What evidence do you have that time spent in front of the TV and computer is time away from homework? Maybe it's time away from running around outside. Maybe it's time away from talking on the phone. Maybe it's time away from other academic related activity.
I have just an "obvious" correlation: spending all your time on homework leads to burnout, which leads to not caring and a drop in grades. You need "me" time in there too, and if the kid wants to spend that time on the computer or TV, that's fine. The trick is just not letting ALL your time become "me" time, and leaving enough time for the homework to get done.
You don't need to know the psychology of shooters to know how to treat a gunshot wound. Someone figured that out, it's taught to doctors, and we're all set. Similarly, SQL injections are known about, and ways of preventing them are known, so no, you shouldn't need a black hat to help secure you against those.
However, thinking up exploits is an entirely different matter. You can't defend yourself against something that you can't think of.
But now, we have hundreds of thousands of qualified people and many IT Professionals are highly trained in the area of Network Security
And yet we still have security holes out the wazoo. Clearly those hundreds of thousands of qualified people aren't doing enough.
Plus, how many of those hundreds of thousands of qualified people could explain how data execution protection is implemented on x86? How many of them even know that the x86 has a separate iTLB and dTLB? (My cynacism says "how many of them know what a TLB is at all", but we'll leave that behind...) And yet that knowledge is *essential* for understanding how the Shadow Walker rootkit works.
If I want to completely remove those features, I should be able to. And no malware should be able to.
Okay, so how do you determine whether what the user "wants" to install is malware? This is a non-easy question. (In fact, impossible generally.) Because we all know that the average user pays a lot of attention to the dialog boxes that opo up and would discriminate appropriately, right?
In all fairness, sometimes a video clip is an appropriate addition to a presentation. Using PDF means you have to change to another program to show it, while using Powerpoint means you could put it inline, which is slightly slicker when it works.
That works great until a man-in-the-middle attack.
You log into phisher's computer; phisher logs on to BofA computer; BofA gives phisher your site key; phisher gives you site key; you give phisher password. (With the challenge there might be an extra step of the challenge, but I bet even most people who would be careful enough to only enter the password with the site key verified would just assume that asking for the computer registration was a bug.)
A system like that buys you very little.
You need to pay attention to the SSL lock icon; there's not any other feasable way currently to verify the authenticity of your banker's site.
Well, credit card contracts explicitly mention fraud, and normally limit your liability to $50 in the case of fraud provided you report the fraud promptly.
In the interest of full disclosure, doesn't the federal government require them to?
(Then again, my credit card waives the $50 liability even.)
My first CS class at Georgia Tech was in Scheme, which has about the simplest syntax you can imagine. Therefore, we spent a few weeks on the basic syntax of that, and then spent the rest of the time learning about algorithms and data structures (e.g. recursion, lists and trees of various kinds, etc.). It's the algorithms and data structures that were the primary focus of the course, not merely the syntax of the language.
There are a few schools that use Scheme or ML (as at CMU) in their intro to programming course. I think I'm in favor of this technique*, and it's what I would consider to be an exception to my statement before that CS curriculums have a class on a language.
The second course I took was on Object-Oriented Programming. Again, we spent a few weeks learning Java syntax, and then the rest of the time was spent on OO concepts.
But then again, without seeing your curriculum, I might consider this a class on Java. I know you're covering more than just Java in it, but then again all those CS classes I said do too. Even mine did; there was coverage of the STL and how various data structures were implemented. So it was in some sense a mini data structures class mixed with C++.
To bring this back to what we were talking about before though, I do sort of wonder if my curriculum is too... technicalish, DeVries-like if you will, but there was a fair amount of stuff that wasn't really too. (So you wrote a MIPS-like assembler in C? We wrote a MIPS disassembler in MIPS assembly, and then ran it on a VHDL model of the chip.) However, regardless of whether it's trying to be the start of a computer SCIENCE curriculum or more technical, it's not currently doing its job.
