I think I disagree a little. I see it as unfortunate that the people expressing their frustration walked into the trap of one of the logical fallacies (which one?) of using the Four-Star laden words (NSFW denoted as ****) in doing so. However there is a point under that flawed frustrated presentation. Put in a fancier manner, the rest of Wikipedia is indeed at a generalist level, meant for people who just want to know what something is, and then go back to their life. In those cases, the "Encyclopedia is only the start" surely applies. As a random example, let's use the article on "Bioavailability", which (intuitively) means that a nutrient is useless if your body in fact cannot absorb and process it. Still at the intuitive level, it was an old criticism of vitamin pills, whereupon your body removed them before the stomach could finish peeling off the layers of nutrients all the way to the middle of the pill.
That's as tricky a topic as any, but the Wiki article is in fact generalist. What the frustrated people are saying is that the content level isn't stable across all of Wikipedia. They're reacting to the wide difference in tone between that article and the math (or sometimes other engineering ones etc.)
Yeah, maybe, but it's all still Employer's Market strategy. They get even more brutal on the under-qualified side because sky help you if your last job was something like "creating AI models out of the movement patterns of muskrats" you'll never see that exact job again.
There's some strange discrepancies lately in Slashdot, both the stories and the comments. No Are we saying that no one can do the Six Degrees thing and come up with a Hashrocket Employee who tells us they're either full of it or else it's Shangri La? What we're clearly missing here is the other hald of the story. X person submits to this outrageous hire process, they get hired,... and then what?
Okay Mods, here I go, this is coming from concerned frustration and is not intended as flamebait! I'm using a couple of rhetorical flourishes, so let's hope I don't misfire them.
I believe the professor's comments are tragically flawed, starting with one reason. They might have worked for *any other subject*, combined with a more constructive goal of "how do we refine next year's class for the best experience" etc. But what is the subject here? Wait for it... Statistics. The art of studying a Sample from a Population, right?
So in this evaluation, the Sample Size is One Class. Sorry Prof, you mentioned *three* other sources of online classes, namely OpenCourseWare, Coursera, and edX (I'm leaving off Khan Academy, it's structured differently). A glance at Wikipedia lists even more. So my first concern is why that sample class is being equated to free statistics courses in general and even worse, online learning as a whole. Some examples: https://www.coursera.org/course/stats1 - Coursera's version of Stats 1.
Then for the criticisms: 1. Lack of Planning 2. Sloppy Writing 3. Quiz Regime 4. Population and Sample 5. Normal Curve Calculations 7. Bipolar Difficulty 8. Final Exam Certification 9. Hucksterism 10. Lack of Updates?
Let's separate those out into Badly Written Course complaints, that can apply for *any* course, including traditional ones. Those are: 1. Lack of Planning 2. Sloppy Writing 4. Population and Sample 5. Normal Curve Calculations 6. CLT Not Explained
So for my fellow Slashdot Readers, the ones for us to thrash around are the ones dealing with the Online Concept. 3. Quiz Regime 7. Bipolar Difficulty 8. Final Exam Certification 9. Hucksterism 10. Lack of Updates
Except that whole "develop skills" part is chicken and egg. Elsewhere I offered him a chance for me to be a "mock client", aka as if it were a more serious engagement, but with a lot of leeway for stumbling. For me at least, only when faced with X specific problem did I realize I had a gap in my knowledge. I have a couple of good test case projects for him to chomp on. If I can "stump him", then that's when he will have something to anchor a week/month's worth of study.
Per a couple of other poster's comments about being hacked, one of my projects involves users and logins to the system. So whatever he comes up with, I'd just put it up as a free for all and tell the "security testers" to go break it. Then he gets that experience too, so when the topics come up in his formal studies, he's "been there, made that mistake."
To be fair on the client side: In many ways we can't know what we want, it's like Jeopardy - we don't have the knowledge to ask the right questions. I've commissioned a few small things here and there, and I much prefer a dev who will warn me if I make a mistake in my wording that entails 500 hours of work, rather than just clunking down to it, only for me to discover "well, my 7 hours of paid time vanished, and the dev didn't bother to tell me that what I asked for could never be completed in that time."
Meanwhile, of course this young guy should continue to study, but actually trying his hand at writing some real code gives context for those studies. Let's say he takes me up on my offer to give him some small things to thrash around on. When he comes up against specific problems in my assignments, then later when he studies, he'll remember "oh, yeah, if you don't do ____ and ____ and ____ when making X kind of program, Bad Things happen." THAT is the fundamental flaw in college - your basic theory might be good, but when it comes time to solve actual coding problems, there's no substitute for having hands on practice.
