I have liberal arts degrees in Statistics and Computer Science. My university offers the same degrees from the College of Engineering. The difference for Stats was 4 semesters of German vs. 2 semesters of physics (ich liebe Deutsch). For Computer Science I got to freely pick my upper-level classes instead of having to be on a particular "track"; I was able to take 3 graduate-level classes instead of the 1 that College of Engineering students take. Oh yea, and I couldn't use a calculator in my math classes, so unlike the College of Engineering students, I know what eigenvalues actually are instead of simply how to compute them in MATLAB.
One of your more controversial points is the idea that every student should major in liberal arts...
..liberal arts, properly conceived, means wrestling with issues and ideas, putting the mind to work in a way these young people will only be able to do for these four years. And we'd like this for everyone. They can always learn vocational things later, on the job. They can even get an engineering degree later--by the way, in two years rather than four.
Disagree. Engineering classes also allow people to communicate and explore new ideas, the subject matter is simply more practical and concrete (i.e. the correct answer is more narrowly defined). Also, many quality engineering programs have liberal-education requirements for this reason. People pay a lot of money for college, and forcing them to take non-practical classes won't solve any problems, it will just further burden them with debt when they go back to "engineering school", or whatever the author is suggesting.
...you even suggest that graduates should work at Old Navy for a year and ruminate on their lives.
In our economy, they're not really ready for you until you're 28 or so. They want you to have a number of years behind you. So when somebody comes out of college at 22 with a bachelor's degree, what can that person really offer Goldman Sachs or General Electric or the Department of the Interior?... There's no rush. That's why I say they should take a year to work at Costco, at Barnes & Noble, whatever, a year away from studying, and think about what they really want to do.
ARE YOU SERIOUS!? I quit reading the article at this point. I worked my ass off in shitty IT jobs over the last 7 years, double majored in 5 years, and this guy want me to go fold shirts or flip burgers?! I didn't expect (and don't have) a fat salary, but I do well enough to be comfortably middle-class at age 24, doing work that I somewhat enjoy. Also, there is a "rush", its called interest on my student loans.
I agree that there is a lot of stuff wrong with American Universities. Rich kids have an inherent advantage because they don't have to work during college. They socialize in Greek organizations, making connections to their future rich buddies, while lower and middle class kids like me bust our asses.
Re:Emphatic Agreement
on
R In a Nutshell
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It handles data nicely. You can do things similar to list comprehensions in python. Implementing it in another language would break its semi-compatibility with S-plus. It also has data-types aimed towards the sorts of processing that it is designed for, like formula objects and data frames. Finally, the interactive mode is invaluable for exploratory analysis.
You could build a ton of syntactic sugar into another language to get something close to R, in-fact, that's actually what basically all of the operations in R are (syntactic sugar, as described in R In A Nutshell).
So to answer your question, it makes more sense to design a language for statistics rather than hack it onto an existing language.
I was a research assistance for a study conducted in 2007, which surveyed the usage of Telemedicine in Minnesota. http://www.mti.umn.edu/mti.html, (be kind, it was my first web application ever, and it has since been broken by the people maintaining it).
The primary usage, IIRC, was for psychiatric health. In particular, mental health facilities in northern Minnesota seemed to favor this approach; it is much cheaper to employ councilors and "out-source" a MD rather than have a full-time psychiatrist on staff.
Telemedicine may be more cost-effective, but IMHO it will probably be abused and doctors (like radiologists), whom are already very busy, will be pushed even harder. Computer-Aided-Diagonsis tools, like those in existence for detecting microcalcifications in breast tissue, will become essential. Over-worked doctors miss things, and sometimes a computerized second opinion can improve the quality of diagnoses while holding down costs.
DISCLAIMER: I am not in the medical industry, but I did some research as an undergrad on the things mentioned above.
I am graduating in 2 days. 5 years of education, 2 degrees, $26k in debt, at a reputable university in a major city (population =~ 1 million). I paid for rent and food like most people I know, by working. Tuition was about $8k a year, minus what I could pay with additional summer earnings. $80k is outrageous, although I do know people with close to $50k in debt.
