I found this via VICE's Motherboard. https://www.alliedmedia.org/dctp/eii - mainly focused on community Internet access, but also some digital literacy stuff.
If anyone else replies, I am in a small town and people are responding to me with "oh, you are a web designer! We could use your help!"
I am not a web designer. But I am a content creator and can serve as a content manager and I am willing to foster some development here. The town has high speed internet and an excellent library. But Facebook seems to be the big thing here. And there is lots of room for growth.
While it might be possible to see some small improvements with digital literacy initiatives and "up-skilling", educators will tell you that there's a much deeper, larger problem that is the root cause of all of this.
Literacy is paramount, NOT digital literacy, I mean the ability to read, write, and perform basic mathematics. Public schools in America are floundering when it comes to basic education. Students leave school without the most fundamental skills required to do anything other than menial labor, let alone author insipid React components.
That's a giant scary problem that is accelerating, and there will be a very ugly comeuppance in the USA for neglecting education.
Honestly if you know how to troubleshoot and use google, you’re 90% of the way to a successful IT career. It’s remarkable how hard it is to find people who know how to solve problems in the general case, rather than know how to use some specific technology.
Yes, being able to "[solve] problems in the general case" is the ultimate positive outcome of a proper education and it has little to do with whether or not the student has been exposed to computer science in their K12 curriculum.
I am not looking to save all of America. I am just looking for actionable advice pertinent to addressing some things in my tiny corner of the world.
I am speaking with literate, competent people. I recently spoke with a guy who is wealthy and a co-owner of a local successful business that has been around a long time. He is a local mover and shaker. He told me he does not own a computer at all.
Meanwhile, the website for his company has one of the best local websites I have tripped across, his business card lists his email address and he carries a very nice smartphone. I imagine he can get online with his smartphone, yet he apparently does not consider that to be a computer for purposes of viewing my websites.
He didn't want my email. He wanted me to text message him my phone number. He is a very intelligent man with a lot going on, but he straight up told me "I am [x age], I am not going to learn this stuff." I know people about that same age on Hacker News who program, etc.
Unemployment is high in this town. I would like to start hooking people up with earning opportunities that already exist on the internet. I am facing a lot of challenges in trying to connect to people. But I think there is a huge opportunity here for making some headway against some of the local problems via spreading the word that the internet is not just a place to watch YouTube videos and hang out on Facebook. There is a lot more going on in cyberspace than that and you can have a lot more going on in your life for the price of a (free) library card and a little digital literacy.
I find it frustrating that every question I have posted so far on Hacker News related to this desire of mine has been generally met with so little real support, for example the utter lack of reply here:
I think you have a very valid and important concern for digital literacy among the general population for the purpose of business and opportunity.
However, it happens to lie next to another concern with a much larger scope and severity: the failure of the American educational system in general. Compared to this, a few Luddites and facebook-only websurfers isn't such a big deal.
The USA is trying to remain a leader in technology and science, while at the same time it is debasing education at all levels and reducing research expenditures. This sounds to me like a recipe for failure...
There are 55 million people in elementary/middle/high school in America, and 20 million in a college or university.
Google employs 74,000 people, so, there are a thousand times more students than Google employees, and obviously not all of those employees are working on AI; I assume most of them are sales & admin.
Facebook employs less than a third of that at 20,000.
A drop in the ocean compared to all the students that are being chronically underserved and undereducated.
The "Divide" in the US is Inner-City Schools and poor Rural Schools. If you look at the rest of America's schools they are among the best in the world. If you take just Massachusetts scores they one of the top 5 in the world. http://www.doe.mass.edu/news/news.aspx?id=24050
The big issue is how we fund schools. It is based on the value of your home divided by the number of children that lives in said homes. Since the richer you are the less children you have they get more money. http://www.economist.com/node/21561112
Until we take the funding of school's to the state level we can talk till we are blue in the face and we will continue to have a "Divide." I don't understand why the AARP and other groups don't jump on the bandwagon and remove the burden of school tax off the backs of fixed income home owners. Fair funding is the foundation that will happen only if the US Court System steps in, because I can't see this happening any other way.
