Not quite. All tenured professors are associate or full. But you can be promoted to associate _before_ you get tenure. (I've seen it a couple of times.) That said, I suspect the title "Associate Prof" assures that tenure will be forthcoming shortly if not already.
And BTW, I'm pretty sure that Thrun was not tenured. At Stanford, he was a research professor and a Google employee at least half-time.
The goal of personalized medicine is to identify which genomic pattern in a population will respond to a given drug, or identify which drug will work for a given person's genome. It has nothing to do with improving public health policy and only tangentially with reducing health care costs. It has a lot to do with reducing time-to-treatment and making drugs more efficacious.
Emanuel is right that it's nuts to waste money on gene-based treatments which target only the symptoms of disease, when fixing the disease itself necessarily requires a change in lifestyle, which is something that technology cannot and will not fix. Once we accept this, the next step is simply, "How"?
All western countries are healthier than the US. Let's start by looking at what they're doing and then reward americans for doing more of that.
Total Drug Resistant (TDR) TB cases arose in Italy in 2007, Iran in 2009, and now in India. In the 1990s, cases of Extensively Drug Resistant (XDR) TB emerged in 58 countries with 25,000 new cases per year.
TDR TB does not respond to any first-line antibiotics (e.g. isoniazid and rifampicin) nor second-line (e.g. levofloxacin and ciprofloxacin), which can be quite toxic in their own right. The TDR TB bug appears to be a 'new entity' which is invulnerable to the mechanisms used by any first or second line antibiotic, requiring third-line chemotherapies which promise to be yet more toxic.
'Third line' antibiotics are so-called because they're either ineffective, unproven, or expensive, and require close attention during treatment to avoid crippling or crippling the patient. Thus the spead of bacteria treatable only by third line antibiotics is A Very Bad Thing, especially for the 33% of the world infected with TB who also live in the Third World.
You need to quit giving medical advice. Type 2 diabetes has several causes, and those that you mention are simply not sufficient to identify the disease.
Many people will eat too many Calories, eat too many simple carbs, fail to exercise, and do so for 50 years and *still* not contract T2. In addition to diet, genetics and physical activity play very large roles in developing Syndrome X and T2.
For example, Arthur Ashe, Thomas Edison, Robert Guillaume, Billie Jean King, Jackie Robinson, Ernest Hemingway, and Ben Vereen are or were T2 diabetics. Halle Berry too is diabetic, and like many, her onset, symptoms, and therapy aren't classically T1 or T2.
Yes, cognitive decline starts early. Nobody expects a 45 year old to be as quick witted as a 25 year old.
But after a cursory scan of the study paper, I think the more interesting revelation is the greater cognitive decline in women vs men in the decade between age 45 and 55. Table 2 on page 8 of the study shows the following:
Difference in score between age 45-49 and 55-59 (percent change):
(Slashdot's brain damaged 'junk' filter forced me to mangle the table. Apologies.)
This shows a much bigger drop in cognitive performance among women than men. Men fell about 3% in reasoning and memory while women fell 6 to 11 percent, or 2x or 3x FARTHER than men during those 10 years.
The study also attempts to correct these results for education. A greater education diminishes the differential among men by perhaps.5 to 1% (subtractive difference in percentiles) and among women by 2 to 4%.
I hope the authors will follow up with further analyses of this data. Clearly there are more compelling stories to tell than the simplistic takeaway, "Senility starts at 45".
The work is based on 'streak camera' technology, which measures the change in the flow of a stream of photons. Raskar is extending the work from 1D to 2D and adding multi-point reflectance data to infer the 3D shape of objects that are otherwise occluded from view.
Clearly the image's spatial resolution will be limited by the smoothness of the reflected surface, the rate of motion of the target, additional noise sources (e.g. ambient light), perhaps even variations in temperature in the air (refractive noise), etc
AFAIK, all streak cameras are currently used only in very structured environments (particle accelerators, flow mass spectrometers, etc). The prospect of using a streak camera to render 2D objects is ambitious. Doing so in an unstructured setting like the battlefield (where do you think his funding is coming from?) is implausible. The prospect of combining such technology with computational photography techniques to practically 'look around corners' degenerates to hopeless hyperbole.
