It doesn't start off all that exciting (one of your first tasks is to kill a tomato, of all things), but it seems to be getting better further into the game, probably because the first few tasks seem to be an in-game tutorial. My only major gripe at this point is that all of the "augmentation" slots are contiguous on the license board. Wouldn't it make more sense to scatter them according to the other things in the area? They should have stuck with FFX's sphere grid system, IMO.
What I meant was going from 2 (knowledge of derivatives and integrals on one variable) to 3 (doing the same with more than one variable). Trying to puzzle out calc. 2 from calc. 1 would leave a lot of holes (Taylor series, for example).
I always thought of probability and statistics as an art. Knowing when and how to apply particular techniques is far more important than knowing the details of the techniques themselves, and the sort of judgment that makes a good statistician arises more from practice than instruction. I'm not sure if this is what you had in mind, but I agree with you regardless that there are not enough "good" probability courses.
I think they study those subjects in the secondary education systems of Europe. You also have the AP Calc. and Stat. tests in the US, though these are considered optional courses of study and therefore tend not to be given as much attention as lower-level math courses.
You can understand how the normal works fairly well without needing to work its equation out, so I'm not sure it pays to take an entire multivariate calculus course for that one purpose. Besides, a reasonably intelligent person with a solid knowledge of univariate calculus should be able to figure out how to do partial derivatives (ignoring directional derivatives, gradients, etc.) and multiple integrals (again, ignoring things like line integrals) fairly easily without the need for a multivariate calculus course - well enough to work out something like the distribution function for the normal, anyway.
Abstract algebra is useful in automata theory, so I would recommend it. It's also pretty handy if you want to do research in mathematics.
Graph theory should be offered as a standalone CS course, IMO. At my university, it was crammed into the Algorithms II course and hardly mentioned in Discrete Math (though that was before they established a special Discrete Math course for CS majors, which goes into much greater detail on graph theory and combinatorics, at the expense of some number theory).
Every math course I've taken has in some way been useful to me as a computer scientist (this is partially because the area I'm interested in researching is applying mathematical concepts to CS topics, however). I would recommend at least minoring in math if you're going to do a CS degree.
In my university, as I suspect in many, they were combined into one class. You could also take a second probability / statistics course (which I did, but most CS majors did not) as an elective.
A lot of programmers (a lot of the good ones, anyway) seem to have an affinity for music, so it may be worth taking a few music courses anyway - it might spark a latent interest and it will help students get a sense of aesthetics in general.
Elements of graphic design should be taught in a web development course, but lacking that, I agree that taking a separate graphic design course will help with GUI/Web development.
Nothing says it has to be hard, either. I found music appreciation (and piano I, piano II, composition,... - see what I mean?) not only easy but very enjoyable. It was a nice complement to a schedule otherwise filled with CS and Math courses.
Natural or anthropogenic, the climate is changing. I would think that if the cause were natural, this would be even more necessary because we wouldn't really be able to do anything reasonable (like cutting CO2 emissions) to stop global warming. We also have ways of inducing global dimming terrestrially that we may wish to explore. If we end up in a positive feedback loop, something like this may be one of the only ways to break it....But my bet's that global warming is primarily an anthropogenic problem. There is some strong evidence correlating mean global temperature to CO2 emissions.
The problem is that "CS" means different things to different schools and organizations. In my undergrad institution, it meant mostly programming, even though we had a separate Software Engineering program. In the grad. school I'm currently attending, it means theory.
Of course, there's no reason why you can't learn both while in college, even if it means doing some self-study.
If you could gather enough people with guns to revolt and challenge the armed forces, you could easily gather enough people to change policy by voting. The reason we're in the situation we're in is widespread apathy more than anything else.
They're controversial to some people for different reasons. Evolution is controversial because it contradicts some people's beliefs (though it need not). Global warming is controversial because it would require drastic action to change, and that would hurt our ecoonomy (but, according to a recent study, much less than doing nothing would) and make us abandon the status quo.
Don't underestimate anti-intellectualism, either. Some people are not able (or willing) to understand science, and that makes them hostile towards the subject and its practitioners.
From what I've read, this may qualify as a type of social science, though I don't understand why there isn't an interdisciplinary sociology / IT research area to cover this sort of thing already.
This should not be billed as either a natural or information science, however, as it is neither.
Usually four or five, but every so often my window usage "bursts" and I end up with 10 to 15 tabs open. I can say similar things about the number of tabs I have open in Firefox as well.
I think that the number of windows open at once may express a user's multitasking preference in general, so I wouldn't be surprised to find other people with about 1:1 ratios of both.
My experience is that you agree to create a text editor and deliver it well ahead of schedule. When you deliver that, however, the buyer's expectations change. Now he wants Word for the same $50.