>The "Divide" in the US is Inner-City Schools and poor Rural Schools. If you look at the rest of America's schools they are among the best in the world.
There's another way to put that: America's well-off suburbs have very good schools, but most of America does not. We need some numbers on the concentration of school-age children into good suburban districts versus "bad" inner-city and rural districts.
Private money spent on applied AI doesn't replace public money being cut from basic research into AI -- or anything else.
Already, the centers of the deep learning universe are in Toronto and London, neither of which is in the United States. France is starting to have a competitive advantage in climate science by promising American scientists the French won't strangle their funding forever, thus exerting a brain drain.
The United States can either feed its brains at the K-12, university, and research science levels, or those brains will go work for someone who promises to fund them and let them do their jobs.
> The United States can either feed its brains at the K-12, university, and research science levels, or those brains will go work for someone who promises to fund them and let them do their jobs.
Just a datapoint to support that statement. There was a drop of 3% and accelerating in first-time international students going to college in the United States. Similarly, the number of American students electing to study abroad increased by 4%. The US has long been a place that valued smart, aspiring people in the nation and from around the world, it looks like more students early in life are putting down different bets for their futures.
Well, I know that if I was applying to school these days rather than ten years ago, I'd be applying to Canadian schools over most of the non-elite American institutions.
My alma mater has had to shorten its semester by something like four or five weeks since I was there, due to state-level austerity. This kind of thing has become normal at public universities across the USA, so your "cheap" (ie: ~$14k/year) in-state tuition is now buying strictly less education. Research is centralizing to the most elite institutions, or going abroad. There was a government shutdown in 2013 that literally cut off the flow of already awarded NSF funding into academic coffers.
Meanwhile, Canada considers $10k/year for tuition to be expensive, and hasn't cut everything to the bone. Australia and New Zealand are similar. Parts of Continental Europe have dirt-cheap degree programs (on the order of $5k/year, even for foreigners), some of which are conducted in English, and others of which require you to speak the language.
If you do take a high-quality degree abroad, you can either subsequently apply for a work permit and enjoy better basic labor provisions than you'd usually get in the United States (cheap health-care and lengthy vacations as defaults), or come back to work at a high-paying American job if you can get one. It's a more diversified portfolio, you could say.
This has gotten to be a serious rot, like mushrooms growing out of a dead tree. The USA has gotten too used to importing its STEM professionals by brain-draining countries who seriously invest in education, and itself radically under-investigating in both STEM professionals and skilled tradespeople. You can't run a First World economy on nothing but low-level laborers, asset managers, and business owners.
I mean, sure, if someone has to do the real work but nobody does the real education, that probably means that us personally who got educated and trained in the "good old days" will have more bargaining power for salaries, but we'll also face a "hole" in the labor market of suitable juniors to train.
I wonder how much is this due to how software is being engineered and UI/UX problem?
An example being software updates on phones. When I got my parents their first android phone, the app drawer worked on swiping left/right. Then came the change in orientation where the swipe went to up/down. My parents were confused and routinely called me to ask how to make the phone work.
Just today I had an app which showed different categories on clicking tabs on top changed to swipe up and down with a small button to choose categories at the bottom.
These kind of changes leaves people more confused. They like to stick to older versions and hence left behind on any thing new.
It's most certainly not funny when you've lived it. My mother is routinely frustrated by her android phone I bought her due to unending UI tweaks.
It's striking how to us software developers what is an exciting new feature or nice cosmetic change is nothing more than a pain point for many people. Digital devices to many people are tools not toys. When we realize this, it's easy to understand how a change is not fun for them but merely work.
When I got my parents their first android phone, the app drawer worked on swiping left/right. Then came the change in orientation where the swipe went to up/down
Someone on here, I don't remember who sorry, commented that Snapchat works by deliberately breaking UI conventions that people have grown accustomed to who have used computers for a while. That's the mechanism by which they exclude older people and "lock in" people who have little pre-existing computing experience. I strongly suspect this is exactly what the Android developers are trying to do as well.
All of which are insignificant compared to ageism. That's the telltale that there is no genuine skills shortage; employers are happy to overlook a large talent pool. The author of the piece even feels the need to mention both "race" and "ethnicity" to pad out the words!