The biggest failing of universities is not providing students with information about the earning power of their major. Students should be required to sign a form at the time they declare their major with the following statistics:
avg starting salary
percent of graduates employed in field 3 years after graduation
Not to say that there isn't a lot of valuable stuff to learn in an Architecture program (my gf is in one), but the highest level of math she had to take is Calculus I.
not to mention economic indicators; most poor people don't have iPhones that they can tweet their every whim. Some people also don't twitter their political views. This whole thing screams selection bias.
Exactly, but I think it somewhat depends on the major program a person is in. I have taken upper-level English classes where participation isn't really required, but hearing other people's interpretations certainly enriched my understanding/appreciation of the material. The goal of traditional liberal arts majors isn't necessarily to prove that you've learned anything (e.g. by doing well on exams), but rather to expose people to enlightening ways of thinking and understanding, which is primarily done in the classroom.
With that said, I majored in CSCI & Stats. Many of my professors were excellent researchers/scholars, but horrible teachers. They would scribble about (often irrelevant) theoretical properties in applications-oriented classes, or slooowwwly and tediously work problems. I figured out that I never looked at the notes I took in class anyway, so why bother taking notes, or even attending lectures?
If the RFID tracking-system is to be applied intelligently (which would be a rarity for administrators in academia), it should be opt-in for teachers, and used only for traditionally liberal arts majors. For engineering, chemistry, and mathematics showing demonstrated knowledge (e.g. tests) is much more important than absorbing a variety of subjective interpretations of the material.
Do you know what a corporation is? A corporation going bankrupt is not the same as a proprietorship going bankrupt; this is the whole reason that you start a corporation... to shield your salary/earnings in case the company goes under. The trade-off is that you essentially pay income tax twice (it is wayy more complicated though).
He blocked efforts to regulate the derivatives market, saying it would "self-regulate". He believed that allowing market-correction was the best way to deal with fraud/over-valuation.
Calling Greenspan "Randian" was a bit of hyperbole.
I think that True market forces can do a better job at regulation than the US Government can.
Until greed, credit, and gullibility enter into the equation. What do you think causes the Great Depression? Unregulated securities markets and overvalued stocks fueled by the credit of your average citizen. What do you think causes the last recession? Under-regulation in the securities markets, and overvalued bonds fueled by the credit (mortgages) of your average citizen. For fucks-sake, my 20 year old friend had a $150,000 mortgage on $30,000 of income for a house that is now worth $40,000. He defaulted, along with basically the whole neighborhood.
Yes I see your point, but what he did was ILLEGAL. What bank CEOs did was idiotic and a byproduct of Greenspan's Randian/laissez faire outlook on "self-regulation". They weren't violating the law, this guy was. He was deliberately engaged in an act of theft, which doesn't compare to the cluster-fuck of idiocy that caused the last recession. Bank CEOs were reckless, the government was allowing it to happen, and a bunch of toxic assets were being rated as AAA bonds.
With that said, the real outrage is that some of the CEOs of failed banks made millions off there own failures. When you become CEO you should sign a contract saying "I will return 100% of my bonuses if my fuckups cause this company to fail".
Initially an intern may cost the company money, but by the end of their internship they are probably making the company money. Interns do not get health insurance, 401K benefits, and are paid.3 to.5 of what a full-time employee is making. Some studies place estimates of bad-hires at 2x-3x their annual salary; so it also is a good way of recruiting new employees.
I may have been in a different position than you, but there is no way in hell I would take an unpaid software development internship. If a company doesn't think that your time is worth anything then what value could the experience possibly have? You would be better off working on your own programming projects; you'd probably learn a lot more because you wouldn't be confined to unpaid intern bitch-work.
as mentioned earlier, see "at-will" employment... private companies are not government entities, they are subject to basically non of the same rules, and thus do not have to honor your constitutional rights.
I glanced over a lot of your code, and saw a lot of tightly coupled code. For example your photo gallery has the display logic/HTML intermingled everywhere. It doesn't have to be object-oriented per-se, I was pointing out that your code is very tightly coupled.
It wasn't my intention to attack you; I just want you to understand that there is a lot more to software development than programming. I am sure you have learned more about mechanical engineering from your job than in college, so realize that this applies to most professions. Saying that computer science isn't a "real" major is ignorant; although I agree entirely that it is a major that should be paired with another degree in a scientific/engineering discipline.
