I get an email from the UCI-Gifted-Students mailing list. Shortly thereafter, a parent clicks Reply All to send out this response:
Please remove my name from your mailing list.
Wait, there’s more. A second parent then responds to the first parent, also via Reply All:
I'm one of receipents [sic] of the UCI-Gifted-Students emails, therefore not responsible and able to remove you. I wish I knew who to direct you to.
Good luck.
Jon Provost and Lassie
A new study from the American Council on Education shows that the percentages of black, Asian and Hispanic provosts have declined over the past five years.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports this story under the headline “Falling Diversity of Provosts Signals Challenge for Presidential Pipeline, Study Finds.”
FALLING DIVERSITY! LOOK OUT BELOW!
Ha ha . . . but seriously, who even knows what a provost is? I don’t. I’ve vaguely heard of it as an academic job title but that’s about it.
I know that Jon Provost played little Timmy on the Lassie TV series. I know that Marie Prevost was a one-time Mack Sennett bathing beauty and leading lady in the 1920s whose screen glory had faded by the time she died of acute alcoholism in a small Hollywood apartment at the age of 38.
By the way, I notice that Asian students are continuing to excel, even in the absence of Asian provosts. Go figure.
The University of Colorado has a $4.3 million grant to research the “problem” of 40 to 60 percent attrition rate among STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) majors.
Someone is missing an obvious point here, which is that there should be a large dropout rate for STEM majors. Incompetent technologists and engineers create disasters.
The music department, the English department, the philosophy department, etc., etc., can graduate their incompetent students without worrying that they’re going to build a collapsing bridge, blow up a space shuttle, disintegrate a Mars orbiter — you get the idea . . .
I took a Computational Finance midterm over the weekend on Coursera. I’ve taken a few Coursera classes before — they had quizzes, problem sets, programming assignments, essays — but none of them had a midterm or final exam.
It’s the first academic exam I’ve taken in at least a couple of decades, and the first exam ever in which — because it was online — I was able to enjoy the company of my life partner, Wild Turkey.
Here’s my result:
I lost the one point on this question right here:
If you understand the question, it’s obvious which one of the four I missed, but it may not be obvious what the right answer is. It wasn’t to me, anyway.
My wife asks, “Did you see the grading curve?”
“No, but when you score 149 out of 150, you leave it to others to worry about the curve.”
Coursera‘s been around long enough now that some classes are being offered for a second time, including a couple that I’ve taken and recommend:
One of the classes I’m taking on Coursera is Principles of Economics for Scientists, taught by Prof. Antonio Rangel at Cal Tech.
First of all, it’s a great class. Rangel has a real passion for the material and he’s provided extra resources to accomodate online students, many of whom probably don’t have the math background of the average Cal Tech student.
He’s from Madrid, so his pronunciations and mannerisms are different, like the gesture below, which I captured from one of the video lectures.
He was explaining how something or other would increase our understanding of economics and he punctuated the word “understanding” by pointing at his head with two fingers. I don’t know what this gesture means in Spain, or if it means anything at all. Probably he knows what it means in America, but as I said, he’s passionate about the material and I think he loses himself in what he’s saying.
He’s also one of the only two people I know who pronounce the word “subsequent” as sub-SEEK-went, the other being one of my work colleagues, who’s actually from this country and therefore has no excuse . . .
Students Rush to Web Classes, but Profits May Be Much Later — NYTimes.com
Profits shmofits . . . if you’re not using Coursera.org, you are missing a life-changing opportunity.
In old days men studied for the sake of self-improvement; nowadays men study in order to impress other people. — Confucius
I’ve been reading a lot of poetry as part of the Modern & Contemporary American Poetry class on Coursera.
One of the things I like about the class is that the video lessons are done a little differently than other Coursera classes I’ve taken. Rather than recorded lectures, the videos consist of the instructor, Al Filreis, leading a small group of Penn students in close readings of selected poems.
Anyway, here are a few of my favorites so far:
These next two, both by Richard Wilbur, I want to single out as being particularly exquisite and heartbreaking:
David Henderson says — accurately, I think — that Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remarks can be paraphrased as “People who are dependent on government will vote for the candidate who credibly (to them, at least) promises to keep the programs that have created that dependence.”
Do you think President Obama disagrees with that? He doesn’t.
If you think he does, please see The Life of Julia on the president’s web site. It lays out a “typical” woman’s cradle-to-grave dependence on government assistance and describes how Obama will keep those programs going while Mitt Romney won’t.
