Estimating confidence intervals, part 4

Here’s the latest installment in my continuing saga to estimate effort with 90% confidence intervals. Here’s the plot:


In this case, my estimate of the expected time to completion was fairly close to the actual time. The upper end of the 90% confidence interval is extremely high, largely because there was some work that I considered optional to complete the feature that decided to put off to some future data.

Here’s the plot of the error:

plot2It takes a non-trivial amount of mental efforts to do these estimates each day. I may stop doing these soon.


Not apprenticeship!

Mark Guzdial points to an article by Nicholas Lemann in the Chronicle of Higher Ed entitled The Soul of the Research University. It’s a good essay about the schizophrenic nature of the modern research university. But Lemann takes some shots at the notion of teaching skills in the university. Here’s some devil’s advocacy from the piece:

Why would you want to be taught by professors who devote a substantial part of their time to writing projects, instead of working professionals whose only role at the university is to teach? Why shouldn’t the curriculum be devoted to imparting the most up-to-the-minute skills, the ones that will have most value in the employment market? Embedded in those questions is a view that a high-quality apprenticeship under an attentive mentor would represent no loss, and possibly an improvement, over a university education.

Later on, Lemann refutes that perspective, that students are better off being taught at research universities by professors engaged in research. He seems to miss the irony that this apprenticeship model is precisely how these research universities train PhD students. For bonus irony, here was the banner ad I saw atop the article: skills-webinar