In case the OP is genuinely ignorant of the difference: race is a psuedo-scientific category based on a person's skin color. For example a person could belong to the Latino ethnic group and yet appear to be white or black. Another case someone could be African American or Yoruba and yet both would be considered black, despite the major cultural differences.
Since the author also brought up "emotional intelligence" as a critical soft skill, I gave up reading it and just moved on. Article is bs. "Digitalization" is a buzz word that hints at how technology is changing the workforce. Unfortunately, technology is not doing any of us any favors. It has not freed us in any way, it has done quite the opposite, in fact.
Interesting article until one notices a couple points...theres the geographic metro dot plot but there's also this statement early on?
"(The study notes some limitations to these O*NET data, which are reported as aggregates, and not available on the micro level. This means that digitalization scores are assigned nationally, without regard to location, which could introduce potential inaccuracies at the local level.)"
Did I miss something, does the data have metro labeling or something?
And finally, that last graph I'm not sure is showing much correlation. R^2 of ~.26?
This kind of apathy is how you end up 40 years down the road asking yourself what happened to your country, where all the good jobs went, why your kids and grandkids can't afford the things you remember having.
Because we led, doesn't mean we will lead. You get to be a leader by leading, not by resting on your laurels while someone else becomes a leader.
The demographics of the United States are fundamentally different than what they once were. Whether people like to admit it or not, IQ and biological origin are linked.
I left it ambiguous to avoid a flame ware, but it is what you think it is. How could you possibly think that societies evolving in different climates under different conditions are the same? Do you understand evolution?
Climate, along with dozens of other factors, produced variations in human traits. Some of them, like skin color, height, etc. are obvious to everyone. Others, including intelligence, are not so obvious.
But the idea that IQ is inheritable and variable between ethnicities is not too terribly controversial, even though it is politically taboo to mention.
Thus, you'd find that some groups are more likely to dominate fields than others (due to nature) and not 100% because of societal differences (i.e. nurture).
So the actual question for a society in a competitive global economy to ask is what proportion of limited resources are used to help those in the rear catch up vs what proportion is used to push the most gifted farther ahead.
Imagine for instance, the abundance of food based on the landscape in civilizations thousands of years ago. High abundance of animals to eat led to different natural selection than low abundance (which in some ways forces things like agriculture). These things matter, why are we turning a blind eye and screaming bloody myrfer at the truth?
Can you clarify what you mean by "the same" for societies?
I could see that a lot of various net outcomes economically similar not due to biological factors, but rather a myriad of environmental ones. The Anna Karenina principle[1] means a lot if some societies get rice and Mediterranean Basins and World Banks, while others get tubers and mountains and slave-trading ships that buy people from you.
I feel like those factors would make a more significant difference, as a few thousand years isn't very long in evolution time, from what I understand.
Yes, I recall reading that Ben Franklin thought Germans were too stupid to make it in America[1]. So you have really good company with this opinion.
For the record my father grew up a shoeless jungle peasant in Nicaragua. At 35 he nearly lost his hand in a factory accident in Brooklyn. So he took college courses at night and eventually became a top DB admin at various institutions in NYC. He had something to prove so he just worked harder than all his peers. He was a man of his word of high integrity so he was given ever increasing responsibility.
Maybe he'd do poorly in a quantum physics class. But I'd prefer a citizens with integrity and ambition (this is within anyone's reach) over a one that scores well on a standardized test.
Yes, I recall reading that Ben Franklin thought Germans were too stupid to make it in America[1]. So you have really good company with this opinion.
For the record my father grew up as a shoeless jungle peasant in Nicaragua. At 35 he nearly lost his hand in a factory accident in Brooklyn. So he took college courses at night and eventually became a top DB admin at various institutions in NYC. He had something to prove so he just worked harder than all his peers. He was a man of his word of high integrity so he was given ever increasing responsibility.
Maybe he'd do poorly in a quantum physics class. But I'd prefer a citizens with integrity and ambition (this is within anyone's reach) over a one that scores well on a standardized test.
Yes, I recall reading that Ben Franklin thought Germans were too stupid to make it in America[1]. So you have really good company with this opinion.
