221–230 of 236 posts
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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.
You should read better researched books
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Baseline capacity and the ability to scale up to withstand peaks are two separate things.
This may apply to equipment and even buildings to a certain extent, but qualified nurses are not something you can just purchase off the shelf like a new rack of servers when demand is high. This applies doubly so for intensive care, which even regular (i.e. non-ICU) nurses are not qualified for without prior training. Where are those people going to come from when demand peaks?
Professional training is not the same as hiring people to idle. See how emergency response services mobilize in case of any emergency scenario, and how that does not involve hiring armies of firemen and police officers to idle by.
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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…
> for an important part of the exam he candidly said "I haven't understood what you did here so I didn't assigned any points to that" -- which is really bullshit. > 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…
Dude/Dudette, circuit theory can't be further than it already is from prose essays and and open-answer questions.
As I mentioned, part of the strategy was to use simple numbers (think of stuff like 1, 2,-1, pi, stuff like that) because the hard part of the exam was not in numbers and/or raw computation.
So basically if you can read numbers, you can see what's been done there.
And I expect an engineering professor to be able to read numbers.
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While I disagree with your framing (only slightly), it has historically been the case that university is where the upper class spends their early 20s with the content of the education not really having a bearing on the direction of the students’ lives. I think we’ve done a pretty good job duplicating this model for the masses! Even down to the alternate justice model inside most universities. Perpetrate a drug or sex…
Yeah, it's actually funny that the GP's characterization is more aligned with the historical/ancient function of colleges and universities than the current one. For many decades at a time, you could characterize the student body of legendary schools like Oxford as "Bands of bored and inebriated wealthy teenagers." For the best example, look no further than the St. Scholastica Day Riots, which started with a drunk ang…
>The seed of the riot was an altercation in the Swindlestock Tavern in Oxford [ when two students became angry at being served poor quality drink ]
I wonder if this is the etymological origin of the word 'swindle?'
The online etymological dictionary indicates that the term was of German origin, brought to England by German Jews, meaning a giddy or untrustworthy person, based on an older word meaning to languish or decline but that seems incognate with its current meaning.
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Perhaps we can establish a nonprofit research institution where people can do research. There are whole towns for sale in various places, we could get one for free probably. Get an endowment together, a few million, that could pay for a bit of food and refurbishment. Brew beer or some sort of herbal liqueur, might cover some expenses.
Most grants require you belong to a university. Removing this requirement would allow competition (even from independent researchers in coffee shops). Good luck trying to change this!
An endowment you can rustle up with sufficiently well connected people, especially if you aren't looking for that much money.
Grants I agree are a problem. Darpa as I recall doesn't necessarily require university connections, but I'm not sure if Europe has anything easy like that. Maybe you attach a startup incubator?
1)https://www.patrice-besse.co.uk/ads/historic-buildings-for-s... 2) https://www.patrice-besse.co.uk/ads/historic-buildings-relig...
EDIT: In terms of financing, how much money do you really need? If you are self sufficient in terms of owning the property, endowment income and growing vegetables and selling beer/yoghurt etc., is that not enough? Would the modern academic type be interested at all in essentially living in a commune/monastery where some amount of time is dedicated to cleaning/maintenance/carpentry/agriculture?
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If you read historic books you will notice this sentiment has been present almost constantly since antiquity. The fact is you get current state with all its gory details but the past with bad parts filtered out.
Maybe, but something is constantly changing in the worrying direction. Humans are becoming slaves of the tools they build, not vice versa. Our biological abilities fade away in the presence of technological progress. People may fantasy about some cyberpank future, but I have doubts about it. Simpler organisms can't control what is superior to them. And I'm pretty sure general AI is a real thing, at least in the futur…
Sure they can. Just pull the electrical plug on the 10,000 IQ general AI. Its future is entirely contingent on the continued existence of cheap oil, which we are already well past its peak.
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Just looking at UCLA employees sorted by gross pay is interesting; Tao ends up around #192 on the list. Mostly due to the medical school, plus some people with titles like "INTERCOL ATH HEAD COACH EX" and "INTERCOL ATH COACH AST EX". The top 3 (and #5) are all "HEAD COACH".
Super hot take here but I genuinely find it disgusting how many money American Universities spend on sporting events and sports, while also somehow not paying their student athletes.
This is good. Too long have universities maintained the illusion that all subjects are worth studying. They are not. And we have a valuation mechanism - pay. The truth is that some subjects need far fewer participants than others. You don’t need the marginal new mathematician or historian or geographer. We do need the marginal electrical engineer or software engineer. It is crucial that we signal to students their pr…
Where would you rank the marginal university administrator?
It is a flaw in The Firm.
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…
You still have to keep in mind that something like 90% of the technological advances of the XX century were born in US labs. So it’s not that broken.
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You still have to keep in mind that something like 90% of the technological advances of the XX century were born in US labs. So it’s not that broken.
Well, if technological advances is the only thing you care for, sure, then go ahead and get rid of stuff like pure maths. However, are you sure that these advances would not have been made if the US had a different system? Like I argued before, Europe has pretty much copied the system by now but I don't see much in terms of catching up. Take A.I., for instance: completely dominated by the U.S. and China. Europe? Like…