141–150 of 236 posts
Also, they should read A Mathematician’s Apology (and the irony that came when Hardy’s work became applicable :P)
Pure math has brought so many amazing things: culture, intellectualism and straight up useful technology. For a university to ditch that means to me they’re not a university.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the current mindset of american universities is commodification of the concept of higher education. Teaching, scholastic tradition and enlightment values are sidelined by values like customer satisfaction, marketing, and money making optimization.
In this case, just let me purchase the fucking credentials without having to follow curriculum at their speed or pay for any of the things that won't benefit me anymore
Modern universities are a mix of two contradictory ideas. It's a place for "higher learning"; trying to fit the same role as institutions from hundreds of years ago where academic learning was much rarer and was fitted for the aristocracy. While simultaneously being something that you need for a job to make money. Oh, and also the people doing the teaching are more interested in their research than actually teaching. Forget teachers putting in 100% of their effort into teaching and making sure people really get the material (here's some slides the T.A. made, deal with it), you're lucky if a professor is a half-way decent orator.
There are so many better ways to get different kinds of education, particularly for humanities. There are books, online videos, etc. that provide a better education on writing, philosophy, etc. than what a single professor charging thousands of dollars can provide.
I wonder if the end game of higher education looks like purely administrative bodies with enormous tuition that just provide the students with leisure, varsity sports and regular events on the currently hot social justice topics. I studied pure math in the Czech Rep. between 1996 and 2003. The administrative staff was about 10 per cent of the entire body of employees. Reading that administrators actually outnumber te…
This is an issue in the US, but it is worth noting this particular administrative maneuver is at University of Leicester which is in the UK. [0]
I wonder if the end game of higher education looks like purely administrative bodies with enormous tuition that just provide the students with leisure, varsity sports and regular events on the currently hot social justice topics. I studied pure math in the Czech Rep. between 1996 and 2003. The administrative staff was about 10 per cent of the entire body of employees. Reading that administrators actually outnumber te…
It's already happening. I went to a Canadian university. The marketing material says the school wanted to give the students a "great student experience". What's great student experience? The glossy pamphlets shows varsity sports facilities, bright lecture halls and students hanging out in residences.
I wonder if the end game of higher education looks like purely administrative bodies with enormous tuition that just provide the students with leisure, varsity sports and regular events on the currently hot social justice topics. I studied pure math in the Czech Rep. between 1996 and 2003. The administrative staff was about 10 per cent of the entire body of employees. Reading that administrators actually outnumber te…
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1. a lecture series or seminar by a researcher specializing in social justice movements, civil rights leaders, abolitionists, etc. Possibly focusing on insights from newly discovered primary documents.
2. events hosted by any political college organization whose participants may be painted with the derisive term "social justice warrior"
Definition #1 isn't an edge case-- most universities are chock full of such events and seminars. Shit like this: a linguist who was tasked with helping a Northern California tribe fill in the blanks in the documentation of their dead language so they could revive it. If your curiosity isn't peaked by that concept and it's associated practical challenges and sets of choices, I'm not sure what you're doing on HN.
Definition #2 is like HN's version of cheating celebrity stories in the Enquirer. If you wanted to spend the rest of your life enumerating each case, you certainly wouldn't run out of bona fide material. But if all you talk about 99% of the time is that-- to the extent that you forget definition #1 even exists-- you have to admit at least part of your outrage is due not to your own free will but due to people clicking upvote buttons as if nudging trays of junk food close to where you're sitting.
Edit: typo
We do need the marginal electrical engineer or software engineer. It is crucial that we signal to students their prospects accurately and operate our collective learning facilities in the interest of the public.
The number of support staff required to service a bug organization does grow super linearly which is a reason to have smaller universities. These institutions suffer massive diseconomies of scale past a certain size as information transfer suffers.
Unfortunately, support staff grow more support staff at a higher rate than productive staff so it is necessary to keep university size small.
But of course, Tim Gowers is a bit of a luminary, so maybe I’m entirely wrong on all of this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, let's skip the twenties part. That's a relic of the hyper-competitive academic system. Normality is you start college at 17/18, finish college around age 21/22, and finish a Ph.D around 26. At that point, you take an academic job if you want one and appear qualified. You spend 7 years having fun as an assistant prof, doing what you love, and then, unless you've messed up, you have tenure. You don't have a strin…
Well, let's skip the twenties part. That's a relic of the hyper-competitive academic system. Normality is you start college at 17/18, finish college around age 21/22, and finish a Ph.D around 26. At that point, you take an academic job if you want one and appear qualified. You spend 7 years having fun as an assistant prof, doing what you love, and then, unless you've messed up, you have tenure. And now the German ver…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can imagine a future in which Universities just pay someone to create online courses which they can reuse over the years and then just keep the teachers for courses which have a practical side (e.g. Robotics, biology/physics/chemistry experiments).
This might not be 100% bad as a model, as long as it is properly implemented. One important thing would be the role of teachers in doing exercises and Q&A instead of plain lecture recitation from the books. Having had a roommate that used to be a researcher in the university i was attending at the time I was able to see a lot of the back-office side that most people don't see. Long story short, most researcher and pr…
> You've got a phd in this shit, you're supposed to be a world-class expert on the matter, how could you not understand this? It's not that you haven't understood, it's that you didn't bother spending 30 seconds to look at the piece of paper.
I can't speak to this specific case. And awarding no points at all does sound quite unusual. But, speaking as a professor, it's disturbing to see how often and how badly students overestimate the intelligibility of their work.
Important qualification: I am thinking of student essays and prose answers to exam questions. The situation may be very different in circuit theory and other areas in which answers to exam questions often aren't in prose.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll just throw this out here to put some numbers on this so people understand it's more than just a political narrative. At the University that I went to, Wisconsin, there are 2200 academic staff. (Professors, TAs, Deans, etc). The total number of employees, however, is roughly 21000. Now I understand that this is due to large, operations level bureaucracies that are necessary to pull off something like a University…
"Yes, Minister" has an episode about a hospital with 500 employees and no patients: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAk448volww The show's creators said: "After inventing this absurdity, we discovered there were six such hospitals (or very large empty wings of hospitals) exactly as we had described them in our episode, notably one in Cambridgeshire in which there was only one patient: the Matron (head of nursing staf…
I recently read Dijkstra's "On the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has two sides". [1] In vast parts, it's not much more than mildly disguised US-bashing (Dijkstra was always a grumpy old man) but that's not what caught my eye. What did was the fact that he describes the US research landscape as a system that orients itself around short-term projects and industry desires. Dijkstra clearly expresses his contempt for this…
The opposite is also true. I read a book about early electricity discoveries. People in Europe were all about the deep end theories. America.. pragmatism reigned supreme. As long as you can make something out of phenomenon you're good to go. The book said that by the time Edison made a light bulb, European academics were still debating unproven theories.
By the time Edison made a light bulb, incandescent light had been initially demonstrated by Davy 70 years beforehand, and shown to practical by Lindsay 35 years after that.
Jobard, de la Rue, and de Moleyns had made experimental light bulbs 40 years beforehand, Lodygin had held a patent for 5 years.
Most crucially, Swan's lightbulbs had been lighting Mosley Street for six months. Carbon arc lights (also shown by Davy early in the 1800s) having been in commercial use for some time before that.
The main invention that made light bulbs practically viable was the improved vacuum pumps of the 1870s, which none of these people lay claim to. This is what led to the rapid development of incandescent light in the 1880s.