Along similar lines, I bought a PS3 several years after the initial release. I think that I have only paid for one new release out of the 15 games or so that I have. Everything else I have bought has either been used or already a 'Greatest Hits' release, so I pretty much never pay the full price. I imagine if they went to this model of no resale, then there would be several other people like me who would wait until the prices dropped before buying.
Then let me put it into terms that you might more easily understand. It would result in theft of the other non informed players in the game because of the existing arbitrage. This is why insider trading rules exist. You really do see this, right?
I see what you mean about any regulation as being non-free market, but you are taking it to an irrational extreme. You really don't make it sound rational when you equate regulation or government interference as theft. The logical conclusion of a system which allows insider trading would be that others are discourage from investing. Why would I put my money in company X if I know that the people inside of said company are just going to fleece me through less than dubious means by using, for example, insider trading? Look past your dogma for a minute. Sheesh.
Step away from the libertarian kool-aid for a minute and think about it rationally. Here is an excerpt from wikipedia about information asymmetry which is what occurs when there is insider trading.
In economics and contract theory, information asymmetry deals with the study of decisions in transactions where one party has more or better information than the other. This creates an imbalance of power in transactions which can sometimes cause the transactions to go awry, a kind of market failure in the worst case. Examples of this problem are adverse selection,[1] moral hazard, and information monopoly.[2] Most commonly, information asymmetries are studied in the context of principalâ"agent problems.
This affects things such as rational pricing of goods, as well as supply and demand. Insider trading is also a momentary arbitrage. While there is nothing inherently wrong with arbitrage, those privy to the information are those that get to take advantage of it while the non-informed parties will suffer. This is not conducive to a true free market.
Um, what? The people that get to sell first will not be impacted by the mass sell off of the others. The insider trading restriction allows for all parties to have the opportunity to sell when the news is released. Insider trading is almost the opposite of a free market. In a free market, all parties make decisions based on all information available and is assumed to be perfect. If there are a select few that have more information than others, then this violates this assumption.
Here is a description that I received that finally made FFT/DFT click for me. I hope it helps you too. First of all, an FFT is just a subset of computation for the DFT, so they really compute the same things. It's just that one is faster than the other. Now look at the formal definition of the fourier transform. It is the integral of your time (or spacial, but I will use time) function times e^(j2*pi*f*t) over time, The exponent is nothing more than a rotating phasor as a function of time at frequency of f. Now choose a single frequency (say 60 Hz). this phasor rotates at this rate. Now the integral is over time, so in the span of one second, the phasor will rotate 60 time (obvious i know, but work with me here). If there is a component of the time signal of interest that resonates with 60 Hz, the integral acts as a way to sum up all of these values that are in resonance which then results in a peak at 60 Hz. If there are no 60 Hz components in the time signal (say there is one at 75 Hz instead), the 60 Hz phasor will not have a peak since phasors at 60 Hz are orthogonal to 75 Hz sinusoids (sin(n*2*pi*t*f)*sin(m*2*pi*f*t) = 0 for m != n).
So in summary, the exponential phasor term is just a means to weight the time signal across all frequencies. I hope this helps.
Re:Can you really trust congress to do what's righ
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SOPA and PIPA So Far
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· Score: 2
In a somewhat serious answer to the OP rather than the snarky one that I gave. My two senators are Dick Durbin and Mark Kirk. While Durbin may be in bed with all of the special interests that plague Washington, he has actually done some good for someone that I know. His office help with some immigration issues that my friend was having with his fiancee. She was stopped at customs in O'Hare and was sent back to Poland immediately. My friend petitioned Durbin to help and he actually came through. His fiance was allowed into the country with his help.
Now while I am not in particular fond of congress in general, especially in regards to things like SOPA and PIPA, they do actually help the people they represent. In the case I illustrated above is a case where I don't mind them. Heck, stuff like that should be their primary goal.
Back to the intent of my original post, I was just commenting on why incumbency is so high. People always think that their representation is fine, but it's everyone else that sucks. But I am with you. In general I try to vote out incumbents. Otherwise they get too comfortable, and if they are there too long, they stop representing the people that elected them in because of this incumbency effect.
Re:Can you really trust congress to do what's righ
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SOPA and PIPA So Far
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· Score: 5, Insightful
That's because every other congressman sucks, but mine. It's those other assholes that are bringing it down./sarcasm
I completely agree with you. There is no reason for girls to do worse than boys in any subject. the point that I was trying to make was in part that there is a bias that almost may be self fulfilling. I was just iterating one possible scenario of why there is a discrepancy of females in science and engineering. (read my first paragraph again).
I would argue that SAT scores are a bit different in that you are just another number when they accumulate these results and are therefore anonymous. However, when you are in a classroom environment you loose that anonymity, so you can either play dumb or be smart. It would depend on the person if they are strong enough to choose which path to take.
Part of the reason that I even brought this up was a bit of anecdotal data point. I had a cousin who at one point had said to my mom (an electrical engineer, btw) that "girls are not good at math" while she was either Jr high or Sr high. My cousin had to learn that from somewhere because being good at math and science runs in that side of the family. Needless to say, my mom was upset with that mentality because it is a cop out and excuse to be intellectually lazy.
Now to your point of this being more of a SW specific issue, I would argue that there has always been a bit of gender bias in any field. I am sure you have heard of the term "the glass ceiling". Back on point to the algorithm vs. GUI type work you brought up. I think the bias goes both ways. From a male's perspective, they too have been brought up to believe that females are not as good at math/science, so it's not just females who are imprinted in this fashion. I don't agree with it, but such is life. I might even suggest that this is type of peer pressure too if your female classmates are being marginalized by the male classmates. Now if you are in a school or environment where you have not seen this bias occur, then I glad for you. It gives me hope for the future.
