A lot of the comments/questions I've read so far are from geeks who seem to feel that BBT perpetuates stereotypes about geeks and does more harm than good to the geek community. Outside of slashdot, do you typically get this kind of response (where non-geeks think it's funny and geeks think it's somehow offensive)? For the record, I consider myself to be a geek and I really enjoy BBT, though, as mentioned elsewhere, the humor is not nearly as intelligent as the show's characters are supposed to be. That's fine, though. Every once in a while it's fun to pick up a show where every average intelligence (and most sub-par intelligence) Americans will get every joke.
Every time I see an article like this I cry inside. Universities are not trade schools. The point of an education is not to get a job. It's to learn and to expand your horizons. I always hated the kids both in high school and college that raised their hands and asked "Am I ever going to use this in the real world?". The teacher/professor's job is not to train you for any job or real world application. It's to teach you knowledge that you can then go apply to whatever real world you want. A student once asked Euclid how geometry was going to help him in real life. The reply was "Give him threepence, since he must make gain out of what he learns". Euclid wasn't offering job training. He was teaching geometry. If you are going to a university just to get trained to do a certain job, then you are absolutely going to be disappointed. And no, they are not the most efficient job training centers, because they were never intended to be.
Why does everything in your life have to revolve around you working for someone else's vision? You eat candy because it tastes good. You play games because they are fun. Some of you have friendships because they are fulfilling. Do you ask how you are going to use these things in your career? Of course not, because your life is about more than your career. Why is education different? Why can't someone teach you something just because it's interesting?
Now that that's out of the way, we still have an interesting question posed here: are university-taught computer scientists more or less proficient than self-taught coders? Yes, self-taught coders do have certain skills that fresh graduates do not (version control, the lastest, greatest, probably going to be obsolete next week programming fad, etc). I'm going to say it depends on what you need. Are you doing mobile apps, websites, and other small-scope stuff? Great. A coder is all you need. Are you doing performance intensive, critical, large and/or complex projects? If so, you probably want someone who spent time learning about how to optimize algorithms, mathematically validate an algorithms' correctness, and other such things that most self taught people view as "theoretical and not very practical". Admittedly, there are more jobs requiring the former than there are the latter, so perhaps HR people need to rethink why they are requiring a degree. You can say there's no difference after 5 years of experience, but I disagree. People will almost always incorporate new knowledge into their existing mental model. If they start out with theoretical model and fit practical knowledge into that, they will have a whole, cohesive understanding of what is going on. If, however, they either never learned all that theory or, like a large number of CS graduates who really wanted a trade school job training, never bothered to let it sink in, the knowledge will either be missed or not be understood holistically.
I guess you could argue that a lot of people with CS degrees were looking for job training and therefore didn't pay attention to the theory they were taught. They come out of college with no practical knowledge but also with no theoretical framework within which to place new knowledge. It sounds like the/. community believes this represents the vast majority of graduates. If that is the case, I guess I can't argue with the conclusions of most of the commentators here. However, someone who went to a university to actually take advantage of the theory taught at a university will come out much different than the stereotype being described by everyone.
This has been quite the ramble, but so be it. These are the thoughts I had in roughly the order I had them. What think ye?
This is all in line with Disney's standard operating procedure. Take a series that has reached the end of its watchable life, then make a bunch more movies to everyone's dismay. Pirates of the Caribbean, anyone? The first was fine, the rest were painful.
This is one of the reasons I hated Biology as a subject. The best definition I ever got for 'species' was a set of organisms that could interbreed and produce fertile offspring. This guy reminds us "remember, that's not always the case". So, if that's not the definition of species, what is? Poke and prod any Zoology professor long enough and he'll finally say "that's just the way it is, so just memorize it". There's no logical process defined for assigning organisms a place in our taxonomy. The only answer is "They guy credited with finding these arbitrarily decided that it belonged in this phylum, genus, etc" (I forgot the orders because, like I said, it's all arbitrary anyway). There is no sure-fire way to decide whether 2 organisms belong to the same species (much less any more generic taxon) because the reproduce with fertile offspring test is not necessarily the answer. It then comes down to "Well, they look different and they act different enough that I now officially say so".
