The Saarland may be an out of the way part of Germany, but the Computer Science Department there is one of the best in Europe, especially with regard to fundamental research. In addition to the CS Department, on campus there's the German Artifical Intelligence Research Center (DFKI) and the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Computer Science, which both contribute to the research stature of the place. They're also planning to build a new MPI for Software Engineering at some point in the not so distant future there.
As for the geographic location, I'm not sure it's as beautiful as you're making it out to be. Saarbruecken is possibly one of the ugliest cities in the former West Germany and much of the surrounding area is dotted with steel mills and coal mines (many closed now though). There is some nice forest land though.
I lived there for almost two years, doing my MS in graphics (although I was associated with the group at the MPI, not the one mentioned in the article). Interesting place to be for sure.
I agree, American middle schools are truly terrible. It's really just a holding pen for awkward preteens, who have already learned the basics in elementary school, but aren't yet socially ready for high school.
My roommate from freshman year of college ended up spending four years in middle school, since he moved from a 6-8 school to a 7-9 school part of the way through. That must have really sucked. Two years was more than enough for me.
Heap sort can be worth it if you don't need all of the elements to be sorted. For example, say you wanted only the smallest 1% of elements from an array sorted.
A heap can be constructed in linear time, but extracting each next smallest element takes log time. Hence, getting the m smallest/largest elements out of an array of n elements takes O(n + m log n). If m is small, we're talking linear sorting time wrt to the total size overall. If n = m, the whole thing becomes O(n log n), which is the provably lowest bound on sorting any ordered sequence. However, in practice the heap overhead usually makes something like quicksort faster in such cases where m is close to n.
A classical example of where you might use this is Kruskal's minimum spanning tree algorithm. For a large graph, typically only a smallish fraction of the edges is ever needed. With heap sort, you avoid having to fully sort all the edges by weight.
True, but India's population is growing more than twice as fast as China's. CIA World Factbook gives annual rates of 1.44% for India, 0.57% for China, 0.92% for the US and Canada, and -0.45 for Russia.
Interesting comments, though I can't agree on the assumed superiority of the USA educational system. This is from personal experience, having observed non-USA engineers both at the postgraduate level and at work here in the USA.
I think it's important to recognize that the non-American engineers somebody would deal with in the US are generally some of the best those countries have to offer. Their abilities probably speak more towards their own intelligence and work ethic than the quality of their primary through undergraduate educational system.
For example, some of my Indian friends have talked about the various IIT campuses and how they compare to American schools. First, IIT is really the top of the heap in India with respect to technical education. Something like 2% of applicants are accepted (I don't remember the exact numbers but the percentage in the single digits for Computer Science). And then of those 2%, only the very best graduates will go on to do graduate school (postgraduate) in the West.
Despite the quality of these students, all of them said the resources offered by Western universities (specifically, this was in Germany) was vastly superior to anything in India. There might have been a lot of great students and even great instructors in India, but for money, equipment and future opportunities the West was the place to be.
In my experience, the US is somewhat better than Europe with regard to resources and opportunities as well, but it varies substantially by institution and field.
On another note, I do feel that American education (at least in Computer Science) does place a heavier focus on creativity than other education systems.
In my own experience in the German and American graduate educational systems, the American system (in my mind) clearly values and encourages creativity more than the German one. Virtually every course I'd ever taken in a German graduate program involved sitting in a lecture, doing some sort of homework (paper or programming) and then usually taking one big test at the end (some had midterms) that only consisted of questions slightly different (say, different numbers) than on the homework. I've heard similar things about other graduate education systems in continental Europe as well as those in eastern Europe (although the latter tend to more strictly prescribe which courses you must take).
A lot of the graduate level courses I've taken in the US have been project courses, where the students were expected to spend several weeks working on something (often novel), resulting in a working demo and a writeup. This is clearly better preparation for doing research work and is also more relevant to working in industry. It's my understanding, that in Canada, things are more in this direction than the Continental model.
I've actually taught Data Structures using both Java and C++. Both universities where these courses were taught did not choose these languages because they were used in industry. They chose them because they thought they would meet the needs of the specific course.
