Coding is very different from the sort of process thinking you use to build processes executed by people, because computers are completely incapable of filling in any gaps or exercising any initiative. If you build company processes the way you write code, they'll be very ineffective, and if you write code the way you build company processes, your code will rarely work.
Oh, if only. There's been plenty of times when I've identified holes or ambiguities in the company process, identified the most likely misinterpretation from the way it's worded and been told I'm just being picking and people will understand what it means... only to be hauled up a year later for not following the designated process when I did what was originally intended, rather than what the documents said.
Why the hell the push to force more women into programming? Programming is a dead-end job.
Yeah, and they should stop teaching kids how to write, because writing is a dead-end job.
Do you see my point? Programming is a skill that can be applied to many jobs. If you can program, you can write macros and scripts to automate day-to-day office tasks such as file archiving. If you can program, you can create a little bit of code to do your accounting and stock-taking rather than building a confusing and error-prone spreadsheet. Programming is not just for programmers.
Consider a Sigma symbol -- That's a fucking for loop you twit.
The danger in using strong language is that it makes you look like more of a fool when you're wrong. Like right now.
You can implement a sigma-style summation using a for loop, but the underlying logic is totally different. Computer science may be a branch of applied mathematics, but the underlying nature of digital computation is not a direct model of classical mathematics. The sigma summation is just one type of "for all" expressions in maths, but these are fundamentally limited to be self-completed, and the order of evaluating the possible values is free. A for loop has a fixed order, and changes in one iteration can have side-effects on all subsequent iterations. Implementing the sigma summation in a FOR loop actually requires these side-effects, as you have to include an accumulator. To implement sigma without FOR-loop side effects requires a fundamental change to the software architecture, and is only truly possible with an infinitely parallel computer.
It's not that hard. But perhaps the best approach to the "boring" bit is to point out that the alternative is even more boring. Rename 500 files to the new naming scheme? I'll just write a wee shell script, thank you very much. Others would do it manually.
All these kids that these programs reach will think programming is fun at first, and as soon as the educational emphasis shifts to real computer science, most of them will just switch majors.
Is that a problem? Why should programming be the sole preserve of CS grads? (grad (en_UK) = major (en_US)
The guys who get the interesting programming jobs usually have another specialism anyway, like my friend who studied astrophysics and now programs space craft maneouvering routines...
Yeah, it's so hard that children can easily teach themselves.
Kids can easily teach themselves to program well? Then why do a grand majority of programmers suck at it completely? They're incompetent and don't have a deep understanding of any of the concepts.
Valid point. Self-teaching is a very hit-and-miss experience. Some self-teachers fail to identify important things and hence never learn them.
The prevalence of the (partially) self-taught programmer in the workplace basically points to one simple problem: a lack of school teachers who are capable of teaching programming. We've not developed enough of a teaching culture, so even good programmers find it difficult to put themselves in the learner's position and so they don't make good teachers.
Coding above a certain, very low competency level, is not a skill you can train people for.
Either that "low" level is a lot higher than you think, or our world is doomed. Coding is a matter of process-thinking, and any large company runs on process thinking. Getting people to code early as a core skill, rather than as a specialism, would have knock-on effects in all organisations employing more than a few dozen people.
The realist response might involve the fact that most females have no interest in programming. MOST.
That's not "realist", that's fatalist -- "girls aren't interested in our misogynistically dominated profession, so let's just appeal to misogynists instead."
God no... bloody sci-fi. Why waste time on actors in silly costumes when you could be overclocking your graphics card to get the latest version of CryEngine operating at full frame-rate?
The "part I know" stuff shows up later in the test (Question 5) in a much clearer context. It looks to me as if this is a phrasing that schools are expected to teach. That said, the test doesn't seem to me to be written at a first grade level
Question 5 is not "clearer context", because it tells you the total is 9. I know 9, so why did the kid lose a mark for not writing "4" under "part I know"? The kid got the final answer, the unknown part, correct. The kid knows the maths, but lost the mark because of language that, whether taught or not, is inherently ambiguous and confusing. In fact, the questions the kid got right are enough to tell me that he/she is good at maths, and the words are just confusing him/her, which isn't supposed to be the point of using word problems with elementary pupils. Words are supposed to keep a problem concrete and hence comprehensible. If the words increase the complexity of the problem rather than decreasing it, that's a whole new world of problems.
