I wouldn't say you have ADD, I'd say you have what I have - a lack of decent work ethic compounded by a reasonable intelligence. In high school I hardly had to work at anything to get the ideas (like you) but at university I also had trouble because I didn't have the work ethic that smart, yet not super smart, people had to build in order to get by in high school.
A lot of university-level ideas require concentration, hard work and yes, listening in class (I had to become a decent note taker). I know people who did better than me not because they were smarter, but because they were good at working.
My advice to you? Build a work ethic. Make yourself sit down and work through problems (any problems, pick up an old math book or a language learner). Also, for comprehension I seriously recommend audio books - my first audio book I had to keep rewinding, but now I'm much better at retaining what's said. Answering phones (receptionist or guest services type role) also really helps on this one too (not a job you'd ever really want, and not one I'd ever been good at, hated answering phones at my dad's office on the odd occasion, but a stint answering phones while on vacation and now I'm a pro).
So yeah, don't take the easy way out and say you have ADD. Just realise you haven't worked on the skills you need to be good at other disciplines.
I had to spend some time in the "Christian prayer room" at Frankfurt once, as it was the only place to have a power outlet in the whole damn crappy terminal 2!
Surely it's possible for an individual to spend a few hours away from an internet connection?
How about if you are not leaving for the airport from your internet-connected house and then arriving at another internet-connected location? What if you are *gasp* travelling on a multi-stop adventure around any particular continent or even the world? Not everyone travelling is doing so for business or for a one-stop trip.
What if your total travel schedule is longer than "a few hours" - up to even 48 hours long? This happened to me and my brother flying home to Australia from Europe - two 9 hour stop overs - yeah you're going to want some free internet!
In my experience airport food is horrendous, but there is more choice in US airports. Australian airports are terrible, those I went to in Europe weren't great either. The food in Dublin airport was good, because it was all made fresh, which in itself was the most ridiculous idea ever seen in an airport - who can afford to wait 30 minutes for their meal (each meal took ~5 minutes for the chef to make and the lines were long) when most people have little more time than that before they have to board the plane????
Even on long journeys (living in Australia means most air travel is 18 hours minimum to Europe or US, and I've been on a few in the last few years) I'd rather have free WiFi than food - I'd rather have something to do than just sit around consuming calories for the sake of it.
Nicely put - when you graduate usually all of your experience leaves with you, unless you stay to do a post-doc (and get involved with new grads).
Otherwise, everyone is constantly reinventing the wheel - and re-discovering safety procedures. Unfortunately both don't get passed along unless there is a good overlap of new and closer-to-graduating students teaching each other (with all the bias and mis-information that comes with that as well).
It's hard to blame Sheri for following the example set by the rest of the lab.
This is the issue.
Many people are not very worried about safety, and even when they are they don't always know the best procedures to take. Most people just copy everyone else in the lab. Some people wear gloves that do nothing for the type of chemical they are using, and don't bother to read the MSDS sheets to find out. So someone else copies them and the myth that they are protected spreads. It IS a good idea to ask around your lab mates what safety procedures are required - but ultimately you DO have to be responsible for yourself. Every lab should have MSDS sheets that give you good safety tips - or else just look them up on the web. Ignorance is not an excuse, though sadly it is easy to remain ignorant when you are busy actually working.
Peer pressure is huge in a lot of labs, but if you're an adult I still believe you should look out for your own safety. I've been laughed at for wearing over protective clothing or gloves, but I don't care - if anything I think of it as practice for when you really are doing something dangerous, you're getting used to wearing awkward gloves etc. Whether or not you are liable in an accident is another matter. If the lab isn't safe ultimately it falls on the lab manager, and they will have to shoulder the blame for being too lazy or uncaring to crack down on unsafe practices.
It's more complicated though (my frustrating probably came through a little too strong). If anything it's a problem with the attitude of the institution - in a industry lab, procedures exist to save money and time - waste, time effectiveness and throughput are monitored for the benefit of the company.
