If I'm hiring someone to do.NET programming, I see no a priori reason to assume that the guy without any.NET experience would be a better hire than a with.NET experience.
It is reasonable to assume that the guy with more programming experience will be a better programmer, period. It's only slightly relevant whether that experience is in a particular language or framework. If you're hiring for a.NET project and you're looking at two programmers with five years of experience, one in.NET and the other in Java, then the default assumption that the first guy is a better choice is entirely reasonable. But if you're looking at one programmer with five years of experience in.NET and nothing else, and another with twenty years of experience in a mix of C, C++, and Java, then it is a damn good bet that the second guy will do a better job.
You don't see surgeons hoping to become hospital administrators, or research scientist hoping to become university administrators...
I agree with the point of your post wholeheartedly, but I'd like to point out that you do in fact see physicians and scientists who want to be administrators -- the former are often referred to sarcastically as "MDA's." They are, almost universally, bad at their primary jobs, they know it, and they desperately want to get into a position where they can spend most of their time telling other people what to do instead of doing it themselves. In other words, they're natural-born PHB's who just barely had what it took to get through med or grad school. A little more brains, same personality type.
It's a combination of things. For interns and residents, it's partly a macho rite of passage; attempts to shorten the hours worked generally meet with cries from older physicians along the lines of, "We had to work those hours, today's kids are just soft and weak!" The fact that these insane hours kill patients has, finally, led to some reform, but it's still pretty grim. And yes, there is a personnel shortage on all levels -- physicians, nurses, techs -- and then there's just the unpredictability of hospital work. It's difficult for anyone with a conscience to walk away from a busy understaffed ER saying, "Sorry, my shift's over, you guys are on your own," so you end up staying and putting a lot more hours than you really should. And when that happens day after day, as it does some weeks, the hours add up fast.
There's also the plain bizarre: I once ended up working six days straight in the base hospital at Minot AFB because a blizzard closed the highway between town and base, and enough of the hospital personnel (including me, damn it) lived off base that we couldn't get home and our relief couldn't get to work. But a base hospital is like a small-town hospital, and with rare exceptions the ER doesn't see enough patients with enough serious problems to really grind you down. When I worked at DHMC, then known as Denver General, on the other hand, a week where I wasn't ground down to the bone felt like a vacation. And it's like that at big city and county hospitals pretty much all over.
I work on the research side of things now, and I do miss patient care a lot of the time... but I sure as hell don't miss that, let me tell you.
I've worked those hundred-hour weeks in a busy hospital; trust me, it does a lot more damage to your ability to take care of patients than a puff or two would do. People who are that tired -- and I don't care how tough you are, by the end of it, you are that tired -- display some of the worst aspects of alcohol and drug intoxication, without any of the relaxed happy feeling which is why people like to get drunk and stoned in the first place.
You may not remember this, but there was a point when Quicktime was pretty much the only decent video player available on any platform. The product as a whole is more likely to end up on a best-of than a worst-of list, regardless of how lousy recent versions have been.
Correct me if I'm wrong but if the young tend to be more liberal than the old, and students are primarily young, doesn't it follow that students tend to be more liberal than the national average? You kind of made my point for me there.
Your original point was something about "leftist professors." My point -- which indeed I may not have made very well, thanks to sleep deprivation -- is twofold: first, that students don't need much encouragement to protest, from professors or anyone else; second, that the "liberalism" of college students, and the young generally, doesn't fit neatly on a left-right axis. Left-wing is not the same as liberal (and neither is right-wing the same as conservative.) Whether the powers-that-be are left-wing authoritarian or right-wing authoritarian, students in general will be against them. In recent US history, we've seen more authoritarianism coming from the right than the left, and student protests have appeared correspondingly left-wing; if that situation changes, the perception of student politics will turn on a dime. In, e.g., the USSR, of course, it worked the other way around.
How about all those students protesting against the Iraq war in the USA...? Was that a "left-right" issue.
Yeah. No duh?
I can't speak to your other examples, but I'm guessing you can't either.
It's funny, I keep hearing all these people solemnly proclaiming that "real conservatives" are opposed to foreign adventurism, and to fighting wars without paying for them. Of course, most of them started saying that only after Bush took a nosedive in the polls, and by all evidence they happily voted for Bush in 2004 and McCain in 2008 (and will probably vote for Palin in 2012) but supposedly there are a good many in America's right wing who thought the Iraq war was a bad idea from the get-go.
