Nobody cares where you went to U, unless it was Phoenix, ITT, or Devry.
You could go to podunk U, and still get hired.
I've seen hiring managers reject resumes when they saw the applicant's degree was granted from DeVry.
Lazy hiring managers are part of the problem with the economy. Wasting time looking for the perfect employee is the enemy of hiring a good employee.
I went to the University of Maine and starting almost immediately afterward I've been working with Harvard-trained people, on AAA PC video games in Boston, and now as a full-time college math lecturer in New York. I always felt that you got out what you put into it.
There's a legitimate debate to be had whether a student like your brother would be better off if they'd been flunked out or not accepted by the university in question. Most of the cultural pressure, however, is to pass those students on.
Indeed you are right about getting out of it what you put into it. This is true no matter where you get your education from.
I have a serious interest in electronics and computer programming and my money was well spent learning about those things at ITT Tech while I was working full time and supporting myself. I did very well at ITT tech and though ITT tech was not Harvard, I got what I needed to move on into the workforce and have a good understanding of what I can do for a potential employer. I love my work and I have continued by auditing classes from MIT and Harvard and Stanford using Open Courseware and other services. From my experience using Massive open online courses I have realized in retrospect what a value my ITT education actually was and how much of it was at the same time, dependent on my interest and effort. ITT was convenient because I was able to go to work in the morning and get off work at around 5 pm and get to school and take classes until about midnight and then get home and get to bed then rinse and repeat day after day.. This would not be possible if I were going to a 4 year school, I would have had to have paid my own way to get through school and then get a job after graduation. That would not have been possible in my situation because I could not hold off paying rent or eating or having medical care for the few years it would take to get such a degree. Anyone who looks down on me because I went to ITT tech, well they lose respect in my eyes.. and how dare they? I worked hard and I did well and asked nothing of anyone other than the freedom to work and go to school. Looking at ITT like it is some sort of ghetto high school, is part of the problem with the economy, and the devaluing of the American workforce that is leading companies to H1b employees. H1b employees are cheaper, but I fail to see how American companies that expect information security to be respected are going to not be in for a rude awakening by funding people from india and china and elsewhere to come in and work on sensitive systems for pennies on the dollar..
I find it funny though how I get less interested employers looking at my resume now that I have ITT tech on it. Just as an experiment I think I am going to stop listing ITT just to see if I get more hits.
I will say that the ITT I attended (15+ yrs ago) actually had teachers that were interested in making sure you learned what you were supposed to and had fun doing it. But, that was when they had CAD and Electronics Engineering courses, not that myriad of options available 2 weeks ago. We Built/Designed Circuits from simple voltage regulators to Amplifiers, including broadcasting FM down the hallway of the school (1W). Programmed Allen-Bradley PLCs w/ ladder logic and an 8bit motorolla processor for machine coding. The PC side of the course was basically, take it apart, put it back together, load DOS in the lab, and learning about the interfaces, designs, whys and hows, for the classroom side.
That said, I went there because I didn't apply myself in High School, and it was no problem to get in knowing that I just needed a piece of paper to get past HR.
I went to ITT and graduated the first time in 2009 and the second time in 2011 and we learned the same things in the electronics program, I also took software application programming and we created a platform agnostic banking application for multiple users that operated on a network with multiple levels of user and administrator access to track customer bank accounts, net worth, interest on savings and loan eligibility. I built a robot for my final project in my associates electronics degree that mapped the floor plan of a building by just driving around and using a laser grid to map where it could go and couldn't go (basically the entire surface of a floor) In my bachelors program we made a serial digital radio where we could implement data logging from sensors within a mile range such that each system had the whole system of data to implement a multi node control system (in our case controlling heating elements to maintain and data-log temperature at multiple points over digital radio.)
HR at companies I have applied to acknowledge almost none of this because it is over their heads, the piece of paper is devalued because it says ITT.. which is sad. usually when I see that look on their face when they talk about ITT I start getting ready to get up and thank them for their time.. usually though when they see that I have spent half a decade working for IBM and working on 911 phone systems, they get interested again.. but usually ITT works against me from what I see which is something that should not happen in my view. Don't let it get you down though, It is the sign of a good company, that they would actually look at your achievements rather than just looking at what school you went to and basing their decision off of that. IBM was a good employer and I learned a lot from them and they acknowledged the skills and my quality of work and time at ITT. It is sad that IBM seems to not be the company that it was a decade ago also. I don't know what has happened that has caused their decline, but I chalk it up to mismanagement. This can bring down any company.. when the bean counters start thinking that because they make loads of money they are somehow qualified to make technical decisions.. this is why disasters like the Challenger accident happen.