The intro courses are changing starting now, so hopefully that will improve the situation a bit.
* Actually just about a week ago this came up in conversation, and I've sorta been thinking about it since (and a bit before too). It has a few problems, but I think it's the best solution. For instance, you'd probably want an introductory course in a language that would be immediately practical for non-CS majors who still want or need programming experience; currently the intro CS course seems to usually serve both purposes, so this split would require adding a new course.
Wow, you really did go to a bad school! No legitimate Computer Science curriculum has any business having a class "on C++" (or any other language, for that matter).
Bull. Just about EVERY CS curriculum has a class I would say is "on" a language. What would you suggest they do, just dump you in a class on data structures and say "program this, oh and by the way, you'll have to go learn this language on your own?"
Truth be told, I was really surprised at the difference too. Like I was writing a reply to your post that was basically just a generalization of my experiences, saying that "oh, I've had plenty of profs who gave out lectures" and stuff. I had it pretty much done and was thinking about it more, and decided that I should go back and look at my transcript and get actual numbers. One of the points was that I had the notion that there seemed to be a difference between CS and not-CS (though again, I was very surprised by the magnitude of it), so I decided to tally the categories separately, and out came the difference. I decided that it was likely the reason for the difference and rewrote the post with that as the central point.
I'm not entirely convinced he's doing it AT ALL for the money, despite him saying that the price is to offset the production cost. It might just be the case where he wants to do something for the people who miss lecture, but at the same time wants to discourage people from taking advantage of it.
If I was in a class like that and missed one because I was sick or had an interview or something, it's no big deal; $2.50 is cheap. But at the same time it starts to add up if you habitually miss class.
I don't necessarily think that the poster is entirely concerned about the IP rights per se. There does seem to be some of that, but my reading is that the concern is separate:
1. He doesn't want tape recorders in class and doesn't give out notes because of concerns about attendence, and 2. In the case of the other prof using his notes, my reading is that the concern is on the "without attribution" part. I suspect that if the other professor had asked to use the notes, your parent would have gladly agreed; it's the fact that the other person was (implicitly by not citing them) claiming the slides as his own work. (The latter I might consider grounds for tenure revoking if I was in change of a university BTW, considering that's what they do to students (rightly) if they don't cite sources...)
Well, there is a direct correlation between bad grades and lack of attendance of lectures even if the notes and powerpoints are posted.
I bet there's also a corrolation between the understanding your better students will get and if they are given the slides in advance too, and that corrolation comes out in favor of giving out the slides.
At least that's my experience.* If it can be generalized, you have to decide whether you want to make it harder on your better students in order to encourage the lazy ones to show up, or help understanding of the better students at the risk of having the lazy ones not show up. It depends on your course, the dynamics of your classroom, and your philosophy which is the better option.
One compromise that was used in one of my classes a little (though you could adapt it to be a lot more prevalent) was to occasionally leave information off of the slides that you distribute.
* I say that it's my experience because I found that being able to take notes right on the slides allowed me to cut down on the amount I was trying to scribble stuff from the board or lecturer's mouth and devote more time to actually listening to the professor and thinking about what he or she was saying. Because if you put up a finite state machine on the projector screen, I'm gonna be spending the next 30 seconds or a minute depending on how complicated it is copying it down (something like that I like to go over after I copy it too to make sure I get all the transitions right), and so anything you say during that time is going to only get half of my attention. Now, your example tells me you're probably not teaching a class where you're putting automata on the screen, but there's probably some similar stuff.
One compromise between the two things that was used a little in one of my classes is to provide slides in advance, but leave occasional critical pieces of information or examples out. Keep them in the "production" slides you use during lecture. That way you still make sure that people are either coming or comparing physical notes with friends to get the pieces that are left out, but you still provide a base to use so you're not frantically scribbling.
This is when PowerPoint slides might actually come in handy. Many professors misuse them, but correctly used, they are a powerful tool for presenting large amounts of information in a small amount of time.