This just got me thinking a bit. While it is true that in industry that there are more men than women in SW engineering, EE, and ME. I almost wonder if it isn't a bit self fulfilling. Girls can be good at math and science, but when they get to a certain age I feel that they are discouraged from pursuing those types of careers. I would guess that most of that comes at young age from peer pressure of friends and the desire to be accepted by others in their 'formative years'. That is not to say that there aren't societal pressures too, but I don't think it's as important as the more localized pressure of friends and classmates.
Because of this desire to fit in or be accepted, they down play their intelligence and other innate gifts that might be considered abnormal to their friends. I would think that a school like this could be helpful to attracting girls who are interested in math and science (I know the article is for SW, but I am being more general) but not feel pressured to play dumb to appease their friends. In an environment with other like-minded individuals, you give the person more of a chance to be themselves.
One other factor to the gender imbalance that I thought of is that most girls probably don't have a good female role model that is any of these fields. I envision it playing out something like this. Girl is good in math/science. Girl gets picked on/teased for being smart. Girl has no parent/role model to provide support for being smart. Girl succumbs to peer pressure to play 'dumb' in math/science. Girl looses interest in math/science.
I was with you until you said, in effect, that our teachers are uneducated. In every public school that I have heard of in the US, you still need at least a bachelor's degree. Now while I was in college I did take a senior level complex analysis class that was filled mostly with math/education majors, and while I couldn't help but chuckle at listening to them whine about how hard the teacher's tests were*, they were at least able to finish college and that alone makes them a step above most people in the US.
This not to say that we can't do better. Take me for example. I would have no problems teaching. I enjoy it. While in undergrad I was a teachers assistant for calc 2 and I liked it. Another bonus to being a teacher in the US is that you do get a nice vacation in the summer, ideally. However there are a few good reasons not to be a teacher in the US.
1. Pay: In general, pay is not as good as I can make in the private sector. Granted, in the Chicago suburbs, teacher pay is on par with what I make, but from what I can tell that is the exception and not the rule
2. Dealing with parents: Parents don't want to hear that their child is just average or worse. So you can just take the easy route and not deal with it by giving decent grades.
3. School administrators: I have a friend who's wife was a music teacher in one of the local school districts. He would tell me horror stories about the superintendent that his wife worked for. If he didn't like you or if you upset him in some fashion, he would have no problems removing you from your position.
4. No respect from community: Typically, us normal 9-5 working stiffs see teachers as having the good life. I mean after all, they have summers off! Because of this, it makes them easy targets for budget cuts. Now the teachers around here unionized, but one just needs to look at Wisconsin in the past year to see what some people think about unions. Some people see it as a shelter to hide incompetent workers, but I see it as a protection from knee jerk reactions of the people, school administrators, and legislative bodies.
I am sure there are more reasons, but these are the few that come to mind. In practice though, I think that I would be a good candidate for teaching. I am passionate about math and science. I have been told that I explained things very well when I was a TA. I would also like to think that having some real world experience would help to enlighten kids as to how and why math is useful, assuming I become a math teacher. Or similarly if I became a physics teacher.
*I had just finished my undergrad EE degree and was in grad school at the time, so this senior level course was pretty easy comparatively to most of the other classes that I had taken previously
Time to commiserate. I too am a degree carrying EE and I went to grad school specializing in electromagnetics, but I feel like I am pretty much in the same boat as you. While I started off as an RF circuit designer, I have since gone and done jobs that are mostly programming and algorithm oriented (since 2008). While I have been fortunate enough to not have been unemployed at all (finished all schooling in Dec 2004, started first job in Jan 2005), I have been looking for embedded programming/DSP jobs for the past 4 months and have not had much luck. I certainly try to emphasize my programming and DSP aspects of my experience, but I don't have the "exact" experience they are looking for.
My favorite rejection so far was for an embedded SW position that required hydraulics knowledge, which was under the "required" portion for experience. I didn't get the job because of this part of the requirements. Never mind that I pretty much all of the other experience they were looking for, and that not many SW people also have had much hydraulics experience, or that hydraulics is an easy enough concept to probably allow for that to be learned through OJT. Sigh!
tl;dr version: I agree with your assessment. I think that there are too many people applying for the same positions which allow companies to be very selective on who they can bring on, even though I know that I am a better programmer than some of the SW engineers I work with. My current title and previous positions just don't give me a chance to change career paths.
So here is the quick and dirty on how the US government works. There are 3 main branches: Executive (President, VP, Sec. of State), the Legislative, and the Judicial (supreme court). The constitution so that in effect all 3 branches should have about equal powers, and that each branch would have some checks and balances over the other two.
As an example, the legislature vote on a bill. At its most basic, it has to pass each house by a simple majority (ignoring BS like filibusters and other procedural tactics). The president has two options on this bill that is available to him (his check on congress). He can sign it and it becomes law or he can veto it. Now congress can do one of a few things. They can vote on it again, but it will take 2/3s of congress to override the president's veto and it will still become law. they can also rewrite the bill or just let it die. The supreme court in all of this says whether the bill is constitutional or not. This is the judicial branches check on the two other houses. Now if the supreme court declares something unconstitutional, then there is an opportunity for the constitution to be amended, which is a bit more complicated, but once the amendment is passed, then the supreme court cannot override it, since it is now part of the constitution.
