After taking a few courses from Coursera, a high dropout rate is not surprising. The CS courses are mainly math courses in disguise, which works when you are teaching CS students at the high end of the intelligence spectrum, like at Stanford and other top-tier colleges, but simply loses most students otherwise. Even the NLP course was very focused on the mathematical models, much less so on the linguistics.
I suppose many might say it's not computer science without the math, but you can still teach much about computer technology and software design while being gentler with the math.
Personally, I've enjoyed the courses because I like math (except the quantum computation course, which was dreadful), but I know most of our CS students would be buried by the math. For the record, I'm at a state univ with some good research, but nowhere near a flagship. We do want to graduate some students, and the students we do graduate are in demand in our area.
As a CS instructor, I use Blackboard for homework and program submission, for posting solutions and for recording grades. Nothing else. Making a full-fledged web site out of Blackboard is too terrible to think about.
I'm not sure why this would be surprising. ML algorithms work best if the future behaves like the past, if it has the same probability distribution as the training data. Some algorithms can handle slow changes if they can continually get new training data, but large changes is a problem.
This has always been the case. Science is not a uniform march to the Truth. There is a difference between well-verified and understood results (think engineering) and working at the margins with not much data and the usual human failings (the vast majority of publications). Scientists are humans, not gods. It takes a lot of effort and error to get to the well-verified and understood part.
If serving meat had as great of an effect on public health as providing universal birth control, then absolutely.
This is the key point. There is an enormous amount of evidence that birth control improves public health. From a scientific point of view, it is a no-brainer.
About half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended. Regular use of contraception prevents unintended pregnancy and reduces the need for abortion. Contraception also allows women to determine the timing and spacing of pregnancies, protecting their health and improving the well-being of their children. Contraceptive use saves money by avoiding the costs of unintended pregnancy and by making pregnancies healthier, saving millions in health care expenses. Several contraceptives also have non-contraceptive health benefits, such as decreasing the risk of certain cancers and treating debilitating menstrual problems. Making contraception more affordable is a significant step forward for the health of women and their families.
Publish any shit you can! That's the best way! unfortunately, that's how academica works.
That is going to be the result of this kind of policy. I know in Computer Science, there are lots of bad conferences and journals that are easy to publish in.
I have bad news for you... dig deep enough, and you find out all the other 'sciences' suffer from exactly the same problems.
In all sciences, reviewers will often ask authors to cite additional papers and provide some commentary on them. [How do your results differ?] Whether the papers are relevant is difficult to answer.
I have been on both sides of this. As a reviewer, I have often asked that additional papers be cited, sometimes my own. After all, I wouldn't be a reviewer if I didn't have some expertise. As an author, usually I agree the additional citations are relevant. Even I don't think so, I 'suck it up' in order to get my paper published. I'm sure the authors of the papers I reviewed sometimes felt the same way.
That's my day job, too, but I think you should take a
little more interest. The Stanford and MIT courses are
significant steps toward the day when we get replaced.
Another thing that is made clear in the New Testament is that the Mosaic law does not apply to Christians (well, non-Jewish Christians, more precisely). The main issue then was circumcision, but most everything else was ruled out as well.
Rather than ruining their dreams, you make this an opportunity to make them realize how important math and science is in CS.
If you know a little graphics, you could start by describing how a 3-D model is represented and how it is converted to a 2-D image.
If you want a realistic simulation of the world, then you need to compute the physics correctly, meaning trig, algebra, calculus, forces, etc.
The old-fashioned version of online courses, mail correspondence courses, have been around for a long time. Online courses have most of the same problems except for the potential of faster feedback.
Books have been around for even longer. Why take any courses when everything is already in books? I think there is some social reason why most students can't learn by themselves, but need to be physically in a class with other students in the same predicament. I guess it must be something about how all the students are in it together plus a little bit of competition. Of course, teacher-student interaction is a plus, but this aspect is overrated, I think. There are lots of classes where there is little interaction or only a few students are active.
The affluent will be able to pay for private school. What these cuts do is to ensure that the poor get less education. Somehow, most of the affluent folks have become convinced that educating the poor is not worth it. It is hard to see how this will end well.
What we need as a start is an addon that will gather
public keys for the sites that you visit and alert you if
the key you get differs from the key that others
have received. This addon could be distributed with
its own public key builtin.
And the current trend in computing devices is one from where the normal consumer device could be tinkered with, to where the normal consumer device is forbidden from being tinkered with.
There are a couple other trends that make it more difficult for learning computer programming.
Even if it's not forbidden, it's very difficult to tinker with any number of devices. When I was a kid, it was useful to spend some effort to take a device apart, figure out what was wrong, replace or juryrig some part, and put it back together again (sounds like programming, doesn't it). Nowadays, you need special tools and even if you get it apart, there's not much
that you can tinker with.
Another trend is that math in schools depends more and more on using calculators rather than manually applying an algorithm to add, multiply, whatever. This might be ok for math, but students lose out on problem solving skills.