Thank you for posting links to your code along with your response, it makes it abundantly clear that you have no real programming experience aside from simple, non-OO PHP. Yes, you can program, but you are by no means a software developer. The comparison that you are drawing is like a shade-tree mechanic considering himself automotive engineer.
A developer creates non-trivial software; the code is modular, documented, and extensively tested. It often makes use of various APIs, and integrates with other systems like DBMSs. The software may be responsible for human lives or millions of dollars. Furthermore it may be a very, very large codebase with dozens of developers, making collaboration essential.
You are correct in that programming is useful in virtually any scientific/engineering job; but realize that college doesn't teach you shit about programming, that your programming experience would better be called scripting experience, and that the majority of these "I need a job" posts are people who are in the lowest 5% of software development food-chain.
I am still in college, and I was hired last week for a full-time position. I was lucky (or prudent) to gain programming experience through a 3 year internship in college. If you don't have any relevant experience, as the parent post points out, you are really going to need to put together some demo code. I wouldn't consider anything less than 500 lines, which if you really can program, should only take you day or two. Try to make it as original and non-trivial as possible... Be sure to document the code well using whatever documentation tools there are for the language you are using.
Also, are you getting the basics right? Do you have a good resume? You should get some feedback from professionals if possible on it. Are you writing cover letters that explain what YOU can do for the company? Be sure to tailor your resume/cover-letter to the job description; expect to spend 2-3 hours on each.
If you would like me to offer some feedback on your resume/cover-letter, I could do so. I've been able to help friends land interviews by doing this before.
Good luck, keep your chin up, expand you skills, and realize that you don't know jack.
Constructive possession is a concept where if the drugs are accessible to you, e.g. you are the passenger of a car and drugs are found in the center console, you can be charged with possession without even knowing you are there. This sort of charge routinely fucks people out of gainful employment for decades; imagine this. Your buddy picks you up, and you are pulled over, drugs are found in the center console. Although you had no idea the drugs were there, you can be charged with possession if the driver doesn't admit to owning the drugs, or perhaps even if he does. If you are moderately wealthy, you get a lawyer, he plays buddy-buddy with the judge and prosecutor, and the charge will get dropped or downgraded to a non-drug offense, but if you are poor which is overwhelmingly the case, you wind up with probation and no hopes of finding a job in the next decade.
No, its closer to Lisp/Scheme; it has been called "Lisp in in C's clothing". The keywords and syntax is somewhat C-like, but once you get beyond the basics you'll understand what I'm talking about... but here is a simple example (styled for brevity):
function func(){
var foo = "bar";
return (function(){alert(foo);}); }
function bazz(arg){
alert(foo);//error
arg();}//alerts foo
bazz(func());
Javascript doesn't allow you to access Objects (aka Associative Arrays) via numeric indexes, if you have found a way to do this you are doing in wrong... And have you tried Firebug?
I walked into the Navy recruiter about a year ago, and asked him what I could in the Navy with a degrees in computer sciences and statistics. I am also physically-fit and have a high GPA. The officer (not enlisted) basically told me "not a goddamn thing, try the Army". The Army guy was the typical pushy recruiter; he told me to enlist and try for OCS (I'd probably end up on a convoy in Afghanistan).
I disagree with what you said about gays and women in the military; recent statistics suggest that 33% percent of female veterans have been raped, and 70% experienced some form of sexual harassment. As for gays being "more creative", that is a stereotype. Furthermore "hacking" is not really a creative endeavor in the artistic sense, it is more analytical and methodological. The best hackers are human compilers (i.e. understand how C code may be exploited), and have encyclopedic knowledge of security. I agree that age shouldn't matter for people with a high degree of technical skills (if under 50).
Slashdot Mirror
I have liberal arts degrees in Statistics and Computer Science. My university offers the same degrees from the College of Engineering. The difference for Stats was 4 semesters of German vs. 2 semesters of physics (ich liebe Deutsch). For Computer Science I got to freely pick my upper-level classes instead of having to be on a particular "track"; I was able to take 3 graduate-level classes instead of the 1 that College of Engineering students take. Oh yea, and I couldn't use a calculator in my math classes, so unlike the College of Engineering students, I know what eigenvalues actually are instead of simply how to compute them in MATLAB.