In my experience, the course in C++ was much less effective. The students spent much more of their time stumbling over the details of C++ (destructors, copy constructors, templates, the virtual keyword) than understanding the underlying data structures and OOP material. C++ is of course widely used in industry and academia, but it was just not the right language for those students at that point in their career for the material they were supposed to be learning. Personally, I'm not entirely sure why the department was using C++ at all. I imagine they wanted to teach it at that point since future courses would assume a C++ background.
In constrast, the course using Java worked pretty well. To begin with, Java (compiler and run-time) is available free (as in beer) and more or less runs the same on pretty much any system a student would use (Windows, Linux, Mac). Second, Sun has comprehensive documentation for the all their included built-in classes. I really liked this, because it allowed me to push the students to RTFM when they had relevant questions, which is a habit you want a programmer to pick up as soon as possible.
Java is also widely used in industry, but it just worked better for these students in that particular academic situation.
Most importantly, by the end of the course using Java, a majority of the students seemed to understand the tradeoffs between lists, arrays, vectors, search trees, etc. They were also writing medium sized programs that could do semi-interesting things. The same could not be said for the students (admittedly at a different and less competitive university) who did the course in C++. They were still confused about data structure tradeoffs and were writing programs that did little more than create a data structure and perform some trivial operations on it.
It's probably worth pointing out that in both cases this was the second course students had to take in a sequence, so all of them had some initial experience programming. In one case (C++ school) they had done their first semester using ML and in the other (Java school) they used Scheme.
As I sit and think about it right now, off the top of my head, I'm not sure of any language that would clearly be superior to use in teaching Data Structures than Java. There are plenty of languages which would be roughly as good, but nothing leaps out as obviously better. Sure, something more obscure could be used, but these tend to offer less portability and thinner documentation. A lot of nice languages like Python, Perl, Scheme etc. lack the more rigid typing of Java or C++. C limits coverage of OOP, which while not the solution to everything is a major topic that needs to be covered.
The problem with investing in an IRA is the money's locked in until your're old.
This isn't quite as true today as it used to be. For example, you can take money out of an IRA penalty-free to help buy your first home. That's definitely a closer goal for people in their teens and 20s.
The thing about that though is that junk food is often much cheaper. Corn syrup, sugar, bleached flour and the industrial processes used to make many of the foods loaded with them are very cheap.
If you're poor, you often buy whatever is cheapest. You're simply unlikely to cough up the extra cash for a loaf of whole-grain, organic bread. The whole thing is further compounded by the fact that a lot of poor people are not as well educated and don't necessarily know bad things like white bread are for them and their kids.
Usually in the US, you can buy 87, 89 and 91 (also 85 in some high altitude places like Colorado), but I know there is a different measurement used in Europe. In Europe RON is used. In the US, CLC is used, which is the average of RON and MON.
In my experience, there aren't many models of American cars that are both available in the US and Europe. I'm pretty sure that Ford doesn't make anything as small as the Ka in the US. There are some models (like the Ford Fiesta) that have the same name, but are in fact very different cars. One of the major reasons is that basically all American brand cars are actually built in Europe for the European market. Ford for example has a plant in Germany (near Saarlouis) and I think another one somewhere in Belgium. General Motors on the other hand only makes cars through its European subsidiaries like Opel and Saab.
In at least Germany and the Netherlands I did often see those Chrysler minivans (which are available in the US) driving around though, which I found quite odd.
The Christian Social Union really has nothing to do with socialism (as we know it in the American vernacular) or for that matter Christianity at all. It's just the mainline conservative political party in Germany. For example, the main opposition party is the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and they are often refered to as "social democrats". I would even go so far to say that the conservative CSU/CDU is actually more like the US Democrats, while the SPD is somewhere to the left of that even.
In Germany, at least, the term 'socialist' has never really had a negative connotation like in the US. In fact, it seems to be thrown around all over the place like we throw 'democratic' around.
CSU is simply the Bavarian equivalent of CDU, the mainline conservative political party in Germany. In reality, it doesn't have that much to do with Christianity at all.