IMHO, the MIT Media Lab's reality distortion field is alive and well.
If you're logged into a remote computer where you're doing your work, only that login session will be visible, not the activity or the amount of activity.
Likewise, if you're running an app remotely (or on an app server or in a cloud), only the connection will register.
Or if you have a web browser up, the site you're visiting won't be visible. You could be browsing for work or for play; you couldn't tell
If the monitor software captured an image snapshot of the display, which would certainly acquire more info, then you could easily circumvent it by running your naughty app on a non-primary screen, because the activity monitor won't capture the activity on all three of your display monitors.
No doubt this technology sounds attractive to managers, but I doubt it'll be effective when monitoring developers or power users.
No. I have degrees in biology and cs and work in a quant group at a major pharma. No one respects or cares about my background in bio. Large companies will look closely at your degree title. We probably would not even phone interview a bio major for a quant position. A bioinformaticist or biostatician would fare better. A computer scientist, computational biologist, mathematician, or any engineer is preferred.
You may want to odentify your degree on your resume differently than it reads on your diploma, especially since your education spans different departments at different universities. I doubt doing so would ever pose a problem, as long as the label you choose accurately describes your skill base. Employers care more about what courses you took and what quals you satisfied than the precise degree name on your diploma.
You could also seek a postdoc with a hard core ML group to solidify your street cred, or go to work in a medical or academic setting. Again, a bio degree is not respected in cs, engineering, or math settings. Quant folks will assume your education stopped with ANOVA and pre-calculus.
So what vendor *other* than Microsoft will use this feature? Hmm?
This tactic is the boldest monopolistic act in computing that I've ever seen -- the de facto lockout of any product other than Microsoft's. Regardless of who sells/promotes it (M$, one mobo vendor, or all of them), it won't survive legal appeal in Europe or many other nations with anti-monopoly laws.
Unfortunately secure boot will probably do fine in the US since our courts rarely recognize monopolies any more.
First of all, in order to take classified data out of a secure area, you have to seal it in an approved manner -- triple wrap it, stow it in a lockable opaque container, sign for it, and basically chain it to your body until it reaches its next secure location. That's been the rule in the DoD for over 50 years. Obviously a cell phone, even one with a password, doesn't meet any of these criteria.
Second, how are you going to access this device while maintaining secure surroundings? Based on the way people must use STU III phones (encrypted mil-spec) you must be in a locked room which is acceptably 'sound proof'. To read or write classified documents, you must be in a locked room with no windows (or that are shuttered).
Who is going to use a classified smartphone ONLY within a locked shielded room? And if the room is secure, who is going to get a 3G/4G signal inside a shielded SCIF?
This idea is not only completely unworkable, it's dumbass to the bone.
Pigeon holing is a matter of choice and capability. Do you want to advance into management? Then you will stay in the same discipline. Do you want to advance technically into a software lead? Then you need to take on deeper technical responsibilities, again in the same domain. If neither of these float your boat, you need to evolve. Are you prepared to take grad courses? Acquire new skills on your own or as part of a new role at work? Take a different kind of job that pays the same or less? Move to a new location? If you want your job to change, then you have to change. That's how you break the mold.
I've done all of the above, morphing from a DOS/database developer to UI developer, to AI and Unix developer and admin, to HPC developer and s/w performance tuner, to R&D image processing, all with the same degree. I took courses. I read a variety of tech books at home, and not just 'learn yet another programming language'. My jobs evolved because I evolved.
It also helps if you've worked in multiple roles within a single job. If you choose a role which is part of an assembly line, it will be clear to future employers that you prefer stability over novelty. Do that for long enough, or for several employers, and yes, you will dig yourself into a rut. But that was your choice, not your destiny.
Lower cost? That's the very point that the OA disputes.
In fact, contractors who work on-site (as most do for the gov't), incur the same costs as gov't in-house staff do for facilities, admin costs, training, etc. In practice, the only savings due to outsourcing are health care and retirement, and outside of the military, these account for nowhere near 50% of an in-house gov't staff salary.
This fallacy is exactly what the gov't concluded in the OA.
