I feel the same way, but I understand why sometimes we take the ctrl-c ctrl-v approach and modify it. Of course, that's in my line of work where we do a lot of rapid application development of GUI's that talk to more hardened back end code, so the GUI's tend to change too much from project to project to make a completely customizable platform (and don't think we haven't tried).
What I do find is that if you keep up the lines of communication with your colleagues, together you can pinpoint specific areas where you could create a generic module that could easily be reused in current and future projects, then all agree on an interface spec, and someone goes and writes it (or adapts existing code to do the job). This seems like a decent compromise between writing everything generically vs. the hack it together approach.
I also find that the highest layer of "business logic" should never be abstracted away, to preserve some form of clarity about what the application actually does. In one case, we have a program that controls 8 different but similar stations (from the same program). I chose to NOT abstract the station into a function block (as it was called in that language), but I did abstract the various components of a station and reuse those across stations. The result was a balance between readability and code re-use. I did this because sometime over the next year or two, at 2 am, someone is going to be looking at that software with a plant manager screaming like a drill sergeant in their ear while they try to figure out what the heck it does and why one of the stations doesn't seem to be working, and if all they see is some multi-dimensional indexing nightmare, then I'll be the first one they call at 2 am.
In my limited experience, there are a lot of "software methodologies" out there, all claiming to make software better (i.e. more scalable, efficient, better re-use, etc.). Of course it all comes down to modular programming, good documentation, and agreement among the developers in an organization on a plan for how everyone is going to do things so that everyone is on the same page.
Also in my experience, more than half the developers at any reasonably sized organization are not really capable of dealing with abstractions like SOA, OOP, or whatever. No matter how well laid your intentions are, and how many rules you create, there will always be some new hack straight out of some college course who dives in and gets the job done, but manages to totally screw up the whole system you and the senior programmers had in place. Then it either goes unnoticed until it becomes a problem (when the next change has to be made), or you have to spend half a day undoing the damage they did, and doing it correctly. Either way, the new guy looks like a genius for getting it done in half the time it would have taken one of the older guys, and you look like an inflexible nimrod that's just getting in the way of productivity.
You want an acronym that works? Here it is: PR (peer review). Find some other smart guys in your company, and team up to review each others' work, share ideas, and build a common set of best practices. Don't let people outside that group touch your code.:)
This is all stupid, and it all falls out of our need to categorize everything, usually on the wrong criteria.
So, you have stars, and they're easy to identify because there's this whole fusion reaction that gives off a lot of radiated energy. Everything that is too small to start the reaction is just in a different category - "not a star".
Falling into the "not a star" category within our solar system, all of the observed objects have parameters that are continuous variables, not categorical. Earth and Mars are more similar than Earth and Jupiter, but they're not the same, and neither can we put them in the same category.
So, stop calling them planets... just call them objects. Earth is a satellite of the sun. The moon is a satellite of Earth. Planet is a pointless definition anyway, based on how humans started discovering the universe, rather than what we now have as a model.
You know what's annoying about that book... all my bosses have read it, and they preach from it, and ALL of them do nearly the exact opposite of what it says in that book. (I've read the highlights).
Very few people can really understand and accept the really hard truths about communication... it's not what you say but how you say it. Listen first, then understand, etc.. It's a rare trait.
What scares me most are the 38,514 hours of audio backlog to be translated. That's over 4 years worth of audio! "Hey boss! I've got some intel about a bombing in a city... but it already happened 2 years ago..."
Erm, that's 4 years divided by the number of microphones that they have recording stuff. So, it may only be a week old, there's just lots of bandwidth.
It would take 4 years to listen to it all if you only had one person listening to it. How many people do you suppose they have on staff?
You can't honestly be comparing cold weather to a hurricane or earthquake, can you? I live in Canada. It gets friggin' cold. I've lived in much colder places within Canada, actually, and you have no idea how cold it can get. However, there is no rebuilding necessary after the winter.
There is very little rebuilding necessary after an ice storm either. It knocks down some power lines, and those with generators go around helping those without generators for a week or 2, and then the power's back. A few people die because they're old and they don't bundle themselves up well enough, and a few people die because they bring their coleman stoves inside to try and keep warm but end up dying of asphyxia.