Anyway, if you look over the other examples GPP cited, it's blindingly obvious that student protests are not linked to the left-right axis. The young tend to be more liberal than the old, it's true (and anyone who digs out the quote commonly misattributed to Churchill at this point will be send back to remedial classes) but what constitutes "liberal" in any particular time and place is generally defined by opposition to the existing power structure.
The post-Civil War West was very rarely the kind of lawless anarchy that Hollywood portrays. There were a few specific times and places where it was, but those trouble spots got cleaned up pretty quickly. People don't like living with bullets flying randomly around their heads.
The early 19th c. frontier (which in those days was mostly east of the Mississippi) on the other hand... yeah. But that was before "Sam Colt made them that way." Most of the killing was done with single-shot firearms or, very often, knives.
Somewhere, there's an irony in this being passed by the state that was first to secede from the Union and instigate the Civil War.
No, there is zero irony. It simply highlights the absurdity of the claim that the Confederate states were fighting for freedom. They seceded in an attempt to keep aristocratic rule alive when the rest of the country was turning against it; and even among the slave states, S.C. was always distinguished by the degree to which it worshiped the aristocratic ideal. The American Revolution was not complete until 1865.
Eh. Counting up the numbers and doing a chi-squared test tells you if you've got a good discrete uniform distribution (so it's a good test of the fairness of a die) but it doesn't measure "randomness" per se, because it doesn't tell you anything about the ordering of the numbers. For a trivial example, the following sequence:
scores perfectly on your test (chi-squared=0). Actually, so does 10 1s, followed by 10 2s,..., followed by 10 6s. But obviously neither sequence is in any way random.
scientists outside of computer science are too busy in their respective fields to know anything about code, or even care
This is true, but it's not an excuse. If your interpretation of the data, or even the data itself, depends on your code, then if you say "I don't care about the code" then you're really saying "I don't care about the science." Scientists tend to be very picky about the quality of their lab equipment, as well they should be, but all too often are willing to let sloppy, untested code make that quality pretty much meaningless.
As a bioinformaticist who used to work in industry as a programmer and DBA, I've spent an enormous amount of time going through other people's code just to get it to the point where it even starts to make sense, so I can be sure it does what it's claimed to do. And very often, it doesn't, which means I have to spend more time fixing it. I'm always happy to do this, and my collaborators are usually happy for my fixes... but it really has to mean that there are an awful lot of published papers out there which depend on code that's never been through this kind of review.
Scientists who want to teach themselves good software engineering should do so. They're certainly capable of it; if you can get a PhD in any scientific subject, you can damn well learn to program at the level of a competent industry developer. Those who don't (and I don't blame them, since they are, after all busy doing other things) need to hire assistants who have, or are willing to gain, the necessary level of knowledge. It makes absolutely no sense to buy a half-million dollars worth of lab equipment and then run the output through code written for the equivalent of a hundred dollars worth of work.
And despite Slashdot posts claiming otherwise, repeating variations on "correlation is not causation" over and over is found not to add anything useful to the discussion.
The participants who reported high levels of boredom were significantly more likely to have died than the participants, in the same age group, who didn't.
[sigh] TentireFA is about ten lines long; it doesn't give much information, but it's enough to get that much. Actually, even an intelligent reading of the summary would have given you that little bit of information. Probably too much to ask here, I know.
Questioning global warming / climate change is a near sure way to get modded down.
He says, in a comment modded to +5.
Taking the pose of the Bold Rebel Speaking Truth To Power is in fact a sure way to get modded up, on just about any topic. Of course it doesn't matter if it has any relation to reality. Just start your comment out with "I'll get modded down for this, but..." or "This may not be politically correct of me, but..." and a bunch of Rugged Individualists Exactly Like You will be there to reward you.
And it does seem more in keeping with Microsoft's history as a whole. Now I can go back to my usual smug Mac user's "Microsoft never did anything worthwhile" stance with a clear conscience.;)
if you grant me the other seven dwarves are planets: eris, makemake, haumea, sedna, orcus, 2001OR10, and quaoar... your choice, but the third graders of 2080 who have to memorize 80 planets might not be too happy with you
All of those but Eris are considerably smaller than Pluto. I wouldn't have any problem with Eris being classified as a planet. And it will be a hell of a long time before we find 70 more Pluto-plus-sized objects in the Solar System. Make 1000 km radius (a nice round number) plus hydrostatic equilbrium the cutoff.
The "cleared its neighborhood" definition is absurd, since by that definition Earth is not a planet.
Mac OS had a small marketshare, it was and is pretty easy to change some pretty radical things without much problems. Not the same thing with an OS with 90%+ of marketshare.
