Well, one could construct an elitist argument that, given the current application over-subscription, MIT could elect to be choosier about language skills. On the other hand, such a policy would preclude admission to talented foreign students and to others who haven't focused on those skills. I suspect that MIT Admissions strikes a good balance. They have always been very serious about analyzing their performance and refining their metrics.
I guess my answer would be, "both." But let's give a pass to those students who clearly don't need remedial instruction.
I went to MIT during the same time period. I wrote well when I arrived, so guess what? I wrote well when I left. The Humanities courses were a total waste of time for me. Thirty years on, I can't recall a single inspiring thought or insight that was transmitted to me by the unhappy and unpleasant faculty in the MIT Humanities Department.
You may have been some kind of weird-ass nerd genius ("the technical stuff was easy"), but please don't assume that everyone else requires two years of remedial training in order to become a human being. We don't.
It does work. Temporarily. I worked with a guy who had dropped out of chiropractic school when he realized that all he was doing was applying nerve blocks and other techniques that weren't really "curing" anything. He couldn't reconcile that with his personal moral code.
He once "cured" my neck pain in 5 seconds with some pressure to a spot in my upper back/neck. The "cure" worked for several hours, it was really miraculous. Then the pain came back, as he predicted it would.
That's their secret. They keep you coming back for relief, because the relief is real -- for a while. Is this better than taking lots of drugs? I'm sure it is, for some people. But the chiropractic claims that "spinal adjustment" has anything to do with anything at all are ridiculous and were disproved 50 years ago. See "Fads and Fallacies" by Martin Gardner for an interesting history and discussion of chiropractic.
In Manhattan, if you are new to the city, it's very easy to do a lot of walking before you can figure out E from W. Here's the scenario.
You climb out of the subway, say at the middle of W 28th (R or W line), trying to adjust to the bright outside light. You look around stupidly. Everyone else seems to know where they're going, and they're in a big hurry to get there, and you are creating a nuisance by standing still. You can't see the horizon because of the tall buildings. So it is not clear where the sun is, plus maybe it's noon or it's overcast or it's nighttime and it wouldn't help anyway. So you pick a random direction and start walking.
You've been told by people like the parent poster that it's easy to get around Manhattan because street numbers increase S to N and avenue numbers increase E to W. OK, say you ended up walking E on W28th to get to an avenue. Turns out it's Fifth Avenue. Cool, but you need another data point. So you keep walking. You get to "Madison Avenue." No help there, "Madison Avenue" doesn't have a number, so WTF. You keep walking. You get to "Park Avenue". Still no help. So you keep walking. You get to "Lexington Avenue." Still no help. Fuck! OK, turn around, walk the other way. Past Park, past Madison, back to Fifth, next Avenue... shit! "Avenue of the Americas." No help there. So you walk another block, and Hallelujah! It's Seventh. Congratulations. You're oriented. Too bad, you really wanted 3rd Avenue, which means you need to walk back the other way 6 blocks... past Avenue of the Americas, Fifth, Madison, Park, Lex, and whoo hoo finally you get to Third.
At this point you've walked 13 blocks, and these are Avenue blocks, not street blocks. Maybe you've walked about 1.5 miles at this point, maybe 2. That's a lot of walking, 30-40 minutes minimally, given waiting for traffic lights and so on.
OK, OK, New Yorkers, you've been jumping up and down yelling "THE STREETS CHANGE THEIR NAMES AT FIFTH AVENUE YOU DUMMY!" Yes, in the example above, the street name changes from "W 28th" to "E 28th" after we passed Fifth Avenue the first time. That's certainly an important clue -- but hell, I already KNOW I'm on 28th, so I'm not exactly studying the damn street sign to see if I'm still on it, am I? The change from "W" to "E" is easy to miss. And I could set up the problem such that I started on the east side, and I would still do a lot of walking.
And don't even get me started on lower Manhattan where the streets stop having numbers at all and start going in completely random directions, along with the subways, which as soon as they enter Lower Manhattan, feel the need to make a zillion right-angle turns amid much squealing of wheels, as though they're confused too.
Bottom line: before you walk around Manhattan, have a street map (in some form) with you. At least memorize the Avenue names and their ordering. And, yeah, it does help in some cases to remember that the street names change from "E " to "W " at Fifth Avenue.
