If I ran a publicly traded company, I would require everyone to work for 1$ and only pay them the equivalent in non-voting stock as their salary
This is a horrible idea. I understand the intention, but I wholly disagree. Take for example Ford's stock. If you were working for them, in the span of a few months their stock price dropped from $17 to the current price of $13.15. I was as low as $12.70 a few days ago. that represents a change of 29%. Would you say that the employee's are working 29% less? How much of that has to do with external market forces (ie. hedge funds) shorting the crap out of your company to push the price lower.
You can even look to a few years ago in oil (or today for that matter) where the price was being artificially inflated since the commodities were a "safer" investment than other stocks. (I would read "safer" as a means to get decent short term gain on an investment).
The "buy and hold" idea of investing is a pretty much thing of the past. Your suggested means of compensation may be possible if buy and hold was the preferred means of investment. However, as long a people with billions of dollars can significantly impact stock prices at a moments notice, then you are almost foolish to adopt a buy and hold strategy since you will lose money quickly unless you are constantly monitoring your stock prices.
To support your scenario, I actually have anecdotal evidence and that would be the case of my maternal grandmother. It starts off similar to how you described it; she was an infant when she was brought into the US from Canada in the 20's. I guess my great grandparents didn't do any paper work to get her to become a citizen, which I imagine would be slightly in ignorance since they too were immigrants from Europe. So after having lived in the US for about 60 years, she finally found out she was an illegal alien when she applied for a passport. Once they found out, the INS gave her citizenship rather quickly. I think she still had to go through the formalities though.
Trust me when I say that I am not defending the actions of people who turn on red lights when they shouldn't. It irks me too when I see it. However, I do believe in due process. This is a convenient circumvention of due process to fill a city's coffers. Plus, as others have pointed out, traffic situations are not necessarily binary and not all intersections are equivalent. In particular, there is a red light camera posted on an intersection near me that is poorly set with a poorly designed intersection on top of. This particular intersection is blind if you are to turn right where the camera is. This is fine, however, the trigger for the camera is set to go off at the white, which again is not a problem. What is the problem is when you stop behind the line, as you are supposed to, you still cannot see oncoming traffic properly since it is about 10 feet behind where you would have good visibility to make the turn safely. So now you have to roll that extra 10 feet and stop again to make the turn safely.
This is essentially contrary to how people would normally approach this intersection that would not have a camera. You would normally roll and stop once you had a good assessment on if you could make the right turn safely. So while the city's intentions might be good, this intersection is a poor implementation. A real person at this corner (or any corner for that matter) could see what the driver's intent is.
Here is the link to the intersection. the camera is position on the road heading north to turn east. Notice how far back the cars are. What you can't see from the above angle is the houses on the SW corner have solid wooden fences that you can't see past, thereby making it a blind turn.
Usually you can't challenge until later. This is the problem with the cameras (at least where I live in Chicagoland). You are essentially guilty by default. They expect you to pay no matter what without a trial. You can appeal, however it is already after you have paid the ticket. I think that they get around the whole PITA 6th amendment thing because it is not a 'crime' per se, but rather an administrative issue when you are caught. If you choose not to pay the fine, then they will send bill collectors to try and collect against you until you pay the fine.
You're right. Designing a tickle me Elmo doll has no where near the requirements for EMI than an aircraft. I worked for a DOD contractor that installed equipment on aircraft. Pretty much all data lines that ran from say the cockpit to where the main hardware was located were differential and shielded, both of which help reduce radiated susceptibility and radiated emission of EMI. Additionally the cable bundles themselves were wrapped in shielding and grounded at both ends. While it did help with reducing EMI, sometimes the cables would pass in close proximity to other antennas and that could cause problems for both our equipment and that which was on the aircraft already. EMI is hard sometimes, even if done right.
Reminds me of when I took my electromagnetics class. The professor had brought his daughter's tickle me Elmo doll into class. I don't remember what device it was that he had, possibly it was his car's remote key entry system remote, but when he click one of the buttons, he was able to make the tickle me Elmo doll activate and start laughing. This would probably be one of you million to one examples, but I think the crux is the same. If someone doesn't design properly, or well for EMI, then stuff like this can happen that isn't supposed to.
