"There's a tool developed by...I can never remember...I want to say somewhere in Washington State. Basically the teacher gives two students (volunteers) tablet PCs and she has her own. She projects her laptop, and the other two tablets can be viewed (along with her own) through a program on the rest of the students' laptops, phones, etc. She goes about teaching her course. The tablet students take notes through a piece of software, make adjustments to a copy of her slides, etc..."
I just about fell asleep reading that. Techno-fetishism is not the solution.
"Work at a company who's business is technology, which is still run by a techie. Make sure to leave once the suits take over."
Excellent advice, wish I could mod it up more. Probably the hardest one for a young worker to grok, considering that the very first piece of boilerplate the suits will utter will be, "We don't expect to make any changes here at all!". See, they know the game too, and are playing the other side of it.
"Then the press release would read, 'Rock Star is proud to announce the opening of our Rock Star Mumbai Studio.' On the up side, at least the developers would have more time to spend with their family....right?"
"Why don't these programmers just QUIT? I can't imagine that those guys would have a problem getting essentially ANY programming job they wanted. 'Member of Grand Theft Auto programming team' looks pretty good on a resume."
Having worked in the industry one major reason is "Naive and heroic dedication to the project". I had friends recently working in a similar crappy situation, crunching for a year, and the attitude they expressed was "The new management sucks! They're killing us. Right after this game ships for christmas (9 months away), I bet the whole team will quit." Which is jaw-droppingly bad career tactics if you think about it; I was pretty aghast listening to them.
Actually, items #1 and #2 are pretty far off the mark.
"The framerate of a game is usually directly tied to the processing of its logic." That really shouldn't be the case. Working on top-end race sim games back in the mid-90's, the very first mission statement was to have separate input, logic, and graphics threads so as to decouple these issues.
College math lecturer, former game programmer. Sounds broadly to me like the first class (discrete structures) will be a bit better for you. Yes, the second class might be better if specifically you expect to focus on 3D graphics programming. (Note: I had a year long sequence in computer graphics in college but even then never actually used it in my two game programming positions... did more game logic, AI, audio, networking, etc.)
"Finally, never, ever forget the most important rule of commenting. NEVER include a URL in a comment. They change over time and cannot be relied upon to still exist in 3 months, let alone the lifetime of a software product. A similar warning should exist for book / magazine references, too. Not only do they become unobtainable or go out of print, they also get modified or corrected in the 'second edition' and therefore still can't be relied on. If an algorithm has a well known name, such as Bresenham's, then by all means quote that otherwise, explain the algorithm in, or before the code that implements it. Unless you want the next guy to curse your name - provided you put that in the comments."
That's flat-out crazy. By your argument the whole idea of footnotes and book references is nonfunctional. You may as well argue against the technology of writing and shared knowledge in general.
"First, I think any time you consider writing some clever one-liner in real production code you should rethink long and hard. Is the hypothetical 6 fewer lines of code really worth it? Unless you're doing it for absolutely required performance reasons, the 6 lines of code you save won't buy you anything but the wrath of whoever has to come along in 3 years and refactor your code."
This sounds like ideology taken too far. Why would one well-commented line inspire wrath? That doesn't make any sense.
Don't think the summary quite found the central point of TFA.
"Dunbar found that most new scientific ideas emerged from lab meetings, those weekly sessions in which people publicly present their data. Interestingly, the most important element of the lab meeting wasn't the presentation -- it was the debate that followed. Dunbar observed that the skeptical (and sometimes heated) questions asked during a group session frequently triggered breakthroughs, as the scientists were forced to reconsider data they'd previously ignored. The new theory was a product of spontaneous conversation, not solitude; a single bracing query was enough to turn scientists into temporary outsiders, able to look anew at their own work."
"I saw this happen all the time," Dunbar says. "A scientist would be trying to describe their approach, and they'd be getting a little defensive, and then they'd get this quizzical look on their face. It was like they'd finally understood what was important."
So that's it: The keys are multiple viewpoints, skepticism, and intellectual competitiveness.
"In September 2004, editors of several prominent medical journals (including the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Annals of Internal Medicine, and JAMA) announced that they would no longer publish results of drug research sponsored by pharmaceutical companies unless that research was registered in a public database from the start.[11] In this way, negative results should no longer be able to disappear."
"Why wouldn't the US invest in liberal arts degrees? Maybe because everyone and there brother has one of those degrees and they are basically useless. We have plenty of actors\actresses already in a billion+ dollar industry. Most of which don't need that degree to begin with. We have plenty of news reporters and journalist. All of which were so bad at 'asking questions' that there newspapers are going under."