There are many Max Planck Institutes in Germany that study all sorts of different subjects. I used to work for the one for computer science and we didn't do any quantum computing (;
Seriously though, the parent organization (the Max Planck Society) used to be known as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. After the war, they decided it would be better to name it after Planck.
The teaching is much more important than any single peice of research that they may be doing.
Here's the root of the problem really. The tenure system is designed in such a manner that teaching is not the most important thing in job promotion. I don't want to defend profs who can't teach, but there is more to a university than just instructing undergrads. In Computer Science, a professor's research and its associated funding is essentially the basis of graduate education.
A university needs to have people who can teach for undergraduate education and people who can research for graduate education. Unfortunately, it's often hard to find one person for both categories. Some schools now have "research professors" (no or minimal teaching obligations) and some "teaching professors" (basically tenured lecturers), where they try to separate out the strengths of various people.
The high end graphics market has really shifted away from these big iron sorts of machines in last several years. PCs (and clusters of them) have really eaten away at the market companies like SGI once held in high end graphics workstations. The increased power of desktop PCs and ubiquity of GPUs has really closed the performance gap (although the price gap does remain, which is why companies like SGI are struggling) between these systems.
I have to say this: For a long time, I've thought German education was superior to anything we had in North America, but in the course of my interactions with German exchange students over the past few years, I've been told that that notion is quite outdated. Furthermore, many Eastern Europeans and Russians tell me that their science and math education is much more rigorous than what they have in Germany (and has always been).
Ya, it's actually sorta sad. Germany is really the birthplace of the research university, but unfortunately it just hasn't kept up with the times (in my opinion). There is pressure for it to change, but from what I've seen it has been slow to occur. There seems to be this constant conflict between the camp that doesn't see anything (majorly) wrong with the current system and wants to keep things mostly the same, and the camp that realizes the current system is failing and wants dramatic changes. In the end, because of comprimise only some minor, relatively unimportant cosmetic changes end up being made.
However, by world standards Germany still does have an education system with good resources. There are a lot of students from Eastern Europe studying here. Despite a historically strong focus in their school system on mathematics education, there's just no money there. PhD students in Russia for example either have to work a job (often a low-level service job like a waiter) or live at home and be supported by their parents. There's very little money from the government or other funding sources. And the job situation after you graduate is miserable there too. So in comparison, Germany is still a really great place to study and especially to do research.
Still, I believe some schools are better than others... Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, TU-Muenchen, RWTH Aachen are among the best...
Yes, some schools are better, especially in certain fields, but the overall public perception (which probably isn't so accurate) is that these differences are not really that big or important. As CS research universities go, the big 4 are really (in no particular order) TU Munich, RWTH Aachen, Karlsruhe, and Saarland (CS is at the main Saarbruecken campus). I admit, I am a Saarbruecken alumni and people often leave it off that list, but it is very strong in Computer Science (especially in certain fields). There is more research funding per faculty in CS there than at any other university in Germany by about a factor of 2 (I think). According to Stern magazine's survey of students and professors, it also has something like the 2nd most satisfied students in Germany (after Luebeck). Heidelberg is a very famous university with many good departments, but it's not known for it's CS. Plus, a lot of the fame for certain universities seems to come from them being very old. Heidelberg is the oldest in Germany, with Freiburg and Tuebingen (both also very famous) not being too far behind in age I think.
It's worth pointing out that in the US and Canada, students enter PhD programs right out of their Bachelor's. Well, in Canada sometimes they make you enter an MS program officially first, but then all the courses transfer to the PhD program when you start that. My impression was that in the UK you have to do an MSc/MPhil/etc. first regardless and that requires some coursework.
So, I think when you add it up from Bachelor's on, it comes out to about the same. Of course, if you already have an Master's and transfer to a different US school, you typically don't save a whole lot of time on those 5 years, although it's probably more likely you'll finish on time, since you presumably have more research experience.
I do have to add that UToronto has pissed me off far too many times.
