I can confirm pretty much all of that (except the Synapse stuff), having done research on Commodore for a project a few months ago. The C64 had by far the most productive assembly lines of its day (hundreds of thousands of units every month!), Tramiel was ousted in January 1984 for decimating the company's financial resources during the 1983 "Home Computer Wars", in which the prices went down to a third of what they'd been in 1982, and he told the Amiga team outright during their tech demo to him (before he bought Atari, after he was booted from Commodore) that if he got hold of their hardware, he intended to sack all of them.
As far as anyone can tell, I don't think it's right to say Tramiel really ever had any failures during the mid-eighties, at least not until '87 when the ST platform fell behind; he applied his ruthless methodology to everything in business, and it achieved the intended results. Stuff only fell apart when others were unwilling to go along with his approach. (Which, admittedly, was ludicrous and pretty unethical most of the time.)
Actually, in the CS component of my program, we had a whole mandatory second-year course on program specification and verification. Validation is pretty much just a natural, real-world extension from it (and at first I thought that you just meant verification). Any safety-critical system naturally needs such analysis alongside more garden-variety methods of testing, and although the canonical examples are vehicle control systems, medical systems and military hardware are pretty much right next on the list, and at least as important. Incidentally, most thoroughbred computer scientists and engineers make a point of refusing to work on such things, to keep their consciences clean.
Good luck with the book.:) But a word of advice there—trying to get published is worse than academia, unless you have exactly what a publisher wants, when they want it. The real world of publishing is like a reverse auction bidding process, except none of the sellers (authors) have any idea what the publisher thinks will make it big on the market. In the absence of an objective metric (i.e. quality of research), all that remains is a connections-driven world, much like fashion. Literature proper died out some sixty or seventy years ago.
They're adding them to the subway system too, albeit in a slight variant. Regarding the fine art of RTFAing, though... I really want to know how xxxJonBoyxxx was able to quote a line mentioning upcoming Skype support and then claim they were just billboards.:\
The 22-inch underground touch screens will be equipped with cameras for video applications, as well as electrical outlets so users can charge their phones while buying access to Web, e-mail and apps.
Well, I wouldn't recommend seeking advice from a 23-year-old student, but I'd probably advise you to stay right where you are. Pharma is nothing if not lucrative, even if everyone I've ever known in it is a giant ball of stress. You could probably retire back into academia afterwards, though; from what I've seen, industry experience is a great way to get into smaller universities as faculty... and age is not much of a threat in that kind of move.
Yes, there certainly were incidents of dishonesty in the laboratory-based classes I attended, however the students who did so are not the kinds of people who went on to pursue graduate work. My experience so far in bioinformatics (and molecular biology in general) has been that curiosity exceeds personal pride by a wide margin. I'm still a master's student (actually just warming up to the position...), so no, my stipend certainly isn't sufficient to handle a family, although the institution I'm attending has special accommodations for graduate students starting families (the most important being cheaper housing), so it's not infeasible that a couple could pull it off if both were working. I can't really comment on postdoc or professors' salaries. (Although being Canadian, medical costs are negligible.)
Based on your questions about cheating and duress, I'm guessing that you weren't studying microbial ecology (which isn't really that common in the first place), but rather your focus in microbiology was more about human impact of microbes. All I can say there is: I'm sorry. You got the short end of the stick with that choice of work. The closer you get to surgeons, the uglier life gets; there are a few other replies to my comment that resonate that.
Going for any additional schooling is a decision to delay starting a family; in places and times where secondary education isn't compulsory you see a lot more pairing off as teenagers, for example. Most people don't start having kids in undergrad, either, after all.
That's... really a very hyperbolic perspective. Yes, that happens, but it's a tiny, tiny fraction of what happens. Calling it "a lot" is weasel-wording at best. Maybe one study in a thousand (not counting studies regarding the efficacy of pharmaceuticals, which have a somewhat higher rate of falsified data) experiences some kind of government interference or has problems that can't be mopped up with an erratum. It's really only a handful of very specific sub-fields (stuff that directly upsets corporate interests) that get a lot of attention. Pry open the latest Nature or Science and you'll see how little of scientific discourse really does revolve around those topics.