The most insulting thing about it is that as you read about Obama funding this and Obama funding that, it sounds like he’s doing it all out of his own goddamn pocket. What a prince!
There’s no acknowledgement that Obama is taking from some and giving to others, and that all of Julia’s “free” stuff is paid for by me and people like me out of money earned by our own labor.
And we are struggling. We’re putting a kid through college, my wife has had an expensive medical condition, our home equity has plummeted, the roof leaks, my car is long overdue for new tires . . . there are unplanned expenses . . . next month, something else will break. That’s life.
As part of our middle-class existence, we pay a five-figure annual federal income tax bill. We pay for Julia’s babysitters, education, health care, etc., and Obama takes the credit. Not even a “thank you.” If we could keep even a fraction of that money, maybe we could afford to pay our own education and health care costs.
How about acknowledging that for every Life of Julia there’s a Life of Paul and presenting their stories in juxtaposition to show how, as with any policy, some people are better off and some people worse.
| Life of Julia | Life of Paul |
| As she prepares for her first semester of college, Julia and her family qualify for President Obama’s American Opportunity Tax Credit—worth up to $10,000 over four years. Julia is also one of millions of students who receive a Pell Grant to help put a college education within reach. | As they go into debt to pay for their own child’s college education, Paul and his wife are required to pay for Julia’s college tuition as well. |
You see the idea? Let’s try another one . . .
| Life of Julia | Life of Paul |
| Julia decides to have a child. Throughout her pregnancy, she benefits from maternal checkups, prenatal care, and free screenings under health care reform. | Paul’s wife is diagnosed with a life-threatening medical condition. Although they have health insurance, which they pay for themselves, there are deductibles, co-pays and out-of-pocket expenses, as well as the financial implications of his wife’s inability to work. They receive no government assistance, which is fine, but their financial woes are compounded by the fact that they are also required to pay for Julia’s “free” medical care. |
The money being used to buy the votes of millions of Julias out there is not coming exclusively or even primarily from unnamed “millionaires” on “Wall Street” . . . it’s coming from “middle class” “hard-working Americans” on “Main Street” who are struggling.
And through it all, there is no presidential leadership. He’s too busy raising money to run ads so he can tell us what a great leader he is.
Everywhere we see, in ruins, Obama’s plans for our country. His foreign policy has encouraged revolutions that have brought our worst enemies to power in the Middle East . . . His education reforms have no teeth and he sits by passively as they are challenged by his own local teachers union.
Credit much of the quick end to his bounce to Romney’s ads which, right off the bat after the Democratic Convention closed, rapped Obama for trying to convince us that we are better off than we were four years ago. Obama’s campaign essentially poses the question: What will you believe — your own eyes or my speeches?
This morning I heard President Obama call for universities to lower their tuition rates so that “everybody in America can go to college.”
I am virtually certain that the President is not stupid enough to think that if tuition rates fell to zero, there would magically be enough room in the colleges for everybody in America. So I’ve got to believe that he’s purposely saying stupid things in order to appeal to stupid voters — the sort of voters, in other words, who probably don’t belong in college.
It’s move-in weekend at UC Berkeley, the world’s greatest university . . .
Saul Perlmutter, who just won the Nobel Prize in Physics, is teaching an undergraduate seminar on physics and music this year.
How many schools even have Nobel Laureates on the faculty? Of those that do, how many of them teach small classes for freshmen and sophomores?
Ivy League schools, with the exception of Harvard, are coasting on their reputations. When’s the last time you heard of an enterpreneur from Dartmouth or Brown or Yale?
Stanford is great in engineering and business but limited in other areas. Also, top professors at private schools would rather piss on a spark plug than traffic with undergrads.
That said, the University of Southern California football season starts Sept. 1 against Hawaii. The Men of Troy!
FIGHT ON FOR OLD ‘SC! OUR MEN FIGHT ON TO VICTORY!
Kennedy Odede grew up in Kibera, a slum in Kenya where more than one million people live in an area the size of New York City’s Central Park without sewage systems, roads, or access to basic health care and education.
And on Sunday, May 27th, he stood proudly before his graduating class with honors, and gave the commencement address. He became the first person from Africa’s largest slum to graduate from an American University.
Sounds like another guy who didn’t get the memo that America is “no longer the land of opportunity” and “the ‘American dream’ is a myth.”