Dizzying, I know. But on paper it should work pretty well. No one branch should be no more powerful than the other, thus avoiding tyranny (in theory). Now back when politicians decided to make a career of being a politician, the realized that there are no constraints on single issue bills. So you might have a bill that would say something like "this bill provide funding for textbooks for children", but buried deeper in the bill it will also have pork spending for "the bridge to nowhere". It's like a trap. Do you vote against the bill to stop wasteful spending, only to be accused of hating children (after all you voted against a bill that provided text books for children, and thus reducing your chance to be re-elected)? Or do you just say fsck it and vote for both the pork and the childrens' textbooks. I think most people vote for the latter. This is also in part why it might appear that many votes of the party's are not strictly along party lines, without getting into even more detail than I already have.
While not entirely true, I believe that the Ctizens United case (ie. "people are corporations") says that corporations are allowed to give unlimited funds to political organizations (like Super PACs) and not have to disclose how much and to whom they are giving the money. Contributions to Individual campaign however do not follow under this rule, IIRC. This is in part why you only hear about the super PACs for the individual candidates making any commercials than the candidates themselves.
I think most recently, Gingrich was trying to take down Romney about his Super PAC. The rules for Super PACs are that they cannot coordinate with the candidate that they are supporting. However if you look at Romney's main Super PAC, it is filled with people that were heavily involved with his campaigns just prior to its formation. Gingrich is suspect that he is in violation of the 'no coordination' aspect of the requirements for Super PACs.
As a side note, you should check out The Colbert Report episodes which feature his Super PAC. In particular, look for the episodes featuring Trevor Potter (this is his lawyer for his Super PAC, and has the episodes tagged with his name). They have been the most informative in showing what the true power and absurdity of the idea of Super PACs. I laugh, but deep down part of me dies when I see what power these Super PACs have.
I think apathetic would be a bit of an understatement. But have you seen who the Republicans are putting up? You run the gambit from crazy (Bachman, who is now out), homophobic (Santorum) to sleazy politicians that you know are just slimy (Romney, Perry).
Admittedly, I wouldn't mind someone who is more like Huntsman (the only one that I know of who actually supported scientists during one of the debates), or even Buddy Roemer (after seeing him on the Colbert Report who is at least showing some principle by not taking money from Super PACs and limiting individual contributions to $100). Now these two who might actually be sane and good for the country have no chance in winning the Republican nomination because they don't pander to the crazy.
Then let's look at Obama. He is pretty much right of center, and he is supposedly for the part that is from the left. It humors me to no end how people from the right actually think that he is 'socialist'. He might talk like he is from the left, but his actions have shown otherwise.
And yet one of these guys is going to be the next president. Pardon me while I don't get excited about my options.
As someone who has been on an AWACS doing parabolics ( I know, it's not as sexy as an F-16, but it is still jet), I would say that even lifting your arms without an additional 40lbs is unusual and not exactly easy. Now admittedly, I was a civilian contractor on the plane but I would say that I was in pretty good shape at the time. I was no where near in shape compared to your average person in the military is, but I wasn't a couch potato either. I would estimate that I was close to 2G of force, but this is a WAG. considering your average F-16 can get to 8G pretty easily, I don't even want to imagine what it would be like in that state to move your body to find this small ring that they are talking about and then have to apply 40 lbs of force to actuate it all while under an oxygen deprived state.
The thing is, you don't need to know what encryption is being used to jam a radio signal. All you would need to do is know what frequencies the drone is receiving its command signals on and blast it with noise such that the noise power of the jammer is greater than their transmitted power.
Now I am sure that the drone is using some sort of frequency hopping, very narrow IF filters, as well as error code corrections to minimize the impact of broadband noise jamming like this, and this is where some intel would be beneficial for the jammer designer but it is not required. If the noise is more powerful than the signal, then none of fixes mentioned above will help. Oh, and all of this should be easily in the grasp of capabilities of anyone who knows anything about RF and radio design.
Sure. I vote we get Germany's government for number one pick. As an outside observer, here is why I would recruit them. They still are a net exporter of goods/services. Their budget appears to be running a surplus. They still have a decent manufacturing sector (ie. they haven't sold them out entirely to China, Mexico, etc.). They have low unemployment when compared to the US. Their GDP is growing > 3%. Their inflation is low at about 1.3%. I guess the downside is that their taxes are a bit higher.
There's truth to the observation that in the modern Republican party, Reagan would be derided as a tax and spend socialist hippie.
Which is funny considering during one of the first Republican debates, they answered the questions asked of them in such a way that allowed the candidates to compare their policies to Reagan. The irony is laughable.
I agree, but with the amount of money that we are talking about in these contracts makes compliance a less risky proposition. One of the possible side effects of being found guilty of fraudulently billing the government is the denial of bidding on future contracts for some amount of time (usually measured in years). If say over 90% of your business is from the Federal Government contracts, I would say it is in the company's best interest to be compliant.
I spend many unpaid hours improving products, no charge to the government
And this would probably be illegal. Government contracts require [1] that all work done on a job is billed appropriately. If you are not reporting your time properly, then your employer can loose their ability to contract and bill the Government. I too worked for a DOD contractor, and I swear that at least once or twice a week we would get clarification on how to fill in our time card. They were paranoid about this stuff.
