"The teacher's job is to design learning experiences; not primarily to impart information." -Fred Brooks
A favorite, lesser known quote of Fred's from his technical communications course at UNC and a SIGCSE talk. Beyond a software engineer and researcher, he was an extraordinary educator. His design ethos carried through to pedagogy, as well, and has been an inspiration to me. Thanks, Fred.
During my short stint in academia, I once addressed our room full of students with something like "Our role here is not to teach you; it's to provide you with the best context in which you can learn." I have often wondered where that philosophy came from, and I an very happy to have an idea now.
As faculty at UNC CS, I can mournfully confirm this is indeed the case. He passed peacefully at his home in Chapel Hill earlier this evening, surrounded by family.
That your commits are made locally, in a clone of the entire repository, is decentralized. Your local respiratory accrues history as divergent (and unbeknownst) from upstream as you'd like it to.
If you're going to collaborate in a decentralized way you ultimately need an accepted mainline source of truth.
FWIW, Brown University was doing research in this *Pad field (stylus-based input apps for domain specific notations) in the late 90s/2000s. I was a member of this group for a brief period of time. It's really exciting to see a resurgence in high quality pen computing with affordable, entry-level consumer hardware like the Surface 3.
What I'm finding from using and talking to beta users of DidSum (referenced in another comment on this post) is that the act of physically tracking a behavior has value in building habits and improving toward goals (or being extra aware of it, when you're not).
This is doubly true in a social setting where your friends/spouse/mom/coach can _see_ when you are or are not taking actions toward what you want to improve at.
I'm building a mobile app, called DidSum, that focuses on your #2 "Avoid Data Entry, but Make it Easy" (and putting an API around the data). It's almost ready for broader use.
I use DidSum to track running, blogging, eating healthy, sex, coffee consumption, and more.
DidSum allows you to define the actions you want to improve at. You can track publicly with friends and family and encourage/compare/compete with each other. You can also track privately (some actions I only track with my wife). It has basic analytics, which will get more powerful with time.
We're in a closed beta right now, if you're interested in helping test I'd love anyone interested in this thread's feedback: http://didsum.com/auth/register.html
I suppose I am part of your Ph.D. 'attrition' statistic. It's less atrocious than you'd think.
I enrolled in Brown's Ph.D. CS computer program immediately after undergrad. In retrospect, I was too green to do proper due diligence to find the right fit with advisor and research area. The advisor relationship is extremely important. Within the first year I realized two things: 1) there was no way I'd be happy going deep with this particular research area and advisor for another 5-6 years, 2) I would complete my masters in the first year, fully paid for (with a research assistant "salary" on top) by being on the PhD track. I returned full-time to the company I co-founded while in undergrad after that first year.
No two PhD paths are the same, unlike with JD/MBA. Some folks come in and earn a master's along the way. Some come in with a master's. Some don't pass the (widely different depending on school) bars to advance to the Ph.D. candidate stage (I imagine there's a good bit of attrition here). Some don't find an advisor who can fund them. The requirement of contributing something novel to the body of research, no matter how long it takes, is a higher bar than completing coursework and projects. 6,7,8 years is a lot longer than 2-3.