I've lived through 2 ice storms - they suck - but you can deal with it without federal assistance.* I'll take 2 ice storms over a hurricane any day.
*I do admit that if 3 inches of snow fall in Toronto, they call in the army to dig them out, but hey, people from Toronto aren't considered Canadian by the rest of the country.:)
You know what? Those $80 Nike sneakers on your feet cost $2 in material and $1 in labor to make (took that out of my ass), $3 to ship to the US, and the rest is marketing, design, inventories, and profits. Mostly marketing. Nike's doing well but they're not Microsoft.
Now look at Microsoft... cost of manufacturing one more cardboard box with plastic CD inside... almost nil. All the cost is in development and marketing.
More money gets spent on sales in many companies than on any other single item, especially when you're selling commodity stuff. CPU's are commodities.
Heh, I am one of 2 Canadians working in a company with over 20 Americans, and we throw it back and forth all the time. It's called good natured ribbing. Most Americans I know are a lot more thick skinned than you, obviously.
I get it every day about Canada's military, and our socialist policies, yadda, yadda, yadda, and I give it back to them about losing the war of 1812, not being able to find the US on a world map, etc. Neither side is 100% grounded in fact, but it's funny none the less.
I wholeheartedly apologize that you did not find my post amusing. If you'd like to sue me for it, I'd consider that an example of the American way.:-)
This is getting off topic, but Martin grew up in Ontario near Windsor. His father was in politics. He's hardly a "frenchman". He's also mildly conservative (remember the liberal party is not liberal - it is centrist; balanced budget and tax cuts don't seem very liberal, do they?). On financial concerns, Martin is a conservative, and on social concerns he is liberal. This makes him slightly a libertarian, but really he's none of the above in any large amount. That seems to sit well with the majority of the Canadian public, which may or may not include you or I personally. Canadians no longer seem to want extremists running their government, so they elect people who play a little to both sides. There's logic in that.
Not being a fan of political parties, myself, I find the whole thing rather refreshing. Not to say politicians aren't a bunch of corrupt bedfellows, but that club includes people from all parties rather equally, now doesn't it?
I'm sorry, but you obviously didn't read the article. These are the OPPOSITION's amendments (the opposition being your beloved CONSERVATIVES) who want to protect their buddies in big business.
The government (i.e. liberal) amendment is to allow the person with the telephone number to say they want to exempt charities when they put themselves on the list. That's more reasonable, obviously.
Don't bother putting your foot in your mouth. We forgive you for your ignorance. You're obviously practicing to be an American.
As a side question, who thinks that as all of the advanced carbon materials become readily available over the next 50 years, and demand increases, that we may have found our solution to global warming? We'll scrub CO2 from the atmosphere to build our carbon products!
Why would you do that when you can just burn down a forest or 2 and gather up all the ashes?
While I agree that the US typically tries to bend most of the agreements it signs, I think you're taking it too far. How many wars have the US started since 1929?
WWII was started by Germany and Japan, and most other countries fought in communal self defense.
Korea and Vietnam were really a case of helping another nation defend itself.
The '91 gulf war was an international coalition to liberate Kuwait, which was unlawfully attacked according to international law. The reason the invasion of Iraq stopped at that time was to prevent it from becoming an aggressive act. You can only defend yourself up until the point you become the agressor.
Afghanistan was clearly self defense, even though some American troops didn't represent their country very well in that country, but the war was still lawful.
The latest Iraq war is unlawful. The US tried to make it lawful by saying there were WMD's there and that Hussein would use them against Israel and possibly the US, and that it was a matter of self defense. Obviously there were none, and in my opinion, there was reasonable doubt that there were any in the first place. This is why there were so many protests.
A capacitor is a resistor for alternating current? Believe it or not, resistors are resistors for alternating current, just like they are for direct current. Capacitors store energy in an electric field, and are second order devices, just like inductors that store energy in a magnetic field.
What capacitors do is add "lead" to the current so that the current leads the voltage in phase. Inductors (coils) do the opposite, and make the current "lag" the voltage.
At any rate, yes, capacitors are typically physically large, so I can see how that will be a problem.
Yes, only n00bs refer to a customer/vendor relationship as a partnership. Partner infers equals, which they are not.
