I'm sort of curious how effective this sort of training is compared to normal best practice pamphlets, or even just a good hyperlinked "choose your own adventure" type website. I guess it could make it a little more interesting... but only vaguely.
We were working on something like that for an african country's military leaders, to practice counter-insurgency and aid missions. Although it was supposed to be somehow linked into actual actors on the scene somehow... never really got off the ground.
My CSE degree taught be absolutely nothing about sys admin work. Zero, zilch - you only talk about hardware in the abstract. I'd hope that a CIS degree of some sort would better cover it, but I'd still bet they leave out a ton of "best practices" type stuff.
But I wouldn't want someone without that degree designing our software components unless they had self taught themselves proper theory as well as just how to hack around in C++. Just in school even, there was such a huge average quality disparity in the code from EE students who had self taught themselves programming and the CSE majors.
In the end, it's about what you know and what you can do. You can learn that at school or on the job. If you only have schooling or only have experience you're going to have some significant gaps in your skills. Mostly a degree is shorthand for "I have seen this list of subjects before and proven my basic competency in them." If you don't have one you're going to have a little more work convincing people that you have covered the skills.
Personally, I'd recommend at least an associates. People like paper, and most schools do a decent job of trying to hook you up with your first job to get your foot in the door.
Not to mention the difficulty of scheduling a possibly several hour phone conversation during business hours PST when you're in Iraq.
One of the companies we work with is in Israel, and getting tech support through anything but email is a real pain. Business hours in Israel are 1 am to 9 am our time...
>90% of the people going into, say, structural engineering, have a basic grasp of newtonian physics from high school and maybe have sort of taken a drafting course. Very few of them could pass the whole first year of courses without showing up, and have designed and built their own houses (and done the math to make sure those houses stay up).
Whereas how many of the people going into CS already knew how to program, had been building and hacking their own systems for years, and could have practically skipped their first three classes in CS? Oh sure, they all think they know more than they actually do (especially when it comes to good coding practices instead of just making things work, but in general, even if the classes can't assume that level of knowledge the majority of the class has it and the majority of the class thinks everything is ridiculously easy.
You take a random person of any gender and toss them into that classroom without that background (all self-taught, btw, at least if you went to most high schools I've seen) and they will be intimidated and feel as though maybe they should be taking something else.
Now combine this with the observed data that the vast majority of the computer nerds in junior high and high school are boys, and you see that the problem starts long before college, and long before high schools even have a chance to start pushing girls toward or away from science. If they aren't hacking their graphics settings to let their overclocked system play the newest game on a shoestring budget, or learning perl and HTML to set up their own website, or setting up Linux on an old box their dad gave him because that's the cool OS their friends online use... they are most likely never going to think "hey, maybe I can get paid for this thing I'm doing for fun anyway", and they're not going to feel as though they belong in a class of people who *are* thinking that.
Figure out why girls aren't doing that, or somehow change the CS culture to be more like the rest of engineering (which *has* seem some increase in female population) and you might see the ratios change.
In my opinion it's because girls aren't encouraged to "geek out" and/or define themselves by their skillset as much. If you asked most young men to think about what really drives them in their sorts of hobbies - sports, cars, computers - I would wager that it comes down to two things - love of doing it, and being competent among their peers. It's not enough to play sports, or game - you have to be good at it, to earn the respect of those who know what that means. My experience has been that these are not the strongest motivators to many young women (although they are strongly found in women who *do* enter tech types of fields). But that's just my opinion and experience, I haven't read any of the good sociological data on that sort of thing.
My internship was around $15/hr, and my wife's was $16-17. My job was the "they actually hired you to work" kind, my wife's was the "sit around and read wikipedia" kind. That seemed fairly standard for our area (Ohio) for a CS degree, from what I've gathered from my friends. That was... three years ago.
Required service is no different from an income tax - in either case they are taking your time and life and efforts to benefit the government (or, less cynically, society at large).
Which is more beneficial to society - having college students work part time to pay for their bills or work in community service for free? I know at my internship pay in college I could have hired three people at minimum wage to do a service job for me instead, and I did of course pay income tax on that money.
Forced community service generally just means that government is paying people to do things that there's no money in doing. In case they didn't notice, 90% of the scholarships out there strongly encourage community service - don't see why it needs to be made mandatory.
Yes, a candidate who received > 90% of the votes from his racial demographic clearly shows that racism is on the way out.
Oh, you just mean racism against black people, not the other way around.
I think it'd be a bigger step if we stopped mentioning that he's black every five minutes, just as I don't remember anyone talking about the McCain is part Irish, or interviewing five Irish guys right after his nomination.
