He didn't say that you can't lead an R&D team without a PhD. He said it equips you to do so. There's no claim about it being the exclusive path to leading an R&D team.
Here's an example, and the study cited here has been replicated in many American cities.[0]
For the petty fines and eroded trust, this is from an advisory letter sent from the Justice Deparment to the judiciary of all fifty states:
“Individuals may confront escalating debt; face repeated, unnecessary incarceration for nonpayment despite posing no danger to the community; lose their jobs; and become trapped in cycles of poverty that can be nearly impossible to escape,” Gupta and Foster wrote. “Furthermore, in addition to being unlawful, to the extent that these practices are geared not toward addressing public safety, but rather toward raising revenue, they can cast doubt on the impartiality of the tribunal and erode trust between local governments and their constituents.”
I own the vacuum pictured in the first link. I bought it with high expectations and disappointment began to set in almost immediately. After 3 years of not-totally-clean floors and periodic struggles getting the rotating brush to work, I finally replaced it with a much cheaper competing brand. My carpets and floors have never been cleaner.
Agreed. I'm also extremely skeptical when classmates, instructors, or co-workers use similar tactics. I have found that, when pressed, they will often reveal that the rest is not nearly as trivial as advertised.
Indeed. There seems to be a big disconnect here from Yale. They collected this data and made it available. However the Dean and Yale's main problem seems to be [1] that YBB+ wasn't showing all of the data. That the numerical ratings are some how strongly linked by spooky action to the detailed reviews and that you cannot show one without the other.
This is, of course, crazy.
From simply a UI/design position, you can't easily display/sort on X different professors/courses each of which has 1..N detailed reviews that are blobs of text.
From a broader perspective sometimes you need to decouple data to be able to better process it. In fact, given so many students used YBB+ it is reasonable to conclude that YBB+'s presentation of the data is doing a job informing students than Yale's own systems.
Everything is a remix
[1] From the article: "The tool created by YBB+ set aside the richer body of information available on the Yale website, including student comments, and focused on simple numerical ratings. In doing so, the developers violated Yale’s appropriate use policy by taking and modifying data without permission, but, more importantly, they encouraged students to select courses on the basis of incomplete information."
The problem is whether it was doing a good job. Sure, students may have felt they were making good decisions by looking at 1-5 average ranking, and yes, the UI was very pretty and made it look like it was providing you lots of information, but the fact is, a simple average of a single metric is not a good way to pick a course.
There are always hard, scary courses, and those classes are going to end up ranked lower because the material is harder or the professor isn't as "cool" or because a 20-year-old doesn't see the point in learning how to do proofs. Letting that become the dominant factor in course selection is not good for education (or intellectual freedom--what happens when a professor with unpopular views is ranked poorly and his/her classes become sparsely attended?)
well you could do NLP on the reviews and sort it using some lexical grammar. if you're into sorting and all that.
mort importantly the ybb reviews are basically useless from a reality perspective due to the way the data is collected (gateway for letter grades) -- they never told you anything important no matter their format, and never will.
if you want to know what a professor is like you just ask around or drop in on the class during shopping period. ybb+ is not an improvement on that process.
digital equivalent of 'dropping in': coursera or open yale. digital equivalent of 'asking around' ... ? not ybb+
personally i think it would make sense to get each professor to record a video introducing themselves and the material. then skip that awkward first lecture. actual teaching video would be tops...
An algebraic solution might have a unique answer, but Math is more than pure Algebra. For instance, Machine Learning problems rarely have a single solution and I would argue that Machine Learning is tightly related to Math.
Very few "real world" math problems reduce to easily computable closed form expression. You're almost always dealing with numeric approximations. So even when your problem has a unique correct answer finding it is either impossible or computationally impractical. A large part of applied math is finding newer, faster and cleverer ways of approximating these solutions. Making the best choice between all the different ways to get the right answer can often be the difference between run times measured in hours vs centuries.
It's actually the case that even in straight up "theorem/proof" math, it's instructive, useful, and informative to have multiple ways to prove a given theorem. This is how you link multiple subfields of mathematics together and create cross-pollination of understanding between areas as advances in one feed into the other via the multiple correspondences (and, yes, that's a very handwavy and not terminology-correct way to put it).
The assertion that users can make unlimited purchases after entering credentials just once is false: "Customers need only enter their password once when activating the payment portion of the app and then use the app to make unlimited purchases without having to key in the password or username again."
That is, unless you have automatic reloading on, which is a crucial point. This doesn't excuse the practice of storing passwords in clear text, but it's an important detail.