I'll reply to you, though offhand I'll remark that I can't find any replies yet by the Submitter.
I had a small project on one of those sites for a little while where I put up an incredibly simple program commission, then see of the few people who replied, who didn't walk into basic proofreading blunders.
Hey Submitter, if you're out there and reading these notes, dig me up, I need a few small things done!! In return, I'll give you a rating as a Slashdot User who is at least modestly respected by the crowd as not being a shill.
Some ads are so slick that even the most rabid frothing anti-ad person will let them slide by. Car dealers is one - On the back of a ton of cars is "Joe's Ford" etc. The other one is mobile phone ads "Sent from my ___".
I'm so upset that I didn't even bother to read more than a few sentences of the article given the topic we're having. "Nobody is quite sure what caused the color change."
So in the rush to get there first with the reporting race, someone couldn't be bothered to give a college chem lab student lunch and an hour to get a chemical composition of the water? Oh, right, that would actually take journalism work.
Samsung: "We admit, you rule, and we suk. Therefore, we appeal to have the judgement vacated. However, the public will buy a shitty product for half the price, because it's good enough. Bye now!"
It's about two new classes of security threats, Anonymous and "Persistent Adversaries" aka government sponsored attacks.
There's a nice point in the middle that if you and your buddy are being chased by a bear, you only have to be faster than your buddy. Not anymore. Now there's lots of bears, you're drenched in bacon fat, you poked a few bears in the eye to piss them off, and you only have one decoy buddy. Oops.
You have a quality Dead Horse, pre-processed! And you're what, going to throw it away? I hereby patent methods and procedures for purchasing bloody, pulpy, dead horses and selling the component parts to tennis racquet manufacturers, biological testing factories, and McDonald's.
The chain I get is: Shanghai Daily Wenhui-Xinmin United Press Group Shanghai SASAC which is a "PRC Governmental Body as defined under Rule 19A.04" (I think of Hong Kong stock listing rules.)
Walter Miller Jr. already looked at this problem, though from a different angle. In the story "The Darfsteller", robots replaced all the singers, then the actors. We're seeing the first edges of that already. So the story looks at a broken down aging man who became a janitor "just to be near the theater still".
Forget the "1%", I'd garner there might be less than 100 companies tops that owned all the robots.
Hatta, sidestepping that long comment sideways to yours, you're not supposed to interpret things quite "however you want". There's a culture to listening to parables as well. We have a big problem elsewhere when people claim that certain religious groups "aren't authentic". What you just discovered is the difficult clash between "authentic" and "modern".
There are ways to recast Parables in modern language, and I try to do that. Out of respect for those classical monks, I try not to "slam" them for being Authentic.
Yeah, that's what schools sometimes are, and the slant of the whole article, while not quite flamebait, is going for the whole "in today's competitive world" meme, clearly with an agenda that the writer will probably benefit from.
This is Slashdot, and I'm hearing the choice come down to "To watch TV while bored or work harder not smarter?!". Is no one using their summer to learn some computing, or form a band, or dig around uncle Joe's beat up old Datsun, or build some Hardware Hack?
Elsewhere on other days the "cynical idea" of paying students to get good grades has appeared, to the shock and horror of "but Education must be pure and noble!" Gee, if they're now saying "to be competitive, let's work harder", it's not noble anymore, is it?
There's other articles out there that say "unstructured time", the bane of writers of articles like this, "is necessary for young adolescent growth because it forms a mental glue that is difficult to measure but is important". Sorry, I also won't fall feed a "Citation Needed" Troll. This whole set of articles is 2012 going on 1981. Why 1981? Let's all intone together! "In this fast moving, high pressure, get it done world, aren't you glad there's one company that can keep up with it all?" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31yxkSIIn9A
P.S. Nothing is ever good enough. So might as well spend a couple month each year reclaiming our humanity.
While that's a great internet meme video, in a lot of areas, it's actually better just to be a "little guy". It's when you get all fancy "upholding your rights" that you'll get in trouble, because so help you if you mess up one line of your "script" the grumpy officer will then go ballistic on you.
This is all made difficult because each town has about three "moods" depending on which set of officers is on shift, times the number of towns in an area. But I've done far better with "Yes Officer, my license is a week expired, but see, this is Route 28, I'm on my way to the DMV 20 miles up that way to go fix it. There's a new section on the form that asks for 'any license number you ever had in the last 10 years' that took me a week to figure out."
That's usually all it takes to get a Warning. If you get all fancy like "I don't have to talk to you", they get pissed, then they unload on you.