ITT tech school became what every business person is trained to create, a institution that takes in money without delivering anything of value
It is the ultimate outcome of constantly trying to lower costs while increasing income
Apollo schools (Univ of Phoenix, etc...) should be next on the list.
They have created billions of dollars in revenue while delivering less real value than if the same money had been spent at state colleges.
What we really need in this country are 4-year community colleges that are really focused on delivering value. Unfortunately pacs funded by private colleges have stopped this repeatedly
The standard of education that is held up is MIT, and you can audit those classes via open courseware if you have the time and motivation to do so. I did it and I found that the material being presented was the same material and skills that were being taught at ITT when I went. I would say if I could get into MIT (which I could if I could get past the admissions department going back and looking at my SAT scores) I would do just as well as I did at ITT where I performed highly, based on what I am hearing across the internet in the light of the news about ITT closing, I am an outlier. I am listed in Who's Who from my time at ITT.. which I gather does not match with what is being said about ITT students in general.
School of Electronics Technology
"Electronics Technology" is a very well-established "code word" for "Electronic Technician" (Not "engineer" -"technician"). In fact, some schools call it "Electronic Engineering Technology."
I took that course in a school that was later brought out by ITT. It was a technician course, and qualified me for a bench tech job. They never advertised it as anything but that.
I have since gone way beyond that, but this was as a result of OJT and extracurricular stuff. I work in an R&D capacity and manage Ph.Ds, these days.
I am grateful for that old EET certificate (It was never referred to as a "degree." It was always a "certificate."). It got my foot in the door. I didn't have the means or the background to get into a real college in those days, and had to get working as quickly as possible. The student loan (in those days) wasn't too bad. Best investment I ever made.
That said, I can completely see how schools like this (Trump U., anyone?) can be little more than shams.
I graduated from ITT 5 years ago and my teachers were top notch and had experience in the workforce in major places. I had a PHD instructor that was a materials science major that had worked for GE and had worked on the design of the engines on the F-117 nighthawk before he retired to teaching. When I left ITT tech I ended up working for IBM for a number of years and every employer acknowledged that my skills were top notch. Whatever is the problem with the placement of graduates at ITT in the past few years that has precipitated this problem causing the failure of ITT is on the students who are not getting hired and on the management that has been in place in the past 5 years. To say that ITT always was a failure and all the students are idiots.. is a cop out. I don't care what school you went to, you get out of your education what you put into it. I take my work very seriously and I am passionate about it and I never stopped learning. ITT is not a get rich quick scheme.. and science and engineering consists of the same information and material no matter what school you go to. I personally have audited MIT courses via open courseware on an ongoing basis to keep my skills sharp and the material that was presented at ITT was the same material that was being taught at MIT.. I concede that MIT's admission standards are prohibitively restrictive, but when I graduated high school I did not know what I wanted to do with my life like I do now.. But it doesn't change the fact (and you can confirm this if you have the stamina to sit through a few years of classes on youtube from MIT open courseware) that the material presented at ITT when I went there is the same material and quality that is presented at MIT. I will never be given the opportunities on the level of an MIT graduate though.. not fair but that is life.. and those that are the high performers and who are passionate about what they do like I am do not let that stop them. They work an order of magnitude harder because of that fact. I have been working on pursuing a masters degree in computer science and despite performing well in prerequisite classes at a higher level than my education at ITT would account for, I get judged harshly because I went to ITT. That is something that I consider a failure of the professors and admissions employees of where I went to graduate school. I also found that the quality of the classes at the graduate school I attended were not as high as the corresponding classes I audited at MIT , Stanford and Harvard. This issue is more nuanced than the people that just come on here and say "oh ITT tech is a ghetto school and none of those guys know anything." etc.. You have to expect that though because we live in a soundbite driven culture and they really don't care or know the details about what is going on.
So when are the FEDs going to shut down the big Universities? $180,000 of student loans and NO JOB prospects
You do realize that you don't have to go to an expensive private university, right? Anyway if I go get a Harvard degree it will cost me a lot of money but I will in all likelihood have gotten an actual education along the way. You can argue that it isn't a good deal financially but you do get something at the end of the day. If you can't turn a Harvard degree into some sort of job you're doing it wrong. Comparing Harvard to or even a state university to ITT Tech is ridiculous.
Companies like ITT (I don't really think of them as schools) basically provide a near worthless degree which nobody respects and doesn't open doors. They do so knowing that a large percentage of their customers (students) will fail out. They exist to load credulous low income people with debt while failing to provide them a real education. They prey on people who probably really aren't the sort of people who are college material in the first place. College is great but it isn't the right path for everyone. Trade schools would serve many of them much better and there is a clear need for skilled trades.
