Many years ago when I was in grad school, I went to Oak Ridge National Labs to use the Small Angle Neutron Scattering line. When I arrived, the staff scientist had the instrument open (think of a large stainless steel pipe in sections that are bolted together). We made some adjustments to the detector and we needed to bolt everything back together and pump down the system.
The staff scientist said, "let's go for coffee". I had done a lot of electron microscopy and knew it took a while to pump down a such a vacuum system, so I said, "shouldn't we get this pumping first?" and picked up a wrench to get started bolting sections together.
He smiled and said you must not have worked in a union shop. He said we had to call a pipe-fitter or we would create a union incident.
I had never encountered this in college or at the non-union company where I had worked in a lab before graduate school nor did I encounter this in the non-union company I worked at for 36 years afterward. We had skilled trades people to help us when needed (especially for large jobs and tasks beyond most scientists), but we could do the easy things for ourselves and get our work done effectively.
I prefer PDFs that I file when I can find them easily. A second advantage is that most manuals have multiple languages. I can split the PDF and make one that has only the pages I want.
Because much of the software we use is only availabe on Windows and is not Open Source. I have ported some to Linux, but the Linux version of one key package I use has bugs and I don't have all the source to fix it.
You nailed it. I run Monte Carlo simulations of electron induced X-ray microanalysis spectra. These can run for hours. I want control of my CPU cycles and don't want some update starting without my explicit permission. I have a friend who runs a big microanalysis lab. A rececent MS update broke DCOM and won't let his microanalysis computer talk to the microscope computer. We know of at least one other system with this problem. These are $1M+ systems...
My community does CPU-intensive work and we want control of OUR computers. We understand the need for antivirus/spyware software and are willing to use it. We don't want our OS to treat us like idiots and BE the spyware... We want to give explicit permission for the OS to phone home...
"Free" and licenced are not incompatible. There are many very generous licenses: CC-by, MIT, BSD. One reason a developer may want to choose one is that they welcome individual or even corporate users using it but want to prevent someone bundling it with something else and selling it to others without either permission and some kind of payment or acknowlegement.
I agree. Want to be safe? Carry a small tablet. You can add a bluetooth keyboard if you hate on-screen keyboards like I do. I would be wary of online banking on an unsecure network...
Armed response is way premature and is the last result when all peaceful means are exhausted.. On the other hand filing a motion for an injunction prohibiting this until the matter has been fully litigated would be a wise move. This is clearly a constitutional issue... We have a Constitution and Bill of Rights for just this reason...
Let's make sure the right head rolls... This was a rookie mistake that no CEO should ever make. One NEVER tries a demo for the first time before an important audience. If the CEO isn't willing to do a dry run, then he should either get a product manager who has the time to do it or the board should get a new CEO.
Earlier this year our Keurig brewer needed to be replaced. Went to the store and got a new one. Got it home and our existing K-cups wouldn't work - they were the old version. Called Keurig - they told me they would replace my cups. Told them that wasn't good enough because I didn't want to worry every time we bought cups. The rep said there was nothing she could do. Told her she lost a customer for life.
Took the brewer back, got a refund. Ordered a Mr Coffee version that is quite acceptable. Use whatever cups I want. Hope their management lose their jobs over this one. First rule of business is to treat your customers with respect or they (we) will find vendors who will.
Interestingly enough, everybody figured out how to defeat their DRM. Keurig alienated customers and competitors found a workaround. Queue up Nelson Munch: "Haa Haa."
There is a clear reason for the rise in tuition: The availability of "easy credit" for student loans.
In the Dark Ages when I was an undergrad, we lived in dorms with painted cinder block walls, spartan furniture, and a bathroom per hallway. We had a minimal gym facility but reasonable equipment in the labs. With some help from my parents and working had during summers and breaks, I graduated with only $750 in loans.
Now you have luxury dorms and sports complexes. Sadly, the cost increases for these facilities and the explosion of administrators made it practically impossible to pay for one's education at a top tier state school by working hard during the summers and breaks and some help from ones parents.
Let's not mention the Lake Wobegone mentality that all the children are above average. Colleges love remedial courses - they get paid and the students stay longer. But that changes the economics. Attending college is a business decision and if the graduate can't repay the debt in a few years, the ROI wasn't there.