I found the same thing to be true, but I'll add something else: I find them to be FAR less useful if they are not provided until after the lecture that they are used in. In fact, I think the difference in utility between "professor does not provide slides" to "professor provides slide after class" is less than the difference between the latter and "professor provides slides before class." In the latter case, you can print the slides out and bring them to class and take notes directly on the slides. It's rare (at least in my experience) that you are in a class where you both need to learn the material and don't need to take notes (even if provided slides), so the difference is whether you write stuff down on the slides or not. It's my habit that if I can't use the slides themselves, I tend to duplicate most of the information on the slides in my notes anyway, because then when I'm going back through there's actually context to the added information. Thus we're back to the scribbling thing.
(Note that a REALLY good student might take just the added notes on paper then go over the slides and add these notes to the slides after the fact, but I'm not that dedicated.)
The benefit of getting them pre-class is even more enhanced if the class involves picures or diagrams in the slides, because they take a long time to copy down and you usually can't abbreviate them. (Like if there's a finite automaton you can't be like "oh, I'll just leave off this state here, and this other transition there".)
Finally, I had one class where in order to stimulate discussion during class the prof had us look over the notes before class we were going to go over that day, and gave us a daily quiz on the material from those notes. (It was basic stuff; even if you didn't understand everything as long as you looked at the slides reasonably carefully you almost always did fine on the quizzes.) It sounds horrible, but somehow it managed to still be one of the better classes of my undergrad.
At the two universities I've studied at, only a few professors provide lecture outlines, and none that I know of provide full lecture notes
Really? I find this surprising. Though what major were you? I found that makes a big difference.
I did a survey of my undergrad transcript, making notes of which classes I took offered notes and which didn't. I didn't count classes where there wasn't really note taking (e.g. fencing or piano) and one class I couldn't remember if we got notes or not. All classes here are standard 3 credits. The results are:
Outside of computer science: 22 classes did NOT provide notes 3 classes did (a physics class, a psych class, and a poli sci class; in particular, there were no such math classes except one cross listed with CS (which is counted in the computer science section))
Within computer science: 5 classes did NOT provide notes 12 classes provided notes
Of the CS classes that provided notes, almost all were powerpoint slides used during lecture. There were: at least 5 classes that provided notes/slides before the lecture in which they were used at least 2 classes that provided the slides after the lecture in which they were used 4 classes that I don't remember wheter we had access before or after
Furthermore, I am currently in two grad classes at a different institution. Both classes provide slides; one class makes them available before and one after the corresponding lecture.
So I don't think it's necessarily a US/UK split; it's either a major split or just where you happen to go.
I agree. This idea doesn't really sit well with me either, but I'd have to think long and hard about any further classification of it, like if I were an administrator and asked to pass a regulation against it or something.
But, I thought of this too; regardless of what that decision would be, having your own text as a required book for the course can easily be FAR worse than this. There are cases where it makes sense, like if there's a standard book on a topic and you're taking the class from the author. But if it's just something where the teacher decided to write another book in a field where there were five million books already (say calc), it starts to look more like they're just doing it for the money. I even heard one person say they had a class where the book (authored by the prof) was one of the ones where there were tear-out exercises that were turned in for credit, so you had to buy the book NEW. The last point IMO is criminal.*
So I think there are a lot bigger fish to fry in terms of suckyness for students than this.
* Not "criminal" in the technical sense of being against the law (though I think you could make a decent case that it should be), but in the sense of being morally vapid.
Regular expressions are a good introduction to formal computer science because they're practically important and immediately useful, so they're not too boring, and at the same time they're the lowest level of formal languages and present a motivation for the mathematical abstraction of computing and for complexity observations
I agree. I'd like to see them more; I'm just saying that, at least at my school, we didn't.
How do you learn about compilers and formal language hierarchies without understanding regular expressions?
