XPost: uk.politics.misc 
 From: anw@cuboid.co.uk 
  
 On 23/10/2019 11:15, Pancho wrote: 
 >>>>> The strange thing about my son's CS degree was how much of it was 
 frozen 
 >>>>> in time. 
 >> €€€€€€€€€€That wouldn't seem strange to anyone with experience of the 
 >> pressures on academic departments. 
 > I'm not tremendously sympathetic. 
  
  Sympathy wasn't the issue.  The point is rather that updating 
 a syllabus is, for all sorts of reasons, a low priority.  You can see 
 that with [eg] A-level syllabuses equally. 
  
 >        Kids are being forced to pay a lot 
 > of money to get a certificate required to gain access to the jobs 
 > market. I'm pretty sure Math and CS university level education could 
 > be provided much better and cheaper without the university system. If 
 > new "disruptive" education technology were allowed. 
  
  The time may come, perhaps even quite soon, when AI and robots 
 can deliver high-quality education cheaply.  We're not there as of 
 today.  Students expect to be educated, not merely pointed at books 
 and articles that cover a syllabus;  that means tutorials, marking, 
 giving feedback, answering questions, projects, experiments, ..., as 
 well as the relatively efficient process of lecturing to large groups 
 [tho' third/fourth-year lectures are often given to quite small groups]. 
 The current levels of tuition fees cover between 15 and 30 minutes per 
 working day per student of academic time at reasonable professional 
 rates;  which is at least roughly what they actually get. 
  
 > Even Open University is charging high fees. 
  
  Why "even"?  The OU equally devotes a lot of time to marking 
 and other labour-intensive interactions with students. 
  
 >>>>> €€€€€€€€€€€€€€€€ A lot of it could have been taught 30 years ago. 
 Turing 
 >>>>> Machines for instance, pretty esoteric even for a math course. 
 >> €€€€€€€€€€Not so.€€ It's a very basic attempt to explain what a computer 
 >> is and can do.€€ Every real computer is a TM at heart; [...]. 
 > A TM is not a way of explaining what a computer can do, in any 
 > practical sense, it is a way of proving what a computer can, or 
 > can't, do. 
  
  I suggest you read Turing's original papers, available on-line 
 and not difficult, and written before there were any computers [in the 
 modern sense, not the then-current sense of "people who compute"]. 
  
 [...] 
 >> €€€€€€€€€€Among the things that *can't* be computed, as opposed to "can't 
 >> be computed efficiently on a particular computer within a given time- 
 >> scale" is practically anything that requires the analysis of what a 
 >> general program does.€€ Yet professional software companies *still* try 
 >> to do just that. 
 > I don't know what you mean by this? 
 > We analyse what programs do all the time. The fact that there are 
 > some pathological cases that are not computable does not justify this 
 > sort of hyperbole. 
  
  They don't need to be "pathological".  That's a common 
 misconception.  Of course, if a program is written specifically 
 with the intention of being analysable, then a relatively simple 
 program can analyse it.  But if things were that simple, then our 
 programs wouldn't contain hard-to-discover bugs, and malware would 
 be much harder to write. 
  
 >> How much would you pay an inventor who tried to pitch 
 >> his proposal for a perpetual motion machine?€€ Crank computing needs the 
 >> same exposure as crank mathematics, physics, medicine, ...;€€ it doesn't 
 >> yet get it.€€ That's not to say that cranks aren't occasionally right; 
 >> but there are limits to how far it's worth kissing frogs in case one 
 >> of them turns into a prince. 
 > Software companies kiss frogs all the time and fail, but I don't know 
 > of any that failed because they tried to kiss an frog that wasn't 
 > computable. 
  
  I do;  and, sadly, it was a company owned by one of our former 
 students.  He didn't believe what he'd been taught, even though he 
 knew and remembered it [not a "given"]. 
  
 >>> [...] 
 >>> Anyway I would characterise that Turing stuff as math/logic not 
 >>> really CS and I'm not sure if even most mathematicians are interested 
 >>> in it. 
 >> €€€€€€€€€€Most mathematicians aren't, except as a matter of history. 
 >> Nor are most interested in number theory or in PDEs or in ..., with 
 >> the same exception.€€ Maths is a *huge* subject. 
 > You are unfairly equating exceedingly rare with a significant minority. 
  
  ??? "Exceedingly rare" seems to be your interpolation, and I 
 wasn't "equating" anything.  But it's more than a century since anyone 
 has seriously claimed [or been claimed about] to know the whole of 
 maths, and almost the whole of our final-year honours course consists 
 of mathematics that would have been unknown to Poincare. 
  
 [...] 
 > I was taught Turing machines and Godel in a computability and logic 
 > course 40 years ago, it was taught badly, I learnt it badly, I didn't 
 > understand it at the time and have never understood it since. I think 
 > I'm representative of what students gain from the course. 
  
  You said it;  "it was taught badly".  Forty years ago, there 
 was virtually no teacher training for university lecturers;  and there 
 was no incentive, other than personal pride and conscience, to teach 
 well, as promotion depended entirely on your research productivity. 
 The miracle was that, despite that, a decent proportion of university 
 teaching was quite good or even excellent. 
  
 > Perhaps teachers overestimate how much students retain. [...] 
  
  Not so.  You may recall the saying that "education is what 
 remains when you have forgotten everything you were taught".  Most 
 of us expect our students to forget everything in their lecture 
 notes as soon as they finish their exams, and are very pleasantly 
 surprised when a former student turns up a decade or two later and 
 says "thank you, you taught me X and I still remember it". 
  
  That, in essence, is why employers are insistent that they 
 don't greatly care what *topics* we teach, and are much more 
 concerned that we instil good habits of how to approach problems 
 and new material, to write reports, to work in teams [eg, but not 
 only, on projects], to make good use of IT, and so on. 
  
 -- 
 Andy Walker, 
 Nottingham. 
  
 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)