Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!caip!think!mit-eddie!genrad!decvax!cca!g-rh
From: g-rh@cca.UUCP (Richard Harter)
Newsgroups: net.cse
Subject: Re: Role of computer science
Message-ID: <10519@cca.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 12-Oct-86 22:01:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: cca.10519
Posted: Sun Oct 12 22:01:35 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 13-Oct-86 06:09:55 EDT
References: <10331@cca.UUCP> <3447@utcsri.UUCP>
Reply-To: g-rh@cca.UUCP (Richard Harter)
Organization: Computer Corp. of America, Cambridge
Lines: 49
Keywords: Concepts

J. Hodgson writes:
>Academics teach concepts. One of the results of this is that if we do it 
>right our students are quick studies!

	Nice concise statement.  Is it true, though?  Let me pose two
questions: (1) Are the teaching methods used in academia conducive to
learning to be a quick study? and (2) If they are not, would methods
which are suitable for producing quick studies be appropriate in an
academic setting.  Perhaps I should add a third question: What am I
talking about when I use the term 'quick study'?

	Let me answer the latter question.  Consider our SE in action.
She has a new assignment which, for the sake of explicitness, I will 
assume to be the specification, design, and implementation of a real
time data gathering and reduction system for marine seismic data.
System specification and design are to be done in collaboration
with geophysicists specializing in marine seismology; the hardware
to be used is a machine and operating systems that she has never
used before.  Specification of the data analysis algorithms will
be done jointly with the geophysicists; she will be expected to 
supply signifigant input as to the appropriateness of the techniques
to be used.  Implementation will be done in part by her and in part
by programmers working under her direction.  [As you may gather,
this is a real example.]

	Now what our heroine has to do amounts to this.  She has
to locate the resources that describe the machine and its operating
system and extract from those resources enough information to do an
intelligible and reasonable design; note that she does not have to
have a comprehensive knowledge -- she merely has to extract the
relevant information.  She must learn a certain amount about the
jargon and concepts that the geophysicists use; again she does not
have to become a geophysicist, but merely has to learn to talk to
them and translate their needs into her requirements.  To do so
she will need to have at hand a certain amount of scientific
knowledge at hand and some she will have to pick up on the fly.
(For example, she will have to either understand or learn about
elementary filter theory.)  The task will probably imply the use
of computational methods that are not part of the domain of knowledge
of the geophysicists.  It will be her task to recognize these
computational requirements and to select the appropriate 
algorithms.

	And then, on her next assignment ....

-- 

Richard Harter, SMDS Inc. [Disclaimers not permitted by company policy.]
	For Cheryl :-)