I had the opportunity to do a PhD (in CS) at UofT and I heard a lot of random comments like this from other people (ie, "UofT: where you're not even just a number"). While the location seemed really great, the faculty and students that I met nice, and there was good research going on there, it also seemed like the school is too huge to actually function in an orderly fashion.
It also seemed like there were some weird things with the funding. I guess the university is pushing a policy now to fund all PhD students for the "standard" duration of their studies, which for CS means 5 years. This seemed reasonable, until I started talking to other students, who pointed out that basically nobody finishes in 5 years. And then after that money is gone, you have to rely on your adivsor, who usually doesn't have a lot of external funding, since their students are already largely funded directly by the university and department.
I TA'd a CS class in Germany (in German) one semester. I'm a native American English speaker, who learned German in undergrad. Let me tell you, those foreign language classes you take at home only prepare you for dealing with literary and cultural studies, conversation, and daily life. Nobody teaches you how to say 'pointer' or 'worst-case running time' or even how to read a mathematical formula ('three times e to third plus the log of x').
If nothing else, it gave me a whole new appreciation of those poor foreign grad student TA's I had back home.
Fortunately, US food is more or less a superset of German food, but I still found it amusing to hear Germans (and other foreigners) talk about how disgusting a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or root beer was.
I'm an American and did a BA in Computer Science and German at Berkeley, then completed an MS program in Germany. I was also offered to do a PhD in Germany, but in the end decided to return to the US instead, mostly for personal reasons. In the end, I couldn't imagine living in this city (Saarbruecken) for another 3 or 4 years and I got tired of only being able to afford to see my family (in California) once a year. Also, being a foreign student really places you on the outside of things not just socially, but also with regard to the dynamic of a research group. After the novelty wears off, you get tired of having to struggle with common things in a foreign system like getting your phone disconnected or filing a tax return.
Perhaps the biggest reason though, was that I really didn't plan to spend the rest of my life in Europe, so it made more sense to complete my degree in North America. The longer you spend abroad, the harder it becomes both logistically (more stuff) and socially (all your friends here vs. all your friends and family at home) to return.
Currently, in Germany there is a movement (pushed by some EU agreements I think) to convert the structure of the education system to match the British model. Traditionally, you earn a Diplom in Computer Science, which is equivalent to an MS. More and more schools are changing to a BS/MS track though, which will make things easier for foreign students to study in Germany and vice-versa. Unfortunately, most schools are still doing Diplom programs, but if you look around you can find MS programs around.
Simultaneously, a lot of departments have started offering courses in English (especially CS departments) in order to draw foreign students. Since hardly anybody learns German in school, it's very hard for German profs to get great foreign grad students like their counterparts based in English speaking countries. You could certainly complete the MS where I did (in Saarbruecken) without knowing any German and you'd still have a good number of courses to choose from. At some other places though, I've heard cases where students would need to take say 4 courses and there are only 4 offered in English, so you have to take those specific ones.
One big downside to doing an MS at a German university though, is that it's hard to get any financial aid. Because the MS has replaced the Diplom (which is/was the first degree earned), MS students are still viewed and treated as undergrads in almost every way. However, for foreign students, there are scholarships available, but obviously not everybody can actually get one. The biggest source is from DAAD, which I believe is funded by the German government. A couple of universities also have some scholarships as well, but I think these are few and far between. I was lucky to get one from the Max Planck Institute (via the IMPRS) located in Saarbruecken where I studied. It paid 715EUR/month, which is plenty to live on, since the cost of living is relatively low and you only need to pay around 100EUR in fees per semester.
Here, there are a lot of jobs on campus usually doing various programming tasks for a research group. Foreign students are allowed to work these jobs, but obviously there's no guarantee that you'll find a job for which you have the necessary skills.
For PhD students, there is obviously more funding available, but it really depends on your advisor's funding situation. Unlike in the US, where many, many profs have external funding from DOD, NSF, DOE, etc. in Europe there's much more of a reliance on money coming directly through the university. Hence, it seems to me that there are a lot of profs who cannot fund their students particularly well. However, those that do have lots of funding, pay their students quite well. After taking into account cost of living, the compensation is better here, but not by a huge margin.
