Would you areee that in a million years it is possible, via the mechanism of evolution, that a housecat will teach mathematics at a college level.
I await your response.
You didn't ask me, but I'll answer anyway: no.
The evolution of human intelligence was determined by certain physical factors, one of which is bipedalism and the evolution of the hand. Human intelligence evolved once our ancestors were presented with the opportunity to use tools, which only came from us having our hands free. Our hands became free when our ancestors came back down from the trees. They would never have evolved the hand if they handed been tree-dwellers, because the prime motivator for the evolution of the hand was to grasp branches.
So for cats to evolve human-like intelligence, they first have to evolve gripping fingers and spend many, many generations in the trees. Their arboreal habitat then has to shrink back due to a global climatic event (like ours did) forcing them back to the ground. They then have to go bipedal instead of returning to quadrapedal locomotion (as, for example, baboons did). Having done so, they then have the possibility of developing rudimentary tool usage (eg chimps using sticks and stones to fetch and crush foot) which might lead to the evolution of abstract symbolic thought.
And all that while, there is the possibility of them getting distracted by a ball of yarn....
Every bloody commercial body needs insurance. Even McDonald's have insurance in case you break a tooth on a bit of unexpected cowbone in your burger. A minibus operator needs insurance to cover injury and damage inside and outside the vehicle. A marshmallow factory is insured in case someone loses a finger in a machine. A school needs insurance in case a slate falls off the roof and injures a child.
Reinsurance is crap. Basically, it disincentivises the first insurer to properly assess risk. The pseudo-science behind bundling was a matter of playing averages... and it didn't work.
Better, then, to have a single insurer, backed by an underwriter or an industry guarantee scheme. The buck should always stop with the insurer if they're still in business, and any third party should only come into play if the insurer goes under.
This is because of our fucked legal system, not because insurance companies are saints who only want to help us.
Actually, it's because of the fucked victims. Imagine demanding compensation when they get fucked by big corporations who fail to take sufficient precautions. Bastards. They should just sit in their hospital beds and stop whinging.
So when things go sideways--it's the stock holders that should pay. And if they don't have enough money--which they probably don't, then they should pay for insurance to ensure that someone can pay for their screw ups.
Also, libertarians forget that the game of give-and-take has been going on for years. The stock holders are specifically protected from paying by the instrument of being a "limited liability company" -- Ltd or LLC. This instrument encourages outside investment, because if stock-holders were liable, they'd have to do a hell of a lot more due dilligence on their stocks. The stock market would crumble, because any shar trade would take about a year.
But someone has to cover the liability, so we regulate and stipulate insurance costs. When some company calls this regulation unfair tampering in the market, we need only to point out that the existance of the Ltd/LLC is the result of "tampering in the market". Offer to deregulate, but the quid pro quo is that the limited liability company is taken out of existence too, and stock holders are personally liable for company debts.
One or two of them might just realise that regulation is the lesser of two evils.
Non sequitur. They wouldn't have a right to do "a damn thing about it" unless it did some damage. And if it did damage something, damned straight they'd do something about it. The treaty lets them demand payment from the government of the country of origin.
The US's problem here isn't spacecraft launched overseas, though, it's spacecraft launched in the US. If one lands on my house, I can sue the US.
humanity as a whole is not stupid enough to continue hobbling itself with such ridiculous rackets as "insurance companies." If they are holding up progress, eventually they will be discarded as the worthless trash they are.
Insurance encourages progress by offsetting risk. Am I going to give a million-pound cheque to a supplier or service provider who's uninsured? Probably not, because I need to know that if something goes wrong, they won't immediately go bust losing me every penny I've put in.
Now, why is driving without insurance illegal in many countries? Because if you hit someone else, you owe him for repairs and medical bills. Very few individuals could afford the lifetime medical care of a paraplegic, which is regrettably a very possible result of road accidents. Imagine, then, some of the consequences of the failure of a spacecraft. If it falls on your house, obliterating also your car and putting your wife and daughter in a wheelchair, you'll be looking for compensation. As will a great many of your neighbours. If it hits the centre of a major urban area, demolishing a couple of office buildings, including several server rooms, during working hours, the bill will be astronomical.
And so we demand that they are insured, so that they have guaranteed funds behind them to ensure they can afford to clean up the mess if the worst comes to the worst.
But the software engineer has a stable job and certain job protections. The company will also be paying various extra costs for the software engineer -- company pension plans, possibly health insurance schemes etc. A model isn't an employee so misses out on employee benefits, protections and various forms of paid leave (holiday, maternity, sickness); as well as having to sort out her own taxes, and she has no guarantee of work from day to day.