I've worked as a contractor for several gov't customers. A case might be made that contractor skills are superior (doubtful) or that it's easier to replace incompetent contractors (true). Is that worth at least a 33% premium for the contractor? Maybe.
The books that first grounded me in the hard and software of computing were "Peter Norton's Guide to Programming the IBM PC", Jeff Duntemann's "Complete Turbo Pascal" and , and Bruce Eckel's "Using C++" and "Thinking in C++".
Each of these books are paragons of clear writing and thought, conveying much more than the rudiments of their topic -- the years of experience and practical perspective of each of the authors.
I began my software career reading these books (ca. 1985), eventually completing a formal MS in CS. Yet sometimes your greatest influences arise not from ivory towers but from the school of hard knocks.
Now parents will have to arrange day care for little kids who will be home on Fridays.
No way that's going to work. No day care provider is prepared to take kids only one day a week, much less non-toddlers, age 5 to 12.
The school board really hasn't thought this one through, unless the $50,000 figure is actually some sort of blackmail: "Parents pay up. Or come Friday, little Johnny will be hanging out on street corners".
You're 39? You're just getting started. You have another 30 years of employment to go. Don't quit now.
When planning your future, you should ask yourself two questions: 1) What kind of job do I want? And 2) what kind of work is plausible for me, given the state of the industry, my age, my skills, my location... and most of all, my attitude. Do I still want to kick ass or not? If not, that's your real problem.
Professionally, learning yet another programming language won't mean much unless you can also show meaningful experience using the language to build something of value.
More importantly, it's not proficiency in a language that will open doors at your age. It's the ability to deliver solutions -- on time, on budget, that work. If you've been a 'principal scientist', or 'software architect', or 'lead programmer', then you can turn your experience into an asset. These roles are out of reach for kids right out of school. But if you can talk a good game, show that you know how to design, coordinate, and integrate the many components needed to deliver a new software service to your employer (or a client company), then you're a rare asset and you possess skills that are far more valuable than being conversant in yet another programming language.
BTW, I'm 53 and since I was your age, I've developed proficiency in several languages (high performance computing, image processing, matlab, R, perl, java, C*). But what I value more (and I think future employers will too) is 1) my ability to take a leadership role in driving a project to a successful conclusion. And 2), I'm willing and able to learn. I've completed several advanced courses part-time (3 grad CS/EE classes in the past 3 years). In doing this, I've shown that I can adapt to changes in the workplace, and reinvent myself as the work changed.
Strategically, I'd suggest that you adopt a 'leader/innovator' attitude in your current workplace and in future interviews. If you look like someone with ability, a 'can do' attitude, and impress others as being engaged, inventive, and innovative, you can break down the negative stereotypes that often beset older techies. At least that's worked for me so far.
A final word of advice. Do NOT express your opinion (*especially* negative ones) on any technology or business philosophy, and don't disparage the quality of your technical skills. DO emphasize that you have learned how to get things done, and have a track record of doing just that, ideally by understanding the business, anticipating needs, inventing and delivering solutions, ideally by leading others.
I loaded Lion about 5 days ago on my 3 GHz dual core iMac (with Nvidia card) and after a total of maybe 24 hours of use, tonight it generated a kernel panic, overwrote the screen with the console message, and froze up.
I strongly suspect Lion's Nvidia driver problem covers more than just MacBooks.
Great idea. Let's say I'm a giant pharma. I decide to promote 'efficiency & safety' by dividing up each of my candidate drugs into its own 'independent' company in which I am NOT the owner, but merely the major investor. (Oddly enough, the other pharmas are more than willing to play this game, so we collaborate).
Throughout development, marketing, and distribution, the indie company then charges all of a drug's costs back to the parent company (where the real work is run & done, and to whom most profits will flow), but because it's supposedly autonomous and 'independent', the indie company remains responsible for all potential liabilities related to the drug. Down the road, if the drug fails to make it to market (too low profits) or encounters safety problems (too high costs), I liquidate my share of the indie company and walk away.
Is that the kind of improvement in 'safety and efficiency' you were talking about?
...the regulations were passed under one party, and now another party is in power and has decided not to enforce those laws. Am I right?