Ya, most cars I've driven do, but on a lot of them the print is small and not always backlit. I was driving my US late model Honda back from Vancouver to Seattle once at night and the metric part of the speedometer wasn't visible. Fortunatly, on a highway you can sorta follow the flow of traffic and be ok.
M/D/Y goes in the order you usually say a date in English. Hence, May 14th, 2004 -> 5/14/2004.
Compare to a language like German: 14. Mai 2004 -> 14.5.2004 or Spanish (most Romance languages follow a similar form too): el 14 de mayo de 2004 -> 14.5.2005.
Of course, in Britain they don't do it the same way as in the US, but like other European countries. Perhaps they got caught in a pickle, trying to decide whether or not to be different from other Europeans or different from Americans (;
However, ignoring the whole "how you say it" issue, it does make more logical sense to say the date then month then year, because the most used and fastest changing information comes first.
Actually, something like this already exists on some of the aircraft of several airlines (especially in business and first class, although I've seen it in coach). You need some sort of specialized adapter though to make it work.
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As for the geographic location, I'm not sure it's as beautiful as you're making it out to be. Saarbruecken is possibly one of the ugliest cities in the former West Germany and much of the surrounding area is dotted with steel mills and coal mines (many closed now though). There is some nice forest land though.
I lived there for almost two years, doing my MS in graphics (although I was associated with the group at the MPI, not the one mentioned in the article). Interesting place to be for sure.
I agree, American middle schools are truly terrible. It's really just a holding pen for awkward preteens, who have already learned the basics in elementary school, but aren't yet socially ready for high school.
My roommate from freshman year of college ended up spending four years in middle school, since he moved from a 6-8 school to a 7-9 school part of the way through. That must have really sucked. Two years was more than enough for me.
Heap sort can be worth it if you don't need all of the elements to be sorted. For example, say you wanted only the smallest 1% of elements from an array sorted.
A heap can be constructed in linear time, but extracting each next smallest element takes log time. Hence, getting the m smallest/largest elements out of an array of n elements takes O(n + m log n). If m is small, we're talking linear sorting time wrt to the total size overall. If n = m, the whole thing becomes O(n log n), which is the provably lowest bound on sorting any ordered sequence. However, in practice the heap overhead usually makes something like quicksort faster in such cases where m is close to n.
A classical example of where you might use this is Kruskal's minimum spanning tree algorithm. For a large graph, typically only a smallish fraction of the edges is ever needed. With heap sort, you avoid having to fully sort all the edges by weight.
True, but India's population is growing more than twice as fast as China's. CIA World Factbook gives annual rates of 1.44% for India, 0.57% for China, 0.92% for the US and Canada, and -0.45 for Russia.
I think it's important to recognize that the non-American engineers somebody would deal with in the US are generally some of the best those countries have to offer. Their abilities probably speak more towards their own intelligence and work ethic than the quality of their primary through undergraduate educational system.
For example, some of my Indian friends have talked about the various IIT campuses and how they compare to American schools. First, IIT is really the top of the heap in India with respect to technical education. Something like 2% of applicants are accepted (I don't remember the exact numbers but the percentage in the single digits for Computer Science). And then of those 2%, only the very best graduates will go on to do graduate school (postgraduate) in the West.
Despite the quality of these students, all of them said the resources offered by Western universities (specifically, this was in Germany) was vastly superior to anything in India. There might have been a lot of great students and even great instructors in India, but for money, equipment and future opportunities the West was the place to be.
In my experience, the US is somewhat better than Europe with regard to resources and opportunities as well, but it varies substantially by institution and field. On another note, I do feel that American education (at least in Computer Science) does place a heavier focus on creativity than other education systems.
In my own experience in the German and American graduate educational systems, the American system (in my mind) clearly values and encourages creativity more than the German one. Virtually every course I'd ever taken in a German graduate program involved sitting in a lecture, doing some sort of homework (paper or programming) and then usually taking one big test at the end (some had midterms) that only consisted of questions slightly different (say, different numbers) than on the homework. I've heard similar things about other graduate education systems in continental Europe as well as those in eastern Europe (although the latter tend to more strictly prescribe which courses you must take).
