The US Economy Needs More "Cool" Nerds 453
Hugh Pickens writes "Steve Lohr writes in the NY Times that the country needs more 'cool' nerds — professionals with hybrid careers that combine computing with other fields like medicine, art, or journalism. Not enough young people are embracing computing, often because they are leery of being branded nerds. Educators and technologists say that two things need to change: the image of computing work, and computer science education in high schools. Today, introductory courses in computer science are too often focused merely on teaching students to use software like word processing and spreadsheet programs, says Janice C. Cuny, a program director at the National Science Foundation adding that the Advanced Placement curriculum concentrates too narrowly on programming. 'We're not showing and teaching kids the magic of computing,' Cuny says. The NSF is working to change this by developing a new introductory high school course in computer science and seeking to overhaul Advanced Placement courses as well. The NSF hopes to train 10,000 high school teachers in the modernized courses by 2015. Knowledge of computer science and computer programming is becoming a necessary skill for many professions, not only science and technology but also increasingly for marketing, advertising, journalism and the creative arts. 'We need to gain an understanding in the population that education in computer science is both extraordinarily important and extraordinarily interesting,' says Alfred Spector, vice president for research and special initiatives at Google. 'The fear is that if you pursue computer science, you will be stuck in a basement, writing code. That is absolutely not the reality.'"
And here is the counterpoint (Score:3, Interesting)
"David Anderegg, a professor of psychology at Bennington College, says that merely mentioning terms like nerd or geek serves to perpetuate the stereotype. The words are damaging, much like racial epithets, he says, and should be avoided."
Fear of Being Stereotyped? Really? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not enough young people are embracing computing, often because they are leery of being branded nerds.
I think a lot of young people just don't find it interesting. I think a lot of older people feel the same way. People tend to do what they're passionate about, and passionate people tend to think less of the opinions of others and more about what they want to do. Do we really need to press this field on more people?
idea (Score:4, Interesting)
they'll be sitting in mom's basement e-mailing resumes, employers don't want fresh-out-of-school grads. maybe we need a national apprenticeship program to give young people experience in the tech fields.
Re:The Onus Should Not Be on the Nerds (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a problem of values. Americans, actually less so among the young generation now, tend to be anti-intellectual and revere anyone who can entertain them. What we need to do is remove our culture's obsession (including its sexual obsession) with the entertainment industry, which all too often traces back to the entertainment industry just flagrantly masturbating. How many movies exist about musicians, writers, and actors? How many songs are about music and dance? Too many. How many movies or songs deal with technology, science, or engineering other than the ones about "tell NASA to assemble our hottest astronauts" Hollywood Science? Not at all that many.
Re:Cool? You don't know cool. (Score:2, Interesting)
Only due to era.
Re:The Onus Should Not Be on the Nerds (Score:3, Interesting)
OMFG, how dare you hit the nail on the head instead of writing a throwaway line to be frist psot! Actually, I am writing to complain because you have just given away some of the points in my own idiom on how to raise my daughter in a world filled with stupid people hell bent on being "football heros|rock stars|famous actors" instead of what makes us more effective, happy people; learning a useful skill and living a normal life. This goes against the Ralph Cramden ethic of anything to get rich quick, but it's the "secret" to what has made my life and career so enjoyable. This is what I want for my little bot, only with more STEM and a degree.
Re:The Onus Should Not Be on the Nerds (Score:5, Interesting)
No, they don't, because you're skewing your data. You're looking at the entire comp sci profession and comparing it to those who play football in the NFL--in other words, the general field of one against those who made it to the very top in the other. You need to compare the average per capita income from IT jobs of those who took a computer-related degree against the average per capita income from football of everybody who played varsity football in college. Who wins that contest? Or reverse it--compare NFL players to the likes of Bill Gates, who are the IT field's equivalent of NFL players. Again, who wins that contest?
