Poll

This is a uniquely informed and diverse group to survey on any question, most definitely this one.  At this point, for whom would you cast your ballot?

Trump
19 (46.3%)
Biden
9 (22%)
Sanders
8 (19.5%)
Booker
4 (9.8%)
Klobuchar
1 (2.4%)

Total Members Voted: 41

Voting closed: March 21, 2019, 04:39:47 PM

Author Topic: 2020 Vision  (Read 124090 times)

PonoBill

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Re: 2020 Vision
« Reply #60 on: February 22, 2019, 01:16:53 PM »
It's been true for a longish time that every educational aspect of a college degree is available for free--or nearly so. Now it's very easy to access and in most ways, better than actually attending college. If development happens as it should, machine learning directed education should be far better than learning from a teacher--any teacher. Will it replace the college experience? Maybe not. There's a lot to push back. Simply saying that current high school teaching is inadequate and should be replaced with machine learning enhanced online education ignites a shitstorm. But its obviously true and easily provable.

I have no faith in anecdotal "proof", but I do disclose my biases. I got nearly nothing from spending 12 years in public schools and nothing more from a year in college. Over my career I've hired more than a hundred people with what was supposed to be relevant degrees and found them totally inadequate for even entry-level positions. Developers with degrees in computer science who have no idea how to actually build software, graphic designers with modest computer skills and no idea how to construct an advertisement or build a catalog, writers who can't write. Our most senior and most valuable software engineers were self-taught with one exception.

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Chan

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Re: 2020 Vision
« Reply #61 on: February 22, 2019, 01:33:49 PM »
Although education is a paltry sum compared to health care, it is possibly of greater concern from a nationalist (as opposed to globalist) viewpoint.  The most valuable resource for some time is still the productive value of the best human minds.  For that you need higher education systems.  China, in part due to their authoritarian governance, is rapidly gaining ground in this area.  The resources they are devoting to AI education and the rapid results they are achieving has me concerned they will outrank the US in education rank within a decade, maybe sooner.

RideTheGlide

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Re: 2020 Vision
« Reply #62 on: February 22, 2019, 01:53:40 PM »
It's been true for a longish time that every educational aspect of a college degree is available for free--or nearly so. Now it's very easy to access and in most ways, better than actually attending college. If development happens as it should, machine learning directed education should be far better than learning from a teacher--any teacher. Will it replace the college experience? Maybe not. There's a lot to push back. Simply saying that current high school teaching is inadequate and should be replaced with machine learning enhanced online education ignites a shitstorm. But its obviously true and easily provable.

I have no faith in anecdotal "proof", but I do disclose my biases. I got nearly nothing from spending 12 years in public schools and nothing more from a year in college. Over my career I've hired more than a hundred people with what was supposed to be relevant degrees and found them totally inadequate for even entry-level positions. Developers with degrees in computer science who have no idea how to actually build software, graphic designers with modest computer skills and no idea how to construct an advertisement or build a catalog, writers who can't write. Our most senior and most valuable software engineers were self-taught with one exception.

My anecdata - one junior college class in BASIC programming, 7 months at Control Data Institute to get their diploma in programming learning 4 languages (COBOL. RPG, Fortran and 360/370 assembler) that I have not used in 35 years. The only one I ever used was Fortran at my first job. All the various languages, environments, databases, etc learned since were mostly self taught (no formal training). I have had a 40 year career and earned way above average for  nearly all of it. I am a believer in tech school - the junior college and CDI experience did give me a good grasp of the fundamentals, plus CDI placed me in my first job.

It's much harder to break in to the industry without a degree now. Start ups are another story - they tend to value perceived potential more than credentials. Most fail but they provide experience to help you land somewhere else. And you might get in on a good one.
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PonoBill

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Re: 2020 Vision
« Reply #63 on: February 22, 2019, 02:10:08 PM »
Yeah, me too. I've forgotten more about coding than most people will ever learn. But unfortunately I really have forgotten it.
« Last Edit: February 22, 2019, 02:11:51 PM by PonoBill »
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RideTheGlide

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Re: 2020 Vision
« Reply #64 on: February 22, 2019, 02:56:50 PM »
Yeah, me too. I've forgotten more about coding than most people will ever learn. But unfortunately I really have forgotten it.