As someone else mentioned, if you allow people to run graphical applications, VNC is a boon. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to do work (particularly GUI development, where a console is not an option!) in a program like Matlab over an SSH X11 forward. VNC does appear to be faster, at least in these circumstances.
Bad with people in general, perhaps (even if the article did state that, which it did not), but probably very good with other mathematicians.
I have a lot of interest (to the extent of doing original research) in pure math, though my primary field is computer science. By far, the most interesting people I've ever met, and the ones I've got along with most, were at mathematics conferences. I would recommend attending conferences to anyone who is interested in math, to meet other mathematicians if for no other reason.
The talks can be very interesting, too. The best one I've attended was on a collection of beautiful combinatorial proofs of various identities on Stirling numbers of the second kind. The experience was like listening to a virtuoso musician in concert or watching a grandmaster playing chess, and I imagine anyone with enough interest in math to understand the talks will find them fascinating.
I never thought I'd be saying anything positive about China's government, but I would consider it far more restrained, and thus safer as a regional power, than Iran's or North Korea's.
Even if employers may ignore the skills at the top, those skills will do a lot to get your resume found by search engines. If you end up near the top of a results list for some common search term and your resume is suitably impressive, people are, at some point or another, going to contact you with job offers. This is obviously a good position to be in. Never be a supplicant if you can avoid it.
As for what to put on it, a short paragraph about each job is pretty standard. Obviously, you want to highlight your strongest points. If you have an excellent academic record, it may help to include more detail in the education section. Similarly, if you have lots of work experience, make sure that the resume gives an accurate representation of that experience. If you have good records in both, balance it based on what sort of job you're looking for.
I recently graduated from college (B.S. CS, Math minor) myself. My experience has been the exact opposite of yours: People are finding me and offering me jobs - I haven't actually applied for one since three years ago. It's come to the point where I'm turning them down (mostly because I'm currently doing a Ph. D. full-time, but I'm assuming you have no desire to do that - you'd honestly have a hard time getting in anyway with a sub-3.0 GPA).
Unfortunately, I also did the opposite of what you did in college (though I'm probably just as shy as you are) - I got involved with lots of extracurriculars (being president of an honor society, in particular, resonates very well with employers) and graduated first in my class. I also built up a relevant work history while in high school and college. If you go back for a master's degree at any point, try to do things differently - it's important.
From my experience, the statistic companies are most interested in when hiring college graduates is the GPA. This can be frustrating regardless of what your GPA is (if it's very high, they ignore the rest of your resume; if it's low or absent, it becomes a focus of the interview). If your major GPA is higher than your general GPA, you can try listing that. Lacking a good GPA, you're going to need to compensate with something else - work experience, hobbies, or, in general, some sort of demonstration that you know what you're doing in the field. If you did some sort of research while in college, you can try listing that, even if you have no intentions of pursuing an academic career - publications demonstrate uncommon expertise in a small area of a field, which can perhaps make up somewhat for a poor GPA.
Next, skills and experience: if you list a skill on your resume, list some way that you've demonstrated that skill, even if it's a hobby. Nothing says you can do a job better than having done something similar already, so build a portfolio of your work. I expect that you at least work on technical projects as a hobby, or else what are you doing in this field in the first place?
To summarize: you want to demonstrate to an employer that you have the skills and experience necessary to successfully perform a job for that employer. Merely listing the skill isn't enough; you have to prove, in one way or another, that you have the knowledge, intellectual strength, passion for the field, and work ethic to work on these sorts of projects. If your academic record does not demonstrate any of these qualities, you must find another way to do so if you expect anyone to hire you.
I remember reading a recent study that concluded what I had always suspected: there is a point of diminishing returns when it comes to homework. Once this point is hit, the student gets it already, and the student's time can be spent more productively doing something else.
I almost never went beyond this point in high school. I simply stopped working on assignments when I felt I extracted all I needed from them. Needless to say, my teachers were not impressed, despite the fact that my test scores were, in general, excellent. My grades were not good in high school, but this did not stem from a lack of understanding of the material (it's because homework is a significant portion of the grade).
I did spend some of my free time playing video games, but I spent most of it programming and reasoning through real problems. I still believe that this was a far better use of my time than working on the contrived assignments I was given in high school. It certainly paid off more in the end.
This is different in college and different still in graduate school, but that's outside of the scope of this discussion.
(Interestingly, the first year of a Ph. D. seems to regress back towards the high school model, but that's probably because everyone has you, as "the new student", doing all of the menial tasks required to conduct large-scale research).
The less work web designers have to do to ensure compatibility, the more likely it is that there won't be compatibility problems for visitors.
It seems to me that the only things that might break due to this change are those browser detection scripts that rely on the name of the browser. The engine is the same, after all.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't start off all that exciting (one of your first tasks is to kill a tomato, of all things), but it seems to be getting better further into the game, probably because the first few tasks seem to be an in-game tutorial. My only major gripe at this point is that all of the "augmentation" slots are contiguous on the license board. Wouldn't it make more sense to scatter them according to the other things in the area? They should have stuck with FFX's sphere grid system, IMO.
