There is no correlation between the blog comment you linked to and the statement you're quoting. Your comment boils down to little more than saying "Not true!"
If you want to make the point that bolstering public education is a wasted effort, then think of countries like Finland or Norway who have an excellent public educational system. Go on vacation there, and you'll be surprised, for instance, how well the average person there speaks English. Now compare this to the US or the UK where people usually don't bother learning a second language, and your average shop clerk has a hard enough time communicating in his mother tongue.
> Your comment boils down to little more than saying "Not true!"
My comment boils down to the same point as the blog post: it's very diffiucult to show benefits of any educational intervention, especially long-term benefits. Corollary: it's very hard to be certain that pumping $100M into the City University will have significant positive results.
> think of countries like Finland or Norway who have an excellent public educational system
Finland is somewhat exceptional but European educational systems are otherwise on par with the American one[1]. Except for the top/prestigious universities where Americans dominate and only Britons keep up[2].
I both live and vacation in Europe. The popularity of English here has more to do with Anglosphere's cultural domination than it has with the school system. If you want anecdotal evidence, English is my second language and I learnt it primarily from trashy American television on cable and then the Internet.
Have you looked at the methodology for Times Higher Education rankings? It has nothing to do with quality of education. It's based on reputation. I went to a top 20 school that was utterly mediocre and was ranked highly only because of its research prowess.
America having a lot of prestigious research institutions has nothing to do with the quality of primary and secondary education in the country. Half of the PhDs and faculty members in those top American schools got their primary and secondary education in foreign countries.
And tertiary, too. Plenty of grad-students in American institutions have their undergrad degree from some cheaper place abroad.
Hell, some of us Americans have left America to go do degrees and careers elsewhere, due to its extreme disinvestment in science. One friend of mine to Montreal and quite possibly Germany for his PhD, me to Israel...
Without wanting to sound overly sarcastic, I'd like to point out that if it's "hard be certain" that CUNY would profit from €100m, how can you be certain that the money would benefit Cornell? Heck, following your line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, why don't we just stop funding education altogether?
There is the saying that the US has the world's 50 best universities --- but also the 5,000 worst. While this is an exaggeration, there is quite some truth in it. Just to reiterate my point: if you, as a foreigner, address a bus driver in Oslo in English, he will quite possibly reply in proper English. However, talk to a shopping clerk at Sainsbury's in England, or Target in the US, and you may have to concede that the language they speak is closer to pidgin than English.
Lastly, I'll let you know that I have attended graduate school at a top UK university, a place you have heard of. Interestingly enough, only about a quarter of the grad students were British, and according to the rector this was because many British schools and universities don't educate their students properly. Now you may also know that the UK school system does quite a good job separating the children of the plebs from the children of the rich.
Can you see what I'm getting at? Well, I'll just spell it out for you: a very large part of my fellow students in graduate school earned their undergraduate degree from public universities in Europe, which normally implied the complete absence of tuition fees. Yet, for some reason Britain's own talent found it difficult to compete with them. This mirrors the point another commenter has already made regarding the situation in the US, but since you're from Europe, I thought you might appreciate this perspective.
A problem I have with modern games is that they literally string you along. I recently played Alan Wake on the Xbox 360. It was an unexpected experience because it paced relatively boring parts with some sudden spikes of adrenaline, and this happened over and over and over. In essence, nothing goes on for about two or three minutes, and suddenly two or three bad guys appear, trying to take you down.
After an hour or two of playing this game, I couldn't help but think that this was carefully balanced, and little more than a clever attempt to stretch the length of the game. I wouldn't be surprised if I the creators of the game (Microsoft and Remedy) had some psychologist conduct studies on how long it takes for people to lose interest. I completed the game, but I felt like in some kind of stupor: never completely engaged, but never so bored that I wanted to quit. Something quite similar happens in MMORPGs where the "drop rates" of items are carefully balanced to maximize the time you invest. From a relevant article [0]:
"How to make players play hard.
