Interesting Links for 15-07-2013

[andrewducker]

• A short guide to understanding introverts
  (tags: introversion viasupergee comic )
• Why Nokia didn't choose Android to replace Symbian.
  Quite glad they didn't. I'm getting an MS phone, but I want there to be competition in the market.
  (tags: android nokia microsoft phones )
• Treating students like adults
  (tags: education academia )
• On the Rowling/

Comments

[andrewducker]

That should read -not-getting an MS phone...

[fanf]

It will be interesting to see what happens to Firefox OS and Ubuntu phone.

[fub]

It remains to be seen how long Nokia can go on like this. On paper not choosing Android makes sense. But once the quarterly results are posted, not so much.

[a_pawson]

Workers at Rugeley spend their days wandering the massive warehouse,

They may not be for much longer. Kiva Systems, who make the robots in the video below was recently bought by Amazon. If they can figure out a way to automate the packing process there could be even less staff in these warehouses.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, it's only a matter of time...

[reverancepavane]

A maths professor of my acquaintance always wanted to throw away his examinations and invite his final year students to his office for a cup of coffee (or other beverage, but he was widely acknowledged to have the best coffee in the University, and mathematicians are generally people by which coffee is transformed to theorems) and a 10 minute chat. The university always disallowed it as cruel and inhuman punishment of the students.

[Given my own feeling with my thesis oral defence and the amount of panic that caused I would have to say I understand the cruel and unusual part intensely.]

[andrewducker]

I did always think that would be a more accurate way of telling whether someone actually understood things.

[bart_calendar]

Weird. Right before I read the link here about the creepy guy on the BART, I was reading a thing about how a tape of two people having sex on the BART went viral on Friday (the same day the creepy guy post was posted.) Who the fuck wants to fuck and/or pick someone up to fuck on mass transit?

[andrewducker]

Nothing wrong with chatting someone up - if they're interested.

But being an ass somewhere with cameras does seem silly.

[drdoug]

Having recently ridden the BART, I can confirm that it is at the less-sexy end of the public transport scale. Which to my mind doesn't reach as high as "sexy" anyway.

[steer]

Re the Dijkstra post -- very interesting but:

At the end of the semester there is an oral examination for each of you, the principle being that, after having followed my thoughts for a full semester, you are entitled to two hours of my undivided attention.Absolutely not a good idea today for two reasons

[naath]

Getting a PhD still typically depends on a viva as well as on your thesis; and of course there's no real way to anonymise a PhD thesis. I think it is good to practice defending your arguments verbally at some point before that.

So I think it depends rather on *what this class is*; is this a class delivered to hundreds of first year undergrads? or a class delivered to ten postgrads? (or something in between).

[steer]

It is a genuine problem for PhD level work. Dijkstra is talking about taught courses though, not PhD level. The issue is that he was working at a time (1997) when lecture sizes were typically a lot smaller. His approach might be practical for a small postgraduate class. Here at UCL we encourage masters students and undergraduates to do oral presentations but it is limited to 15 minutes each because of the scale problem and the proportion of marks gained from it is quite small because of any possible bias problems.