Blog Marco

I read an article today about university students outsourcing their uni studies through websites called RentACoder and Kasamba. There are other websites out there called Elance and Guru that do the same thing. You can write down what work you want done, post it on the outsourcing website and wait for the incoming bids from service providers from all over the world including India, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

In the article, it discusses computer science students using these outsourcing services to have their programming assignments done by other people overseas. Perhaps it is more worthwhile for them to find part time work - being paid around $20 per hour and trading it with the arbitrage advantage of outsourcing with hourly rates starting from $2 per hour.

But don't stop with Bachelor of IT or Science in computing sciences. You can apply this outsourcing magic with any uni course. Journalism - you can hire people to do your research for you. Engineering - similar with programming - hire someone to "show you" how to do things, calculate equations, etc. Commerce - assignments can be tendered out to the best bidder. What if you can outsource the actual exam taking? You could probably do it with those computer multiple choice questions. Good luck!

Number of school pupils in Australia: 3.3 million; number of schools: 9600; number of full-time teachers or equivalent: 230,000.

Proportion of male Year 10 pupils in Australia who continue to Year 12: 72 per cent; of females: 82 per cent.

Here's an interesting video of University Students by university students. It reveals what a typical college student life is about, what they do and issues that they are thinking about. Well done Kansas State University!

There's plenty of foreign students in Australia... studying because they either find Australian education better than what they can get back in their country or so they can get a PR (Permanent Resident) ticket into Australia. But the latter reason is being tightened up by the Australian Government. From September 1, foreign students finishing their courses will no longer be automatically entitled to apply for a general skilled migration visa - which is used as a stepping stone to PR status. From that date, their will need to have "competent" English skills equivalent to those of a year 12 student with 12 months work experience in the field in which they studied, working a minimum of 20 hours a week. Labor's immigration spokesman, Tony Burke was all for it saying that Engineers arrive in Australia with English so bad that they end up as Taxi drivers... "and they don't make great Sydney taxi drivers," he said. Also some universities are becoming visa factories where there has been a surge of enrolments in cooking and hairdressing although they have no intention of following up with that vocation - only to use the education as a ticket to PR status.

"Give Us the Answers!" Cry out the students... was I on the right track back in my math tutoring days? I usually gave a few examples before I set the student on their course of homework questions. Some questions used similar techniques as the example questions and other questions needed some extra thought. A research team from UNSW have found that looking at an already solved problem reduces the working memory load and hence allows the student to actually learn. Which means next time you come across a problem like that, you have a better chance of solving the problem. They found that "The working memory was only effective in juggling two or three tasks at the same time, retaining them for a few seconds. When too many mental tasks were taken on some things were forgotten."

Powerpoint presentations are ineffective (Generally). It all depends on how use use the presentation tool. Most presenters have multiple dot points on their lecture presentations - a popular way to present new material to University students. It is more effective to speak to a diagram because it presents information in a different form according to a researcher from UNSW. It is ineffective to have a lecture powerpoint presentation speaking the same words that are written because it is putting loo much load on the mind and hence decresing your ability to understand the presentation. The research findings show limits to the brain's capacity to retain and process information in the short term memory.

4. Practice the shit out of them.
Musicians often practice 8 hours a day.

Mark Cuban on how to make money from Basketball.

If you can't own an NBA basketball team, buy a minor league team, recruit good basketball players from high school, train them up and then sell them off at a profit.

New research suggests that good-looking people do better in exams and thus probably in later life, than the plain or downright ugly.

In the study, better-looking students achieved superior results in both oral and written exams - the latter marked anonymously - suggesting that success is not just down to teachers favouring attractive students but to superior natural ability.

Debate has raged for years among sociologists and economists over "the beauty factor".

Most research, beginning with Gary Becker, the 1992 Nobel prizewinning economist, has suggested that discrimination, whether because of looks, height or race, is due to observed physical characteristics.

The significance of the new research is that even where testing is "blind", good-looking people do better. One reason for this, the researchers suggest, is that attractive children get more attention from their parents.

Even more important is that good looks lead to higher self-esteem. Attractive people may be more confident and work harder.

Don't use Wikipedia as an Academic Resource.

"Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia’s founder) said that he gets about 10 e-mail messages a week from students who complain that Wikipedia has gotten them into academic hot water. “They say, ‘Please help me. I got an F on my paper because I cited Wikipedia’” and the information turned out to be wrong, he says. But he said he has no sympathy for their plight, noting that he thinks to himself: “For God sake, you’re in college; don’t cite the encyclopedia.”"

You can rate your professors at ratemyprofessors.com - too bad University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) ain't on the list otherwise I would be making a fair number of comments.

Our Autumn end-of-semester final exams are coming up this June so don’t expect any random posts about celebrities or technology or anything about photography for that matter. I’ll be blogging about my studies from now, for about a month. So if you want to learn a thing or two about studying electrical engineering, go away for the next month or two.

I remember walking past a Law lecture at my university a few years ago and seeing every student busy typing away at their laptops. Heres an article about students in the US losing their right to use a laptop in the classroom. Notable article quotes: "But as an experiment, the professor permitted laptops this past year to compare the difference in students' performance. His conclusion: Don't allow laptops." .... "A chemistry professor at the University of Oregon, said he was disturbed to find students gambling online while they were purportedly working on an in-class assignment."

This website offers a very large primer on How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

The primer advises that before asking a technical question by email, or in a newsgroup, or on a website chat board, do the following:

1. Try to find an answer by searching the Web.
2. Try to find an answer by reading the manual.
3. Try to find an answer by reading a FAQ.
4. Try to find an answer by inspection or experimentation.
5. Try to find an answer by asking a skilled friend.
6. If you are a programmer, try to find an answer by reading the source code.

It is an interesting read, it outlines the main rules that should be followed so you don't annoy your fellow users with useless questions that wastes everybody else's time.

In summary it rehashes through section by section:
* Choose your forum carefully
* Web and IRC forums directed towards newbies often give the quickest response
* As a second step, use project mailing lists
* Use meaningful, specific subject headers
* Make it easy to reply
* Write in clear, grammatical, correctly-spelled language

Over-education leads to being over-qualified for a job.

In Australia, being over-educated is becoming the standard as there is higher competition for jobs. Some may say that they get rejected from jobs as they are overqualified. But in this case, Australia is setting a trend where you actually get employed because you are over-educated and overqualified.

"Almost 30 per cent of Australians are over-educated for the jobs they do, leading to time wasting, low job satisfaction, and reduced earnings."

"People with business, engineering and architecture qualifications, in particular, are at risk of ending up in jobs for which they are overqualified, a study shows. But even big proportions of high school graduates are in jobs that require less education."
Me:: I disagree with the here: Australia plainly has an engineering shortage. Go ask The Institute of Engineers Australia. I also went on a site visit to the RAAF Richmond site and they were in demand for engineers.

In a study called "Causes of Overeducation in the Australian Labour Market", by Ingrid Linsley, it "suggests that too many young Australians have university degrees that are not strictly needed for the jobs they do; and not enough have trade qualifications in areas where the nation is suffering a skills shortage."

The reason for this is best illustrated with an example of overqualification in demand:
"Ms Linsley said managers liked to employ people with more education than less because they were easier to train. For example, a person with an arts degree would be preferred for a job as a personal assistant, though the degree was not essential, because the graduate could probably write more effectively and would be easier to teach."

"People accepted jobs for which they were over-qualified because they were the highest-paying jobs they could get. Ms Linsley said the huge expansion of university places in the 1980s and 1990s had contributed to the mismatch of jobs and skills, shifting people away from TAFE and vocational training."

And this leads to Australia's shortage of trades type personnel. Noticed the apprenticeship advertising campaign on TV? The government is also combatting this problem by enticing people from overseas with skills to come to Australia.

The attached article states that: "Many students [will] never earn enough to repay their loan," Ms Macklin said. "Students are already saying to us, and research shows, that young graduates are finding it harder and harder to buy a home and start a family because of the very high levels of HECS debt that they have. People don't want to carry those very high levels of debt throughout their lives."

That statement above is a little frightening as most people go to university in the hope of earning a better living.

But with "one-third of the multi-billion dollar HECS debt owed by university students has been written off by the Federal Government as a bad or doubtful debt"... means that a significant number of students aren't earning enough to even pay off their education debt completely.