Umm, China is officially communist. That little tidbit aside, I will paraphrase Jim Cramer. He says that we can learn a thing or two about capitalism from the Chinese. The leadership in China knows that by keeping labor costs low in addition to keeping their currency artificially low by fixing its value to the dollar, that it can export to many countries. It is part why it is so lucrative for US companies to export the labor and production there.
I think lately that China has allowed its currency's value to vary, but I think that it is still relatively low. Looking at google finance, the current exchange rate is 6.4 yuan to the dollar. This is possibly a double edged sword for them. Sure it allows their exports to look cheap. the down side is that imports are expensive. If any of the products they export are heavily dependent on imports, then this could be why Foxconn is suffering. Are the material required to make the electronic components heavily dependent on imports?
With the fed playing with things like quantitative easing, which reduces the value of the dollar, and with China fixing their value to the dollar, then This is really just helping China more on the relative cheapness of their exports. Although, I know most of Europe called foul and accused the US of doing the same thing as China with the whole QE fiasco. I don't blame Bernake though. I think he is just trying to get the US economy working again.
Re:expecting quality from the movie, you ask too m
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X-Men: First Class
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Between what you wrote and the previous person to reply to my post, I certainly don't remember much of these story details from when I read the book to when I watched the movies. Maybe I need to reread the books, but I would certainly loath reading the Two Towers again:)
I think I read the books around 1996, which was certainly enough time for some of the details to become lost between then and when the movies were released.
Re:expecting quality from the movie, you ask too m
on
X-Men: First Class
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· Score: 1
You seem pretty strong about how they messed up the books. Care to explain? I know that Tom Bombadil was left out of the fellowship of the ring, but his role was pretty small if I recall. In the big scheme of things, I thought they did a decent job. Hell, they made the Two Towers good, and when I read that I felt like this is the most boring s#!t in the world. Granted, it had been several years between me reading the books and watching the movies, so there are certainly plenty of the smaller details that I am missing. I should also add that I am thinking of the extended releases on DVD that almost pack an extra hour into each movie, so given more time they covered maybe some more details that you might have missed.
In a way I agree with you, but lets just look at the numbers. A password of n characters long of only lower case letters (in English) is 26^n possible combinations. Adding upper case then give 52^n combinations. If you were a code cracker, and knew in advanced that most people only used lower case letters, then why waste you time with upper case letters. Your code cracking program would take longer allowing for upper case letters. It a matter of low hanging fruit; non capitalized password code cracker will give you reasonable success rate at a shorter time that allowing for capitals.
It's not just the time that is ridiculous, but also the fact that it is a felony. A felony is a huge thing to be charged of. It means that you essentially lose your civil rights. You can't vote. Your chances of finding future work will certainly be more difficult, since after all you are a convicted felon.
Your story pretty much duplicates mine. I was in the Navy for 6 years. I didn't know what I wanted to do after high school, so instead of wasting my time and flunking out of a school that I was neither ready for, mature enough for, and couldn't afford, I figured I could save my money for college and use the GI Bill. I wasn't able to do much of the simple course work (English 101, social studies 101, etc.) while I was in the Navy, it is hard to try to go to a community college when you could be out to sea for 1 to 6 months at a time. Additionally, I don't think the school I went to would accept those classes that you could take a test for and get credit.
That being said, I enjoyed taking the basic classes again from a fresh perspective of someone who is really interested in learning. Especially as an engineering student, it was nice to take all of the calculus classes being taught formally and showing some of the fine points of the theory. It really helped when getting to my electrical engineering courses.
The university I went to did have more total credit hours required for engineering majors (128 vs 120 for non-engineering), which equates to about a half semester more if you average 15 credit hours per semester. However, the average engineering course was 3 credit hours, which means to stay on course you would need to take 5 engineering courses per semester. That would be self torture. Realistically, it would probably take about 5 years (10 semesters) to complete courses for engineering at this school and to be able to manage the course load and possibly have a part time job. I personally took summer classes over two summers to finish within 4 years.
I can't speak for 10 years ago, but Matlab is still slow when using 'for' loops. Just recently I was updating a grid search algorithm that was originally done in VBA. I originally ported it to Matlab using all of the vectorization tricks that were available, but I still needed for loops. For smaller data sets, it was tolerable but when our input data grew to a certain size, it would take over 70 minutes for the computation to complete (as a side note, this is with Matlab 2010b).