And yet Microsoft did pull off exactly such a transition once, and did so at a time when it was even more of a monopoly than it is now. Windows NT (which became 2000, XP, etc.) was just as different "under the hood" from Windows 3.x/95/98/ME as Mac OS X was from the classic Mac OS, but Microsoft managed to move PC users from one to the other with minimal disruption -- less disruption, in fact, than Mac users experienced going from Classic to X. (And I'm not taking sides here: I'm a Mac user by preference, but at the time I was working as a developer on Windows.) I don't really think they'll be able to do it again, you understand, but it's not because of their market share that this is so. It's a more fundamental problem in their corporate culture, one that's really only developed in the last decade or so.
Totalitarianism is one group being given absolute authority over all aspects of its citizens lives. This country's law enforcement can't even figure out how to cooperate with each other. It's the same in the military, the different branches of government... well, pretty much everywhere you look. I don't see a "totalitarian" government springing up anytime soon.
You're imposing an absurdly high standard for what constitutes "totalitarian" here. Nazi Germany and the USSR were both characterized by a plethora of government agencies, law enforcement and otherwise, which never managed to cooperate with each other, and which often fought each other at every opportunity. Never at their worst did they achieve "absolute authority over all aspects" of... well, anything, really. And yet they are, with good reason, the canonical modern examples of totalitarian states.
If the depression rates are as high as they say they are (8%, as of a 2004 study), they can find a correlation between depression and virtually any activity involving enough people.
Please explain why this is so, and specifically, why a high depression rate by itself makes it more likely that you will find a correlation with some randomly chosen activity. Show your work.
The study is a failure if it finds both ends of the argument plausible and no concrete evidence for either.
No, it is not a failure. It succeeds in saying, "we observed this phenomenon, it's significant, and it might be worth studying further." Science succeeds when it places observations before conclusions; it fails when it does the opposite, as people like you seem to want it to do. Establishing that something exists in the first place is the prerequisite for everything that follows.
Slashdot Mirror
If I'm hiring someone to do .NET programming, I see no a priori reason to assume that the guy without any .NET experience would be a better hire than a with .NET experience.
It is reasonable to assume that the guy with more programming experience will be a better programmer, period. It's only slightly relevant whether that experience is in a particular language or framework. If you're hiring for a .NET project and you're looking at two programmers with five years of experience, one in .NET and the other in Java, then the default assumption that the first guy is a better choice is entirely reasonable. But if you're looking at one programmer with five years of experience in .NET and nothing else, and another with twenty years of experience in a mix of C, C++, and Java, then it is a damn good bet that the second guy will do a better job.
You don't see surgeons hoping to become hospital administrators, or research scientist hoping to become university
administrators...
I agree with the point of your post wholeheartedly, but I'd like to point out that you do in fact see physicians and scientists who want to be administrators -- the former are often referred to sarcastically as "MDA's." They are, almost universally, bad at their primary jobs, they know it, and they desperately want to get into a position where they can spend most of their time telling other people what to do instead of doing it themselves. In other words, they're natural-born PHB's who just barely had what it took to get through med or grad school. A little more brains, same personality type.
It's a combination of things. For interns and residents, it's partly a macho rite of passage; attempts to shorten the hours worked generally meet with cries from older physicians along the lines of, "We had to work those hours, today's kids are just soft and weak!" The fact that these insane hours kill patients has, finally, led to some reform, but it's still pretty grim. And yes, there is a personnel shortage on all levels -- physicians, nurses, techs -- and then there's just the unpredictability of hospital work. It's difficult for anyone with a conscience to walk away from a busy understaffed ER saying, "Sorry, my shift's over, you guys are on your own," so you end up staying and putting a lot more hours than you really should. And when that happens day after day, as it does some weeks, the hours add up fast.
There's also the plain bizarre: I once ended up working six days straight in the base hospital at Minot AFB because a blizzard closed the highway between town and base, and enough of the hospital personnel (including me, damn it) lived off base that we couldn't get home and our relief couldn't get to work. But a base hospital is like a small-town hospital, and with rare exceptions the ER doesn't see enough patients with enough serious problems to really grind you down. When I worked at DHMC, then known as Denver General, on the other hand, a week where I wasn't ground down to the bone felt like a vacation. And it's like that at big city and county hospitals pretty much all over.
I work on the research side of things now, and I do miss patient care a lot of the time ... but I sure as hell don't miss that, let me tell you.