1) What's another good title for this story?
a) The sun
b) Timmy goes to the park
c) Rain and sun
d) Timmy takes a nap
2) Why did Timmy put on dry socks?
a) Because Timmy was home
b) Because his socks were wet
c) Because he was sleepy
d) Because Timmy wanted to go back to the park
So question #1 is asking for an opinion, and question #2 is asking about something that's not mentioned in the story. After my kid missed both questions, I asked the teacher why, and her answer was that the questions are introducing higher learning. Higher learning? An opinion is higher learning? Asking questions that are full of assumptions not mentioned in the story, is higher learning?
I think I see what they've done here. This sort of question typically appears in tests aimed at identifying stages of cognitive development, the sort of tests used to diagnose learning difficulties, or as data for scientific papers on child development. These are supposed to tell us when children are ready for more abstract tasks based on more sophisticated modes of thought.
This sort of test is not the sort of thing you should be giving a grade for, though, because at its root, it's not a taught skill. Either a child is at that stage where (question 1) they see the whole story in terms of the "big picture" (hence correct answer) or they are still too immature and fixate on one of the events (wrong answer). Either they're at the stage where their brain reflects on other people's actions and reasons about their motivation (correct answer) or they're still at that stage where they have no concept of it (and the wrong answer is given).
TLDR: they're testing cognitive development, which cannot be taught. Idiots.
I don't see the Common Core standards as the problem, this is just a poorly written test made by people who were not the authors of Common Core.
Unless I misunderstand, Common Core simply defines what skills a student should be proficient at by the end of school years. It doesn't define these test questions, Pearson Education did.
The principle of "common core" isn't a problem, but the implementation certainly is. If you RTFA, you'll see a host of general criticisms raised by an experienced and highly regarded school principle about the rushed and unacademic approach taken in defining these principles. In particular, note:
If you read Commissioner John King’s Powerpoint slide 18,... you see that the Common Core standards were “backmapped” from a description of 12th grade college-ready skills. There is no evidence that early childhood experts were consulted to ensure that the standards were appropriate for young learners.
They broke down the skills quantitatively, with apparently no regard to the stages of children's cognitive development.
The bit about "word problems" in the standard has led to a sort of pedagogical inversion: traditionally, the goal of words in initial numeracy has been to make the questions easier by making them into something the child understands, rather than juggling with abstract figures. However, the Pearson test is now using the maths to test the children's ability to understand the words, rather than using the words to test the children's maths. It's wrong, but it follows from the Common Core, so the CC has to carry some of the blame.
It's the responsibility of the writer to make his meaning clear. If one of the world's biggest educational publishers misinterprets you, it's probably your fault.
The umbilical chord clamp: Teach people they can just leave the baby attached to the placenta till it dries out, or tie it of with string or anything else they have at hand before cutting the chord.
AIUI, there is a notable risk of the baby being deprived of oxygen due to blood being diverted to the placenta, not to mention the fact that the plancenta is fragile and presents a vulnerable spot which could result in bleeding out. For the peak of the evolutionary ladder, us humans are pretty defective animals. (Although I think the traditional way of dealing with this was just to tie a knot in the cord itself by hand.)
Because sending in by the ton is a slow and difficult process. If the patient needs the operation now and the roads are out, you can't just place the bits and bobs on the order list for Friday's supply drop from the Chinook, and diverting a chopper to save one life when there's thousands at risk just isn't going to happen.
I think the real advantage of 3D printing here is the simple nightmare of logistics. How many different little medical bits and bobs are there? Are you going to ship a huge load of everything you might need to wherever the doctors are attending? Probably not.
So what's the options? At the moment you either tie up your helicopters on courier duty to get the goods where they're needed on demand, or the operation's going to have to wait until the next delivery is due, or you're going to have to send a car out on a long journey... if the road's intact.
3D printing may be slow, but if it's quicker than the alternative, that's good enough.
But it's not a long-term solution -- the future of disaster relief is clearly unmanned drones. While a full-sized chopper is too expensive and valuable a resource to tie up on small jobs, a fleet of autonomous GPS-guided polycopters will be able to redistribute specialist supplies quickly and efficiently, and will circumvent the operational difficulties of a 3D printer. Soon the most important item in a relief-worker's kit bag will be a beacon to mark the designated "helipad".