To speed up the computation, I at first just wrote a Java class to be called from Matlab. this showed considerable speed improvement when compared to the Matlab code. I then decided that I could multithread the application in Java for even more through put. In this particular machine, I have 12 cores, so I used 10 threads and reduced the computation from over 70 minutes to less than a minute by using a Java class plus Java's concurrent libraries.
Now, in general I prefer to code in Matlab, because you can do more with less lines of code, but there are certain times where strictly Matlab is not fast enough. What is nice with Matlab 2010b, ( I don't remember how far this capability goes back), you can seamlessly use Java.jar files and create Java objects in your Matlab code. As an added bonus, Matlab creates 'double' arrays by default for numeric values. This can be passed in directly as an argument to your method without casting types like you might need to when using a.dll file.
"70% unit coverage" means that your production code before being integrated should have touched at least 70% of the code. The complexity number is related to how many branching statements there are in a single function/program. You can look up how they compute it, but it involves basic graph theory. I have no idea what "pre-sprint grooming" is though.
My initial thought on why someone would propose this is that they are seeing a shortfall on taxes because people are either a) driving less, b) people are being responsible and driving more fuel efficient cars, or c) some combination of a and b. So if people say are buying about 10% less gas, then the state has 10% less revenue to fund projects that the tax money has been allocated for.
In part I would also think that the state has problems saving for a "rainy day". They maximize their expenditures for the money that they have now and don't project that their income could diminish. I cite Michigan as a case where the population is shrinking. I don't think their government has shrunk in proportion to the population (too lazy to verify right now).
As a solution though, I agree with you. Tax the type of vehicle instead of some ridiculous "pay per mile" scheme, which I feel is only there to punish people for buying efficient cars. Efficient cars should be a means to reducing the US's desire for foreign oil. If anything we should be subsidizing this behavior, but instead it looks like it is going to be punished.
If you've been here long enough (the US, that is), then I think you will see that this is not unknown. It certainly is one of my biggest gripes of the perverse relationship between the politicians and the press. It all has to do with what they call "access". If you're a reporter and you start asking tough questions of whom you are interviewing, you will lose access to other events that can be covered. Since the media companies are all in competition with one another, if their network/paper is not allowed into the event to cover it, then they will be losing out to the competition that has played nice and by their rules. I feel like this was a bigger issue when GWB was in office, but that's not to say that Obama hasn't learned from his predecessor.
Plus, when they finally do get asked a tough question, they usually ignore it. The 2008 VP debate between Palin and Biden comes to mind as a specific instance where Palin straight out said she wasn't going to answer the question by the moderator so that she could get her talking points out. To top it all off, I don't recall any media outlet even mention the blatant F. U. that she delivered from her actions to both the validity of these debates (which are nothing more than a talking point meeting) and the credibility of the media as a reliable source as an overseer of government (which in my opinion is one of the biggest reasons for having a free press).
And what is this about a dearth of funding? More money is allocated to the biomedical and health sector than any other branch of research.
While I can't confirm that they are the most funded, it certainly depends on what you are researching. Again, I use my wife as my anecdotal evidence. She is currently studying Legionella, which is a mere bacteria which if you are old or are immuno-compromised could cause you to develop Legionairs disease that is a type of respiratory disease. You may occasionally hear about this on your local news, but it doesn't get much press. Compare this to other things such as AIDS, Alzheimer's, cancer, etc, which are more "sexy" research topics. If you are researching those topics, where there is a more immediate need/desire for drugs and/or cures, then you will be well funded. If you are doing research on other bacteria/viruses, then it may be tougher to get funding.
But hey! I don't make the system, and my wife doesn't care for it either. I would classify what my wife as doing is general science improvement, which may not have an immediate benefit, but will improve the body of research on general topics that could be applied to more specific topics, such as those that I mentioned above. But I don't think that this is unique to just her field. I would say general research is down across all fields and not just in biomedical research. I think I just heard in the last few months that the NSF was getting some of its budget cut.
It's a line of study where a geek has an actual chance of landing a girlfriend!
This is true. When my wife first started grad school, she had many single female friends. And me being an engineer, had many single male friends. I did try to get some of my friends introduced to her friends since it can be difficult meeting people after college.