Depends upon whether six months of backup meets the requirements of the records retention statute. If not, at a minimum all management who signed off on the policy should be fired.
I could also see a statute setting different retention periods for different levels of employees. I could see a shorter period for lower level employees, but senior employees such as Lerner should have records that cover a much longer period, such as the statute of limitation for the consequences of criminal action in their position.
Several knowledgeable sources have noted that fuel is both expensive and heavy. Extra weight creates drag. Airlines tend to load an aircraft with the amount of fuel required for a flight and a reserve to cover delays that weather and air traffic cause, not filled to the brim.
> That is... naive. It is highly unlikely that that professor has any hand in this.
I suspect you are wrong. Prof. Shiller already makes his classes available through OpenYale. I have watched several of his lectures. His lectures are quite engaging and he seems to enjoy teaching.
I, too, have taken three Coursera classes for credit and done all the work. All three were well worth the effort. One was a teaser program for an expensive masters sponsored by the University. That was clear and did not diminish the value. Another was the first offering and was experimenting with peer grading. There were many problems with peer grading, but that did not diminish the value. I respect all three of the instructors and benefited greatly from the work and interaction.
One must have reasonable expectations of MOOCs. Much of the data mining is actually designed to benefit students. Andrew Ng and Daphne Kohler have written about how valuable the large sample size is for detecting conceptual misunderstanding from wong quiz answers to give appropriate automatic feedback. Two of my classes had over 10,000 participants. Compare that to the typical size of less than 200 at most universities. Seems to me that both faculty and students benefit from such research - faculty from publications and name recognition and students from better instruction.
It is a bit more complicated. I work in the analytical division of well-recognized company. Most of our vendors design instrumentation to work with Windows. There are rarely drivers for other OS choices. Most is also designed with an over-emphasis on graphical user interfaces, the bane of reproducible research.
I see way too much abuse of spreadsheets. According to Baggerly and Coombes, part of the problems in the Duke scandal were caused by off-by one index errors with Excel. Similar spreadheet blunders arose in the recent Reinhart-Rogoff problem.
I hate Excel. It is hard to do simple things efficiently. Try and do a scatterplot with multiple series. How many keystrokes will it take? Once you get your analysis done and your report written with Word, how difficult is it to fix if the client wants to add one more sample? Then consider the changes in VBA. We have 3rd party code that are locked and won't even open on current versions of Excel.
Over the last few years, I migrated all of my back-end data processing to R/Sweave/LaTeX. For some projects I use markdown instead of LaTeX. Everything is scriptable, plays well with version control (code is mainly text files), and runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows. I use (and contribute) to Open Source whenever feasible. Solving problems is easier and I find community support better than most vendor support.
If I could get my hardware to play nice with Linux, I'd switch in a heartbeat. There is only one application I would miss - the debugger in Visual Studio. RStudio is pretty good at what it was designed for, but that does not include debugging the C++ code that needs to be written to speed up some computationally intensive parts...
I use JabRef and am quite satisfied. I also prefer LaTeX to Word etc and with Sweave can include chunks of R code to produce figures. RStudio is a decent IDE for all of this and
Sweave/LaTeX/BibTeX files are all text files and work efficiently with git for version control. Having everything under version control has saved my bacon more than once. An added benefit of git is that it is easy to keep work synched across multiple computers with different operating systems.
I find support from these Open Source communities better than commercial support (as long as one follows Eric Raymond's advice on "How to ask questions the smart way."
You are spot on. I work in a basement lab (electron microscopy) constructed with Hauserman partition walls (metal over drywall type core). These act like a Faraday Cage and cause cellular reception to be awful. To make matters worse, my management - trying to cut cost - decided that everybody had personal electronic devices these days and eliminated voice mail on our desk phone. What a mess. I have a hard time reading Dilbert these days -- it is too close to my reality...
The statement that caused me most concern was, "'We stand by the forensic review that we've seen." Excuse me? Somebody didn't look closely enough. Wouldn't a deal this big require a bond? Were I an HP shareholder, that statement would start my petitions to the BOD that Meg should go. Were I an HP shareholder, I would expect at least a statement like: "We have commissioned an independent review to insure that our forensic accountants used due diligence. HP will actively support the authorities with appropriate jurisdiction in the prosecution any fraud." Hindsight is always 20:20, but the shareholders deserve a specific analysis of what went wrong and assurance that the company will support prosecution of fraud.