Additionally, as a taxpayer, I want DOD contractor to have proof of the actual amount of work required to complete certain projects. That way, when bidding for new work, there is a valid barometer for the government to make valid comparisons between contractors when awarding the contract. For example, suppose that the government has 20 million to develop a new system on an aircraft. Suppose contractor A said it would take 2 years develop, and they would require 16 million to complete the job. Company A has kept an accurate record of their time card practices and has a history of no significant overruns. Now company B says that they can complete the project in one year and do so for 10 million. However company B does not have good time keeping practices, but they still bid the contract based on their actauls from previous programs, so they aren't intentionally underbidding the time required, they are just basing it on bad baseline data. On paper, most people would choose B if the only requirements were cost and time to complete (and all other factors ignored). Realistically though, company B will take as long as company A (assuming similar design process and manpower) and they would probably end up costing the government more that company A. (10 mill * 2years = 20 million > 16 million of company A).
[1] I say probably illegal, because when I first started working for the contractor, it was policy that if you worked between 40 and 45 hours, those were on your time and you were not to fill in those hours on our time card. They changed it since. How this worked with the Government requirements for billing them, I am not sure but this is why we had a staff lawyer on site to figure this stuff out.
In a submarine, your vehicle is under huge pressures and a small leak could turn catastrophic due to high pressure water streams coming through into the ship
My memory is a little hazy on the specifics, but I will share this too. Every now and then, the boat would send some people over to the flooding trainer. they covered the basics on how to apply various flood stoppage techniques. If I recall correctly, they certainly didn't recommend putting your hand/body into any fluid streams. I think the primary concern was so much that you would have a liquid laser in the case of a fine stream, similar to what happens when you put your thumb over a hose, but more that if you had anything in your hand that would then get knocked out and then become a fast moving projectile.
This was particularly true for one technique that was used to stop a rupture from a pipe. If the hole/gash in pipe as the right size, then they had these curved metal pieces with rubber on one side that would match the contour of the pipe. The idea is then to put this piece of metal across the pipe, apply pressure , which then would be sealed by the rubber. It was amazing at how effective it was in stopping the leaks in the simulator. The problem being, if you did this wrong, this would be a lethal projectile. The idea was to then pre-secure this metal patch a few inches away from the pipe with some metal banding and then inch it down the pipe until it covered the hole. Then the final compression was applied to the metal banding. When everything was done, you would hardly know there was a leak there.
All in all, I thought this was the best, funnest, and most practical training that I think I have ever had. Granted, if this was happening while I was on the boat in a real situation I would probably not find it so fun, but I wouldn't be useless either on what to do if needed.
While slightly anecdotal, I was a submariner. If we ever were to have severe flooding, we would be going down to never return in all likelihood. Fortunately there are varying degrees of flooding, However I recognize space is not as forgiving. Now this certainly is a small case of comparing apples to oranges, there are still some similarities. You're locked in a tube and there is no way out, and if you do find a way out, you are probably hosed anyway. People always ask me how did I coped with being on a sub, and didn't it make you claustrophobic . I answer honestly and say that I didn't think about it and that it didn't bother me. It was actually kind of enjoyable and cool. I imagine that there are other people like me who would have a similar attitude about being in a space vessel.
I somewhat agree. One might be able to argue that it could be worse psychologically too. In that I mean that the participants still know that they are on earth, so why do I need to wait 6 minutes (guessing at a time delta here...) to get a response from 'earth' when I know that it shouldn't take that long. It could make a play on the frustration aspect of human psychology. If I were in space, I would just know that it's a limitation of radio waves being limited to the speed of light. On earth, it's just make believe.
While I'm not the person you were responding to (nor am I hiring anyone or an expert in resumes), but if you are submitting a resume that is scaring potential employers off, you're doing it wrong.
I feel that I have done this. I have put the team player angle in there. I have put what experience I have had doing SW and some embedded SW in there too. I have had a few calls from HR, but I seem to get hung up between the HR and Technical Manager hand off [1]. The question that I am getting most recently is whether I have done any driver development, which I haven't. Or another is, have you had experience with this microcontroller? My thoughts are, who cares. Whatever assembly instruction set I learned is probably not what they are using, but I have programmed in assembly before which to me is what should matter. I think it just might be the location that I am looking for work is that the companies can be rather picky.
[1] My favorite rejection from an HR rep was for a manufacturer of heavy machinery (a competitor to John Deere). They were looking for an embedded SW developer. I pretty much fit everything on their 'requirements' portion and even a good number of the 'would like to haves'. The one required field that I was missing was 'experience with hydraulics'. The HR person could not forward my resume to any of the hiring managers because I didn't have that experience. I just shook my head. Of all the requirements to be lenient on, I would think that would be the one. It's fucking hydraulics! The ancient Greeks learned about this stuff. Give me a book and in a week I will be a hydraulics expert. (I am not afraid of the math either. My masters was in electromagnetics, which is fluid systems for EEs).
While I don't have any Packt books, the books that I have received from Wrox have been pretty good. In fact my "go to" book for C++ was by Ivor Horton and was published by Wrox (I think it was published around 2000). He pretty much left no stone unturned, had some pretty good tips & tricks, covered plenty of gotchas, and did a good job of explaining it all. I also picked up a book on Access that was pretty good too. Maybe you have just had some bad books or maybe I just got lucky.
But along similar lines of the original poster, I am looking for a new job, but might be in a similar quandary. I am an EE (about 7 years out of school with an MS) with a background primarily in RF. However, I pretty much program every day at my current job. And the programming that I do is primarily numeric/algorithmic in nature. The tools I use are Matlab, and if that is too slow, then I use either my own Java or C++ libraries. Lately it has been mostly Java if I do this, since it has a mature and easy to use multi-threading API.
