Yes, also large companies do recruit more from the graduate pool I believe. Smaller companies (who, because they're more numerous, offer most of the jobs in the sector) are more concerned with experience.
All else being equal. I mean existing graduates with CS degrees, rather than new ones. I wouldn't want to be a developer without a degree no-matter how much experience I had.
This is the main issue I think. An experienced candidate is almost always preferred to an inexperienced one. During a recession this is particularly true because taking on a new member of staff is both a cost and a risk. Given the pool of experienced candidates has increased (due to immigration), I'm not surprised new UK graduates are finding it harder to find work.
Why do Scientists need to present a message at all? The problem here is the marketing of Science, or Science by press-release, rather than the actual Science itself. As institutional funding is increasingly secured by political patronage, "post-modern" science is moving itself into the political arena. I'm not sure I need to point out the obvious problems concerning scientific integrity that this will (and has in some cases) inevitably lead to.
One of the criticisms of Amdahl's Law is that it makes pessimistic assumptions about the amount of program code that must be serial. These assumptions are wholly dependent on the problem domain under consideration of course. To use Google as a case in point, the amount of serial code is closer to 0% and so Amdahl's Law doesn't really apply here. So, to state the obvious, this kind of processing works well if the problem to be solved is naturally parallel in nature (each element can be effectively processed independently).
Well, the problem here is that physicists prefer to do what works and if adding in a new exotic ____ (fill in the blank) that is conveniently invisible but that we're surely going to find eventually fixes the problem, then the problem can be said to have gone away. What we have here is (1) not enough mass, so enter Dark Matter. Then we have (2), accelerating galaxies, so enter Dark Energy. Then we have (3) the possible breaking of Lorentz symmetry, so enter some mysterious Dark Force. Then we have (4) the size of the Universe, so enter Inflation. This is notwithstanding all of the extra invisible dimensions we have to throw into the mix these days. Does this all remind you of anything? Do Epicycles come to mind?
It's a mess, isn't it? It's not surprising though, as these problems are hard to solve. Indeed, some of them may well transcend Human understanding. They do mine at least.
Dark matter is no more a "hack" than expolanets around stars with slight wobbles are "hacks".
I think the difference is that we know from the experience of our own senses that 9 (or 8, depending on whether or not you agree) planets do actually exist, are visible and have some demonstrable gravitational effect on our own Sun. It's not such a great leap to infer that perhaps other such bodies exist around other stars and perhaps by measuring the wobble of those stars we may be able to learn something new.
The interesting thing given your example therefore, is that in the absence of things called planets, with a gravitational effect on their stars, we might observe a slight wobble in a star and then try to correct for it by introducing "dark matter" to explain it. But actually by doing so we have explained nothing. Our knowledge has not really increased in this case, has it? What has happened is a theory that cannot explain observation has been given a crutch to aid it limping along for a while longer until a new hypothesis is introduced to explain the discrepancy.
Of course it's a hack! So is "dark energy". I know Physicists don't think too much about philosophical or meta-physical implications of theory; they're very practical men (and women). If the mathematics work and agrees with observation, then they're good to go. The problem is when there's no observation to either agree or disagree with, or when the observations they're developing models for are actually wrong. That is why many of these people do what is called "theoretical physics". Of course sometimes observations are made that contradict current theoretical physical theories. When this happens my raised eyebrow can be justifiably lowered (for a moment).
No, they don't. They are what they are only in the context of our limited understanding and the inherent limitations of the tools we have for exploring the nature of the Universe (mathematics). Explaining it as a computer simulation brings nothing to the table in terms of knowledge. It just moves the problem one step further away (as invoking a God would), requiring an even greater more complex entity that itself has to be explained.
What do you mean by "simulation"? Simulating what? A real Universe? Which real Universe? And why isn't that real Universe this one, rather than this one being a simulation of a real Universe? The idea that it's a simulation is really the same as saying, "God does it".
There is a way to escape the inference of superluminal speeds and spooky action at a distance. But it involves absolute determinism in the universe, the complete absence of free will. Suppose the world is super-deterministic, with not just inanimate nature running on behind-the-scenes clockwork, but with our behavior, including our belief that we are free to choose to do one experiment rather than another, absolutely predetermined, including the "decision" by the experimenter to carry out one set of measurements rather than another, the difficulty disappears. There is no need for a faster than light signal to tell particle A what measurement has been carried out on particle B, because the universe, including particle A, already "knows" what that measurement, and its outcome, will be.
It does? It's pretty hard to get your head around. Using Bell's Theorem, it's possible to say that a unified theory cannot both be local and deterministic. That means you have to throw out one or the other. It also discounts hidden variables as an explanation for non-local effects (I think). So I suppose there's a good reason it's called "spooky"!
In my eminently ignorable view, this is a false dichotomy. The possible options are, (1) smart people are less smart than they would otherwise be, (2) smart people are smarter than they would otherwise be, (3) dumb people are dumberer than they would otherwise be, (4) dumb people are smarter than they would otherwise be, (5) dumb people are neither smarter nor dumber and smart people are neither smarter or dumber, than they would otherwise be.