I've been told that in most places, salary is only a third of the cost of an employee. The model who makes the same as the software engineer during hours of work is really only making a third of what the software engineer does, which brings it back down to around twice minimum wage for the upper band of Computex workers. The lower band are at about $4.15. And applying the same to the lower rate shows, you're looking at something that's effectively $2.50 an hour, and less than what MacDonald's will be spending on their staff, even accounting for the model's agent's 10% cut.
OK, I don't know too much about worker benefits and protection in Taiwan, and it may be that an employee only costs twice his or her salary, but all-in-all, they're still not making as much money as it appears at first glance. It looks glamorous and well-paid when you look at a select minority of girls and events, but overall its a bunch of agents selling unrealistic dreams to impressionable young women.
Even a taught masters traditionally requires a lot of research. In Scotland, a Masters-by-research is effectively a one-year mini-PhD of all research, but a taught masters still dedicates one third of its credit to the masters thesis/dissertation, which should be a new research project or publishable quality. Most of this is done over the summer after taking a full year of classes, which by themselves are equivalent to the workload of a honours degree year, but at a higher level of difficulty. I can't imagine a masters with no research component. Other than an MBA, and that's not a real masters.
Actually, that may be more to do with the "vocationalisation" of degrees in many places. Employers keep calling for degrees with more "career relevance", which essentially means that they're trying to shift the burden of training to the state and/or individual, to prevent employers having to do training.
Mark my words, it won't be long before "kitchen hygiene" is a basic component of most degree schemes -- MacDonald's will demand it....
And for me, the penny finally drops. Because I was about to say "yeah, but that's a computer course." However, people keep arguing that computer programming is the "new Latin" -- the sine qua non of modern education, and I now see why they're correct. I've been following the Coursera Machine Learning course (to a point) and working through the book Natural Language Processing with Python, and I'm learning a lot about matrix manipulations and list manipulations... and this through Octave and Python respectively. (Well, relearning mostly, but Octave and Python are new to me.)
These languages transform mathematical calculations and manipulations of text into computer programs, and computer programs are fairly easy to assess automatically -- therefore the subject becomes more suitable for quick grading. But more than that, as I go, I'm building up my toolkit of technologies that I can apply to real-world problems in various spheres.
I've not been employed in any dev work in a long time, and in the roles I have, I often see opportunities for automation that my less-IT-literate colleagues miss.
So we need to turn every subject possible into a programming problem , and everyone's a winner.
One TA could give each student one dedicated hour every other month and maintain a regular 40 hr per week year round schedule.
That's not that far off from being reasonable.
If you pay the TAs only $15K-20K you would have budget for overhead and profit, or more TAs for more FTF time.
A full-load TA generally can work only 20 hours/week at the job, so the numbers are off by a factor of two.
Then append the magic letters FTE to the number of TAs (=Full-Time Equivalent). The exact number of TAs isn't important, just the man hours.
One hour per month is a little low to begin with, and 30 minutes per month is not workable unless the assignments are trivial to grade. 30 min/month is something like 7.5 minutes per week.
There have been leaps and bounds in automatic grading, even to the point where some people use it "in anger" -- which isn't to say they aren't spectacularly useless. But they're becoming more and more the reality in education.
There are some efficiencies to be had by moving elements of education online. For example, discussion boards are a great way to answer a question once for the entire class to see. Sometimes students will even answer questions other students have posted. But there is no economy of scale on grading and providing useful feedback. Some things are inherently labor intensive.
Feedback? You want feedback? You've been out of school too long -- feedback is increasingly rare....
If you're a native in your country and not being hired with the understanding that you're going to be abused, a $100 Master's degree is literally worse than worthless. The folks with dime store diploma's that applied at my old place were specifically weeded out because the assumption was if you're dumb enough to pay for one of those you're not worth hiring.
If you're dumb enough to equate a qualification from people such as Thrun and Peter frigging Norvig with the degree mills, you're the one who's not worth hiring.
Although having said that, they seem to be having a hard time attracting any other real academics and instead fall back on a mix of.com types, and in the long term, reputation's going to be the make-or-break for Udacity....
The value of a degree to highly talented, highly motivated and also pretty damned lucky individuals is questionable, but if you average out the entire jobs market, the ordinarily talented, highly motivated and not especially lucky individual is better off with a degree than without.