I've worked those hundred-hour weeks in a busy hospital; trust me, it does a lot more damage to your ability to take care of patients than a puff or two would do. People who are that tired -- and I don't care how tough you are, by the end of it, you are that tired -- display some of the worst aspects of alcohol and drug intoxication, without any of the relaxed happy feeling which is why people like to get drunk and stoned in the first place.
You may not remember this, but there was a point when Quicktime was pretty much the only decent video player available on any platform. The product as a whole is more likely to end up on a best-of than a worst-of list, regardless of how lousy recent versions have been.
Correct me if I'm wrong but if the young tend to be more liberal than the old, and students are primarily young, doesn't it follow that students tend to be more liberal than the national average? You kind of made my point for me there.
Your original point was something about "leftist professors." My point -- which indeed I may not have made very well, thanks to sleep deprivation -- is twofold: first, that students don't need much encouragement to protest, from professors or anyone else; second, that the "liberalism" of college students, and the young generally, doesn't fit neatly on a left-right axis. Left-wing is not the same as liberal (and neither is right-wing the same as conservative.) Whether the powers-that-be are left-wing authoritarian or right-wing authoritarian, students in general will be against them. In recent US history, we've seen more authoritarianism coming from the right than the left, and student protests have appeared correspondingly left-wing; if that situation changes, the perception of student politics will turn on a dime. In, e.g., the USSR, of course, it worked the other way around.
How about all those students protesting against the Iraq war in the USA...? Was that a "left-right" issue.
Yeah. No duh?
I can't speak to your other examples, but I'm guessing you can't either.
It's funny, I keep hearing all these people solemnly proclaiming that "real conservatives" are opposed to foreign adventurism, and to fighting wars without paying for them. Of course, most of them started saying that only after Bush took a nosedive in the polls, and by all evidence they happily voted for Bush in 2004 and McCain in 2008 (and will probably vote for Palin in 2012) but supposedly there are a good many in America's right wing who thought the Iraq war was a bad idea from the get-go.
Anyway, if you look over the other examples GPP cited, it's blindingly obvious that student protests are not linked to the left-right axis. The young tend to be more liberal than the old, it's true (and anyone who digs out the quote commonly misattributed to Churchill at this point will be send back to remedial classes) but what constitutes "liberal" in any particular time and place is generally defined by opposition to the existing power structure.
The post-Civil War West was very rarely the kind of lawless anarchy that Hollywood portrays. There were a few specific times and places where it was, but those trouble spots got cleaned up pretty quickly. People don't like living with bullets flying randomly around their heads.
The early 19th c. frontier (which in those days was mostly east of the Mississippi) on the other hand ... yeah. But that was before "Sam Colt made them that way." Most of the killing was done with single-shot firearms or, very often, knives.
My taxes went up, not down, when I moved from Massachusetts to California. Thanks for playing, though.
The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
Somewhere, there's an irony in this being passed by the state that was first to secede from the Union and instigate the Civil War.
No, there is zero irony. It simply highlights the absurdity of the claim that the Confederate states were fighting for freedom. They seceded in an attempt to keep aristocratic rule alive when the rest of the country was turning against it; and even among the slave states, S.C. was always distinguished by the degree to which it worshiped the aristocratic ideal. The American Revolution was not complete until 1865.
Eh. Counting up the numbers and doing a chi-squared test tells you if you've got a good discrete uniform distribution (so it's a good test of the fairness of a die) but it doesn't measure "randomness" per se, because it doesn't tell you anything about the ordering of the numbers. For a trivial example, the following sequence:
123456123456123456123456123456123456123456123456123456123456
scores perfectly on your test (chi-squared=0). Actually, so does 10 1s, followed by 10 2s, ..., followed by 10 6s. But obviously neither sequence is in any way random.
Heh. Well, yes, there is that.
How does the brain choose a random number?
It tells the body to roll a die. If you try to pick random numbers by just thinking about it, you'll do a spectacularly bad job.
scientists outside of computer science are too busy in their respective fields to know anything about code, or even care
This is true, but it's not an excuse. If your interpretation of the data, or even the data itself, depends on your code, then if you say "I don't care about the code" then you're really saying "I don't care about the science." Scientists tend to be very picky about the quality of their lab equipment, as well they should be, but all too often are willing to let sloppy, untested code make that quality pretty much meaningless.
As a bioinformaticist who used to work in industry as a programmer and DBA, I've spent an enormous amount of time going through other people's code just to get it to the point where it even starts to make sense, so I can be sure it does what it's claimed to do. And very often, it doesn't, which means I have to spend more time fixing it. I'm always happy to do this, and my collaborators are usually happy for my fixes ... but it really has to mean that there are an awful lot of published papers out there which depend on code that's never been through this kind of review.