Let's just say that the arts of dissecting fundamentalist faiths was perfected during the 20th century, so they are here since the start of the 21st. Those monks were not trolling, it was probably a really "classical" answer to the question. The deep problem with truly fundamental classical religious thought is that by this age, we've lost the respect for the old ways. Of course he's not in a "fancy glass house" at 192487 Dharma Boulevard. I'd garner that there's well over 60% chance that this is a "parable". At my feeble level as a post-modern blended-faith Buddhist, the interpretation might be "Steve Jobs exists as the sum of the memories of anyone who has been impacted by him, and how you view your life since he passes determines how you think of him now that he is gone".
Actually, you have the spark of a brilliant business plan. "Pill"? How incredibly boring. Is it that unstable? Make it into a drink! Charge whatever you wanted for it, (price of the pill plus bar markup for the entertainment).
You could have a "Malaria Killer Drink". But no, we like things Safe For Kiddies around here, so it must be a nice boring pill that the school nurse can dish out. That's because we really don't want to fix the economy (increased revenue from the adult drink model). We just like complaining about it while the 1% does their thing.
Mods, I'm being vicious, so don't modslam me from the tone. This is only one example of how if we really wanted to fix the economy, we'd unleash a few more "grownup" products and services into the world. There are hundreds more examples.
There's a lot of early snark going on here. But they're missing an Elephant In The Room. What about the Religious questions? "God put them there, we killed them off, so of course we should do God's Will to put them back!" The article dares to mention "the natural evolution of Earth". Oh, I'm sorry, 41% (or whatever it is now) doesn't believe in evolution, right?
New wrinkle. Watch them try to Patent the processes that create the extinct animals. Wanna see what that trial looks like? "The Samsung Grizzly looks too much like Apple's iBear! Cease and Desist and re-Extinct the Samsung Grizzly!"
So if you're gonna get into ethics, get into ALL of them.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I disagree a little. I see it as unfortunate that the people expressing their frustration walked into the trap of one of the logical fallacies (which one?) of using the Four-Star laden words (NSFW denoted as ****) in doing so. However there is a point under that flawed frustrated presentation. Put in a fancier manner, the rest of Wikipedia is indeed at a generalist level, meant for people who just want to know what something is, and then go back to their life. In those cases, the "Encyclopedia is only the start" surely applies. As a random example, let's use the article on "Bioavailability", which (intuitively) means that a nutrient is useless if your body in fact cannot absorb and process it. Still at the intuitive level, it was an old criticism of vitamin pills, whereupon your body removed them before the stomach could finish peeling off the layers of nutrients all the way to the middle of the pill.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioavailability
That's as tricky a topic as any, but the Wiki article is in fact generalist. What the frustrated people are saying is that the content level isn't stable across all of Wikipedia. They're reacting to the wide difference in tone between that article and the math (or sometimes other engineering ones etc.)
Yeah, maybe, but it's all still Employer's Market strategy. They get even more brutal on the under-qualified side because sky help you if your last job was something like "creating AI models out of the movement patterns of muskrats" you'll never see that exact job again.
There's some strange discrepancies lately in Slashdot, both the stories and the comments. No Are we saying that no one can do the Six Degrees thing and come up with a Hashrocket Employee who tells us they're either full of it or else it's Shangri La? What we're clearly missing here is the other hald of the story. X person submits to this outrageous hire process, they get hired, ... and then what?
I got a spirit message from Pierre de Fermat. He says he worked it out, but it's too long to post as a reply to an AC who will never read it.
Okay Mods, here I go, this is coming from concerned frustration and is not intended as flamebait! I'm using a couple of rhetorical flourishes, so let's hope I don't misfire them.
I believe the professor's comments are tragically flawed, starting with one reason. They might have worked for *any other subject*, combined with a more constructive goal of "how do we refine next year's class for the best experience" etc. But what is the subject here? Wait for it ... Statistics. The art of studying a Sample from a Population, right?
So in this evaluation, the Sample Size is One Class. Sorry Prof, you mentioned *three* other sources of online classes, namely OpenCourseWare, Coursera, and edX (I'm leaving off Khan Academy, it's structured differently). A glance at Wikipedia lists even more. So my first concern is why that sample class is being equated to free statistics courses in general and even worse, online learning as a whole. Some examples:
https://www.coursera.org/course/stats1 - Coursera's version of Stats 1.