Bah. Is anything that arbitrary truly a science?
No, you won't use calculus as a programmer. If you want to more than the most boring and repetative programming jobs, though, you need a sound understanding of discrete math and preferably computational theory. The jobs where these are needed are the fun, fulfilling jobs where you feel like you did more than just rewrite the same form in a slightly different format over and over.
If web design is your thing, you won't need as much math as you will need art and HCI skills. But you'll also be doing the same thing in slightly different colors every day for the tenure of your career. It's your call. You can either learn math or trust that the people who did wrote the libraries you are using correctly.
Want a great example of magical thinking being nearly universal? Go to the first 5 people you see and ask them what their suggestion on a cure for hiccups is. You will get 5 different answers with absolutely no reasoning propping them up. They usually come in pairs, too: hold your breath vs. breath deeply. Sip water vs. drink it rapidly, etc. Nobody can explain why their method of choice works (most of them don't), but they believe them nonetheless.
From the original post:
"... we ought to be able to see more clearly how government spending bettered everyday life, confirmed Keynesian economic theory and revealed that, before the war, the New Deal did too little, rather than too much, to stimulate the U.S. economy."
From the Sherlock Holmes novel A Scandal in Bohemia:
"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."
What I got from that article is "Now that we have data, we can pick and choose what suits the theory we have already decided as true". The attitude people ought to take if they want the actual truth rather than just some sort of affirmation (which few people do in politically charged issues such as Keynesian economics, sadly) is "let's look at this massive bunch of data and see what theory it suggests is true",
Statistics and its rules, including margins of error, do not apply when the sample size is equal to the population. "Margin of error" does not mean "probability that someone messed up". It means the margin by which the statistical sample is likely to be different than the population. When the sample is the population (in this case, every caucus members vote was counted, and therefore the sample is indeed the population), then the statistical margin of error is zero. Whoever posted this either doesn't understand statistics or purposely misused the word "margin of error" in order to get a rise out of other people who don't understand statistics.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of the comments/questions I've read so far are from geeks who seem to feel that BBT perpetuates stereotypes about geeks and does more harm than good to the geek community. Outside of slashdot, do you typically get this kind of response (where non-geeks think it's funny and geeks think it's somehow offensive)? For the record, I consider myself to be a geek and I really enjoy BBT, though, as mentioned elsewhere, the humor is not nearly as intelligent as the show's characters are supposed to be. That's fine, though. Every once in a while it's fun to pick up a show where every average intelligence (and most sub-par intelligence) Americans will get every joke.
There is a kill switch for military equipment. It's called drones.
Every time I see an article like this I cry inside. Universities are not trade schools. The point of an education is not to get a job. It's to learn and to expand your horizons. I always hated the kids both in high school and college that raised their hands and asked "Am I ever going to use this in the real world?". The teacher/professor's job is not to train you for any job or real world application. It's to teach you knowledge that you can then go apply to whatever real world you want. A student once asked Euclid how geometry was going to help him in real life. The reply was "Give him threepence, since he must make gain out of what he learns". Euclid wasn't offering job training. He was teaching geometry. If you are going to a university just to get trained to do a certain job, then you are absolutely going to be disappointed. And no, they are not the most efficient job training centers, because they were never intended to be. Why does everything in your life have to revolve around you working for someone else's vision? You eat candy because it tastes good. You play games because they are fun. Some of you have friendships because they are fulfilling. Do you ask how you are going to use these things in your career? Of course not, because your life is about more than your career. Why is education different? Why can't someone teach you something just because it's interesting? Now that that's out of the way, we still have an interesting question posed here: are university-taught computer scientists more or less proficient than self-taught coders? Yes, self-taught coders do have certain skills that fresh graduates do not (version control, the lastest, greatest, probably going to be obsolete next week programming fad, etc). I'm going to say it depends on what you need. Are you doing mobile apps, websites, and other small-scope stuff? Great. A coder is all you need. Are you doing performance intensive, critical, large and/or complex projects? If so, you probably want someone who spent time learning about how to optimize algorithms, mathematically validate an algorithms' correctness, and other such things that most self taught people view as "theoretical and not very practical". Admittedly, there are more jobs requiring the former than there are the latter, so perhaps HR people need to rethink why they are requiring a degree. You can say there's no difference after 5 years of experience, but I disagree. People will almost always incorporate new knowledge into their existing mental model. If they start out with theoretical model and fit practical knowledge into that, they will have a whole, cohesive understanding of what is going on. If, however, they either never learned all that theory or, like a large number of CS graduates who really wanted a trade school job training, never bothered to let it sink in, the knowledge will either be missed or not be understood holistically. I guess you could argue that a lot of people with CS degrees were looking for job training and therefore didn't pay attention to the theory they were taught. They come out of college with no practical knowledge but also with no theoretical framework within which to place new knowledge. It sounds like the /. community believes this represents the vast majority of graduates. If that is the case, I guess I can't argue with the conclusions of most of the commentators here. However, someone who went to a university to actually take advantage of the theory taught at a university will come out much different than the stereotype being described by everyone.