The class where we learned about regular expressions WAS the (only undergraduate) class where you learn about the language hierarchy. And few take it.
At my school you see BNFs in our PL class (which is required), but you don't go into anything more than showing that they are useful for defining part of the syntax of a language, and the complications that arise because of that, like ambiguity in parse trees, associativity, prescedence, etc. I don't think we talked at all about the larger picture of how CFGs describe a class of languages, and that there is a more restrictive set called regular languages, or anything like that. The only think I think we did on that line was to say that CFGs can't define all of the syntax of a language, and there might have been an anecdote about how something like type checking has to take place outside of the system because those aren't describeable by a CFG.
And certainly you've had practical courses about lex (and yacc)...
Ha... again, there's really only one course I think that covers this (compilers), and it's unpopular (even more than the automata and languages class) and only offered every other semester. You don't see lex or yacc in the normal flow of curriculum. And even in that class, the use of those tools was very poorly explained. I essentially had to go to 3rd party sources for instructions of how they should be used. (Then again, the compilers class was one of the worst courses the dept. offers. Here at my grad institution, the undergrad compilers course actually codes up a compiler through the course of the semester. (Fancy that.) At my undergrad school, we did a calculator in lex/yacc and two straight-line register allocators.)
I think that this discussion might reflect poorly on my school, and that's only partly what I intend. There's a lot they didn't do wrong too, and I'm definitely a much better computer scientist and programmer having gone through it. But, there's a fair amount they do wrong too, so this discussion has pulled out some of those complaints. (I also don't see how you can teach two semesters on C++ programming and cover neither virtual functions nor exceptions, but that's another discussion.) I'd be interested at comparing what I went through with other schools that seem like they should be in the same class.
Oh, and in the class where we learned about them, they were a lot simpler than what actual languages have. We learned about them from a theoretical standpoint, not a practical one. So you use [0-9]+? We learned to write (0 | 1 | 2 |... | 9)(0 | 1 | 2 |... | 9)*. [A-Z]{5}? We're writing out (A | B |... | Z) five times.
It's just as expressive, and makes the translation to and from FAs easier, but it's not practical.
Regular expressions are pretty much the first thing you learn in computer science.
Where did you go to school? At my alma mater, the only reason I learned about them AT ALL was because I took a small elective class (~20 people) that's offered once every other semester.
Granted, there are A LOT of things that it could have done A LOT better, and the curriculum is currently weak, but I don't think that this is an uncommon situation either.
The improvements from the Rebel to the Rebel XT (300 to 350) are definitely non-trivial, and that site doesn't do it justice really. dpreview has a better list. The DIGIC II is a huge upgrade, Canon unlocked a number of "custom functions" like mirror lockup (even if it was more a negative in the Rebel instead of an improvement in the XT), the faster operation is a huge advantage, etc.
The changes between the Rebel and XT seem a lot more defined and important than the improvements from the XT to the new XTi.
Our eyes are always moving, even if by almost imperceptable amounts. And they've proven how your mind makes your 'blind spot' look just as real and detailed as the rest of your vision.
Not only that, but most of the field of your vision look hi-res when really the only part of the eye that has good resolution covers about an area of your view equal to the size of a quarter held at arm's length. Go ahead, try it: open up Notepad or something and type a letter. Stare at it. Now don't move your eye off of it for the rest of the test. (This is actually a lot harder at first than you might think.) Start typing random letters. After just a few of them you'll stop being able to tell what they are. Yet when you're reading everything looks fine.
I think people know this implicitly, because if you pay attention to what you do when you're reading, driving, etc, you're constantly moving your eyes to follow the focus of what you're looking at. At the same time, I don't think most people realize how poor the vision is in most of our eyes.
Slashdot Mirror
Really?
What evidence do you have that time spent in front of the TV and computer is time away from homework? Maybe it's time away from running around outside. Maybe it's time away from talking on the phone. Maybe it's time away from other academic related activity.