Translated into the language we've been using, how do we make players maintain a high, consistent rate of activity? Looking at our four basic schedules, the answer is a variable ratio schedule, one where each response has a chance of producing a reward. Activity level is a function of how soon the participant expects a reward to occur. The more certain they are that something good or interesting will happen soon, the harder they'll play. When the player knows the reward is a long way off, such as when the player has just leveled and needs thousands of points before they can do it again, motivation is low and so is player activity.
How to make players play forever.
The short answer is to make sure that there is always, always a reason for the player to be playing. The variable schedules I discussed produce a constant probability of reward, and thus the player always has a reason to do the next thing. What a game designer also wants from players is a lot of "behavioral momentum," a tendency to keep doing what they're doing even during the parts where there isn't an immediate reward. One schedule that produces a lot of momentum is the avoidance schedule, where the players work to prevent bad things from happening. Even when there's nothing going on, the player can achieve something positive by postponing a negative consequence."
That article makes for some chilling reading.
To get back to the point Michael was making: I do think that games nowadays are in general much more unappealing than they used to be. I know, I know, in the early 90s we had one platformer after another, but they often had quite distinct graphical styles and the mechanics didn't transfer 1:1 either --- just compare Mario to Sonic --- but today you've got one FPS after another, and almost all of them strive for realism and instant gratification a la Call of Duty. Many FPS games have absolutely identical mechanics, down to the button mapping. Storywise, FPS games are an absolute disaster. Very few games try to be different, like Spec Ops: The Line which provided a rather unusual emotional experience. Sadly, it sold very poorly.
There are quite a few people who hold exactly that opinion. For instance, check out Alex Berenson's The Number: How the Drive for Quarterly Earnings Corrupted Wall Street and Corporate America, or read any "alternative" financial blog, and this line of reasoning might start to make at least some sense.
Don't forget to check out the bio of the instructor:
"His thesis, "A detailed study of gender stratification, resource allocation, and asphyxiation contingencies as manifested in the context of the submergent handicrafts of the peoples of the Aquacamamata Peninsula" was named Paper of the Year by the Maritime Anthropology Digest. Professor Dunne also holds an honorary degree in Professional Salon Services, and has starred in numerous bathroom fixture advertisements."
I've studied at a number of universities, starting from a relatively unknown local university, and eventually graduating from a very renowned institution. Judging from my own experience, I'd say that if you're only used to high-quality tertiary education, you'd be surprised how disorganized and poorly taught courses at universities further down the ranks can be. Compared to that, MOOCs are already far superior. Should the working world move towards portfolio-based hiring, which seems to get more and more common, then a great many universities will find it hard to justify their existence. Sebastian Thrun, founder of Udacity, said that in 50 years only 10 universities will be left, which sounds hyperbolic to me. [0] Nonetheless, I would be very surprised if there wasn't a wide-scale disappearance of institutions from the 2nd tier and below.
I'm not aware of a site that gathers MOOC reviews, but occasionally reviews get posted on Hackernews, which was the reason I submitted mine, too.
Exponential not hyperbolic. If the median real world inflation adjusted income of the general population continues to drop as it has for about three generations so far, at the same time as tuition increases faster than inflation, the rate of decline of general population who can afford to attend will decrease somewhat exponentially not hyperbolic.
Also if you model higher ed as a fad, where rich kids used to go to the ivies so the masses try to copy them by going to state-U, this fad might burn out. Maybe if rich peoples kids try to do startups there will be a flood of the masses all simultaneously trying to get their kids into YC. I would theorize that fads and trends socially propagate exponentially not hyperbolic.
There are also arguments about lack of funding by .gov directly and via loan guarantees having to come to an end, but I think that would be a pretty sharp step function rather than exp or hyp.
Overall I think the best long term argument is exp decline with some pretty sharp step functions. Both linear and hyp are too extreme.