This is actually a brilliant case study in what the "maniacal engineer" mindset looks like. Once again, I find it fascinating that these right-wing viewpoints are always necessarily expressed with 0.67 grammatical errors per sentence (or round up to 1 error/sentence if you prefer).
"It's amazing to me that anyone with an engineering background could have blind (I.E. without tangible proof) faith in any religion... this sort of engineering mindset..."
If you were to replace the word "engineering" with "science" then I would agree with you. Scientific inquiry features the kind of search for evidence that you describe. Engineering can, to a greater degree, be regarded as a bunch of techniques that you're trained to follow (particularly so for some young people forced by their parents into engineering school for financial reasons). Dare I say "trained to follow 'religiously'"?
Research data FTA: "Gambetta and Hertog updated a study that was first published in 1972, when a pair of researchers named Seymour Lipset and Carl Ladd surveyed the ideological bent of their fellow American academics. According to the original paper, engineers described themselves as 'strongly conservative' and 'deeply religious' more often than professors in any other field. Gambetta and Hertog repeated this analysis for data gathered in 1984, so it might better match up with their terrorist sample. They found similar results, with 46 percent of the (male American) engineers describing themselves as both conservative and religious, compared with 22 percent of scientists."
"Based on my experience working in a University (and attending a couple) it seems to me that students who get sent abroad from Islamic countries study Engineering because it's a particularly useful degree back home... I really don't think the recruiters and leaders are looking specifically for highly trained engineers so they can be expended on the front-line. If Engineers are actually valued for their technical skills, planning capability, etc, I'd use them for designing IEDs and planning operations..."
Okay, to start with you make a really good point. But I think you left out something that would bolster your argument and solve the mystery at the end, and that is:
It's the people from a fundamentalist society, sent off alone at a very young age to a foreign Western country, who will be afflicted with intense loneliness, astrocization, humiliating checkpoint searches, difficulty becoming accultured to things on the street that were forbidden while they were growing up, etc., etc. They're likely to be emotionally lost and looking for something to join, and more likely to be radicalized. They may feel like they don't belong in either society anymore (too Western for home, too foreign for the West), and have nothing to lose from a martyr operation.
In other words, the hypothesis could be that (1) foreign countries send more young people abroad for Engineering degrees, (2) young people sent abroad are more likely to become radicalized, and hence (3) Engineering degrees appear correlated with terrorist acts. The fact that engineers are good at the mechanics of sabotage is more icing on the cake.
Just got done reading the comic Persepolis last night, the emotional state of the Iranian author who escaped to the West in her college years (ultimately leading to depression and a suicide attempt) is laid out very well there.
"OTOH, contracts can and routinely do include clauses to the effect that you cannot disclose the terms of the contract. Whether an employment agreement is a contract at best varies by state, but I'm aware of no reason they couldn't contain confidentiality agreements regardless."
Great, but of course not binding on any 3rd parties.
"An asteroid on a collision course for Earth would be a pretty obvious threat. Climate change is: a) Not necessarily a threat (it might be a benefit for your area!) b) Not a near enough threat anyways (it's a problem that will eventuate in another generation, hardly a 10 year problem) c) Something that while a PITA to live through, is survivable."
I completely agree with the grandparent. The current climate change summit is an excellent case study of what response to a global threat looks like.
I'm sure if some scientists actually announced an asteroid targeting Earth in 10-30 years, arguments a, b, c would be absolutely forwarded by lots of entrenched interests regarding said asteroid. There would also be widespread anti-scientific propaganda bandied about. I could imagine pre-emptive military actions to prevent foreign powers from interacting with it in ways we don't trust.
Slashdot Mirror
"There's a tool developed by...I can never remember...I want to say somewhere in Washington State. Basically the teacher gives two students (volunteers) tablet PCs and she has her own. She projects her laptop, and the other two tablets can be viewed (along with her own) through a program on the rest of the students' laptops, phones, etc. She goes about teaching her course. The tablet students take notes through a piece of software, make adjustments to a copy of her slides, etc..."
I just about fell asleep reading that. Techno-fetishism is not the solution.
"Work at a company who's business is technology, which is still run by a techie. Make sure to leave once the suits take over."
Excellent advice, wish I could mod it up more. Probably the hardest one for a young worker to grok, considering that the very first piece of boilerplate the suits will utter will be, "We don't expect to make any changes here at all!". See, they know the game too, and are playing the other side of it.
I'll agree with the guy who said "If you can't make them follow a policy, then you can't make them sign a fucking form".