My wife is hoping to finish with her PhD from Northwestern (in Chicago and Evanston) this summer in microbiology. While she admits that she tolerates math, she is competent with it (if not a little rusty). However, I did find this interesting with the program that she is in, and how it differed from my own experience in grad school. Her university's curriculum was done in a way such that there was little flexibility on what courses she could take. I do not recall any course of higher math/statistics being offered or required. Additionally, they are only in class for the first two years. Everything after that is lab work. I am not sure she could take another class after this period if she wanted. The question I think here is whether the university is catering to the students (I hope not) by not making them take it, or if it was offered as an elective would they even be able to fill the class.
I am not arguing that statistics wouldn't be helpful. In fact I agree that there should be more. I think I have even heard of my wife complaining about the validity of some papers' statistical analysis. I just took point that generalizing scientists, and then females as being bad at math, which is just wrong.
Re:So is there a way to revert to the old layout y
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Firefox 4, A Day Later
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Yes. Right click on the '+' by the tabs. Deselect "Tabs on Top" and it should be back to normal.
Intersting points about the signs in the US vs the UK. I would think that while the green signs in the US aren't 'beautiful', it is pretty much universal across the country. I would think that in a place like the UK, where the buildings could be significantly older, the last thing that I would want to do is put a street sign on it. In other words, I would preserve the aesthetics of the old building and have a green sign on the corner instead.
The one instance I got lost in the UK, I was on a business trip with someone else and I was navigating and he was driving. We were going to a customer's site in Chester. The best we had to go by were some Google maps, that quickly became useless after we missed a turn, so the best we had to go by was a brochure type map and where they only show some of the main roads. Eventually we stumbled upon the place, but it wasn't easy.
As an American that has been to the UK (the apparent location of the authors) and has driven around with both a GPS and just a map, I will take the GPS hands down! The signage in a typical UK town is bad. You generally need to look at the buildings to find out what street you are on if you can spot it before you pass it. The roundabouts seem to tell you what town you are going to end up in if you take that particular road instead of what street that you are turning onto. Navigating with a map was painful!
Now it could just be because I am not used to it. I know that there are parts of the US (Maryland and NY come to mind) that I have been to that can be similarly difficult to navigate, but not to the level that I experienced in the UK. So I am curious if there are any Brits that have driven in the US and what their impressions were on driving here compared to the UK. Would you take GPS over a map also?
now I know it's early in the morning, and I haven't had my coffee yet, but how does selling 350K at $0.99 and 35% royalties = $500k? I could see 350k*.35 = $122k, which is still nice.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a horrible idea. I understand the intention, but I wholly disagree. Take for example Ford's stock. If you were working for them, in the span of a few months their stock price dropped from $17 to the current price of $13.15. I was as low as $12.70 a few days ago. that represents a change of 29%. Would you say that the employee's are working 29% less? How much of that has to do with external market forces (ie. hedge funds) shorting the crap out of your company to push the price lower.
You can even look to a few years ago in oil (or today for that matter) where the price was being artificially inflated since the commodities were a "safer" investment than other stocks. (I would read "safer" as a means to get decent short term gain on an investment).
The "buy and hold" idea of investing is a pretty much thing of the past. Your suggested means of compensation may be possible if buy and hold was the preferred means of investment. However, as long a people with billions of dollars can significantly impact stock prices at a moments notice, then you are almost foolish to adopt a buy and hold strategy since you will lose money quickly unless you are constantly monitoring your stock prices.
To support your scenario, I actually have anecdotal evidence and that would be the case of my maternal grandmother. It starts off similar to how you described it; she was an infant when she was brought into the US from Canada in the 20's. I guess my great grandparents didn't do any paper work to get her to become a citizen, which I imagine would be slightly in ignorance since they too were immigrants from Europe. So after having lived in the US for about 60 years, she finally found out she was an illegal alien when she applied for a passport. Once they found out, the INS gave her citizenship rather quickly. I think she still had to go through the formalities though.
Trust me when I say that I am not defending the actions of people who turn on red lights when they shouldn't. It irks me too when I see it. However, I do believe in due process. This is a convenient circumvention of due process to fill a city's coffers. Plus, as others have pointed out, traffic situations are not necessarily binary and not all intersections are equivalent. In particular, there is a red light camera posted on an intersection near me that is poorly set with a poorly designed intersection on top of. This particular intersection is blind if you are to turn right where the camera is. This is fine, however, the trigger for the camera is set to go off at the white, which again is not a problem. What is the problem is when you stop behind the line, as you are supposed to, you still cannot see oncoming traffic properly since it is about 10 feet behind where you would have good visibility to make the turn safely. So now you have to roll that extra 10 feet and stop again to make the turn safely.
