Re:Stop accepting crap systems research!!!
on
Saving U.S. Science
·
· Score: 1
Systems Software Research Is Irrelevant. And you're getting the link from a guy who thinks he's invented a new type of IPC in operating systems and can't wait to 1) Make it into real research, or 2) Patent it because that gives me more money than publishing an academic paper would.
Just slightly bitter that the professor I emailed at a school couldn't tell me what exact storage her storage manager manages and I'm seeing a bleak future for myself in Computer Science but I haven't even gotten into undergrad university yet, but it's the field I love so fuck it all...
Oh, and most of the my sentences don't run on like that. You'll have to forgive the pre-career sour grapes.
Now let's try that same logic with a human being...
Human: I can climb that jungle gym over there. Slashdotter: Let's test that claim. Climb the jungle gym. Human: I don't really feel like it. Slashdotter: Since my ability to apply logic to organisms with free will has not advanced since I was 7 years old on this very playground and you refuse to climb the jungle gym, I am forced to conclude that you cannot possibly climb the jungle gym.
I'm not trying to back up ID here, but you need a better argument.
What's the point of the government--and therefore the taxpayers--expending money to educate a class of students who don't need more education, don't want more education, and are going to have no more satisfying lives for this supposed service being given to them?
It's a waste. At private schools, such a thing would be only a waste for the parents and the students who have to pay for it, but at public schools, much of the burden is borne by the community, and for no purpose whatsoever. Supply and demand, probably. If those state schools didn't lower their standards enough to let morons in, they might not take in enough money to be there for guys like you who're good students with little money.
Those kids don't *deserve* to be at state colleges. This is my point. They don't deserve to be in college at all. A couple generations ago, they wouldn't have been, and they wouldn't have made any less money or done jobs any less complicated than the ones they're doing now.
This isn't just "a few people." It's the vast majority of the ones I had classes with as an undergrad, and more than a few of the people I'm encountering in graduate school. And that's in one of the programs with a reputation here for being "hard"--I suspect that some of the other majors graduate students without ever giving them an exam that isn't multiple choice. Great. I'll see you at the top and remember that when most people say "hard", they really mean "requires actual competence".
And, unfortunately, those of us who lack the funds to attend a more prestigious school then get marked by the fact that oh, no *good* student would ever have gone to one of these state schools in the first place. It's just not true. It's just that unfortunately, right now, you need a degree to get all manner of jobs that didn't require a college education thirty years ago, so they show up to get their Bachelor's with a major in Binge Drinking, just to have that piece of paper. You have to accept that some crappy students will be at the lower tier state schools. That's who they were intended for. If you want to complain about lack of student grants, I'm with you, but don't confuse the issue of lackluster funding for college kids with that of earning one's place.
If you could only afford to go to a low-tier state school, go. You can do damn good for yourself there. But don't complain about the kids who actually *deserve* to be there.
But doing well on those sections is generally *not* required to get into your Ordinary Generic State University. In fact, a lot of the places around here seem to hardly care if you've taken the test at all, much less if you scored well enough on it to indicate that you're capable of doing college-level work. Ordinary Generic State Universities (in America, at least) aren't supposed to be all that good. In this country, if you do well in high school and on your SATs you either go to a private school (like the famous Ivy League) or to a top-tier public university (a whole group of schools called the Public Ivies exist).
I see your point though. According to what I've read thus far, the Egyptians were real jerks to the Jewish slaves. Then again, if you're enslaved, what kind of treatment do you expect? Something to ponder. Actually, I was just making a joke about the notion that slaves took pride in their work.
The ones that get perfect scores do everything you said they should and still manage to suck as writing. That happens because, like coding or painting (see Paul Graham), writing is a fine art. You can teach everyone to write (ie: write SAT Essays or Slashdot comments that suck but get the point across), but you can't teach everyone to write well.