Perhaps they're aware of the effects is has on other people, but they're not aware of the effects it has on themselves. High-school kids tend to be shallow, and place a lot of value on looks (particularly those blessed with good looks) but on growing up a bit, that sort of superficiality is extremely limiting, and devalues you as a person.
I've never relied on my looks to get along, but I've spent a lot of time relying on my language -- hanging around with learners of English. The early buzz of feeling wanted burns out quite quickly as you start to appreciate that you as a person are meaningless to them. They don't care who you are or what you do, you're just an opportunity to speak. It's demeaning.
I nearly slipped into depression, but took a break from hanging around with foreigners and got my life back in balance. But don't dare say that I asked for it. I looked for a social "in", but I was totally unaware of the price.
Remember that Australia has been largely untouched by the global economic chaos of the last decade, and the Australian Dollar is pretty much the strongest it's ever been. I can only assume that Australia is full of the sort of filthy communists who regulate their banks. It's a very bad idea, as it will destroy your economy.
But many other costs of education, grading, feedback, etc., are proportional to the number of students. The amount of personal time you get from instructors for $100 is at most a few hours. For some students, that's enough. For most, it isn't.
As budgetary squeezes affect the universities in Europe (where laws prevent the fee gouging that angry people on the internet tell me is killing the US), personal time is the first casualty. I took a career break last year to do a university language course, and my individual time was limited to the marking of two or three assignments for each module. There was some class groupwork, but nothing like what I consider equivalent to the tutorials I got in my first degree. As an outside course, I did an online module in anatomy and physiology. There were three formative assignments. The first was a short essay on the first two units of the course. My individual feedback was two sentences. The next two formative assessments were multiple choice quizzes, and the tutor just distributed an answer sheet for us to mark them ourselves. After that came the final assignment -- one single essay which determined the full mark for the module.
This module on its own (you take 8 modules per year at my uni) would have cost the standard fee of £161, and that is after the subsidy from the government. I have a strong suspicion that this module is a lot cheaper to run than their honours-level modules, and that the degree level courses are cross subsidised by first and second year modules.
I'm dubious about the full mass-market distance degree, but I don't see any reason why we can't automate first-year courses in this way. The purpose of first and second year in most disciplines is to teach the absolute fundaments of the field of study. In my first uni, everyone studying in the Faculty of Science and Engineering was squeezed into one of four or five maths courses(maths, maths for engineering, maths for computing, maths for physical sciences etc), and that was already many, many thousands of students being handled by 10 lectures and a bunch of postgraduates acting as paid tutors (not quite equivalent to US TAs). Find a suitable solution to deal with the problems of inputting mathematical notation on-screen and develop a robust algorithm to mark students' work including working (neither of these is a major issue now) and those 4 maths courses can be expanded from the thousands at that particular university to millions worldwide, at a tiny marginal cost.
Cheating may seem like a problem, but if the model goes the way I predict it, cheating will only mean that you get entry into the degree years, which you'll obviously fail, because you haven't learnt what you should have in the first place and you just aren't ready for degree-level study.
If you read the article, you might notice that one of the complaints is that the outfits are getting skimpier -- the job is changing, so it's not necessarily the one that some of these girls first signed up for.
It's pretty clearly not what GP meant. I think s/he's saying not that they deserve it (and for the record, I don't think the "it" here is outright sexual harassment, just creepy stares and objectification) because they dress sexy, but because they accepted a job that they knew consisted of nothing but dressing sexy so that they could be objectified for the purpose of selling something.
Blaming the genuinely victimized is bad form, but if being the "victim" is your voluntarily-accepted, paid profession, that's a little different, wouldn't you say? And what is modeling if not being voluntarily objectified?
Do you think that when a naive, wide-eyed pretty young woman, just out of high school, goes to the modelling agency, the agent says "Coooorrrrrr, those dirty old pervs are gonna have a great time wrapping their eyes round your tits!!!"?
No, they talk all sweetly about elegance and class and other nice neutral ideas.
On a similar note, when you were last on the job market, did your current boss tell you about all the budgetary hassles; cutbacks in the staff entertainments programme and irritating bureaucracy in the company, or did he tell you it was a great place to work and like one big happy family?
Slashdot Mirror
The goal of evolution is "more life, less death". For some species, intelligence mean more life. For others, a bright red shiny bum does the trick.
Would you areee that in a million years it is possible, via the mechanism of evolution, that a housecat will teach mathematics at a college level.
I await your response.
You didn't ask me, but I'll answer anyway: no.