Ouch. That's definitely right in the glamour hole. When I was entering university I too wanted to be in a field that had big and impressive findings and answered questions everyone's interested in, but since most of my classes were with pre-med students I quickly realized that the culture surrounding human research was absolutely toxic when you really dig down into it. It didn't take me long after that to settle into the other side of bioinformatics, evolutionary genomics. Still answering big and important questions, but most of the big names are stuffy old guys in armchairs smoking pipes. They're too tenured to be competitive.
Molecular biology really depends on what organism you're focusing on. Worm researchers, for example, are all really nice people because there's an unbroken lineage and it's a relatively small community. If you were studying mammals, you shouldn't be too surprised that things were a little more cut-throat. Anything remotely medical is unfortunately very competitive, a product of self-aggrandisement that it really doesn't deserve. I obviously can't speak for your particular experience, but coming from a very medicine-heavy school that had a radically different culture between the (faculty of medicine) biochemistry department and the (faculty of arts and sciences) biology department, it seems to me that such is the trend. If you're going into pharma, you're really just asking for it even harder.:) Pick something considered less glamorous by prime time television, and you'll find less careerism and more curiosity.
Those cases are all exceptions. Look around at your department, or the next one over. They're not full of crooks (probably.) The vast majority of upper-level academes are just committed nerds: think about how many cases you've heard of, and then how many universities there are, and how many professors, postdocs, and graduate students at each. Life goes on.
Think more honeypottish. The defender's best tactic against an attacker is to deny the attacker knowledge of whether or not their break-in was actually successful: the more complex and bewildering you can make the fake prompt, the better. No one will try to brute-force a machine they think they already have access to.
It's the name of a botnet. Assume any unfamiliar word in any Slashdot summary is the name of a botnet; it makes them eminently more readable. You can try out the technique on this one.
I'm not saying Weird Shit has eclipsed mainstream porn, just that it's increasingly more common. It's easy to avoid, but there's a sector of the market that's hungry for 'extreme' that also includes 'dehumanizing', in a way that was only really found in BDSM material a decade or two ago. Poke around the top-rated items on a free video site long enough, and you'll probably stumble into it.
Gay male porn is different in some pretty fundamental ways from all other gender combinations; this sort of sums it up. At some point, (many) producers realized that the majority of women in porn were just in it for the money, and started making increasing demands on them to get an edge over the competition. Just like with watching soap operas, there's always a part of the human psyche that's reserved for sadistic glee, proportional to how competitive general living is.
No! They were supposed to hide the incriminating documents from that one time in Australia! No one in the world must know that "confidential child pornography blacklist" is a euphemism for "censor any website we like without oversight!" How will we crush dissenting opinions now?!
We had some fairly good posts on this in the 'Egypt pornography ban' story earlier today. The general consensus (I think) is that it is a threat to the kind of compulsory, loveless marriages that are common accomplices to conservative values. It's not anyone's fault; merely an unfortunate equilibrium that built up over time. Personally, I'm still waiting for the complementary ban on Harlequin Romance novels.
...and sarcastically: escapism is clearly an unacceptable coping mechanism for a bad relationship that you're duty-bound to maintain by a bundle of two-thousand-year-old fairy tales and comic books.
Conversely, have you seen some of the absurdities they get up to in hardcore porn these days? Catering to private fantasies is one thing, but the amount of violence contaminating the general pool of smut at this point is pretty unsettling. It's enough to make me think that a concerted effort to reduce violence in the media might help clean up how sexuality is perceived by the people currently trying to oppress it.
Completely agree. I have a theory about the underlying cause, though, and I'm curious as to what you (and others) would think of it:
Love is a meeting of minds, and healthy marriages are based on love. In the most grown-up model of a monogamous relationship, a sexual relationship is a possession of love.