Everyone made a mess of the lab, but no one person trashed the whole thing - it was just a build up of YEARS of not cleaning up after yourself properly. Basically everyone needed to form better habits and this needs to come FROM THE TOP - ie from supervisors and full-time research assistants. Many of the people in the labs were my friends and they weren't assholes - just slobs?!
You can't say 'need to learn not to trash the lab' because this implies someone gives a shit (all the way up the chain). If no-one cares the lab is a mess there are no consequences. Sad to say, until an accident occurs it is perceived as OK.
In fact, no-one expected anyone to clean up - everyone just accepted that that was the way the lab was, and that attitude it itself was the main problem. Also, everyone was too busy actually working on their projects to clean up the expanse of mess until we finally got someone at the top to tackle the issue and organise a group clean.
Ultimately though, cleanliness comes from the individual researcher, and some people will always be pigs. When it compromises safety, the problem is again that someone ELSE needs to intervene if the individual doesn't believe they are being dangerous.
I recently finished my PhD in microelectronics and I have to say some of our labs were HORRENDOUS. Sure, our spanking new cleanroom had a decent set of safety procedures drawn up when it opened (which weren't always followed, but generally infractions resulted in a decent telling off or suspension), but our regular measurement lab? It was a total mess and no-one really cared. Whoever was in charge of it (ie some academic) had probably not set foot in there in years. There were old bottles of random chemicals all over the place (at least one of which was handled pretty carefully when finally removed over the course of a few cleanups that were finally initiated by those of us grads who could stand it no longer). Basically most grad students, and most academics, are guys, and they are pigs. Sorry, but it is the truth. You should see their offices/desks. If their mom cleans the dishes at home, no wonder they don't give a shit about wiping down a bench after making a mess. And we had a lot of them in the labs (the presence of undergrads only makes things 100x times worse). Sure some mess was not dangerous per se, but en-masse the effect was that no-one cared if they really DID make a dangerous mess. Unlabelled bottles of clear liquids all over the place - is it iso or tric? Big difference!
Didn't help that some of the most-loved stories were of our current supervisors as grads themselves in the 70s handling BUCKETS of HF and swishing them around to clean out quartz annealing tubes, without gloves or safety gear. Pouring vats of HCl on the floor. Why aren't they dead? Blind luck is all I can say. So when I get antsy about not wanting to work with HF even with safety gear they give it the brush off.
So yeah, read the MSDS sheets in your own time, and then be told that no, you CAN boil acetone at over 60 degrees (its flash point) because 'we're all been doing it for years'. People in general do not like to be told they don't know what they think they know. They get very defensive and only constant nagging makes any difference. And you know what? It's not my job to nag or clean up after others, yet I spent a shit load of my time doing it, so that MY devices were not ruined by the state of the laboratory and so that I did not have to get cancer later.
You need a decent lab manager who has time to monitor what goes on. Other labs in the university were run much better because the academic basically had his office off the lab, was participant in the work, had only a few students and CLEANED UP. I always thought we should hire someone's mum as a lab tech - get her prepped on lab safety, chemicals etc, then pay her to clean the lab one day a week. It would give work to older ladies who would be valued for their experience because they are CLEAN and ORGANISED and would do a much better job than the guys. It would also mean someone took responsibility for the lab. That said, I wouldn't want my mum doing it, because there was scary stuff in there.
My grad supervisor, who has both a masters and a PhD, is only mid-30s and not entirely without a clue, thought that old classical artwork, eg Monet (and even older works), were still under copyright and that it was reasonable to pay a fortune for a print of the work, and that such prints had to come from 'authorised' vendors. She then baulked at the notion you could take a photo of the work, and argued AGAINST the idea that good would come if it was out of copyright. Seriously, Joe Public has no idea about copyright and what the point of it is (even highly educated Joes, or Janes) other than that 'it can't be free - that's.... WRONG!'
I don't think functional programming is the place to start for the majority of students. A procedural language has a much more direct relationship to the underlying machine code.