I mean, great for Barak Obama, and I don't care personally whether he's black, but this race has shown that although some views have changed (and for the better) racism is alive and well.
I would argue that kids using Kung Fu on each other is A-OK. Kids heal easily, and struggling will improve their balance, dexterity, strength, and pain tolerance, as well as giving them valuable insights into how to defend themselves from others.
Every predator's children wrestles and play fights their entire childhood, humans are no different. The important thing to learn is that just like tiger cubs, they need to learn that if they go too far or attack the wrong person they will get slapped back into line.
Controlled aggression is a useful tool. It's only when it becomes uncontrolled violence that it is deleterious to society.
Fifteen years ago I would have told you that porn causes objectification of women and leads to violence against them. A number of studies have indicated otherwise, and I have abandoned this viewpoint.
Hurrah for the internet, that has made such in depth studies possible:)
Agreed. It's a curse of our national media that everyone seems to lean on the federal government for everything now.
What have been the big federal initiatives in education lately? No Child Left Behind. The legislation that increases funding by 2x while increasing costs by 3x. The legislation that has killed nearly all external arts funding that can't directly be tied to test scores? The legislation that "pushes" lower scoring schools (ie, schools in poor, inner city neighborhoods) to increase their test scores or lose their funding (and possibly disappear, so that the kids will go where now)?
I realize that not every federal education initiative has to be this big of a clusterfuck, but I have no confidence in their ability to do anything else. The farther away you get from the students the less decisions will be made by someone who cares about something other than their polls and statistics. A local school board is directly answerable to the parents of the students and the community that those students become. They might have a chance to listen to some teachers. Even at the state level, education decisions are more likely to be made by an "education expert" who has never set foot in a real classroom, and will be based on which textbook or test-writing company lobbied hardest that year. Every move I've seen in the last ten years has been away from actually teaching subjects and more towards teaching the language of the current test.
Disclaimer: I don't work in education, but both my parents do, my mother as a teacher in an low income city school and my father as one of those traveling artist/historians that do special programs at schools.
I thought there were a few studies showing abnormally high rates of aspergers and autism (related or not) in areas with high numbers of tech workers and nerds.
That said, I'm entirely willing to believe that by the time any of these studies filtered down to the mass media level they were completely disproven or misunderstood. If you have a link to something more accurate on the matter I'd be glad to read it. My understanding of AS and Autism extends to the wikipedia pages and a recent diagnosis of AS of my adult cousin.
Actually, housing codes in general have very little to do with disasters and quite a bit to do with resale. They are to prevent people from making a house unsafe to live in and then selling it as a flawed product to someone else.
The unfortunate problem is that Mr. OP may know a bit about construction, and be able to tell that his wall is not load bearing, or even if it is, be able to put the proper supports in place to replace it. But he could also have the building skills of a chimp with a hammer, and go knocking out seriously important walls. I've been in houses where people have done that sort of thing (including so-called "professionals" running ductwork who have cut more than halfway through main support headers) and the result is an unsafe house that will in the best case sag in strange ways and in the worst case collapse and kill someone. The laws are there to protect people from ignorant or crooked builders... not that they do that much good, since I've only met one inspector in my career who wouldn't let things slide for the contractors who did a lot of business, and then turn around and nit-pick the small builders to death.
My advice to those who do know what they're doing (and this has been repeated to me by many handymen and professionals) is that if the job is inside and not of a scale that it's likely to destroy the house if you mess up, screw the permits. On a commercial site inspectors can drop by for any reason at any time to look at things. At a residence, they can only come in if invited or if there is something suspicious they can see from the road. ie, no one in the country gets permits for anything they don't have to. As a home-owner, if you get caught, you show up at the local courthouse and pay a fine (or claim ignorance and work immediately with the inspector to get a permit - you can get away with a lot, since *most* home-owners are ignorant of the local permit laws).
Was that ever actually true? If it was, I'd call it the good old days.
Of course, during the time it might have been true (goldwater?) the US government was busy having the FBI execute black militants, so they didn't have to hit too high of a standard to be the movement of less intrusive government.
The point is that the bible says a bunch of retarded shit, too, but the mostly Christian nations of Western Europe and the US still manage to be general decent people in a liberal sense DESPITE their religious bullshittery. Even the strongest fundamentalist churches in the US today do not generally recommend the stoning of anyone who works on Sunday.
As societies advance in wealth, as they are exposed to new ideas, they tend to liberalize, slowly, and the religions of that society adapt or disappear.
The problem is that there is a assumption in the US that most people bashing Islam are Christian, and are saying by implication that Islam is a bad religion, as compared to their own. This is caused by experience, because something like 80% of the US is Christian and many of them do seem to express that opinion.