The evolution of human intelligence was determined by certain physical factors, one of which is bipedalism and the evolution of the hand. Human intelligence evolved once our ancestors were presented with the opportunity to use tools, which only came from us having our hands free. Our hands became free when our ancestors came back down from the trees. They would never have evolved the hand if they handed been tree-dwellers, because the prime motivator for the evolution of the hand was to grasp branches.
So for cats to evolve human-like intelligence, they first have to evolve gripping fingers and spend many, many generations in the trees. Their arboreal habitat then has to shrink back due to a global climatic event (like ours did) forcing them back to the ground. They then have to go bipedal instead of returning to quadrapedal locomotion (as, for example, baboons did). Having done so, they then have the possibility of developing rudimentary tool usage (eg chimps using sticks and stones to fetch and crush foot) which might lead to the evolution of abstract symbolic thought.
And all that while, there is the possibility of them getting distracted by a ball of yarn....
So I'm supposed to assume the risk when everyone about me is cutting corners and driving unsafe vehicles...? No thanks.
The Wright brothers only put themselves at risk.
This is SpaceX -- we're not planning on launching the Enterprise any time soon!!
Right, I've had enough.
Do oil refineries have to pay insurance
Yes.
Every bloody commercial body needs insurance. Even McDonald's have insurance in case you break a tooth on a bit of unexpected cowbone in your burger. A minibus operator needs insurance to cover injury and damage inside and outside the vehicle. A marshmallow factory is insured in case someone loses a finger in a machine. A school needs insurance in case a slate falls off the roof and injures a child.
Everyone needs insurance.
Reinsurance is crap. Basically, it disincentivises the first insurer to properly assess risk. The pseudo-science behind bundling was a matter of playing averages... and it didn't work.
Better, then, to have a single insurer, backed by an underwriter or an industry guarantee scheme. The buck should always stop with the insurer if they're still in business, and any third party should only come into play if the insurer goes under.
I don't expect the US spaceflight insurance is fully comp, though....
This is because of our fucked legal system, not because insurance companies are saints who only want to help us.
Actually, it's because of the fucked victims. Imagine demanding compensation when they get fucked by big corporations who fail to take sufficient precautions. Bastards. They should just sit in their hospital beds and stop whinging.
So when things go sideways--it's the stock holders that should pay. And if they don't have enough money--which they probably don't, then they should pay for insurance to ensure that someone can pay for their screw ups.
Also, libertarians forget that the game of give-and-take has been going on for years. The stock holders are specifically protected from paying by the instrument of being a "limited liability company" -- Ltd or LLC. This instrument encourages outside investment, because if stock-holders were liable, they'd have to do a hell of a lot more due dilligence on their stocks. The stock market would crumble, because any shar trade would take about a year.
But someone has to cover the liability, so we regulate and stipulate insurance costs. When some company calls this regulation unfair tampering in the market, we need only to point out that the existance of the Ltd/LLC is the result of "tampering in the market". Offer to deregulate, but the quid pro quo is that the limited liability company is taken out of existence too, and stock holders are personally liable for company debts.
One or two of them might just realise that regulation is the lesser of two evils.
Non sequitur. They wouldn't have a right to do "a damn thing about it" unless it did some damage. And if it did damage something, damned straight they'd do something about it. The treaty lets them demand payment from the government of the country of origin.
The US's problem here isn't spacecraft launched overseas, though, it's spacecraft launched in the US. If one lands on my house, I can sue the US.
humanity as a whole is not stupid enough to continue hobbling itself with such ridiculous rackets as "insurance companies." If they are holding up progress, eventually they will be discarded as the worthless trash they are.
Insurance encourages progress by offsetting risk. Am I going to give a million-pound cheque to a supplier or service provider who's uninsured? Probably not, because I need to know that if something goes wrong, they won't immediately go bust losing me every penny I've put in.
Now, why is driving without insurance illegal in many countries? Because if you hit someone else, you owe him for repairs and medical bills. Very few individuals could afford the lifetime medical care of a paraplegic, which is regrettably a very possible result of road accidents. Imagine, then, some of the consequences of the failure of a spacecraft. If it falls on your house, obliterating also your car and putting your wife and daughter in a wheelchair, you'll be looking for compensation. As will a great many of your neighbours. If it hits the centre of a major urban area, demolishing a couple of office buildings, including several server rooms, during working hours, the bill will be astronomical.
And so we demand that they are insured, so that they have guaranteed funds behind them to ensure they can afford to clean up the mess if the worst comes to the worst.
