There needs to be more resources for self-learning. Solutions need to be provided for problems, with clear explanations. It's a different mindset from a formal academic setting, where there's a strong focus on cheating prevention.
Funny you say that. I recently picked up a textbook on Corporate Finance for self-learning purposes. Going through the problem sets, it's not really that useful if you have no idea if you got the answer right or not. Looked all around online for where to buy the solutions manual, ended up just calling the publisher to ask. Turns out they refuse to sell the solutions manual to anyone not a registered instructor at a University.
It took like 5 minutes on the phone to even explain to them that I'm reading the book for self learning purposes. Like they'd never encountered such a thing. Even after explaining, they wouldn't let me have the solutions.
I ended up just going on the black market, and finding some anonymous person to sell me the solutions on WhatsApp for $25.
I just googled, and by the way when you want to google for something with qustionable legality, it's best to use search engines not based in western countries, such as Yandex. There ended up being a lot of sites advertising the solutions manual for sale. But also, there are entire subreddits where these people post threads advertising that they have whatever ebook/solutions for sale with a whatsapp phone number included in the content. I messaged on Whatsapp and sent a paypal payment (yes, I had no recourse, it was a leap of faith) but it's not that much a risk since it's only $25.
Agreed. It's frustrating to solve a problem and being unable to check if it is correct. It's even more frustrating knowing that if you had the answer, it would help you to solve the problem. Sometimes the answer pushes you in the right direction to figure out how to solve the problem.
> with clear explanations.
Hopefully separate from the answers.
For programming exercises, we should be given datasets so that we can tests whether our code works or not. Heck books should provide links to unit tests.
I'd go a bit deeper: as we developed, in particular with the advent of the Internet, we went from scarcity of information to spectacular opulence. This demands different studying habits that what we had 30 years ago or so.
For example, we need to find ways to filter out noise from signal, or to connect scattered bits of knowledge from various sources to get intelligible solutions to problems (most problems can be solved by googling around, especially in maths/physics, because people of all levels have been asking/answering questions for Internet points e.g. on Stack Exchange & cie for many years now, but — take it as a feature — you have to work a little to get there).
EDIT: regarding solutions, it's not just about preventing cheating, it's because teachers wants you to do the work. The point isn't necessarily to succeed in solving problems, but more to have you try, get creative, etc.
Perseverance is crucial to move forwards. But they could still provide clear and/or progressive solutions, I fully agree.
I'd really like a Khan Academy-like site, maybe with explanations from different textbooks for each concept. Of course then you'd need a good set of diverse problems or a way to generate such problems.
It's a shame that Khan has gotten less diverse in subjects. They used to have medicine and bio stuff among others, but now it's mostly maths. The maths lectures and exercises are still great, but even those seem limited (still no discrete maths last time I looked).
A Textbook is good enough for self learning. Almost all university learning is "self learning", at least that has been the case for my mathematical training.
> It's a different mindset from a formal academic setting, where there's a strong focus on cheating prevention.
What? Who cares about cheating prevention, most of my classes had oral exams, you can't cheat there.
These were master and late Bachelor courses, so 30 people at most. Exams lasted around 60 minutes, of which around 45 were questions.
>how many questions are asked?
Totally depends on the subject and how the exam goes.
>What's it like in general?
Your professor is poking you with questions. Usually he has prepared some general questions and then asks follow ups. It might go something like this. "What is X Theorem? What does it represent geometrically? Does conditions Z need to be true for the Theorems to hold? Can you name a counter example? How does the proof (discussed in lecture) look like? How exactly do you construct that part? Where do you need that condition? Here is a similar theorem (not discussed in class), can you outline a proof for this?"
I agree with you. It's been my experience though that tracking down solutions manuals for textbooks is very hard. Presumably because they want them out of the hands of students (to prevent cheating).
Have you tried to read any of the literature on the Risch algorithm? If you haven't, you might want to get started by taking a look at the paper "Integration in Finite Terms" by Rosenlicht [1] and chasing down some of the references mentioned in [2].