It is one thing to have an older MacBook and think about moving to a Linux distro when the current OS no longer supports your hardware, but unless you are a hobbyist who get pleasure from tinkering and wants to see "if I can...", it seems like a waste of time and money. Note that I am writing this on a 2009 MacBook Pro with Mountain Lion but I also use Linux for many aspects of my work. If I wanted a Linux laptop to just "get my work done," I would look carefully at one of these:
http://zareason.com/shop/Laptops/
The key is to let your supplier work out the hardware details. That is part of why one buys from a given supplier. We are all free to tinker to our hearts content, but if our objective is to use the system to do something useful, it is typically more productive to get something that works on the OS of choice. This is hardly a new concept...
As a couple of others have noted, there is no reason to posit a false dichotomy - that one must use either Kahn Academy (or similar) or a "live" teacher. Short lessons like Kahn does are useful to review concepts/unit operations where a student is rusty. My wife teaches physics, statistics, and calculus at a small high school and is an adjunct at a local community college, teaching the CC classes in the high school. The best bang for the buck for college credits around. Anyway, her biggest complaint is that too many of her students have been coddled in lower level classes and have either never mastered the pre-requisites or simply not retained them. Kahn's videos are one of many helpful resources for such students. The goal is to transform students into self-directed, life-long learners. This is really the only path to success, because the half-life to obsolescence of any technical course of study is so short.
Prof. Jean-Claude Bradly at Drexel discovered that students actually preferred pod/vodcasts of lectures (they could pause and watch on their schedule) and it freed up class time to work problems and answer questions. I see Kahn Academy videos in this same light. Are they perfect? No. can they be improved? Yes. Will polite, constructive criticism be better received than snarky comments? Absolutely! In this regard, the cliche "everything i needed to know, i learned in kindergarten" has some merit - things are a lot better when everybody is polite and plays nice in the sandbox.
Slashdot Mirror
Many years ago when I was in grad school, I went to Oak Ridge National Labs to use the Small Angle Neutron Scattering line. When I arrived, the staff scientist had the instrument open (think of a large stainless steel pipe in sections that are bolted together). We made some adjustments to the detector and we needed to bolt everything back together and pump down the system.
The staff scientist said, "let's go for coffee". I had done a lot of electron microscopy and knew it took a while to pump down a such a vacuum system, so I said, "shouldn't we get this pumping first?" and picked up a wrench to get started bolting sections together.
He smiled and said you must not have worked in a union shop. He said we had to call a pipe-fitter or we would create a union incident.
I had never encountered this in college or at the non-union company where I had worked in a lab before graduate school nor did I encounter this in the non-union company I worked at for 36 years afterward. We had skilled trades people to help us when needed (especially for large jobs and tasks beyond most scientists), but we could do the easy things for ourselves and get our work done effectively.
I prefer PDFs that I file when I can find them easily. A second advantage is that most manuals have multiple languages. I can split the PDF and make one that has only the pages I want.
Because much of the software we use is only availabe on Windows and is not Open Source. I have ported some to Linux, but the Linux version of one key package I use has bugs and I don't have all the source to fix it.
You nailed it. I run Monte Carlo simulations of electron induced X-ray microanalysis spectra. These can run for hours. I want control of my CPU cycles and don't want some update starting without my explicit permission. I have a friend who runs a big microanalysis lab. A rececent MS update broke DCOM and won't let his microanalysis computer talk to the microscope computer. We know of at least one other system with this problem. These are $1M+ systems...
My community does CPU-intensive work and we want control of OUR computers. We understand the need for antivirus/spyware software and are willing to use it. We don't want our OS to treat us like idiots and BE the spyware... We want to give explicit permission for the OS to phone home...
"Free" and licenced are not incompatible. There are many very generous licenses: CC-by, MIT, BSD. One reason a developer may want to choose one is that they welcome individual or even corporate users using it but want to prevent someone bundling it with something else and selling it to others without either permission and some kind of payment or acknowlegement.
I agree. Want to be safe? Carry a small tablet. You can add a bluetooth keyboard if you hate on-screen keyboards like I do. I would be wary of online banking on an unsecure network...