I have to wonder why any part of law enforcement is in the executive branch of government. Inevitably, the law becomes politicized as executive(s) selectively enforce(s) only the laws that will lead to re-election of his/her BFFs, especially when there's money involved (e.g. large corporations).
Instead, maybe all law enforcement should be part of the judicial branch. And while we're at it, eliminate election of judges and court officers (e.g. DAs). Instead, appoint them ranked on only their competency (their accuracy and competency in past investigations and court cases, as judged anonymously by their peers).
Annoying? Possibly. POS? No way. Here are some killer applications for Big Brother:
- Your employer, who wants to watch you every moment to make sure you aren't goofing off or stealing from the company.
- Your grandchildren, who want to make sure that granddad hasn't fallen and can't get up. Ideally, they'd love to know if you've had a stroke and are fumbling around, or you're waving frantically for help.
- You, because in your dotage, you'd like to live alone, but need someone/something to check up on you in case of... (see above).
- You again, to keep track of your town's police officers, your baby sitters, your kids, neighborhood visitors who might steal from you, damage the house, threaten your kids, or enter your home when you're away...
The list is endless.
Remember too, just because the system can identify what you (or someone else) is doing, it doesn't necessarily have to report what it saw. That part of the service is still up to you. For now, anyway.
If you won't, then let me advocate Pascal. ISO Pascal adopted most of the OOPL extensions added by Borland's Pascal 4 and Apple's Object Pascal. The resulting OOPL retained most of Pascal's simplicity while integrating all the essentials of OOP. And unlike any practical OOPL I know, ISO Pascal is still explicable in a book of less than 200 pages.
Today's ISO Pascal is that rare example of a language that has escaped the curse that befalls more popular tools -- the accrual of ugly cruft and dross in order to silence too many squeaky wheels.
The OA quotes IARPA (DARPA for intelligence gathering):
"For decision makers to be effective in a world of mass communication and global interaction, they must understand the shared concepts and worldviews of members of other cultures of interest."
Horse hockey.
No computer can help a human understand a simile, much less an abstraction that's often in the guise of a complex historical or literary reference (i.e. metaphor). So what is the *real* purpose for this 5 year spy program?
First, metaphors are a great identifier of individual writing styles. The trick though is to recognize *when* a word is being used as a metaphor. Tagging a word like 'lion' as trackworthy works only when you know when the word was not meant literally.
Second, and more likely, from snippets of some of Bin Laden's recently unearthed messages, it's clear that Al-Qaeda is using metaphorical code phrases to refer to plans and goals rather than explicit sentences. Part of this program is probably intended to recognize syntactic (and maybe semantic) variations on a given metaphor so it can be recognized and tracked across multiple messages from different people.
So despite IARPA's dumbass lie about 'encouraging greater cultural understanding', this is yet another signals intelligence target tracking program.
In fact there are several well-designed user-extensible medical image processing frameworks available already. ImageJ, MIPAV, and ITK were funded by the NIH and fill the very void suggested by the OP. Many more mature medical imaging tools that serve a variety of niches are freely available, many of which include free source code.
Frankly, I think the OP's main thesis is fundamentally wrong. Medical imaging research is about inventing or improving IP techniques and algorithms, not implementing and distributing software tools. Asking researchers to deliver more than a design or perhaps benchmark results would be counterproductive and a poor use of research funds. If better software tools are the goal, then some more constructive questions might be: Who best should manage such an effort? Who should fund it? And how could we fund and coordinate such endeavors better?
Personally, I'd like to see, as part of any publication, the software, data, and runtime parameters be part of the submission. "Unreproducible research considered harmful", should be the new maxim. But I digress.
IMHO, the current state of gov't funded medical imaging research tools is doing quite nicely, thank you. If the OP really does in fact know a better way, then he should write up his grand plan and submit a grant proposal of his own.
Slashdot Mirror
> An Associate Professor IS tenured.
Not quite. All tenured professors are associate or full. But you can be promoted to associate _before_ you get tenure. (I've seen it a couple of times.) That said, I suspect the title "Associate Prof" assures that tenure will be forthcoming shortly if not already.
