“You want to know what percentage of the emails sent by John Smith last month were about sustainability”
As I interpret that task, every compsci Ph.D. in the world given an infinite research budget couldn’t reliably do it in any rigorous way inside the next 30 years.
Is the test of “level 3” user status that you know about CTRL-F? Because just scrolling down through last month’s e-mails and re-reading everything John Smith sent you (probably the level 1 or 2 approach?) might be a better solution for a typical use case than trying to search every word John Smith might have used around the concept of “sustainability.”
I’m not saying the study is crap, but it sure sounds like either it or the writeup of it contains crap. When I get a moment I’ll code up an AI to auto-generate regex searches to figure out which.
You’re correct in that the write-up isn’t really clear about the task. The way I read it (and I may be wrong), the idea is for the user to do, say, a Gmail search on all e-mails sent from John Smith and get count “A”, then run the same search with the specific additional terms “sustainability” (and perhaps “sustainable”) and get count “B,” and then solve for B/A and cast the result as a percentage. As you mentioned earlier, I suspect some of the problems completing such a task (especially in the U.S.) would have more to do with innumeracy and lack of basic problem-solving skills than it would with UX or UI design.
Once again, I’ll be the jerk who points out these categories are arbitrary and therefore pretty useless. You can compare apples to apples - Japan’s skill at Level 2 vs. the USA, for example - but after you’ve said “better,” you’re left with nothing else. The measures seem to be totally vague. They do nothing to identify a problem, let alone solve one.
I suspect one of the study’s justified and reasonable assumptions was that most of the subjects, like most of the general population, would think that grep is a type of soda pop and that regex is a character from Archie comics.
To be fair, good passwords, security and the like are still important of course, but these days if you’re a victim of identity theft or fraud its likely because some online vendor was hacked or they swiped their debit card in the wrong gas station reader. Kids live in an era where IT security is almost entirely out of your hands.
I blame good computers for younger people with low computing skills.
I’m an “old” millennial, which means I grew up in the era of ubiquitous home computers, but they were bad computers, at least by modern standards. I still had to deal with DOS, basic troubleshooting, anti-virus software, and so on.
Young millennials have access to much better hardware and software and therefore less opportunity to learn the nitty gritty crap.
The good news is Linux is still a pain in the ass. Give a 7 year old a Linux laptop and in a few months you’ll have a level 3 computing kid who longs for an ipad.
My nine year old wants something she can play Guild Wars 2 on, but I am sorely tempted to make her first desktop computer a Raspberry Pi just for the “educational” value.
Haha, I have a 5 year old daughter and I’ve had this exact conversation with my wife for her first computer. I still have a few years to win the argument!
I don’t know how to determine the percentage of emails that are about a certain thing. That’s an oddly specific task to measure general computer aptitude.
I think it’s problem-solving in general. Many people seem to think that random guessing is the best way to solve a problem…they don’t even try to think it through. Another part is that I think many people really don’t know what a computer is or what it does. They think it’s a mysterious thing with a little man inside. Also, fractions? People really do not get that. http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/07/great-third-pound-burger-ripoff
And for some people, fear. My mother is terrified of her tablet device. She thinks it’s a thing that plays one game, and everything else is for experts.
If you don’t have proficiency with a table saw, it’s probably because you don’t actually need one. I would say that this applies to computers. The difference is that you don’t have some gigantic trillion-dollar industry pushing table saws to people on every street corner.
I completely agree. Some people have scoffed when I said that you can easily learn more about computers using a C64 or Arduino then a modern general-purpose box where everything is completely abstracted, or >choke< an iPad. People I know who have become knowledgeable about computers did so because they had some task or problem which they could adapt a computer towards.
Implicit in that statement is that most people have a need to do stuff like that. People learn what’s most relevant to their own lives. For some people, that means sharing cat videos and retweeting white supremacists.
One of those things is not like the other…
