> If students in your program can ask the mentor questions about their problem sets, I highly doubt Duke CS department will allow this.
Came to write this. Homework help services were specifically called out in our course policies as a form of academic dishonesty. Getting outside help on a problem set would get you kicked out of the major. It would take a lot of care to design a tutoring program that was specific to our courses and didn't run afoul of our academic integrity rules.
OP: this is a nice service for universities that allow this sort of thing, but you should be sure you're not running afoul of programs with stricter academic integrity rules (which, AFAIK, includes most top programs).
As white collar automation starts to hit hard over the next 5-10 years, the number of desk jobs will massively decline. Also, most of the remaining people who work desk jobs will be doing some sort of programming.
> I refuse to bow to the notion that everyone should learn to code or become programmers...
Why?
Most programming isn't as hard as people seem to think.
I used to think that a perhaps some really smart middle schoolers can learn enough about programming to build a simple CRUD-based web app: a bit of Python or PHP, just enough SQL (the idea of tables, columns, rows, and cells; SELECT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements), and just enough HTML/Javascript.
However, after doing a few semester-long middle school enrichment activities with randomly (not self) selected students, I am now relatively certain that EVERY "normal" middle schooler can learn enough Python, SQL, and HTML/Javascript to build a CRUD web app.
> ...because trucking jobs will be gone.
Driving a truck is quite a bit more difficult than people seem to think. Frankly, I'm fairly confident that truck drivers will be better off than your average white collar worker, even if trucking is completely automated.
In the world where "everyone at a desk does some programming", any properly educated person within a std.dev. or two of average intelligence will be fine. The only question is whether there will be enough work to go around.
Also (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Job_perf...): ”The US military has minimum enlistment standards at about the IQ 85 level. There have been two experiments with lowering this to 80 but in both cases these men could not master soldiering well enough to justify their costs”.
Yes, 2 full standard deviations would be the higher (ie, lower) extreme of my "within a std.dev. or two" ballpark.
I use that ballpark because I'm told it's (very roughly) the population that my students were randomly selected from. My methodology isn't perfect, to be sure, but I'm not pulling numbers out of thin air :)
The specific criteria is that none of my students had an IEP. And, by definition, everyone more than two standard deviations from mean had an IEP.
Now, probably there are a lot of students with IEPs who are less than two standard deviations from the mean. Hard to know who those students were in terms of the IQ distribution. Probably a lot of them are on the lower end, but possibly learning disabilities are more smoothly distributed than that. And I also don't know how many students were excluded, so even if we knew where to concentrate their mass in the IQ distribution, it wouldn't help.
It's worth noting that this means I also never worked with students who tested above two standard deviations from the mean. "Gifted" students had their own special education that ran concurrently with the period of the day when the enrichment activities were done. I guess the assumption is they'd be fine, but I'm told by some teachers that's not necessarily the case.
The fundamental conceit of csrankings.org is right in the name. US News (and anyone else) does just as good a job. And always will. You can matter have your measurement gamed. Or you can measure in obscurity. Or you can matter and not measure. Pick one.
For undergraduate, just go wherever is cheapest with a reasonable curriculum and non-joke professors (decently difficult to hack: couple hundred citations and also real industry experience). Emphasize places that will also teach you non-CS skills (a second major, a great network that in addition implicitly teaches you the right type of communication skills, etc.).
For a masters, just don't.
For a phd, go with the best advisor you can find and finish fast.
Ignore rankings. They exist to be hacked. And academics are great hackers.
The regulation already exists, ridesharing companies just decided to break the law and challenge the definition of "employee" and "taxi" because ridesharing companies have an app. That was weird from the begging.
All the gig economy is just based in the idea that companies that do business thru an app doesn't need to follow established laws.
They were bad laws that deserved and earned open defiance. All people care about is getting from Point A to Point B in a quick, reliable and safe manner. People don’t care if the driver has an expensive medallion that makes them a member of a government-sanctioned mafia, if the driver of the car is willing to fulfill the passenger’s request in exchange for money.
When you make the request for a private car to take you somewhere, you’re putting your life in the driver’s hands for the duration of the ride. The medallion and privileges don’t make a difference, but they can make the difference in the availability of cars in your vicinity.
> All people care about is getting from Point A to Point B in a quick, reliable and safe manner.
Drivers also care about having a safe work environment, reasonable working hours and a fair pay. Capitalism is not just about consumers, but about consumers and producers.
Apps push employees to accept ever lowering salaries to achieve that "cheap trips" and to renounce to their rights as employees to increase "availability". Labour laws were created to address this situations and should not be ignored.
How would you solve these problems?
> The medallion and privileges don’t make a difference, but they can make the difference in the availability of cars in your vicinity.
Many cities require tests, background checks, etc. to get a taxi driver license. Apps seem to have lowered that standards. So, the opposite - less safe travel - could be the actual reality. I think that your statement needs some extra proof.
People aren't the only consumer of grains. You have biofuels, as well as livestock feed. Biofuels are likely having a bad time with the breakdown in OPEC. With livestock, people might eat a bit less meat, but I donno if that's really gonna move much. But directly to your point, grain alcohol products might drop a smidge with restaurants out of commission for months. Even if people only drink marginally less, they'll be paying way less for it and I imagine some of that margin cut trickles down the supply chain.
More darkly, there may be 1 percent fewer people around to eat bread, steak and drink vodka.