From TFA:
One of your more controversial points is the idea that every student should major in liberal arts...
..liberal arts, properly conceived, means wrestling with issues and ideas, putting the mind to work in a way these young people will only be able to do for these four years. And we'd like this for everyone. They can always learn vocational things later, on the job. They can even get an engineering degree later--by the way, in two years rather than four.
Disagree. Engineering classes also allow people to communicate and explore new ideas, the subject matter is simply more practical and concrete (i.e. the correct answer is more narrowly defined). Also, many quality engineering programs have liberal-education requirements for this reason. People pay a lot of money for college, and forcing them to take non-practical classes won't solve any problems, it will just further burden them with debt when they go back to "engineering school", or whatever the author is suggesting.
...you even suggest that graduates should work at Old Navy for a year and ruminate on their lives.
In our economy, they're not really ready for you until you're 28 or so. They want you to have a number of years behind you. So when somebody comes out of college at 22 with a bachelor's degree, what can that person really offer Goldman Sachs or General Electric or the Department of the Interior? ... There's no rush. That's why I say they should take a year to work at Costco, at Barnes & Noble, whatever, a year away from studying, and think about what they really want to do.
ARE YOU SERIOUS!? I quit reading the article at this point. I worked my ass off in shitty IT jobs over the last 7 years, double majored in 5 years, and this guy want me to go fold shirts or flip burgers?! I didn't expect (and don't have) a fat salary, but I do well enough to be comfortably middle-class at age 24, doing work that I somewhat enjoy. Also, there is a "rush", its called interest on my student loans.
I agree that there is a lot of stuff wrong with American Universities. Rich kids have an inherent advantage because they don't have to work during college. They socialize in Greek organizations, making connections to their future rich buddies, while lower and middle class kids like me bust our asses.
http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/worlds-best-universities/2010/02/25/worlds-best-universities-top-400
http://www.4icu.org/top200/
It handles data nicely. You can do things similar to list comprehensions in python. Implementing it in another language would break its semi-compatibility with S-plus. It also has data-types aimed towards the sorts of processing that it is designed for, like formula objects and data frames. Finally, the interactive mode is invaluable for exploratory analysis.
You could build a ton of syntactic sugar into another language to get something close to R, in-fact, that's actually what basically all of the operations in R are (syntactic sugar, as described in R In A Nutshell).
So to answer your question, it makes more sense to design a language for statistics rather than hack it onto an existing language.
I was a research assistance for a study conducted in 2007, which surveyed the usage of Telemedicine in Minnesota. http://www.mti.umn.edu/mti.html, (be kind, it was my first web application ever, and it has since been broken by the people maintaining it).
The primary usage, IIRC, was for psychiatric health. In particular, mental health facilities in northern Minnesota seemed to favor this approach; it is much cheaper to employ councilors and "out-source" a MD rather than have a full-time psychiatrist on staff.
Telemedicine may be more cost-effective, but IMHO it will probably be abused and doctors (like radiologists), whom are already very busy, will be pushed even harder. Computer-Aided-Diagonsis tools, like those in existence for detecting microcalcifications in breast tissue, will become essential. Over-worked doctors miss things, and sometimes a computerized second opinion can improve the quality of diagnoses while holding down costs.
DISCLAIMER: I am not in the medical industry, but I did some research as an undergrad on the things mentioned above.
Broccoli
The GP said he spent $80k over 4 years, right? That sounds like a public school to me, at least nowadays.
Nope..
I am graduating in 2 days. 5 years of education, 2 degrees, $26k in debt, at a reputable university in a major city (population =~ 1 million). I paid for rent and food like most people I know, by working. Tuition was about $8k a year, minus what I could pay with additional summer earnings. $80k is outrageous, although I do know people with close to $50k in debt.
The biggest failing of universities is not providing students with information about the earning power of their major. Students should be required to sign a form at the time they declare their major with the following statistics:
There actually isn't much engineering in architecture, in fact one of the most famous Architects ever didn't have a degree.
