Good point. Perhaps restrict this to Civil Servants who have NEVER worked on a flying mission -- it'd still either get rid of a lot of useless people or give them incentive to be useful :)

I think NASA should get rid of its cadre of bureaucrats who do NOTHING but squabble over budgets, kill programs, and buy staplers. That way, they can let the brilliant (and I do NOT mean this sarcastically) engineers who still work there do their job.

Here's a rule of thumb:

If you're a civil servant and you have not worked on anything that has left the ground in the last 5 years, you get fired, and the engineers you manage get assigned to someone who HAS worked on something that has gone into space.

Good points. I've also seen stand-up meetings used mostly for micromanagement/time compliance/etc. instead of information. They've left a bad taste for me...

Thanks.

I generally like to have some grasp of the material before I study with others, but group sessions can also be very useful.

What I find the most helpful is having to explain something to a friend (or a group) -- it forces me to learn it, since I now have an 'audience'. There have been occasions, however, when I've gotten stuff explained to me (better than the instructor could), and have benefited from studying in a group.

If you want to get the most out of your group study session, do some 'homework' by yourself first and read through the material. You'll probably get (and give) a lot more, even if you don't understand everything going into the group session.

“Because humans have unlimited storage capacity, having total recall would be a mess,” says Bjork.

In that case, using only 10% of it shouldn't be a problem! :)

Joking aside, most of the suggestions in the article make sense.

After years and years of classes, some years off, and going back to taking classes (and doing much better in them), this is the advice I have. It is not free -- you are required to give me $5 if you ever find me in real life:

0) Understand the material. Keep a laptop connected to the Internet open during class. Google whatever you don't understand immediately, fill the gaps in your knowledge, and get back to the lecture. Bookmark or transcribe the info down if necessary (this helps me with definitions, acronyms, etc.). This will keep you from getting bored, since boredom generally results from not understanding. If you understand the material and the instructor is truly being boring, the tangential information you discover during this process may be more useful than the class itself!

1) Understand the material! I mean really -- even if you're behind. Do reading before class if you can. Check Wikipedia. Consult the Khan Academy. Do the homework, and spread it over multiple days, making sure you get some sleep in between the days. All-nighters, while they make for great stories, are not as helpful as you think. (My record was 36 hours straight -- I got the A -- but I wouldn't do it again if I had the chance!)

2) Avoid early morning classes, if possible. Unless you're a morning person -- in which case you probably don't need the advice.

3) Take notes during class. On paper, with indelible pen, in a bound notebook, writing/drawing only the points which seem relevant to you. The point of doing this is to help you focus and summarize, not to record the lecturers words for posterity. I've found that typing, while faster and more legible, does not aid my recall as well. Recording the lecture may be helpful if it's an exam review, but is pointless if you're not paying attention while there.

4) Teach someone the material right afterward, if you can. Tutor someone, or bore your significant other to tears...

5) Find a way to extend what you learned. Right down your ideas. Implement them if practical. Post them on Halfbakery if not...

I doubt there are many people out there who bought an iPad and are complaining that they can't install Linux on it (me included), so why should it be any different for these 'Designed for Windows 8' devices?

For several reasons:

1) In case you haven't noticed, the tablet is (not so slowly) replacing the laptop and the desktop. By the time the transition is done, you may notice that all you can purchase is a subscription to use your tablet. The tablet itself may be prohibitively expensive, but easily leased from the connectivity provider, much like your cell phone. This will discourage casual hacking or jailbreaking. It'll be like the good old days of leasing your phone from the phone company. The "desktop" may turn into a developer only tool, much like the console (XBox, Playstation, etc.) developer machines you can buy for around $10K *if* you qualify.

2) The rise of Linux was enabled by the abundance of cheap hardware originally meant for the 'WinTel' platform. Had the devices been locked to Windows 3.1, the world would look very different right now.