And BTW, I'm pretty sure that Thrun was not tenured. At Stanford, he was a research professor and a Google employee at least half-time.
The goal of personalized medicine is to identify which genomic pattern in a population will respond to a given drug, or identify which drug will work for a given person's genome. It has nothing to do with improving public health policy and only tangentially with reducing health care costs. It has a lot to do with reducing time-to-treatment and making drugs more efficacious.
Emanuel is right that it's nuts to waste money on gene-based treatments which target only the symptoms of disease, when fixing the disease itself necessarily requires a change in lifestyle, which is something that technology cannot and will not fix. Once we accept this, the next step is simply, "How"?
All western countries are healthier than the US. Let's start by looking at what they're doing and then reward americans for doing more of that.
Total Drug Resistant (TDR) TB cases arose in Italy in 2007, Iran in 2009, and now in India. In the 1990s, cases of Extensively Drug Resistant (XDR) TB emerged in 58 countries with 25,000 new cases per year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensively_drug-resistant_tuberculosis
TDR TB does not respond to any first-line antibiotics (e.g. isoniazid and rifampicin) nor second-line (e.g. levofloxacin and ciprofloxacin), which can be quite toxic in their own right. The TDR TB bug appears to be a 'new entity' which is invulnerable to the mechanisms used by any first or second line antibiotic, requiring third-line chemotherapies which promise to be yet more toxic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculosis_treatment
'Third line' antibiotics are so-called because they're either ineffective, unproven, or expensive, and require close attention during treatment to avoid crippling or crippling the patient. Thus the spead of bacteria treatable only by third line antibiotics is A Very Bad Thing, especially for the 33% of the world infected with TB who also live in the Third World.
You need to quit giving medical advice. Type 2 diabetes has several causes, and those that you mention are simply not sufficient to identify the disease.
Many people will eat too many Calories, eat too many simple carbs, fail to exercise, and do so for 50 years and *still* not contract T2. In addition to diet, genetics and physical activity play very large roles in developing Syndrome X and T2.
For example, Arthur Ashe, Thomas Edison, Robert Guillaume, Billie Jean King, Jackie Robinson, Ernest Hemingway, and Ben Vereen are or were T2 diabetics. Halle Berry too is diabetic, and like many, her onset, symptoms, and therapy aren't classically T1 or T2.
Yes, cognitive decline starts early. Nobody expects a 45 year old to be as quick witted as a 25 year old.
But after a cursory scan of the study paper, I think the more interesting revelation is the greater cognitive decline in women vs men in the decade between age 45 and 55. Table 2 on page 8 of the study shows the following:
Difference in score between age 45-49 and 55-59 (percent change):
Facility, Men, Women
Reasoning, -3.2, -11.4
Memory, -3.6, -6.5
Phonemic fluency,-2.9, -6.5
Semantic fluency, -3.4, -7.9
Vocabulary, 1.0, -7.4
(Slashdot's brain damaged 'junk' filter forced me to mangle the table. Apologies.)
This shows a much bigger drop in cognitive performance among women than men. Men fell about 3% in reasoning and memory while women fell 6 to 11 percent, or 2x or 3x FARTHER than men during those 10 years.
The study also attempts to correct these results for education. A greater education diminishes the differential among men by perhaps .5 to 1% (subtractive difference in percentiles) and among women by 2 to 4%.
I hope the authors will follow up with further analyses of this data. Clearly there are more compelling stories to tell than the simplistic takeaway, "Senility starts at 45".
More info here:
http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar//trillionfps/
The work is based on 'streak camera' technology, which measures the change in the flow of a stream of photons. Raskar is extending the work from 1D to 2D and adding multi-point reflectance data to infer the 3D shape of objects that are otherwise occluded from view.
Clearly the image's spatial resolution will be limited by the smoothness of the reflected surface, the rate of motion of the target, additional noise sources (e.g. ambient light), perhaps even variations in temperature in the air (refractive noise), etc
AFAIK, all streak cameras are currently used only in very structured environments (particle accelerators, flow mass spectrometers, etc). The prospect of using a streak camera to render 2D objects is ambitious. Doing so in an unstructured setting like the battlefield (where do you think his funding is coming from?) is implausible. The prospect of combining such technology with computational photography techniques to practically 'look around corners' degenerates to hopeless hyperbole.