Marginally better tactic: Have a polite face-to-face chat with them. Afterwards, send them an email with a recap "here's what we discussed" body.
"Then the press release would read, 'Rock Star is proud to announce the opening of our Rock Star Mumbai Studio.' On the up side, at least the developers would have more time to spend with their family....right?"
FUD. Somehow all these digital animation studios are still in business even with unions: http://www.animationguild.org/_Jobs/Jobs_h/jobsFRM.html
"Why don't these programmers just QUIT? I can't imagine that those guys would have a problem getting essentially ANY programming job they wanted. 'Member of Grand Theft Auto programming team' looks pretty good on a resume."
Having worked in the industry one major reason is "Naive and heroic dedication to the project". I had friends recently working in a similar crappy situation, crunching for a year, and the attitude they expressed was "The new management sucks! They're killing us. Right after this game ships for christmas (9 months away), I bet the whole team will quit." Which is jaw-droppingly bad career tactics if you think about it; I was pretty aghast listening to them.
Totally agree. It's a pretty simple state of affairs. "United we stand, divided we fall" and all that.
There's also the 5-kids with a 6th-on-the-way issue. Geez.
Actually, items #1 and #2 are pretty far off the mark.
"The framerate of a game is usually directly tied to the processing of its logic." That really shouldn't be the case. Working on top-end race sim games back in the mid-90's, the very first mission statement was to have separate input, logic, and graphics threads so as to decouple these issues.
College math lecturer, former game programmer. Sounds broadly to me like the first class (discrete structures) will be a bit better for you. Yes, the second class might be better if specifically you expect to focus on 3D graphics programming. (Note: I had a year long sequence in computer graphics in college but even then never actually used it in my two game programming positions... did more game logic, AI, audio, networking, etc.)
Just my take.
"Finally, never, ever forget the most important rule of commenting. NEVER include a URL in a comment. They change over time and cannot be relied upon to still exist in 3 months, let alone the lifetime of a software product. A similar warning should exist for book / magazine references, too. Not only do they become unobtainable or go out of print, they also get modified or corrected in the 'second edition' and therefore still can't be relied on. If an algorithm has a well known name, such as Bresenham's, then by all means quote that otherwise, explain the algorithm in, or before the code that implements it. Unless you want the next guy to curse your name - provided you put that in the comments."
That's flat-out crazy. By your argument the whole idea of footnotes and book references is nonfunctional. You may as well argue against the technology of writing and shared knowledge in general.
"First, I think any time you consider writing some clever one-liner in real production code you should rethink long and hard. Is the hypothetical 6 fewer lines of code really worth it? Unless you're doing it for absolutely required performance reasons, the 6 lines of code you save won't buy you anything but the wrath of whoever has to come along in 3 years and refactor your code."
This sounds like ideology taken too far. Why would one well-commented line inspire wrath? That doesn't make any sense.
Don't think the summary quite found the central point of TFA.
"Dunbar found that most new scientific ideas emerged from lab meetings, those weekly sessions in which people publicly present their data. Interestingly, the most important element of the lab meeting wasn't the presentation -- it was the debate that followed. Dunbar observed that the skeptical (and sometimes heated) questions asked during a group session frequently triggered breakthroughs, as the scientists were forced to reconsider data they'd previously ignored. The new theory was a product of spontaneous conversation, not solitude; a single bracing query was enough to turn scientists into temporary outsiders, able to look anew at their own work."
"I saw this happen all the time," Dunbar says. "A scientist would be trying to describe their approach, and they'd be getting a little defensive, and then they'd get this quizzical look on their face. It was like they'd finally understood what was important."
So that's it: The keys are multiple viewpoints, skepticism, and intellectual competitiveness.
This is well known and called the "file drawer effect" (or publication bias).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias
"In September 2004, editors of several prominent medical journals (including the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Annals of Internal Medicine, and JAMA) announced that they would no longer publish results of drug research sponsored by pharmaceutical companies unless that research was registered in a public database from the start.[11] In this way, negative results should no longer be able to disappear."
"Why wouldn't the US invest in liberal arts degrees? Maybe because everyone and there brother has one of those degrees and they are basically useless. We have plenty of actors\actresses already in a billion+ dollar industry. Most of which don't need that degree to begin with. We have plenty of news reporters and journalist. All of which were so bad at 'asking questions' that there newspapers are going under."
This is actually a brilliant case study in what the "maniacal engineer" mindset looks like. Once again, I find it fascinating that these right-wing viewpoints are always necessarily expressed with 0.67 grammatical errors per sentence (or round up to 1 error/sentence if you prefer).
