I dumped TV a long time ago and found myself use more and more audio stuff. It's amazing how much better that works for me.
I don't just sit motionlessly on my sofa anymore. I go for a walk instead. I also listen while doing my house chores, when I drive, when I work out - simply whenever I'm doing any activity that does not require much thought.
I also don't have to deal with any of the MAFIAA shit - just buy an audiobook for a reasonable price in a format I choose from a number of providers on the internet, or download a free podcast or free radio content. No hassle, tons of high quality works.
That may be, but let me go on a wild guess that it wasn't nearly as popular as Summertime (Gershwin/Fitzgerald) that you can easily play and sing along using just 5 chords. Just like Jethro Tull's Living in the Past is a well known song and it's a quite a complex (yet seamless) arrangement riding upon a 5/4 rythm - yet it's not what people would choose to sing and play drunkenly at a party as opposed to things like Let It Be.
Read TFA and I find it's argumentation is embarrasingly weak. Here's a summary:
1) Mathematics causes high dropout rate in the US
The author goes on a tirade some 6 paragraphs long about how math is that no.1 subject that causes people to fail high school. Great. So what? Suppose we cut math. Then the no.1 drop out subject will be Chemistry (or whatever). Will we continue cutting subjects until we have none that cause students to drop out of schools?
2) Low drop out rate in other countries does not matter
In the next paragraph the author addresses the fact that in other countries people don't drop out because of math at such a high rate without sacrificing content. His answer is - it doesn't matter. Not in these precise words, but seriously - look it up in the article for yourself.
3) Math we learn has no relationship to the kind of reasoning we need at work
Interesting argument. So what is the proof for that claim? Well, some psychologist said it. Great. Some other psychologist said the contrary.
4) A mere 5 percent of entry-level workers will need to be proficient in algebra or above
Again, so what? How many entry-level workers will need to be proficient with history, english literature, chemistry or geography? How about when they will want to move on beyond the entry-level? How did you get that number anyway?
5) There's no evidence that learning math makes you a better thinker
Or in his words - " there’s no evidence that being able to prove (x + y) = (x - y) + (2xy) leads to more credible political opinions or social analysis." (no actual citations of studies how math helps or doesn't help thinking are provided). Oh my, this is so wrong! How would you measure the 'credibility of political opinions'? Why would you even want to measure it. Just because your political opinion is credible it does not have to be good! This where I should invoke the Goodwin law and be justified in it!
6)The doctors and veterinarians don't need math
This is getting silly. Would you have the educational system only teach the lowest common denominator for all jobs? What would it be? Basic English?
That's it for his arguments. Now what about all the arguments he didn't address:
1) Math teaches rigorous thinking. And it's probably the simplest tool to do so - it's very easy to verify and (on a High-School level) it's indisputable.
2) Math teaches to follow procedure - again - it's a very effective tool for that
3) Math trains you in critical thinking - teaches you to look for proofs in a controlled environment where proofs exist.
None of these arguments is properly examined in the article as the author fails to proceed (1) through critical examination (3) in a rigorous way (2).
Read TFA and I find it's argumentation is embarrasingly weak. Here's a summary:
1) Mathematics causes high dropout rate in the US
The author goes on a tirade some 6 paragraphs long about how math is that no.1 subject that causes people to fail high school. Great. So what? Suppose we cut math. Then the no.1 drop out subject will be Chemistry (or whatever). Will we continue cutting subjects until we have none that cause students to drop out of schools?
2) Low drop out rate in other countries does not matter
In the next paragraph the author addresses the fact that in other countries people don't drop out because of math at such a high rate without sacrificing content. His answer is - it doesn't matter. Not in these precise words, but seriously - look it up in the article for yourself.
3) Math we learn has no relationship to the kind of reasoning we need at work
Interesting argument. So what is the proof for that claim? Well, some psychologist said it. Great. Some other psychologist said the contrary.
4) A mere 5 percent of entry-level workers will need to be proficient in algebra or above
Again, so what? How many entry-level workers will need to be proficient with history, english literature, chemistry or geography? How about when they will want to move on beyond the entry-level? How did you get that number anyway?
