Comment What will we do? (Score 1) 73
But if they stop accepting it, how can I feel morally superior while pretending the plastic is recyced?
Comment Typing Gap Babies (Score 1) 191
We were in school after typing ended and before keyboarding started. Now I'm too busy typing to learn to type.
Comment Re:People still use WordPress? (Score 1) 14
Yes but not the Gutenberg editor. Last I used it over a year ago, it created errors by default.
Comment Re:As expected (Score 1) 100
But it's endorsed by Shaq! A celebrity wouldn't mislead people for money would he?
Comment True as far back as Windows 95 (Score 2) 174
Windows 95 ended the era of doing what you could with existing hardware and demanded new hardware to do the same work as before. I've been shouting this from the rooftops ever since. All people do is call me crazy and get me arrested for trespassing.
Comment Re:Whow, what a load of buzzwords. (Score 1) 101
All I needed to hear was AI and I immediately sent them my entire savings. Now I'm looking around to see what I can sell. Maybe friends and family can loan me some money.
Comment TikTok (Score 0) 52
Because the cognitive decline began when they started using TikTok and now can't go much lower.
Submission + - Computer Science Has Confused 'Hard' with 'Interesting' or 'Valuable'
theodp writes: "There is a lot of literature about how much CS overwhelms students," writes Univ. of Michigan CS Prof Mark Guzdial. "There’s also literature on how we can do better."
One of Guzdial's top paper picks in this space is A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design by Felienne Hermans and Ari Schlesinger, which makes the case for why CS and computing education should be broader than just what computer scientists and the Tech industry want it to be. In her engaging presentation of the material, Hermans opens with an acknowledgement that the title may be off-putting or confusing to some ("And maybe you're like, 'What? What does feminism have to do with programming languages?'") and quickly gets to her points by giving the audience an 'Is it a programming language?' quiz (C? UML? Spreadsheets? Scratch? Knitting patterns? HTML?).
"I appreciated Felienne’s point that computer science has confused 'hard' with 'interesting' or 'valuable'," Guzdial writes. "We overly value things that are hard to do, which leads us to undervalue things that are interesting, valuable, or useful but are not necessarily hard to do (e.g., studying how people build in Excel is interesting and valuable, even if it’s not as 'hard' as studying programmers building million LOC systems). I have heard this sentiment voiced lots of times. 'The study was really not that much. I don’t see why it’s interesting.' 'The system wasn’t hard to do. Anyone could have built it. It’s not really a contribution.' 'Anyone could have thought of that.' An academic contribution should be judged by what we learn, not by how hard it was to do or invent. That focus on being hard is part of what drives students away from computer science."
A good example of what Hermans talks about can be observed in a 2013 Microsoft Research video, in which a CS-degreed middle school math teacher gets ostracized by the research crowd after she has the temerity to suggest that most kids would be better served by instruction on how to use computers and software like Office (she also suggests 'computational thinking' could be learned in math class and coding concepts be taught outside of the context of CS courses) rather than the 'rigorous CS courses' Microsoft and Google insisted were needed for UK and US K-12 schoolchildren. Interestingly, eight years later in a 2021 Microsoft Research podcast, the same Microsoft Researcher from the 2013 video now embraces the idea of giving children instruction in Office ("We teach children programming using Excel"). Why the change of heart? Microsoft Research explained that it had transformed Excel ('easy' concepts) into a 'Turing-complete' formula language with a new LAMBDA function ('hard' CS concepts).
One of Guzdial's top paper picks in this space is A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design by Felienne Hermans and Ari Schlesinger, which makes the case for why CS and computing education should be broader than just what computer scientists and the Tech industry want it to be. In her engaging presentation of the material, Hermans opens with an acknowledgement that the title may be off-putting or confusing to some ("And maybe you're like, 'What? What does feminism have to do with programming languages?'") and quickly gets to her points by giving the audience an 'Is it a programming language?' quiz (C? UML? Spreadsheets? Scratch? Knitting patterns? HTML?).
"I appreciated Felienne’s point that computer science has confused 'hard' with 'interesting' or 'valuable'," Guzdial writes. "We overly value things that are hard to do, which leads us to undervalue things that are interesting, valuable, or useful but are not necessarily hard to do (e.g., studying how people build in Excel is interesting and valuable, even if it’s not as 'hard' as studying programmers building million LOC systems). I have heard this sentiment voiced lots of times. 'The study was really not that much. I don’t see why it’s interesting.' 'The system wasn’t hard to do. Anyone could have built it. It’s not really a contribution.' 'Anyone could have thought of that.' An academic contribution should be judged by what we learn, not by how hard it was to do or invent. That focus on being hard is part of what drives students away from computer science."
A good example of what Hermans talks about can be observed in a 2013 Microsoft Research video, in which a CS-degreed middle school math teacher gets ostracized by the research crowd after she has the temerity to suggest that most kids would be better served by instruction on how to use computers and software like Office (she also suggests 'computational thinking' could be learned in math class and coding concepts be taught outside of the context of CS courses) rather than the 'rigorous CS courses' Microsoft and Google insisted were needed for UK and US K-12 schoolchildren. Interestingly, eight years later in a 2021 Microsoft Research podcast, the same Microsoft Researcher from the 2013 video now embraces the idea of giving children instruction in Office ("We teach children programming using Excel"). Why the change of heart? Microsoft Research explained that it had transformed Excel ('easy' concepts) into a 'Turing-complete' formula language with a new LAMBDA function ('hard' CS concepts).
Comment celebrity backers (Score 1) 18
> celebrity backers
How could it fail?
Comment Who will buy it? (Score 3, Interesting) 28
Who will buy all that sweet, sweet private info without the ability to sell it?
Comment Re:Anything but metric? (Score 1) 29
In metric, it's 10.25 Manhattans.
Comment RIP (Score 1) 28
o7
Comment Re:Some notes (Score 2) 63
I'm pre-ordering 2 for GTA 6.
Comment Goodbye NFT shoes, hello AI shoes (Score 1) 18
Forget NFTs. Get yourself some AI shoes like the cool kids!
Comment Re:"Science" vs "Scientists" (Score 1) 250
This. I was just commenting the same thing when I saw your reply.
> Trust in Science Recovers Slightly,
> Public trust in scientists is showing signs of recovery,
There's a difference. Science is the scientific method. It has no emotions. Scientists are squishy with emotions, varying motivations and levels of honesty You can trust science and lose trust in scientists.
Slashdot Top Deals
Getting the job done is no excuse for not following the rules. Corollary: Following the rules will not get the job done.