I can usually brush the rust off pretty quick when I need to work in an environment I haven't used in a while. I pick up new ones reasonably fast; my oldest trick is learning new tricks. But the real value is in problem solving more than implementing the solutions. You are most valuable if you can do both. I like finding solutions to really hard problems. I would rather work on a crazy hard implementation in Excel macros than implement a widely known/used design pattern on a muitltiered enterprise wide database using all the latest buzzwords (that all sound like blah, blah, blah to me). I can do either, but the latter option bores me to tears.
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PonoBill

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Re: 2020 Vision
« Reply #65 on: February 22, 2019, 03:23:18 PM »
We probably need a geek thread, but this one is wandering anyway. I've leveraged one language to another since I learned assembler for the PDP1 in the early 60's. FORTRAN, Basic, Pascal, AWK, C, and a bunch of languages that are as dead as Latin. I wrote a program to design expansion chambers for two stroke motorcycles in Fortan. Eight boxes of punchcards. Try to explain how fucked that was to a Millennial grand kid. Then I had to do a serious reset to understand encapsulation and recursion. Then C++, C#, dBase, FoxBase, SQL, PHP, CSS and various markups, a little Java, Ruby, Python and Perl. I've never been a professional developer, just a hack, but I've written a lot of code. Most of which is safely dead. Like my geek hero Steve Ciarca, my favorite programming language is solder.
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TallDude

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Re: 2020 Vision
« Reply #66 on: February 22, 2019, 05:09:02 PM »
We probably need a geek thread, but this one is wandering anyway. I've leveraged one language to another since I learned assembler for the PDP1 in the early 60's. FORTRAN, Basic, Pascal, AWK, C, and a bunch of languages that are as dead as Latin.
How about a Nested Loop thread ::)
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RideTheGlide

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Re: 2020 Vision
« Reply #67 on: February 22, 2019, 05:31:41 PM »
We probably need a geek thread, but this one is wandering anyway. I've leveraged one language to another since I learned assembler for the PDP1 in the early 60's. FORTRAN, Basic, Pascal, AWK, C, and a bunch of languages that are as dead as Latin.
How about a Nested Loop thread ::)
I had to come back and comment on that, because all our threads are re-entrant....   :D 8)
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surf4food

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Re: 2020 Vision
« Reply #68 on: February 22, 2019, 06:07:37 PM »
Yeh, yeh,  I know I'm an optometrist, but I don't see how Trump can win against any Democrat. In the last election most of Trumps votes were against Hillary, not for him ; Hilary got 2 million more votes than Trump; and many who voted for Trump now regret it or at least realize they didn't get what they hoped for.

(I promised myself I wasn't going to post on this thread, but this is my only post. I really mean it this time)

I couldn't for the life of me see how Trump could get the nomination, but yet he did.  And then.........

RideTheGlide

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Re: 2020 Vision
« Reply #69 on: February 22, 2019, 06:13:25 PM »
Yeh, yeh,  I know I'm an optometrist, but I don't see how Trump can win against any Democrat. In the last election most of Trumps votes were against Hillary, not for him ; Hilary got 2 million more votes than Trump; and many who voted for Trump now regret it or at least realize they didn't get what they hoped for.

(I promised myself I wasn't going to post on this thread, but this is my only post. I really mean it this time)

I couldn't for the life of me see how Trump could get the nomination, but yet he did.  And then.........

A lot of people were what I call "brick through the window" voters. One reason I think Bernie would have beat Trump is that a lot of those people would have voted for Bernie. They were more about what they weren't getting than what they were; they didn't want business as usual.
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Rider

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Re: 2020 Vision
« Reply #70 on: February 22, 2019, 07:07:19 PM »
Those of us that have been around for awhile call them freeloaders. Sorry if that offends you. Hey, Burnie has another chance. Please burnie for 2020. Feel the burn....