5) There's no evidence that learning math makes you a better thinker
Or in his words - " there’s no evidence that being able to prove (x + y) = (x - y) + (2xy) leads to more credible political opinions or social analysis." (no actual citations of studies how math helps or doesn't help thinking are provided). Oh my, this is so wrong! How would you measure the 'credibility of political opinions'? Why would you even want to measure it. Just because your political opinion is credible it does not have to be good! This where I should invoke the Goodwin law and be justified in it!
6)The doctors and veterinarians don't need math
This is getting silly. Would you have the educational system only teach the lowest common denominator for all jobs? What would it be? Basic English?
That's it for his arguments. Now what about all the arguments he didn't address:
1) Math teaches rigorous thinking. And it's probably the simplest tool to do so - it's very easy to verify and (on a High-School level) it's indisputable.
2) Math teaches to follow procedure - again - it's a very effective tool for that
3) Math trains you in critical thinking - teaches you to look for proofs in a controlled environment where proofs exist.
None of these arguments is properly examined in the article as the author fails to proceed (1) through critical examination (3) in a rigorous way (2).
It's easy to dismiss today's pop-music as simplistic and look up to Wagners and Mozarts of the past. However, 200 years ago, most of the western worlds population never heard an opera and the music they were playing/singing and listening to was just as simplistic. A typical tune, like Pastime with Good Company was nowhere near the complexity of the Ride of the Valkyries
On the other hand, there is still a lot of serious music being made now-days that is being listened to by a minority, just like before.
Nor will Salman Khan's idea that he is going to build Charter schools where students watch and hour of his videos a day to learn all the math they need to know and spend the rest of the day playing guitar or making paintings.
You completely missed the point of Khan Academy. The point is not to reduce education to watching an hour of videos and it's not to remove teachers from educational process. To the contrary - it's to use the teachers more effectively.
Here are the important points:
1)Teacher's time
At the moment, teachers spend 50% or more of their classroom time delivering a lecture. This is a complete waste of their talent. Instead, kids can look at the lecture themselves online - they cannot interrupt the teacher to ask a question, but they don't do that during a lesson anyway - with a video they can at least rewind it and listen to it again. Then, they can spend the time in the classes doing creative work, discussions and exercises with the teacher's assistance.
2)Student's speed
At the moment we require that all students go through the material at the same speed. This is terribly inefficient as it results with most students either underachieving and getting bored or moving on through the material without learning what's needed. With Khan's approach you can let students go through the material at their own speed. You can still challenge them to do better but you don't need to abandon the slower students because the class has to move on
3)Tracking
The teacher can track each student's development in a comprehensive way - he'll be able to easier identify who has what kind of problems or strengths and use this information to develop the kids to their best possibilities.
Yes, the education process has been developing a long time but if Khan's approach catches on, it will be a pretty big step forward.
why we quite see the blame shifted onto the lawyers is beyond me.
It's not so hard to understand
A hired hit-man that actually performs the murder is generally seen as more despicable as the person who hired him. And even if you might disagree you surely must see why that hit-man would take so much heat from the public.
either cutthroats or visionaries with a killer instinct.
Yahoo already went trough an asshole cutthroat Bartz and a cutthroat technocrat Thompson and they still did not get very far. Mayer better be a visionary I guess.
Seems more like a slightly interesting continuation of a process that started with the invention of agriculture (destroying hunter-gather jobs).
You failed to notice an important difference. In all previous cases unskilled labor was not diminished very much. People moved from the fields to assembly lines, from assembly lines to retail - all without needing much skill. What venues for unskilled labor are there now? If your work does not require any creativity or social skills, you can be replaced by a machine. So what to do with all the low-skilled labor force? What if low skill work as a concept has become obsolete?
The correct course would have been for people to reduce debt and start saving to prepare for the worse.
The problem is that the 'saving' part has become very convoluted these days. It used to be so easy - a kingdom would maintain a system of granaries for the rainy day, but that is not what you can do now.
Say you 'save' 10% of your income - just stuff it in your pillow. What happens? Will it mean that somewhere a stockpile of canned beans will grow bigger by that amount? Or will it mean that somebody will just have less work to do, less service to provide and thus will produce less? I would say the latter is the more likely outcome. So if 'saving' in the form of keeping your money happens en masse in an economy, it will lead to reduced productivity, to a recession.
Now you could say that you wouldn't be so stupid as to stuff your money into your pillow, that you would *invest* it. You could find a good venue for your capital that would appreciate the money and keep the productivity up at the same time. The problem there is that if a lot of people start to invest, the 'good' venues for capital will be depleted really quickly and the capital will be invested in an inefficient way and into bad businesses and concepts. This is when you get a bubble like the one in the housing market recently.