Scientists who want to teach themselves good software engineering should do so. They're certainly capable of it; if you can get a PhD in any scientific subject, you can damn well learn to program at the level of a competent industry developer. Those who don't (and I don't blame them, since they are, after all busy doing other things) need to hire assistants who have, or are willing to gain, the necessary level of knowledge. It makes absolutely no sense to buy a half-million dollars worth of lab equipment and then run the output through code written for the equivalent of a hundred dollars worth of work.
And despite Slashdot posts claiming otherwise, repeating variations on "correlation is not causation" over and over is found not to add anything useful to the discussion.
The participants who reported high levels of boredom were significantly more likely to have died than the participants, in the same age group, who didn't.
[sigh] TentireFA is about ten lines long; it doesn't give much information, but it's enough to get that much. Actually, even an intelligent reading of the summary would have given you that little bit of information. Probably too much to ask here, I know.
Questioning global warming / climate change is a near sure way to get modded down.
He says, in a comment modded to +5.
Taking the pose of the Bold Rebel Speaking Truth To Power is in fact a sure way to get modded up, on just about any topic. Of course it doesn't matter if it has any relation to reality. Just start your comment out with "I'll get modded down for this, but ..." or "This may not be politically correct of me, but ..." and a bunch of Rugged Individualists Exactly Like You will be there to reward you.
Ah, fascinating bit of history. Thanks.
And it does seem more in keeping with Microsoft's history as a whole. Now I can go back to my usual smug Mac user's "Microsoft never did anything worthwhile" stance with a clear conscience. ;)
Yep. You could also say that the Solar System consists of one star, one failed star, and a bunch of other junk.
if you grant me the other seven dwarves are planets: eris, makemake, haumea, sedna, orcus, 2001OR10, and quaoar ... your choice, but the third graders of 2080 who have to memorize 80 planets might not be too happy with you
All of those but Eris are considerably smaller than Pluto. I wouldn't have any problem with Eris being classified as a planet. And it will be a hell of a long time before we find 70 more Pluto-plus-sized objects in the Solar System. Make 1000 km radius (a nice round number) plus hydrostatic equilbrium the cutoff.
The "cleared its neighborhood" definition is absurd, since by that definition Earth is not a planet.
Mac OS had a small marketshare, it was and is pretty easy to change some pretty radical things without much problems. Not the same thing with an OS with 90%+ of marketshare.
And yet Microsoft did pull off exactly such a transition once, and did so at a time when it was even more of a monopoly than it is now. Windows NT (which became 2000, XP, etc.) was just as different "under the hood" from Windows 3.x/95/98/ME as Mac OS X was from the classic Mac OS, but Microsoft managed to move PC users from one to the other with minimal disruption -- less disruption, in fact, than Mac users experienced going from Classic to X. (And I'm not taking sides here: I'm a Mac user by preference, but at the time I was working as a developer on Windows.) I don't really think they'll be able to do it again, you understand, but it's not because of their market share that this is so. It's a more fundamental problem in their corporate culture, one that's really only developed in the last decade or so.
Totalitarianism is one group being given absolute authority over all aspects of its citizens lives. This country's law enforcement can't even figure out how to cooperate with each other. It's the same in the military, the different branches of government... well, pretty much everywhere you look. I don't see a "totalitarian" government springing up anytime soon.
You're imposing an absurdly high standard for what constitutes "totalitarian" here. Nazi Germany and the USSR were both characterized by a plethora of government agencies, law enforcement and otherwise, which never managed to cooperate with each other, and which often fought each other at every opportunity. Never at their worst did they achieve "absolute authority over all aspects" of ... well, anything, really. And yet they are, with good reason, the canonical modern examples of totalitarian states.
If the depression rates are as high as they say they are (8%, as of a 2004 study), they can find a correlation between depression and virtually any activity involving enough people.
Please explain why this is so, and specifically, why a high depression rate by itself makes it more likely that you will find a correlation with some randomly chosen activity. Show your work.
Go ahead. I dare you.
"Everyone I know who's died drinks water or something that has water in it!" someone will say.
Everyone you know who's still alive drinks water or something that has water in it, too. What this study found is nothing like that.
The study is a failure if it finds both ends of the argument plausible and no concrete evidence for either.
No, it is not a failure. It succeeds in saying, "we observed this phenomenon, it's significant, and it might be worth studying further." Science succeeds when it places observations before conclusions; it fails when it does the opposite, as people like you seem to want it to do. Establishing that something exists in the first place is the prerequisite for everything that follows.