But the software engineer has a stable job and certain job protections. The company will also be paying various extra costs for the software engineer -- company pension plans, possibly health insurance schemes etc. A model isn't an employee so misses out on employee benefits, protections and various forms of paid leave (holiday, maternity, sickness); as well as having to sort out her own taxes, and she has no guarantee of work from day to day.
I've been told that in most places, salary is only a third of the cost of an employee. The model who makes the same as the software engineer during hours of work is really only making a third of what the software engineer does, which brings it back down to around twice minimum wage for the upper band of Computex workers. The lower band are at about $4.15. And applying the same to the lower rate shows, you're looking at something that's effectively $2.50 an hour, and less than what MacDonald's will be spending on their staff, even accounting for the model's agent's 10% cut.
OK, I don't know too much about worker benefits and protection in Taiwan, and it may be that an employee only costs twice his or her salary, but all-in-all, they're still not making as much money as it appears at first glance. It looks glamorous and well-paid when you look at a select minority of girls and events, but overall its a bunch of agents selling unrealistic dreams to impressionable young women.
It's also a very short-liv
Even a taught masters traditionally requires a lot of research. In Scotland, a Masters-by-research is effectively a one-year mini-PhD of all research, but a taught masters still dedicates one third of its credit to the masters thesis/dissertation, which should be a new research project or publishable quality. Most of this is done over the summer after taking a full year of classes, which by themselves are equivalent to the workload of a honours degree year, but at a higher level of difficulty. I can't imagine a masters with no research component. Other than an MBA, and that's not a real masters.
Actually, that may be more to do with the "vocationalisation" of degrees in many places. Employers keep calling for degrees with more "career relevance", which essentially means that they're trying to shift the burden of training to the state and/or individual, to prevent employers having to do training.
Mark my words, it won't be long before "kitchen hygiene" is a basic component of most degree schemes -- MacDonald's will demand it....
Click!
And for me, the penny finally drops. Because I was about to say "yeah, but that's a computer course." However, people keep arguing that computer programming is the "new Latin" -- the sine qua non of modern education, and I now see why they're correct. I've been following the Coursera Machine Learning course (to a point) and working through the book Natural Language Processing with Python, and I'm learning a lot about matrix manipulations and list manipulations... and this through Octave and Python respectively. (Well, relearning mostly, but Octave and Python are new to me.)
These languages transform mathematical calculations and manipulations of text into computer programs, and computer programs are fairly easy to assess automatically -- therefore the subject becomes more suitable for quick grading. But more than that, as I go, I'm building up my toolkit of technologies that I can apply to real-world problems in various spheres.
I've not been employed in any dev work in a long time, and in the roles I have, I often see opportunities for automation that my less-IT-literate colleagues miss.
So we need to turn every subject possible into a programming problem , and everyone's a winner.
160,000 students @ $100 each is $16M.
$16M at $32k buys 500 TAs / year.
160K students / 500 TAs is 320 students / TA.
One TA could give each student one dedicated hour every other month and maintain a regular 40 hr per week year round schedule.
That's not that far off from being reasonable.
If you pay the TAs only $15K-20K you would have budget for overhead and profit, or more TAs for more FTF time.
A full-load TA generally can work only 20 hours/week at the job, so the numbers are off by a factor of two.
Then append the magic letters FTE to the number of TAs (=Full-Time Equivalent). The exact number of TAs isn't important, just the man hours.
One hour per month is a little low to begin with, and 30 minutes per month is not workable unless the assignments are trivial to grade. 30 min/month is something like 7.5 minutes per week.
There have been leaps and bounds in automatic grading, even to the point where some people use it "in anger" -- which isn't to say they aren't spectacularly useless. But they're becoming more and more the reality in education.
There are some efficiencies to be had by moving elements of education online. For example, discussion boards are a great way to answer a question once for the entire class to see. Sometimes students will even answer questions other students have posted. But there is no economy of scale on grading and providing useful feedback. Some things are inherently labor intensive.
Feedback? You want feedback? You've been out of school too long -- feedback is increasingly rare....
If you're a native in your country and not being hired with the understanding that you're going to be abused, a $100 Master's degree is literally worse than worthless. The folks with dime store diploma's that applied at my old place were specifically weeded out because the assumption was if you're dumb enough to pay for one of those you're not worth hiring.
If you're dumb enough to equate a qualification from people such as Thrun and Peter frigging Norvig with the degree mills, you're the one who's not worth hiring.
Although having said that, they seem to be having a hard time attracting any other real academics and instead fall back on a mix of .com types, and in the long term, reputation's going to be the make-or-break for Udacity....
