I
was thinking yesterday, about how if you learn a skill and don't use
it, you lose (forget) it. I think this has been one of the major
benefits that an apprenticeship has over a university degree. For some
reason though, many employers still favour university graduates. I
understand that completing a university degree demonstrates commitment
to a task, but would 3-5 years not be better spent learning skills that
we remember? For hard-diciplines, such as Law and Medecine,
this is exactly what happens. You are taught the knowledge that you are
required to know in order to legal matters (for example), and much of
the course is demonstrating that you have a grasp of the principles and
are capable of justifying a point of view legally.Lets contrast
that to a BA or BCom. In my BA, I've touched on everything from
Accounting, to Strategising; From Finance to Law. Now a BA is designed
to be generic. But people who do a BCom specialize in one field - this
is where most of our Accountants, Financial Officers etc come from. In
this case, why is there so much time spent on erroneous information
they do not directly use? If you wanted your Finance department to have
a "reasonable" knowledge of accounting, send them to a seminar at your
own expense! That way, they will learn information they use straight
away. By learning it at the 1st year uni level, by the time we
graduate, we've forgotten it anyway, and have to relearn it at your
expense again!Perhaps university would benefit from being more
generic, shorter courses (i.e. just the 1 year), and when you choose a
"major" or dicipline (depending on what course you are studying, same
thing though), you actually work with a company in that industry who
trains you for that field. Civil Engineers would do generic maths and
physics in the first year, then spend 3 years honing that theory in the
field with people who know what is going to be used and what is not!One day, I'll start a corporation that does this :)

Wow, read enough books that encourage the mind, and you come up with random ideas. At work today, and just thought: it would be cool if when you search for something on google.com , if it had the ability to summarize the page...intelligently, not like MS Word Autosummarize (where the summary is non-sensical). There are just too many words on the internet, and no one has time to sift through them all! An automated tool would fit right into Google's toolbase.

I went to tell Google about this, only to find they don't have a way to submit ideas to them! So I thought I'd blog it instead, maybe someone out there will feel inspired to write some software that does it anyway :)