Interesting Links for 19-12-2015

[andrewducker]

• Star Wars medley on bass. I rather liked the laid-back feel of this.
  • starwars music video viaSoonLee
• Learn To Code, It’s Harder Than You Think
  • software coding education viasupergee
• What to say about fucking weirdo feminists
  • feminism
• What's really going on with "Baby it's cold outside"
  • song women society meaning
• Baby Cakes by Neil Gaiman,

Comments

[gonzo21]

Feminism has arguably never been more needed. As Americans in Texas are increasingly performing backstreet abortions on themselves because they can't get access to women's health facilities (and then being arrested), the plight of women living under conservative Islam, all of the female refugees, slave-trafficking in Eastern Europe... It's no surprise the media is over-inflating the crazy to discredit the entire movement.

I had no idea the Danish were quite such racist fuckheads.

[xenophanean]

I think feminism (as a movement) is possibly at its very strongest, with a very large number of public figures, both male and female making a big deal of their feminism, and it starting to a exert a profound influence on government, society and business, especially in the West, but also globally. A lot of work needs to be done yet to bring the world even close to equality, but changes are actually occurring, and this makes many groups uncomfortable, and this is why they're so keen to discredit it. I don't think they'll succeed in the long run, I certainly hope not, but they can make life miserable for women whilst they're trying.

[gonzo21]

Is it possible do you think that 'feminism' has become as big, as you say, that it has stopped being a 'movement' that people ascribe to, and just become... part of the fabric?

[xenophanean]

Not quite yet, but I think they're close, and that's really scary to their enemies.

[steer]

Learn To Code, It’s Harder Than You Think

So much wrong in one article:

Given the skills shortage one would expect graduates from computer science courses to have very high employment rates.

Computer science is very much not about learning to code. I work in one of the leading CS depts in the UK (technically refer to ourselves as a dept of computing but same thing). We teach barely more coding courses than a typical mathematics or physics dept.

The Higher Education Statistics Agency found that computer science graduates have “the unwelcome honour of the lowest employment rate of all graduates.” Why is this

Why is this? A massive cherry picking of articles. The author must have searched long and hard to find one stating that computer science was the least employable subject in the UK. It's consistently about mid way up.

There seems to be a ‘double hump’ in the outcome of any programming course between those who can code and those who can’t.I've taught and marked coding courses since 1999 and have never seen this double hump

[steer]

Moving to the anecdotal, I found that for the first five or six years I taught programming the numbers passing my module was exactly what I would expect in line with other modules on that degree (indicating I'd pitched the course correctly). Many people went from being unable to code to being able to code. Mostly people who failed did so by simple laziness rather than not being capable -- that is they gave in reports which contained working (or near working) code but which didn't contain write ups surrounding it, documentation etc

[gonzo21]

A friend of mine works at a senior level of computer game programming, and has endless problems with computer science graduates applying for jobs, being brought in, and they discover that very few of them actually know how to program. But they have these shiny degrees. From ~cough~ certain un-named Universities that are apparently just rubber stamping graduates.

[steer]

ARGH! NO!

Seriously, a CS degree is not supposed to teach you programming. That is not its job. That is not what the course is designed for. They have these shiny degrees in Computer Science that is not a shiny degree in programming. You do not fail because you can't program. Indeed someone with great mathematical and algorithmic talent and a good understanding of process and logical thought who could not program would do far better than a brilliant programmer with no other skills.

OK, if the person has a degree in Games Programming then you'd probably expect that they could program.

So what you're seeing is not that Universities are rubber stamping graduates it's that your friend has fundamentally misunderstood what Computer Science is.

[spacefem]

Thanks for the link :)

[andrewducker]

Thanks for the post!