This has been quite the ramble, but so be it. These are the thoughts I had in roughly the order I had them. What think ye?
This is all in line with Disney's standard operating procedure. Take a series that has reached the end of its watchable life, then make a bunch more movies to everyone's dismay. Pirates of the Caribbean, anyone? The first was fine, the rest were painful.
This is one of the reasons I hated Biology as a subject. The best definition I ever got for 'species' was a set of organisms that could interbreed and produce fertile offspring. This guy reminds us "remember, that's not always the case". So, if that's not the definition of species, what is? Poke and prod any Zoology professor long enough and he'll finally say "that's just the way it is, so just memorize it". There's no logical process defined for assigning organisms a place in our taxonomy. The only answer is "They guy credited with finding these arbitrarily decided that it belonged in this phylum, genus, etc" (I forgot the orders because, like I said, it's all arbitrary anyway). There is no sure-fire way to decide whether 2 organisms belong to the same species (much less any more generic taxon) because the reproduce with fertile offspring test is not necessarily the answer. It then comes down to "Well, they look different and they act different enough that I now officially say so". Bah. Is anything that arbitrary truly a science?
And why is it in yro?
No, you won't use calculus as a programmer. If you want to more than the most boring and repetative programming jobs, though, you need a sound understanding of discrete math and preferably computational theory. The jobs where these are needed are the fun, fulfilling jobs where you feel like you did more than just rewrite the same form in a slightly different format over and over. If web design is your thing, you won't need as much math as you will need art and HCI skills. But you'll also be doing the same thing in slightly different colors every day for the tenure of your career. It's your call. You can either learn math or trust that the people who did wrote the libraries you are using correctly.
Want a great example of magical thinking being nearly universal? Go to the first 5 people you see and ask them what their suggestion on a cure for hiccups is. You will get 5 different answers with absolutely no reasoning propping them up. They usually come in pairs, too: hold your breath vs. breath deeply. Sip water vs. drink it rapidly, etc. Nobody can explain why their method of choice works (most of them don't), but they believe them nonetheless.
From the original post: "... we ought to be able to see more clearly how government spending bettered everyday life, confirmed Keynesian economic theory and revealed that, before the war, the New Deal did too little, rather than too much, to stimulate the U.S. economy." From the Sherlock Holmes novel A Scandal in Bohemia: "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts." What I got from that article is "Now that we have data, we can pick and choose what suits the theory we have already decided as true". The attitude people ought to take if they want the actual truth rather than just some sort of affirmation (which few people do in politically charged issues such as Keynesian economics, sadly) is "let's look at this massive bunch of data and see what theory it suggests is true",
Statistics and its rules, including margins of error, do not apply when the sample size is equal to the population. "Margin of error" does not mean "probability that someone messed up". It means the margin by which the statistical sample is likely to be different than the population. When the sample is the population (in this case, every caucus members vote was counted, and therefore the sample is indeed the population), then the statistical margin of error is zero. Whoever posted this either doesn't understand statistics or purposely misused the word "margin of error" in order to get a rise out of other people who don't understand statistics.