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Wednesday, December 14, 2005
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A pair of Duke professors have released a new report questioning the conventional wisdom that Chinese and Indian university engineering and CS programs are surging while the American ones are in decline. They wrote an article about it in BusinessWeek too.
They raise some interesting points worthy of debate. They did two things fundamentally wrong, though -- or perhaps intentionally misleading -- that hide the truth supporting the conventional wisdom.
First, they report on degrees awarded last year. Those numbers look rosy, because the people getting their degrees now are the "boomlet" of people who went back to school when the dot-com bust happened. To see the problem, you need to look at enrollment, not degrees. Because starting in 2003, enrollment dropped off a cliff. The bow wave looks great; the trough behind it is frightening. In two to three years, we will see a staggering drop-off in degrees awarded.
Second, they take a static view of one year, 2004, instead of looking at the year-over-year trend. Once again, the trend is up in India and China, and down in the U.S.
If you want to see the longer-term trend for CS, and the enrollment numbers, here's the CRA's Taulbee Study, the definitive source on CS academic statistics (which by the way was not even cited in the Duke report).
My conclusion: this report is self-serving garbage by two professors with an agenda. But the links are all here; read and make up your own mind.
8:32:25 PM 
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Two related bits of news today that make one wonder how much respect Bush and his adminisration have for the people fighting his war.
The first is this report about how soldiers killed in combat are being returned home, and it's not pretty. Our honored dead are not freight.
The second is this well-reported gaffe by Bush, (official transcript here) in which after he answers a very direct question about the number of dead Iraqis a a result of the war, he makes a stupid, pointless joke.
The first one is just awful, though I'm not sure whether to conclude that the Bush administration is unfeeling or simply incompetent. On this one I would tend to argue unfeeling, because there's precedent of how this is supposed to be done. On the second one, people are jumping all over Bush for joking at an inappropriate time as a sign that he doesn't care about the thousands of dead Americans and Iraqis; I have a hard time buying that; I think he just has abysmal public speaking skills, and had no idea what he was doing. But read the transcript yourself -- actually, read the whole transcript, because there is some scary stuff, like Bush still trying to make a connection between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein.
And here's another weird thing -- on the home page of the World Affairs Council, where Bush made his gaffe. Look at the description Paul Bremer for his upcoming talk:
As head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), Ambassador Bremer worked toward rebuilding a devastated Iraq.
That's just bizarre, because we were the ones who devastated it -- and it's still largely devastated today. Ths makes it sound like tsunami relief in Indonesia -- gosh, we're such good guys to come in and help them recover from their devastation. I'm getting dizzy from all that spin.
8:10:21 PM
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Here's a totally cool thing: add encarta@conversagent.com to your MSN Messenger contact list. You can then ask it all sorts of questions, and it will give you the answer! It even does math: try typing in a math problem.
My favorite question so far: what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
Someone pointed me at another bot: smarterchild@hotmail.com.
I know there are some of these for other IM platforms too, but since I don't use other IM interfaces, I can't vouch for them... anyway, I thought these two were really cool.
7:47:41 PM
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© Copyright 2006 Kevin Schofield.
Last update: 1/7/2006; 8:37:49 PM.
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