The jobs that I am looking for would be along the embedded SW development lines, since it is a good hybrid of SW and HW. However, I think that people are scared of my resume to take me on because of the RF and circuit design background. Since in you previous post you mentioned you hired (or at least was involved in the hiring process) a Mechanical Eng in what appears to be a SW development/requirements position, do you have any pointers for me, or others like me, that are trying to make a change in seemingly orthogonal fields?
Slashdot Mirror
Along similar lines, I bought a PS3 several years after the initial release. I think that I have only paid for one new release out of the 15 games or so that I have. Everything else I have bought has either been used or already a 'Greatest Hits' release, so I pretty much never pay the full price. I imagine if they went to this model of no resale, then there would be several other people like me who would wait until the prices dropped before buying.
Then let me put it into terms that you might more easily understand. It would result in theft of the other non informed players in the game because of the existing arbitrage. This is why insider trading rules exist. You really do see this, right?
I see what you mean about any regulation as being non-free market, but you are taking it to an irrational extreme. You really don't make it sound rational when you equate regulation or government interference as theft. The logical conclusion of a system which allows insider trading would be that others are discourage from investing. Why would I put my money in company X if I know that the people inside of said company are just going to fleece me through less than dubious means by using, for example, insider trading? Look past your dogma for a minute. Sheesh.
This affects things such as rational pricing of goods, as well as supply and demand. Insider trading is also a momentary arbitrage. While there is nothing inherently wrong with arbitrage, those privy to the information are those that get to take advantage of it while the non-informed parties will suffer. This is not conducive to a true free market.
Um, what? The people that get to sell first will not be impacted by the mass sell off of the others. The insider trading restriction allows for all parties to have the opportunity to sell when the news is released. Insider trading is almost the opposite of a free market. In a free market, all parties make decisions based on all information available and is assumed to be perfect. If there are a select few that have more information than others, then this violates this assumption.
Here is a description that I received that finally made FFT/DFT click for me. I hope it helps you too. First of all, an FFT is just a subset of computation for the DFT, so they really compute the same things. It's just that one is faster than the other. Now look at the formal definition of the fourier transform. It is the integral of your time (or spacial, but I will use time) function times e^(j2*pi*f*t) over time, The exponent is nothing more than a rotating phasor as a function of time at frequency of f. Now choose a single frequency (say 60 Hz). this phasor rotates at this rate. Now the integral is over time, so in the span of one second, the phasor will rotate 60 time (obvious i know, but work with me here). If there is a component of the time signal of interest that resonates with 60 Hz, the integral acts as a way to sum up all of these values that are in resonance which then results in a peak at 60 Hz. If there are no 60 Hz components in the time signal (say there is one at 75 Hz instead), the 60 Hz phasor will not have a peak since phasors at 60 Hz are orthogonal to 75 Hz sinusoids (sin(n*2*pi*t*f)*sin(m*2*pi*f*t) = 0 for m != n).
So in summary, the exponential phasor term is just a means to weight the time signal across all frequencies. I hope this helps.
In a somewhat serious answer to the OP rather than the snarky one that I gave. My two senators are Dick Durbin and Mark Kirk. While Durbin may be in bed with all of the special interests that plague Washington, he has actually done some good for someone that I know. His office help with some immigration issues that my friend was having with his fiancee. She was stopped at customs in O'Hare and was sent back to Poland immediately. My friend petitioned Durbin to help and he actually came through. His fiance was allowed into the country with his help.
Now while I am not in particular fond of congress in general, especially in regards to things like SOPA and PIPA, they do actually help the people they represent. In the case I illustrated above is a case where I don't mind them. Heck, stuff like that should be their primary goal.
Back to the intent of my original post, I was just commenting on why incumbency is so high. People always think that their representation is fine, but it's everyone else that sucks. But I am with you. In general I try to vote out incumbents. Otherwise they get too comfortable, and if they are there too long, they stop representing the people that elected them in because of this incumbency effect.
That's because every other congressman sucks, but mine. It's those other assholes that are bringing it down. /sarcasm
I completely agree with you. There is no reason for girls to do worse than boys in any subject. the point that I was trying to make was in part that there is a bias that almost may be self fulfilling. I was just iterating one possible scenario of why there is a discrepancy of females in science and engineering. (read my first paragraph again).
I would argue that SAT scores are a bit different in that you are just another number when they accumulate these results and are therefore anonymous. However, when you are in a classroom environment you loose that anonymity, so you can either play dumb or be smart. It would depend on the person if they are strong enough to choose which path to take.
Part of the reason that I even brought this up was a bit of anecdotal data point. I had a cousin who at one point had said to my mom (an electrical engineer, btw) that "girls are not good at math" while she was either Jr high or Sr high. My cousin had to learn that from somewhere because being good at math and science runs in that side of the family. Needless to say, my mom was upset with that mentality because it is a cop out and excuse to be intellectually lazy.
Now to your point of this being more of a SW specific issue, I would argue that there has always been a bit of gender bias in any field. I am sure you have heard of the term "the glass ceiling". Back on point to the algorithm vs. GUI type work you brought up. I think the bias goes both ways. From a male's perspective, they too have been brought up to believe that females are not as good at math/science, so it's not just females who are imprinted in this fashion. I don't agree with it, but such is life. I might even suggest that this is type of peer pressure too if your female classmates are being marginalized by the male classmates. Now if you are in a school or environment where you have not seen this bias occur, then I glad for you. It gives me hope for the future.