If you are not an engineer or a doctor, then you are nobody. This is an outlook that is very prevalent among Indian parents
So basically, all of India's parents have suddenly become Jewish.
if you cannot converse well with others, if you cannot carry yourself with confidence and in general cannot interact socially, then it's probably not the college's fault. it is up to the students to read non-curricular english books (which a college cannot, and shouldn't force), to form groups, try out new ideas and socialise more.
I would ask for the caveat that universities give their students time to socialize in. A good engineering or premedical education nowadays can and sometimes does take up so much time that the students can do nothing but study. For example, at MIT and CMU students now have "work, sleep, friends - choose two." That isn't right if you want students graduating with social and communication skills. You don't have to let students slack off, just let them work a 5 class, 3 credit-hours per-semester class schedule like all those "other" (liberal arts, mostly) majors do.
Actually, I might go to RPI with a 4 class, 4 credit-hours schedule, so what right have I to talk about socializing?
Seriously, I've been too afraid to look in the last few years: what % of college grads can write 2 pages of text that argues a point, backs it up with logic and evidence, and is basically "correct" in terms of grammar and word usage. Funny, because the SAT Reasoning Test now demands that students show their ability to do exactly that by writing an essay in the first section.
The majority of Egyptian slaves were proud to be working on the pyramids, generation after generation, and though it was back-breaking work, they got props for it and nobody spit on them. We were so proud, we killed all their first-born sons and left for our own damn country.
I agree very much with you, and fear that, unfortunately, this is the way most political issues are being presented by the media, by politicians, and by private individuals. Either you're a Republican or you're a Democrat. Either you're in favor of every kind of affirmative action, or you're a minority-hating bigot. Either you want the US to cede sovereignty to the UN, or you think the US shouldn't work with other countries. Either you wanted the US to invade Iraq or you think Saddam was a good leader. Either your a tree-hugger or you drive and H3.
It's a divisive and disingenuous method of argumentation, and shame on us for falling for it. Even worse, it pushes people towards extreme positions, one way or the other, when moderate positions would often bring about better results.
Gottlieb's Law of Ideology: Once any irrational idea is debunked, people will believe its extreme opposite just as irrationally.
This meme first planted on Reddit two days ago. Spread it where you see it in action!
Ironically, you've been modded +5 Insightful. The groupthink thinks there's a groupthink.
Anyway, you should be happy that we have Slashdot's moderation system. Here, content-free jokes and trolls get modded up and relatively anyone with a long, reasoned-out post can receive some upmodding (though not necesarrily to +5). On sites like Digg and Reddit, disagreeing with the consensus opinion gets you modded deep into the bowels of hell, because everyone has a mod point for each post and the site places no caps or floors on moderation values.
You think it's the fault of the left that China has most-favored nation trading status with the United States?
Yes:
On May 19, President Clinton announced that he would be renewing China's trading privileges in spite of its human rights record, and against the wishes of over sixty percent of Americans who are opposed to trading with the oppressive communist regime.
If you call Clinton a leftist you're either a Republican or you have your head up your ass. Actually, those're pretty much the same thing.
Let's put your assertions here in syllogistic form:
Premise 1: All learning is some work. Premise 2: All high school is some work. Conlusion: All high school is learning.
Without even addressing the truth or untruth of your premises, you've already committed the Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle Term./learned about syllogisms studying rhetoric as a home-schooler.
Some years later when the boring, slow, dull math concept of the moment was square roots and the immensely tedious process of calculating them by hand, I was so bored I just plain refused to bother with them. We got a friend in the neighborhood - a structural engineer of some kind, IIRC - to give me some idea of when they might be used, and show me how to do them, including faster ways than the show-every-boring-bit-of-work methods the school textbook had.
You were lucky. My town never taught hand-calculation of square roots (or trig functions) at all. I asked, but nobody - up to and including the calculus teachers - knew.
I know nobody, especially not Slashdot moderators, will ever read this comment, so I'll post it with my karma bonus.
The American education system suffers from the lack of a saleable product.