I was recently writing a program for an assembly line, and these days I focus entirely on maintainability and readability of the code (making it work is the easy part). It worked, and started up relatively well. However, I was called "inflexible" because we would tell them we need a change order for software changes after the equipment was delivered, and I kept telling them why they shouldn't do some changes, that it made the system overly complex and too hard to maintain.
So they bring in this mechanical engineer fresh out of university from another company that they pay by the hour, who starts hacking at my code while I'm still finishing starting up the system. This other company tells them everything they want to hear - "sure, you can do that", "sure I'll make it do that". Of course he will, his company is getting paid by the hour. They don't have a warranty to honor.
I had a look at their code and there's no way a plant maintenance person will be able to figure out what it does when the line is down at 2 AM and the plant manager is yelling over their shoulder (this is a just-in-time manufacturing plant, so downtime costs over $100,000 an hour if they shut down their customer). There were no comments. Everything used double-referenced addressing, etc. Of course, when something goes wrong... they're going to blame my company. It's been the project from hell.
Let me tell you a story. I work in the automation industry, and have for 5 to 8 years now, depending on when you start counting. When I started, I was so keen about automating everything. "Sure, we can make it do that!" All the experienced old fogies kept telling me to shut up in meetings because, absolutely we were NOT going to make it do that.
Now, 5 years later I've become the old fogie, parading the KISS principle around like it's a religion unto itself. I've seen first hand on many occasions how an overly complicated and overly automated system just isn't reliable. The main reason is that automation is not scalable unless its mass produced, and this type of system is always custom. Not only is the software custom, but the hardware itself is custom designed (from off the shelf components, of course).
Here's how it works (just like any software project)... the customer comes and wants a system. We, the integrator, bid on it. We get the job. We have a couple months of writing a functional spec, going back and forth over what the system has to do, and at every meeting they bring in another person who has another great idea about what it should be, sometimes contradicting the previous guy. Since I'm an old "unflexible" guy, many times I try to talk them out of these ideas, but sometimes you have to give in. If the customer wants to add 20% to the cost of the project, not to mention the complexity and maintenance costs, just so they don't have to spend as much time training their operators, then you do it. They never realize that means they have to hire a Ph.D. to fix the thing when it breaks down.
There are so many odd scenarios in a real life system that automating them all would cost so much more than just automating the first 90% and making sure that humans have all the info they need to handle the other 10% of whatever happens. That last 10% costs 10 times what the original 90% cost.
My wife is a psychologist and gives/grades IQ tests all the time. Something I've learned about them is that although they come up with one final number (the IQ), they start by coming up with many sub-scores (performance IQ, visual-spatial IQ, etc.), and these sub-scores are sometimes much more important information about a person than the overall IQ.
For instance, she tested me (I'm an engineer), and although my IQ was high, I had a comparatively low "performance IQ", which is how fast I process information through my brain. Believe it or not, this is quite normal for engineers, apparently. It is related to how we focus so much on the details, that we slow down our mental processing to accomodate and focus.
So IQ as a single number is misleading, but then again, if your IQ is 70, then it does mean something different than if your IQ is 130. However, if you're comparing 2 people and one person has 115 and another has 125, it's hard to say that one is particularly "smarter", as the 115 person could be quite more competent in many subjects and endeavors compared to the higher IQ person, or vice-versa.
Thankfully, most organizations that use this information, such as the military and medical institutions, look very closely at the subscores, not necesarily the overall score.
I'm a control systems engineer, which means I design electrical panels, program automation, and start up these kinds of systems. Think big machines with motors and hydraulics, etc. If there's a bug in my code, steel crashes and smoke comes out of the equipment.
When I'm onsite, I'm one of the lucky engineers because I get paid a straight time overtime rate (divide my salary by 2000 hours per year, and they give me that much for each overtime hour while I'm on the road for 2 to 4 months a year - not time and a half, just straight time). Many of the other engineers doing a similar job do not get this.
Meanwhile, when I go onsite to a unionized factory to install this equipment, I need to have a union electrician with me all the time. This is because I can't plug in my laptop because I'm not qualified, so I need to have an electrician do that for me, or at least be present when I do it. Also, I can't use an electrical meter to measure voltages in MY machine that I'm installing for them, so I have to get them to hold the meter and probes for me.