This just got me thinking a bit. While it is true that in industry that there are more men than women in SW engineering, EE, and ME. I almost wonder if it isn't a bit self fulfilling. Girls can be good at math and science, but when they get to a certain age I feel that they are discouraged from pursuing those types of careers. I would guess that most of that comes at young age from peer pressure of friends and the desire to be accepted by others in their 'formative years'. That is not to say that there aren't societal pressures too, but I don't think it's as important as the more localized pressure of friends and classmates.
Because of this desire to fit in or be accepted, they down play their intelligence and other innate gifts that might be considered abnormal to their friends. I would think that a school like this could be helpful to attracting girls who are interested in math and science (I know the article is for SW, but I am being more general) but not feel pressured to play dumb to appease their friends. In an environment with other like-minded individuals, you give the person more of a chance to be themselves.
One other factor to the gender imbalance that I thought of is that most girls probably don't have a good female role model that is any of these fields. I envision it playing out something like this. Girl is good in math/science. Girl gets picked on/teased for being smart. Girl has no parent/role model to provide support for being smart. Girl succumbs to peer pressure to play 'dumb' in math/science. Girl looses interest in math/science.
I was with you until you said, in effect, that our teachers are uneducated. In every public school that I have heard of in the US, you still need at least a bachelor's degree. Now while I was in college I did take a senior level complex analysis class that was filled mostly with math/education majors, and while I couldn't help but chuckle at listening to them whine about how hard the teacher's tests were*, they were at least able to finish college and that alone makes them a step above most people in the US.
This not to say that we can't do better. Take me for example. I would have no problems teaching. I enjoy it. While in undergrad I was a teachers assistant for calc 2 and I liked it. Another bonus to being a teacher in the US is that you do get a nice vacation in the summer, ideally. However there are a few good reasons not to be a teacher in the US.
1. Pay: In general, pay is not as good as I can make in the private sector. Granted, in the Chicago suburbs, teacher pay is on par with what I make, but from what I can tell that is the exception and not the rule
2. Dealing with parents: Parents don't want to hear that their child is just average or worse. So you can just take the easy route and not deal with it by giving decent grades.
3. School administrators: I have a friend who's wife was a music teacher in one of the local school districts. He would tell me horror stories about the superintendent that his wife worked for. If he didn't like you or if you upset him in some fashion, he would have no problems removing you from your position.
4. No respect from community: Typically, us normal 9-5 working stiffs see teachers as having the good life. I mean after all, they have summers off! Because of this, it makes them easy targets for budget cuts. Now the teachers around here unionized, but one just needs to look at Wisconsin in the past year to see what some people think about unions. Some people see it as a shelter to hide incompetent workers, but I see it as a protection from knee jerk reactions of the people, school administrators, and legislative bodies.
I am sure there are more reasons, but these are the few that come to mind. In practice though, I think that I would be a good candidate for teaching. I am passionate about math and science. I have been told that I explained things very well when I was a TA. I would also like to think that having some real world experience would help to enlighten kids as to how and why math is useful, assuming I become a math teacher. Or similarly if I became a physics teacher.
*I had just finished my undergrad EE degree and was in grad school at the time, so this senior level course was pretty easy comparatively to most of the other classes that I had taken previously
Time to commiserate. I too am a degree carrying EE and I went to grad school specializing in electromagnetics, but I feel like I am pretty much in the same boat as you. While I started off as an RF circuit designer, I have since gone and done jobs that are mostly programming and algorithm oriented (since 2008). While I have been fortunate enough to not have been unemployed at all (finished all schooling in Dec 2004, started first job in Jan 2005), I have been looking for embedded programming/DSP jobs for the past 4 months and have not had much luck. I certainly try to emphasize my programming and DSP aspects of my experience, but I don't have the "exact" experience they are looking for.
My favorite rejection so far was for an embedded SW position that required hydraulics knowledge, which was under the "required" portion for experience. I didn't get the job because of this part of the requirements. Never mind that I pretty much all of the other experience they were looking for, and that not many SW people also have had much hydraulics experience, or that hydraulics is an easy enough concept to probably allow for that to be learned through OJT. Sigh!
tl;dr version: I agree with your assessment. I think that there are too many people applying for the same positions which allow companies to be very selective on who they can bring on, even though I know that I am a better programmer than some of the SW engineers I work with. My current title and previous positions just don't give me a chance to change career paths.
So here is the quick and dirty on how the US government works. There are 3 main branches: Executive (President, VP, Sec. of State), the Legislative, and the Judicial (supreme court). The constitution so that in effect all 3 branches should have about equal powers, and that each branch would have some checks and balances over the other two.
As an example, the legislature vote on a bill. At its most basic, it has to pass each house by a simple majority (ignoring BS like filibusters and other procedural tactics). The president has two options on this bill that is available to him (his check on congress). He can sign it and it becomes law or he can veto it. Now congress can do one of a few things. They can vote on it again, but it will take 2/3s of congress to override the president's veto and it will still become law. they can also rewrite the bill or just let it die. The supreme court in all of this says whether the bill is constitutional or not. This is the judicial branches check on the two other houses. Now if the supreme court declares something unconstitutional, then there is an opportunity for the constitution to be amended, which is a bit more complicated, but once the amendment is passed, then the supreme court cannot override it, since it is now part of the constitution.