For the record my father grew up as a shoeless jungle peasant in Nicaragua. At 35 he nearly lost his hand in a factory accident in Brooklyn. So he took college courses at night and eventually became a top DB admin at various institutions in NYC. He had something to prove so he just worked harder than all his peers. He was a man of his word of high integrity so he was given ever increasing responsibility.
Maybe he'd do poorly in a quantum physics class. But one does not need to score well on an IQ test in order to have integrity and ambition or to be a valued citizen.
Yes, I recall reading that Ben Franklin thought Germans were too stupid to make it in America[1]. So you have really good company with this opinion.
For the record my father grew up as a shoeless jungle peasant in Nicaragua. He immigrated to the US in his late 20's and at the age of 30 he nearly lost his hand in a factory accident in Brooklyn. So he took college courses at night and eventually became a top DB admin at various institutions in NYC. He had something to prove so he just worked harder than all his peers. He was a man of his word of high integrity so he was given ever increasing responsibility.
Maybe he'd do poorly in a quantum physics class. But one does not need to score well on an IQ test in order to have integrity and ambition or to be a valued citizen.
A lot of people here are arguing with corporateguy5 (to whom i can't reply directly on his dead comment) on the basis of his apparent racism, which is bad, but no one has pointed out that he's just passing the buck, instead of making an effort to improve the country, he can just blame the failure on ethnicity xyz.
So, while I don't think I'll have an impact on corporateguy5's opinion, maybe some other reader will keep this in mind and somehow benefit from the awareness?
57 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 208 ms ] threadIf anyone else replies, I am in a small town and people are responding to me with "oh, you are a web designer! We could use your help!"
I am not a web designer. But I am a content creator and can serve as a content manager and I am willing to foster some development here. The town has high speed internet and an excellent library. But Facebook seems to be the big thing here. And there is lots of room for growth.
Literacy is paramount, NOT digital literacy, I mean the ability to read, write, and perform basic mathematics. Public schools in America are floundering when it comes to basic education. Students leave school without the most fundamental skills required to do anything other than menial labor, let alone author insipid React components.
That's a giant scary problem that is accelerating, and there will be a very ugly comeuppance in the USA for neglecting education.
I am speaking with literate, competent people. I recently spoke with a guy who is wealthy and a co-owner of a local successful business that has been around a long time. He is a local mover and shaker. He told me he does not own a computer at all.
Meanwhile, the website for his company has one of the best local websites I have tripped across, his business card lists his email address and he carries a very nice smartphone. I imagine he can get online with his smartphone, yet he apparently does not consider that to be a computer for purposes of viewing my websites.
He didn't want my email. He wanted me to text message him my phone number. He is a very intelligent man with a lot going on, but he straight up told me "I am [x age], I am not going to learn this stuff." I know people about that same age on Hacker News who program, etc.
Unemployment is high in this town. I would like to start hooking people up with earning opportunities that already exist on the internet. I am facing a lot of challenges in trying to connect to people. But I think there is a huge opportunity here for making some headway against some of the local problems via spreading the word that the internet is not just a place to watch YouTube videos and hang out on Facebook. There is a lot more going on in cyberspace than that and you can have a lot more going on in your life for the price of a (free) library card and a little digital literacy.
I find it frustrating that every question I have posted so far on Hacker News related to this desire of mine has been generally met with so little real support, for example the utter lack of reply here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15729897
However, it happens to lie next to another concern with a much larger scope and severity: the failure of the American educational system in general. Compared to this, a few Luddites and facebook-only websurfers isn't such a big deal.
Google employs 74,000 people, so, there are a thousand times more students than Google employees, and obviously not all of those employees are working on AI; I assume most of them are sales & admin.
Facebook employs less than a third of that at 20,000.
A drop in the ocean compared to all the students that are being chronically underserved and undereducated.
The big issue is how we fund schools. It is based on the value of your home divided by the number of children that lives in said homes. Since the richer you are the less children you have they get more money. http://www.economist.com/node/21561112
Until we take the funding of school's to the state level we can talk till we are blue in the face and we will continue to have a "Divide." I don't understand why the AARP and other groups don't jump on the bandwagon and remove the burden of school tax off the backs of fixed income home owners. Fair funding is the foundation that will happen only if the US Court System steps in, because I can't see this happening any other way.
