Exactly - assessment methods that are difficult for the sake of being difficult benefit nobody. They’re only marginally more meaningful than FAANG interview questions.
Employers, students and society as a whole have all moved on; they want assessment to demonstrate that students can do what the course has taught them (known in the jargon as “alignment”), not memorise a bunch of facts that they can regurgitate on demand.
Having lived in Norway for two years, and resorted to deep frozen baguettes from Meny (an upscale supermarket chain) because the fresh bread was so bad, I'm... not sure about this.
Glad to be back in Finland where the bread is good (seriously!) and the lunches are substantial, healthy, warm and filling.
IMO you can't get good bread in grocery stores in any Western country, Norway included. Good bread has about 2-3 times the density of store bread, for one thing, which would make it 2-3 times more expensive to make (2-3 times more raw ingredients + more time & energy in the oven). That takes the price into ridiculous territory, so it's just not reasonable for supermarkets to stock them.
My recommendation: get a decent bread baking machine. What's decent? One where the bread, container and rotor all come out of the machine after baking, so they can be easily washed. It takes about 2 minutes to mix in everything, and the quality is honestly pretty indistinguishable from hand made (as long as I remember to put the rotor back in after cleaning it :).
Dwarf bread refined over decades: 400g wheat flour (coarse if you can get a hold of it), 300ml water, 1ts salt, 50ml olive oil and ½ts dry yeast, which goes in a separate compartment in the machine to be dropped in when ready. To this you can add up to 200g or so of goodies - pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, walnuts or grated carrot.
Transporting goods inland was hard because no way had yet been found to use horses to provide motive power without strangling them, hence
"It remained cheaper to transport heavy goods in bulk from one end of the Mediterranean to the other than to haul them without a river-way for seventy miles inland."
Ancient "Greeks" seemed to have pretty good horse collars by about 1000BC, http://www.salimbeti.com/micenei/chariots.htm, suitable for pulling double chariots. It seems they could provide some motive power without strangulation at least, via what is now termed a breast-collar harness.
However this http://www.machine-history.com/sites/default/files/images/ho... shows the issue, some of the artwork from Greek times seems to match with part 2. of that image, some not far from part 5. So it was, it seems, seen that the burden needed to be pulled from the horses chest and not from the neck per se.
www1.hollins.edu/faculty/saloweyca/horse/h_tack.htm describes the issue in detail and makes the same claim for the Greeks; again stating that the Chinese developed the horse shoulder harness in about 300 BCE.
Perhaps they lost that technology during the "dark age" between collapse of the Mycenaean culture (i.e. "Homeric" times, although Homer lived much later) and the rise of Classical Greece?
I think it should be something like "was even harder than you would think because..." Sure it was harder before efficient harnesses, but even after efficient harnesses were invented, indeed even in good terrain, horses and carts were very expensive. Note that not only were railroads and trucks a lasting revolution in commerce, they were a radical improvement on another (less enduring) radical improvement before that, extensive artificial canals (very famously the Erie Canal, but there were many others, some successful). Rivers and canals were central to inland commerce in Europe and America because even with good harnesses, enthusiastic breeding of suitable strains of horses, and various other refinements horses and carts are still expensive per ton per mile.
Useful to note that parent's Ref. 0 has been peer-reviewed and is published in JHEP, a respectable high energy physics journal.
Sadly, articles like those linked often do not check the authors' credentials or whether the research being summarised has been successfully published somewhere rather than just put on the arXiv.
The BBC (and possibly others) go further, asking rival or independent researchers to comment on new work; this approach (check for peer review and also seeking critical comment from third parties) should be the expected standard in scientific news reporting for a lay audience.
That's not about putting their eggs into separate baskets, it's about Nokia's shortcomings in terms of both management and engineering.
I worked very closely with Nokia during that time period. As closely as one could work without being directly employed (we deployed a product directly to the S60 baseline).
What happened at Nokia was the end result of years of engineering neglect. Symbian was a monster. It was poorly engineered in general, and certain subsystems (like messaging) had a reputation for simply being impossible to work with. It was just a huge mess.
The UI saga was just another symptom of that mess. That touchscreen phone referenced in the article? It existed well before the iPhone in various incarnations. They spent years trying to push that thing over the finish line, and failed. The underlying graphical subsystems gave them problems. The new form factors presented by the emergence of touchscreen slate devices proved at odds with a whole host of assumptions made throughout the (huge) Symbian/S60 codebase.
The whole thing was just a giant hot mess.
It's possible that competing internal frameworks could have worked. The ultimate problem is that they never developed one compelling UI paradigm/library that actually worked. Much less worked in a well integrated way across the whole platform.
Nokia failed at project management. They failed at engineering. They failed at leadership.
History has shown us that Nokia was always good at hardware and very bad at software.
I suspect they've learnt from that and now leave the software side to Microsoft, while leaving them free to focus once again on creating good hardware.
Employers, students and society as a whole have all moved on; they want assessment to demonstrate that students can do what the course has taught them (known in the jargon as “alignment”), not memorise a bunch of facts that they can regurgitate on demand.