I have little patience with a system that is so obviously broken. Software patents can't be granted. Process patents can't be granted. Patent law must catch up to reality. Until then, we can all argue about precedents and manuals of procedure and anything we want, but it's a complete waste of time.
Eventually enough Congresscritters will wake up to the fact that this is bad and broken (probably at the point where the Chinese et al are kicking our stupid legal-ass butts all over the map) and wipe the whole thing out. Unless, of course, they're paid off by the companies that have invested $billions in accumulating patent war chests -- who are the only ones who benefit from patents, anyway (you can name on the fingers of one hand the "individual inventors" whom the system actually protected).
It's exactly the dumb terminal scenario again. Now that we've successfully translated every CICS application to the web, who needs anything but the modern equivalent of the 3270? Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
What we've mostly been busy doing for the last 10 years is reinventing CICS. The same old business applications that generated bazillions in revenue and worked well under CICS have now been (painfully) rewritten to work on hopelessly buggy Web browsers across the public net.
Or the reflexive criticism of the screamer of "groupthink", of which the parent is an example. Or the reflexive criticism of the criticizer of the screamer of "groupthink", of which this comment is an example. Or... [stack overflow]
You apparently do not know that an MIT education is affordable by practically everyone, because of their extremely aggressive scholarship program. This casts doubt on your assertion that you were admitted.
Be that as it may, you'd be fine at any of the three institutions mentioned, although because of your bio inclination I'd say MIT has an edge.
I made the same decision, gave up on the comments for the same reason, was about to make exactly your point.. and then I encountered your comment. Very strange sensation.
While there's no doubting her accomplishments, I will say that my enjoyment of 6.170 was in spite of her.
Not surprised.
I had no use for her in 1978. She actively assisted in flunking a good friend of mine out of the PhD program. She turned down a thesis idea I had, called it "totally the wrong direction" -- and three years later a guy got a PhD and an award with the same idea at Waterloo.
Maybe she mellowed with age, but given your comment, I guess not.
Wrong. Government DID stimulate the economy out of the Depression, and Roosevelt essentially prevented a revolution (Hoover, though, did nothing useful). It's true, though, that Roosevelt's pre-war stimulus plans were too small. It took WWII and pretty much unrestrained government spending to get us fully back on track.
How do I figure out whether my main switch is "double throw" or not? My main switch (on a 200A panel) just looks like a heavy-duty light switch that says "On" and "Off". House was built circa 1981, if that helps.
Most web applications are doing the same thing functionally as the forms-based COBOL business applications that you rail against, except that now those very same forms-based business applications "run on the Web" with a prettier UI.
Sure, the skill set required to make a forms-based business app run properly on the web (tolerant of JScript missing, full use of CSS, leveraging XMLHttpRequest() for better interactivity, etc.) is important; but what I worry about is not that the app fails to work well or properly under [some platform].[some browser].[some config], but rather that the basic *functionality* of apps seems to have been taking a back seat to Web UI frenzy.
For example, where does the Google rubber hit the road? It ain't the UI, it's the down-and-dirty code, running on the server farms. Not HTML, CSS, Javascript, XSL, PHP, ASP, JSP, and SQL.
You say you once were a C coder, so you understand what I'm saying.
anyone with enough knowledge can tell that there is a perfectly justified field of knowledge there to be studied.
Really? There's been a massive discussion for the last 20 years on this very topic, in CACM and other CS journals, led by faculty who have a great deal of difficulty both defining CS and justifying themselves to other academics. But I'm glad the world is so simple for you.
I've never had to use Modern Algebra, and it was a terrible class (Ron Rivest is a nice guy, but at the time, at least, was a really awful lecturer). But I sure wish I'd paid more attention to the linear algebra course, and the probability course that seemed completely inapplicable back then has been enormously useful to me over the years.
I'm not sure you can ever justify a core curriculum to students. It may be an impossibly high bar.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, one could construct an elitist argument that, given the current application over-subscription, MIT could elect to be choosier about language skills. On the other hand, such a policy would preclude admission to talented foreign students and to others who haven't focused on those skills. I suspect that MIT Admissions strikes a good balance. They have always been very serious about analyzing their performance and refining their metrics.
I guess my answer would be, "both." But let's give a pass to those students who clearly don't need remedial instruction.
