Category: Technology

15 Years of Java experience required…

This post has a very interesting take on the “Required: X years of experience with Y” concept:

Programming platform experience is like knowing your way around the kitchen. Where are the knives, what size plates do we have, and what spices are available. It’s very useful for getting things done without having to search high and low for every little thing. But it’s also an asset with a cut-off point of diminished returns. Once you have a reasonably good idea where things are, it’s no longer the bottleneck in your culinary performance.

Like chefs, like programmers. Peopleware quotes a study that six months seemed to be the cut-off point for programmers. Once they had six months under their belt, the platform knowledge was no longer the bottleneck in their abilities.

[…]
Which leads me to my point: Requiring X years of experience on platform Y in your job posting is, well, ignorant. As long as applicants have 6 months to a year of experience, consider it a moot point for comparison. Focus on other things instead that’ll make much more of a difference. Platform experience is merely a baseline, not a differentiator of real importance.

See full article.

Cameras to prevent teacher absenteeism in rural India

Update: After writing this post, I looked at the original research paper and wrote a much more detailed post on this topic which is worth reading.

Interesting idea:

Esther Duflo, a French economics professor at MIT, wondered whether there was anything that could be done about absentee teachers in rural India, which is a large problem for remote schoolhouses with a single teacher. Duflo and her colleague Rema Hanna took a sample of 120 schools in Rajasthan, chose 60 at random, and sent cameras to teachers in the chosen schools. The cameras had tamper-proof date and time stamps, and the teachers were asked to get a pupil to photograph the teacher with the class at the beginning and the end of each school day.

It was a simple idea, and it worked. Teacher absenteeism plummeted, as measured by random audits, and the class test scores improved markedly.

Found: here.

Warning sounded over ‘flirting robots’ | Beyond Binary – A blog by Ina Fried – CNET News.com

CNet has  a report on a program developed by Russian hackers which poses as a person looking for “friends” online. Basically it starts flirting with people with and then extracts personal information from them. It is claimed to be able to establish 10 “relationships” in 1/2 an hour and can then produce a report on every person it meets with name, contact information, photos etc. Excerpt:

Among CyberLover’s creepy features is its ability to offer a range of different profiles from “romantic lover” to “sexual predator.” It can also lead victims to a “personal” Web site, which could be used to deliver malware, PC Tools said.

See full article. I have a feeling that reporter is exaggerating the capabilities of this program, because any other program that I have seen in this category (i.e. ability to carry on a conversation with humans) fall far short of what can be considered normal conversation. It doesn’t take more than 3 or 4 lines to figure out that the thing at the other end is a stupid computer. See the first example here. But anyway, if you start flirting with someone online and lose everything, don’t say you weren’t warned.