So the answer is not to simply 'spend more' or 'save more' or 'invest more'. The solution is to find a fine line between those three. That is very hard to do.
The problem is - how do you do it? How do you change the copyright/IP rights?
The problem is clearly political - the media magnates that reap the benefits of the current regulation have enough power to bury any politician that might try to cut their profits. Who is going to pick a fight with them?
True, however 'incorrect or missing patient results' in a record can be as deadly as a high dose of radiation. I'm sure you can imagine a catastrophic scenario yourself.
Don't get too hung up on the whole 'financial' stuff. Just like in any industry today, the IT jobs in Financial industry are really diverse - GUI expert, Customer Web Portal developer, data mining, real-time statistical analysis, system administration, IT security expertise, even low level parallel programming (to squeeze every drop of processor juice out of those High Frequency Trading machines).
So just concentrate on your strengths and look for the kind of job that best fits your experience. Knowing something about the financial world is good, but being new to it is not a showstopper - the Financial sector still needs more IT guys and they have to come from somewhere.
You probably should know enough to understand what the company you are applying to is doing (e.g. knowing what a hedge fund is) in general and you should be prepared to answer questions like 'How do you handle your finances?' in a respectable manner.
It's on page 22. It's not spelled out but it seems to be close to that number on the chart. Not sure how they got to the 24% though - in the text they cite 13 removal and recall actions. The closest number of total software attributable recalls would then be 3 - which is 23.07% of 13.
On a side note - is it really that alarming that 3 out of a total of 13 recalled system were due to software error? If anything, it is a surprisingly low number.
You misunderstand the fallacy. Of course you can be easily identifiable as a Scotsman. The point of it is though that there is no clear definition for a 'True Scotsman'
From Wikipedia entry on the matter:
Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the "Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again." Hamish is shocked and declares that "No Scotsman would do such a thing." The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again and this time finds an article about an Aberdeen man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says, "No true Scotsman would do such a thing."
I work for an industrial MegaCorp and the process is very simple. True, the bottom line is profit and growth but it is by no means quarterly - at least not for the development because it takes a lot more time than 4 months to implement a new iteration of industrial equipment and bring it into the field.
The process starts with defining new requirements - of course ones that will either increase sales or decrease costs. Then development budgets and timelines are established and after that the development tech people come - engineers, coders, testers... In our company these people are indispensable. If a couple of them leave during a project, your timeline is blown. You're never going to hire replacements in time. And if the milestones are not reached, management gets some really hard time from somebody up the stream.
While Google might have scores of talented people lining up to work for them, your local (and global) assembly line (medical device, power plants etc.) manufacturer does not. Well, there are plenty of people who can do web pages, but try finding somebody experienced in embedded software and robotics or in parallel programming and high-availability platforms or a GUI expert for government regulated medical environment.
You can consider yourself very lucky if you find somebody like that. Generally the only way is to hire a graduate (which is hard enough since they don't tend to look for assembly line development jobs) and school him over a couple of years and if he leaves, you are fucked.
So if you are treated like dirt, you are either working for the wrong company, or you've chosen a branch of IT where you are easily replaceable. At the same time there are industries killing themselves to find professionals who are just not there because the field is not hip enough.
And on a side note - to find a capable manager for these fields is even much much harder
None of the Ponzi scheme-makers have ever "known" whether it catches or not.
The Ponzi scheme-makers don't put money into the scheme (other than initial promotion), just collect the revenues.
The Ponzi scheme "shares" are only valuable if people are buying them - identical to Bitcoin.
No, Bitcoins are valuable if people are using it as a currency. If you find nobody that would buy your bitcoin (as in - pay you for it in USD) but you can still use it to buy goods and services online, it will still have value - and consequently - there will be people willing to pay USD for it. This is how any fiat currency works. It is not how a Ponzi scheme works.
Ponzi scheme works on the basis of fraud - what you are getting is not what you think. You think you are getting an investment vehicle that gets valuated by a reputable financial institution. Instead you are getting an ever diminishing share of what other people are putting into the scheme.