Dizzying, I know. But on paper it should work pretty well. No one branch should be no more powerful than the other, thus avoiding tyranny (in theory). Now back when politicians decided to make a career of being a politician, the realized that there are no constraints on single issue bills. So you might have a bill that would say something like "this bill provide funding for textbooks for children", but buried deeper in the bill it will also have pork spending for "the bridge to nowhere". It's like a trap. Do you vote against the bill to stop wasteful spending, only to be accused of hating children (after all you voted against a bill that provided text books for children, and thus reducing your chance to be re-elected)? Or do you just say fsck it and vote for both the pork and the childrens' textbooks. I think most people vote for the latter. This is also in part why it might appear that many votes of the party's are not strictly along party lines, without getting into even more detail than I already have.
While not entirely true, I believe that the Ctizens United case (ie. "people are corporations") says that corporations are allowed to give unlimited funds to political organizations (like Super PACs) and not have to disclose how much and to whom they are giving the money. Contributions to Individual campaign however do not follow under this rule, IIRC. This is in part why you only hear about the super PACs for the individual candidates making any commercials than the candidates themselves.
I think most recently, Gingrich was trying to take down Romney about his Super PAC. The rules for Super PACs are that they cannot coordinate with the candidate that they are supporting. However if you look at Romney's main Super PAC, it is filled with people that were heavily involved with his campaigns just prior to its formation. Gingrich is suspect that he is in violation of the 'no coordination' aspect of the requirements for Super PACs.
As a side note, you should check out The Colbert Report episodes which feature his Super PAC. In particular, look for the episodes featuring Trevor Potter (this is his lawyer for his Super PAC, and has the episodes tagged with his name). They have been the most informative in showing what the true power and absurdity of the idea of Super PACs. I laugh, but deep down part of me dies when I see what power these Super PACs have.
I think apathetic would be a bit of an understatement. But have you seen who the Republicans are putting up? You run the gambit from crazy (Bachman, who is now out), homophobic (Santorum) to sleazy politicians that you know are just slimy (Romney, Perry).
Admittedly, I wouldn't mind someone who is more like Huntsman (the only one that I know of who actually supported scientists during one of the debates), or even Buddy Roemer (after seeing him on the Colbert Report who is at least showing some principle by not taking money from Super PACs and limiting individual contributions to $100). Now these two who might actually be sane and good for the country have no chance in winning the Republican nomination because they don't pander to the crazy.
Then let's look at Obama. He is pretty much right of center, and he is supposedly for the part that is from the left. It humors me to no end how people from the right actually think that he is 'socialist'. He might talk like he is from the left, but his actions have shown otherwise.
And yet one of these guys is going to be the next president. Pardon me while I don't get excited about my options.
As someone who has been on an AWACS doing parabolics ( I know, it's not as sexy as an F-16, but it is still jet), I would say that even lifting your arms without an additional 40lbs is unusual and not exactly easy. Now admittedly, I was a civilian contractor on the plane but I would say that I was in pretty good shape at the time. I was no where near in shape compared to your average person in the military is, but I wasn't a couch potato either. I would estimate that I was close to 2G of force, but this is a WAG. considering your average F-16 can get to 8G pretty easily, I don't even want to imagine what it would be like in that state to move your body to find this small ring that they are talking about and then have to apply 40 lbs of force to actuate it all while under an oxygen deprived state.
The thing is, you don't need to know what encryption is being used to jam a radio signal. All you would need to do is know what frequencies the drone is receiving its command signals on and blast it with noise such that the noise power of the jammer is greater than their transmitted power.
Now I am sure that the drone is using some sort of frequency hopping, very narrow IF filters, as well as error code corrections to minimize the impact of broadband noise jamming like this, and this is where some intel would be beneficial for the jammer designer but it is not required. If the noise is more powerful than the signal, then none of fixes mentioned above will help. Oh, and all of this should be easily in the grasp of capabilities of anyone who knows anything about RF and radio design.
Sure. I vote we get Germany's government for number one pick. As an outside observer, here is why I would recruit them. They still are a net exporter of goods/services. Their budget appears to be running a surplus. They still have a decent manufacturing sector (ie. they haven't sold them out entirely to China, Mexico, etc.). They have low unemployment when compared to the US. Their GDP is growing > 3%. Their inflation is low at about 1.3%. I guess the downside is that their taxes are a bit higher.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Germany
Which is funny considering during one of the first Republican debates, they answered the questions asked of them in such a way that allowed the candidates to compare their policies to Reagan. The irony is laughable.
I agree, but with the amount of money that we are talking about in these contracts makes compliance a less risky proposition. One of the possible side effects of being found guilty of fraudulently billing the government is the denial of bidding on future contracts for some amount of time (usually measured in years). If say over 90% of your business is from the Federal Government contracts, I would say it is in the company's best interest to be compliant.
And this would probably be illegal. Government contracts require [1] that all work done on a job is billed appropriately. If you are not reporting your time properly, then your employer can loose their ability to contract and bill the Government. I too worked for a DOD contractor, and I swear that at least once or twice a week we would get clarification on how to fill in our time card. They were paranoid about this stuff.