Armed response is way premature and is the last result when all peaceful means are exhausted.. On the other hand filing a motion for an injunction prohibiting this until the matter has been fully litigated would be a wise move. This is clearly a constitutional issue... We have a Constitution and Bill of Rights for just this reason...
Let's make sure the right head rolls... This was a rookie mistake that no CEO should ever make. One NEVER tries a demo for the first time before an important audience. If the CEO isn't willing to do a dry run, then he should either get a product manager who has the time to do it or the board should get a new CEO.
Earlier this year our Keurig brewer needed to be replaced. Went to the store and got a new one. Got it home and our existing K-cups wouldn't work - they were the old version. Called Keurig - they told me they would replace my cups. Told them that wasn't good enough because I didn't want to worry every time we bought cups. The rep said there was nothing she could do. Told her she lost a customer for life.
Took the brewer back, got a refund. Ordered a Mr Coffee version that is quite acceptable. Use whatever cups I want. Hope their management lose their jobs over this one. First rule of business is to treat your customers with respect or they (we) will find vendors who will. Interestingly enough, everybody figured out how to defeat their DRM. Keurig alienated customers and competitors found a workaround. Queue up Nelson Munch: "Haa Haa."
In the Dark Ages when I was an undergrad, we lived in dorms with painted cinder block walls, spartan furniture, and a bathroom per hallway. We had a minimal gym facility but reasonable equipment in the labs. With some help from my parents and working had during summers and breaks, I graduated with only $750 in loans.
Now you have luxury dorms and sports complexes. Sadly, the cost increases for these facilities and the explosion of administrators made it practically impossible to pay for one's education at a top tier state school by working hard during the summers and breaks and some help from ones parents.
Let's not mention the Lake Wobegone mentality that all the children are above average. Colleges love remedial courses - they get paid and the students stay longer. But that changes the economics. Attending college is a business decision and if the graduate can't repay the debt in a few years, the ROI wasn't there.
Depends upon whether six months of backup meets the requirements of the records retention statute. If not, at a minimum all management who signed off on the policy should be fired. I could also see a statute setting different retention periods for different levels of employees. I could see a shorter period for lower level employees, but senior employees such as Lerner should have records that cover a much longer period, such as the statute of limitation for the consequences of criminal action in their position.
Several knowledgeable sources have noted that fuel is both expensive and heavy. Extra weight creates drag. Airlines tend to load an aircraft with the amount of fuel required for a flight and a reserve to cover delays that weather and air traffic cause, not filled to the brim.
> That is... naive. It is highly unlikely that that professor has any hand in this.
I suspect you are wrong. Prof. Shiller already makes his classes available through OpenYale. I have watched several of his lectures. His lectures are quite engaging and he seems to enjoy teaching.
I, too, have taken three Coursera classes for credit and done all the work. All three were well worth the effort. One was a teaser program for an expensive masters sponsored by the University. That was clear and did not diminish the value. Another was the first offering and was experimenting with peer grading. There were many problems with peer grading, but that did not diminish the value. I respect all three of the instructors and benefited greatly from the work and interaction.
One must have reasonable expectations of MOOCs. Much of the data mining is actually designed to benefit students. Andrew Ng and Daphne Kohler have written about how valuable the large sample size is for detecting conceptual misunderstanding from wong quiz answers to give appropriate automatic feedback. Two of my classes had over 10,000 participants. Compare that to the typical size of less than 200 at most universities. Seems to me that both faculty and students benefit from such research - faculty from publications and name recognition and students from better instruction.
It is a bit more complicated. I work in the analytical division of well-recognized company. Most of our vendors design instrumentation to work with Windows. There are rarely drivers for other OS choices. Most is also designed with an over-emphasis on graphical user interfaces, the bane of reproducible research.
I see way too much abuse of spreadsheets. According to Baggerly and Coombes, part of the problems in the Duke scandal were caused by off-by one index errors with Excel. Similar spreadheet blunders arose in the recent Reinhart-Rogoff problem.
I hate Excel. It is hard to do simple things efficiently. Try and do a scatterplot with multiple series. How many keystrokes will it take? Once you get your analysis done and your report written with Word, how difficult is it to fix if the client wants to add one more sample? Then consider the changes in VBA. We have 3rd party code that are locked and won't even open on current versions of Excel.