I've never seen a good biz argument against .edu mergers. Why the higher ed system has to have the biz model like corner store retail is unclear. Why can't it be like banking or big media or automotive where a handful of major players control the vast majority of the market? I could totally see 10 or so universities, each with as many local campuses as car mfgrs have car dealers. I could totally see franchise operated proctored test centers, maybe with onsite small group meeting/conference/workspace. Could you run an ochem lab for chemistry classes as a local franchise? I'm thinking probably not for various safety/liability reasons.
The course site was closed after the statements of accomplishments were created. Currently, the class archive is only accessible to those who were enrolled. But don't worry, the professors announced that this course will be offered again in August.
You have to consider the condition and rarity of some of the games. I only skimmed the listing, but he does has quite a few gems. In recent years, prices for "retro games" have ballooned. You'll be surprised what games in a great condition go for.
Just to mention a couple of examples:
- Earthbound (SNES) has a market value of up to over $300
- Chrono Trigger (SNES) normally sells for several hundred dollars as well.
- Neo Geo AES carts are coveted by collectors.
- Progear (CPS2) is one of the most sought after PCBs in the shmup scene, still selling for hundreds of dollars.
Also, sealed games sell for quite a premium.
I do think that if he took the time to sell the items individually, he would make more money. Then again, this would also involve a quite substantial investment of time.
But aren't those entirely different issue altogether?
Don't get me wrong, I do agree with you that MOOCs are a boon. A well-structured course may be able to provide a better experience than working through a textbook on your own. Still, this doesn't mean that those courses live up to the hype.
I wasn't talking about insufficient test cases. Your remark about extensive unit tests is therefore quite irrelevant in this context as I don't question at all that the unit tests take border cases into account.
I am mostly concerned with "soft" aspects. Just consider the case where a student has to define variables, but picks variable names in a language other than English, or where control flow in a submission is more convoluted than it would have to be. Those are the cases I discuss in the article.
Moments ago, someone left a very fitting comment on my blog:
"I am taking the edX CS169.1 course and I find that I will consistently have a "less than elegant" solution that the auto grader accepts but that I feel is sub-par. The irony is this class has a large BDD/TDD aspect and is teaching RED-GREEN-REFACTOR, but with an auto grader once its green there is little reason to go back and refactor."
Let me try to make my point by a "soft" analogy, in your terminology.
If a fiction book has a great, gripping plot and interesting, relatable, wonderfully done characters, then weird spelling and heavy sentences are not a big deal and can be easily fixed by a competent editor. But nothing can save a very grammatical and clean-written text that is just flat, boring, or makes no sense at all. Ask any publisher - which kind of books they prefer?
Similarly in software, getting the big picture right is much much more important than "elegance" in each individual line.
You are setting up a false dichotomy here. Speaking in your analogy, the question is not between grammatical and boring and ungrammatical and exciting, but between a novel that is gripping and grammatical versus one that may be as gripping but wasn't properly edited.
That comment on your blog is exactly what professional programmers do in the real world: pass the test suite and move on. After all, the goal of software engineering isn't to write elegant code; it's to deliver software that solves the customer's needs. And the customer's needs are tracked via the spec, not the style guide.
Apart from the issue that we're talking about an introductory CS course, the greater problem remains that you'll only load up "technical debt", which may well lead to problems later on.
This is a short term attitude that is incompatible with building a system that grows mor ppwerful or a decade. That may be OK or maybe not, depending on your horizon and sunset plans.
In our corporate environment we do enough to pass the tests, with one extra 'test' being a peer review which should take into account a list of criteria that aren't easy to check for automatically; house code style, test code coverage, future maintainability, g11n/i18n-ness, etc.
We often only go as far as 'just good enough' but the standard to which that is assessed is pretty high.
If you want to make the point that bolstering public education is a wasted effort, then think of countries like Finland or Norway who have an excellent public educational system. Go on vacation there, and you'll be surprised, for instance, how well the average person there speaks English. Now compare this to the US or the UK where people usually don't bother learning a second language, and your average shop clerk has a hard enough time communicating in his mother tongue.