With Bitcoin, there is no such fraud involved. You know what you are getting - a currency that is only worth something as long as people keep using it. If there is a general feeling that people might stop accepting it, its price will fall. This is no different from how other currencies work. The only difference is that there is no central issuing authority and no law to require it being accepted by anyone. Yes, that might be a big difference but it's one that you are aware of when you adopt it. Therefore it is not a Ponzi scheme.
Bitcoin is meant to be means of exchange. It is only valuable if people are using it for exchange. Early adopters could not have known whether bitcoin would catch on and find a large base of adopters. They were taking all the risk. Now that bit-coin has a larger base, each additional adopter experiences a smaller risk of bit-coin going bust. That's why its value grows.
Ponzi scheme works the other way around. Each additional adopter has a greater chance that he's going to end up being the sucker - without even realizing it.
why smart people are often more likely to make cognitive errors than stupid people.
The article is not talking about any cognitive errors. It is talking about problems that are specifically designed to induce these kind of errors. If the tests comprised of questions like "the bat and the ball cost together $1.13. The bat costs $87. How much does the ball cost?" you would find that those 'stupid' people would make more mistakes.
Furthermore the research itself seems dishonest. They state that knowing about these biases does not help a person to avoid them. So did they make a test where they warned the participants that the questions were specifically designed to provoke wrong answers? If they did, they forgot to mention the results.
is the hype in medical and industrial devices. it involves datamining techniques to discover and report a possible future fault in a device. the end effect is tha for example a CT scanner has 99% uptime and a much lower chance of something going wrong during a patient scan. This stuff is being implemented for assembly lines offshore wind farms, AC units, airplanes, pretty much anything...
Unlike others here I don't think you should fire your sales staff and let the tech people handle all the talking. It's not realistic and it's not efficient.
Instead, let the sales people know their limits and when they reach them while talking to the customer, let them propose to organize a meeting between the potential customer and a developer. Have them say "Look, I'm not a coder myself so there's only so much I can tell you about the details of our product but if you are really interested, you could talk to one of our developers."
I love to hear that as a customer - I can tell when a salesperson is out of his/her depth and it's great to see they realize it and are open about it.
Have your developers do consulting duties where they do these kind of talks - you'll have to coach them a bit about what to avoid when talking to a customer - but unlike teaching your salespeople how to code, this is doable.
You can also push the limits of what the salespeople understand up to a point - you'll have to discover what that point is for yourself - after that it's a waste of time and money. You can probably make them do some simple hands-on on coding just so they see what the difference is between code and a binary and how you get one from the other and such things.
Math is not science. At least not in commonly accepted Popper's model and not according to definitions that resulted from the discussions in the Scopes Trial.
In math it makes sense to say 'prove that this statement is true in all possible cases'. In science this is meaningless because it does not build upon a complete set of axioms.
A teacher should always be prepared to explain kids what kind of experiments were made so far to try to disprove a theory and why they failed.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the sci-fi from behind the iron curtain was pretty bleak (and quite deep).
Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers and His Masters Voice by Stanislaw Lem are two great examples of that. Highly recommended.
I dumped TV a long time ago and found myself use more and more audio stuff. It's amazing how much better that works for me.
I don't just sit motionlessly on my sofa anymore. I go for a walk instead. I also listen while doing my house chores, when I drive, when I work out - simply whenever I'm doing any activity that does not require much thought.
I also don't have to deal with any of the MAFIAA shit - just buy an audiobook for a reasonable price in a format I choose from a number of providers on the internet, or download a free podcast or free radio content. No hassle, tons of high quality works.
Radio killed the video stars for me.
Yet Summertime is the most covered song from that era.
That may be, but let me go on a wild guess that it wasn't nearly as popular as Summertime (Gershwin/Fitzgerald) that you can easily play and sing along using just 5 chords. Just like Jethro Tull's Living in the Past is a well known song and it's a quite a complex (yet seamless) arrangement riding upon a 5/4 rythm - yet it's not what people would choose to sing and play drunkenly at a party as opposed to things like Let It Be.
Whoops - wrong article - wanted to post it at http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/07/29/1918214/political-science-prof-asks-is-algebra-necessary
Read TFA and I find it's argumentation is embarrasingly weak. Here's a summary:
1) Mathematics causes high dropout rate in the US
The author goes on a tirade some 6 paragraphs long about how math is that no.1 subject that causes people to fail high school. Great. So what? Suppose we cut math. Then the no.1 drop out subject will be Chemistry (or whatever). Will we continue cutting subjects until we have none that cause students to drop out of schools?