IMHO, the MIT Media Lab's reality distortion field is alive and well.
If you're logged into a remote computer where you're doing your work, only that login session will be visible, not the activity or the amount of activity.
Likewise, if you're running an app remotely (or on an app server or in a cloud), only the connection will register.
Or if you have a web browser up, the site you're visiting won't be visible. You could be browsing for work or for play; you couldn't tell
If the monitor software captured an image snapshot of the display, which would certainly acquire more info, then you could easily circumvent it by running your naughty app on a non-primary screen, because the activity monitor won't capture the activity on all three of your display monitors.
No doubt this technology sounds attractive to managers, but I doubt it'll be effective when monitoring developers or power users.
No. I have degrees in biology and cs and work in a quant group at a major pharma. No one respects or cares about my background in bio. Large companies will look closely at your degree title. We probably would not even phone interview a bio major for a quant position. A bioinformaticist or biostatician would fare better. A computer scientist, computational biologist, mathematician, or any engineer is preferred.
You may want to odentify your degree on your resume differently than it reads on your diploma, especially since your education spans different departments at different universities. I doubt doing so would ever pose a problem, as long as the label you choose accurately describes your skill base. Employers care more about what courses you took and what quals you satisfied than the precise degree name on your diploma.
You could also seek a postdoc with a hard core ML group to solidify your street cred, or go to work in a medical or academic setting. Again, a bio degree is not respected in cs, engineering, or math settings. Quant folks will assume your education stopped with ANOVA and pre-calculus.
...It costs a billion dollars.
So what vendor *other* than Microsoft will use this feature? Hmm?
This tactic is the boldest monopolistic act in computing that I've ever seen -- the de facto lockout of any product other than Microsoft's. Regardless of who sells/promotes it (M$, one mobo vendor, or all of them), it won't survive legal appeal in Europe or many other nations with anti-monopoly laws.
Unfortunately secure boot will probably do fine in the US since our courts rarely recognize monopolies any more.
First of all, in order to take classified data out of a secure area, you have to seal it in an approved manner -- triple wrap it, stow it in a lockable opaque container, sign for it, and basically chain it to your body until it reaches its next secure location. That's been the rule in the DoD for over 50 years. Obviously a cell phone, even one with a password, doesn't meet any of these criteria.
Second, how are you going to access this device while maintaining secure surroundings? Based on the way people must use STU III phones (encrypted mil-spec) you must be in a locked room which is acceptably 'sound proof'. To read or write classified documents, you must be in a locked room with no windows (or that are shuttered).
Who is going to use a classified smartphone ONLY within a locked shielded room? And if the room is secure, who is going to get a 3G/4G signal inside a shielded SCIF?
This idea is not only completely unworkable, it's dumbass to the bone.
Pigeon holing is a matter of choice and capability. Do you want to advance into management? Then you will stay in the same discipline. Do you want to advance technically into a software lead? Then you need to take on deeper technical responsibilities, again in the same domain. If neither of these float your boat, you need to evolve. Are you prepared to take grad courses? Acquire new skills on your own or as part of a new role at work? Take a different kind of job that pays the same or less? Move to a new location? If you want your job to change, then you have to change. That's how you break the mold.
I've done all of the above, morphing from a DOS/database developer to UI developer, to AI and Unix developer and admin, to HPC developer and s/w performance tuner, to R&D image processing, all with the same degree. I took courses. I read a variety of tech books at home, and not just 'learn yet another programming language'. My jobs evolved because I evolved.
It also helps if you've worked in multiple roles within a single job. If you choose a role which is part of an assembly line, it will be clear to future employers that you prefer stability over novelty. Do that for long enough, or for several employers, and yes, you will dig yourself into a rut. But that was your choice, not your destiny.
Lower cost? That's the very point that the OA disputes.
In fact, contractors who work on-site (as most do for the gov't), incur the same costs as gov't in-house staff do for facilities, admin costs, training, etc. In practice, the only savings due to outsourcing are health care and retirement, and outside of the military, these account for nowhere near 50% of an in-house gov't staff salary.