"Ask any engineer who has designed a product..."
Article summary: Those who can, do. Those who can't, become unemployed, radicalized, and possibly terrorists.
"It's amazing to me that anyone with an engineering background could have blind (I.E. without tangible proof) faith in any religion... this sort of engineering mindset..."
If you were to replace the word "engineering" with "science" then I would agree with you. Scientific inquiry features the kind of search for evidence that you describe. Engineering can, to a greater degree, be regarded as a bunch of techniques that you're trained to follow (particularly so for some young people forced by their parents into engineering school for financial reasons). Dare I say "trained to follow 'religiously'"?
Research data FTA: "Gambetta and Hertog updated a study that was first published in 1972, when a pair of researchers named Seymour Lipset and Carl Ladd surveyed the ideological bent of their fellow American academics. According to the original paper, engineers described themselves as 'strongly conservative' and 'deeply religious' more often than professors in any other field. Gambetta and Hertog repeated this analysis for data gathered in 1984, so it might better match up with their terrorist sample. They found similar results, with 46 percent of the (male American) engineers describing themselves as both conservative and religious, compared with 22 percent of scientists."
So there's the facts, engineering professors 46% religious & conservative, science professors 22% religious & conservative. Big difference. Searchable survey data archive at: http://www.thearda.com/Archive/Files/Codebooks/NSHEF84_CB.asp
"Based on my experience working in a University (and attending a couple) it seems to me that students who get sent abroad from Islamic countries study Engineering because it's a particularly useful degree back home... I really don't think the recruiters and leaders are looking specifically for highly trained engineers so they can be expended on the front-line. If Engineers are actually valued for their technical skills, planning capability, etc, I'd use them for designing IEDs and planning operations..."
Okay, to start with you make a really good point. But I think you left out something that would bolster your argument and solve the mystery at the end, and that is:
It's the people from a fundamentalist society, sent off alone at a very young age to a foreign Western country, who will be afflicted with intense loneliness, astrocization, humiliating checkpoint searches, difficulty becoming accultured to things on the street that were forbidden while they were growing up, etc., etc. They're likely to be emotionally lost and looking for something to join, and more likely to be radicalized. They may feel like they don't belong in either society anymore (too Western for home, too foreign for the West), and have nothing to lose from a martyr operation.
In other words, the hypothesis could be that (1) foreign countries send more young people abroad for Engineering degrees, (2) young people sent abroad are more likely to become radicalized, and hence (3) Engineering degrees appear correlated with terrorist acts. The fact that engineers are good at the mechanics of sabotage is more icing on the cake.
Just got done reading the comic Persepolis last night, the emotional state of the Iranian author who escaped to the West in her college years (ultimately leading to depression and a suicide attempt) is laid out very well there.
"OTOH, contracts can and routinely do include clauses to the effect that you cannot disclose the terms of the contract. Whether an employment agreement is a contract at best varies by state, but I'm aware of no reason they couldn't contain confidentiality agreements regardless."
Great, but of course not binding on any 3rd parties.
May not be needed, but I did just confirm that from my Brooklyn zip, as well.
And I'll point out that last night here in Brooklyn, a woman hung herself in a police station over a marijuana arrest:
http://ny1.com/7-brooklyn-news-content/top_stories/110727/woman-found-hanging-in-brooklyn-police-cell
"There are two possibilities: either it is dark matter or it isn't. Therefore the probability is 50%."
Hidden assumption of equally likely events.
Indeed. The article seems to recommend switching from "Rock, Paper, Scissors" to (from a Se8infeld episode) "Rock, Rock". And that's just ludicrous.
"An asteroid on a collision course for Earth would be a pretty obvious threat. Climate change is:
a) Not necessarily a threat (it might be a benefit for your area!)
b) Not a near enough threat anyways (it's a problem that will eventuate in another generation, hardly a 10 year problem)
c) Something that while a PITA to live through, is survivable."
I completely agree with the grandparent. The current climate change summit is an excellent case study of what response to a global threat looks like.
I'm sure if some scientists actually announced an asteroid targeting Earth in 10-30 years, arguments a, b, c would be absolutely forwarded by lots of entrenched interests regarding said asteroid. There would also be widespread anti-scientific propaganda bandied about. I could imagine pre-emptive military actions to prevent foreign powers from interacting with it in ways we don't trust.
Of course. It's the old la-la-la-la-la can't-hear-you-fingers-in-my-ears defense. Works every time.
"What's missing is a state willingness to prosecute, a willingness that won't change just because the cops are enforcers from Superpol."
That's SuperCyberPol, mister!