Over the last few years, I migrated all of my back-end data processing to R/Sweave/LaTeX. For some projects I use markdown instead of LaTeX. Everything is scriptable, plays well with version control (code is mainly text files), and runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows. I use (and contribute) to Open Source whenever feasible. Solving problems is easier and I find community support better than most vendor support.
If I could get my hardware to play nice with Linux, I'd switch in a heartbeat. There is only one application I would miss - the debugger in Visual Studio. RStudio is pretty good at what it was designed for, but that does not include debugging the C++ code that needs to be written to speed up some computationally intensive parts...
Sweave/LaTeX/BibTeX files are all text files and work efficiently with git for version control. Having everything under version control has saved my bacon more than once. An added benefit of git is that it is easy to keep work synched across multiple computers with different operating systems.
I find support from these Open Source communities better than commercial support (as long as one follows Eric Raymond's advice on "How to ask questions the smart way."
Clever. The Battlestar Galactica reference made my morning.
You are spot on. I work in a basement lab (electron microscopy) constructed with Hauserman partition walls (metal over drywall type core). These act like a Faraday Cage and cause cellular reception to be awful. To make matters worse, my management - trying to cut cost - decided that everybody had personal electronic devices these days and eliminated voice mail on our desk phone. What a mess. I have a hard time reading Dilbert these days -- it is too close to my reality...
The statement that caused me most concern was, "'We stand by the forensic review that we've seen." Excuse me? Somebody didn't look closely enough. Wouldn't a deal this big require a bond? Were I an HP shareholder, that statement would start my petitions to the BOD that Meg should go. Were I an HP shareholder, I would expect at least a statement like: "We have commissioned an independent review to insure that our forensic accountants used due diligence. HP will actively support the authorities with appropriate jurisdiction in the prosecution any fraud." Hindsight is always 20:20, but the shareholders deserve a specific analysis of what went wrong and assurance that the company will support prosecution of fraud.
I couldn't get the latest Ubuntu disk to boot on mine (Summer 2009). Any tips?
It is one thing to have an older MacBook and think about moving to a Linux distro when the current OS no longer supports your hardware, but unless you are a hobbyist who get pleasure from tinkering and wants to see "if I can...", it seems like a waste of time and money. Note that I am writing this on a 2009 MacBook Pro with Mountain Lion but I also use Linux for many aspects of my work. If I wanted a Linux laptop to just "get my work done," I would look carefully at one of these: http://zareason.com/shop/Laptops/ The key is to let your supplier work out the hardware details. That is part of why one buys from a given supplier. We are all free to tinker to our hearts content, but if our objective is to use the system to do something useful, it is typically more productive to get something that works on the OS of choice. This is hardly a new concept...
As a couple of others have noted, there is no reason to posit a false dichotomy - that one must use either Kahn Academy (or similar) or a "live" teacher. Short lessons like Kahn does are useful to review concepts/unit operations where a student is rusty. My wife teaches physics, statistics, and calculus at a small high school and is an adjunct at a local community college, teaching the CC classes in the high school. The best bang for the buck for college credits around. Anyway, her biggest complaint is that too many of her students have been coddled in lower level classes and have either never mastered the pre-requisites or simply not retained them. Kahn's videos are one of many helpful resources for such students. The goal is to transform students into self-directed, life-long learners. This is really the only path to success, because the half-life to obsolescence of any technical course of study is so short.
Prof. Jean-Claude Bradly at Drexel discovered that students actually preferred pod/vodcasts of lectures (they could pause and watch on their schedule) and it freed up class time to work problems and answer questions. I see Kahn Academy videos in this same light. Are they perfect? No. can they be improved? Yes. Will polite, constructive criticism be better received than snarky comments? Absolutely! In this regard, the cliche "everything i needed to know, i learned in kindergarten" has some merit - things are a lot better when everybody is polite and plays nice in the sandbox.
The authors found this in mice. Seems premature to assume that this same mechanism exists in humans.
http://www.cell.com/molecular-cell/abstract/S1097-2765(12)00341-3
Not quite that simple. The complaint is that revenue projections were selectively disclosed to insiders. That is a violation of SEC regulations.