I have just an "obvious" correlation: spending all your time on homework leads to burnout, which leads to not caring and a drop in grades. You need "me" time in there too, and if the kid wants to spend that time on the computer or TV, that's fine. The trick is just not letting ALL your time become "me" time, and leaving enough time for the homework to get done.
I disagree 100%. It's a stupid analogy.
You don't need to know the psychology of shooters to know how to treat a gunshot wound. Someone figured that out, it's taught to doctors, and we're all set. Similarly, SQL injections are known about, and ways of preventing them are known, so no, you shouldn't need a black hat to help secure you against those.
However, thinking up exploits is an entirely different matter. You can't defend yourself against something that you can't think of.
But now, we have hundreds of thousands of qualified people and many IT Professionals are highly trained in the area of Network Security
And yet we still have security holes out the wazoo. Clearly those hundreds of thousands of qualified people aren't doing enough.
Plus, how many of those hundreds of thousands of qualified people could explain how data execution protection is implemented on x86? How many of them even know that the x86 has a separate iTLB and dTLB? (My cynacism says "how many of them know what a TLB is at all", but we'll leave that behind...) And yet that knowledge is *essential* for understanding how the Shadow Walker rootkit works.
I just got two monitors in my office... looks like I have a new wallpaper for them! Sweet!
It just means that the range of wiring jobs out there is very narrow.
Or maybe the editor/submitter was having a bit of a Dickens moment...
If I want to completely remove those features, I should be able to. And no malware should be able to.
Okay, so how do you determine whether what the user "wants" to install is malware? This is a non-easy question. (In fact, impossible generally.) Because we all know that the average user pays a lot of attention to the dialog boxes that opo up and would discriminate appropriately, right?
In all fairness, sometimes a video clip is an appropriate addition to a presentation. Using PDF means you have to change to another program to show it, while using Powerpoint means you could put it inline, which is slightly slicker when it works.
Oh c'mon, the linguist is just trying to think different.
Heck, this case isn't even phishing.
That works great until a man-in-the-middle attack.
You log into phisher's computer; phisher logs on to BofA computer; BofA gives phisher your site key; phisher gives you site key; you give phisher password. (With the challenge there might be an extra step of the challenge, but I bet even most people who would be careful enough to only enter the password with the site key verified would just assume that asking for the computer registration was a bug.)
A system like that buys you very little.
You need to pay attention to the SSL lock icon; there's not any other feasable way currently to verify the authenticity of your banker's site.
Well, credit card contracts explicitly mention fraud, and normally limit your liability to $50 in the case of fraud provided you report the fraud promptly.
In the interest of full disclosure, doesn't the federal government require them to?
(Then again, my credit card waives the $50 liability even.)
My first CS class at Georgia Tech was in Scheme, which has about the simplest syntax you can imagine. Therefore, we spent a few weeks on the basic syntax of that, and then spent the rest of the time learning about algorithms and data structures (e.g. recursion, lists and trees of various kinds, etc.). It's the algorithms and data structures that were the primary focus of the course, not merely the syntax of the language.
There are a few schools that use Scheme or ML (as at CMU) in their intro to programming course. I think I'm in favor of this technique*, and it's what I would consider to be an exception to my statement before that CS curriculums have a class on a language.
The second course I took was on Object-Oriented Programming. Again, we spent a few weeks learning Java syntax, and then the rest of the time was spent on OO concepts.
But then again, without seeing your curriculum, I might consider this a class on Java. I know you're covering more than just Java in it, but then again all those CS classes I said do too. Even mine did; there was coverage of the STL and how various data structures were implemented. So it was in some sense a mini data structures class mixed with C++.
To bring this back to what we were talking about before though, I do sort of wonder if my curriculum is too... technicalish, DeVries-like if you will, but there was a fair amount of stuff that wasn't really too. (So you wrote a MIPS-like assembler in C? We wrote a MIPS disassembler in MIPS assembly, and then ran it on a VHDL model of the chip.) However, regardless of whether it's trying to be the start of a computer SCIENCE curriculum or more technical, it's not currently doing its job.
