Daily Stuff--8/22/12

Chinese:

I watched episode 36 of Travel in Chinese. This episode was about buying traditional Chinese style clothing.

Article:

I read two newspaper articles (Wall Street Journal). One was about consumer electronics start-ups and why they're so much easier to launch now than they used to be. The prototypes are much cheaper to develop now and China offers cheap labor and the no hassle of factories or similar facilities. They're willing to work on anything someone tells them to manufacture.

The other article was about algorithms and the fact that they can now do a fair amount of creative things, like writing and picking potential hits in music--things that used to only be done by humans. This leads to the question of what exactly is left for humans to do? The best option is probably to be the person making the algorithms but I still think it's a little sad that the one thing that made humans superior to computers isn't there anymore. I will say that on a large scale, algorithms can be useful. For example, sifting through potential movies to see which ones are potential money-makers. But for music, I think an algorithm can determine which songs are catchy, but the music, more often than not, has no substance to it. And to think that those radio hits with no substance are getting played in favor of songs that are still good but overlooked is sad to me. It's less creative.

Philosophy:

I read about John Dewey and his philosophy on education. He believed that education should be a place to acquire general knowledge like math and reading, as well as a place to learn how to live. In other words, students should be taught with the bigger picture in mind. How will they use these skills in the future? What jobs could they get with these skills? It's up to the student to use these skills to their full potential, but it's the teacher's job to teach those skills so they can be used to their full potential.

Internships:

I looked up jobs at Qualcomm and found several in software engineering. I looked at one internship specifically. It's for summer 2013, and it's for people majoring in Computer Science or some sort of engineering major.