alberte

...actually when you think about it - if the market forces argument was all there was to it administrators would be getting paid very little to, there's an abundance of administrators

The solution is get on the administration track https://www.higheredjobs.com/salary/salaryDisplay.cfm?Survey...

e.g. Chief Student Financial Aid Officer $83,726

twit.tv I listen to it's a nice radio level stream of tech

I think in all these discussions of bean counters, the underlying assumptions non bean counters make is that the bean counters are trying to improve things. That, in my experience, is seldom the case. Mostly the act of bean counting is to create positions for bean counters, and insert themselves into the process. There is no end game in this, they will happily have meetings to discuss processes and improve metrics, because to them, bean counting is all there is. Without bean counting they would be unemployed. Once you let them in, you're screwed, cause they're impossible to get out.

Edit: Why the down vote? Perhaps some argument? (Oh, of course, it was probably a bean counter)

I posted this as a very real comment - once you accept that what you are doing is an item measurable by parties that aren't professionals in your field (bean counters) then any qualitative aspects of the profession are lost. Only the quantifiable is left, and because the bean counter doesn't communicate using the language of the profession - you are forced to learn their language. A language of quantifiables and reduction to line items. The rise of the professional manager who has necessarily no expertise in the field they are managing must of necessity reduce all non quantifiables to a 0 value. Thus you end up in the pickle that educators and physicians find themselves in. In the past administration was performed by members of the profession and so they could communicate using the same language.

That could be possible - though we'd like to believe other wise the human eye isn't well calibrated. After all maps of the canals of mars came about from eye balling - and they never existed.

That can't be right, sounds more like a grab for consultant dollars :-). I've been 25 years a developer, and never been on a failure. Had one small one cancelled - but for business reasons. I have seen one spectacular failure - that was great sport to watch, lots of project plans, and project managers - they decided to write their own control language as part of the project - doomed from that day on. Seen some others that didn't work out as well as they could, but seen many, many go into production successfully.

#insert standard weekly hackernews attack academia article response here

yes, unfortunately that is one interpretation of events, even so I feel more comfortable knowing that people like Martin Bryant can't get guns. I guess we'll just have to wait for more data points

> but it seems to do the trick in keeping firearms out of the hands of crazies thus far.

Yes you wouldn't think this change would be enough - because if you want to get a gun you can but for some reason it has.

Australian here, we had a mass shooting in Australia some years ago. As a result of this Assault rifles were banned (Edit: without a demonstrable need), licenses were required for rifles and hand guns. Any guns could be traded in to the govt for money in the cut over period. We haven't had a mass shooting since as far as I can recall. The occasional knifing or someone with a hand gun argument occurs still. Guns are a lot harder to come by here, so if you're a loony who wants to kill everyone for looking at you funny then you're out of luck.

yes I see your point. Mine was degrees have been dumbed down and in many was are glorified vocational courses now, the courses have more people, a greater student to teacher ratio, and stray from theoretical considerations to the more immediate. The driver for this is cost and what can be readily identified as a useful function by the bean counters (said MBA's).

Some thing's are easy to quantify and this is what the focus is on. How do you quantify something like critical thinking, what quantifiable value is there in a knowledge of history - how do these things help little Johnny get a job. Well they don't really. I think of the results of learning these things as emergent properties, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Wouldn't it be more interesting to have a population educated in the humanities? wouldn't a democratic society be better served by a population educated with at least a base in the humanities? A society of people that can make rational arguments and evaluate the political arguments of the day would be a lot different from the one we live in now.

These sort of arguments are for a qualitative change - and I don't see how you can quantify them in a spread sheet. The thinking that drives MBA’s currently drives education from what I can see - keep costs down, standard courses, pack as many into a class as you can, and so on.

I'm not sure how this relates to MBA's? Please expand if you would

It's not grammatical nitpicking it's teleological nitpicking. You've made some incredibly broad statements without a shred of evidence, this I grant you is the norm for an internet forum, however it is not something that an arts graduate should be involved in. That was one of the points of an arts degree - critical thinking. Thats one of the reasons they called it an ivory tower imho, because instead of indulging in tabloid rants academics argued in logical progression to make their point.

If we lose this, then it will be a sad day imho.