Of course, in the real world we don't give up on integrals just because they can't be expressed in terms of elementary functions. Usually we also check if the result happens to be a hypergeometric function, such as a Bessel function. If you want to get started on understanding hypergeometric functions, maybe try reading [3] (as well as the tangentially related book "A = B" [4]).
I hate when I buy an interesting math book and then it's like "oh wait, no solutions." And then I end up going on GitHub hoping for community-worked solutions.
I think it's naive to attribute all of the world's problems to "misinformation". You can give everyone the same information; in fact, we all already have the same information. But perspectives will vary, and there will be conflict.
I don't attribute it all to misinformation. I attribute it all to greed but misinformation is a great tool for the ruling class to satisfy their greed.
Agree completely. I think the author misses the big insight here. Rather than universal deferment to authority, I think the insights here are a) that people overstate their confidence and b) not all science should be treated equally.
I enjoy my job and the lifestyle it provides. But as other have said, I tune out the "emergencies" and people panicking over it. It's all BS and I think it's important to recognize that. You're going to die in a short period of time. Do your best while at your job, and pretend to give a shit while you're there. But make sure to budget time for your family and yourself.
This is surely a stupid question: In the article, the graph sure looks like a right triangle, with a base of 2 and a height of 1. Wouldn't the area under this curve (from 0-2) be ~1?
I started going down the org-mode rabbit hole when I was investigating emacs last year. Then I came across Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/) and haven't looked back.
Obsidian is using the webstack, so you get more fancy interface-elements. The crowd is also technerdy and more focused on different areas, so the features implemented in extensions have a different angle, are more focused on knowledge managment and using non-lisp-languages.
Some common issues I ran across that pushed me to Obsidian (for now) were mobile app support, package maintenance, and difficulty configuring and maintaining.
Many people have no difficulty setting up and maintaining an app like beorg and orgzly, but translating the many keybinds and modes to a ml mobile interface can be cumbersome. I've personally experienced issues with folding large org files, not to mention the act of actually keeping the files in sync. SyncThing / rsync works for many, but is another tool to maintain. Even if you can get your files right, the workflow on mobile is not up to par with desktop, and I've had a much easier time with Obsidian sync.
Which leads to package managment. It can be harder to depend on the goodwill of open source maintainers to find solutions to corner cases, particularly if you find something that becomes a staple of your workflow. If my choices are become a competent Elisp developer or kick someone a fee to keep working on a project, I'm picking the latter. I personally still am hesitant to push more and more of my workflow onto org-roam knowing it was birthed as a labor of love and a side project, knowing that it might not be maintained, or that versions will require labor and patching on my part to roll out, as was the case with the jump from org-roam v1 to v2.
Also, depending on how you do choose to setup emacs, it can be a house of cards to set up all your packages and keep them running and up to date. Even if you are really savvy with elisp, keeping your versions, packages, and dotfiles in working order across multiple systems (not to mention mobile, as above) can be daunting. And not all platforms are supported equally. Configuring doom emacs to run on my Windows 10 work machine was and is not easy. Obsidian installed and opened in one click.
I get and understand supporting open source and if that's an objective, logseq seems to be doing a great job on that front. It's still missing some features that would push me to switch over entirely (their Android support is non-existent, and many plugins I loved on emacs and Obsidian I haven't found a nice solution for (time-tracking and time blocking, and not even Obsidian can match org's export features, but markdown works fine for now, while logseq files were difficult to format).
Overall, I love org mode and want it to be my daily driver. But at the end of the day I have to remember that I can't let knowledge management be a part-time job. I was spending so much time tinkering with tooling that it was impacting the very thing it was supposed to help: my workflow. Maybe someday I'll revisit org over several cups of coffee and a rainy afternoon, but Obsidian and Todoist will take care of me until then.
Good point. There's always a lot of self-righteous judgment with these sort of things. Not trying to necessarily defend Ms. Holmes, but the objective reality is that no one knows her motivations.
I view depression as the result of a faulty process. It seems to me that it's mistake to take a drug to correct these symptoms, rather than learning to control one's thoughts and perspectives.
Yep. I use the VIM extension for Vs Code. I do a CMD-SHIFT-P -> Disable Vim whenever I need this functionality. Not sure if there's a better way to do it.