For Pennsylvania they have the biggest gap in the nation with the poorest Charter School Law in America. http://fairfundingpa.org/resources/infographics/
There's another way to put that: America's well-off suburbs have very good schools, but most of America does not. We need some numbers on the concentration of school-age children into good suburban districts versus "bad" inner-city and rural districts.
http://hechingerreport.org/struggling-cities-and-excelling-s...
The issue is defining suburbs. Usually it is Rural vs City (Which includes suburbs)
Already, the centers of the deep learning universe are in Toronto and London, neither of which is in the United States. France is starting to have a competitive advantage in climate science by promising American scientists the French won't strangle their funding forever, thus exerting a brain drain.
The United States can either feed its brains at the K-12, university, and research science levels, or those brains will go work for someone who promises to fund them and let them do their jobs.
Just a datapoint to support that statement. There was a drop of 3% and accelerating in first-time international students going to college in the United States. Similarly, the number of American students electing to study abroad increased by 4%. The US has long been a place that valued smart, aspiring people in the nation and from around the world, it looks like more students early in life are putting down different bets for their futures.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-international-stude...
My alma mater has had to shorten its semester by something like four or five weeks since I was there, due to state-level austerity. This kind of thing has become normal at public universities across the USA, so your "cheap" (ie: ~$14k/year) in-state tuition is now buying strictly less education. Research is centralizing to the most elite institutions, or going abroad. There was a government shutdown in 2013 that literally cut off the flow of already awarded NSF funding into academic coffers.
Meanwhile, Canada considers $10k/year for tuition to be expensive, and hasn't cut everything to the bone. Australia and New Zealand are similar. Parts of Continental Europe have dirt-cheap degree programs (on the order of $5k/year, even for foreigners), some of which are conducted in English, and others of which require you to speak the language.
If you do take a high-quality degree abroad, you can either subsequently apply for a work permit and enjoy better basic labor provisions than you'd usually get in the United States (cheap health-care and lengthy vacations as defaults), or come back to work at a high-paying American job if you can get one. It's a more diversified portfolio, you could say.
This has gotten to be a serious rot, like mushrooms growing out of a dead tree. The USA has gotten too used to importing its STEM professionals by brain-draining countries who seriously invest in education, and itself radically under-investigating in both STEM professionals and skilled tradespeople. You can't run a First World economy on nothing but low-level laborers, asset managers, and business owners.
I mean, sure, if someone has to do the real work but nobody does the real education, that probably means that us personally who got educated and trained in the "good old days" will have more bargaining power for salaries, but we'll also face a "hole" in the labor market of suitable juniors to train.
Nah, people drop money into CS education and the reasoning changes to "that's just businesses seeding cheap labor 20-30 years from now"
An example being software updates on phones. When I got my parents their first android phone, the app drawer worked on swiping left/right. Then came the change in orientation where the swipe went to up/down. My parents were confused and routinely called me to ask how to make the phone work.
Just today I had an app which showed different categories on clicking tabs on top changed to swipe up and down with a small button to choose categories at the bottom.
These kind of changes leaves people more confused. They like to stick to older versions and hence left behind on any thing new.
That sounds so funny.
It's striking how to us software developers what is an exciting new feature or nice cosmetic change is nothing more than a pain point for many people. Digital devices to many people are tools not toys. When we realize this, it's easy to understand how a change is not fun for them but merely work.
Someone on here, I don't remember who sorry, commented that Snapchat works by deliberately breaking UI conventions that people have grown accustomed to who have used computers for a while. That's the mechanism by which they exclude older people and "lock in" people who have little pre-existing computing experience. I strongly suspect this is exactly what the Android developers are trying to do as well.
All of which are insignificant compared to ageism. That's the telltale that there is no genuine skills shortage; employers are happy to overlook a large talent pool. The author of the piece even feels the need to mention both "race" and "ethnicity" to pad out the words!
Do you understand the difference between the words? I can't figure out any other context in which this comment makes sense.