A lot of the graduate level courses I've taken in the US have been project courses, where the students were expected to spend several weeks working on something (often novel), resulting in a working demo and a writeup. This is clearly better preparation for doing research work and is also more relevant to working in industry. It's my understanding, that in Canada, things are more in this direction than the Continental model.
In my experience, the course in C++ was much less effective. The students spent much more of their time stumbling over the details of C++ (destructors, copy constructors, templates, the virtual keyword) than understanding the underlying data structures and OOP material. C++ is of course widely used in industry and academia, but it was just not the right language for those students at that point in their career for the material they were supposed to be learning. Personally, I'm not entirely sure why the department was using C++ at all. I imagine they wanted to teach it at that point since future courses would assume a C++ background.
In constrast, the course using Java worked pretty well. To begin with, Java (compiler and run-time) is available free (as in beer) and more or less runs the same on pretty much any system a student would use (Windows, Linux, Mac). Second, Sun has comprehensive documentation for the all their included built-in classes. I really liked this, because it allowed me to push the students to RTFM when they had relevant questions, which is a habit you want a programmer to pick up as soon as possible.
Java is also widely used in industry, but it just worked better for these students in that particular academic situation. Most importantly, by the end of the course using Java, a majority of the students seemed to understand the tradeoffs between lists, arrays, vectors, search trees, etc. They were also writing medium sized programs that could do semi-interesting things. The same could not be said for the students (admittedly at a different and less competitive university) who did the course in C++. They were still confused about data structure tradeoffs and were writing programs that did little more than create a data structure and perform some trivial operations on it.
It's probably worth pointing out that in both cases this was the second course students had to take in a sequence, so all of them had some initial experience programming. In one case (C++ school) they had done their first semester using ML and in the other (Java school) they used Scheme.
As I sit and think about it right now, off the top of my head, I'm not sure of any language that would clearly be superior to use in teaching Data Structures than Java. There are plenty of languages which would be roughly as good, but nothing leaps out as obviously better. Sure, something more obscure could be used, but these tend to offer less portability and thinner documentation. A lot of nice languages like Python, Perl, Scheme etc. lack the more rigid typing of Java or C++. C limits coverage of OOP, which while not the solution to everything is a major topic that needs to be covered.
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This isn't quite as true today as it used to be. For example, you can take money out of an IRA penalty-free to help buy your first home. That's definitely a closer goal for people in their teens and 20s.
If you're poor, you often buy whatever is cheapest. You're simply unlikely to cough up the extra cash for a loaf of whole-grain, organic bread. The whole thing is further compounded by the fact that a lot of poor people are not as well educated and don't necessarily know bad things like white bread are for them and their kids.
In my experience, there aren't many models of American cars that are both available in the US and Europe. I'm pretty sure that Ford doesn't make anything as small as the Ka in the US. There are some models (like the Ford Fiesta) that have the same name, but are in fact very different cars. One of the major reasons is that basically all American brand cars are actually built in Europe for the European market. Ford for example has a plant in Germany (near Saarlouis) and I think another one somewhere in Belgium. General Motors on the other hand only makes cars through its European subsidiaries like Opel and Saab.
In at least Germany and the Netherlands I did often see those Chrysler minivans (which are available in the US) driving around though, which I found quite odd.
The Christian Social Union really has nothing to do with socialism (as we know it in the American vernacular) or for that matter Christianity at all. It's just the mainline conservative political party in Germany. For example, the main opposition party is the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and they are often refered to as "social democrats". I would even go so far to say that the conservative CSU/CDU is actually more like the US Democrats, while the SPD is somewhere to the left of that even.
In Germany, at least, the term 'socialist' has never really had a negative connotation like in the US. In fact, it seems to be thrown around all over the place like we throw 'democratic' around.
CSU is simply the Bavarian equivalent of CDU, the mainline conservative political party in Germany. In reality, it doesn't have that much to do with Christianity at all.
