OKAY YEAH I REMEMBER THIS ONE Basically it came from a survey done by Bank of America. Of only their customers. Of only those customers that had a long term savings account with them. And only surveyed 1500 of them. And that, friends, is how statistics is used to lie!!
Always ask who ran the survey, the study, the poll, ask how many people were involved, and ask about the breakdown of the demographics.
As someone who had to study statistics, this is important to know. So important that it’s one of the first things they taught me. “You can prove anything with statistics.”
This is my first coding assignment for my software engineering class that started today. It’s going to be a really good semester.
UPDATE: I got my grade back and
“100″
Since this post has gotten some attention, I feel like it’s worth mentioning that this was just the first half of the assignment.
The second half, which we weren’t made aware of until the day we were meant to turn this one in, was to trade USB drives with the person sitting next to us and MODIFY their “unreadable” code without getting any help from them.
This was to teach us two things:
1) In this field, you’ll spend more time working with code written by other people than you will writing original code from a blank slate. The people who wrote the original code will probably not be around to help you. Learning to read code is IMPORTANT, even if it seems unreadable.
2) There is a strong brotherhood/sisterhood among programmers and software engineers. Respect that bond when you’re writing code and documentation. In my professor’s words: “When you write code, pretend that the person who will have to maintain it after you’re gone is a homicidal maniac who knows where you live.”
You know, I like to think that this wasn’t JUST the attitudes and passion of the crew, but also a side effect of working so long within a story that radiates the value of friendship and comaraderie in difficult times. I like to think that soaking in those values within a good work setting that also cared about and valued those messages helped lead to these, some of the most heartfelt emotions I’ve ever seen related to the cast and crew of a movie or show.
