Skip to main content

University of Florida Eliminates Computer Science Department


Today, a colleague has shared the following article with me "University of Florida Eliminates Computer Science Department, Increases Athletic Budgets. Hmm." Here's a quick excerpt:
“Actually, the real villains here are the Florida state legislators, who have cut the budget for their flagship university by 30% over the past 6 years. Meanwhile, just two days ago, Florida governor Rick Scott approved the creation of a brand-new public university, Florida Polytechnic University, to be located near the city of Tampa.”
What do I think about this? Well many things, but most of all: instead of looking for the villains or trying to do good with other people money - of course, thinking of the public good in the most objective way, which usually turns out to be somewhat skewed and biased, at best - we should get out of the business of subsidizing education in this fashion and let the market forces work. The education should cost what it costs, and if it is paid by people who consume the service they are more likely to get what they need. If the demand for computer science education is high and there are no distorting subsidies involved, it would be suicidal for the business to cut down on the product in such demand. So, it simply would not happen.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

" In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself. " The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick - t his was not an easy read for me, I spent more time on this book than on two before and two after (all of comparable volume) combined. And I am not exactly sure why. I guess it could be the style, the vocabulary, the depth and the breadth of the subject matter  coverage , or all of these and few other things put together.  But I feel like it was well worth the effort. The story flows smoothly from the talking drums of Africa to the  world of oral culture;  to the invention of scripts and alphabets; to evolution of languages, books, catalogs and dictionaries; to  further developments of abstraction,  symbolic logic,  and mathematics; to  the birth of computer science, communications theory , information theory, quantum theory, ... I don't think I can right a review that will do this book just...

Omar Khayyám, The Rubaiyat #1

I am a big fan of poetry and "The Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayyám is one of my favorites. Naturally, I have first discovered him in Russian translation and I still enjoy it the most (by far), but recently I have been exploring English translation of his work as well; and some things are not bad at all. So, I decided to do a few posts of my favorites in both languages to showcase the differences and the similarities. This is a first one (hopefully, of many):   You know, my Friends, with what a brave Carouse I made a Second Marriage in my house; Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed, And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.                           *** Мы чашей весом в ман печаль сердец убьем, Обогатим себя кувшинами с вином. Трикраты дав развод сознанью, званью, вере, На дочери лозы мы женимся потом.

The Heroic Rescue of Bulgaria's Jews

We have just returned from a very nice vacation (more about it in a different post), which I have used, among other things, to finish reading a couple of books - " Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) " by none other than Richard P. Feynman himself, and " Beyond Hitler's Grasp: The Heroic Rescue of Bulgaria's Jews " by Michael Bar-Zohar:   Both are (IMHO) great books, but in this post I wanted to cover the latter (more on Mr. Feynman after I finish reading " What Do You Care What Other People Think?: further adventures of a curious character "). First of all, I would like to thank my good friend Al for turning me onto the subject and gifting me the book. I thought I knew quite a bit about the history and the fate of European Jewry during the WWII  and the " Die Endlösung " . After all, I have read extensively on the subject, both in school and later on; watched many documentary and popular movies...