“If there is anybody at all who has a dream, then they can definitely make it happen,” she told WBTV. “There are no excuses. It depends on you and no one else.”
In his latest book, The Price of Inequality, Columbia Professor and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz examines the causes of income inequality and offers some remedies. In between, he reaches some startling conclusions, including that America is “no longer the land of opportunity” and “the ‘American dream’ is a myth.”
I’m not a Nobel laureate (yet) but I can tell you that income correlates to things like education, skills and motivation. If you’re concerned about the inequality of your income, take the time you spend keeping up with fantasy football and reality television and invest it in learning and maintaining marketable skills, and see if your income doesn’t go up.
If you’re complaining about income inequality, and you have any idea who was voted off any reality television program in the last week, you need to pipe down and reexamine your priorities. Watch your programs if you want to, but keep in mind that you’re competing in the job market with people who are more serious than you are.
(Photo credit: matt hutchinson)
The biggest headache in software development is that most programmers can’t program and don’t want to learn anything.
I recently finished up a MOOC called Software Engineering for SaaS, offered by UC Berkeley through Coursera. For a modest investment of a few hours a week for five weeks, I learned some Ruby on Rails — a well-designed platform and a lot of fun to work with — as well as tools like GitHub, Cucumber, RSpec, SimpleCov and Heroku.
Over 50,000 students from 150 countries signed up for the class. According to a final email from the professors, about 10,000 students attempted at least one assignment or quiz. Or to look at another way, 80 percent of the students gave up without even trying.
Approximately 2,000 students, or 4 percent, completed all four of the assignments and the three quizzes.
One of the enrollees who gave up without trying is a former colleague of mine, an ASP.NET programmer, who threw in the towel when he realized he wasn’t going to be allowed to do the programming assignments in C#.
Evidently he read under Prerequisites: “Programming proficiency in an object-oriented programming language such as Java, C#, C++, Python, or Ruby” and missed the course description at the top of the page: “This course teaches the engineering fundamentals for long-lived software using the highly-productive Agile development method for Software as a Service (SaaS) using Ruby on Rails.”
“I’m not going to learn Ruby on Rails,” he said, as though it was a silly, irrelevant thing to suggest to a professional programmer, like learning a yo-yo trick.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
Satan
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan -- PE]
It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.
The shift is affecting children’s lives. Researchers have consistently found that children born outside marriage face elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioral problems.
HA HA HA! And it’s only going to get worse!
These poor illiterate bastards will be stabbing each other for food in a few years!
Unwed mothers are my meal ticket. Keep up the good work, my little darlings!
See you all in Hell . . .
The Crosstown Cup was on the line Saturday night. The USC and UCLA hockey teams faced off at Anaheim Ice and the Trojans dominated pretty much as I expected.
It was also Senior Night — the last game of the season.
One of the Trojans players is graduating with a doctorate in education, one kid is getting an MBA and two kids are graduating with a bachelor’s degree in petroleum engineering.
As scholar-athletes, they’re pretty darn good scholars.
As athletes . . . let’s say that they were somewhat less good than my kid’s 18-and-under roller team from last season. Speed, puck control, rink awareness — all limited at best.
They were a lot better than UCLA though.
The Victory Bell was in attendance. Something I didn’t know is that the Victory Bell is really loud if you’re right next to it. And by “right next to it,” I mean we were 25 feet away and it was deafening.
The fake ID market seems to be booming in Southern California. A lot of underage-looking kids were enjoying a beer at the game.
My wife asked one underage-looking couple, “How do you get beer? You don’t look old enough.”
“Um . . . there is a way to do it,” the girl replied, without providing any further details.
The University of California is prohibited by law from considering race in the admissions process, but they are allowed to identify certain ethnic groups as “underrepresented minorities.”
Here are some freshman enrollment numbers at UC Berkeley for Fall 2011. The first four groups on the list are considered underrepresented; the others aren’t.
| Ethnicity | 2011 Fall |
|---|---|
| African American/Black | 130 |
| Mexican American/Chicano | 325 |
| Other Hispanic/Latino | 150 |
| Native American/Alaskan Native | 33 |
| Pacific Islander | 11 |
| Chinese | 936 |
| Filipino | 108 |
| Japanese | 68 |
| Korean | 250 |
| Other Asian | 45 |
| South Asian | 324 |
| Vietnamese | 142 |