Then for the criticisms:
1. Lack of Planning
2. Sloppy Writing
3. Quiz Regime
4. Population and Sample
5. Normal Curve Calculations
7. Bipolar Difficulty
8. Final Exam Certification
9. Hucksterism
10. Lack of Updates?
Let's separate those out into Badly Written Course complaints, that can apply for *any* course, including traditional ones. Those are:
1. Lack of Planning
2. Sloppy Writing
4. Population and Sample
5. Normal Curve Calculations
6. CLT Not Explained
So for my fellow Slashdot Readers, the ones for us to thrash around are the ones dealing with the Online Concept.
3. Quiz Regime
7. Bipolar Difficulty
8. Final Exam Certification
9. Hucksterism
10. Lack of Updates
Except that whole "develop skills" part is chicken and egg.
Elsewhere I offered him a chance for me to be a "mock client", aka as if it were a more serious engagement, but with a lot of leeway for stumbling. For me at least, only when faced with X specific problem did I realize I had a gap in my knowledge. I have a couple of good test case projects for him to chomp on. If I can "stump him", then that's when he will have something to anchor a week/month's worth of study.
Per a couple of other poster's comments about being hacked, one of my projects involves users and logins to the system. So whatever he comes up with, I'd just put it up as a free for all and tell the "security testers" to go break it. Then he gets that experience too, so when the topics come up in his formal studies, he's "been there, made that mistake."
To be fair on the client side: In many ways we can't know what we want, it's like Jeopardy - we don't have the knowledge to ask the right questions. I've commissioned a few small things here and there, and I much prefer a dev who will warn me if I make a mistake in my wording that entails 500 hours of work, rather than just clunking down to it, only for me to discover "well, my 7 hours of paid time vanished, and the dev didn't bother to tell me that what I asked for could never be completed in that time."
Meanwhile, of course this young guy should continue to study, but actually trying his hand at writing some real code gives context for those studies. Let's say he takes me up on my offer to give him some small things to thrash around on. When he comes up against specific problems in my assignments, then later when he studies, he'll remember "oh, yeah, if you don't do ____ and ____ and ____ when making X kind of program, Bad Things happen." THAT is the fundamental flaw in college - your basic theory might be good, but when it comes time to solve actual coding problems, there's no substitute for having hands on practice.
I'll reply to you, though offhand I'll remark that I can't find any replies yet by the Submitter.
I had a small project on one of those sites for a little while where I put up an incredibly simple program commission, then see of the few people who replied, who didn't walk into basic proofreading blunders.
Hey Submitter, if you're out there and reading these notes, dig me up, I need a few small things done!! In return, I'll give you a rating as a Slashdot User who is at least modestly respected by the crowd as not being a shill.
Dang, MillionShort is the best new idea in search I've seen in years. I'm going to go play with it soon.
Is your cat named Schrodinger? And are you quite certain of how he was looking at you? (Ba-dump-duush!)
You know, you found a really good example there.
Some ads are so slick that even the most rabid frothing anti-ad person will let them slide by. Car dealers is one - On the back of a ton of cars is "Joe's Ford" etc. The other one is mobile phone ads "Sent from my ___".
I'm so upset that I didn't even bother to read more than a few sentences of the article given the topic we're having.
"Nobody is quite sure what caused the color change."
So in the rush to get there first with the reporting race, someone couldn't be bothered to give a college chem lab student lunch and an hour to get a chemical composition of the water? Oh, right, that would actually take journalism work.
Let's try an even sharper version.
Samsung: "We admit, you rule, and we suk. Therefore, we appeal to have the judgement vacated. However, the public will buy a shitty product for half the price, because it's good enough. Bye now!"
It's about two new classes of security threats, Anonymous and "Persistent Adversaries" aka government sponsored attacks.
There's a nice point in the middle that if you and your buddy are being chased by a bear, you only have to be faster than your buddy. Not anymore. Now there's lots of bears, you're drenched in bacon fat, you poked a few bears in the eye to piss them off, and you only have one decoy buddy. Oops.
Oh come on now, you have no sense of innovation!
You have a quality Dead Horse, pre-processed! And you're what, going to throw it away? I hereby patent methods and procedures for purchasing bloody, pulpy, dead horses and selling the component parts to tennis racquet manufacturers, biological testing factories, and McDonald's.
Looks to me like it is indeed Chinese controlled.
The chain I get is:
Shanghai Daily
Wenhui-Xinmin United Press Group
Shanghai SASAC which is a "PRC Governmental Body as defined under Rule 19A.04" (I think of Hong Kong stock listing rules.)
Walter Miller Jr. already looked at this problem, though from a different angle. In the story "The Darfsteller", robots replaced all the singers, then the actors. We're seeing the first edges of that already. So the story looks at a broken down aging man who became a janitor "just to be near the theater still".
Forget the "1%", I'd garner there might be less than 100 companies tops that owned all the robots.