Overall, there are a number of factors that result in kids not having to learn problem solving skills that come in handy for computer programming. You could include following recipes in a cookbook, making up games and arguing about the rules, sewing, fishing, wandering around by yourself and finding your way back. Kids hardly do any stuff that involves real-world planning, execution, and debugging. No, a video game does not suffice for this (at least not so far).
The result is that college instructors (such as yours truly at an average college) end up with students that are essentially clueless about putting one step after another. Because the students have not been exposed to this, they are crippled when it comes to doing programming for the first time, and only a lucky few make it through the first few courses.
Hanging folders with labels by category and year. Most categories only need 1 folder per year. At the end of the year, I move them to a "history" storage box and start a new set of folders.
I do this, but I don't organize papers into folders until they go into the storage box, which happens after I get done filing income taxes.
The main advantage of paper is that it lasts a long time. Many banks and financial institutions say they'll keep records for 10 years, which sounds like a long time, but sometimes you need longer. For me, I inherited some stock some 30 or so years ago. If I sell the stock, I need to know the cost basis, so I need information from 30 years ago, and I need to track mergers and splits over that time period.
Once financial institutions promise to keep records for my lifetime, I'll probably still keep the paper for backup purposes.
That is unrealistic. People will always want to keep secrets.
I think (a part of) a solution is to limit discrimination based on personal information. My car insurance rates should be based on whether I have been a safe driver or not (past accidents, traffic violations, and so on), not on personal information that correlate with safe driving (credit report, home ownership, and so on). My company should retain/fire me based on my job performance, not on what I do or say off the job.
The boundaries are not so clear-cut, but I think the principle should be in place.
Slashdot Mirror
After taking a few courses from Coursera, a high dropout rate is not surprising. The CS courses are mainly math courses in disguise, which works when you are teaching CS students at the high end of the intelligence spectrum, like at Stanford and other top-tier colleges, but simply loses most students otherwise. Even the NLP course was very focused on the mathematical models, much less so on the linguistics.
I suppose many might say it's not computer science without the math, but you can still teach much about computer technology and software design while being gentler with the math.
Personally, I've enjoyed the courses because I like math (except the quantum computation course, which was dreadful), but I know most of our CS students would be buried by the math. For the record, I'm at a state univ with some good research, but nowhere near a flagship. We do want to graduate some students, and the students we do graduate are in demand in our area.
Redhat, then Fedora
It's not only the extra cost, but it's also a loss of control over private information of the students.
As a CS instructor, I use Blackboard for homework and program submission, for posting solutions and for recording grades. Nothing else. Making a full-fledged web site out of Blackboard is too terrible to think about.
I'm not sure why this would be surprising. ML algorithms work best if the future behaves like the past, if it has the same probability distribution as the training data. Some algorithms can handle slow changes if they can continually get new training data, but large changes is a problem.
This has always been the case. Science is not a uniform march to the Truth. There is a difference between well-verified and understood results (think engineering) and working at the margins with not much data and the usual human failings (the vast majority of publications). Scientists are humans, not gods. It takes a lot of effort and error to get to the well-verified and understood part.
If serving meat had as great of an effect on public health as providing universal birth control, then absolutely.
This is the key point. There is an enormous amount of evidence that birth control improves public health. From a scientific point of view, it is a no-brainer.
About half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended. Regular use of contraception prevents unintended pregnancy and reduces the need for abortion. Contraception also allows women to determine the timing and spacing of pregnancies, protecting their health and improving the well-being of their children. Contraceptive use saves money by avoiding the costs of unintended pregnancy and by making pregnancies healthier, saving millions in health care expenses. Several contraceptives also have non-contraceptive health benefits, such as decreasing the risk of certain cancers and treating debilitating menstrual problems. Making contraception more affordable is a significant step forward for the health of women and their families.
This quote comes from http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/article/2011/11/03/testimony-of-douglas-laube-md, which also includes citations for the above points. I would also include reduction of teenage pregnancy as an additional plus.
Publish any shit you can! That's the best way! unfortunately, that's how academica works.
That is going to be the result of this kind of policy. I know in Computer Science, there are lots of bad conferences and journals that are easy to publish in.
I suppose privacy is impractical to those who want to sell our personal information.
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.
- Albert Einstein -
I have bad news for you ... dig deep enough, and you find out all the other 'sciences' suffer from exactly the same problems.
In all sciences, reviewers will often ask authors to cite additional papers and provide some commentary on them. [How do your results differ?] Whether the papers are relevant is difficult to answer.
I have been on both sides of this. As a reviewer, I have often asked that additional papers be cited, sometimes my own. After all, I wouldn't be a reviewer if I didn't have some expertise. As an author, usually I agree the additional citations are relevant. Even I don't think so, I 'suck it up' in order to get my paper published. I'm sure the authors of the papers I reviewed sometimes felt the same way.
Welcome to peer-review.
Terrorist suspect #29773 checking in!
