I must disagree here. I attended Engineering school in South America and North America. I've found that the teaching style made a world of a difference in how I approached learning and what purposed it served.
Back in that South American institution, we were constantly challenged to think for ourselves, to solve difficult problems and encouraged to find original solutions to conventional engineering problems. Due to the difficulty of the program, my grades were average, but that pushed me to try harder and learn more.
Once I came to the new institution in North America, I've found the system to be more like training for a job. I got nothing but straight A's. But the university experience became a burden, it was not exciting anymore to come to school. Teachers were somewhat like described in the posted article. They followed the book so if the book sucked, the class sucked (With rare exceptions). The teacher-student interactions were minimal and professors rarely knew who we were. Tests were simple with examples taken from the book. The math/phyisics courses were limited to the minimal necessary to solve problems (why learning more than you need?, why learning quantum physiscs, right?). Labs were like following step-by-step instructions. It was definitely not my performance which made frustated but more the system which failed at any opportunity to promote creativity and originality. That's the point here, although some inspired students will do well even in this scenario, how many couldn't also be inspired and be great engineers but were lacking the chance to flourish? The article's value is to consider if we are being inspiring at university or if it is rather more of a training experience.
Just to make it clear, I am not saying South American universities are better, I'm just using those particular insitutions as a basis to compare teaching methodology.
I thought something along those lines as well. If we could eliminate the use of tan^(-1) functions on a program using it several times on a 1x10^10 x 1x10^10 matrix, could this make programs run faster?
This comment reminded me of the feeling of atonishment when I read one of Einstein's letters to Max Born. The quote goes like:
"Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice."
This, together with other sources may indicate that Einstein may have used intuition as a major part of his method of work - he just knew. Mathematics could then be applied to make those intuitions work out.
It is remarkable to see the possibility of Newton using similar approaches.
Yeah, except that then we had a 56Kb/s connection, if so. Good luck using Gmail, Google Maps, and so on with that internet connection. Today it is quite easy to consider dropping MS Outlook for Gmail for personal usage. Not then...
This is simply not true - you do have a choice! You could pack your stuff and go to Whitehorse, Yukon, build your own house, work as much (little) as you want and live with under $1000 dollars (canadian!) per year.
Why don't you do it? Not because it is too cold upthere but probably because city is nice, you have places to go and nice things to do, so we're back at the original problem, there you go.
Paying the bill, groceries is as much part of "stuff" as a plasma tv is!
That all sounds like naive bucolic idealism to me.
"Why is this all of a sudden a big deal when you put the camera on a phone? Small, very concealable cameras have been available for quite a long time."
Right, but you didn't have millions of people wandering around with those cameras everywhere. One would probably not go as far as buying a small camera for the purpose of taking pics of girls legs but if they have the device embedded in their cell they already carry then hey, why not...
"Blogs in particular have made life very easy for the Stupid Contrarian"
While your comment may be true, blogs may well be a great tool for improving the way we get news.
If there were a blog as popular as CNN for the general public (experts, non-experts, jornalists,etc.), there could be great dicussions such as those we have here but for general news topics.
Why not assume that experts in the field are or will eventually become part of the contributors group?
Also, the hard part of writing a technical book is the research involved. It's unlikely you can find a professor who can write a book without consulting other sources.
Contributors could include experts in particular areas - those would do the research part.
Other contributors could include professors and since the research part would be over with then they could take care of the putting the stuff together part.
Slashdot Mirror
I must disagree here. I attended Engineering school in South America and North America. I've found that the teaching style made a world of a difference in how I approached learning and what purposed it served. Back in that South American institution, we were constantly challenged to think for ourselves, to solve difficult problems and encouraged to find original solutions to conventional engineering problems. Due to the difficulty of the program, my grades were average, but that pushed me to try harder and learn more. Once I came to the new institution in North America, I've found the system to be more like training for a job. I got nothing but straight A's. But the university experience became a burden, it was not exciting anymore to come to school. Teachers were somewhat like described in the posted article. They followed the book so if the book sucked, the class sucked (With rare exceptions). The teacher-student interactions were minimal and professors rarely knew who we were. Tests were simple with examples taken from the book. The math/phyisics courses were limited to the minimal necessary to solve problems (why learning more than you need?, why learning quantum physiscs, right?). Labs were like following step-by-step instructions. It was definitely not my performance which made frustated but more the system which failed at any opportunity to promote creativity and originality. That's the point here, although some inspired students will do well even in this scenario, how many couldn't also be inspired and be great engineers but were lacking the chance to flourish? The article's value is to consider if we are being inspiring at university or if it is rather more of a training experience. Just to make it clear, I am not saying South American universities are better, I'm just using those particular insitutions as a basis to compare teaching methodology.
I thought something along those lines as well. If we could eliminate the use of tan^(-1) functions on a program using it several times on a 1x10^10 x 1x10^10 matrix, could this make programs run faster?
This comment reminded me of the feeling of atonishment when I read one of Einstein's letters to Max Born. The quote goes like:
"Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice."
This, together with other sources may indicate that Einstein may have used intuition as a major part of his method of work - he just knew. Mathematics could then be applied to make those intuitions work out.
It is remarkable to see the possibility of Newton using similar approaches.
Yeah, except that then we had a 56Kb/s connection, if so. Good luck using Gmail, Google Maps, and so on with that internet connection. Today it is quite easy to consider dropping MS Outlook for Gmail for personal usage. Not then...
From Dictionary.com
Rincon (in Spanish) = Corner (in English)
This is simply not true - you do have a choice! You could pack your stuff and go to Whitehorse, Yukon, build your own house, work as much (little) as you want and live with under $1000 dollars (canadian!) per year.
Why don't you do it? Not because it is too cold upthere but probably because city is nice, you have places to go and nice things to do, so we're back at the original problem, there you go.
Paying the bill, groceries is as much part of "stuff" as a plasma tv is!
That all sounds like naive bucolic idealism to me.
"Why is this all of a sudden a big deal when you put the camera on a phone? Small, very concealable cameras have been available for quite a long time."
Right, but you didn't have millions of people wandering around with those cameras everywhere. One would probably not go as far as buying a small camera for the purpose of taking pics of girls legs but if they have the device embedded in their cell they already carry then hey, why not...
It is not a coincidence the greek letter lambda was chosen as it is usually employed to represent the half-life of a certain matter.
"Blogs in particular have made life very easy for the Stupid Contrarian"
While your comment may be true, blogs may well be a great tool for improving the way we get news.
If there were a blog as popular as CNN for the general public (experts, non-experts, jornalists,etc.), there could be great dicussions such as those we have here but for general news topics.
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Hmmm. Are you sure you're not in Canada?
Why not assume that experts in the field are or will eventually become part of the contributors group?
Also, the hard part of writing a technical book is the research involved. It's unlikely you can find a professor who can write a book without consulting other sources.
Contributors could include experts in particular areas - those would do the research part.
Other contributors could include professors and since the research part would be over with then they could take care of the putting the stuff together part.