stoneaxe

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Re: 2020 Vision
« Reply #71 on: February 22, 2019, 07:44:41 PM »
My whole career was mostly self taught....though I had a great springboard early on. I got into drafting and design by chance after floundering around after HS and a little college. A friend of a friend noticed I could draw and asked if I was interested. Piping design school at the Badger America company was the springboard...learned more of actual use to me in a very intense 8 weeks than I had in a year of college. Then I recognized early on that computers and CAD were the future so I built my 1st computer (with Pono's long distance tutoring) and pirated a copy of Autocad to learn on. Pretty much on the job and self taught ever since.
« Last Edit: February 22, 2019, 08:23:44 PM by stoneaxe »
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Admin

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Re: 2020 Vision
« Reply #72 on: February 23, 2019, 02:02:39 AM »
It's been true for a longish time that every educational aspect of a college degree is available for free--or nearly so. Now it's very easy to access and in most ways, better than actually attending college. If development happens as it should, machine learning directed education should be far better than learning from a teacher--any teacher. Will it replace the college experience? Maybe not. There's a lot to push back. Simply saying that current high school teaching is inadequate and should be replaced with machine learning enhanced online education ignites a shitstorm. But its obviously true and easily provable.

This is all true.  When we are considering free college for all, however, that can be something new - an opportunity.  I like things that we can do at a relatively low cost in a super efficient way and offer a huge benefit.  Do we need to offer the application process, campus, dorms, classrooms, staff, social setting, pomp and circumstance environment to all or is the obligation (if you view it that way) to provide everyone the actual learning, interactions, verification, and comparative ranking that colleges can offer and that will be the greatest benefit to both the students entering the workforce and the employers that they are presenting to?  There are a number of things that a currently feasible, free to the student, cheap to the taxpayer, online, higher education system could offer which would smoke the current structure. 

As an employer, consider the metrics that this system could provide on every student applicant.  Not just verifiable attendance, processing of syllabus and materials and completion of coursework (and that the intake, work, writing and testing has actually been done by the student) but the parsed down data on the competencies that are particularly relevant to the employer in relation to a country's worth of competitor students.

We have 5300 colleges and universities that are largely duplicating effort.   I thought is article was interesting.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/07/20/how-many-colleges-and-universities-do-we-really-need/?utm_term=.236d8c475133

The federal government has a huge stake in this game. It spends about $165 billion annually on higher education in grants, loans, and tax credits, while the states spend about $74 billion in direct appropriations. Given that government subsides account for close to 90 percent of revenues at some colleges when you add up grants, loans, and research funds, the federal government certainly should have a big say in how that money is spent nationwide.

“In the absence of a government subsidy, most colleges could not fill up their seats,” Ronald Ehrenberg, a higher-education economist and professor at Cornell University, told me.
« Last Edit: February 23, 2019, 02:18:08 AM by Admin »

RideTheGlide

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Re: 2020 Vision
« Reply #73 on: February 23, 2019, 04:35:16 AM »
Those of us that have been around for awhile call them freeloaders. Sorry if that offends you. Hey, Burnie has another chance. Please burnie for 2020. Feel the burn....

Are you responding to my "brick through the window" voter post? Those people were from all kinds of income strata and political leanings. They were just so upset with the gridlock and the system in general that they wanted a sea change and didn't seem too picky about who it was as long as it wasn't another mainstream candidate from either party. As far as being around for a while, I am not the oldest but I don't pay full price at the movies; I am an Eisenhower baby.

I do lean left and I am not offended by people with other opinions as long as there isn't a body count.
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RideTheGlide

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Re: 2020 Vision
« Reply #74 on: February 23, 2019, 06:39:20 AM »
It's been true for a longish time that every educational aspect of a college degree is available for free--or nearly so. Now it's very easy to access and in most ways, better than actually attending college. If development happens as it should, machine learning directed education should be far better than learning from a teacher--any teacher. Will it replace the college experience? Maybe not. There's a lot to push back. Simply saying that current high school teaching is inadequate and should be replaced with machine learning enhanced online education ignites a shitstorm. But its obviously true and easily provable.

This is all true.  When we are considering free college for all, however, that can be something new - an opportunity.  I like things that we can do at a relatively low cost in a super efficient way and offer a huge benefit.  Do we need to offer the application process, campus, dorms, classrooms, staff, social setting, pomp and circumstance environment to all or is the obligation (if you view it that way) to provide everyone the actual learning, interactions, verification, and comparative ranking that colleges can offer and that will be the greatest benefit to both the students entering the workforce and the employers that they are presenting to?  There are a number of things that a currently feasible, free to the student, cheap to the taxpayer, online, higher education system could offer which would smoke the current structure. 