As an exercise that may be helpful to you in future, see if you can identify the flaw in your comment from this list of fallacious arguments: http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html.
Then get off my lawn.
I went to MIT during the same time period. I wrote well when I arrived, so guess what? I wrote well when I left. The Humanities courses were a total waste of time for me. Thirty years on, I can't recall a single inspiring thought or insight that was transmitted to me by the unhappy and unpleasant faculty in the MIT Humanities Department.
You may have been some kind of weird-ass nerd genius ("the technical stuff was easy"), but please don't assume that everyone else requires two years of remedial training in order to become a human being. We don't.
It does work. Temporarily. I worked with a guy who had dropped out of chiropractic school when he realized that all he was doing was applying nerve blocks and other techniques that weren't really "curing" anything. He couldn't reconcile that with his personal moral code.
He once "cured" my neck pain in 5 seconds with some pressure to a spot in my upper back/neck. The "cure" worked for several hours, it was really miraculous. Then the pain came back, as he predicted it would.
That's their secret. They keep you coming back for relief, because the relief is real -- for a while. Is this better than taking lots of drugs? I'm sure it is, for some people. But the chiropractic claims that "spinal adjustment" has anything to do with anything at all are ridiculous and were disproved 50 years ago. See "Fads and Fallacies" by Martin Gardner for an interesting history and discussion of chiropractic.
In Manhattan, if you are new to the city, it's very easy to do a lot of walking before you can figure out E from W. Here's the scenario.
You climb out of the subway, say at the middle of W 28th (R or W line), trying to adjust to the bright outside light. You look around stupidly. Everyone else seems to know where they're going, and they're in a big hurry to get there, and you are creating a nuisance by standing still. You can't see the horizon because of the tall buildings. So it is not clear where the sun is, plus maybe it's noon or it's overcast or it's nighttime and it wouldn't help anyway. So you pick a random direction and start walking.
You've been told by people like the parent poster that it's easy to get around Manhattan because street numbers increase S to N and avenue numbers increase E to W. OK, say you ended up walking E on W28th to get to an avenue. Turns out it's Fifth Avenue. Cool, but you need another data point. So you keep walking. You get to "Madison Avenue." No help there, "Madison Avenue" doesn't have a number, so WTF. You keep walking. You get to "Park Avenue". Still no help. So you keep walking. You get to "Lexington Avenue." Still no help. Fuck! OK, turn around, walk the other way. Past Park, past Madison, back to Fifth, next Avenue... shit! "Avenue of the Americas." No help there. So you walk another block, and Hallelujah! It's Seventh. Congratulations. You're oriented. Too bad, you really wanted 3rd Avenue, which means you need to walk back the other way 6 blocks... past Avenue of the Americas, Fifth, Madison, Park, Lex, and whoo hoo finally you get to Third.
At this point you've walked 13 blocks, and these are Avenue blocks, not street blocks. Maybe you've walked about 1.5 miles at this point, maybe 2. That's a lot of walking, 30-40 minutes minimally, given waiting for traffic lights and so on.
OK, OK, New Yorkers, you've been jumping up and down yelling "THE STREETS CHANGE THEIR NAMES AT FIFTH AVENUE YOU DUMMY!" Yes, in the example above, the street name changes from "W 28th" to "E 28th" after we passed Fifth Avenue the first time. That's certainly an important clue -- but hell, I already KNOW I'm on 28th, so I'm not exactly studying the damn street sign to see if I'm still on it, am I? The change from "W" to "E" is easy to miss. And I could set up the problem such that I started on the east side, and I would still do a lot of walking.
And don't even get me started on lower Manhattan where the streets stop having numbers at all and start going in completely random directions, along with the subways, which as soon as they enter Lower Manhattan, feel the need to make a zillion right-angle turns amid much squealing of wheels, as though they're confused too.
Bottom line: before you walk around Manhattan, have a street map (in some form) with you. At least memorize the Avenue names and their ordering. And, yeah, it does help in some cases to remember that the street names change from "E " to "W " at Fifth Avenue.
My choice is to avoid the blood and the pain. Norelco is my friend. Can't speak for the ladies and their legs, different problem.
I have little patience with a system that is so obviously broken. Software patents can't be granted. Process patents can't be granted. Patent law must catch up to reality. Until then, we can all argue about precedents and manuals of procedure and anything we want, but it's a complete waste of time.