Not to say that there isn't a lot of valuable stuff to learn in an Architecture program (my gf is in one), but the highest level of math she had to take is Calculus I.
not to mention economic indicators; most poor people don't have iPhones that they can tweet their every whim. Some people also don't twitter their political views. This whole thing screams selection bias.
Exactly, but I think it somewhat depends on the major program a person is in. I have taken upper-level English classes where participation isn't really required, but hearing other people's interpretations certainly enriched my understanding/appreciation of the material. The goal of traditional liberal arts majors isn't necessarily to prove that you've learned anything (e.g. by doing well on exams), but rather to expose people to enlightening ways of thinking and understanding, which is primarily done in the classroom.
With that said, I majored in CSCI & Stats. Many of my professors were excellent researchers/scholars, but horrible teachers. They would scribble about (often irrelevant) theoretical properties in applications-oriented classes, or slooowwwly and tediously work problems. I figured out that I never looked at the notes I took in class anyway, so why bother taking notes, or even attending lectures?
If the RFID tracking-system is to be applied intelligently (which would be a rarity for administrators in academia), it should be opt-in for teachers, and used only for traditionally liberal arts majors. For engineering, chemistry, and mathematics showing demonstrated knowledge (e.g. tests) is much more important than absorbing a variety of subjective interpretations of the material.
They are police... so yes they should be charged... but I'm sure that "an internal review concluded that no police policies were violated".
This shit happens every day. NYPD stole hundreds of bicycles today, this innocent teenager was arrested for "resisting arrest" after being mistaken for a burglar, and of course this is what happens when you videotape the police. We live in a police state, plain and simple.
Do you know what a corporation is? A corporation going bankrupt is not the same as a proprietorship going bankrupt; this is the whole reason that you start a corporation... to shield your salary/earnings in case the company goes under. The trade-off is that you essentially pay income tax twice (it is wayy more complicated though).
He blocked efforts to regulate the derivatives market, saying it would "self-regulate". He believed that allowing market-correction was the best way to deal with fraud/over-valuation.
Calling Greenspan "Randian" was a bit of hyperbole.
I think that True market forces can do a better job at regulation than the US Government can.
Until greed, credit, and gullibility enter into the equation. What do you think causes the Great Depression? Unregulated securities markets and overvalued stocks fueled by the credit of your average citizen. What do you think causes the last recession? Under-regulation in the securities markets, and overvalued bonds fueled by the credit (mortgages) of your average citizen. For fucks-sake, my 20 year old friend had a $150,000 mortgage on $30,000 of income for a house that is now worth $40,000. He defaulted, along with basically the whole neighborhood.
Yes I see your point, but what he did was ILLEGAL. What bank CEOs did was idiotic and a byproduct of Greenspan's Randian/laissez faire outlook on "self-regulation". They weren't violating the law, this guy was. He was deliberately engaged in an act of theft, which doesn't compare to the cluster-fuck of idiocy that caused the last recession. Bank CEOs were reckless, the government was allowing it to happen, and a bunch of toxic assets were being rated as AAA bonds.
With that said, the real outrage is that some of the CEOs of failed banks made millions off there own failures. When you become CEO you should sign a contract saying "I will return 100% of my bonuses if my fuckups cause this company to fail".
Initially an intern may cost the company money, but by the end of their internship they are probably making the company money. Interns do not get health insurance, 401K benefits, and are paid .3 to .5 of what a full-time employee is making. Some studies place estimates of bad-hires at 2x-3x their annual salary; so it also is a good way of recruiting new employees.
I may have been in a different position than you, but there is no way in hell I would take an unpaid software development internship. If a company doesn't think that your time is worth anything then what value could the experience possibly have? You would be better off working on your own programming projects; you'd probably learn a lot more because you wouldn't be confined to unpaid intern bitch-work.
as mentioned earlier, see "at-will" employment... private companies are not government entities, they are subject to basically non of the same rules, and thus do not have to honor your constitutional rights.
I glanced over a lot of your code, and saw a lot of tightly coupled code. For example your photo gallery has the display logic/HTML intermingled everywhere. It doesn't have to be object-oriented per-se, I was pointing out that your code is very tightly coupled.