Sounding a little tin-foil there... The way I see it, Microsoft has been burned repeatedly by their activation servers returning false positives and identifying legit software as pirated. Apple's biggest marketing claim is "it just works", so they really want to avoid that sort of negative publicity. On top of that, there's the administrative cost of dealing with customer claims. How much staff time would be required to deal with complaints and update records? Letting the pirates off the hook, and gifting a freebie to a bunch of folk that had installed the trial version but had presumably decided that it wasn't worth upgrading anyway... well, that's an "opportunity cost", but dealing with customer complaints is a bookable cost.
I never backed anything on kickstarter yet, but from the secondary information i got, i always thought that you get your money back if the project fails. Am i under a false assumption?
You're right -- the terms and conditions of Kickstarter state that you must give out all the promised rewards, and as most of the rewards tiers for Star Citizen include access to the game, they have to ship something. The problem is, what constitutes a game? Are the claimed features all contractually binding? Would there be any legal comeback if Star Citizen was released as simply an old-school Elite clone with a slightly fancier flight interface made with CryEngine and featuring all the starship types included in the Kickstarter tiers? Probably not. But there's the further problem of the non-Kickstarter backing to deal with, because they solicited further funds independently of KS, so the contractual conditions are a bit murkier.
But the article only exists because unscrupulous individuals were profiting off others' ignorance, and the guys who make the game should have written such a guide earlier to protect the majority of their customers from being exploited by a minority.
In fact, if a car ever comes close to you, you can be sure it's a German or Dutch tourist. Not kidding.
Not necessarily. But then again, my biggest worry is Dutch and German camper vans (en_us: RVs). The thing that makes them very scary is the fact that they're almost all hire vehicles, so the driver isn't always 100% comfortable with the width or length of the thing. They come reeeeeeeeeeeeeally close.
Slashdot Mirror
Coding is very different from the sort of process thinking you use to build processes executed by people, because computers are completely incapable of filling in any gaps or exercising any initiative. If you build company processes the way you write code, they'll be very ineffective, and if you write code the way you build company processes, your code will rarely work.
Oh, if only. There's been plenty of times when I've identified holes or ambiguities in the company process, identified the most likely misinterpretation from the way it's worded and been told I'm just being picking and people will understand what it means... only to be hauled up a year later for not following the designated process when I did what was originally intended, rather than what the documents said.
Why the hell the push to force more women into programming? Programming is a dead-end job.
Yeah, and they should stop teaching kids how to write, because writing is a dead-end job.
Do you see my point? Programming is a skill that can be applied to many jobs. If you can program, you can write macros and scripts to automate day-to-day office tasks such as file archiving. If you can program, you can create a little bit of code to do your accounting and stock-taking rather than building a confusing and error-prone spreadsheet. Programming is not just for programmers.
Yes! Teach them BASIC! Because it's not like a dumbed-down, logically crippled shadow of a real programming language, is it? GOTO FTW!
Sorry, but you've just fallen into the biggest educational fallacy there is: "it worked for me, therefore it is the best".
Consider a Sigma symbol -- That's a fucking for loop you twit.
The danger in using strong language is that it makes you look like more of a fool when you're wrong. Like right now.
You can implement a sigma-style summation using a for loop, but the underlying logic is totally different. Computer science may be a branch of applied mathematics, but the underlying nature of digital computation is not a direct model of classical mathematics. The sigma summation is just one type of "for all" expressions in maths, but these are fundamentally limited to be self-completed, and the order of evaluating the possible values is free. A for loop has a fixed order, and changes in one iteration can have side-effects on all subsequent iterations. Implementing the sigma summation in a FOR loop actually requires these side-effects, as you have to include an accumulator. To implement sigma without FOR-loop side effects requires a fundamental change to the software architecture, and is only truly possible with an infinitely parallel computer.
Was programming ever not hard or boring?
It's not that hard. But perhaps the best approach to the "boring" bit is to point out that the alternative is even more boring. Rename 500 files to the new naming scheme? I'll just write a wee shell script, thank you very much. Others would do it manually.
All these kids that these programs reach will think programming is fun at first, and as soon as the educational emphasis shifts to real computer science, most of them will just switch majors.
Is that a problem? Why should programming be the sole preserve of CS grads? (grad (en_UK) = major (en_US)
The guys who get the interesting programming jobs usually have another specialism anyway, like my friend who studied astrophysics and now programs space craft maneouvering routines...
Yeah, it's so hard that children can easily teach themselves.
