BU SHI KE FOU

It's a Big World Out There.

May 2006

Released in December, a report by Duke University -- presented recently to Congress -- seems to run against the commonly-held notion that China and India are graduating proportionately-more (and equally-qualified) engineers than the US. The report asserts that China and India's greater numbers of "graduates" actually include many people with associates' degrees and other sub-baccalaureate-level qualifications.

It feels as though this is whistling in the dark, especially as regards software development -- largely because software is still almost a pure meritocracy. That is, you can still get a job in software based on two criteria: how much you charge, and whether you can really code. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of the most supreme coders used to be that they "dropped out of MIT in their sophomore year, so they could spend more time coding." So I'm not sure this report -- though much-ballyhooed -- tells us about anything so much as the fact that there are still institutional vested interests bent on professionalizing the upper echelons of the profession. This is pure distraction from much more important global issues: a) whether or not we can genuinely develop architectural disciplines and metrics, train and certify practitioners and insure the reliability of software products; and b) what does it mean to a technical culture when all its Wizards go across the sea? (Hint: it's bad!)

Posted by John Jainschigg at 03:05 PM  Permalink |

Google has just come out with a Trends tool that lets you explore trends in search term use, correlated with dated news items relating to the search term (and in some cases, presumably, inflecting the numbers or vice-versa). Check it out here.

For the moment, the tool is only useful for broad strokes analysis at the level of large social, economic and media phenomena (try "Paris Hilton vs. Lindsay Lohan"). "Sex" vs. "Love" is interesting from the global perspective -- the citizens of Delhi are apparently the world's champion enterers of "sex" as a search term, followed by those of Cairo.

Posted by John Jainschigg at 03:54 PM  Permalink |

We're thinking about enabling translated browsing of the Portal via Google Language Tools. The interface is straightforward -- here's the site in French. Aside from the fact that they translate 'About Us' as 'About the USA,' the translation seems ... well, let's call it "usable," in most places. Question is, what do readers really think? I'd be interested in hearing native speakers' views of the utility of such machine translation, particularly of dense article copy. Please write me here, and thanks!

Posted by John Jainschigg at 04:55 PM  Permalink |