Seed: This is a science magazine. I like this magazine for the somewhat new age articles that they run, with enough in-depth analysis to be interesting but not overwhelming.
Circuit Cellar: This is a computer and electrical engineering magazine. This is a rather advanced publication, without too much emphasis on beginning students. It focuses on specific architectures and applications (within an article). It’s a good magazine for learning some of the more traditional techniques.
Servo: This is an (in my opinion) amateur robotics magazine. The articles are clearly made for a beginner, without very much depth. It’s interesting in a “getting back to basics” sort of way, but not something that you can learn too much from.
American Scientist: This is my favorite science magazine. It covers all sorts of science and engineering, and has in particular two columns that I look forward to: Computing Science and Engineering. The magazine presents excellent analysis on current topics.
IEEE Spectrum: This magazine is the IEEE general interest magazine. It lacks the significant depths of the more specific journals, but it generally has interesting articles of a tech forum category.
Elector: This electronics magazine is well formatted, and perhaps that’s why I like it. The articles are generally fairly in depth (a little less than Circuit Cellar), but it’s a well published magazine.
Scientific American: This magazine is a bastion of the science magazines that I read. It’s a little too Pop-Sci to be truly reputable, but it has intermediate level articles that with some dedication can be well to read.
Nuts and Volts: I like this electronics engineering magazine for the well written and informative articles. There isn’t anything overwhelming here, but the contributors generally provide a good analysis of modern electronics (the breadboard kind), and it does have a column that occasionally deals with the Propeller that I like.
Communications of the ACM: I really like this Computer Science magazine. It has (basically) journal articles that are cleaned up to the density, and republished with more pictures. This is a good magazine in which to learn a specific topic in computing.
Make Magazine: This magazine (really almost a soft cover book) is a hobbyist technology magazine. It’s almost what Popular Mechanics was back in the day, before it was corrupted by bad articles. Make has many unique and interesting projects that, while I’ll never build most of them, are inspiring to do something of my own. Add in the culture that they nourish, and it’s an enjoyable read. Think Portland.Cheers,
Cody
Cody,
ReplyDeleteI hadn't heard of some of these. I'll have to take a look at them!
By the way, I've enjoyed reading the comments you've left on other people's blogs. Far as I've seen, you're the only person who did that.
I disagree with your disagreement about cheating, though. It really does hurt non-cheaters, in ways you might not appreciate now. You can get hurt by something and not be aware of it. Knew a guy once who had "walking pneumonia," and he felt just fine all the way up to the point that he went into a coma. For some people, the first symptom of an unhealthy heart is death -- they don't get any warning signs. Some policies and programs hurt people who think they're being helped by them. Lots of students like the idea of curving a test, but for most of them it's a bad idea. Similarly, cheating hurts non-cheaters, though admittedly not as much as it hurts the cheaters themselves.
One way is by forcing the system to account for it: Just as *you* pay more in insurance premiums because other people are engaging in insurance fraud or frivolous lawsuits, and you pay more to see a 3D movie than you ought to because the distributor has to account for the fact that some people won't recycle those glasses after the show, teachers have to account for the fact that people are cheating, and the measures they take hurt non-cheaters. (In some classes, the teachers just keep making the tests harder. In other cases, we adopt zero-tolerance policies that -- because legally we have to aim for consistency -- end up nailing otherwise honest students for stupid mistakes and treating them like criminals, something that wouldn't happen if we could just safely assume that students are honest.)
Another way is by damaging the reputations of programs and organizations to which honest people belong. There were honest people at Enron, but try being a former Enron executive applying for a job these days. A military facility where I once trained was stung by a sex scandal a few years after I left it, and people looked at me weird for a while when they learned I had trained there. Universities, similarly, have reputations -- and so do programs within them. Until you've talked to a lot of employers or other people who pay attention to university reputations, you don't realize how serious that is. Harvard and Yale have reputations for grade inflation -- people remain impressed that you *got into* (and afforded) those places, but they aren't as impressed by a 4.0 magna cum laude from Harvard as the student with that achievement would expect -- there are zillions of those students. The market is full of them.
For a while, UC Riverside had a lousy track record with cheaters -- and so it wasn't too surprising to me when the first season of "24" featured a traitor within Jack Bauer's operation, and that traitor was described as a computer science graduate from UCR. (Seriously. Look it up.)
Now, UCR's developing a pretty good reputation for cracking down on that stuff. The student conduct office at CSU San Bernardino, however, has a widespread reputation for being asleep at the wheel. I have a bachelors from there, and it ticks me off, because I know that CSUSB has a growing reputation for letting cheaters off the hook, and that reflects badly on me.
Now, I completely agree that most people aren't *aware* of being hurt by cheating. But I think the Internet will make these reputations more apparent in the long run, and as soon as students start to become aware of reputation issues, they'll start to resurrect the old honor codes, which you think are unlikely, but which we've had before. I'm not saying that they'll be widespread movements, with every student on board. But I think they'll happen, for the same reason that other people self-organize and self-discipline -- self-preservation. I could be wrong about that, but I'm certainly not wrong about the impact of cheating on non-cheaters. On that score, I understand your perspective, but I think it'll change in time. Let me know if it does, or doesn't!
- GS