I agree - the first language we were taught in CS 101 was gofer - it was easy, but it really gave you very little insight into how programming actually worked (as opposed to just getting it working). I would have much preferred to learn C straight up. I still think it is the best starting point there is (though I wouldn't dedicate the entire year to it - first year should expose you to a couple different ideas).
Gofer would have been easy to teach in a non-procedural unit as an aside. But really I've never used it again (yes yes I'm sure there are valid applications out there) and feel like it was a waste of precious first year brain-still-a-ready-sponge opportunity.
Thermal expansion coefficients are governed by the material - single crystal silicon has a very different thermal expansion coefficient to single crystal sapphire, for example. SOI silicon is also single crystal just on an insulator, so its thermal expansion is exactly the same as standard silicon. Perhaps you mean strained-silicon? Even then it's still single crystal and unlikely to have a thermal expansion coefficient that is much different from standard silicon. I'm not sure of exactly how much they change to LN2 temperatures (77 K), but it's not much, and the article only goes to 244 K (if it is -20 F they mean as I expect).
The biggest issue is the _difference_ in expansion coefficients between the silicon, the SiO2, the 'S' and the 'I' in an SOI system, the metal layers and whatever other insulating layers are used between the metal tracks. If everything cooled and warmed with the same thermal expansion ratios, then it wouldn't be a problem no matter how many times you cycled it.
Ahh, my mistake, probably from reading a reply to your original post. At 46 degrees I'll have to take your word for it whether an extra hour forwards or back makes any difference at all anyway!
Plenty of people like it, myself included. Being able to get to the beach after work before the bastard of a sea breeze comes in is heaven.
And the hottest temperature in Perth on record is 46.2, so I think your 45-50oC is a little bit exaggerated. That said, it can feel really hot, but usually it's below 40 most summers (though I love a 40oC Christmas!).
"No, what isn't fair is that the top 5% earn 60% of the income."
Since when does fairness mean anything? Sure, I'd like to make more money for the hard work that I do rather than see seemingly incompetent old white guys making millions driving companies into the ground, but I don't go whining that it's unfair. It's like that because you need power hungry money grabbers to drive business, which attracts the kind of people who will decide their own payscales. The world wouldn't get anywhere if 'fair' tree-hugging hippies were in control, nor if only average people like myself were.
Why do you need target disk mode when you can boot the thing up and move your files normally?
you can boot a friends laptop in target disk mode and drag and drop files off their harddrive onto your computer as though it were an external harddrive - byebye problem with permissions, network sharing, network lag etc. it is SO EASY and quick, I'm really sad to see it go
you also may need target disk mode say when you CAN'T boot up normally for whatever reason
Oh, the APL is out already - and yes the first line reads "The terahertz THz spectral range = 30 - 300 um has long been devoid of electrically pumped room temperature RT semiconductor source." (another great example of APL editing - should read devoid of _a_ source, or devoid of sources).
Personally, I have come to really enjoy reading the online NY Times (and I don't even live in the US).
The re-design they did a couple years ago is a pleasure to navigate, to read (I love the fonts) and while the photos are always top notch, I must say the award goes to whoever makes the graphs. They have the most fantastic and unique ways of presenting data - far beyond a boring Excel bar graph. I am really really impressed by the interesting and informative graphs which are often highly interactive, and I would love to know who thinks them up.
At the end of the day, they use templates (I believe he says as much in TFA, IIRC, I read it a week or so ago) and hand tweak the site to make it sure it stays cross-platform pretty. Each story has a similar layout so it can't be hard for them to simply tweak by hand where needed.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't say you have ADD, I'd say you have what I have - a lack of decent work ethic compounded by a reasonable intelligence. In high school I hardly had to work at anything to get the ideas (like you) but at university I also had trouble because I didn't have the work ethic that smart, yet not super smart, people had to build in order to get by in high school.
A lot of university-level ideas require concentration, hard work and yes, listening in class (I had to become a decent note taker). I know people who did better than me not because they were smarter, but because they were good at working.