This is essentially contrary to how people would normally approach this intersection that would not have a camera. You would normally roll and stop once you had a good assessment on if you could make the right turn safely. So while the city's intentions might be good, this intersection is a poor implementation. A real person at this corner (or any corner for that matter) could see what the driver's intent is.
Here is the link to the intersection. the camera is position on the road heading north to turn east. Notice how far back the cars are. What you can't see from the above angle is the houses on the SW corner have solid wooden fences that you can't see past, thereby making it a blind turn.
Usually you can't challenge until later. This is the problem with the cameras (at least where I live in Chicagoland). You are essentially guilty by default. They expect you to pay no matter what without a trial. You can appeal, however it is already after you have paid the ticket. I think that they get around the whole PITA 6th amendment thing because it is not a 'crime' per se, but rather an administrative issue when you are caught. If you choose not to pay the fine, then they will send bill collectors to try and collect against you until you pay the fine.
You're right. Designing a tickle me Elmo doll has no where near the requirements for EMI than an aircraft. I worked for a DOD contractor that installed equipment on aircraft. Pretty much all data lines that ran from say the cockpit to where the main hardware was located were differential and shielded, both of which help reduce radiated susceptibility and radiated emission of EMI. Additionally the cable bundles themselves were wrapped in shielding and grounded at both ends. While it did help with reducing EMI, sometimes the cables would pass in close proximity to other antennas and that could cause problems for both our equipment and that which was on the aircraft already. EMI is hard sometimes, even if done right.
Reminds me of when I took my electromagnetics class. The professor had brought his daughter's tickle me Elmo doll into class. I don't remember what device it was that he had, possibly it was his car's remote key entry system remote, but when he click one of the buttons, he was able to make the tickle me Elmo doll activate and start laughing. This would probably be one of you million to one examples, but I think the crux is the same. If someone doesn't design properly, or well for EMI, then stuff like this can happen that isn't supposed to.
Umm, China is officially communist. That little tidbit aside, I will paraphrase Jim Cramer. He says that we can learn a thing or two about capitalism from the Chinese. The leadership in China knows that by keeping labor costs low in addition to keeping their currency artificially low by fixing its value to the dollar, that it can export to many countries. It is part why it is so lucrative for US companies to export the labor and production there.
I think lately that China has allowed its currency's value to vary, but I think that it is still relatively low. Looking at google finance, the current exchange rate is 6.4 yuan to the dollar. This is possibly a double edged sword for them. Sure it allows their exports to look cheap. the down side is that imports are expensive. If any of the products they export are heavily dependent on imports, then this could be why Foxconn is suffering. Are the material required to make the electronic components heavily dependent on imports?
With the fed playing with things like quantitative easing, which reduces the value of the dollar, and with China fixing their value to the dollar, then This is really just helping China more on the relative cheapness of their exports. Although, I know most of Europe called foul and accused the US of doing the same thing as China with the whole QE fiasco. I don't blame Bernake though. I think he is just trying to get the US economy working again.
Between what you wrote and the previous person to reply to my post, I certainly don't remember much of these story details from when I read the book to when I watched the movies. Maybe I need to reread the books, but I would certainly loath reading the Two Towers again :)
I think I read the books around 1996, which was certainly enough time for some of the details to become lost between then and when the movies were released.
You seem pretty strong about how they messed up the books. Care to explain? I know that Tom Bombadil was left out of the fellowship of the ring, but his role was pretty small if I recall. In the big scheme of things, I thought they did a decent job. Hell, they made the Two Towers good, and when I read that I felt like this is the most boring s#!t in the world. Granted, it had been several years between me reading the books and watching the movies, so there are certainly plenty of the smaller details that I am missing. I should also add that I am thinking of the extended releases on DVD that almost pack an extra hour into each movie, so given more time they covered maybe some more details that you might have missed.
In a way I agree with you, but lets just look at the numbers. A password of n characters long of only lower case letters (in English) is 26^n possible combinations. Adding upper case then give 52^n combinations. If you were a code cracker, and knew in advanced that most people only used lower case letters, then why waste you time with upper case letters. Your code cracking program would take longer allowing for upper case letters. It a matter of low hanging fruit; non capitalized password code cracker will give you reasonable success rate at a shorter time that allowing for capitals.
