While I'm not an MIT student, I think the school puts a huge emphasis on being pragmatic ( see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=530659 ). Also, given the huge disparities in abilities of the freshmen there, I'd reckon that, more often than not, an MIT education would be a humbling experience.
My dad, an MIT alum (though in chemistry, not CS), likes to tell the story of how whenever new grad students arrive on campus, everybody's wearing Phi Beta Kappa rings. By the second week, they've all disappeared. When everybody's got one, flaunting yours displays arrogance a whole lot more than intelligence.
Tennis has very strange scoring.
It's complicated to explain, but here goes:
The first person to get 6 games wins the set.*
The first person to win 4 rallies in a game wins that game.*
During a game, if you have one point your score is "15," two points is "30" and three points is "40." When you get four points or win by two, then you win the game.
My sample consists almost entirely of engineers, so I'm disregarding most of humanity, but within that limited sample I believe the answer is a definite yes. That's one of the few saving graces of the American educational system.
Of course, our educational system still sucks at it. I can't tell you how incredibly soul-crushing all my math classes were until about the time I got to trigonometry. And English classes generally suck royally. And don't get me started on biology classes taught by young earth creationists. Or the culture that looks down on learning. Fuck.
Evidence for this? (How much time have you spent in Asia, and how recently? As a reply above said, Europe has several different countries, and so does Asia, so what specific places are you talking about?)
I'm in India right now and I've spent a total of 14 years here. The places I'm referring to are the ones the article seems to talk about: China, India, Japan and Korea.
It always seemed like more of a cultural difference than a financial one to me. Don't you think that TopCoder could be useful for American high school and undergraduate students, who could be preparing for the IOI and ICPC respectively?
Fun fact: this year's TopCoder Open Algorithm Championship winner was a Chinese high school student who never qualified for the IOI.
As an aside, if you don't mind telling me, do you think your participation in the IOI helped get you into grad school at MIT? If so, to what extent?
I requested to see my admission file after I was accepted into MIT. My guess is I wouldn't have been there without my medal.
Disclaimers: I can't into the heads of the people in the admissions office. Also, the Dean of Admissions was changed a few years ago, so my input is likely to be irrelevant.
Seems like I've finally found a way to Bing for "sex" in India.
Actually I found out you can bypass the filter by adding in a generic stop word at the end which the search engine should ignore anyway (I use the word "the") and it will search for whatever phrase you want just fine.