I have gone to ITT in two different states, and I would say that the negative attitude towards the educational quality of the ITT brand is unfounded. ITT was a good school between 5 and 10 years ago so if there was funny business going on with the educational quality since I went there that is on them and does not reflect on it's alumni, however we have to deal with it. It is unfair but the students that worked hard will continue to work hard and will get other degrees regardless of how the negative press against ITT hurts them. When I get that attitude from people about going to ITT Tech I quickly ask them questions regarding their understanding of the skills and materials and I find that usually the people that scoff at ITT students skills don't demonstrate a solid understanding of the skills they are interviewing for.. per the dunning kruger effect. This is to be expected because everyone that knows how to click a mouse this days think that they are an IT expert.. everyone that has compiled an arduino program thinks that they are an embedded systems expert and everyone that has made a Velleman christmas tree thinks that they are an electronics expert. The best thing that can happen here is the employers knuckling down and finding that a large number of the ITT tech graduates are experts and that you need to judge people not based on the college they went to but based on what they did with the skills they gained there. You can tell a lot about a company by the way they handle that conversation in the first interview!
Not all ITT graduates are idiots.
Perhaps not, but the vast majority of them are. I am not going to interview 100 turds just to find one halfway competent ITT graduate, especially when I have plenty of other applicants with degrees from real colleges.
That is the attitude that makes it hard for the high performers from ITT to stand out. This is why I am going to just spend the money to go to a not for profit school and essentially re-certify on all the same material. It is less problem rather than having to engage in the same argument at every interview and having to deal with the same attitude due to ITT soiling it's brand through no fault of mine or most everyone else that worked hard there and did well. Unfair? Undoubtedly! This is life though Sometimes you find the best people stand out because when things like this happen they knuckle down and work harder rather than throw their hands up and give up. This is war!
Because it is trivially easy to break into the medical industry systems while their IT security is being designed by MBA managers with impotent and clueless security policies. Anyone here ever tried to apply for one of these management positions? Anyone here ever worked in the medical industry's IT division and realized that it was a dead end job if you are an IT worker? You are never going to get into the management there because they don't promote people from IT into management positions. It does not take a lot of thought to see the problem and the hackers know this. So what is the response from the hiring mangers here? I bet nothing because they are not into solving problems, just letting them continue and complaining about them.
That begs a question that would probably need a legal precedent to determine, if no "encryption" algorithm was used but you still used some other sort of steganography technique they couldn't break, if you are then guilty of a crime. You could have had navajo code talkers translate all of your incoming and outgoing emails as a "value added" service instead of using encryption like those dirty drug dealers and terrorist hackers do, but are you breaking the law? If I tell you, "I put that thing in that place I put it that one time".. will a 3 letter initialed agency bust down my door?
If it becomes illegal to use steganography as well as encryption, then the first amendment and the fourth amendment and the fifth technically go away don't they?
My question here, "How exactly is this constitutional?"
Um... IIRC, a southern state (Tennessee?) passed a law defining pi as exactly 3 because it made calculations easier. This explains a lot about the mental capacities of legislators.
It was Indiana.
And being an Indianan, I hang my head in shame.
The sad thing is that pi would be 3 in a universe with a different curvature of spacetime. It is clear they are not here in the same reality with the rest of us 3.14159265'ers! If pi is 3 in Indiana, then in that state the angles of a triangle do not add all the way up to 180 degrees.. so many things hypothetically broke when they did that.
Every time I pass through Indiana I cannot escape the foreboding feeling that there is something fundamentally "wrong" with the universe around me.. and that no one will tell me what it is. Maybe it is just simple paranoia.. but I don't think so! I will constantly be driving along I-70 and wondering if my GPS is right or not, if the road is where the screen says it is and if I actually am on it where the arrow says I am! If the ratio of the diameter of my tires to their circumference is more than 3 then how can I be sure that my speedometer is right? I am probably speeding if I keep the needle on my speedometer at 70.. but... how can I even be sure that is right seeing as it is governed by angles too?
I wonder if it is a coincidence that Indiana is the state where I lose an hour traveling East from crossing from the central time zone into the eastern time zone.. but no it is because the speed of light shifted with the faulty geometry of spacetime in the state of Indiana! I will constantly be asking myself if I just experienced missing time from being abducted by aliens or if the governing body of the state are just blistering idiots!
I wonder if you could get a speeding ticket in Indiana and argue that their radar gun's reading was wrong because using 3 for pi, does not come up to what the radar gun read out.. I would make Johnny Cochrane spin in his grave screaming: "If Pi is 3.00000000, you must acquit!"
Intelligence is the outcome, not the process.
Do you consider a mechanical governor to be artificial intelligence? This is how they work. The job of the governor is to keep speed constant regardless of load.