Re:Media Branding (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Oxymoron anyone? cool... nerds (Score:3, Interesting)
You'd be surprised what people find sexy and cool. There's an entire generation of engineers and scientists who think the Apollo program is and was the coolest thing humanity has ever done. Some percentage of them almost certainly were inspired by that cool factor to become the professionals they are today. Even outside the technology fields I'll bet the vast majority of people can name the first people to step on the moon (poor Micheal Collins, probably not though). If you want to inspire people you have to show them how something they think is impossible is possible with technology, something that is becoming very hard as people are slowly becoming accustomed to rapidly advancing technology. Even landing on Mars won't do it because people don't actually understand how much more difficult that is than landing on the moon, they assume it would just be an extension of the Apollo technology.
The only thing I can think of on the horizon that could inspire people in that way would be the building of a space elevator. When I explain to people how a space elevator could work, it's amazing. People not in technology or science fields start asking distinctly sciency questions, questions that could be the launching point to detailed discussions about orbital mechanics, centripetal force, rockets, materials sciences, photovoltaics, and lasers. Things that push the boundaries of what people think are possible make them want to learn; which is of course the most important step in teaching something.
Re:We have enough. (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is that he managers were not competent and those promises were never kept. Rather than admitting failure to keep a contract, the managers blamed health care costs. Incompetent managers were allowed to receive huge pay and workers were shafted out of their contracts.
I will ask this. If you were a rational, intelligent, and educated worker with choices, would you put yourself into a position where you could lied to and cheated, or would you try to get into a position where you can be an incompetant and still receive a million dollar bonus? In other words, would you be a person how made something, or pushed paper around. I think we all know the answer to that.
The average engineer can make a middle class income after college, but will be fired a drop of a hat. A competent software developer can make quite a bit of money, if the money if being invested in infrastructure instead or paying off foreign governments and mercenaries and flipping houses. If flipping houses and toppling government is a better investment that is where the money will go. If such things are structurally limited, them more money will go into infrastructure, and the people who make things will have well paying jobs.
For the past 8 years or so the best placed for semi-skilled worker to go is in the military or a prison guard. If that is not a communist government, I don't know what is. There simply has been no capital to do anything truly creative. Recall that Google was 1996.
Re:The Onus Should Not Be on the Nerds (Score:2, Interesting)
Get rid of this fucked up idea that there is any dichotomy between being good at sports and being good academically. ... Then people can do what the fuck they want without society telling them they fall into some particular clique.
I would bet money this will never happen. This is what's called a self-fulfilling prophecy. Kids find out they excel in certain areas, and and rather than trying to improve where they're weak, they simply try to do what they're good at. As kids grow up, they tend to divide into groups of like-minded people - or cliques - so they can continue to do what they like doing. And of course, everyone wants to think their clique is the best, so they belittle the other groups to boost their standing. This is particularly useful for the physically-oriented groups, one because on an instinctual level, able-bodied/beautiful people are more desirable, and two because physically-oriented groups can belittle the others in the most direct ways (very easy to see when someone is better looking than you or can/will beat you up). Later on, once these kids are adults and having kids of their own, they impress upon their kids the values they grew up with, driving their kids to see if they too can follow the same pattern (based on another human instinct to find a survival pattern that works and follow it, which is much easier to do when someone shows you the way, and amazingly difficult to get change once established, because destroying a survival pattern that works - flawed as it may be - is instinctual suicide), thus inculcating the pattern for another generation. Most times those kids follow in their parents footsteps, though some either don't or can't (the black sheep), but it's not genetics that foster families with a history of artists, or doctors, or laborers.
Re:Oh really? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah. The reality is that you will be stuck in a small cube writing code instead.
This story speaks to me in a lot of ways.
My only exposure to anything related to programming before college was HTML. I had no idea of the 'magic' of programming until I was in a college level programming course. Which I was only in because it was a requirement for electrical engineering classes I was interested in because I wanted to understand synthesizers and analog circuits better.
I grew up under a lot more pressure to be an 'artist' or creative-type than engineer. Most of my friends are from this world as well. From the outside, computer science looks pretty bleak. My idea of it was as follows. You sit at a computer terminal for your entire life, typing. And no one even reads what you write. If I was going to sit at a computer, why wouldn't I at least write for an audience? Why would I choose a job that seems solitary and unexciting? It seems like what you'd think being an accountant would be like.