My advice to you? Build a work ethic. Make yourself sit down and work through problems (any problems, pick up an old math book or a language learner). Also, for comprehension I seriously recommend audio books - my first audio book I had to keep rewinding, but now I'm much better at retaining what's said. Answering phones (receptionist or guest services type role) also really helps on this one too (not a job you'd ever really want, and not one I'd ever been good at, hated answering phones at my dad's office on the odd occasion, but a stint answering phones while on vacation and now I'm a pro).
So yeah, don't take the easy way out and say you have ADD. Just realise you haven't worked on the skills you need to be good at other disciplines.
I had to spend some time in the "Christian prayer room" at Frankfurt once, as it was the only place to have a power outlet in the whole damn crappy terminal 2!
Surely it's possible for an individual to spend a few hours away from an internet connection?
How about if you are not leaving for the airport from your internet-connected house and then arriving at another internet-connected location? What if you are *gasp* travelling on a multi-stop adventure around any particular continent or even the world? Not everyone travelling is doing so for business or for a one-stop trip.
What if your total travel schedule is longer than "a few hours" - up to even 48 hours long? This happened to me and my brother flying home to Australia from Europe - two 9 hour stop overs - yeah you're going to want some free internet!
In my experience airport food is horrendous, but there is more choice in US airports. Australian airports are terrible, those I went to in Europe weren't great either. The food in Dublin airport was good, because it was all made fresh, which in itself was the most ridiculous idea ever seen in an airport - who can afford to wait 30 minutes for their meal (each meal took ~5 minutes for the chef to make and the lines were long) when most people have little more time than that before they have to board the plane????
Even on long journeys (living in Australia means most air travel is 18 hours minimum to Europe or US, and I've been on a few in the last few years) I'd rather have free WiFi than food - I'd rather have something to do than just sit around consuming calories for the sake of it.
Nicely put - when you graduate usually all of your experience leaves with you, unless you stay to do a post-doc (and get involved with new grads).
Otherwise, everyone is constantly reinventing the wheel - and re-discovering safety procedures. Unfortunately both don't get passed along unless there is a good overlap of new and closer-to-graduating students teaching each other (with all the bias and mis-information that comes with that as well).
It's hard to blame Sheri for following the example set by the rest of the lab.
This is the issue.
Many people are not very worried about safety, and even when they are they don't always know the best procedures to take. Most people just copy everyone else in the lab. Some people wear gloves that do nothing for the type of chemical they are using, and don't bother to read the MSDS sheets to find out. So someone else copies them and the myth that they are protected spreads. It IS a good idea to ask around your lab mates what safety procedures are required - but ultimately you DO have to be responsible for yourself. Every lab should have MSDS sheets that give you good safety tips - or else just look them up on the web. Ignorance is not an excuse, though sadly it is easy to remain ignorant when you are busy actually working.
Peer pressure is huge in a lot of labs, but if you're an adult I still believe you should look out for your own safety. I've been laughed at for wearing over protective clothing or gloves, but I don't care - if anything I think of it as practice for when you really are doing something dangerous, you're getting used to wearing awkward gloves etc. Whether or not you are liable in an accident is another matter. If the lab isn't safe ultimately it falls on the lab manager, and they will have to shoulder the blame for being too lazy or uncaring to crack down on unsafe practices.
It's more complicated though (my frustrating probably came through a little too strong). If anything it's a problem with the attitude of the institution - in a industry lab, procedures exist to save money and time - waste, time effectiveness and throughput are monitored for the benefit of the company.
Everyone made a mess of the lab, but no one person trashed the whole thing - it was just a build up of YEARS of not cleaning up after yourself properly. Basically everyone needed to form better habits and this needs to come FROM THE TOP - ie from supervisors and full-time research assistants. Many of the people in the labs were my friends and they weren't assholes - just slobs?!
You can't say 'need to learn not to trash the lab' because this implies someone gives a shit (all the way up the chain). If no-one cares the lab is a mess there are no consequences. Sad to say, until an accident occurs it is perceived as OK.