The value of a degree to highly talented, highly motivated and also pretty damned lucky individuals is questionable, but if you average out the entire jobs market, the ordinarily talented, highly motivated and not especially lucky individual is better off with a degree than without.
Perhaps they're aware of the effects is has on other people, but they're not aware of the effects it has on themselves. High-school kids tend to be shallow, and place a lot of value on looks (particularly those blessed with good looks) but on growing up a bit, that sort of superficiality is extremely limiting, and devalues you as a person.
I've never relied on my looks to get along, but I've spent a lot of time relying on my language -- hanging around with learners of English. The early buzz of feeling wanted burns out quite quickly as you start to appreciate that you as a person are meaningless to them. They don't care who you are or what you do, you're just an opportunity to speak. It's demeaning.
I nearly slipped into depression, but took a break from hanging around with foreigners and got my life back in balance. But don't dare say that I asked for it. I looked for a social "in", but I was totally unaware of the price.
Remember that Australia has been largely untouched by the global economic chaos of the last decade, and the Australian Dollar is pretty much the strongest it's ever been. I can only assume that Australia is full of the sort of filthy communists who regulate their banks. It's a very bad idea, as it will destroy your economy.
But many other costs of education, grading, feedback, etc., are proportional to the number of students. The amount of personal time you get from instructors for $100 is at most a few hours. For some students, that's enough. For most, it isn't.
As budgetary squeezes affect the universities in Europe (where laws prevent the fee gouging that angry people on the internet tell me is killing the US), personal time is the first casualty. I took a career break last year to do a university language course, and my individual time was limited to the marking of two or three assignments for each module. There was some class groupwork, but nothing like what I consider equivalent to the tutorials I got in my first degree. As an outside course, I did an online module in anatomy and physiology. There were three formative assignments. The first was a short essay on the first two units of the course. My individual feedback was two sentences. The next two formative assessments were multiple choice quizzes, and the tutor just distributed an answer sheet for us to mark them ourselves. After that came the final assignment -- one single essay which determined the full mark for the module.
This module on its own (you take 8 modules per year at my uni) would have cost the standard fee of £161, and that is after the subsidy from the government. I have a strong suspicion that this module is a lot cheaper to run than their honours-level modules, and that the degree level courses are cross subsidised by first and second year modules.
I'm dubious about the full mass-market distance degree, but I don't see any reason why we can't automate first-year courses in this way. The purpose of first and second year in most disciplines is to teach the absolute fundaments of the field of study. In my first uni, everyone studying in the Faculty of Science and Engineering was squeezed into one of four or five maths courses(maths, maths for engineering, maths for computing, maths for physical sciences etc), and that was already many, many thousands of students being handled by 10 lectures and a bunch of postgraduates acting as paid tutors (not quite equivalent to US TAs). Find a suitable solution to deal with the problems of inputting mathematical notation on-screen and develop a robust algorithm to mark students' work including working (neither of these is a major issue now) and those 4 maths courses can be expanded from the thousands at that particular university to millions worldwide, at a tiny marginal cost.
Cheating may seem like a problem, but if the model goes the way I predict it, cheating will only mean that you get entry into the degree years, which you'll obviously fail, because you haven't learnt what you should have in the first place and you just aren't ready for degree-level study.
If you read the article, you might notice that one of the complaints is that the outfits are getting skimpier -- the job is changing, so it's not necessarily the one that some of these girls first signed up for.
It's pretty clearly not what GP meant. I think s/he's saying not that they deserve it (and for the record, I don't think the "it" here is outright sexual harassment, just creepy stares and objectification) because they dress sexy, but because they accepted a job that they knew consisted of nothing but dressing sexy so that they could be objectified for the purpose of selling something.
Blaming the genuinely victimized is bad form, but if being the "victim" is your voluntarily-accepted, paid profession, that's a little different, wouldn't you say? And what is modeling if not being voluntarily objectified?
Do you think that when a naive, wide-eyed pretty young woman, just out of high school, goes to the modelling agency, the agent says "Coooorrrrrr, those dirty old pervs are gonna have a great time wrapping their eyes round your tits!!!"?
No, they talk all sweetly about elegance and class and other nice neutral ideas.
On a similar note, when you were last on the job market, did your current boss tell you about all the budgetary hassles; cutbacks in the staff entertainments programme and irritating bureaucracy in the company, or did he tell you it was a great place to work and like one big happy family?
Are you a physics major or something? Objects have methods and properties -- where did this notion of "functions" come from?