A mechanical governor has the same transfer function as an artificial intelligence programmed for the job of keeping speed constant regardless of load. Input and outputs of both black boxes are indistinguishable by definition.
I think you misunderstand who would have to publish what. If you had evidence that the brain was super-Turing in performance that would be a HUGE result. It is currently widely accepted that super-Turing machines are not physically realisable. In fact I believe it can be proven given the laws of physics.
So the brain is not super-Turing and therefore the brain can be simulated on a Turing machine. So in a sense, the brain is just algorithms.
Points for pointing to the burden of proof, but I have to count some of for the lack of definition about what a super turing machine is. A turing machine is simply any machine that can perform a set of defined mathematically defined instructions. Something either is or isn't a turing machine, some particularly specialized instructions such as factoring large primes in one step may be better performed by one type of computer versus another
The argument here that, there is a "Magic sauce" that makes the brain special over other turing machines is largely a load of dingos kidneys, because by definition any mechanism that can perform a turing computable set of instructions is by definition a turing machine. Some turing machines are more well suited to the requirements of one particular task over another computer, but that does not invalidate the original assertion that all turing machines by definition are logically equivalent. This does not mean that the human brain is more practical over a conventional computer at, for instance the Four Color Theorem, which is of reasonable complexity that it cannot be performed without a computer.
Huh. I didn't realize the brain was a Turing machine. I'll await the publication of your paper.
No need to post a new paper, there is prior art from 20 years ago:
I quote:
"Turing was interested in the question of what it means for a task to be computable, which is one of the foundational questions in the philosophy of computer science. Intuitively a task is computable if it is possible to specify a sequence of instructions which will result in the completion of the task when they are carried out by some machine. Such a set of instructions is called an effective procedure, or algorithm, for the task. The problem with this intuition is that what counts as an effective procedure may depend on the capabilities of the machine used to carry out the instructions. In principle, devices with different capabilities may be able to complete different instruction sets, and therefore may result in different classes of computable tasks (see the entry on computability and complexity).
Turing proposed a class of devices that came to be known as Turing machines. These devices lead to a formal notion of computation that we will call Turing-computability. A task is Turing computable if it can be carried out by some Turing machine."
By this very definition, the human brain is capable of carrying out any procedure defined as "Turing Computable", thereby making the human brain a "Turing Machine" QED.
AI is "just algorithms". Your brain is "just algorithms".
There's a classic phenomena whereby as soon as a problem considered to require AI is solved, it is defined away as "not really AI". This happened with Chess, with Go, with automated vehicles, with handwriting recognition, with facial recognition... every one was claimed to be the domain of "real intelligence", right up until computers could do them as well as humans.
I sometimes wonder if it is just that the AI is programmed not to be included in any group that would have it as a member.
Yes I should have mailed the joke to the Marx brothers!
What is an AI if it isn't an algorithm?
AI is a trained system, a matrix of weights. This is different from a program that says
for(;;){
if (desired_temp
turn_on_heater();
if (desired_temp >= sensor_temp() )
turn_off_heater();
}
So you define an AI as a "matrix of weights" and then differentiate it from an arbitraially defined 1 or possibly 2 dimensional matrix of weights!
I see what you did there! Just so you know, your little control system would "chatter" a lot because of a too tightly defined trigger for on off toggling.
This can be avoided, by implementing a PID controller. This type of system is all around us, if you want to learn about it, try spending an afternoon with an Allen Bradley Ladder Logic trainer.
PID is not largely considered AI, however it largely shares the transfer function, with an AI designed to do the same defined task. You would not build a control system with a super computer to turn on and off a heater to maintain temperature in a room (that would be overkill) when you could achieve the same "transfer function" with a simple op-amp circuit configured as a differential amplifier implementing adjustable negative feedback. The former would cost hundreds of dollars and the latter under 5 dollars!
What is important here, and the concept that 110010001000 is glossing over without realizing they are glossing over it is the concept of the "transfer function".
You can build a computer to play chess, you can train a person to play chess or hypothetically build an analog circuit to implement "Chess playing like" logic. The transfer function of all three things would be the same. Each thing plays chess, some more robust than others, and one could argue that the human brain does not play chess by performing a massive database search of scored chess game positions from millions of grandmaster chess games, but you do have to admit that it is a good way to beat Gary Kasparov at playing chess in a pinch.. one that is such a no brainer a super computer could do it! Kasparov does not do a database search when he plays chess, but when he is done, intuiting and psyching out his opponent and thinking a few moves ahead of the game.. the result is the same.. a chess game played according to the legal rules with either one winner and one loser, or a winner and a resigner. The transfer function between Kasparov and Deep blue were and are equivalents. This does not mean that Deep blue could drive a drunken and beaten Kasparov home from the bar afterward.
Put no trust in cryptic comments.