This does, however, lead to arguments which are meant to expose the hypocrisy of that view, but on their own (without that shared assumption) merely show that both religions have violent crap in them.
"The Bible is violent, too" is a perfectly reasonable rejoinder if the origin poster claims that it is not -- so given the polls in the US there's probably a 50% or so chance that it was a decent argument, and a 50% chance that he's just making himself look stupid to the atheists who think all religious people are crazy.
I would bet that we'd be stuck in one foreign occupation instead of two, the TSA would still want a full body scan to get onto a plane, and the market would still be on fire with the government planning to dump taxpayer money on it until it goes out. The CIA was wanting to go ahead with torture before Bush greenlighted it. Freaking out over terrorism was a bipartisan thing, so we'd probably have had quite a few of the executive abuses of power still.
So yeah, not entirely the same, but still pretty crappy, from a libertarian point of view, I would expect.
Honestly, though, I am still a little more leery of democrats. Our great democrat presidents have left us with the programs that are likely to eventually bankrupt the country - social security, medicare, and medicaid - because they have no cap on their cost. Once a war ends, you stop paying for it. We will always have more and more old, sick, and poor people, unfortunately. Republicans just screw everything up for the short term.:/
We have lan parties at work with about 6 people every couple weeks. There's a net connection available, but it isn't fast enough for all of us to be playing on it lag-free at all.
Which is, of course, why units from California would be sent to attack Texas, and vice versa. You're keeping those other idiots in line, not like your family back home, who support you.
I had a friend in high school who took her PSAT while stoned out of her mind (I think it might have been prescription meds for something she caught that week, but that could have just been what she said in front of the teacher). She claimed there was a pink rabbit sitting on her desk her told her the answers.
Apparently it was a smart rabbit, as she scored pretty close to the top of her class.
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I'm sort of curious how effective this sort of training is compared to normal best practice pamphlets, or even just a good hyperlinked "choose your own adventure" type website. I guess it could make it a little more interesting... but only vaguely.
We were working on something like that for an african country's military leaders, to practice counter-insurgency and aid missions. Although it was supposed to be somehow linked into actual actors on the scene somehow... never really got off the ground.
It really depends on what you want to do.
My CSE degree taught be absolutely nothing about sys admin work. Zero, zilch - you only talk about hardware in the abstract. I'd hope that a CIS degree of some sort would better cover it, but I'd still bet they leave out a ton of "best practices" type stuff.
But I wouldn't want someone without that degree designing our software components unless they had self taught themselves proper theory as well as just how to hack around in C++. Just in school even, there was such a huge average quality disparity in the code from EE students who had self taught themselves programming and the CSE majors.
In the end, it's about what you know and what you can do. You can learn that at school or on the job. If you only have schooling or only have experience you're going to have some significant gaps in your skills. Mostly a degree is shorthand for "I have seen this list of subjects before and proven my basic competency in them." If you don't have one you're going to have a little more work convincing people that you have covered the skills.
Personally, I'd recommend at least an associates. People like paper, and most schools do a decent job of trying to hook you up with your first job to get your foot in the door.
Not to mention the difficulty of scheduling a possibly several hour phone conversation during business hours PST when you're in Iraq.
One of the companies we work with is in Israel, and getting tech support through anything but email is a real pain. Business hours in Israel are 1 am to 9 am our time...
And what do you do when that value is in the form of property, or a company.
Sorry, son, the family farm/business/house is being given to charity so the government can't get it.
Not all inheritable wealth is in the form of liquid assets.
As another former FIRST member, I agree 100%.
Guy give the most *depressing* speeches, though.
CS/CE is the hacker's engineering discipline.
>90% of the people going into, say, structural engineering, have a basic grasp of newtonian physics from high school and maybe have sort of taken a drafting course. Very few of them could pass the whole first year of courses without showing up, and have designed and built their own houses (and done the math to make sure those houses stay up).
Whereas how many of the people going into CS already knew how to program, had been building and hacking their own systems for years, and could have practically skipped their first three classes in CS? Oh sure, they all think they know more than they actually do (especially when it comes to good coding practices instead of just making things work, but in general, even if the classes can't assume that level of knowledge the majority of the class has it and the majority of the class thinks everything is ridiculously easy.
You take a random person of any gender and toss them into that classroom without that background (all self-taught, btw, at least if you went to most high schools I've seen) and they will be intimidated and feel as though maybe they should be taking something else.