This fallacy is exactly what the gov't concluded in the OA.
I've worked as a contractor for several gov't customers. A case might be made that contractor skills are superior (doubtful) or that it's easier to replace incompetent contractors (true). Is that worth at least a 33% premium for the contractor? Maybe.
So Vinod Khosla thinks all experts are useless.
But he's NOT an expert?
The books that first grounded me in the hard and software of computing were "Peter Norton's Guide to Programming the IBM PC", Jeff Duntemann's "Complete Turbo Pascal" and , and Bruce Eckel's "Using C++" and "Thinking in C++".
Each of these books are paragons of clear writing and thought, conveying much more than the rudiments of their topic -- the years of experience and practical perspective of each of the authors.
I began my software career reading these books (ca. 1985), eventually completing a formal MS in CS. Yet sometimes your greatest influences arise not from ivory towers but from the school of hard knocks.
Now parents will have to arrange day care for little kids who will be home on Fridays.
No way that's going to work. No day care provider is prepared to take kids only one day a week, much less non-toddlers, age 5 to 12.
The school board really hasn't thought this one through, unless the $50,000 figure is actually some sort of blackmail: "Parents pay up. Or come Friday, little Johnny will be hanging out on street corners".
You're 39? You're just getting started. You have another 30 years of employment to go. Don't quit now.
When planning your future, you should ask yourself two questions: 1) What kind of job do I want? And 2) what kind of work is plausible for me, given the state of the industry, my age, my skills, my location... and most of all,
my attitude. Do I still want to kick ass or not? If not, that's your real problem.
Professionally, learning yet another programming language won't mean much unless you can also show meaningful experience using the language to build something of value.
More importantly, it's not proficiency in a language that will open doors at your age. It's the ability to deliver solutions -- on time, on budget, that work. If you've been a 'principal scientist', or 'software architect', or 'lead programmer', then you can turn your experience into an asset. These roles are out of reach for kids right out of school. But if you can talk a good game, show that you know how to design, coordinate, and integrate the many components needed to deliver a new software service to your employer (or a client company), then you're a rare asset and you possess skills that are far more valuable than being conversant in yet another programming language.
BTW, I'm 53 and since I was your age, I've developed proficiency in several languages (high performance computing, image processing, matlab, R, perl, java, C*). But what I value more (and I think future employers will too) is 1) my ability to take a leadership role in driving a project to a successful conclusion. And 2), I'm willing and able to learn. I've completed several advanced courses part-time (3 grad CS/EE classes in the past 3 years). In doing this, I've shown that I can adapt to changes in the workplace, and reinvent myself as the work changed.
Strategically, I'd suggest that you adopt a 'leader/innovator' attitude in your current workplace and in future interviews. If you look like someone with ability, a 'can do' attitude, and impress others as being engaged, inventive, and innovative, you can break down the negative stereotypes that often beset older techies. At least that's worked for me so far.
A final word of advice. Do NOT express your opinion (*especially* negative ones) on any technology or business philosophy, and don't disparage the quality of your technical skills. DO emphasize that you have learned how to get things done, and have a track record of doing just that, ideally by understanding the business, anticipating needs, inventing and delivering solutions, ideally by leading others.
Good luck.
I loaded Lion about 5 days ago on my 3 GHz dual core iMac (with Nvidia card) and after a total of maybe 24 hours of use, tonight it generated a kernel panic, overwrote the screen with the console message, and froze up.
I strongly suspect Lion's Nvidia driver problem covers more than just MacBooks.
Great idea. Let's say I'm a giant pharma. I decide to promote 'efficiency & safety' by dividing up each of my candidate drugs into its own 'independent' company in which I am NOT the owner, but merely the major investor. (Oddly enough, the other pharmas are more than willing to play this game, so we collaborate).
Throughout development, marketing, and distribution, the indie company then charges all of a drug's costs back to the parent company (where the real work is run & done, and to whom most profits will flow), but because it's supposedly autonomous and 'independent', the indie company remains responsible for all potential liabilities related to the drug. Down the road, if the drug fails to make it to market (too low profits) or encounters safety problems (too high costs), I liquidate my share of the indie company and walk away.