The intro courses are changing starting now, so hopefully that will improve the situation a bit.
* Actually just about a week ago this came up in conversation, and I've sorta been thinking about it since (and a bit before too). It has a few problems, but I think it's the best solution. For instance, you'd probably want an introductory course in a language that would be immediately practical for non-CS majors who still want or need programming experience; currently the intro CS course seems to usually serve both purposes, so this split would require adding a new course.
Wow, you really did go to a bad school! No legitimate Computer Science curriculum has any business having a class "on C++" (or any other language, for that matter).
Bull. Just about EVERY CS curriculum has a class I would say is "on" a language. What would you suggest they do, just dump you in a class on data structures and say "program this, oh and by the way, you'll have to go learn this language on your own?"
I never had any CS courses in college.
I guess that's the difference then.
Truth be told, I was really surprised at the difference too. Like I was writing a reply to your post that was basically just a generalization of my experiences, saying that "oh, I've had plenty of profs who gave out lectures" and stuff. I had it pretty much done and was thinking about it more, and decided that I should go back and look at my transcript and get actual numbers. One of the points was that I had the notion that there seemed to be a difference between CS and not-CS (though again, I was very surprised by the magnitude of it), so I decided to tally the categories separately, and out came the difference. I decided that it was likely the reason for the difference and rewrote the post with that as the central point.
I'm not entirely convinced he's doing it AT ALL for the money, despite him saying that the price is to offset the production cost. It might just be the case where he wants to do something for the people who miss lecture, but at the same time wants to discourage people from taking advantage of it.
If I was in a class like that and missed one because I was sick or had an interview or something, it's no big deal; $2.50 is cheap. But at the same time it starts to add up if you habitually miss class.
I don't necessarily think that the poster is entirely concerned about the IP rights per se. There does seem to be some of that, but my reading is that the concern is separate:
1. He doesn't want tape recorders in class and doesn't give out notes because of concerns about attendence, and
2. In the case of the other prof using his notes, my reading is that the concern is on the "without attribution" part. I suspect that if the other professor had asked to use the notes, your parent would have gladly agreed; it's the fact that the other person was (implicitly by not citing them) claiming the slides as his own work. (The latter I might consider grounds for tenure revoking if I was in change of a university BTW, considering that's what they do to students (rightly) if they don't cite sources...)
Well, there is a direct correlation between bad grades and lack of attendance of lectures even if the notes and powerpoints are posted.
I bet there's also a corrolation between the understanding your better students will get and if they are given the slides in advance too, and that corrolation comes out in favor of giving out the slides.
At least that's my experience.* If it can be generalized, you have to decide whether you want to make it harder on your better students in order to encourage the lazy ones to show up, or help understanding of the better students at the risk of having the lazy ones not show up. It depends on your course, the dynamics of your classroom, and your philosophy which is the better option.
One compromise that was used in one of my classes a little (though you could adapt it to be a lot more prevalent) was to occasionally leave information off of the slides that you distribute.
* I say that it's my experience because I found that being able to take notes right on the slides allowed me to cut down on the amount I was trying to scribble stuff from the board or lecturer's mouth and devote more time to actually listening to the professor and thinking about what he or she was saying. Because if you put up a finite state machine on the projector screen, I'm gonna be spending the next 30 seconds or a minute depending on how complicated it is copying it down (something like that I like to go over after I copy it too to make sure I get all the transitions right), and so anything you say during that time is going to only get half of my attention. Now, your example tells me you're probably not teaching a class where you're putting automata on the screen, but there's probably some similar stuff.
One compromise between the two things that was used a little in one of my classes is to provide slides in advance, but leave occasional critical pieces of information or examples out. Keep them in the "production" slides you use during lecture. That way you still make sure that people are either coming or comparing physical notes with friends to get the pieces that are left out, but you still provide a base to use so you're not frantically scribbling.