It's not just the time that is ridiculous, but also the fact that it is a felony. A felony is a huge thing to be charged of. It means that you essentially lose your civil rights. You can't vote. Your chances of finding future work will certainly be more difficult, since after all you are a convicted felon.
Anyone else just getting tired of this crap?
Your story pretty much duplicates mine. I was in the Navy for 6 years. I didn't know what I wanted to do after high school, so instead of wasting my time and flunking out of a school that I was neither ready for, mature enough for, and couldn't afford, I figured I could save my money for college and use the GI Bill. I wasn't able to do much of the simple course work (English 101, social studies 101, etc.) while I was in the Navy, it is hard to try to go to a community college when you could be out to sea for 1 to 6 months at a time. Additionally, I don't think the school I went to would accept those classes that you could take a test for and get credit.
That being said, I enjoyed taking the basic classes again from a fresh perspective of someone who is really interested in learning. Especially as an engineering student, it was nice to take all of the calculus classes being taught formally and showing some of the fine points of the theory. It really helped when getting to my electrical engineering courses.
The university I went to did have more total credit hours required for engineering majors (128 vs 120 for non-engineering), which equates to about a half semester more if you average 15 credit hours per semester. However, the average engineering course was 3 credit hours, which means to stay on course you would need to take 5 engineering courses per semester. That would be self torture. Realistically, it would probably take about 5 years (10 semesters) to complete courses for engineering at this school and to be able to manage the course load and possibly have a part time job. I personally took summer classes over two summers to finish within 4 years.
I can't speak for 10 years ago, but Matlab is still slow when using 'for' loops. Just recently I was updating a grid search algorithm that was originally done in VBA. I originally ported it to Matlab using all of the vectorization tricks that were available, but I still needed for loops. For smaller data sets, it was tolerable but when our input data grew to a certain size, it would take over 70 minutes for the computation to complete (as a side note, this is with Matlab 2010b).
.jar files and create Java objects in your Matlab code. As an added bonus, Matlab creates 'double' arrays by default for numeric values. This can be passed in directly as an argument to your method without casting types like you might need to when using a .dll file.
To speed up the computation, I at first just wrote a Java class to be called from Matlab. this showed considerable speed improvement when compared to the Matlab code. I then decided that I could multithread the application in Java for even more through put. In this particular machine, I have 12 cores, so I used 10 threads and reduced the computation from over 70 minutes to less than a minute by using a Java class plus Java's concurrent libraries.
Now, in general I prefer to code in Matlab, because you can do more with less lines of code, but there are certain times where strictly Matlab is not fast enough. What is nice with Matlab 2010b, ( I don't remember how far this capability goes back), you can seamlessly use Java
Yes. It might result in the people Voting out Several Washed up Representatives. (aka VSWR).
Is it too early in the morning for bad RF humor?
"70% unit coverage" means that your production code before being integrated should have touched at least 70% of the code. The complexity number is related to how many branching statements there are in a single function/program. You can look up how they compute it, but it involves basic graph theory. I have no idea what "pre-sprint grooming" is though.
My initial thought on why someone would propose this is that they are seeing a shortfall on taxes because people are either a) driving less, b) people are being responsible and driving more fuel efficient cars, or c) some combination of a and b. So if people say are buying about 10% less gas, then the state has 10% less revenue to fund projects that the tax money has been allocated for.
In part I would also think that the state has problems saving for a "rainy day". They maximize their expenditures for the money that they have now and don't project that their income could diminish. I cite Michigan as a case where the population is shrinking. I don't think their government has shrunk in proportion to the population (too lazy to verify right now).
As a solution though, I agree with you. Tax the type of vehicle instead of some ridiculous "pay per mile" scheme, which I feel is only there to punish people for buying efficient cars. Efficient cars should be a means to reducing the US's desire for foreign oil. If anything we should be subsidizing this behavior, but instead it looks like it is going to be punished.
If you've been here long enough (the US, that is), then I think you will see that this is not unknown. It certainly is one of my biggest gripes of the perverse relationship between the politicians and the press. It all has to do with what they call "access". If you're a reporter and you start asking tough questions of whom you are interviewing, you will lose access to other events that can be covered. Since the media companies are all in competition with one another, if their network/paper is not allowed into the event to cover it, then they will be losing out to the competition that has played nice and by their rules. I feel like this was a bigger issue when GWB was in office, but that's not to say that Obama hasn't learned from his predecessor.