Edit: PG even wrote a post on this http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

You do make my point well. What used to be taught in an arts degree is how to structure an argument, e.g. 'psychology studies cannot be replicated' should really be 'some psychology studies cannot be replicated' use of the existential quantifier changes the statement totally. This used to be taught in a first year philosophy subject, but do they even teach philosophy any more?

>I do respect the humanities, but there's only so much you can do with them.

I believe someone from the humanities would have trouble with this statement. Of what use is all the techno gadgets if we lose what makes us human? I'm a techie, but I've also studied some humanities, and delve into some in my spare time, things like communication, psychology, arts these all make life a lot richer, even if they do have less flashing lights.

Humanities professors on the other hand have had it pretty easy, and that seems to be coming to an end, the same for universities in general. It's something I'm torn about, I always loved my time at university, but the reason I went there was for the knowledge, because that was where it was stored. Now universities are in many ways obsolete - all the knowledge is in the cloud. If you need to ask an expert then just ask online, so we still need experts, just the renumeration model is being disrupted - like everyone elses pretty well.

What we do need is critical thinking, and traditionally this was what was taught in an arts degree. In many ways the academics have done this to themselves, by dumbing down degrees and focusing more on 'business' outcomes they've eliminated what was the defining characteristic of a degree and it is now just a set of check boxes, which of course you don't need a uni for. I blame the MBA's - the cultureless hoards of middle management that suck the life out of everything that's not quantifiable and can be entered on a spread sheet.

perhaps it's less of an issue in delphi (and pascal) since parameters that change in procedures have the var keyword?

In practice it doesn't seem to cause issues since pretty well every thing is a pointer, the only time it causes a problem is if you're using records. The compiler does catch this but, yes, in this case it is sub optimal. It's a trade off I suppose - 95-99.9% of the time your using classes so the '.' is everywhere rather than ->.

Interesting - I've always thought Delphi was easier to use than many other systems, but could never put my finger on why. It seems they thought about it a lot at the beginning in a hundred little ways.

Due to L-Theanine they say http://www.worldoftea.org/caffeine-and-l-theanine/ it relaxes you and mellows out the caffeine

Have you tried a tea strainer - something like this http://www.amazon.com/OXO-Good-Grips-3-Inch-Strainer/dp/B001... the old school way

Edit: http://www.amazon.com/Online-Stores-Inc-Tstr-Strainer/dp/B00... more traditional

If you want to try tea I wouldn't try earl grey first, it has a funny taste to me - and I drink a lot of tea. Try english breakfast (twinings if you can get it), or even better orange pekoe, but all the other instructions are spot on.

There are so many different flavours that black tea can be, no two brands taste the same, if you really want to enjoy it though avoid supermarket tea bags they are so very dull.

...Delphi's not dead - see http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi, now it's cross platform, modern language features - generics, lambdas etc etc. Writing a Mac app in it right now :-)

His dog has dreads - very cool

lots in database land - Oracle Enterprise Manager, quest had one - forget the name - the makers of Toad, it was very pretty. Splunk is one for server log management. a quick google turned up https://www.paessler.com/router_monitoring for network monitoring. Maybe they're not as widespread because you have to pay for most of them :-)

epsilons are fun, epsilons like to play and run

the startup lifestyle seems very unappealing to me, work 60 hour days for some lottery tickets, that will probably become diluted over time. Maybe thats not the truth but thats how it appears to me on the other side of the pond.

I'm probably one of the 95% but I make a nice little living live near the beach, work from home and basically have a nice life. not sure why I'd subject myself to silicon valley, I suspect the locals overvalue how much everyone else wants to be there.

oh - lol, never seen it, my comments still stand even though it's a fictional business.

Why didn't you patent it? I often think when I see the tag no one will steal your idea, only applies if you're idea isn't worth stealing - 'I'm gonna sell some stuff' isn't really an idea, it's just business, and so how you do your business matters - i.e. execution.

However if you come up with a truly new idea - a better compression algorithm for example - then the idea matters and execution matter as well. It's just truly new ideas are rare, and so the 'execution matters' mantra continues, because most new businesses aren't new ideas just different packaging.

The question should be "If two objects approach at 75 percent the speed of light relative to me then what is their speed relative to each other"