Now combine this with the observed data that the vast majority of the computer nerds in junior high and high school are boys, and you see that the problem starts long before college, and long before high schools even have a chance to start pushing girls toward or away from science. If they aren't hacking their graphics settings to let their overclocked system play the newest game on a shoestring budget, or learning perl and HTML to set up their own website, or setting up Linux on an old box their dad gave him because that's the cool OS their friends online use... they are most likely never going to think "hey, maybe I can get paid for this thing I'm doing for fun anyway", and they're not going to feel as though they belong in a class of people who *are* thinking that.
Figure out why girls aren't doing that, or somehow change the CS culture to be more like the rest of engineering (which *has* seem some increase in female population) and you might see the ratios change.
In my opinion it's because girls aren't encouraged to "geek out" and/or define themselves by their skillset as much. If you asked most young men to think about what really drives them in their sorts of hobbies - sports, cars, computers - I would wager that it comes down to two things - love of doing it, and being competent among their peers. It's not enough to play sports, or game - you have to be good at it, to earn the respect of those who know what that means. My experience has been that these are not the strongest motivators to many young women (although they are strongly found in women who *do* enter tech types of fields). But that's just my opinion and experience, I haven't read any of the good sociological data on that sort of thing.
My internship was around $15/hr, and my wife's was $16-17. My job was the "they actually hired you to work" kind, my wife's was the "sit around and read wikipedia" kind. That seemed fairly standard for our area (Ohio) for a CS degree, from what I've gathered from my friends. That was... three years ago.
Probably varies HUGELY by geography.
Required service is no different from an income tax - in either case they are taking your time and life and efforts to benefit the government (or, less cynically, society at large).
Which is more beneficial to society - having college students work part time to pay for their bills or work in community service for free? I know at my internship pay in college I could have hired three people at minimum wage to do a service job for me instead, and I did of course pay income tax on that money.
Forced community service generally just means that government is paying people to do things that there's no money in doing. In case they didn't notice, 90% of the scholarships out there strongly encourage community service - don't see why it needs to be made mandatory.
Yes, a candidate who received > 90% of the votes from his racial demographic clearly shows that racism is on the way out.
Oh, you just mean racism against black people, not the other way around.
I think it'd be a bigger step if we stopped mentioning that he's black every five minutes, just as I don't remember anyone talking about the McCain is part Irish, or interviewing five Irish guys right after his nomination.
I mean, great for Barak Obama, and I don't care personally whether he's black, but this race has shown that although some views have changed (and for the better) racism is alive and well.
I would argue that kids using Kung Fu on each other is A-OK. Kids heal easily, and struggling will improve their balance, dexterity, strength, and pain tolerance, as well as giving them valuable insights into how to defend themselves from others.
Every predator's children wrestles and play fights their entire childhood, humans are no different. The important thing to learn is that just like tiger cubs, they need to learn that if they go too far or attack the wrong person they will get slapped back into line.
Controlled aggression is a useful tool. It's only when it becomes uncontrolled violence that it is deleterious to society.
Fifteen years ago I would have told you that porn causes objectification of women and leads to violence against them. A number of studies have indicated otherwise, and I have abandoned this viewpoint.
Hurrah for the internet, that has made such in depth studies possible :)
Agreed. It's a curse of our national media that everyone seems to lean on the federal government for everything now.
What have been the big federal initiatives in education lately? No Child Left Behind. The legislation that increases funding by 2x while increasing costs by 3x. The legislation that has killed nearly all external arts funding that can't directly be tied to test scores? The legislation that "pushes" lower scoring schools (ie, schools in poor, inner city neighborhoods) to increase their test scores or lose their funding (and possibly disappear, so that the kids will go where now)?
I realize that not every federal education initiative has to be this big of a clusterfuck, but I have no confidence in their ability to do anything else. The farther away you get from the students the less decisions will be made by someone who cares about something other than their polls and statistics. A local school board is directly answerable to the parents of the students and the community that those students become. They might have a chance to listen to some teachers. Even at the state level, education decisions are more likely to be made by an "education expert" who has never set foot in a real classroom, and will be based on which textbook or test-writing company lobbied hardest that year. Every move I've seen in the last ten years has been away from actually teaching subjects and more towards teaching the language of the current test.
Disclaimer: I don't work in education, but both my parents do, my mother as a teacher in an low income city school and my father as one of those traveling artist/historians that do special programs at schools.
I thought there were a few studies showing abnormally high rates of aspergers and autism (related or not) in areas with high numbers of tech workers and nerds.
That said, I'm entirely willing to believe that by the time any of these studies filtered down to the mass media level they were completely disproven or misunderstood. If you have a link to something more accurate on the matter I'd be glad to read it. My understanding of AS and Autism extends to the wikipedia pages and a recent diagnosis of AS of my adult cousin.
