Doctors Robert Dewar and Edmond Schonberg (Professors Emeritus at NYU in Computer Science) recently penned a rather scathing paper about the sorry state of Computer Science education in the United States today. In it, we see the usual laments that Java is dumbing down Computer Science curricula and that the lack of emphasis on mathematics is making students completely uncompetitive in the global market. This is in an attempt to make CS “soft” and keep the numbers up in terms of number of people majoring and number of degrees granted. But this is what students want, apparently.When I got my B.S. (in 2003), I can remember students in my classes constantly grousing about how topics like Scheme or Finite State Automata were “useless” and we should spend our time doing “useful” things like learning how to use VB to make a database app or something. Or, God forbid, writing web apps in PHP.In one of my courses, the students actually got together and petitioned to have the course language changed from OCAML to Java (no kidding). And this was a Computer Languages class, where the entire purpose of the class was to write several interpreters to study different programming language constructs (such as closures or continuations). In case you aren’t familiar with it, OCAML is an ML-derivative which is designed for writing interpreters and compilers. Java is a general-purpose language which isn’t designed for anything specific, as near as I can tell. In this case, OCAML was unquestionably the better tool for the job, and yet, because students were uncomfortable having to learn a new language, and the professor was a bit weak-willed, we ended up having to deal with a monstrous interpreter written in Java. What was a few lines of OCAML became 20 or 30 files in Java (because each syntactic construct needs its own class).

These are the future software engineers of America, and they’re killing themselves. They’ve no one else to blame. As Dewar points out in his article, the adoption of Java is driven almost entirely by a desire to make programming “fun” and to alleviate students’ fears that they won’t learn anything “useful” from a course taught in an academic language like Scheme. The students are propped up by administrators who have a vested interest in graduating as many people as possible, regardless of how qualified they are. So, as is usual, you have the least qualified people making these decisions.

It’s like if you walked into a painting class, told everyone that learning to paint was too hard, and then gave everyone a camera and told them that photography was the same thing as painting, only a lot easier to do. No disrespect towards photographers intended.

From personal experience, I’d like to add that a lack of requirement for systems programming is making many CS grads almost completely useless in industry. I’ve interviewed candidates who literally fled from the room when I asked them to find a memory allocation problem in a “Hello World”-level C program. It’s apparently entirely possible at this point to have a Master’s degree (or possibly even a PhD) in Computer Science, and be unable to describe what memory management is or to know what a pointer is.

While I agree with the fundamental message of the article. I disagree when it boils down to the reality of it. I was one of the students who wanted to do “useful” things like learning how to program using C#/VB, ASP.NET, MS SQL 2005, etc. instead of learning how to write 10 line console applications in C++.

I would be more than happy to learn how to write finite state machines or some language complilers if it would help getting me a job after graduation. But it doesn’t! I’ve been through many interviews where all the employer cared about was what I could do for their company. Did I know all the tools and languages that they used?? They didn’t care if I knew the history of computer science, or how to write a complier in C. I’ve had many employers who have said this to me up-front. So I dont think its the students’ fault that they don’t want to learn the fundamentals. What they want to learn is driven by the market.

Just look at some of the most popular web sites:

• Craigslist
• Wikipedia
• Google
• PlentyOfFish
• MySpace
• Orkut

All of those websites have a very down-to-earth or in some cases downright clumsy design. But it doesn’t matter, I think the key is content, especially user generated content. If you have the right content then the people will come. Also this ties in with my previous post about The Delphi Effect. We are seeing more and more of it and that’s the thing of the future.

Secondly besides the content, those sites are welcoming. They have a casual feel to it. You could compare it with a departmental store analogy. If you are walking down the 7th Avenue in New York, you are less likely to think that you’ll find a good deal or at least something cheap in one of the stores compared to let’s say Wal-Mart or Ross.

I don’t know if this was an intended strategy while they made those sites but it definitely seemed to work out quite well.

Vitamin has a very interesting article discussing this phenomenon and Robert Scoble has also touched upon this topic.

"Sociologists discovered that the averaged opinion of a mass of equally expert or equally ignorant observers is quite a bit more reliable a predictor than the opinion of a single randomly-chosen one of the observers."

Between Hope and Fear has an interesting entry on Delphi Effect. I’m posting some parts of it here:

The Delphi Effect appears to be affecting news gathering and analysis, and the promulgation of knowledge in general. There are armies of volunteers brought together on blogs whose averaged opinions and knowledge create a formidable challenge to traditional cathedral-style news organizations. The trend extends into other areas of knowledge, such as the Wikipedia—a collaboratively developed free encyclopedia that is created and updated by its users. No article is finished in the Wikipedia. It has a self-healing quality that gradually extracts false data. The Delphi Effect keeps the Wikipedia current, accurate and dynamic. Wikipedia’s competitors are centuries-old cathedral-style knowledge bureaucracies like Encyclopedia Brittanica. They spend millions maintaining their knowledge base, releasing it in large, expensive sets once a year. Wikipedia costs little to maintain, is far more dynamic, current, and perhaps covers a broader knowledge gamut.

We are seeing the Delphi Effect route around faulty news evidence from CBS just as it does buggy code, rendered anachronistic. Competing against CBS’s ‘cathedral’ style of news gathering and reporting is a vibrant, stealthy and reliable watchdog: blogs. Where CBS stonewalls over time, blogs self-correct, nearly instantaneously.