Additionally, as a taxpayer, I want DOD contractor to have proof of the actual amount of work required to complete certain projects. That way, when bidding for new work, there is a valid barometer for the government to make valid comparisons between contractors when awarding the contract. For example, suppose that the government has 20 million to develop a new system on an aircraft. Suppose contractor A said it would take 2 years develop, and they would require 16 million to complete the job. Company A has kept an accurate record of their time card practices and has a history of no significant overruns. Now company B says that they can complete the project in one year and do so for 10 million. However company B does not have good time keeping practices, but they still bid the contract based on their actauls from previous programs, so they aren't intentionally underbidding the time required, they are just basing it on bad baseline data. On paper, most people would choose B if the only requirements were cost and time to complete (and all other factors ignored). Realistically though, company B will take as long as company A (assuming similar design process and manpower) and they would probably end up costing the government more that company A. (10 mill * 2years = 20 million > 16 million of company A).
[1] I say probably illegal, because when I first started working for the contractor, it was policy that if you worked between 40 and 45 hours, those were on your time and you were not to fill in those hours on our time card. They changed it since. How this worked with the Government requirements for billing them, I am not sure but this is why we had a staff lawyer on site to figure this stuff out.
My memory is a little hazy on the specifics, but I will share this too. Every now and then, the boat would send some people over to the flooding trainer. they covered the basics on how to apply various flood stoppage techniques. If I recall correctly, they certainly didn't recommend putting your hand/body into any fluid streams. I think the primary concern was so much that you would have a liquid laser in the case of a fine stream, similar to what happens when you put your thumb over a hose, but more that if you had anything in your hand that would then get knocked out and then become a fast moving projectile.
This was particularly true for one technique that was used to stop a rupture from a pipe. If the hole/gash in pipe as the right size, then they had these curved metal pieces with rubber on one side that would match the contour of the pipe. The idea is then to put this piece of metal across the pipe, apply pressure , which then would be sealed by the rubber. It was amazing at how effective it was in stopping the leaks in the simulator. The problem being, if you did this wrong, this would be a lethal projectile. The idea was to then pre-secure this metal patch a few inches away from the pipe with some metal banding and then inch it down the pipe until it covered the hole. Then the final compression was applied to the metal banding. When everything was done, you would hardly know there was a leak there.
All in all, I thought this was the best, funnest, and most practical training that I think I have ever had. Granted, if this was happening while I was on the boat in a real situation I would probably not find it so fun, but I wouldn't be useless either on what to do if needed.
While slightly anecdotal, I was a submariner. If we ever were to have severe flooding, we would be going down to never return in all likelihood. Fortunately there are varying degrees of flooding, However I recognize space is not as forgiving. Now this certainly is a small case of comparing apples to oranges, there are still some similarities. You're locked in a tube and there is no way out, and if you do find a way out, you are probably hosed anyway. People always ask me how did I coped with being on a sub, and didn't it make you claustrophobic . I answer honestly and say that I didn't think about it and that it didn't bother me. It was actually kind of enjoyable and cool. I imagine that there are other people like me who would have a similar attitude about being in a space vessel.
I somewhat agree. One might be able to argue that it could be worse psychologically too. In that I mean that the participants still know that they are on earth, so why do I need to wait 6 minutes (guessing at a time delta here...) to get a response from 'earth' when I know that it shouldn't take that long. It could make a play on the frustration aspect of human psychology. If I were in space, I would just know that it's a limitation of radio waves being limited to the speed of light. On earth, it's just make believe.
Just playing devil's advocate here.
I feel that I have done this. I have put the team player angle in there. I have put what experience I have had doing SW and some embedded SW in there too. I have had a few calls from HR, but I seem to get hung up between the HR and Technical Manager hand off [1]. The question that I am getting most recently is whether I have done any driver development, which I haven't. Or another is, have you had experience with this microcontroller? My thoughts are, who cares. Whatever assembly instruction set I learned is probably not what they are using, but I have programmed in assembly before which to me is what should matter. I think it just might be the location that I am looking for work is that the companies can be rather picky.
[1] My favorite rejection from an HR rep was for a manufacturer of heavy machinery (a competitor to John Deere). They were looking for an embedded SW developer. I pretty much fit everything on their 'requirements' portion and even a good number of the 'would like to haves'. The one required field that I was missing was 'experience with hydraulics'. The HR person could not forward my resume to any of the hiring managers because I didn't have that experience. I just shook my head. Of all the requirements to be lenient on, I would think that would be the one. It's fucking hydraulics! The ancient Greeks learned about this stuff. Give me a book and in a week I will be a hydraulics expert. (I am not afraid of the math either. My masters was in electromagnetics, which is fluid systems for EEs).
While I don't have any Packt books, the books that I have received from Wrox have been pretty good. In fact my "go to" book for C++ was by Ivor Horton and was published by Wrox (I think it was published around 2000). He pretty much left no stone unturned, had some pretty good tips & tricks, covered plenty of gotchas, and did a good job of explaining it all. I also picked up a book on Access that was pretty good too. Maybe you have just had some bad books or maybe I just got lucky.
But along similar lines of the original poster, I am looking for a new job, but might be in a similar quandary. I am an EE (about 7 years out of school with an MS) with a background primarily in RF. However, I pretty much program every day at my current job. And the programming that I do is primarily numeric/algorithmic in nature. The tools I use are Matlab, and if that is too slow, then I use either my own Java or C++ libraries. Lately it has been mostly Java if I do this, since it has a mature and easy to use multi-threading API.
The jobs that I am looking for would be along the embedded SW development lines, since it is a good hybrid of SW and HW. However, I think that people are scared of my resume to take me on because of the RF and circuit design background. Since in you previous post you mentioned you hired (or at least was involved in the hiring process) a Mechanical Eng in what appears to be a SW development/requirements position, do you have any pointers for me, or others like me, that are trying to make a change in seemingly orthogonal fields?