Now, it seems to me that people who didn't read before, when given access to intertubes, may gain knowledge they would never have gained previously (I know many people like this), hence they are less dumberer than they were before. It is also true that smart people can become even smarter with access to the internet because they are given access to a much wider and more diverse body of knowledge within which to embed and test their expertise (post-modernly known as Contextualising). Knowledge comes in bundles, but cleverality involves forming associations between bundles. The more bundles you know about, the greater the number of possible associations and transferable metaphors/techniques are available to you to solve any particular problem. The internet does not stop you gaining expertise in any one bundle, it just allows you to gain a greater understanding of the fields surrounding your particular chosen bundle.
In the UK it's called The Red Book and has been in the public domain for many years. COIN isn't the same thing - this is a full (mostly) breakdown of public spending. In the US you even get to see the Presidents tax return, so we've still got some way to go before we're on a par with the US. It's a good start.
What may prove to be this study's most significant revelation is that contrary to the popular scientific notion that entanglement is a fragile and exotic property, difficult to engineer and maintain, the Berkeley researchers have demonstrated that entanglement can exist and persist in the chaotic chemical complexity of a biological system.
The most interesting aspect of this from my point of view is that it points towards such effects being taken advantage of by other biological systems, such as brains. Many objections to Penrose/Hameroff/Harris-Walker type physics being important in brain processes (and hence conscious activity) are based on coherence being hard if not impossible to achieve in "noisy" biological systems. I think perhaps these objections may be premature.
It's a simple economic argument: in 100 years time, we'll be much richer (that's an assumption of course) and so the cost of any mitigation will be that much less than it is now. Moreover, we'll have a century of technological advance behind us which will also reduce costs. At the moment not only do you factor in the amount spent on the issue, you also have to factor in the opportunity costs for growth for the money you *aren't* spending in other areas.
Yes, I'm sceptical of Global Warming but I'm not pro-fossil fuel necessarily. I think arguments about energy security are preferable to destroying public trust in the integrity of Science, which is what this issue is slowly doing. Your point on whether it's "knowable" is a straw man unfortunately because complex systems like the weather are unpredictable, literally. That is why you can't predict them further than a few days.
So in your opinion, speculation on the possible weather 100 years from now, based on flakey evidence of a system that isn't `knowable' anyway and that actual reality shows to be at odds with current understanding, spending billions of dollars on trying to reverse some change that is almost certainly wrong and that you almost certainly have no control over, is better than mitigating any negative changes if and when they occur, at 1/10th of the cost? Hmmmmmm.
What about the cycles you don't know about? Choosing a significant cycle time is only useful if you fully understand the system. Otherwise, it's still completely arbitrary.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, also large companies do recruit more from the graduate pool I believe. Smaller companies (who, because they're more numerous, offer most of the jobs in the sector) are more concerned with experience.
All else being equal. I mean existing graduates with CS degrees, rather than new ones. I wouldn't want to be a developer without a degree no-matter how much experience I had.
This is the main issue I think. An experienced candidate is almost always preferred to an inexperienced one. During a recession this is particularly true because taking on a new member of staff is both a cost and a risk. Given the pool of experienced candidates has increased (due to immigration), I'm not surprised new UK graduates are finding it harder to find work.
Why do Scientists need to present a message at all? The problem here is the marketing of Science, or Science by press-release, rather than the actual Science itself. As institutional funding is increasingly secured by political patronage, "post-modern" science is moving itself into the political arena. I'm not sure I need to point out the obvious problems concerning scientific integrity that this will (and has in some cases) inevitably lead to.
One of the criticisms of Amdahl's Law is that it makes pessimistic assumptions about the amount of program code that must be serial. These assumptions are wholly dependent on the problem domain under consideration of course. To use Google as a case in point, the amount of serial code is closer to 0% and so Amdahl's Law doesn't really apply here. So, to state the obvious, this kind of processing works well if the problem to be solved is naturally parallel in nature (each element can be effectively processed independently).
Well, the problem here is that physicists prefer to do what works and if adding in a new exotic ____ (fill in the blank) that is conveniently invisible but that we're surely going to find eventually fixes the problem, then the problem can be said to have gone away. What we have here is (1) not enough mass, so enter Dark Matter. Then we have (2), accelerating galaxies, so enter Dark Energy. Then we have (3) the possible breaking of Lorentz symmetry, so enter some mysterious Dark Force. Then we have (4) the size of the Universe, so enter Inflation. This is notwithstanding all of the extra invisible dimensions we have to throw into the mix these days. Does this all remind you of anything? Do Epicycles come to mind?
It's a mess, isn't it? It's not surprising though, as these problems are hard to solve. Indeed, some of them may well transcend Human understanding. They do mine at least.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent
I think the difference is that we know from the experience of our own senses that 9 (or 8, depending on whether or not you agree) planets do actually exist, are visible and have some demonstrable gravitational effect on our own Sun. It's not such a great leap to infer that perhaps other such bodies exist around other stars and perhaps by measuring the wobble of those stars we may be able to learn something new.