There are many Max Planck Institutes in Germany that study all sorts of different subjects. I used to work for the one for computer science and we didn't do any quantum computing (; Seriously though, the parent organization (the Max Planck Society) used to be known as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. After the war, they decided it would be better to name it after Planck.
Here's the root of the problem really. The tenure system is designed in such a manner that teaching is not the most important thing in job promotion. I don't want to defend profs who can't teach, but there is more to a university than just instructing undergrads. In Computer Science, a professor's research and its associated funding is essentially the basis of graduate education.
A university needs to have people who can teach for undergraduate education and people who can research for graduate education. Unfortunately, it's often hard to find one person for both categories. Some schools now have "research professors" (no or minimal teaching obligations) and some "teaching professors" (basically tenured lecturers), where they try to separate out the strengths of various people.
The high end graphics market has really shifted away from these big iron sorts of machines in last several years. PCs (and clusters of them) have really eaten away at the market companies like SGI once held in high end graphics workstations. The increased power of desktop PCs and ubiquity of GPUs has really closed the performance gap (although the price gap does remain, which is why companies like SGI are struggling) between these systems.
Don't forget, Bubba was Rhodes Scholar, not just some dude, who's family connections got him into Yale, where he earned pretty low grades.
Sure, no problem.
I have to say this: For a long time, I've thought German education was superior to anything we had in North America, but in the course of my interactions with German exchange students over the past few years, I've been told that that notion is quite outdated. Furthermore, many Eastern Europeans and Russians tell me that their science and math education is much more rigorous than what they have in Germany (and has always been).
Ya, it's actually sorta sad. Germany is really the birthplace of the research university, but unfortunately it just hasn't kept up with the times (in my opinion). There is pressure for it to change, but from what I've seen it has been slow to occur. There seems to be this constant conflict between the camp that doesn't see anything (majorly) wrong with the current system and wants to keep things mostly the same, and the camp that realizes the current system is failing and wants dramatic changes. In the end, because of comprimise only some minor, relatively unimportant cosmetic changes end up being made.
However, by world standards Germany still does have an education system with good resources. There are a lot of students from Eastern Europe studying here. Despite a historically strong focus in their school system on mathematics education, there's just no money there. PhD students in Russia for example either have to work a job (often a low-level service job like a waiter) or live at home and be supported by their parents. There's very little money from the government or other funding sources. And the job situation after you graduate is miserable there too. So in comparison, Germany is still a really great place to study and especially to do research.
Still, I believe some schools are better than others... Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, TU-Muenchen, RWTH Aachen are among the best...
Yes, some schools are better, especially in certain fields, but the overall public perception (which probably isn't so accurate) is that these differences are not really that big or important. As CS research universities go, the big 4 are really (in no particular order) TU Munich, RWTH Aachen, Karlsruhe, and Saarland (CS is at the main Saarbruecken campus). I admit, I am a Saarbruecken alumni and people often leave it off that list, but it is very strong in Computer Science (especially in certain fields). There is more research funding per faculty in CS there than at any other university in Germany by about a factor of 2 (I think). According to Stern magazine's survey of students and professors, it also has something like the 2nd most satisfied students in Germany (after Luebeck). Heidelberg is a very famous university with many good departments, but it's not known for it's CS. Plus, a lot of the fame for certain universities seems to come from them being very old. Heidelberg is the oldest in Germany, with Freiburg and Tuebingen (both also very famous) not being too far behind in age I think.
So, I think when you add it up from Bachelor's on, it comes out to about the same. Of course, if you already have an Master's and transfer to a different US school, you typically don't save a whole lot of time on those 5 years, although it's probably more likely you'll finish on time, since you presumably have more research experience.
I had the opportunity to do a PhD (in CS) at UofT and I heard a lot of random comments like this from other people (ie, "UofT: where you're not even just a number"). While the location seemed really great, the faculty and students that I met nice, and there was good research going on there, it also seemed like the school is too huge to actually function in an orderly fashion.
It also seemed like there were some weird things with the funding. I guess the university is pushing a policy now to fund all PhD students for the "standard" duration of their studies, which for CS means 5 years. This seemed reasonable, until I started talking to other students, who pointed out that basically nobody finishes in 5 years. And then after that money is gone, you have to rely on your adivsor, who usually doesn't have a lot of external funding, since their students are already largely funded directly by the university and department.
