18 Jan
2014
18 Jan
'14
11:29 p.m.
On Saturday 18 January 2014 17:16:38 Fons Adriaensen did opine:
Scary isn't it?
On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 01:24:22PM -0500, Gene Heskett
wrote:
That sort of musical knowledge is definitely out of my field of relative
expertise. Above my pay grade IOW. :)
I'm sorry if that reflects poorly on the
composer of that particular
exam, but what you want, is not to test the memory of the test taker,
but to test their powers of deduction.
Even so, students taking a course on the history of Western classical
music should be able to identify Pierrot Lunaire without requiring
internet resources. More so if during the course they had the
opportunity to hear it. And I don't agree with the idea that knowledge
(as opposed to the application of it) is a thing of the past. If I had
to look up every equation I use on Wikipedia I'd consider myself to be
a very lousy DSP programmer.
That may reflect on the diffs in our ages as much as anything else, Fons.
Approaching 80 yo, I'd probably make a lousy DSP programmer.
I learned to
do square roots on paper, probably something over 70
years ago, but today I'd have to use a calculator AND the answer
would have to make sense
You'd be surprised to know the percentage of people that would
accept *any* result from a calculator, even if it doesn't make
sense at all. When I was in high school most math or physics
teachers would
accept an error in the calculations for an exam problem if the
logic of the solution was right. But I had one who didn't. His
reasoning was that if you make a stupid calculation error as an
engineer, the result would be as useless as if you didn't grasp
the problem at all. The bridge would collapse or the airplane
would fall out of the sky. And he was right. Remember the 10^8
dollar NASA Mars probe that got lost because JPL was using
imperial units while NASA expected metric ones ?
Yes, the ultimate forehead slapper, a 100 Billion dollar one. But nobody's
head was paraded around on a pike over it either. That is almost as sad.
Only we, the taxpayer paid for JPL's mistake AFAIK. It should have been
common knowledge that the biggest contributor to JPL's payroll had been
mandating metric units for decades when that little "forehead slapper"
occurred.
Ciao,
Cheers Fons, Gene
--
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Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
Required reading:
<http://culturalslagheap.wordpress.com/2014/01/12/elemental/>
Stult's Report:
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