98% of the time I don't need these services, so the union electrician sits beside me reading a newspaper. I don't have a problem with this because generally they're nice guys, and they are skilled, but here's the kicker:
They didn't have to get a 4 or 5 year electrical engineering degree. They can't do my job, but I'm actually overqualified for their job... and while he's sitting there reading the newspaper, he makes 50% to 100% more per year than I do, even though I'm paid respectably based on salaries quoted on salary.com for my area.
I like my job, but the financial incentive clearly tells me I should have gone for the 2 year college course to be an electrician and gotten hired to a union shop.
That's where the science and technology edge has gone. An average American in a factory makes $22 to $45 an hour, and you wonder why the country can't compete with India and China for manufacturing jobs?
I can go online and hire 2 or 3 Indians to play my MMO game for me for a total of $1.50 an HOUR to power level my character. If there was free trade in the world, the western nations would be SCREWED.
Private Catholic schools (for instance) have higher aptitude scores for math and science. Public schools do not teach ID.
Private catholic schools are private. Therefore, you must pay extra money to send your kids there. Therefore, they have better equipment, teachers, etc. Also, the students come from a higher social/economic strata, and they don't have to have metal detectors at the entrances.
In Canada we have state funded catholic schools and state funded public schools. It would be more useful to compare the aptitude scores for math and science between these two populations.
I don't know of any significant difference, but I haven't looked into it much. You are free to look into it.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, that was an interesting read.
I feel the same way, but I understand why sometimes we take the ctrl-c ctrl-v approach and modify it. Of course, that's in my line of work where we do a lot of rapid application development of GUI's that talk to more hardened back end code, so the GUI's tend to change too much from project to project to make a completely customizable platform (and don't think we haven't tried).
What I do find is that if you keep up the lines of communication with your colleagues, together you can pinpoint specific areas where you could create a generic module that could easily be reused in current and future projects, then all agree on an interface spec, and someone goes and writes it (or adapts existing code to do the job). This seems like a decent compromise between writing everything generically vs. the hack it together approach.
I also find that the highest layer of "business logic" should never be abstracted away, to preserve some form of clarity about what the application actually does. In one case, we have a program that controls 8 different but similar stations (from the same program). I chose to NOT abstract the station into a function block (as it was called in that language), but I did abstract the various components of a station and reuse those across stations. The result was a balance between readability and code re-use. I did this because sometime over the next year or two, at 2 am, someone is going to be looking at that software with a plant manager screaming like a drill sergeant in their ear while they try to figure out what the heck it does and why one of the stations doesn't seem to be working, and if all they see is some multi-dimensional indexing nightmare, then I'll be the first one they call at 2 am.
Every situation is unique.
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), etc.
:)
In my limited experience, there are a lot of "software methodologies" out there, all claiming to make software better (i.e. more scalable, efficient, better re-use, etc.). Of course it all comes down to modular programming, good documentation, and agreement among the developers in an organization on a plan for how everyone is going to do things so that everyone is on the same page.
Also in my experience, more than half the developers at any reasonably sized organization are not really capable of dealing with abstractions like SOA, OOP, or whatever. No matter how well laid your intentions are, and how many rules you create, there will always be some new hack straight out of some college course who dives in and gets the job done, but manages to totally screw up the whole system you and the senior programmers had in place. Then it either goes unnoticed until it becomes a problem (when the next change has to be made), or you have to spend half a day undoing the damage they did, and doing it correctly. Either way, the new guy looks like a genius for getting it done in half the time it would have taken one of the older guys, and you look like an inflexible nimrod that's just getting in the way of productivity.
You want an acronym that works? Here it is: PR (peer review). Find some other smart guys in your company, and team up to review each others' work, share ideas, and build a common set of best practices. Don't let people outside that group touch your code.
This is all stupid, and it all falls out of our need to categorize everything, usually on the wrong criteria.
So, you have stars, and they're easy to identify because there's this whole fusion reaction that gives off a lot of radiated energy. Everything that is too small to start the reaction is just in a different category - "not a star".