This is when PowerPoint slides might actually come in handy. Many professors misuse them, but correctly used, they are a powerful tool for presenting large amounts of information in a small amount of time.
I found the same thing to be true, but I'll add something else: I find them to be FAR less useful if they are not provided until after the lecture that they are used in. In fact, I think the difference in utility between "professor does not provide slides" to "professor provides slide after class" is less than the difference between the latter and "professor provides slides before class." In the latter case, you can print the slides out and bring them to class and take notes directly on the slides. It's rare (at least in my experience) that you are in a class where you both need to learn the material and don't need to take notes (even if provided slides), so the difference is whether you write stuff down on the slides or not. It's my habit that if I can't use the slides themselves, I tend to duplicate most of the information on the slides in my notes anyway, because then when I'm going back through there's actually context to the added information. Thus we're back to the scribbling thing.
(Note that a REALLY good student might take just the added notes on paper then go over the slides and add these notes to the slides after the fact, but I'm not that dedicated.)
The benefit of getting them pre-class is even more enhanced if the class involves picures or diagrams in the slides, because they take a long time to copy down and you usually can't abbreviate them. (Like if there's a finite automaton you can't be like "oh, I'll just leave off this state here, and this other transition there".)
Finally, I had one class where in order to stimulate discussion during class the prof had us look over the notes before class we were going to go over that day, and gave us a daily quiz on the material from those notes. (It was basic stuff; even if you didn't understand everything as long as you looked at the slides reasonably carefully you almost always did fine on the quizzes.) It sounds horrible, but somehow it managed to still be one of the better classes of my undergrad.
At the two universities I've studied at, only a few professors provide lecture outlines, and none that I know of provide full lecture notes
Really? I find this surprising. Though what major were you? I found that makes a big difference.
I did a survey of my undergrad transcript, making notes of which classes I took offered notes and which didn't. I didn't count classes where there wasn't really note taking (e.g. fencing or piano) and one class I couldn't remember if we got notes or not. All classes here are standard 3 credits. The results are:
Outside of computer science:
22 classes did NOT provide notes
3 classes did (a physics class, a psych class, and a poli sci class; in particular, there were no such math classes except one cross listed with CS (which is counted in the computer science section))
Within computer science:
5 classes did NOT provide notes
12 classes provided notes
Of the CS classes that provided notes, almost all were powerpoint slides used during lecture. There were:
at least 5 classes that provided notes/slides before the lecture in which they were used
at least 2 classes that provided the slides after the lecture in which they were used
4 classes that I don't remember wheter we had access before or after
Furthermore, I am currently in two grad classes at a different institution. Both classes provide slides; one class makes them available before and one after the corresponding lecture.
So I don't think it's necessarily a US/UK split; it's either a major split or just where you happen to go.
I agree. This idea doesn't really sit well with me either, but I'd have to think long and hard about any further classification of it, like if I were an administrator and asked to pass a regulation against it or something.
But, I thought of this too; regardless of what that decision would be, having your own text as a required book for the course can easily be FAR worse than this. There are cases where it makes sense, like if there's a standard book on a topic and you're taking the class from the author. But if it's just something where the teacher decided to write another book in a field where there were five million books already (say calc), it starts to look more like they're just doing it for the money. I even heard one person say they had a class where the book (authored by the prof) was one of the ones where there were tear-out exercises that were turned in for credit, so you had to buy the book NEW. The last point IMO is criminal.*
So I think there are a lot bigger fish to fry in terms of suckyness for students than this.
* Not "criminal" in the technical sense of being against the law (though I think you could make a decent case that it should be), but in the sense of being morally vapid.
Regular expressions are a good introduction to formal computer science because they're practically important and immediately useful, so they're not too boring, and at the same time they're the lowest level of formal languages and present a motivation for the mathematical abstraction of computing and for complexity observations
I agree. I'd like to see them more; I'm just saying that, at least at my school, we didn't.