In the past ages, having a high-school diploma really meant something - that you knew basic math, history, science and English. The courses took real learning to complete, and thus even a lowly high school diploma told an employer you had an education. Yes, the real point of school was still to produce good sheeple, but at that point job markets demanded reasonably educated sheeple.
Only smart and dedicated students went on to university, where the education would allow them to rise a full societal class in terms of income. The extremely dedicated students creative enough to do real research got admitted to graduate school. Normal kids started working jobs, making money and supporting themselves.
Nowadays, however, the high-school diploma has lost all value and the bachelor's degree has begun losing its. High schools teach no vocational or even financial courses whatsoever. I, at 17 years of age right now, shall have to learn banking and investing from my parents and grandmother (who, thankfully, all handle their money quite well). The expectation, rising ever since the GI Bill (though the GI Bill was a good thing), that everyone will go to college leaves no real incentive for high schools to educate. After all, they can blame their graduate's failures to win admissions to Stanford and MIT on underfunding, the envied magnet school next town over, poverty, the parents or even the students themselves, because the school is not accountable to the local job market.
Top it off with politicians taking this obvious issue and spinning through each excuse the schools make up for their poor performance, not only to avoid confronting the real problem but because each successive scare issue over schools allows the politicians to avoid confronting the economic change that underlies all of it. Generation after generation, white men in suits tell us what's wrong with our schools, so they can keep sending jobs to Mexico and India instead of educating Americans. Nowadays a high-school diploma shows nothing other than the student's willingness and ability to slog through endless hours of busywork for no real reason or profit - exactly what modern business and government want to see.
The bachelor's degree has only begun to lose value very recently, but it's still losing its value. As ever-more Americans attempt an education that can out-earn the dying high-school diploma, they flood the job market with bachelor's degrees. And what happens when supply exceeds demand? The value of the commodity in question - in this case bachelor's educated American workers - drops. In the process, "savvier" young folks start taking master's degrees and Ph.D's solely for their financial value. Someday these, too, will bring in only a little more money than lower education and will burden young people with much more debt.
One thing is clear: Advanced degrees cannot demand high salaries while the high-school diploma falls in value. A house with a decaying foundation cannot stand.
The solution? In my opinion, we should once again make public high schools accountable to the local job market, as well as to the state and national university markets. Most universities will eagerly tell an inquirer how much money their graduates make - even for specific departments or majors. Given that high schools teach only General Education, they have no excuse not to supply such data to parents and students. Indeed, the better public schools already enjoy bragging about which universities their graduates attend.
However, many public schools no longer serve a substantial labor market. I know that Bethlehem Central High School here in Delmar, New York, USA does not. On some level, we have to bring back the high-school diploma jobs that once existed in most towns and cities of the country. Right-wingers are
I think the broad model should be the US university system. It doesn't have to be all private or all public, but you have real competition between schools and people can direct some of their government subsidies for education towards private schools instead of public schools.
I don't think so. Universities have the advantage that they can choose which students to admit. When you add entrance exams to kindergarten... well look how well that works in Japan. They get a powerful and smart economy with one of the most dismally depressed student populations in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Systems Software Research Is Irrelevant. And you're getting the link from a guy who thinks he's invented a new type of IPC in operating systems and can't wait to 1) Make it into real research, or 2) Patent it because that gives me more money than publishing an academic paper would.
Just slightly bitter that the professor I emailed at a school couldn't tell me what exact storage her storage manager manages and I'm seeing a bleak future for myself in Computer Science but I haven't even gotten into undergrad university yet, but it's the field I love so fuck it all...
Oh, and most of the my sentences don't run on like that. You'll have to forgive the pre-career sour grapes.
Except that Spiderman himself is a scientist. Last I heard, he did that freelance photography thing as a side gig to fund school.
Now let's try that same logic with a human being...
Human: I can climb that jungle gym over there.
Slashdotter: Let's test that claim. Climb the jungle gym.
