Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: fatty who wrote (16747)	2/5/2004 3:24:24 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 306849

and besides, who cares about SAT scores or PhDs. US executives never made a big deal out of these things before (in fact I have seen a resistance to hire PhDs at tech companies, for fear they are expensive and not "hands on"). US tech executives are looking for a way to make a case that offshore engineers are better, not equal to US engineers at less than half the cost, and they are grasping for the "PhD" angle. I don't believe it, and I think any call to the Dell call center proves the point to a tee. The Dell call center is a disaster. Oracle and Microsoft are also not the companies they were when they were located 100% locally. Now, this is a hard case to make because as companies get larger, the mythical man month comes into play and most mature companies have a hard time replicating their earlier success. However, Oracle cannot achieve the quality of smaller local rivals like Peoplesoft, despite Oracle's HUGE offshore R&D facility which can hire twice the team that Peoplesoft can. The US software market's answer to poor offshore quality coming from the largest software firms is open source. I suspect open source deals a fatal blow to msft and orcl this year.

To: fatty who wrote (16747)	2/5/2004 5:52:00 PM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

I was right, you can't solve a simple probability problem even though clearly you agree that US students are over represented in US graduate programs based on population and normal distribution. But you don't even know that you agree because you got lost in the assumptions I asked you to make. Let's review the problem: Ywiu had stated something to the effect that foreigners were better at engineering, math and science than US students and the way she backed this up was to say that foreigners held almost half of all the advanced graduate positions here in the US at our top Universities with science and math specialties. She backed it up with the stats that my post was in response to and the gist was that the US remained at the top by cherry picking from the whole world and foreigners represented 44% or so. I looked at her stats and knew without even looking up world population figures that foreign students were under represented by a large margin and admission was either strongly biased towards US born students (for whatever reason) or US students were in fact more likely (probability again) than their foreign counter parts to enter into advanced science and math degrees because US born represent an outsized proportion of students in the programs based on population and normal distribution (of those who might be good at math and science). I arrived at this observation considering the US comprises 6% of the world's population while it also has a lower percentage of graduate school aged students than most other large industrialized countries and considerably less than the under-developed ones. This is the exact opposite of what she was contending. I told her she could go a long way towards proving to me that Asians were in fact superior at math if she could show me the math behind my statement. I didn't intend to prove that US students were in fact more likely to attend graduate school in these disciplines, I only attempted to prove that her statistical method for making her claim was flawed. Now the reasons that US students are over represented in their own Universities may in fact be for some of the reasons you give, but when one is handed a probability problem that starts out with assuming x and assuming y, you have to use those assumptions to solve the problem. Ywiu used probability incorrectly in her "proof" that US students were somehow inferior to their foreign counter parts because foreigners comprised a very large proportion of the programs. Neither of you understands my statement or can frame the problem in a manner which could "prove" anything. Furthermore: So if we hold a math & science family feud between the US and Chindia, we would probably lose the game You can't make such a claim based on the present situation. Probability would suggest that we should get creamed, yet we remain grossly over represented even while they chip away at our lead.

To: fatty who wrote (16747)	2/6/2004 4:51:32 AM
From: Amy J	Respond to of 306849

RE: "So if we hold a math & science family feud between the US and Chindia" The last time I looked at a worldwide math competition event (among universities from all over the world), the USA was represented extremely well. This was a couple of years ago. India & China's middle class aren't too much bigger than ours and our universities are better. Having said that, as their middle class gets bigger than ours, we need to step it up over here in the USA, otherwise we'll lose out just by the sheer volume of people, as you suggest. But we haven't lost yet, and there's no need to ever lose, as long as all of us in the USA chooses to stay competitive. It's our option. It's a decision we all control. Regards, Amy J