That's my day job, too, but I think you should take a little more interest. The Stanford and MIT courses are significant steps toward the day when we get replaced.
...
I don't think it will happen soon, but someday
Another thing that is made clear in the New Testament is that the Mosaic law does not apply to Christians (well, non-Jewish Christians, more precisely). The main issue then was circumcision, but most everything else was ruled out as well.
Rather than ruining their dreams, you make this an opportunity to make them realize how important math and science is in CS. If you know a little graphics, you could start by describing how a 3-D model is represented and how it is converted to a 2-D image. If you want a realistic simulation of the world, then you need to compute the physics correctly, meaning trig, algebra, calculus, forces, etc.
The old-fashioned version of online courses, mail correspondence courses, have been around for a long time. Online courses have most of the same problems except for the potential of faster feedback.
Books have been around for even longer. Why take any courses when everything is already in books? I think there is some social reason why most students can't learn by themselves, but need to be physically in a class with other students in the same predicament. I guess it must be something about how all the students are in it together plus a little bit of competition. Of course, teacher-student interaction is a plus, but this aspect is overrated, I think. There are lots of classes where there is little interaction or only a few students are active.
The affluent will be able to pay for private school. What these cuts do is to ensure that the poor get less education. Somehow, most of the affluent folks have become convinced that educating the poor is not worth it. It is hard to see how this will end well.
What we need as a start is an addon that will gather public keys for the sites that you visit and alert you if the key you get differs from the key that others have received. This addon could be distributed with its own public key builtin.
The lie comes from focusing on only one tax from one level of government.
This link http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/02/tax-rates-for-rich-and-poor.html shows the effective federal tax rate:
From a recent CBO report http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/98xx/doc9884/12-23-EffectiveTaxRates_Letter.pdf, here are effective tax rates (total taxes divided by total income) for 2005, the most recent year available:
Lowest quintile: 4.3 percent
Second quintile: 9.9 percent
Middle quintile: 14.2 percent
Fourth quintile: 17.4 percent
Percentiles 81-90: 20.3 percent
Percentiles 91-95: 22.4 percent
Percentiles 96-99: 25.7 percent
Percentiles 99.0-99.5: 29.7 percent
Percentiles 99.5-99.9: 31.2 percent
Percentiles 99.9-99.99: 32.1 percent
Top 0.01 Percentile: 31.5 percent
For state and local taxes,http://www.itepnet.org/whopays3.pdf shows that lower income pays a higher tax rate (11%) than higher income (7%).
NoScript would give you back control of the search, but would mess up other things Google.
And the current trend in computing devices is one from where the normal consumer device could be tinkered with, to where the normal consumer device is forbidden from being tinkered with.
There are a couple other trends that make it more difficult for learning computer programming.
Even if it's not forbidden, it's very difficult to tinker with any number of devices. When I was a kid, it was useful to spend some effort to take a device apart, figure out what was wrong, replace or juryrig some part, and put it back together again (sounds like programming, doesn't it). Nowadays, you need special tools and even if you get it apart, there's not much that you can tinker with.
Another trend is that math in schools depends more and more on using calculators rather than manually applying an algorithm to add, multiply, whatever. This might be ok for math, but students lose out on problem solving skills.
Overall, there are a number of factors that result in kids not having to learn problem solving skills that come in handy for computer programming. You could include following recipes in a cookbook, making up games and arguing about the rules, sewing, fishing, wandering around by yourself and finding your way back. Kids hardly do any stuff that involves real-world planning, execution, and debugging. No, a video game does not suffice for this (at least not so far).
The result is that college instructors (such as yours truly at an average college) end up with students that are essentially clueless about putting one step after another. Because the students have not been exposed to this, they are crippled when it comes to doing programming for the first time, and only a lucky few make it through the first few courses.
1. Known knowns
2. Known unknowns
3. Unknown knowns
4. Unknown unknowns
Hanging folders with labels by category and year. Most categories only need 1 folder per year. At the end of the year, I move them to a "history" storage box and start a new set of folders.
I do this, but I don't organize papers into folders until they go into the storage box, which happens after I get done filing income taxes.
The main advantage of paper is that it lasts a long time. Many banks and financial institutions say they'll keep records for 10 years, which sounds like a long time, but sometimes you need longer. For me, I inherited some stock some 30 or so years ago. If I sell the stock, I need to know the cost basis, so I need information from 30 years ago, and I need to track mergers and splits over that time period.
Once financial institutions promise to keep records for my lifetime, I'll probably still keep the paper for backup purposes.
I'm not sure why this is news. Many STEM courses already have extra lab fees.
solution of this is ultimate transparency.
That is unrealistic. People will always want to keep secrets.
I think (a part of) a solution is to limit discrimination based on personal information. My car insurance rates should be based on whether I have been a safe driver or not (past accidents, traffic violations, and so on), not on personal information that correlate with safe driving (credit report, home ownership, and so on). My company should retain/fire me based on my job performance, not on what I do or say off the job.
The boundaries are not so clear-cut, but I think the principle should be in place.