In fact, no-one expected anyone to clean up - everyone just accepted that that was the way the lab was, and that attitude it itself was the main problem. Also, everyone was too busy actually working on their projects to clean up the expanse of mess until we finally got someone at the top to tackle the issue and organise a group clean.
Ultimately though, cleanliness comes from the individual researcher, and some people will always be pigs. When it compromises safety, the problem is again that someone ELSE needs to intervene if the individual doesn't believe they are being dangerous.
they sell American beer in plastic bottles around the pool in Vegas. neat, really :)
I recently finished my PhD in microelectronics and I have to say some of our labs were HORRENDOUS. Sure, our spanking new cleanroom had a decent set of safety procedures drawn up when it opened (which weren't always followed, but generally infractions resulted in a decent telling off or suspension), but our regular measurement lab? It was a total mess and no-one really cared. Whoever was in charge of it (ie some academic) had probably not set foot in there in years. There were old bottles of random chemicals all over the place (at least one of which was handled pretty carefully when finally removed over the course of a few cleanups that were finally initiated by those of us grads who could stand it no longer). Basically most grad students, and most academics, are guys, and they are pigs. Sorry, but it is the truth. You should see their offices/desks. If their mom cleans the dishes at home, no wonder they don't give a shit about wiping down a bench after making a mess. And we had a lot of them in the labs (the presence of undergrads only makes things 100x times worse). Sure some mess was not dangerous per se, but en-masse the effect was that no-one cared if they really DID make a dangerous mess. Unlabelled bottles of clear liquids all over the place - is it iso or tric? Big difference!
Didn't help that some of the most-loved stories were of our current supervisors as grads themselves in the 70s handling BUCKETS of HF and swishing them around to clean out quartz annealing tubes, without gloves or safety gear. Pouring vats of HCl on the floor. Why aren't they dead? Blind luck is all I can say. So when I get antsy about not wanting to work with HF even with safety gear they give it the brush off.
So yeah, read the MSDS sheets in your own time, and then be told that no, you CAN boil acetone at over 60 degrees (its flash point) because 'we're all been doing it for years'. People in general do not like to be told they don't know what they think they know. They get very defensive and only constant nagging makes any difference. And you know what? It's not my job to nag or clean up after others, yet I spent a shit load of my time doing it, so that MY devices were not ruined by the state of the laboratory and so that I did not have to get cancer later.
You need a decent lab manager who has time to monitor what goes on. Other labs in the university were run much better because the academic basically had his office off the lab, was participant in the work, had only a few students and CLEANED UP. I always thought we should hire someone's mum as a lab tech - get her prepped on lab safety, chemicals etc, then pay her to clean the lab one day a week. It would give work to older ladies who would be valued for their experience because they are CLEAN and ORGANISED and would do a much better job than the guys. It would also mean someone took responsibility for the lab. That said, I wouldn't want my mum doing it, because there was scary stuff in there.
I bet believes in infinite copyright periods also
My grad supervisor, who has both a masters and a PhD, is only mid-30s and not entirely without a clue, thought that old classical artwork, eg Monet (and even older works), were still under copyright and that it was reasonable to pay a fortune for a print of the work, and that such prints had to come from 'authorised' vendors. She then baulked at the notion you could take a photo of the work, and argued AGAINST the idea that good would come if it was out of copyright. Seriously, Joe Public has no idea about copyright and what the point of it is (even highly educated Joes, or Janes) other than that 'it can't be free - that's.... WRONG!'
I don't think functional programming is the place to start for the majority of students. A procedural language has a much more direct relationship to the underlying machine code.
I agree - the first language we were taught in CS 101 was gofer - it was easy, but it really gave you very little insight into how programming actually worked (as opposed to just getting it working). I would have much preferred to learn C straight up. I still think it is the best starting point there is (though I wouldn't dedicate the entire year to it - first year should expose you to a couple different ideas).