Falling into the "not a star" category within our solar system, all of the observed objects have parameters that are continuous variables, not categorical. Earth and Mars are more similar than Earth and Jupiter, but they're not the same, and neither can we put them in the same category.
So, stop calling them planets... just call them objects. Earth is a satellite of the sun. The moon is a satellite of Earth. Planet is a pointless definition anyway, based on how humans started discovering the universe, rather than what we now have as a model.
You know what's annoying about that book... all my bosses have read it, and they preach from it, and ALL of them do nearly the exact opposite of what it says in that book. (I've read the highlights).
Very few people can really understand and accept the really hard truths about communication... it's not what you say but how you say it. Listen first, then understand, etc.. It's a rare trait.
What scares me most are the 38,514 hours of audio backlog to be translated. That's over 4 years worth of audio! "Hey boss! I've got some intel about a bombing in a city... but it already happened 2 years ago..."
Erm, that's 4 years divided by the number of microphones that they have recording stuff. So, it may only be a week old, there's just lots of bandwidth.
It would take 4 years to listen to it all if you only had one person listening to it. How many people do you suppose they have on staff?
You can't honestly be comparing cold weather to a hurricane or earthquake, can you? I live in Canada. It gets friggin' cold. I've lived in much colder places within Canada, actually, and you have no idea how cold it can get. However, there is no rebuilding necessary after the winter.
:)
There is very little rebuilding necessary after an ice storm either. It knocks down some power lines, and those with generators go around helping those without generators for a week or 2, and then the power's back. A few people die because they're old and they don't bundle themselves up well enough, and a few people die because they bring their coleman stoves inside to try and keep warm but end up dying of asphyxia.
I've lived through 2 ice storms - they suck - but you can deal with it without federal assistance.* I'll take 2 ice storms over a hurricane any day.
*I do admit that if 3 inches of snow fall in Toronto, they call in the army to dig them out, but hey, people from Toronto aren't considered Canadian by the rest of the country.
The best part of the Sims 2 is that my wife can't tell me that I play the computer too much, 'cuz I'll never catch up to her playtime anymore. :^)
Remember that this is per-unit profit, but doesn't include R&D costs.
Dammit! You have a copy of all my files! HA - not anymore! Check again fool! I pwnz j@#$@#!!%@.?[]&*&**@++++#@ NO CARRIER
On second thought, I'll give it to you for free. Turn on file sharing and give me your IP address... ;-)
Yes, send me the $5 and I'll email you the code.
But, why do you let these assholes represent you?
As a non-USian myself, let me further ask...
Why are these assholes also the first to 1) join the military, 2) travel, 3) become missionaries to different countries?
Seriously, the US gets a bad rap because of the 1% of the population that chooses to leave its borders are mostly the worst sort of pricks.
You know what? Those $80 Nike sneakers on your feet cost $2 in material and $1 in labor to make (took that out of my ass), $3 to ship to the US, and the rest is marketing, design, inventories, and profits. Mostly marketing. Nike's doing well but they're not Microsoft.
Now look at Microsoft... cost of manufacturing one more cardboard box with plastic CD inside... almost nil. All the cost is in development and marketing.
More money gets spent on sales in many companies than on any other single item, especially when you're selling commodity stuff. CPU's are commodities.
This isn't news.
Heh, I am one of 2 Canadians working in a company with over 20 Americans, and we throw it back and forth all the time. It's called good natured ribbing. Most Americans I know are a lot more thick skinned than you, obviously.
:-)
I get it every day about Canada's military, and our socialist policies, yadda, yadda, yadda, and I give it back to them about losing the war of 1812, not being able to find the US on a world map, etc. Neither side is 100% grounded in fact, but it's funny none the less.
I wholeheartedly apologize that you did not find my post amusing. If you'd like to sue me for it, I'd consider that an example of the American way.
This is getting off topic, but Martin grew up in Ontario near Windsor. His father was in politics. He's hardly a "frenchman". He's also mildly conservative (remember the liberal party is not liberal - it is centrist; balanced budget and tax cuts don't seem very liberal, do they?). On financial concerns, Martin is a conservative, and on social concerns he is liberal. This makes him slightly a libertarian, but really he's none of the above in any large amount. That seems to sit well with the majority of the Canadian public, which may or may not include you or I personally. Canadians no longer seem to want extremists running their government, so they elect people who play a little to both sides. There's logic in that.
