Author: admin

This reminds me I’m up for my quarterly blood chemistry for cholesterol, etc. Hope everything goes well.

One way was made clear yesterday, when, as a (temporary) citizen of Bonn, Germany, my wife received a letter saying she had been scheduled for a free mammogram at a particular time and place. With a preset appointment, no effort is required to arrange things; this arrangement would certainly not exist for most people at home.
Substituting the small cost of preventive care for the large costs of curative care for all citizens seems like a sensible way to contain medical costs under a universal health care system.
Maybe, as I think will happen, the U.S. will finally provide access to health care for all citizens; and it may be possible to do so without shifting still more resources into this sector.
Your Country Would Like to Treat You to a Doctors Appointment – Freakonomics – Opinion – New York Times Blog.

Me and my brother and sister went home to the province to surprise our dad on his birthday. I would say it was tiring but it was worth it!  I mostly slept to and fro.
It was amazing that it took us less than an hour and a half to go home thanks to NLEX and SCTex. we averaged 120kph and if it weren’t for the heavy rains we would have been ale to shave about 15 minutes from our travel time.
I seem to miss my parents a lot right now, and with an under two hours travel time by car, i’d probably be going home more often.
An incoherent post from someone who has less than two hours of sleep in 36 hours. hehehe!

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in response to this statement from jaafgie:

The fact that less than 20% of the initial block makes it to grad day means that there’s either something wrong with the selection process, the curriculum, or the quality of education and teaching.

Probably the problem is with selection and the program.
I read somewhere that in Harvard they had a projected grade that few people deviate from. You probably had to be someone who couldn’t take the pressure and ultimately failed or someone like bill gates who just had to conquer the world (In a way.)
In another interview I read that the head of an Ivy League institution alumni fund raising head probably Princeton or Yale commissioned a research  on donors. He wanted to know what were the profiles of the students who donated money later on.
What they found out was very interesting, it wasn’t the ones with the highest grades or the best in everything that were the most likely to donate 20 million later on in life. The people who donated the most were the were jst good enough to get through the selection wall and had other skills. They were the ones who were presiednt of an organization, already doing nonprofit volunteer work, people who had what they call soft skills (leadership, management, communication).
The thing is if you graduate from eee of up, you went through a very challenging set of hoops, and (specifically for someone) you are one of the smartest people anyone of us would probably know personally. The problem is that I feel that the “future donors to the department” are somewhat being turned away because the hoops are more apt to produce college professors (Nothing wrong with this i love my professors) rather than future stewards of industry. Think of it this way, circuit and erg consistently place at the top 6 of the freshman orientation rankings, and those two organizations are not pushovers in the engineering week overall championships. We have some of the best if not the best students in our department, but we seem to not let them fly. We burden them with stuff that they probably would be forgetting a semester removed. I read something from a professor I think a canadian school, he said “Joy First Theory Second”. And forgive me for saying this but in eee its, “Theory First, Your lucky if you find Joy”
If I were to regret something, it was that if I graduated on time I would probably never have found the time to love science, engineering , technology and research. If i graduated on time I would have been lacking most of the soft skill that I believe I now possess. The course was hard enough to really limit interactions and joy of work.
The thing is Ideally I shouldn’t have had to graduate 2 years later than expected to just have a full college experience.

I so long to be a teacher. and when the time finally arrives. Hell I’m going to be one hell of a teacher.  hope I do become one and I’m going to be using this as a criterion.  Do I change the people that I teach?

Successful designs shape those for whom they are designed. In designing structures for people, we design them, their possibilities.
I wonder how often we who make software think this sobering thought. How often do we simply string characters together without considering that our product might — should?! — change the lives of its users? My experience with software written by small, independent developers for the Mac leads me to think that at least a few programmers believe they are doing something more than “just” cutting code to make a buck.
I have had similar feelings about tools built for the agile world. Even if Ward and Kent were only scratching their own itches when they built their first unit-testing framework in Smalltalk, something tells me they knew they were doing more than “making a tool”; they were changing how they could write Smalltalk. And I believe that Kent and Erich knew that JUnit would redefine the world of the developers who adopted it.
What about educators? I wonder how often we who “design curriculum” think this sobering thought. Our students should become new people after taking even one of our courses. If they don’t, then the course wasn’t part of their education; it’s just a line on their transcripts. How sad. After four years in a degree programs, our students should see and want possibilities that were beyond their ken at the start.
Knowing and Doing: September 2008 Archives.