RE: Every student with PC's
Paul, you can wonder why until you have had to read 80 or 90 research papers by students without a computer and internet access and the same number with. The non-computer papers are purely ignorant on every subject. The data are outdated, the references childish, the writing incomprehensible. Once students learn to use the web they find data not yet published, critical articles by the score on every subject, and in most instances are able to develop well-written and timely papers on any subject. If they can't, they can find huge archives of term papers that they can plagiarize and submit with equivalent results. Look under any subject and you will find student papers of a quality I never saw in years of reading pre-computer papers. I leave aside statistics and mathematics. Unless you have tried to teach statistics without a computer you do not know what agony is. Computations by hand (we didn't have electromechanical calculators (except for faculty) when I started teaching. One reason Pascal, and Babbage, and the other pre-starters work led to so little, was the lack of decent electrical parts. Remember the Mark IV was electromagnetic relays. Harold Hotelling and John von Neumann were lightning calculaters, and were flown around the country to solve peoples' computational problems. Maybe that encouraged von Neumann invent his version of the computer. I remember toiling hours doing stupid analytical tasks, while the infrared spectrophotometer sat unused, reserved for the faculty, most of whom were too backward to use it. I remember as a graduate student trying to teach a bunch of old economists how actually to estimate some of those econometric equations they had blathered about, but never seemed to estimate.
It's no trick to make a list of great discoveries made without computers. Napier and Briggs computed their first logarithm tables by hand, and the discovers of Neptune did all of those damned calculations by hand. Astronomers have discovered far more planets and planetoids via computer than, all of the wasted hours of former times.
Every day new chemicals are designed by computer modelling. The other day, the guys and University of Wisconsin and Geron claimed to have discovered an immortalization process. I won't bore you with the other applications, but you know as well as I that computers have transformed scientific research and all kinds of learning. True, many people will not make a useful application of computers, but then most students never made much use of writing. Einstein, Shakespear, and Mozart more than make up for all of those who do nothing more than write angry words on subway walls. |