Kids can easily teach themselves to program well? Then why do a grand majority of programmers suck at it completely? They're incompetent and don't have a deep understanding of any of the concepts.
Valid point. Self-teaching is a very hit-and-miss experience. Some self-teachers fail to identify important things and hence never learn them.
The prevalence of the (partially) self-taught programmer in the workplace basically points to one simple problem: a lack of school teachers who are capable of teaching programming. We've not developed enough of a teaching culture, so even good programmers find it difficult to put themselves in the learner's position and so they don't make good teachers.
Coding above a certain, very low competency level, is not a skill you can train people for.
Either that "low" level is a lot higher than you think, or our world is doomed. Coding is a matter of process-thinking, and any large company runs on process thinking. Getting people to code early as a core skill, rather than as a specialism, would have knock-on effects in all organisations employing more than a few dozen people.
Yes, that's the "politically correct" response.
The realist response might involve the fact that most females have no interest in programming. MOST.
That's not "realist", that's fatalist -- "girls aren't interested in our misogynistically dominated profession, so let's just appeal to misogynists instead."
Or we could just be less misogynistic.
God no... bloody sci-fi. Why waste time on actors in silly costumes when you could be overclocking your graphics card to get the latest version of CryEngine operating at full frame-rate?
Dude, this is slashdot, where real nerds hang out. Trekkies are beneath our contempt.
The "part I know" stuff shows up later in the test (Question 5) in a much clearer context. It looks to me as if this is a phrasing that schools are expected to teach. That said, the test doesn't seem to me to be written at a first grade level
Question 5 is not "clearer context", because it tells you the total is 9. I know 9, so why did the kid lose a mark for not writing "4" under "part I know"? The kid got the final answer, the unknown part, correct. The kid knows the maths, but lost the mark because of language that, whether taught or not, is inherently ambiguous and confusing. In fact, the questions the kid got right are enough to tell me that he/she is good at maths, and the words are just confusing him/her, which isn't supposed to be the point of using word problems with elementary pupils. Words are supposed to keep a problem concrete and hence comprehensible. If the words increase the complexity of the problem rather than decreasing it, that's a whole new world of problems.
1) What's another good title for this story? a) The sun b) Timmy goes to the park c) Rain and sun d) Timmy takes a nap 2) Why did Timmy put on dry socks? a) Because Timmy was home b) Because his socks were wet c) Because he was sleepy d) Because Timmy wanted to go back to the park So question #1 is asking for an opinion, and question #2 is asking about something that's not mentioned in the story. After my kid missed both questions, I asked the teacher why, and her answer was that the questions are introducing higher learning. Higher learning? An opinion is higher learning? Asking questions that are full of assumptions not mentioned in the story, is higher learning?
I think I see what they've done here. This sort of question typically appears in tests aimed at identifying stages of cognitive development, the sort of tests used to diagnose learning difficulties, or as data for scientific papers on child development. These are supposed to tell us when children are ready for more abstract tasks based on more sophisticated modes of thought.
This sort of test is not the sort of thing you should be giving a grade for, though, because at its root, it's not a taught skill. Either a child is at that stage where (question 1) they see the whole story in terms of the "big picture" (hence correct answer) or they are still too immature and fixate on one of the events (wrong answer). Either they're at the stage where their brain reflects on other people's actions and reasons about their motivation (correct answer) or they're still at that stage where they have no concept of it (and the wrong answer is given).
TLDR: they're testing cognitive development, which cannot be taught. Idiots.
He didn't RTFA. Neither did you. I wish more people did.
This is not just a "crappy test". It's a crappy test written to crappy guidelines produced by a crappy, rushed process.
I don't see the Common Core standards as the problem, this is just a poorly written test made by people who were not the authors of Common Core. Unless I misunderstand, Common Core simply defines what skills a student should be proficient at by the end of school years. It doesn't define these test questions, Pearson Education did.
The principle of "common core" isn't a problem, but the implementation certainly is. If you RTFA, you'll see a host of general criticisms raised by an experienced and highly regarded school principle about the rushed and unacademic approach taken in defining these principles. In particular, note:
If you read Commissioner John King’s Powerpoint slide 18, ... you see that the Common Core standards were “backmapped” from a description of 12th grade college-ready skills. There is no evidence that early childhood experts were consulted to ensure that the standards were appropriate for young learners.