Having just graduated and spent the last few years doing programming internships, it amazes me how wrong I was about the rewards of programming. No one told me the 'power' I would wield, the infinities of computing, the vastness of what you can express with programming language. That I'd confront hundreds of problems with thousands of solutions, and use my creativity and cunning to apply the most elegant and effective one. That the 'barrier to entry' of creating your own startup that could influence millions of users is little more than some education and a laptop and a server in your closet.
I feel like I found a goldmine that no one was hinting at. It is a primary goal of my professional career to expose more kids like myself to programming. The sentiment of the article is right on. Computers are not leveraged nearly enough in the fields I'm interested in. And it's due primarily I think to a misunderstanding about what programming is, and how it feels to do it. I encounter this firsthand often in Linguistics (also something I focused on in college) where many problems of data collection and analysis are considered impossible by my peers but understood as a solvable engineering problem to me.
I hope that this continues to be in focus. Too often it is a dichotomy between being a 'computer-person' or not, and I think many of us who were into other things got sucked into computers when we discovered them. It's a deep field and difficult to get a handle on, I think, coming from another area. But the benefits are too great to ignore.
Horrible Idea (Score:4, Interesting)
Steve Lohr writes in the NY Times that the country needs more 'cool' nerds — professionals with hybrid careers that combine computing with other fields like medicine, art, or journalism.
Bad idea (not unless we are talking about people who have a BS/BA degree in a technical field pursuing another BS/BA degree - or even a MS - in another technical field. Now, THAT'S A HYBRID CAREER. We already have a problem with watered down CompSci and MIS programs churning chumps who can't code for shit themselves out of a wet paper bag. CompSci, MIS, Software Development and IT, these are fields that call for people that are domain experts and specialist, not watered down hobbyists with superficial and inadequate training.
It is quite telling of our society that when facing with a shortage of scientific/engineering talent, the solution is to make it more "cool" as opposed to raising the scholastic expectations of kids. As if "cool" makes up for the grey matter required to be a (good) software developer. Either the author thinks software disciplines are shallow enough that they can be weaved in with a medicine, journalist or even an arts curriculum (an art curriculum takes quite a lot of work to get through.) Either that, or he thinks these other disciplines can be watered down so as to allow someone to be graduate in both (notice that I say "graduate", not "be sufficiently competent.")
How come you don't see that type of mentality in India, China or, say Eastern Europe? You want kids to be interested in hard sciences (not just software disciplines)? Then raise the bar and academic rigor starting from 2nd grade all the way to 12th, where the objective is to learn and not simply to pass. You don't solve an educational deficiency by painting "cool" all over it.
On another note, I stopped reading the article when I hit this:
Today, introductory courses in computer science are too often focused merely on teaching students to use software like word processing and spreadsheet programs, said Janice C. Cuny, a program director at the National Science Foundation.
Say fucking what? I know that Computer Science curriculum in most universities have been watered down into Java/C# schools, but give me a fucking break. Either the journalist is misquoting Cuny, or she actually said - and I quote - that introductory courses in computer science are too focused on software like word processing and spreadsheet programs. If it's the later, someone kicks her out of the NSF. There is no "science" in that kind of stupid remark.
Re:The Onus Should Not Be on the Nerds (Score:3, Interesting)
For me, two years of Judo and five years of Aikido practice. But the software guys don't mess with me, either... there are wrist locks that send regular folks into new and painful places. Imagine if you have carpal tunnel syndrome! And I know how to fall, after bashing my head too hard.
I don't think, in this age of unprecedented teenage sloth, it's wise or necessary to cut down the value of sports just to raise up the value of the sciences, computer or otherwise. What we need to really address is "fat kid on a couch, playing X-Box and eating chips, for hours after school" as a standard and acceptable behavior.
There's a commonality between these, too. When you get good at a sport, you get pushed to new physical plateaus... places you never imagined going. But you go there primarily with your mind, or you fail... most people give up mentally long before their bodies just stop working (which they absolutely will, if you can keep pushing hard enough, long enough... but that's good too, as long as its not a destructive failure).