What I meant was going from 2 (knowledge of derivatives and integrals on one variable) to 3 (doing the same with more than one variable). Trying to puzzle out calc. 2 from calc. 1 would leave a lot of holes (Taylor series, for example).
I always thought of probability and statistics as an art. Knowing when and how to apply particular techniques is far more important than knowing the details of the techniques themselves, and the sort of judgment that makes a good statistician arises more from practice than instruction. I'm not sure if this is what you had in mind, but I agree with you regardless that there are not enough "good" probability courses.
I think they study those subjects in the secondary education systems of Europe. You also have the AP Calc. and Stat. tests in the US, though these are considered optional courses of study and therefore tend not to be given as much attention as lower-level math courses.
You can understand how the normal works fairly well without needing to work its equation out, so I'm not sure it pays to take an entire multivariate calculus course for that one purpose. Besides, a reasonably intelligent person with a solid knowledge of univariate calculus should be able to figure out how to do partial derivatives (ignoring directional derivatives, gradients, etc.) and multiple integrals (again, ignoring things like line integrals) fairly easily without the need for a multivariate calculus course - well enough to work out something like the distribution function for the normal, anyway.
Abstract algebra is useful in automata theory, so I would recommend it. It's also pretty handy if you want to do research in mathematics.
Graph theory should be offered as a standalone CS course, IMO. At my university, it was crammed into the Algorithms II course and hardly mentioned in Discrete Math (though that was before they established a special Discrete Math course for CS majors, which goes into much greater detail on graph theory and combinatorics, at the expense of some number theory).
These are things that should (but probably won't) be studied before deploying these systems.
Every math course I've taken has in some way been useful to me as a computer scientist (this is partially because the area I'm interested in researching is applying mathematical concepts to CS topics, however). I would recommend at least minoring in math if you're going to do a CS degree.
In my university, as I suspect in many, they were combined into one class. You could also take a second probability / statistics course (which I did, but most CS majors did not) as an elective.
A lot of programmers (a lot of the good ones, anyway) seem to have an affinity for music, so it may be worth taking a few music courses anyway - it might spark a latent interest and it will help students get a sense of aesthetics in general.
... - see what I mean?) not only easy but very enjoyable. It was a nice complement to a schedule otherwise filled with CS and Math courses.
Elements of graphic design should be taught in a web development course, but lacking that, I agree that taking a separate graphic design course will help with GUI/Web development.
Nothing says it has to be hard, either. I found music appreciation (and piano I, piano II, composition,
Natural or anthropogenic, the climate is changing. I would think that if the cause were natural, this would be even more necessary because we wouldn't really be able to do anything reasonable (like cutting CO2 emissions) to stop global warming. We also have ways of inducing global dimming terrestrially that we may wish to explore. If we end up in a positive feedback loop, something like this may be one of the only ways to break it. ...But my bet's that global warming is primarily an anthropogenic problem. There is some strong evidence correlating mean global temperature to CO2 emissions.
The problem is that "CS" means different things to different schools and organizations. In my undergrad institution, it meant mostly programming, even though we had a separate Software Engineering program. In the grad. school I'm currently attending, it means theory.
Of course, there's no reason why you can't learn both while in college, even if it means doing some self-study.
If you could gather enough people with guns to revolt and challenge the armed forces, you could easily gather enough people to change policy by voting. The reason we're in the situation we're in is widespread apathy more than anything else.
They're controversial to some people for different reasons. Evolution is controversial because it contradicts some people's beliefs (though it need not). Global warming is controversial because it would require drastic action to change, and that would hurt our ecoonomy (but, according to a recent study, much less than doing nothing would) and make us abandon the status quo.
Don't underestimate anti-intellectualism, either. Some people are not able (or willing) to understand science, and that makes them hostile towards the subject and its practitioners.
This was not my experience with the beta, but I'll wait until the final release before passing judgement on the OS.
From what I've read, this may qualify as a type of social science, though I don't understand why there isn't an interdisciplinary sociology / IT research area to cover this sort of thing already.
This should not be billed as either a natural or information science, however, as it is neither.
Usually four or five, but every so often my window usage "bursts" and I end up with 10 to 15 tabs open. I can say similar things about the number of tabs I have open in Firefox as well. I think that the number of windows open at once may express a user's multitasking preference in general, so I wouldn't be surprised to find other people with about 1:1 ratios of both.
My experience is that you agree to create a text editor and deliver it well ahead of schedule. When you deliver that, however, the buyer's expectations change. Now he wants Word for the same $50.
Because they're the only ones that get attention.
Kind of pathetic, isn't it?