Hatta, sidestepping that long comment sideways to yours, you're not supposed to interpret things quite "however you want". There's a culture to listening to parables as well. We have a big problem elsewhere when people claim that certain religious groups "aren't authentic". What you just discovered is the difficult clash between "authentic" and "modern".
There are ways to recast Parables in modern language, and I try to do that. Out of respect for those classical monks, I try not to "slam" them for being Authentic.
You will disclose the First Post. V'GER requires the information.
THIS is one variant of the "Mayan Grade" Apocalypse.
Forget Wikileaks, what if ALL DATA ANYWHERE got turbo-released because of a devastating flaw?
We'd have like 999*999 Terabytes of infringing data on EVERYONE, EVER.
Good luck with the lawsuits arising from THAT!
Yeah, that's what schools sometimes are, and the slant of the whole article, while not quite flamebait, is going for the whole "in today's competitive world" meme, clearly with an agenda that the writer will probably benefit from.
This is Slashdot, and I'm hearing the choice come down to "To watch TV while bored or work harder not smarter?!". Is no one using their summer to learn some computing, or form a band, or dig around uncle Joe's beat up old Datsun, or build some Hardware Hack?
Elsewhere on other days the "cynical idea" of paying students to get good grades has appeared, to the shock and horror of "but Education must be pure and noble!" Gee, if they're now saying "to be competitive, let's work harder", it's not noble anymore, is it?
There's other articles out there that say "unstructured time", the bane of writers of articles like this, "is necessary for young adolescent growth because it forms a mental glue that is difficult to measure but is important". Sorry, I also won't fall feed a "Citation Needed" Troll. This whole set of articles is 2012 going on 1981. Why 1981? Let's all intone together! "In this fast moving, high pressure, get it done world, aren't you glad there's one company that can keep up with it all?" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31yxkSIIn9A
P.S. Nothing is ever good enough. So might as well spend a couple month each year reclaiming our humanity.
Naw, it's all about the area you are in.
While that's a great internet meme video, in a lot of areas, it's actually better just to be a "little guy". It's when you get all fancy "upholding your rights" that you'll get in trouble, because so help you if you mess up one line of your "script" the grumpy officer will then go ballistic on you.
This is all made difficult because each town has about three "moods" depending on which set of officers is on shift, times the number of towns in an area. But I've done far better with "Yes Officer, my license is a week expired, but see, this is Route 28, I'm on my way to the DMV 20 miles up that way to go fix it. There's a new section on the form that asks for 'any license number you ever had in the last 10 years' that took me a week to figure out."
That's usually all it takes to get a Warning. If you get all fancy like "I don't have to talk to you", they get pissed, then they unload on you.
Naw, let me try to voice a bit of sensitivity.
Let's just say that the arts of dissecting fundamentalist faiths was perfected during the 20th century, so they are here since the start of the 21st. Those monks were not trolling, it was probably a really "classical" answer to the question. The deep problem with truly fundamental classical religious thought is that by this age, we've lost the respect for the old ways. Of course he's not in a "fancy glass house" at 192487 Dharma Boulevard. I'd garner that there's well over 60% chance that this is a "parable". At my feeble level as a post-modern blended-faith Buddhist, the interpretation might be "Steve Jobs exists as the sum of the memories of anyone who has been impacted by him, and how you view your life since he passes determines how you think of him now that he is gone".
Actually, you have the spark of a brilliant business plan. "Pill"? How incredibly boring. Is it that unstable? Make it into a drink! Charge whatever you wanted for it, (price of the pill plus bar markup for the entertainment).
You could have a "Malaria Killer Drink". But no, we like things Safe For Kiddies around here, so it must be a nice boring pill that the school nurse can dish out. That's because we really don't want to fix the economy (increased revenue from the adult drink model). We just like complaining about it while the 1% does their thing.
Mods, I'm being vicious, so don't modslam me from the tone. This is only one example of how if we really wanted to fix the economy, we'd unleash a few more "grownup" products and services into the world. There are hundreds more examples.
There's a lot of early snark going on here. But they're missing an Elephant In The Room. What about the Religious questions? "God put them there, we killed them off, so of course we should do God's Will to put them back!" The article dares to mention "the natural evolution of Earth". Oh, I'm sorry, 41% (or whatever it is now) doesn't believe in evolution, right?
New wrinkle. Watch them try to Patent the processes that create the extinct animals. Wanna see what that trial looks like? "The Samsung Grizzly looks too much like Apple's iBear! Cease and Desist and re-Extinct the Samsung Grizzly!"
So if you're gonna get into ethics, get into ALL of them.