IP: Our product

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

> From Peter Newmanns RISK


Date: Sun, 25 Jan 1998 11:56:31 -0500 
From: abuse () orion-com com (Joe Thompson) 


Subject: Risks of making assumptions on education (Wolper, RISKS-19.56)
RISKS-19.56 contains the following statement by Jim Wolper, in reference to 
risks of misuse of the Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System:


> After all, pilots are no more computer literate than the population at 
> large. I teach Computer Science at the university and flying at the 
> airport, and there is no overlap between these student populations.


The assumption that appears to be made here is that computer science 
students are more literate than the population at large. There has been a 
long discussion of this (widespread) assumption on alt.sysadmin.recovery 
and the conclusion was that it is a rare CS program indeed which imparts 
computer literacy to its students.


General agreement was that a CS degree certifies that you were given 
certain tools and did certain things with them; whether or not you can do 
different things with those tools, or use other tools, cannot be predicted.
The more disturbing assumption that might be inferred from the quoted text 
is that the "general population" is uniformly *less* computer literate than 
those with CS degrees. This is most emphatically *not* true.


None of this is intended as a critique of Mr. Wolper or his teaching. He 
seems to be well-informed and I'm sure he does his level best to ensure that 
his students (in both classes) are as well. The risk here is that many 
personnel departments do in fact hire on the basis of the above assumptions, 
with no idea of what they're getting themselves into.


Joe Thompson, Charlottesville, VA
<http://driver-8.rlc.net/>http://driver-8.rlc.net/