2) Low drop out rate in other countries does not matter
In the next paragraph the author addresses the fact that in other countries people don't drop out because of math at such a high rate without sacrificing content. His answer is - it doesn't matter. Not in these precise words, but seriously - look it up in the article for yourself.
3) Math we learn has no relationship to the kind of reasoning we need at work
Interesting argument. So what is the proof for that claim? Well, some psychologist said it. Great. Some other psychologist said the contrary.
4) A mere 5 percent of entry-level workers will need to be proficient in algebra or above
Again, so what? How many entry-level workers will need to be proficient with history, english literature, chemistry or geography? How about when they will want to move on beyond the entry-level? How did you get that number anyway?
5) There's no evidence that learning math makes you a better thinker
Or in his words - " there’s no evidence that being able to prove (x + y) = (x - y) + (2xy) leads to more credible political opinions or social analysis." (no actual citations of studies how math helps or doesn't help thinking are provided). Oh my, this is so wrong! How would you measure the 'credibility of political opinions'? Why would you even want to measure it. Just because your political opinion is credible it does not have to be good! This where I should invoke the Goodwin law and be justified in it!
6)The doctors and veterinarians don't need math
This is getting silly. Would you have the educational system only teach the lowest common denominator for all jobs? What would it be? Basic English?
That's it for his arguments. Now what about all the arguments he didn't address:
1) Math teaches rigorous thinking. And it's probably the simplest tool to do so - it's very easy to verify and (on a High-School level) it's indisputable.
2) Math teaches to follow procedure - again - it's a very effective tool for that
3) Math trains you in critical thinking - teaches you to look for proofs in a controlled environment where proofs exist.
None of these arguments is properly examined in the article as the author fails to proceed (1) through critical examination (3) in a rigorous way (2).
Read TFA and I find it's argumentation is embarrasingly weak. Here's a summary:
1) Mathematics causes high dropout rate in the US
The author goes on a tirade some 6 paragraphs long about how math is that no.1 subject that causes people to fail high school. Great. So what? Suppose we cut math. Then the no.1 drop out subject will be Chemistry (or whatever). Will we continue cutting subjects until we have none that cause students to drop out of schools?
2) Low drop out rate in other countries does not matter
In the next paragraph the author addresses the fact that in other countries people don't drop out because of math at such a high rate without sacrificing content. His answer is - it doesn't matter. Not in these precise words, but seriously - look it up in the article for yourself.
3) Math we learn has no relationship to the kind of reasoning we need at work
Interesting argument. So what is the proof for that claim? Well, some psychologist said it. Great. Some other psychologist said the contrary.
4) A mere 5 percent of entry-level workers will need to be proficient in algebra or above
Again, so what? How many entry-level workers will need to be proficient with history, english literature, chemistry or geography? How about when they will want to move on beyond the entry-level? How did you get that number anyway?
5) There's no evidence that learning math makes you a better thinker
Or in his words - " there’s no evidence that being able to prove (x + y) = (x - y) + (2xy) leads to more credible political opinions or social analysis." (no actual citations of studies how math helps or doesn't help thinking are provided). Oh my, this is so wrong! How would you measure the 'credibility of political opinions'? Why would you even want to measure it. Just because your political opinion is credible it does not have to be good! This where I should invoke the Goodwin law and be justified in it!
6)The doctors and veterinarians don't need math
This is getting silly. Would you have the educational system only teach the lowest common denominator for all jobs? What would it be? Basic English?
That's it for his arguments. Now what about all the arguments he didn't address:
1) Math teaches rigorous thinking. And it's probably the simplest tool to do so - it's very easy to verify and (on a High-School level) it's indisputable.
2) Math teaches to follow procedure - again - it's a very effective tool for that
3) Math trains you in critical thinking - teaches you to look for proofs in a controlled environment where proofs exist.
None of these arguments is properly examined in the article as the author fails to proceed (1) through critical examination (3) in a rigorous way (2).
It's easy to dismiss today's pop-music as simplistic and look up to Wagners and Mozarts of the past. However, 200 years ago, most of the western worlds population never heard an opera and the music they were playing/singing and listening to was just as simplistic. A typical tune, like Pastime with Good Company was nowhere near the complexity of the Ride of the Valkyries
On the other hand, there is still a lot of serious music being made now-days that is being listened to by a minority, just like before.