Not being a fan of political parties, myself, I find the whole thing rather refreshing. Not to say politicians aren't a bunch of corrupt bedfellows, but that club includes people from all parties rather equally, now doesn't it?
I'm sorry, but you obviously didn't read the article. These are the OPPOSITION's amendments (the opposition being your beloved CONSERVATIVES) who want to protect their buddies in big business.
The government (i.e. liberal) amendment is to allow the person with the telephone number to say they want to exempt charities when they put themselves on the list. That's more reasonable, obviously.
Don't bother putting your foot in your mouth. We forgive you for your ignorance. You're obviously practicing to be an American.
As a side question, who thinks that as all of the advanced carbon materials become readily available over the next 50 years, and demand increases, that we may have found our solution to global warming? We'll scrub CO2 from the atmosphere to build our carbon products!
Why would you do that when you can just burn down a forest or 2 and gather up all the ashes?
...and Panama (where US soldiers actually bulldozed bodies into mass graves), but I'm only counting things as a war if it lasted longer than 24 hours.
While I agree that the US typically tries to bend most of the agreements it signs, I think you're taking it too far. How many wars have the US started since 1929?
WWII was started by Germany and Japan, and most other countries fought in communal self defense.
Korea and Vietnam were really a case of helping another nation defend itself.
The '91 gulf war was an international coalition to liberate Kuwait, which was unlawfully attacked according to international law. The reason the invasion of Iraq stopped at that time was to prevent it from becoming an aggressive act. You can only defend yourself up until the point you become the agressor.
Afghanistan was clearly self defense, even though some American troops didn't represent their country very well in that country, but the war was still lawful.
The latest Iraq war is unlawful. The US tried to make it lawful by saying there were WMD's there and that Hussein would use them against Israel and possibly the US, and that it was a matter of self defense. Obviously there were none, and in my opinion, there was reasonable doubt that there were any in the first place. This is why there were so many protests.
But, that's only one war breaking that pact.
A capacitor is a resistor for alternating current? Believe it or not, resistors are resistors for alternating current, just like they are for direct current. Capacitors store energy in an electric field, and are second order devices, just like inductors that store energy in a magnetic field.
What capacitors do is add "lead" to the current so that the current leads the voltage in phase. Inductors (coils) do the opposite, and make the current "lag" the voltage.
At any rate, yes, capacitors are typically physically large, so I can see how that will be a problem.
Yes, only n00bs refer to a customer/vendor relationship as a partnership. Partner infers equals, which they are not.
I was recently writing a program for an assembly line, and these days I focus entirely on maintainability and readability of the code (making it work is the easy part). It worked, and started up relatively well. However, I was called "inflexible" because we would tell them we need a change order for software changes after the equipment was delivered, and I kept telling them why they shouldn't do some changes, that it made the system overly complex and too hard to maintain.
So they bring in this mechanical engineer fresh out of university from another company that they pay by the hour, who starts hacking at my code while I'm still finishing starting up the system. This other company tells them everything they want to hear - "sure, you can do that", "sure I'll make it do that". Of course he will, his company is getting paid by the hour. They don't have a warranty to honor.
I had a look at their code and there's no way a plant maintenance person will be able to figure out what it does when the line is down at 2 AM and the plant manager is yelling over their shoulder (this is a just-in-time manufacturing plant, so downtime costs over $100,000 an hour if they shut down their customer). There were no comments. Everything used double-referenced addressing, etc. Of course, when something goes wrong... they're going to blame my company. It's been the project from hell.
Let me tell you a story. I work in the automation industry, and have for 5 to 8 years now, depending on when you start counting. When I started, I was so keen about automating everything. "Sure, we can make it do that!" All the experienced old fogies kept telling me to shut up in meetings because, absolutely we were NOT going to make it do that.
Now, 5 years later I've become the old fogie, parading the KISS principle around like it's a religion unto itself. I've seen first hand on many occasions how an overly complicated and overly automated system just isn't reliable. The main reason is that automation is not scalable unless its mass produced, and this type of system is always custom. Not only is the software custom, but the hardware itself is custom designed (from off the shelf components, of course).