I TA'd a CS class in Germany (in German) one semester. I'm a native American English speaker, who learned German in undergrad. Let me tell you, those foreign language classes you take at home only prepare you for dealing with literary and cultural studies, conversation, and daily life. Nobody teaches you how to say 'pointer' or 'worst-case running time' or even how to read a mathematical formula ('three times e to third plus the log of x').
If nothing else, it gave me a whole new appreciation of those poor foreign grad student TA's I had back home.
Fortunately, US food is more or less a superset of German food, but I still found it amusing to hear Germans (and other foreigners) talk about how disgusting a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or root beer was.
Perhaps the biggest reason though, was that I really didn't plan to spend the rest of my life in Europe, so it made more sense to complete my degree in North America. The longer you spend abroad, the harder it becomes both logistically (more stuff) and socially (all your friends here vs. all your friends and family at home) to return.
Currently, in Germany there is a movement (pushed by some EU agreements I think) to convert the structure of the education system to match the British model. Traditionally, you earn a Diplom in Computer Science, which is equivalent to an MS. More and more schools are changing to a BS/MS track though, which will make things easier for foreign students to study in Germany and vice-versa. Unfortunately, most schools are still doing Diplom programs, but if you look around you can find MS programs around.
Simultaneously, a lot of departments have started offering courses in English (especially CS departments) in order to draw foreign students. Since hardly anybody learns German in school, it's very hard for German profs to get great foreign grad students like their counterparts based in English speaking countries. You could certainly complete the MS where I did (in Saarbruecken) without knowing any German and you'd still have a good number of courses to choose from. At some other places though, I've heard cases where students would need to take say 4 courses and there are only 4 offered in English, so you have to take those specific ones.
One big downside to doing an MS at a German university though, is that it's hard to get any financial aid. Because the MS has replaced the Diplom (which is/was the first degree earned), MS students are still viewed and treated as undergrads in almost every way. However, for foreign students, there are scholarships available, but obviously not everybody can actually get one. The biggest source is from DAAD, which I believe is funded by the German government. A couple of universities also have some scholarships as well, but I think these are few and far between. I was lucky to get one from the Max Planck Institute (via the IMPRS) located in Saarbruecken where I studied. It paid 715EUR/month, which is plenty to live on, since the cost of living is relatively low and you only need to pay around 100EUR in fees per semester.
Here, there are a lot of jobs on campus usually doing various programming tasks for a research group. Foreign students are allowed to work these jobs, but obviously there's no guarantee that you'll find a job for which you have the necessary skills.
For PhD students, there is obviously more funding available, but it really depends on your advisor's funding situation. Unlike in the US, where many, many profs have external funding from DOD, NSF, DOE, etc. in Europe there's much more of a reliance on money coming directly through the university. Hence, it seems to me that there are a lot of profs who cannot fund their students particularly well. However, those that do have lots of funding, pay their students quite well. After taking into account cost of living, the compensation is better here, but not by a huge margin.
As actual instruction goes,
Ya, most cars I've driven do, but on a lot of them the print is small and not always backlit. I was driving my US late model Honda back from Vancouver to Seattle once at night and the metric part of the speedometer wasn't visible. Fortunatly, on a highway you can sorta follow the flow of traffic and be ok.
Compare to a language like German: 14. Mai 2004 -> 14.5.2004 or Spanish (most Romance languages follow a similar form too): el 14 de mayo de 2004 -> 14.5.2005.
Of course, in Britain they don't do it the same way as in the US, but like other European countries. Perhaps they got caught in a pickle, trying to decide whether or not to be different from other Europeans or different from Americans (;
However, ignoring the whole "how you say it" issue, it does make more logical sense to say the date then month then year, because the most used and fastest changing information comes first.
Actually, something like this already exists on some of the aircraft of several airlines (especially in business and first class, although I've seen it in coach). You need some sort of specialized adapter though to make it work.
Hey, Fred Brooks Jr. is still live and well!