3) Apple is a genuine OEM (in that they manufacture both hardware and software and sell you a complete device). There is much less of a need to replace the software (although we'd all love to have the freedom to do so). Anything you buy with Windows on it is a much less integrated solution.

4) Most importantly, we'd like to be able to run *FREE* software on commodity hardware. Economies of scale do not operate the way libertarians fantasize -- the free market will NOT spawn a sizable open source hardware industry (if you believe otherwise, please point me to the tens of truly open smart phones that I can buy right now). There *may* be one or two tablets which allow free software in a locked down world in order to satisfy the die hards -- but they will be several generations behind the state of the art.

Call me paranoid if you wish, but I believe this trend is part of a decade long *gradual* transition to trusted computing for consumer hardware. What started out with consoles (cryptographic signing of games) moved to smart phones and is now moving to tablets.

Think about it: we live in an age of pervasive connectivity, hardware manufacturers which own content creators (e.g., Sony) and rent politicians (who cared little about your rights to begin with). You should *want* the freedom to run your own software, even if you choose not to at this moment.

A much more effective option would be for Google to quietly blacklist all SOPA supporting companies, websites, & politicians from its search results. Or find the results and send them to a "access to this web page restricted due to support of SOPA" message.

Mean spirited and childish, but it would work.

On the other hand, I'm afraid such a blackout would have unintended consequences.

I did the same thing for a group of middle school students back in 2005 and after evaluating a bunch of graphics and sound libraries, we settled on Basic4GL.

Basic4GL is everything BASIC was, except without line numbers and with all the GLUT functionality built in (minus the initialization cruft). It also supports sound, loading a bunch of texture formats, and has the NEHE tutorials ported to it, and runs on VERY low end hardware. Download and run the demos -- you'll be impressed.

The kids did exceptionally well. We got a classroom full of (failing) middle school students to understand the idea of a coordinate system, and use this to design their own spaceship (using only a piece of graph paper and their own derived x,y coordinate pairs). We then guided them through animating this spaceship with key press events (and in the process they learned about coordinate transformations).

Our goal of having them design their own textures and sound effects never quite panned out, since we ran out of time -- but our ultimate goal was a classroom produced game where every student had a piece of the production workflow.

Afterwards, I found myself using Basic4GL for OpenGL prototyping since it does away with so much of the initialization, etc.

For example, the following is a whole Basic4GL program to draw a triangle

glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES)
        glVertex3f(0, 10, -30)
        glVertex3f(8, -4, -30)
        glVertex3f(-8, -4, -30)
        glEnd()
SwapBuffers()

This was, of course, several years ago. You may find something better now (I'd recommend looking into Processing. I'd stay away from anything that a kid can't set up on his own (i.e., combination of multiple libraries)).

For the classes, you want to emphasize the basics while at the same time giving them something they can sink their teeth into from Day 1. I started with having them type in a very simple program in the first class and then run it themselves. I went from there to what the coordinates mean, etc. You will find that some kids are faster than others, and some of them might surprise you. You will also find that they'll do really well teaching each other.

Good luck!

Mod parent up. I also got into programming because all I had access to was a hand-me-down Apple II in 1993. It probably got me into the field single-handedly.

That being said, there is something to be said to provide technology for the sake of learning the technology itself. Logging onto the web and finding your own games IS a skill. The second part of my computer education was getting through the school's pathetic security (FileMenu=0 in Windows 3.1's win.ini) to run my own programs. Sometimes I think the whole thing was set up as a sneaky way to teach kids about computer networking.

(Downloading Doom on a 2400 baud connection and running it on a 25 Mhz Pentium with 4MB of RAM was also quite a learning experience)

Not surprised. All I knew about the company was the apparent character of their CEO, as indicated by the Elephant Shooting Incident:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/01/bob-parsons-go-daddy-elephant-video_n_843623.html

Now that I've posted this, Slashdot will soon be only known as 216.34.181.45 :)