It really is two sides of the same coin, physical and mental development. This occurred to me again last Sunday, during a 6 hour, non-stop, snow shoveling session, clearing my 1/5th mile driveway from a 24" blizzard. You need to go to the same place on those three-or-four-days-without-sleep marathon hacking sessions as well (in the old days at Commodore, this was otherwise termed "between Christmas and New Years"... that annual week of sleeplessness, getting ready for the CES show). But I digress.
Re:idea (Score:3, Interesting)
they'll be sitting in mom's basement e-mailing resumes, employers don't want fresh-out-of-school grads. maybe we need a national apprenticeship program to give young people experience in the tech fields.
I can agree with this. Germany has a good approach towards engineering education. Students go through the typical University level engineering education with math, physics, engineering, etc, but then it is also paired with apprenticeships where they are mentored with real hands on work (note: there is a difference between apprenticeship and "intern" or "coop" like we have in the USA where a college student sits in front of a computer all day with no hands on work). Also, if you want to get an engineering PhD you have the option of being paired with a private company and basing your thesis on real work you do at a real job. USA academics look down upon private sector work and consider it work done by people who couldn't cut it in academia, so our university system tends to produce ivory tower academics rather than practical ones like Germany that are useful to the private sector economy (that's NOT to say that academic engineers aren't important, but we seem to not have a balance here in the USA). So, I think our university and corporate system is partially to blame here.
Culturally we have a real problem with where scientific and engineering work is placed both economically and socially, just like the article summary suggests. Here, patent lawyers get paid more than the engineer(s) who designed and built the product they are patenting and it says a lot about our society and system of governance. In Europe, getting an engineering degree typically indicates that you are solidly in the upper ranks of the social hierarchy--the same definitely can't be said in the USA as I'm sure everyone here knows. It makes me worry we are riding on the heels of the 1950s where all the good scientists and engineers emigrated here to escape the World War, and that slowly but surely we are turning into a South America type banana republic while the world economy and intellectual activity shifts back to Europe and Asia.
Former NFL star Dave Pear is sorry he ever played (Score:3, Interesting)
"Former NFL star Dave Pear is sorry he ever played football" ..." ... ...
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/jeff_pearlman/12/18/pear/ [cnn.com]
"""
"I wish I never played football. I wish that more than anything. Every single day, I want to take back those years of my life
The words are not subtle. They spit from Pear's mouth, with a blistering contempt normally reserved for drunk drivers. We are speaking via phone. I am in New York, sipping a hot chocolate, leaning back in a chair. My two young children are asleep. A Pretenders song, "2000 Miles," plays in the background. No worries, no complexities. Pear is sitting at his home in Seattle. His neck hurts. His hips hurt. His knees hurt. His feet hurt. When he wakes up in the morning, pain shoots through his body. When he goes to sleep at night, pain shoots through his body.
Be a man! Be tough! "Those last two years in Oakland were very, very difficult times," he says. "I was in pain 24 hours per day, and my employers failed to acknowledge my injury. Sure, I won a Super Bowl ring. But was it worth giving up my health for a piece of jewelry? No way. Those diamonds have lost their luster."
Throughout North America, many of Pear's retired football brethren hear his words and scream, Amen! Conrad Dobler, the legendary Cardinals offensive lineman, is about to go through his 32nd knee surgery. Wally Chambers, the Chicago Bears' three-time Pro Bowl defensive end, spends much of his time in a wheelchair. Earl Campbell, the powder blue bowling ball, struggles to walk and underwent surgery to remove three large bone spurs. The list is both heartbreaking and never-ending -- one NFL player after another after another, debilitated either mentally, physically, or both. I'm currently working on a book that has led me to interview more than 150 former players. I'd say 60 percent experience blistering pain from a sport they last played two decades ago.
"And the NFL," Pear says, "doesn't care."
Hence, he is fighting back. Two years ago, Pear started a blog, davepear.com, with the intent of supporting hobbled NFL veterans and calling out the league's laughable disability policy.
"""
http://davepear.com/blog/ [davepear.com]