How do you learn about compilers and formal language hierarchies without understanding regular expressions?
The class where we learned about regular expressions WAS the (only undergraduate) class where you learn about the language hierarchy. And few take it.
At my school you see BNFs in our PL class (which is required), but you don't go into anything more than showing that they are useful for defining part of the syntax of a language, and the complications that arise because of that, like ambiguity in parse trees, associativity, prescedence, etc. I don't think we talked at all about the larger picture of how CFGs describe a class of languages, and that there is a more restrictive set called regular languages, or anything like that. The only think I think we did on that line was to say that CFGs can't define all of the syntax of a language, and there might have been an anecdote about how something like type checking has to take place outside of the system because those aren't describeable by a CFG.
And certainly you've had practical courses about lex (and yacc)...
Ha... again, there's really only one course I think that covers this (compilers), and it's unpopular (even more than the automata and languages class) and only offered every other semester. You don't see lex or yacc in the normal flow of curriculum. And even in that class, the use of those tools was very poorly explained. I essentially had to go to 3rd party sources for instructions of how they should be used. (Then again, the compilers class was one of the worst courses the dept. offers. Here at my grad institution, the undergrad compilers course actually codes up a compiler through the course of the semester. (Fancy that.) At my undergrad school, we did a calculator in lex/yacc and two straight-line register allocators.)
I think that this discussion might reflect poorly on my school, and that's only partly what I intend. There's a lot they didn't do wrong too, and I'm definitely a much better computer scientist and programmer having gone through it. But, there's a fair amount they do wrong too, so this discussion has pulled out some of those complaints. (I also don't see how you can teach two semesters on C++ programming and cover neither virtual functions nor exceptions, but that's another discussion.) I'd be interested at comparing what I went through with other schools that seem like they should be in the same class.
Oh, and in the class where we learned about them, they were a lot simpler than what actual languages have. We learned about them from a theoretical standpoint, not a practical one. So you use [0-9]+? We learned to write (0 | 1 | 2 | ... | 9)(0 | 1 | 2 | ... | 9)*. [A-Z]{5}? We're writing out (A | B | ... | Z) five times.
It's just as expressive, and makes the translation to and from FAs easier, but it's not practical.
Regular expressions are pretty much the first thing you learn in computer science.
Where did you go to school? At my alma mater, the only reason I learned about them AT ALL was because I took a small elective class (~20 people) that's offered once every other semester.
Granted, there are A LOT of things that it could have done A LOT better, and the curriculum is currently weak, but I don't think that this is an uncommon situation either.
The improvements from the Rebel to the Rebel XT (300 to 350) are definitely non-trivial, and that site doesn't do it justice really. dpreview has a better list. The DIGIC II is a huge upgrade, Canon unlocked a number of "custom functions" like mirror lockup (even if it was more a negative in the Rebel instead of an improvement in the XT), the faster operation is a huge advantage, etc.
The changes between the Rebel and XT seem a lot more defined and important than the improvements from the XT to the new XTi.
Our eyes are always moving, even if by almost imperceptable amounts. And they've proven how your mind makes your 'blind spot' look just as real and detailed as the rest of your vision.
Not only that, but most of the field of your vision look hi-res when really the only part of the eye that has good resolution covers about an area of your view equal to the size of a quarter held at arm's length. Go ahead, try it: open up Notepad or something and type a letter. Stare at it. Now don't move your eye off of it for the rest of the test. (This is actually a lot harder at first than you might think.) Start typing random letters. After just a few of them you'll stop being able to tell what they are. Yet when you're reading everything looks fine.
I think people know this implicitly, because if you pay attention to what you do when you're reading, driving, etc, you're constantly moving your eyes to follow the focus of what you're looking at. At the same time, I don't think most people realize how poor the vision is in most of our eyes.