Human: I don't really feel like it.
Slashdotter: Since my ability to apply logic to organisms with free will has not advanced since I was 7 years old on this very playground and you refuse to climb the jungle gym, I am forced to conclude that you cannot possibly climb the jungle gym.
I'm not trying to back up ID here, but you need a better argument.
It's a waste. At private schools, such a thing would be only a waste for the parents and the students who have to pay for it, but at public schools, much of the burden is borne by the community, and for no purpose whatsoever. Supply and demand, probably. If those state schools didn't lower their standards enough to let morons in, they might not take in enough money to be there for guys like you who're good students with little money. Those kids don't *deserve* to be at state colleges. This is my point. They don't deserve to be in college at all. A couple generations ago, they wouldn't have been, and they wouldn't have made any less money or done jobs any less complicated than the ones they're doing now.
This isn't just "a few people." It's the vast majority of the ones I had classes with as an undergrad, and more than a few of the people I'm encountering in graduate school. And that's in one of the programs with a reputation here for being "hard"--I suspect that some of the other majors graduate students without ever giving them an exam that isn't multiple choice. Great. I'll see you at the top and remember that when most people say "hard", they really mean "requires actual competence".
If you could only afford to go to a low-tier state school, go. You can do damn good for yourself there. But don't complain about the kids who actually *deserve* to be there.
That has more to do with American and European immigration law and attitudes towards newcomers.
The ones that get perfect scores do everything you said they should and still manage to suck as writing. That happens because, like coding or painting (see Paul Graham), writing is a fine art. You can teach everyone to write (ie: write SAT Essays or Slashdot comments that suck but get the point across), but you can't teach everyone to write well.
If you are not an engineer or a doctor, then you are nobody. This is an outlook that is very prevalent among Indian parents
So basically, all of India's parents have suddenly become Jewish.
if you cannot converse well with others, if you cannot carry yourself with confidence and in general cannot interact socially, then it's probably not the college's fault. it is up to the students to read non-curricular english books (which a college cannot, and shouldn't force), to form groups, try out new ideas and socialise more.
I would ask for the caveat that universities give their students time to socialize in. A good engineering or premedical education nowadays can and sometimes does take up so much time that the students can do nothing but study. For example, at MIT and CMU students now have "work, sleep, friends - choose two." That isn't right if you want students graduating with social and communication skills. You don't have to let students slack off, just let them work a 5 class, 3 credit-hours per-semester class schedule like all those "other" (liberal arts, mostly) majors do.
Actually, I might go to RPI with a 4 class, 4 credit-hours schedule, so what right have I to talk about socializing?
I agree very much with you, and fear that, unfortunately, this is the way most political issues are being presented by the media, by politicians, and by private individuals. Either you're a Republican or you're a Democrat. Either you're in favor of every kind of affirmative action, or you're a minority-hating bigot. Either you want the US to cede sovereignty to the UN, or you think the US shouldn't work with other countries. Either you wanted the US to invade Iraq or you think Saddam was a good leader. Either your a tree-hugger or you drive and H3.
It's a divisive and disingenuous method of argumentation, and shame on us for falling for it. Even worse, it pushes people towards extreme positions, one way or the other, when moderate positions would often bring about better results.
Gottlieb's Law of Ideology: Once any irrational idea is debunked, people will believe its extreme opposite just as irrationally.This meme first planted on Reddit two days ago. Spread it where you see it in action!
Ironically, you've been modded +5 Insightful. The groupthink thinks there's a groupthink.
Anyway, you should be happy that we have Slashdot's moderation system. Here, content-free jokes and trolls get modded up and relatively anyone with a long, reasoned-out post can receive some upmodding (though not necesarrily to +5). On sites like Digg and Reddit, disagreeing with the consensus opinion gets you modded deep into the bowels of hell, because everyone has a mod point for each post and the site places no caps or floors on moderation values.