Gofer would have been easy to teach in a non-procedural unit as an aside. But really I've never used it again (yes yes I'm sure there are valid applications out there) and feel like it was a waste of precious first year brain-still-a-ready-sponge opportunity.
Too bad PayPal is not governed by banking laws and can do away with your money anyway, without anyone stealing your password!
Surely you can get it colder than -20 F (~244 K) using LN2 which is at a temperature of 77 K??
Thermal expansion coefficients are governed by the material - single crystal silicon has a very different thermal expansion coefficient to single crystal sapphire, for example. SOI silicon is also single crystal just on an insulator, so its thermal expansion is exactly the same as standard silicon. Perhaps you mean strained-silicon? Even then it's still single crystal and unlikely to have a thermal expansion coefficient that is much different from standard silicon. I'm not sure of exactly how much they change to LN2 temperatures (77 K), but it's not much, and the article only goes to 244 K (if it is -20 F they mean as I expect).
The biggest issue is the _difference_ in expansion coefficients between the silicon, the SiO2, the 'S' and the 'I' in an SOI system, the metal layers and whatever other insulating layers are used between the metal tracks. If everything cooled and warmed with the same thermal expansion ratios, then it wouldn't be a problem no matter how many times you cycled it.
LaTeX! (instead of powerpoint)
Ahh, my mistake, probably from reading a reply to your original post. At 46 degrees I'll have to take your word for it whether an extra hour forwards or back makes any difference at all anyway!
and kills my garden, all that extra sunlight!!
Plenty of people like it, myself included. Being able to get to the beach after work before the bastard of a sea breeze comes in is heaven.
And the hottest temperature in Perth on record is 46.2, so I think your 45-50oC is a little bit exaggerated. That said, it can feel really hot, but usually it's below 40 most summers (though I love a 40oC Christmas!).
"No, what isn't fair is that the top 5% earn 60% of the income."
Since when does fairness mean anything? Sure, I'd like to make more money for the hard work that I do rather than see seemingly incompetent old white guys making millions driving companies into the ground, but I don't go whining that it's unfair. It's like that because you need power hungry money grabbers to drive business, which attracts the kind of people who will decide their own payscales. The world wouldn't get anywhere if 'fair' tree-hugging hippies were in control, nor if only average people like myself were.
No, his land purchase was short sighted if he wanted the water, and should have bought upstream.
I don't understand your argument - you can't own the water on your property because of what people around you might do?
Does the US not have tax deductions for charitable giving?
Why do you need target disk mode when you can boot the thing up and move your files normally?
you can boot a friends laptop in target disk mode and drag and drop files off their harddrive onto your computer as though it were an external harddrive - byebye problem with permissions, network sharing, network lag etc. it is SO EASY and quick, I'm really sad to see it go
you also may need target disk mode say when you CAN'T boot up normally for whatever reason
Oh, the APL is out already - and yes the first line reads "The terahertz THz spectral range = 30 - 300 um has long been devoid of electrically pumped room temperature RT semiconductor source." (another great example of APL editing - should read devoid of _a_ source, or devoid of sources).
No, they aren't. It should read 30 - 300 um, which is the correct units quoted in the first line of the actual paper which I just dl'd from APL.
Yep you're correct, especially since their angstrom has a lowercase a!
:)
In fact the summary is rather fluffy, I'll wait to read the APL
Personally, I have come to really enjoy reading the online NY Times (and I don't even live in the US).
The re-design they did a couple years ago is a pleasure to navigate, to read (I love the fonts) and while the photos are always top notch, I must say the award goes to whoever makes the graphs. They have the most fantastic and unique ways of presenting data - far beyond a boring Excel bar graph. I am really really impressed by the interesting and informative graphs which are often highly interactive, and I would love to know who thinks them up.
At the end of the day, they use templates (I believe he says as much in TFA, IIRC, I read it a week or so ago) and hand tweak the site to make it sure it stays cross-platform pretty. Each story has a similar layout so it can't be hard for them to simply tweak by hand where needed.