"(The study notes some limitations to these O*NET data, which are reported as aggregates, and not available on the micro level. This means that digitalization scores are assigned nationally, without regard to location, which could introduce potential inaccuracies at the local level.)"
Did I miss something, does the data have metro labeling or something?
And finally, that last graph I'm not sure is showing much correlation. R^2 of ~.26?
Because we led, doesn't mean we will lead. You get to be a leader by leading, not by resting on your laurels while someone else becomes a leader.
Can you clarify that? Because it sounds like some pretty racist bad science.
So, racist bad science then?
I always love new spins on old racism. Do tell how 'climate' plays a role in potential for technical workforce ability.
Climate, along with dozens of other factors, produced variations in human traits. Some of them, like skin color, height, etc. are obvious to everyone. Others, including intelligence, are not so obvious.
But the idea that IQ is inheritable and variable between ethnicities is not too terribly controversial, even though it is politically taboo to mention.
Thus, you'd find that some groups are more likely to dominate fields than others (due to nature) and not 100% because of societal differences (i.e. nurture).
So the actual question for a society in a competitive global economy to ask is what proportion of limited resources are used to help those in the rear catch up vs what proportion is used to push the most gifted farther ahead.
I could see that a lot of various net outcomes economically similar not due to biological factors, but rather a myriad of environmental ones. The Anna Karenina principle[1] means a lot if some societies get rice and Mediterranean Basins and World Banks, while others get tubers and mountains and slave-trading ships that buy people from you.
I feel like those factors would make a more significant difference, as a few thousand years isn't very long in evolution time, from what I understand.
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle
For the record my father grew up a shoeless jungle peasant in Nicaragua. At 35 he nearly lost his hand in a factory accident in Brooklyn. So he took college courses at night and eventually became a top DB admin at various institutions in NYC. He had something to prove so he just worked harder than all his peers. He was a man of his word of high integrity so he was given ever increasing responsibility.
Maybe he'd do poorly in a quantum physics class. But I'd prefer a citizens with integrity and ambition (this is within anyone's reach) over a one that scores well on a standardized test.
[1]https://qz.com/904933/a-history-of-american-anti-immigrant-b...
For the record my father grew up as a shoeless jungle peasant in Nicaragua. At 35 he nearly lost his hand in a factory accident in Brooklyn. So he took college courses at night and eventually became a top DB admin at various institutions in NYC. He had something to prove so he just worked harder than all his peers. He was a man of his word of high integrity so he was given ever increasing responsibility.
Maybe he'd do poorly in a quantum physics class. But I'd prefer a citizens with integrity and ambition (this is within anyone's reach) over a one that scores well on a standardized test.
[1]https://qz.com/904933/a-history-of-american-anti-immigrant-b...
For the record my father grew up as a shoeless jungle peasant in Nicaragua. At 35 he nearly lost his hand in a factory accident in Brooklyn. So he took college courses at night and eventually became a top DB admin at various institutions in NYC. He had something to prove so he just worked harder than all his peers. He was a man of his word of high integrity so he was given ever increasing responsibility.
Maybe he'd do poorly in a quantum physics class. But one does not need to score well on an IQ test in order to have integrity and ambition or to be a valued citizen.
[1]https://qz.com/904933/a-history-of-american-anti-immigrant-b...
For the record my father grew up as a shoeless jungle peasant in Nicaragua. He immigrated to the US in his late 20's and at the age of 30 he nearly lost his hand in a factory accident in Brooklyn. So he took college courses at night and eventually became a top DB admin at various institutions in NYC. He had something to prove so he just worked harder than all his peers. He was a man of his word of high integrity so he was given ever increasing responsibility.
Maybe he'd do poorly in a quantum physics class. But one does not need to score well on an IQ test in order to have integrity and ambition or to be a valued citizen.
[1]https://qz.com/904933/a-history-of-american-anti-immigrant-b...
So, while I don't think I'll have an impact on corporateguy5's opinion, maybe some other reader will keep this in mind and somehow benefit from the awareness?
Has only 2 US universities, 3 from China and 2 from Singapore (which is crazy, as there are only 4 technical universities in the first place).
I will admit that the US has some damn fine universities, but far from all the top innovation happens in the US.