Eventually enough Congresscritters will wake up to the fact that this is bad and broken (probably at the point where the Chinese et al are kicking our stupid legal-ass butts all over the map) and wipe the whole thing out. Unless, of course, they're paid off by the companies that have invested $billions in accumulating patent war chests -- who are the only ones who benefit from patents, anyway (you can name on the fingers of one hand the "individual inventors" whom the system actually protected).
It's exactly the dumb terminal scenario again. Now that we've successfully translated every CICS application to the web, who needs anything but the modern equivalent of the 3270? Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Now THAT'S funny.
What we've mostly been busy doing for the last 10 years is reinventing CICS. The same old business applications that generated bazillions in revenue and worked well under CICS have now been (painfully) rewritten to work on hopelessly buggy Web browsers across the public net.
Congratulations, but... whoo hoo.
Or the reflexive criticism of the screamer of "groupthink", of which the parent is an example.
Or the reflexive criticism of the criticizer of the screamer of "groupthink", of which this comment is an example.
Or...
[stack overflow]
You apparently do not know that an MIT education is affordable by practically everyone, because of their extremely aggressive scholarship program. This casts doubt on your assertion that you were admitted.
Be that as it may, you'd be fine at any of the three institutions mentioned, although because of your bio inclination I'd say MIT has an edge.
I made the same decision, gave up on the comments for the same reason, was about to make exactly your point.. and then I encountered your comment. Very strange sensation.
While there's no doubting her accomplishments, I will say that my enjoyment of 6.170 was in spite of her.
Not surprised.
I had no use for her in 1978. She actively assisted in flunking a good friend of mine out of the PhD program. She turned down a thesis idea I had, called it "totally the wrong direction" -- and three years later a guy got a PhD and an award with the same idea at Waterloo.
Maybe she mellowed with age, but given your comment, I guess not.
Hey! I remember that! (shit, I'm old)
Wrong. Government DID stimulate the economy out of the Depression, and Roosevelt essentially prevented a revolution (Hoover, though, did nothing useful). It's true, though, that Roosevelt's pre-war stimulus plans were too small. It took WWII and pretty much unrestrained government spending to get us fully back on track.
I went to MIT, and it sounds like your "living group" was too busy "drinking." No such stats in my class.
I suggest that you carefully peruse the web and see if you can locate a reliable purveyor of a sense of humor.
If my code's still running in 2100, our society has got way bigger problems than me not figuring leap years correctly.
Neo,
How do I figure out whether my main switch is "double throw" or not? My main switch (on a 200A panel) just looks like a heavy-duty light switch that says "On" and "Off". House was built circa 1981, if that helps.
Thx,
Boz
Most web applications are doing the same thing functionally as the forms-based COBOL business applications that you rail against, except that now those very same forms-based business applications "run on the Web" with a prettier UI.
Sure, the skill set required to make a forms-based business app run properly on the web (tolerant of JScript missing, full use of CSS, leveraging XMLHttpRequest() for better interactivity, etc.) is important; but what I worry about is not that the app fails to work well or properly under [some platform].[some browser].[some config], but rather that the basic *functionality* of apps seems to have been taking a back seat to Web UI frenzy.
For example, where does the Google rubber hit the road? It ain't the UI, it's the down-and-dirty code, running on the server farms. Not HTML, CSS, Javascript, XSL, PHP, ASP, JSP, and SQL.
You say you once were a C coder, so you understand what I'm saying.
Based on this prediction, I predict that Gartner will be dead in three to five years.
Agreed.
anyone with enough knowledge can tell that there is a perfectly justified field of knowledge there to be studied.
Really? There's been a massive discussion for the last 20 years on this very topic, in CACM and other CS journals, led by faculty who have a great deal of difficulty both defining CS and justifying themselves to other academics. But I'm glad the world is so simple for you.
I've never had to use Modern Algebra, and it was a terrible class (Ron Rivest is a nice guy, but at the time, at least, was a really awful lecturer). But I sure wish I'd paid more attention to the linear algebra course, and the probability course that seemed completely inapplicable back then has been enormously useful to me over the years.
I'm not sure you can ever justify a core curriculum to students. It may be an impossibly high bar.