Is that the kind of improvement in 'safety and efficiency' you were talking about?
...the regulations were passed under one party, and now another party is in power and has decided not to enforce those laws. Am I right?
I have to wonder why any part of law enforcement is in the executive branch of government. Inevitably, the law becomes politicized as executive(s) selectively enforce(s) only the laws that will lead to re-election of his/her BFFs, especially when there's money involved (e.g. large corporations).
Instead, maybe all law enforcement should be part of the judicial branch. And while we're at it, eliminate election of judges and court officers (e.g. DAs). Instead, appoint them ranked on only their competency (their accuracy and competency in past investigations and court cases, as judged anonymously by their peers).
Oooo. Governance by meritocracy. What a concept.
Annoying? Possibly. POS? No way. Here are some killer applications for Big Brother:
- Your employer, who wants to watch you every moment to make sure you aren't goofing off or stealing from the company.
- Your grandchildren, who want to make sure that granddad hasn't fallen and can't get up. Ideally, they'd love to know if you've had a stroke and are fumbling around, or you're waving frantically for help.
- You, because in your dotage, you'd like to live alone, but need someone/something to check up on you in case of... (see above).
- You again, to keep track of your town's police officers, your baby sitters, your kids, neighborhood visitors who might steal from you, damage the house, threaten your kids, or enter your home when you're away...
The list is endless.
Remember too, just because the system can identify what you (or someone else) is doing, it doesn't necessarily have to report what it saw. That part of the service is still up to you. For now, anyway.
If you won't, then let me advocate Pascal. ISO Pascal adopted most of the OOPL extensions added by Borland's Pascal 4 and Apple's Object Pascal. The resulting OOPL retained most of Pascal's simplicity while integrating all the essentials of OOP. And unlike any practical OOPL I know, ISO Pascal is still explicable in a book of less than 200 pages.
Today's ISO Pascal is that rare example of a language that has escaped the curse that befalls more popular tools -- the accrual of ugly cruft and dross in order to silence too many squeaky wheels.
Exactly. Clean out my gutters. Paint my house. Weed my garden. Stop just writing papers.
The OA quotes IARPA (DARPA for intelligence gathering):
"For decision makers to be effective in a world of mass communication and global interaction, they must understand the shared concepts and worldviews of members of other cultures of interest."
Horse hockey.
No computer can help a human understand a simile, much less an abstraction that's often in the guise of a complex historical or literary reference (i.e. metaphor). So what is the *real* purpose for this 5 year spy program?
First, metaphors are a great identifier of individual writing styles. The trick though is to recognize *when* a word is being used as a metaphor. Tagging a word like 'lion' as trackworthy works only when you know when the word was not meant literally.
Second, and more likely, from snippets of some of Bin Laden's recently unearthed messages, it's clear that Al-Qaeda is using metaphorical code phrases to refer to plans and goals rather than explicit sentences. Part of this program is probably intended to recognize syntactic (and maybe semantic) variations on a given metaphor so it can be recognized and tracked across multiple messages from different people.
So despite IARPA's dumbass lie about 'encouraging greater cultural understanding', this is yet another signals intelligence target tracking program.
In fact there are several well-designed user-extensible medical image processing frameworks available already. ImageJ, MIPAV, and ITK were funded by the NIH and fill the very void suggested by the OP. Many more mature medical imaging tools that serve a variety of niches are freely available, many of which include free source code.
Frankly, I think the OP's main thesis is fundamentally wrong. Medical imaging research is about inventing or improving IP techniques and algorithms, not implementing and distributing software tools. Asking researchers to deliver more than a design or perhaps benchmark results would be counterproductive and a poor use of research funds. If better software tools are the goal, then some more constructive questions might be: Who best should manage such an effort? Who should fund it? And how could we fund and coordinate such endeavors better?
Personally, I'd like to see, as part of any publication, the software, data, and runtime parameters be part of the submission. "Unreproducible research considered harmful", should be the new maxim. But I digress.
IMHO, the current state of gov't funded medical imaging research tools is doing quite nicely, thank you. If the OP really does in fact know a better way, then he should write up his grand plan and submit a grant proposal of his own.