As someone else mentioned, if you allow people to run graphical applications, VNC is a boon. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to do work (particularly GUI development, where a console is not an option!) in a program like Matlab over an SSH X11 forward. VNC does appear to be faster, at least in these circumstances.
Bad with people in general, perhaps (even if the article did state that, which it did not), but probably very good with other mathematicians.
I have a lot of interest (to the extent of doing original research) in pure math, though my primary field is computer science. By far, the most interesting people I've ever met, and the ones I've got along with most, were at mathematics conferences. I would recommend attending conferences to anyone who is interested in math, to meet other mathematicians if for no other reason.
The talks can be very interesting, too. The best one I've attended was on a collection of beautiful combinatorial proofs of various identities on Stirling numbers of the second kind. The experience was like listening to a virtuoso musician in concert or watching a grandmaster playing chess, and I imagine anyone with enough interest in math to understand the talks will find them fascinating.
Maybe their values will just start to shift to cope with the circumstances.
This is just giving them ideas what to pirate next.
I never thought I'd be saying anything positive about China's government, but I would consider it far more restrained, and thus safer as a regional power, than Iran's or North Korea's.
Even if employers may ignore the skills at the top, those skills will do a lot to get your resume found by search engines. If you end up near the top of a results list for some common search term and your resume is suitably impressive, people are, at some point or another, going to contact you with job offers. This is obviously a good position to be in. Never be a supplicant if you can avoid it.
As for what to put on it, a short paragraph about each job is pretty standard. Obviously, you want to highlight your strongest points. If you have an excellent academic record, it may help to include more detail in the education section. Similarly, if you have lots of work experience, make sure that the resume gives an accurate representation of that experience. If you have good records in both, balance it based on what sort of job you're looking for.
I recently graduated from college (B.S. CS, Math minor) myself. My experience has been the exact opposite of yours: People are finding me and offering me jobs - I haven't actually applied for one since three years ago. It's come to the point where I'm turning them down (mostly because I'm currently doing a Ph. D. full-time, but I'm assuming you have no desire to do that - you'd honestly have a hard time getting in anyway with a sub-3.0 GPA).
Unfortunately, I also did the opposite of what you did in college (though I'm probably just as shy as you are) - I got involved with lots of extracurriculars (being president of an honor society, in particular, resonates very well with employers) and graduated first in my class. I also built up a relevant work history while in high school and college. If you go back for a master's degree at any point, try to do things differently - it's important.
From my experience, the statistic companies are most interested in when hiring college graduates is the GPA. This can be frustrating regardless of what your GPA is (if it's very high, they ignore the rest of your resume; if it's low or absent, it becomes a focus of the interview). If your major GPA is higher than your general GPA, you can try listing that. Lacking a good GPA, you're going to need to compensate with something else - work experience, hobbies, or, in general, some sort of demonstration that you know what you're doing in the field. If you did some sort of research while in college, you can try listing that, even if you have no intentions of pursuing an academic career - publications demonstrate uncommon expertise in a small area of a field, which can perhaps make up somewhat for a poor GPA.
Next, skills and experience: if you list a skill on your resume, list some way that you've demonstrated that skill, even if it's a hobby. Nothing says you can do a job better than having done something similar already, so build a portfolio of your work. I expect that you at least work on technical projects as a hobby, or else what are you doing in this field in the first place?
To summarize: you want to demonstrate to an employer that you have the skills and experience necessary to successfully perform a job for that employer. Merely listing the skill isn't enough; you have to prove, in one way or another, that you have the knowledge, intellectual strength, passion for the field, and work ethic to work on these sorts of projects. If your academic record does not demonstrate any of these qualities, you must find another way to do so if you expect anyone to hire you.
I remember reading a recent study that concluded what I had always suspected: there is a point of diminishing returns when it comes to homework. Once this point is hit, the student gets it already, and the student's time can be spent more productively doing something else.
I almost never went beyond this point in high school. I simply stopped working on assignments when I felt I extracted all I needed from them. Needless to say, my teachers were not impressed, despite the fact that my test scores were, in general, excellent. My grades were not good in high school, but this did not stem from a lack of understanding of the material (it's because homework is a significant portion of the grade).
I did spend some of my free time playing video games, but I spent most of it programming and reasoning through real problems. I still believe that this was a far better use of my time than working on the contrived assignments I was given in high school. It certainly paid off more in the end.
This is different in college and different still in graduate school, but that's outside of the scope of this discussion.
(Interestingly, the first year of a Ph. D. seems to regress back towards the high school model, but that's probably because everyone has you, as "the new student", doing all of the menial tasks required to conduct large-scale research).
The less work web designers have to do to ensure compatibility, the more likely it is that there won't be compatibility problems for visitors.
It seems to me that the only things that might break due to this change are those browser detection scripts that rely on the name of the browser. The engine is the same, after all.