23 Jun
2004
23 Jun
'04
10:24 a.m.
I seem to recall for my degree anything requiring
databooks would be
done as coursework, not as an exam in an exam hall - which seems the
logical approach.
Nah. Course work was invented for wimps who could not
cope with the fact that the worth of their entire lives
up to that point was going to be measured in three days
or so :-)
handy. But the current attitude of most people
I've known who
have taken such exams is that they don't need to actually
know anything, because they can just bluff their way through
it in an exam by reading the book
and get sufficient marks to pass.
It is pretty easy to set questions that are not specifically
in the book(s), although they are easy to tackle if you
underestand what is in the books. Real life seems to be
capable of this on a daily basis!
I'm amazed at how often the fundamentals that we
were taught
have helped
me work some problem out
Absolutely. I'd be lost without addition and multiplication.
Subtraction is pretty useful but division just seems to be
an optimisation that I can often get by without :-)
I'm trying to think of the last time I needed any
vector calculus or Cachy-Riemann or even simple
control theory. There's the occasional would-this-
other-algorithm-be-any-better, but not often.
industry on the surface of things think they want. I
do wonder quite
where things will be in ten years when there's almost nobody left who
can actually think for themselves though...
As with all these things we just look back in history
and see how things panned out before. Obviously the
generation before me were pretty useless about
predicting the future, since we were clearly an
improvement on them; but I feel we got it right
about your lot :-) :-)
Actually, I was going to point out that the
world has been in terminal decline for all
of recorded history, but I'm afraid the
pyramids may crop up again :-)
Antonio
--
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Antonio Carlini arcarlini(a)iee.org