, I think its inevitable. The Internet IS bringing more power to the individual. No longer should we expect to see so many top-down pre-established hierachies of power, we should get used to the bottom-up emergent organization fostered by the massive connectivity of the Net.
Examples of publishing include the already mentioned physics archive and JAIR which is published online. It is still reviewed in a traditional manner but has plans for an open review process.
Also see the Interactive Paper Project for some technology that already allows open review (I think its a better approach than slashdot for papers) Another option would be that company that allows user to "post" messages to websites.
My point is that the only real barrier is the established publish-or-perish publishing-house culture and, like any culture, it is just a matter of time before it evolves to match the available technology.
--Books used to be only for monks, then came the printing press--
Of course, I have no idea how long it will take. Soon, I hope.
Jose
It is hard to believe, especially since the 1999 Taulbee Survey shows how enrollement doubled between 1995 and 1997, staying put for 1998. Perhaps they are taking longer to graduate?