Plus, when they finally do get asked a tough question, they usually ignore it. The 2008 VP debate between Palin and Biden comes to mind as a specific instance where Palin straight out said she wasn't going to answer the question by the moderator so that she could get her talking points out. To top it all off, I don't recall any media outlet even mention the blatant F. U. that she delivered from her actions to both the validity of these debates (which are nothing more than a talking point meeting) and the credibility of the media as a reliable source as an overseer of government (which in my opinion is one of the biggest reasons for having a free press).
While I can't confirm that they are the most funded, it certainly depends on what you are researching. Again, I use my wife as my anecdotal evidence. She is currently studying Legionella, which is a mere bacteria which if you are old or are immuno-compromised could cause you to develop Legionairs disease that is a type of respiratory disease. You may occasionally hear about this on your local news, but it doesn't get much press. Compare this to other things such as AIDS, Alzheimer's, cancer, etc, which are more "sexy" research topics. If you are researching those topics, where there is a more immediate need/desire for drugs and/or cures, then you will be well funded. If you are doing research on other bacteria/viruses, then it may be tougher to get funding.
But hey! I don't make the system, and my wife doesn't care for it either. I would classify what my wife as doing is general science improvement, which may not have an immediate benefit, but will improve the body of research on general topics that could be applied to more specific topics, such as those that I mentioned above. But I don't think that this is unique to just her field. I would say general research is down across all fields and not just in biomedical research. I think I just heard in the last few months that the NSF was getting some of its budget cut.
This is true. When my wife first started grad school, she had many single female friends. And me being an engineer, had many single male friends. I did try to get some of my friends introduced to her friends since it can be difficult meeting people after college.
Wow, generalize much?
My wife is hoping to finish with her PhD from Northwestern (in Chicago and Evanston) this summer in microbiology. While she admits that she tolerates math, she is competent with it (if not a little rusty). However, I did find this interesting with the program that she is in, and how it differed from my own experience in grad school. Her university's curriculum was done in a way such that there was little flexibility on what courses she could take. I do not recall any course of higher math/statistics being offered or required. Additionally, they are only in class for the first two years. Everything after that is lab work. I am not sure she could take another class after this period if she wanted. The question I think here is whether the university is catering to the students (I hope not) by not making them take it, or if it was offered as an elective would they even be able to fill the class.
I am not arguing that statistics wouldn't be helpful. In fact I agree that there should be more. I think I have even heard of my wife complaining about the validity of some papers' statistical analysis. I just took point that generalizing scientists, and then females as being bad at math, which is just wrong.
Yes. Right click on the '+' by the tabs. Deselect "Tabs on Top" and it should be back to normal.
Intersting points about the signs in the US vs the UK. I would think that while the green signs in the US aren't 'beautiful', it is pretty much universal across the country. I would think that in a place like the UK, where the buildings could be significantly older, the last thing that I would want to do is put a street sign on it. In other words, I would preserve the aesthetics of the old building and have a green sign on the corner instead.
The one instance I got lost in the UK, I was on a business trip with someone else and I was navigating and he was driving. We were going to a customer's site in Chester. The best we had to go by were some Google maps, that quickly became useless after we missed a turn, so the best we had to go by was a brochure type map and where they only show some of the main roads. Eventually we stumbled upon the place, but it wasn't easy.
Thanks for the reply.
As an American that has been to the UK (the apparent location of the authors) and has driven around with both a GPS and just a map, I will take the GPS hands down! The signage in a typical UK town is bad. You generally need to look at the buildings to find out what street you are on if you can spot it before you pass it. The roundabouts seem to tell you what town you are going to end up in if you take that particular road instead of what street that you are turning onto. Navigating with a map was painful!
Now it could just be because I am not used to it. I know that there are parts of the US (Maryland and NY come to mind) that I have been to that can be similarly difficult to navigate, but not to the level that I experienced in the UK. So I am curious if there are any Brits that have driven in the US and what their impressions were on driving here compared to the UK. Would you take GPS over a map also?
Ahh... I missed the operative word 'annual'. Should teach me to post before caffeinated.
now I know it's early in the morning, and I haven't had my coffee yet, but how does selling 350K at $0.99 and 35% royalties = $500k? I could see 350k*.35 = $122k, which is still nice.
btw....first post?