We should expect to see the Delphi Effect continue to challenge traditional strongholds of knowledge. We should also be aware of potential pitfalls with Blogospheric news. There are questions that should be considered as we move into the Delphi Age:

• Is Al Qaeda an example of the Delphi Effect applied to extremists? Does this account for much of their power to challenge sovereign nations?
• If so, is a sovereign country a ‘cathedral’ to the terrorist’s ‘bazaar’? In other words, can Delphi-style terrorists be defeated by traditional top-down applications of power?
• Dan Rather’s ‘cathedral’ career is on the line; is there equivalent accountability in the Blogosphere, where most users are anonymous?
• Is the war on terror a war against asymmetrical opposition? If so, how can we embrace asymmetry in technological and social development while we fight it’s darkest sociological side-effects?
• Does the power of evaluation created by blogs always serve the cause of truth? What about Al Quaeda’s blogs, or ones in the Arab world? No doubt that in those blogospheres Jews are pigs and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is the de facto truth. Can the Delphi Effect work against itself in a bazaar composed of closed minds laboring under a consensus of delusion?
• Can the Blogosphere become the ultimate medium for a new kind of demagoguery? With over 100,000 readers a day, could someone like Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs organize the ultimate flash mobs, if so inclined? That’s real power in this era. What are the limits of power available to bloggers?

We live in momentous times.

So why am I writing about this?

Well that’s because I recently bought the domain name – http://www.delphieffect.com

I don’t have anything up there as of yet but I might add something soon. I’m still brain-storming for ideas. Any suggestions?

“The U.S. House of Representatives definitively rejected the concept of Net neutrality on Thursday, dealing a bitter blow to Internet companies like Amazon.com, eBay and Google that had engaged in a last-minute lobbying campaign to support it.” [Link]

This was very much expected though. Who are we kidding? Since when did the major internet companies start lobbying in Washington? Like yesterday?! This is what they get for thinking pure idealism could get the political bureaucracy to do what they want. Expecially when Republicans control both the House and the Senate. It’s just a very bad time to introduce such legislation. The dotcoms need to play the lobbying game just like everyone else. That means getting out savvy lobbyists who know exactly which buttons to push in Washington and some iconic figures to publicly speak up for the issue.

The universe is at least 986 billion years older than physicists thoughtThe universe may be 986 billion years older than previously thought, and creation may be cyclical and is probably much older still, according to a radical new theory. The revolutionary study suggests that time did not begin with the big bang 14 billion years ago…

The standard big bang theory says the universe began with a massive explosion, but the new theory suggests it is a cyclic event that consists of repeating big bangs and big crunches – where every particle of matter collapses together…

“I think it is much more likely to be far older than a trillion years though,” said Prof Turok. “There doesn’t have to be a beginning of time. According to our theory, the universe may be infinitely old and infinitely large…” [Link]

… According to Steinhardt and Turok, today’s universe is part of an endless cycle of big bangs and big crunches, with each cycle lasting about a trillion years. At every big bang, the amount of matter and radiation in the universe is reset, but the cosmological constant is not. Instead, the cosmological constant gradually diminishes over many cycles to the small value observed today… the cosmological constant decreases in steps, through a series of quantum transitions. [Link]

The Hindu concept of time is so over-the-top that it beats even the Chinese long view quoted sanctimoniously by bestsellers on the business shelves:

… the life cycle of Brahma is… 311 trillion years. We are currently in the 51st year of the present Brahma and so about 155 trillion years have elapsed… [Link]

As Carl Sagan wrote in his book Cosmos (via Slashdot commenter):

The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much longer time scales still…

The most elegant and sublime of these is a representation of the creation of the universe at the beginning of each cosmic cycle, a motif known as the cosmic dance of Lord Shiva. The god, called in this manifestation Nataraja, the Dance King. In the upper right hand is a drum whose sound is the sound of creation. In the upper left hand is a tongue of flame, a reminder that the universe, now newly created, with billions of years from now will be utterly destroyed. [Link]

If you are interested you can read “The Tao of Physics” by Fritjof Capra (or many other similar books). In his book he explores the similarities between Eastern religious/philosophical ideas (Hindu and Buddhist mainly) and quantum physics. There are quite a lot of striking similarities between the conclusions arrived at by modern physics and ancient Indian philosophy.

The more I look at eastern (specifically Indian) culture, the more it seems to me that ancient religions have always been very good at abstract concepts. The concept of zero (born in India), when you really think about it, is quite abstract but of great practical significance. The same is with the “no beginning and no end of time” concept of Hinduism. We see this in almost every facet of Indian society – painting, music, science.

I have spent quite some time researching the link between science and religion and have found that Hinduism beats all other religions as far as factoring science into the practice of religion. There is a well thought out scientific reason behind almost every fundamental act in Hinduism. And let me just say, I don’t mean to patronize the religion, I’m not a Hindu fanatic, and nor do I think Hinduism is perfect. If one can get beyond the silly cultural traditions established by man and go to the core of the vedas and upanishads, many of the answers lie within them.

I wonder how they were so precise in predicting/calculating so many things. Maybe we are just taking a wrong apporach with science…