The interesting thing given your example therefore, is that in the absence of things called planets, with a gravitational effect on their stars, we might observe a slight wobble in a star and then try to correct for it by introducing "dark matter" to explain it. But actually by doing so we have explained nothing. Our knowledge has not really increased in this case, has it? What has happened is a theory that cannot explain observation has been given a crutch to aid it limping along for a while longer until a new hypothesis is introduced to explain the discrepancy.
Of course it's a hack! So is "dark energy". I know Physicists don't think too much about philosophical or meta-physical implications of theory; they're very practical men (and women). If the mathematics work and agrees with observation, then they're good to go. The problem is when there's no observation to either agree or disagree with, or when the observations they're developing models for are actually wrong. That is why many of these people do what is called "theoretical physics". Of course sometimes observations are made that contradict current theoretical physical theories. When this happens my raised eyebrow can be justifiably lowered (for a moment).
Don't you think the treasury ran the numbers on whether it was worth it? We're borrowing £500,000,000 per day for goodness sake!
Only last night I was reading Edward Witten's article on this very subject, after visiting his little web page at SNS:
The Mass Question
No, they don't. They are what they are only in the context of our limited understanding and the inherent limitations of the tools we have for exploring the nature of the Universe (mathematics). Explaining it as a computer simulation brings nothing to the table in terms of knowledge. It just moves the problem one step further away (as invoking a God would), requiring an even greater more complex entity that itself has to be explained.
What do you mean by "simulation"? Simulating what? A real Universe? Which real Universe? And why isn't that real Universe this one, rather than this one being a simulation of a real Universe? The idea that it's a simulation is really the same as saying, "God does it".
Superdeterminism
It does? It's pretty hard to get your head around. Using Bell's Theorem, it's possible to say that a unified theory cannot both be local and deterministic. That means you have to throw out one or the other. It also discounts hidden variables as an explanation for non-local effects (I think). So I suppose there's a good reason it's called "spooky"!
Please, accept my use of the the words `dumberer' and `cleverality' as intentional irony.
In my eminently ignorable view, this is a false dichotomy. The possible options are, (1) smart people are less smart than they would otherwise be, (2) smart people are smarter than they would otherwise be, (3) dumb people are dumberer than they would otherwise be, (4) dumb people are smarter than they would otherwise be, (5) dumb people are neither smarter nor dumber and smart people are neither smarter or dumber, than they would otherwise be.
Now, it seems to me that people who didn't read before, when given access to intertubes, may gain knowledge they would never have gained previously (I know many people like this), hence they are less dumberer than they were before. It is also true that smart people can become even smarter with access to the internet because they are given access to a much wider and more diverse body of knowledge within which to embed and test their expertise (post-modernly known as Contextualising). Knowledge comes in bundles, but cleverality involves forming associations between bundles. The more bundles you know about, the greater the number of possible associations and transferable metaphors/techniques are available to you to solve any particular problem. The internet does not stop you gaining expertise in any one bundle, it just allows you to gain a greater understanding of the fields surrounding your particular chosen bundle.
In the UK it's called The Red Book and has been in the public domain for many years. COIN isn't the same thing - this is a full (mostly) breakdown of public spending. In the US you even get to see the Presidents tax return, so we've still got some way to go before we're on a par with the US. It's a good start.
"The Following Plug-In has crashed: Shockwave Flash"
The most interesting aspect of this from my point of view is that it points towards such effects being taken advantage of by other biological systems, such as brains. Many objections to Penrose/Hameroff/Harris-Walker type physics being important in brain processes (and hence conscious activity) are based on coherence being hard if not impossible to achieve in "noisy" biological systems. I think perhaps these objections may be premature.
Yes. Yes you are.
Vi - designed and used by people far off into the distance on the autistic spectrum.
It's a simple economic argument: in 100 years time, we'll be much richer (that's an assumption of course) and so the cost of any mitigation will be that much less than it is now. Moreover, we'll have a century of technological advance behind us which will also reduce costs. At the moment not only do you factor in the amount spent on the issue, you also have to factor in the opportunity costs for growth for the money you *aren't* spending in other areas.
Yes, I'm sceptical of Global Warming but I'm not pro-fossil fuel necessarily. I think arguments about energy security are preferable to destroying public trust in the integrity of Science, which is what this issue is slowly doing. Your point on whether it's "knowable" is a straw man unfortunately because complex systems like the weather are unpredictable, literally. That is why you can't predict them further than a few days.
So in your opinion, speculation on the possible weather 100 years from now, based on flakey evidence of a system that isn't `knowable' anyway and that actual reality shows to be at odds with current understanding, spending billions of dollars on trying to reverse some change that is almost certainly wrong and that you almost certainly have no control over, is better than mitigating any negative changes if and when they occur, at 1/10th of the cost? Hmmmmmm.
What about the cycles you don't know about? Choosing a significant cycle time is only useful if you fully understand the system. Otherwise, it's still completely arbitrary.