What you get is asperger's and autism :(
Actually, housing codes in general have very little to do with disasters and quite a bit to do with resale. They are to prevent people from making a house unsafe to live in and then selling it as a flawed product to someone else.
The unfortunate problem is that Mr. OP may know a bit about construction, and be able to tell that his wall is not load bearing, or even if it is, be able to put the proper supports in place to replace it. But he could also have the building skills of a chimp with a hammer, and go knocking out seriously important walls. I've been in houses where people have done that sort of thing (including so-called "professionals" running ductwork who have cut more than halfway through main support headers) and the result is an unsafe house that will in the best case sag in strange ways and in the worst case collapse and kill someone. The laws are there to protect people from ignorant or crooked builders... not that they do that much good, since I've only met one inspector in my career who wouldn't let things slide for the contractors who did a lot of business, and then turn around and nit-pick the small builders to death.
My advice to those who do know what they're doing (and this has been repeated to me by many handymen and professionals) is that if the job is inside and not of a scale that it's likely to destroy the house if you mess up, screw the permits. On a commercial site inspectors can drop by for any reason at any time to look at things. At a residence, they can only come in if invited or if there is something suspicious they can see from the road. ie, no one in the country gets permits for anything they don't have to. As a home-owner, if you get caught, you show up at the local courthouse and pay a fine (or claim ignorance and work immediately with the inspector to get a permit - you can get away with a lot, since *most* home-owners are ignorant of the local permit laws).
Was that ever actually true? If it was, I'd call it the good old days.
Of course, during the time it might have been true (goldwater?) the US government was busy having the FBI execute black militants, so they didn't have to hit too high of a standard to be the movement of less intrusive government.
Correlation does not imply causation in a scientific sense, although it could in an English language sense.
The best way to put it would be that correlation is necessary but not sufficient for causation, which is what is implied (haha) by the tag.
Exactly.
The point is that the bible says a bunch of retarded shit, too, but the mostly Christian nations of Western Europe and the US still manage to be general decent people in a liberal sense DESPITE their religious bullshittery. Even the strongest fundamentalist churches in the US today do not generally recommend the stoning of anyone who works on Sunday.
As societies advance in wealth, as they are exposed to new ideas, they tend to liberalize, slowly, and the religions of that society adapt or disappear.
The problem is that there is a assumption in the US that most people bashing Islam are Christian, and are saying by implication that Islam is a bad religion, as compared to their own. This is caused by experience, because something like 80% of the US is Christian and many of them do seem to express that opinion.
This does, however, lead to arguments which are meant to expose the hypocrisy of that view, but on their own (without that shared assumption) merely show that both religions have violent crap in them.
"The Bible is violent, too" is a perfectly reasonable rejoinder if the origin poster claims that it is not -- so given the polls in the US there's probably a 50% or so chance that it was a decent argument, and a 50% chance that he's just making himself look stupid to the atheists who think all religious people are crazy.
I would bet that we'd be stuck in one foreign occupation instead of two, the TSA would still want a full body scan to get onto a plane, and the market would still be on fire with the government planning to dump taxpayer money on it until it goes out. The CIA was wanting to go ahead with torture before Bush greenlighted it. Freaking out over terrorism was a bipartisan thing, so we'd probably have had quite a few of the executive abuses of power still.
So yeah, not entirely the same, but still pretty crappy, from a libertarian point of view, I would expect.
Honestly, though, I am still a little more leery of democrats. Our great democrat presidents have left us with the programs that are likely to eventually bankrupt the country - social security, medicare, and medicaid - because they have no cap on their cost. Once a war ends, you stop paying for it. We will always have more and more old, sick, and poor people, unfortunately. Republicans just screw everything up for the short term. :/
We have lan parties at work with about 6 people every couple weeks. There's a net connection available, but it isn't fast enough for all of us to be playing on it lag-free at all.
I've dropped my Titanium powerbook 3ft several times and have a couple dents and nicks that don't hurt anything.
Standard rules about anecdotes versus data apply.
It's a problem with any metal case. You pay for the lightness, looks, and, yes, durability over plastic.
A plastic case will snap and break, a metal one will bend a dent.
Which is, of course, why units from California would be sent to attack Texas, and vice versa. You're keeping those other idiots in line, not like your family back home, who support you.
I had a friend in high school who took her PSAT while stoned out of her mind (I think it might have been prescription meds for something she caught that week, but that could have just been what she said in front of the teacher). She claimed there was a pink rabbit sitting on her desk her told her the answers.
Apparently it was a smart rabbit, as she scored pretty close to the top of her class.