They broke down the skills quantitatively, with apparently no regard to the stages of children's cognitive development.
The bit about "word problems" in the standard has led to a sort of pedagogical inversion: traditionally, the goal of words in initial numeracy has been to make the questions easier by making them into something the child understands, rather than juggling with abstract figures. However, the Pearson test is now using the maths to test the children's ability to understand the words, rather than using the words to test the children's maths. It's wrong, but it follows from the Common Core, so the CC has to carry some of the blame.
It's the responsibility of the writer to make his meaning clear. If one of the world's biggest educational publishers misinterprets you, it's probably your fault.
He says his name's reality impaired...
But no-one knows he really is a (bum-bum) plastic man.
The umbilical chord clamp: Teach people they can just leave the baby attached to the placenta till it dries out, or tie it of with string or anything else they have at hand before cutting the chord.
AIUI, there is a notable risk of the baby being deprived of oxygen due to blood being diverted to the placenta, not to mention the fact that the plancenta is fragile and presents a vulnerable spot which could result in bleeding out. For the peak of the evolutionary ladder, us humans are pretty defective animals. (Although I think the traditional way of dealing with this was just to tie a knot in the cord itself by hand.)
Because sending in by the ton is a slow and difficult process. If the patient needs the operation now and the roads are out, you can't just place the bits and bobs on the order list for Friday's supply drop from the Chinook, and diverting a chopper to save one life when there's thousands at risk just isn't going to happen.
I think the real advantage of 3D printing here is the simple nightmare of logistics. How many different little medical bits and bobs are there? Are you going to ship a huge load of everything you might need to wherever the doctors are attending? Probably not.
So what's the options? At the moment you either tie up your helicopters on courier duty to get the goods where they're needed on demand, or the operation's going to have to wait until the next delivery is due, or you're going to have to send a car out on a long journey... if the road's intact.
3D printing may be slow, but if it's quicker than the alternative, that's good enough.
But it's not a long-term solution -- the future of disaster relief is clearly unmanned drones. While a full-sized chopper is too expensive and valuable a resource to tie up on small jobs, a fleet of autonomous GPS-guided polycopters will be able to redistribute specialist supplies quickly and efficiently, and will circumvent the operational difficulties of a 3D printer. Soon the most important item in a relief-worker's kit bag will be a beacon to mark the designated "helipad".
Sounding a little tin-foil there... The way I see it, Microsoft has been burned repeatedly by their activation servers returning false positives and identifying legit software as pirated. Apple's biggest marketing claim is "it just works", so they really want to avoid that sort of negative publicity. On top of that, there's the administrative cost of dealing with customer claims. How much staff time would be required to deal with complaints and update records? Letting the pirates off the hook, and gifting a freebie to a bunch of folk that had installed the trial version but had presumably decided that it wasn't worth upgrading anyway... well, that's an "opportunity cost", but dealing with customer complaints is a bookable cost.
I never backed anything on kickstarter yet, but from the secondary information i got, i always thought that you get your money back if the project fails. Am i under a false assumption?
You're right -- the terms and conditions of Kickstarter state that you must give out all the promised rewards, and as most of the rewards tiers for Star Citizen include access to the game, they have to ship something. The problem is, what constitutes a game? Are the claimed features all contractually binding? Would there be any legal comeback if Star Citizen was released as simply an old-school Elite clone with a slightly fancier flight interface made with CryEngine and featuring all the starship types included in the Kickstarter tiers? Probably not. But there's the further problem of the non-Kickstarter backing to deal with, because they solicited further funds independently of KS, so the contractual conditions are a bit murkier.
The specific document is the articlee
But the article only exists because unscrupulous individuals were profiting off others' ignorance, and the guys who make the game should have written such a guide earlier to protect the majority of their customers from being exploited by a minority.
So when you donate money to charity through a middleman and he takes a sizeable portion of your money, it's ok?
It's not necessarily OK, but it's definitely standard practice, more's the pity.
Tha''s a li'le bi' bigo'ed of you. Some of us li'er our pa'er with glo'al stops.
In fact, if a car ever comes close to you, you can be sure it's a German or Dutch tourist. Not kidding.
Not necessarily. But then again, my biggest worry is Dutch and German camper vans (en_us: RVs). The thing that makes them very scary is the fact that they're almost all hire vehicles, so the driver isn't always 100% comfortable with the width or length of the thing. They come reeeeeeeeeeeeeally close.