I have had it with these mother-fucking dupes on this mother-fucking Slashdot!
Not really, thanks to kashrut.
This AC needs mod points.
You think it's the fault of the left that China has most-favored nation trading status with the United States?
Yes:
If you call Clinton a leftist you're either a Republican or you have your head up your ass. Actually, those're pretty much the same thing.Let's put your assertions here in syllogistic form:
/learned about syllogisms studying rhetoric as a home-schooler.
Premise 1: All learning is some work.
Premise 2: All high school is some work.
Conlusion: All high school is learning.
Without even addressing the truth or untruth of your premises, you've already committed the Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle Term.
What exactly is EQ?
You were lucky. My town never taught hand-calculation of square roots (or trig functions) at all. I asked, but nobody - up to and including the calculus teachers - knew.
I know nobody, especially not Slashdot moderators, will ever read this comment, so I'll post it with my karma bonus.
The American education system suffers from the lack of a saleable product.
In the past ages, having a high-school diploma really meant something - that you knew basic math, history, science and English. The courses took real learning to complete, and thus even a lowly high school diploma told an employer you had an education. Yes, the real point of school was still to produce good sheeple, but at that point job markets demanded reasonably educated sheeple.
Only smart and dedicated students went on to university, where the education would allow them to rise a full societal class in terms of income. The extremely dedicated students creative enough to do real research got admitted to graduate school. Normal kids started working jobs, making money and supporting themselves.
Nowadays, however, the high-school diploma has lost all value and the bachelor's degree has begun losing its. High schools teach no vocational or even financial courses whatsoever. I, at 17 years of age right now, shall have to learn banking and investing from my parents and grandmother (who, thankfully, all handle their money quite well). The expectation, rising ever since the GI Bill (though the GI Bill was a good thing), that everyone will go to college leaves no real incentive for high schools to educate. After all, they can blame their graduate's failures to win admissions to Stanford and MIT on underfunding, the envied magnet school next town over, poverty, the parents or even the students themselves, because the school is not accountable to the local job market.
Top it off with politicians taking this obvious issue and spinning through each excuse the schools make up for their poor performance, not only to avoid confronting the real problem but because each successive scare issue over schools allows the politicians to avoid confronting the economic change that underlies all of it. Generation after generation, white men in suits tell us what's wrong with our schools, so they can keep sending jobs to Mexico and India instead of educating Americans. Nowadays a high-school diploma shows nothing other than the student's willingness and ability to slog through endless hours of busywork for no real reason or profit - exactly what modern business and government want to see.
The bachelor's degree has only begun to lose value very recently, but it's still losing its value. As ever-more Americans attempt an education that can out-earn the dying high-school diploma, they flood the job market with bachelor's degrees. And what happens when supply exceeds demand? The value of the commodity in question - in this case bachelor's educated American workers - drops. In the process, "savvier" young folks start taking master's degrees and Ph.D's solely for their financial value. Someday these, too, will bring in only a little more money than lower education and will burden young people with much more debt.
One thing is clear: Advanced degrees cannot demand high salaries while the high-school diploma falls in value. A house with a decaying foundation cannot stand.
The solution? In my opinion, we should once again make public high schools accountable to the local job market, as well as to the state and national university markets. Most universities will eagerly tell an inquirer how much money their graduates make - even for specific departments or majors. Given that high schools teach only General Education, they have no excuse not to supply such data to parents and students. Indeed, the better public schools already enjoy bragging about which universities their graduates attend.
However, many public schools no longer serve a substantial labor market. I know that Bethlehem Central High School here in Delmar, New York, USA does not. On some level, we have to bring back the high-school diploma jobs that once existed in most towns and cities of the country. Right-wingers are
I think he's only partly right, but he's damn well interesting!
I don't think so. Universities have the advantage that they can choose which students to admit. When you add entrance exams to kindergarten... well look how well that works in Japan. They get a powerful and smart economy with one of the most dismally depressed student populations in the world.