It sounds like these marriages have been put together for the wrong reasons. Perhaps, when men come from a conservative culture where they must find women with whom to get married because there's social pressure to do so, they end up with sub-optimal relationships. At that point, all they have holding their holy matrimony together is a base instinct to pair off and procreate, and a big sign that says "recreational sex = eternal damnation." The traditional family structure puts the woman subservient to the man in pretty much every regard, so to her, he's primarily a ticket towards safety. Complicating this is the pressure to provide a positive environment for any children (which may be merely customary, as in Protestantism, or downright a legal matter, as in other monotheistic Abrahamic religions.) It's not hard to find examples of dirty jokes and other media that affirm these perceptions of the sexes, and the indoctrination seems to come mostly from how people have adapted to accommodate the expectations of traditional institutions. (This is not to say that men only want sex and women only want security; merely that they're encouraged to think that way through many generations of group polarization.)
It would seem to me that all this really proves is that the more rules you put on people, the more likely they are to resent them. The label of 'pornography addiction' is hence utterly pseudo-scientific; it's just a disinterest in the forced baby-generating/baby-protecting relationship brought on by animosity between partners. I would even go so far as to call it a misandrist concept, because escapism through trashy romance novels (the distaff counterpart to cheap pornography) in response to marital stress has been given absolutely no attention.
Yeah, that's what I meant by "unmaintainable expectations." The students will get an idea of the principles at work more quickly, but they'll be ruined when it comes time to think non-interactively, which is of course unavoidable.
Specialists are divided. Some experts believe that Internet statistics aren't as reliable as they seem; others insist that all information on the Internet remains completely factual, owing to the serious nature of the business.
Slashdot Mirror
Why buy just a video game from Atari or Intellivision? Invest in the wonder computer of the 1980s for under $300: the Commodore VIC-20.
I can confirm pretty much all of that (except the Synapse stuff), having done research on Commodore for a project a few months ago. The C64 had by far the most productive assembly lines of its day (hundreds of thousands of units every month!), Tramiel was ousted in January 1984 for decimating the company's financial resources during the 1983 "Home Computer Wars", in which the prices went down to a third of what they'd been in 1982, and he told the Amiga team outright during their tech demo to him (before he bought Atari, after he was booted from Commodore) that if he got hold of their hardware, he intended to sack all of them.
As far as anyone can tell, I don't think it's right to say Tramiel really ever had any failures during the mid-eighties, at least not until '87 when the ST platform fell behind; he applied his ruthless methodology to everything in business, and it achieved the intended results. Stuff only fell apart when others were unwilling to go along with his approach. (Which, admittedly, was ludicrous and pretty unethical most of the time.)
Actually, in the CS component of my program, we had a whole mandatory second-year course on program specification and verification. Validation is pretty much just a natural, real-world extension from it (and at first I thought that you just meant verification). Any safety-critical system naturally needs such analysis alongside more garden-variety methods of testing, and although the canonical examples are vehicle control systems, medical systems and military hardware are pretty much right next on the list, and at least as important. Incidentally, most thoroughbred computer scientists and engineers make a point of refusing to work on such things, to keep their consciences clean.
Good luck with the book. :) But a word of advice there—trying to get published is worse than academia, unless you have exactly what a publisher wants, when they want it. The real world of publishing is like a reverse auction bidding process, except none of the sellers (authors) have any idea what the publisher thinks will make it big on the market. In the absence of an objective metric (i.e. quality of research), all that remains is a connections-driven world, much like fashion. Literature proper died out some sixty or seventy years ago.
They're adding them to the subway system too, albeit in a slight variant. Regarding the fine art of RTFAing, though... I really want to know how xxxJonBoyxxx was able to quote a line mentioning upcoming Skype support and then claim they were just billboards. :\
The 22-inch underground touch screens will be equipped with cameras for video applications, as well as electrical outlets so users can charge their phones while buying access to Web, e-mail and apps.
