electronvolt

>The first one "Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians." just sounds like bragging between academic camps.

From a mathematical/proofs point of view, computer science is much harder then many forms of applied math. Sure, basic programming isn't all that difficult, but algorithm design and some of the more complex fields, like computer vision? Proofs of correctness are harder on algorithms (you need more in your head, state wise, then you do to a simple inductive proof), and even basic edge detection (Let's say 'Canny', because that's a particular algorithm) requires a deep, intuitive understanding of multivariable calculus.

>Critics say that tenure hurts students by making professors lazy. Course loads vary widely from school to school: At some public universities, professors teach nine or 10 courses. At smaller schools, they teach as few as one or two, totaling as few as 140 classroom hours a year. If you can't be fired, what's to stop you from refusing to teach an extra course? "I honestly don't know what a lot of academics do a lot of the time," says Taylor.

As a child of two senior academics who are fairly well known in their fields at one of the best Universities in the USA, I do know what a lot of academics do a lot of the time. Just because they are not teaching 10 courses does not mean they are wasting their time or spending it at leisure: my parents often work 10-12 hour days all year long, mainly working on their research (a course that has already been developed and taught several times is not much extra work for a professor, assuming they have TA help or the like; see note at the bottom). Although it is certainly a flexible schedule, it is not an easy one: if you intend to continue doing good work and are not slacking off after tenure, there is no obvious point where you are 'done'. There are always new problems to address, writing to polish, or another conference to attend.

Note on teaching: Although teaching a class for the first time is a huge amount of work, as you need to come up with lectures/etc., teaching it -again- with no changes requires much less time; maybe an hour or two of prep for an hour of classroom time compared to 4+ hours:1 in class. Either way, teaching 9 or 10 -different- courses seems ludicrous if you care about undergraduate teaching quality; even if you are actually teaching two courses 5 times, that leaves no time for research.

>By the time you come up for tenure, you're 40. For men, the timeline is inconvenient. But for women who want to have children, it's just about unworkable.

This is certainly the case. I was born when my parents were in their late 30s, and my younger sister in their mid 40s. Not only are you looking at challenges in terms of stability, but also in terms of just physical location: academic jobs are few and far between, so when one of you can get a job at Ivy League A and the other at Flagship State School B, you take what you get, even if it means that you will be three states away from your spouse. I was born as soon as my parents were able to live in the same place.

Tenure has its disadvantages: in the case of schools which are simply emulating the much better institutions that world class research does flow out of, tenure seems (to me, at least) less important. It does have an impact on undergraduate teaching quality; this is why I believe that teaching staff as well as research staff are so important to the success of a university. Teaching comes as a second responsibility after research to most professors, particularly undergraduate teaching.

The system proposed by nagrom, with divisions between teaching, administration, and research, makes some sense, and from what I've seen it's already partly in place. Any professor who ends up doing administrative work (chairing a department, running a graduate program, etc.) often receives a teaching cut in order to facilitate that. However, the only way that I see to balance the teaching and research is to have dedicated teaching staff who are evaluated primarily on the merits of their teaching.

To be fair, Joel makes that point. He claims that: "It may be a fine language to work in, but that's not today's topic. I would even go so far as to say that the fact that Java is not hard enough is a feature..."

In my experience at UVa, the weeder class is where they introduce pointers, re-introduce recursion, and do basic data structures, and start people with a language other than Java (C++ and x86 assembly; there is also an option to do the first class in Scheme, but that is only open to some people). Someone here was obviously listening to Joel.

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I think that the perils of a "Java school" are reasonably similar to the perils of a "C School" or a "Lisp school", though: you are only learning one programming language. As a CS student who has written nontrivial programs in 5-6 languages, I do not believe you can produce even reasonably competent computer scientists who are limited by the one language they know and cannot think outside of that limitation on their conceptualizing of problems. Although the individual issues with, say, C might be different (you -will- understand pointers), your thought processes are still limited to the one language that you know.

Disclaimer: I don't claim to be exceptionally experienced in those languages, but enough to have hit the "I get how to do basic things in this language" point. I'm reasonable with really 2 languages, and nowhere near mastery of programming.

Even a correlation between higher incomes and lower rates of altruism is interesting.

The whole rationality/lack thereof may actually be the case (at least from my personal experiences working in lower end jobs, where the people were either older and, frankly, not particularly smart, or younger, smarter, and temporary). Does the fact that it could be considered irrational invalidate any value of the altruism?

I was most interested in the last part, where they were seeing if people would help another person who was right in front of them. It shows something more about simple compassion, which I consider different from altruism. It also helps address your point about organized charitable activities: it was an opportunity to give what would have been perceived as help someone more in the here and now and less in the airy "well, this seems like a good percentage of my income to donate to charity...".