As an employer, consider the metrics that this system could provide on every student applicant.  Not just verifiable attendance, processing of syllabus and materials and completion of coursework (and that the intake, work, writing and testing has actually been done by the student) but the parsed down data on the competencies that are particularly relevant to the employer in relation to a country's worth of competitor students.

I cut off the rest only because it leads off in another direction. It's a direction worthy of discussion, but I am tracked in on the first part...

My opinion about the efficiency of education is often dismissed as defensive because it seems to be an effort to put my training on par with having a degree. I attended CDI (Control Data Institute) for ~7 months around 1980. It was a self paced program that was set up to take about a year but I blew through it. It was way ahead of its time in one respect - it was online training with a graphical UI. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)#The_CDC_years - CDI was a votech venture of CDC (Control Data Corporation) and I took most of the lessons on a PLATO terminal. It was really weird; I saw nothing like that again for many years.

CDI was very much grounded in its time or even behind it in a couple of other areas. I had to use punch cards to write my programs, put them in the queue for the operator to run them and got them back with a print out of the run. I had to wear dress slacks/shirt and a tie and be on premises from 7 - 11 AM 5 days a week or get reprimanded if I hadn't asked for time off ahead of time or if I didn't meet dress code. I had regular appointments with the instructor to go over my progress and receive new assignments. Even though he had access to all the info from PLATO and my program runs, I had to prepare a status report and present it to him. I think there were special procedures to ask for help without waiting for the next appointment. When I got into the last section, I had to do mock interviews with other instructors. When I went on interviews and then into the work force, I knew how to dress and how to act.

If any of you remember commercials from CDI or others like it from back then, one of their biggest selling points was placement rates. CDI was claiming about 96% when I attended. The dirty little secret they didn't tell you is that they convinced potential employers to bring you in on a trial period that didn't pay a lot more than flipping burgers and CDI would provide the employer partial compensation if it didn't work out. A student was counted as "placed" if the trial didn't work out and they never were able to break into the industry. That happened to a *lot* of students.

I turned down a chance to work at Honeywell because they were notorious for hiring up to four CDI grads for one opening. I had worked for them part time the last couple of months migrating COBOL programs from other vendors' hardware when they had a customer switch to Honeywell; very boring work. Lots of students jumped at any opportunity and wound up in jobs like that.

Earlier I mentioned reprimands and you may have wondered who really cares. CDI cherry picked who to send on interviews with employers based on job requirements. While the program was pass/fail - either you got the diploma or you didn't - performance mattered when it came time to job hunt. When they had an opportunity to place a Fortran programmer at a market research service bureau writing statistical analysis software, they sent a student that blew through the program with consistently high test scores and only a couple of reprimands early in the program (I never said I was perfect  ;D ).

I'll admit that there is some boasting in my anecdata, but the point is that they trained me to be productive and professional in the workplace and they had some hard data to back up that assessment. I hit the ground running, while most of my college educated coworkers had substantially more ramp up time.

Another thing that we should do here (in the US; lots of other countries are doing a good job now) is get better at vocational testing and assessment. My parents were both scientists and I started college as a chemistry major mostly because I really hadn't figured out what I wanted to do, so like a lot of people I started down the path I was most familiar with from dinner table talk and tagging along some times. I flunked out mostly from bad decisions and partying, but I really wasn't excited about it. After that, I was working and attending junior college to get my grades back up to give it another shot. I took the BASIC class because it seemed interesting and I had a hole in my schedule; kind of a long time to just hang out between classes but too short to do much else. I didn't want to do homework because I had a cute study buddy. I crushed the BASIC class. Finding out I am good at breaking down problems into logical operations was pure luck. I don't think I am brilliant or smarter than everyone else; there are lots of things I suck at (like not blowing it with that study buddy). My brain is just wired for this. People will go a lot further once they are on the right path.
« Last Edit: February 23, 2019, 07:00:19 AM by RideTheGlide »
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