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Ireland’s “education deficit”

Could write a book about this I’ll keep it to a single rambling post! I was reading this article in today’s Irish Times. The conclusion appears to be that we don’t have a world class education system and that some tech companies are finding recent graduates poor. This was described by Craig Barrett at the Farmleigh conference last year and more recently at the described December 2009 meeting between the management of tech multinationals based in Ireland and the minister for education, Batt O’ Keefe.

Many multinationals, Oโ€™Keeffe heard, were reluctant to recruit from certain colleges because of concerns about standards. There were even suggestions that several institutes of technology (ITs) and one university were on an unofficial recruitment โ€œblacklistโ€. At the core of the problem was grade inflation across the education sector, from Leaving Cert to third-level degrees.

Categories
philosophy science

random stuff

Thanks to my colleague Brendan Jennings I’m now spending an unhealthy amount of time considering whether a random number generator would have to be tested over an enumerably or unenumerably infinite period of time to be proven truly random. When you leave behind the notion of statistically useful levels of randomness, <b>”random”</b> becomes an ideal. Random? is one of the biggest questions imaginable, predicated on a perhaps-impossible absolute comprehension of relativity, quantum effects, determinism, free-will, the origins of life and the universe itself.

I’ll never take

java.util.Random generator = new java.util.Random();

for granted again.

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twitter

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-28

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twitter

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-21