A puzzling trend in French engineer school students is to contest the role of companies in their training or even the very training towards an engineering job, as illustrated by the above Le Monde article of last weekend. A former Polytechnique student has even published a book entitled Désertons, calling for deserting the job market. (Paradoxically on sale on Amazon!) These schools are indeed a French peculiarity in that they were initially created to train civil servants for the French State and later expanded to larger cohorts free to join public or private companies. They are radically distinct (and independent) from universities, in their entry mechanism (with a specific competition exam, requiring its own specific preparation public programme), in their training, and in their funding (three times higher per student and mostly issued from other ministries than the Ministry of Education, with minute fees if any). The State support extend to paying a salary to Polytechnique students during their studies, which should on principle be reimbursed when the students do not join a civil service or a public company although it is unclear if anyone has yet been asked to since 2000. (Not due to the 2000 bug!) I thus fail to get the logic of this contestation when the professional purpose of these schools is clear to everyone, when there exist alternatives in the (public) university system, and when the French State is supporting much more intensively this branch of the education system…
Archive for bug
le beurre et l’argent du beurre (have your cake and eat it too)[nicht den Fünfer und das Weggli]
Posted in Books, Kids, University life with tags École Polytechnique, beurre, bug, cake, Centrale Supélec, classes préparatoires, Engineering, ENSAE, enterprises, French education ministry, French politics, grandes écoles, have your cake and eat it too, Le Monde, Mines de Paris, sponsorship, Telecom ParisTech on October 21, 2025 by xi'anno [Google] play
Posted in Travel with tags British Columbia, bug, cellphone, Golden, Google, Google Play, vacations on September 14, 2023 by xi'an
golden bug [jatp]
Posted in pictures, Travel with tags bug, garden, jatp, scarab beetle, summer on August 11, 2021 by xi'an
genuine Latinsquare rectangle
Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags art restoration, bioweapon, bug, Choi Seok-jeong, Firenze, Florence, Italia, latin square, Leonhard Euler, Medicis, NYT, sacrophagus, Serratia ficaria SH7 on June 9, 2021 by xi'an
the strange occurrence of the one bump
Posted in Books, Kids, R, Statistics with tags accept-reject algorithm, bug, code golf, cross validated, debugging, Gamma generator, mixture of distributions, R, sample on June 8, 2020 by xi'an
When answering an X validated question on running an accept-reject algorithm for the Gamma distribution by using a mixture of Beta and drifted (bt 1) Exponential distributions, I came across the above glitch in the fit of my 10⁷ simulated sample to the target, apparently displaying a wrong proportion of simulations above (or below) one.
a=.9
g<-function(T){
x=rexp(T)
v=rt(T,1)<0
x=c(1+x[v],exp(-x/a)[!v])
x[runif(T)<x^a/x/exp(x)/((x>1)*exp(1-x)+a*(x<1)*x^a/x)*a]}
It took me a while to spot the issue, namely that the output of
z=g(T) while(sum(!!z)<T)z=c(z,g(T)) z[1:T]
was favouring simulations from the drifted exponential by truncating. Permuting the elements of z before returning solved the issue (as shown below for a=½)!