A good review article is worth its weight in gold for both the researchers who write it and the research community.
Remember that research communities are extremely transient because of the professor : phd student : practitioner ratio and the low odds that a graduated phd student a) stays in research and then b) stays in the same research area for their whole career. Therefore, most members of a given research community have approximately 1-3 years of experience in the broader academic field and approximately no experience in the area covered by the review. Therefore, a good review can simultaneously:
1. prevent a lot of wheel re-invention, and
2. push the research field in a certain direction (either accidentally or purposefully).
Also, good review articles typically include some amount of synthesis. I.e., the creation of a conceptual framework and language for understanding and talking about a bunch of vaguely related stuff. This article tries to do that e.g. in Section 2.1 but the topic of the review is so incredibly broad that the categories are not super useful.
"Oh boy, I can hear the sophomore software engineering studio students firing up their word processors from here" works just as well.
I don't think the critique was of self-learning or bootcamps. It was a critique of a certain sort of cringe-worthy self-promotion.
And not just cringe-worthy. Spreading information based upon a cursory analysis of some CSV files without any training or experience in epidemiology, public health, public communications, etc. seems... irresponsible.
Also, off-topic, but most of my peers at university taught themselves how to program years before starting college -- typically in middle/early high school. And I mean actually taught themselves, from books and zine tutorials, not 'attended a formal course of instruction that was offered by a venture-backed firm instead of a formal course of instruction at a traditional university'. I guess times have changed, but the characterization of university students in CS as 'not self-taught programmers' is definitely the opposite of my experience. You came into the CS degree knowing how to program and learned how to do CS. And the characterization of "anything not university" as "self-taught" -- even formal courses of instruction that cost five figures -- is even more strange.
That just doesn't seem like a fair standard. Why should only experts in a relevant field talk about the coronavirus? Nobody tries to stop people from sharing hospital stories from their friend's cousin's boyfriend who's a nurse.
I get what you're saying, but I don't consider the two things separate magisteria. I don't think there's anything generally wrong with people trying to spread honest ideas they've had, even if they aren't experts.
One thing about experts is that they’ve usually made it through the Dunning-Kruger “confidence pit” and come out the other side. They’re often cautious about making very strident remarks, and when they are really confident in a conclusion, it’s usually because it has a very high probability of being correct. When someone new to a field comes to a contrarian conclusion, they’re often willing to show more confidence in their conclusion because of the Dunning-Kruger effect. This makes it hard to take non-experts at their word, since they’re often unaware of how likely they are to be wrong.
Now, if a total non-expert had come out of nowhere with an analysis that contradicted the public health establishment, definitively showed that the danger was massively overblown, and was right, that would be one thing. But this medium post was incorrect in its conclusion, quite confident in its conclusion, and advised courses of action that would put many people in danger (such as reopening schools).
I'm not sure which medium post you're referring to here. I'm sure people do sometimes write incorrect advice on Medium that would be dangerous if followed, but experts can do the same thing. Remember when the WHO said not to ban travel?
I'm also not sure that distinguishes the case I mentioned. It might also cause problems to assume some particular anecdote is true and representative.
That's a very romanticised view of expertise that doesn't match what is seen in the real world. If your view were true the replication crisis would not be happening, but it's barely even got started.
Not all self promotion is good self promotion. I've nuked candidates because their online portfolios demonstrate bad technical judgement, questionable professional ethics, a fundamental misunderstanding of core ideas, etc.
Put more simply: a portfolio is a demonstration of your work. Anything you put out in public with your name on it is part of your portfolio. Obviously, don't put bad work in your public portfolio.
There's a reason you see very few serious data scientists publishing hot takes on their medium blogs -- it's a serious threat to your professional integrity and brand if you get it wrong. The only people I know & respect who are writing publicly about this topic have SME collaborators. (Of course, we're all playing with the data and talking about it in private with friends/coworkers over coffee.)
Self promotion specifically by spreading your amateur take on a health crisis seems a bit... immoral? Or at least the sort of thing that makes me question the candidate's judgement.
If you want to write publicly and in a formal way on this topic, get a subject matter expert to serve as a co-author. Anything less is more risky than it's worth, even from a purely selfish perspective.
Love your layers of hate-keeping. Not only did they learn before uni, they actually learned before uni, none of that fake bs!
Never mind that most of the people learning before uni did so from opportunity - they often had an engineer in the family or lived in a well-to-do area where such skills were apparent. (This magnified even further the older you are).
FWIW, I studied CS at a great cs uni (cal), and most of my peers were not self-taught. They still ended up at the same companies in the same positions as those who did ️.
This comment is a tad ironic. My monthly expenses are $N, and I keep at most $N + 1,000 in my checking account. Often much less e.g during the first half of the month. I keep my checking account balance as low as possible precisely because I know "the difference between checkings and [high-yield] savings". Keeping more than a small buffer extra in your checking account seems pretty financially illiterate to me.
Also, keeping anything more than absolutely necessary in a checking account is ridiculously dangerous if you're using ATMs outside gas stations....
Came to write this. Homework help services were specifically called out in our course policies as a form of academic dishonesty. Getting outside help on a problem set would get you kicked out of the major. It would take a lot of care to design a tutoring program that was specific to our courses and didn't run afoul of our academic integrity rules.
OP: this is a nice service for universities that allow this sort of thing, but you should be sure you're not running afoul of programs with stricter academic integrity rules (which, AFAIK, includes most top programs).