RTFA much?
Well, I wouldn't recommend seeking advice from a 23-year-old student, but I'd probably advise you to stay right where you are. Pharma is nothing if not lucrative, even if everyone I've ever known in it is a giant ball of stress. You could probably retire back into academia afterwards, though; from what I've seen, industry experience is a great way to get into smaller universities as faculty... and age is not much of a threat in that kind of move.
Yes, there certainly were incidents of dishonesty in the laboratory-based classes I attended, however the students who did so are not the kinds of people who went on to pursue graduate work. My experience so far in bioinformatics (and molecular biology in general) has been that curiosity exceeds personal pride by a wide margin. I'm still a master's student (actually just warming up to the position...), so no, my stipend certainly isn't sufficient to handle a family, although the institution I'm attending has special accommodations for graduate students starting families (the most important being cheaper housing), so it's not infeasible that a couple could pull it off if both were working. I can't really comment on postdoc or professors' salaries. (Although being Canadian, medical costs are negligible.)
Based on your questions about cheating and duress, I'm guessing that you weren't studying microbial ecology (which isn't really that common in the first place), but rather your focus in microbiology was more about human impact of microbes. All I can say there is: I'm sorry. You got the short end of the stick with that choice of work. The closer you get to surgeons, the uglier life gets; there are a few other replies to my comment that resonate that.
Going for any additional schooling is a decision to delay starting a family; in places and times where secondary education isn't compulsory you see a lot more pairing off as teenagers, for example. Most people don't start having kids in undergrad, either, after all.
That's... really a very hyperbolic perspective. Yes, that happens, but it's a tiny, tiny fraction of what happens. Calling it "a lot" is weasel-wording at best. Maybe one study in a thousand (not counting studies regarding the efficacy of pharmaceuticals, which have a somewhat higher rate of falsified data) experiences some kind of government interference or has problems that can't be mopped up with an erratum. It's really only a handful of very specific sub-fields (stuff that directly upsets corporate interests) that get a lot of attention. Pry open the latest Nature or Science and you'll see how little of scientific discourse really does revolve around those topics.
Ouch. That's definitely right in the glamour hole. When I was entering university I too wanted to be in a field that had big and impressive findings and answered questions everyone's interested in, but since most of my classes were with pre-med students I quickly realized that the culture surrounding human research was absolutely toxic when you really dig down into it. It didn't take me long after that to settle into the other side of bioinformatics, evolutionary genomics. Still answering big and important questions, but most of the big names are stuffy old guys in armchairs smoking pipes. They're too tenured to be competitive.
That one got a good rise out of me. :)
Molecular biology really depends on what organism you're focusing on. Worm researchers, for example, are all really nice people because there's an unbroken lineage and it's a relatively small community. If you were studying mammals, you shouldn't be too surprised that things were a little more cut-throat. Anything remotely medical is unfortunately very competitive, a product of self-aggrandisement that it really doesn't deserve. I obviously can't speak for your particular experience, but coming from a very medicine-heavy school that had a radically different culture between the (faculty of medicine) biochemistry department and the (faculty of arts and sciences) biology department, it seems to me that such is the trend. If you're going into pharma, you're really just asking for it even harder. :) Pick something considered less glamorous by prime time television, and you'll find less careerism and more curiosity.
Those cases are all exceptions. Look around at your department, or the next one over. They're not full of crooks (probably.) The vast majority of upper-level academes are just committed nerds: think about how many cases you've heard of, and then how many universities there are, and how many professors, postdocs, and graduate students at each. Life goes on.
Think more honeypottish. The defender's best tactic against an attacker is to deny the attacker knowledge of whether or not their break-in was actually successful: the more complex and bewildering you can make the fake prompt, the better. No one will try to brute-force a machine they think they already have access to.