It wasn't my intention to attack you; I just want you to understand that there is a lot more to software development than programming. I am sure you have learned more about mechanical engineering from your job than in college, so realize that this applies to most professions. Saying that computer science isn't a "real" major is ignorant; although I agree entirely that it is a major that should be paired with another degree in a scientific/engineering discipline.
Thank you for posting links to your code along with your response, it makes it abundantly clear that you have no real programming experience aside from simple, non-OO PHP. Yes, you can program, but you are by no means a software developer. The comparison that you are drawing is like a shade-tree mechanic considering himself automotive engineer.
A developer creates non-trivial software; the code is modular, documented, and extensively tested. It often makes use of various APIs, and integrates with other systems like DBMSs. The software may be responsible for human lives or millions of dollars. Furthermore it may be a very, very large codebase with dozens of developers, making collaboration essential.
You are correct in that programming is useful in virtually any scientific/engineering job; but realize that college doesn't teach you shit about programming, that your programming experience would better be called scripting experience, and that the majority of these "I need a job" posts are people who are in the lowest 5% of software development food-chain.
A bit cynical... but mostly true.
I am still in college, and I was hired last week for a full-time position. I was lucky (or prudent) to gain programming experience through a 3 year internship in college. If you don't have any relevant experience, as the parent post points out, you are really going to need to put together some demo code. I wouldn't consider anything less than 500 lines, which if you really can program, should only take you day or two. Try to make it as original and non-trivial as possible... Be sure to document the code well using whatever documentation tools there are for the language you are using.
Also, are you getting the basics right? Do you have a good resume? You should get some feedback from professionals if possible on it. Are you writing cover letters that explain what YOU can do for the company? Be sure to tailor your resume/cover-letter to the job description; expect to spend 2-3 hours on each.
If you would like me to offer some feedback on your resume/cover-letter, I could do so. I've been able to help friends land interviews by doing this before.
Good luck, keep your chin up, expand you skills, and realize that you don't know jack.
In all seriousness, does drinking beer impact dissolution?
It doesn't, it is Canada.
Constructive possession is a concept where if the drugs are accessible to you, e.g. you are the passenger of a car and drugs are found in the center console, you can be charged with possession without even knowing you are there. This sort of charge routinely fucks people out of gainful employment for decades; imagine this. Your buddy picks you up, and you are pulled over, drugs are found in the center console. Although you had no idea the drugs were there, you can be charged with possession if the driver doesn't admit to owning the drugs, or perhaps even if he does. If you are moderately wealthy, you get a lawyer, he plays buddy-buddy with the judge and prosecutor, and the charge will get dropped or downgraded to a non-drug offense, but if you are poor which is overwhelmingly the case, you wind up with probation and no hopes of finding a job in the next decade.
No, its closer to Lisp/Scheme; it has been called "Lisp in in C's clothing". The keywords and syntax is somewhat C-like, but once you get beyond the basics you'll understand what I'm talking about... but here is a simple example (styled for brevity):
function func(){
var foo = "bar";
return (function(){alert(foo);}); }
function bazz(arg){ //error //alerts foo
alert(foo);
arg();}
bazz(func());
Javascript doesn't allow you to access Objects (aka Associative Arrays) via numeric indexes, if you have found a way to do this you are doing in wrong... And have you tried Firebug?
see liquid layout
I walked into the Navy recruiter about a year ago, and asked him what I could in the Navy with a degrees in computer sciences and statistics. I am also physically-fit and have a high GPA. The officer (not enlisted) basically told me "not a goddamn thing, try the Army". The Army guy was the typical pushy recruiter; he told me to enlist and try for OCS (I'd probably end up on a convoy in Afghanistan).
I disagree with what you said about gays and women in the military; recent statistics suggest that 33% percent of female veterans have been raped, and 70% experienced some form of sexual harassment. As for gays being "more creative", that is a stereotype. Furthermore "hacking" is not really a creative endeavor in the artistic sense, it is more analytical and methodological. The best hackers are human compilers (i.e. understand how C code may be exploited), and have encyclopedic knowledge of security. I agree that age shouldn't matter for people with a high degree of technical skills (if under 50).