Here's how it works (just like any software project)... the customer comes and wants a system. We, the integrator, bid on it. We get the job. We have a couple months of writing a functional spec, going back and forth over what the system has to do, and at every meeting they bring in another person who has another great idea about what it should be, sometimes contradicting the previous guy. Since I'm an old "unflexible" guy, many times I try to talk them out of these ideas, but sometimes you have to give in. If the customer wants to add 20% to the cost of the project, not to mention the complexity and maintenance costs, just so they don't have to spend as much time training their operators, then you do it. They never realize that means they have to hire a Ph.D. to fix the thing when it breaks down.
There are so many odd scenarios in a real life system that automating them all would cost so much more than just automating the first 90% and making sure that humans have all the info they need to handle the other 10% of whatever happens. That last 10% costs 10 times what the original 90% cost.
But try to make a customer understand that.
My wife is a psychologist and gives/grades IQ tests all the time. Something I've learned about them is that although they come up with one final number (the IQ), they start by coming up with many sub-scores (performance IQ, visual-spatial IQ, etc.), and these sub-scores are sometimes much more important information about a person than the overall IQ.
For instance, she tested me (I'm an engineer), and although my IQ was high, I had a comparatively low "performance IQ", which is how fast I process information through my brain. Believe it or not, this is quite normal for engineers, apparently. It is related to how we focus so much on the details, that we slow down our mental processing to accomodate and focus.
So IQ as a single number is misleading, but then again, if your IQ is 70, then it does mean something different than if your IQ is 130. However, if you're comparing 2 people and one person has 115 and another has 125, it's hard to say that one is particularly "smarter", as the 115 person could be quite more competent in many subjects and endeavors compared to the higher IQ person, or vice-versa.
Thankfully, most organizations that use this information, such as the military and medical institutions, look very closely at the subscores, not necesarily the overall score.
I'm a control systems engineer, which means I design electrical panels, program automation, and start up these kinds of systems. Think big machines with motors and hydraulics, etc. If there's a bug in my code, steel crashes and smoke comes out of the equipment.
When I'm onsite, I'm one of the lucky engineers because I get paid a straight time overtime rate (divide my salary by 2000 hours per year, and they give me that much for each overtime hour while I'm on the road for 2 to 4 months a year - not time and a half, just straight time). Many of the other engineers doing a similar job do not get this.
Meanwhile, when I go onsite to a unionized factory to install this equipment, I need to have a union electrician with me all the time. This is because I can't plug in my laptop because I'm not qualified, so I need to have an electrician do that for me, or at least be present when I do it. Also, I can't use an electrical meter to measure voltages in MY machine that I'm installing for them, so I have to get them to hold the meter and probes for me.
98% of the time I don't need these services, so the union electrician sits beside me reading a newspaper. I don't have a problem with this because generally they're nice guys, and they are skilled, but here's the kicker:
They didn't have to get a 4 or 5 year electrical engineering degree. They can't do my job, but I'm actually overqualified for their job... and while he's sitting there reading the newspaper, he makes 50% to 100% more per year than I do, even though I'm paid respectably based on salaries quoted on salary.com for my area.
I like my job, but the financial incentive clearly tells me I should have gone for the 2 year college course to be an electrician and gotten hired to a union shop.
That's where the science and technology edge has gone. An average American in a factory makes $22 to $45 an hour, and you wonder why the country can't compete with India and China for manufacturing jobs?
I can go online and hire 2 or 3 Indians to play my MMO game for me for a total of $1.50 an HOUR to power level my character. If there was free trade in the world, the western nations would be SCREWED.
Private Catholic schools (for instance) have higher aptitude scores for math and science. Public schools do not teach ID.
Private catholic schools are private. Therefore, you must pay extra money to send your kids there. Therefore, they have better equipment, teachers, etc. Also, the students come from a higher social/economic strata, and they don't have to have metal detectors at the entrances.
In Canada we have state funded catholic schools and state funded public schools. It would be more useful to compare the aptitude scores for math and science between these two populations.
I don't know of any significant difference, but I haven't looked into it much. You are free to look into it.