It's the name of a botnet. Assume any unfamiliar word in any Slashdot summary is the name of a botnet; it makes them eminently more readable. You can try out the technique on this one.
I'm not saying Weird Shit has eclipsed mainstream porn, just that it's increasingly more common. It's easy to avoid, but there's a sector of the market that's hungry for 'extreme' that also includes 'dehumanizing', in a way that was only really found in BDSM material a decade or two ago. Poke around the top-rated items on a free video site long enough, and you'll probably stumble into it.
Gay male porn is different in some pretty fundamental ways from all other gender combinations; this sort of sums it up. At some point, (many) producers realized that the majority of women in porn were just in it for the money, and started making increasing demands on them to get an edge over the competition. Just like with watching soap operas, there's always a part of the human psyche that's reserved for sadistic glee, proportional to how competitive general living is.
No! They were supposed to hide the incriminating documents from that one time in Australia! No one in the world must know that "confidential child pornography blacklist" is a euphemism for "censor any website we like without oversight!" How will we crush dissenting opinions now?!
We had some fairly good posts on this in the 'Egypt pornography ban' story earlier today. The general consensus (I think) is that it is a threat to the kind of compulsory, loveless marriages that are common accomplices to conservative values. It's not anyone's fault; merely an unfortunate equilibrium that built up over time. Personally, I'm still waiting for the complementary ban on Harlequin Romance novels.
...and sarcastically: escapism is clearly an unacceptable coping mechanism for a bad relationship that you're duty-bound to maintain by a bundle of two-thousand-year-old fairy tales and comic books.
Conversely, have you seen some of the absurdities they get up to in hardcore porn these days? Catering to private fantasies is one thing, but the amount of violence contaminating the general pool of smut at this point is pretty unsettling. It's enough to make me think that a concerted effort to reduce violence in the media might help clean up how sexuality is perceived by the people currently trying to oppress it.
It's all about the hyperspanners.
I hate to break it to you, but those generally aren't the same groups of women.
Completely agree. I have a theory about the underlying cause, though, and I'm curious as to what you (and others) would think of it:
Love is a meeting of minds, and healthy marriages are based on love. In the most grown-up model of a monogamous relationship, a sexual relationship is a possession of love.
It sounds like these marriages have been put together for the wrong reasons. Perhaps, when men come from a conservative culture where they must find women with whom to get married because there's social pressure to do so, they end up with sub-optimal relationships. At that point, all they have holding their holy matrimony together is a base instinct to pair off and procreate, and a big sign that says "recreational sex = eternal damnation." The traditional family structure puts the woman subservient to the man in pretty much every regard, so to her, he's primarily a ticket towards safety. Complicating this is the pressure to provide a positive environment for any children (which may be merely customary, as in Protestantism, or downright a legal matter, as in other monotheistic Abrahamic religions.) It's not hard to find examples of dirty jokes and other media that affirm these perceptions of the sexes, and the indoctrination seems to come mostly from how people have adapted to accommodate the expectations of traditional institutions. (This is not to say that men only want sex and women only want security; merely that they're encouraged to think that way through many generations of group polarization.)
It would seem to me that all this really proves is that the more rules you put on people, the more likely they are to resent them. The label of 'pornography addiction' is hence utterly pseudo-scientific; it's just a disinterest in the forced baby-generating/baby-protecting relationship brought on by animosity between partners. I would even go so far as to call it a misandrist concept, because escapism through trashy romance novels (the distaff counterpart to cheap pornography) in response to marital stress has been given absolutely no attention.
Simple! Just block those categories too! This plan is perfectly sustainable.
They're "Idle" articles. You can block them from Options > Exclusions.
Yeah, that's what I meant by "unmaintainable expectations." The students will get an idea of the principles at work more quickly, but they'll be ruined when it comes time to think non-interactively, which is of course unavoidable.
Specialists are divided. Some experts believe that Internet statistics aren't as reliable as they seem; others insist that all information on the Internet remains completely factual, owing to the serious nature of the business.