Nor will Salman Khan's idea that he is going to build Charter schools where students watch and hour of his videos a day to learn all the math they need to know and spend the rest of the day playing guitar or making paintings.
You completely missed the point of Khan Academy. The point is not to reduce education to watching an hour of videos and it's not to remove teachers from educational process. To the contrary - it's to use the teachers more effectively.
Here are the important points:
1)Teacher's time
At the moment, teachers spend 50% or more of their classroom time delivering a lecture. This is a complete waste of their talent. Instead, kids can look at the lecture themselves online - they cannot interrupt the teacher to ask a question, but they don't do that during a lesson anyway - with a video they can at least rewind it and listen to it again. Then, they can spend the time in the classes doing creative work, discussions and exercises with the teacher's assistance.
2)Student's speed
At the moment we require that all students go through the material at the same speed. This is terribly inefficient as it results with most students either underachieving and getting bored or moving on through the material without learning what's needed. With Khan's approach you can let students go through the material at their own speed. You can still challenge them to do better but you don't need to abandon the slower students because the class has to move on
3)Tracking
The teacher can track each student's development in a comprehensive way - he'll be able to easier identify who has what kind of problems or strengths and use this information to develop the kids to their best possibilities.
Yes, the education process has been developing a long time but if Khan's approach catches on, it will be a pretty big step forward.
why we quite see the blame shifted onto the lawyers is beyond me.
It's not so hard to understand
A hired hit-man that actually performs the murder is generally seen as more despicable as the person who hired him. And even if you might disagree you surely must see why that hit-man would take so much heat from the public.
either cutthroats or visionaries with a killer instinct.
Yahoo already went trough an asshole cutthroat Bartz and a cutthroat technocrat Thompson and they still did not get very far. Mayer better be a visionary I guess.
Seems more like a slightly interesting continuation of a process that started with the invention of agriculture (destroying hunter-gather jobs).
You failed to notice an important difference. In all previous cases unskilled labor was not diminished very much. People moved from the fields to assembly lines, from assembly lines to retail - all without needing much skill. What venues for unskilled labor are there now? If your work does not require any creativity or social skills, you can be replaced by a machine. So what to do with all the low-skilled labor force? What if low skill work as a concept has become obsolete?
The correct course would have been for people to reduce debt and start saving to prepare for the worse.
The problem is that the 'saving' part has become very convoluted these days. It used to be so easy - a kingdom would maintain a system of granaries for the rainy day, but that is not what you can do now.
Say you 'save' 10% of your income - just stuff it in your pillow. What happens? Will it mean that somewhere a stockpile of canned beans will grow bigger by that amount? Or will it mean that somebody will just have less work to do, less service to provide and thus will produce less? I would say the latter is the more likely outcome. So if 'saving' in the form of keeping your money happens en masse in an economy, it will lead to reduced productivity, to a recession.
Now you could say that you wouldn't be so stupid as to stuff your money into your pillow, that you would *invest* it. You could find a good venue for your capital that would appreciate the money and keep the productivity up at the same time. The problem there is that if a lot of people start to invest, the 'good' venues for capital will be depleted really quickly and the capital will be invested in an inefficient way and into bad businesses and concepts. This is when you get a bubble like the one in the housing market recently.
So the answer is not to simply 'spend more' or 'save more' or 'invest more'. The solution is to find a fine line between those three. That is very hard to do.
The problem is - how do you do it? How do you change the copyright/IP rights?
The problem is clearly political - the media magnates that reap the benefits of the current regulation have enough power to bury any politician that might try to cut their profits. Who is going to pick a fight with them?
True, however 'incorrect or missing patient results' in a record can be as deadly as a high dose of radiation. I'm sure you can imagine a catastrophic scenario yourself.
Don't get too hung up on the whole 'financial' stuff. Just like in any industry today, the IT jobs in Financial industry are really diverse - GUI expert, Customer Web Portal developer, data mining, real-time statistical analysis, system administration, IT security expertise, even low level parallel programming (to squeeze every drop of processor juice out of those High Frequency Trading machines).
So just concentrate on your strengths and look for the kind of job that best fits your experience. Knowing something about the financial world is good, but being new to it is not a showstopper - the Financial sector still needs more IT guys and they have to come from somewhere.
You probably should know enough to understand what the company you are applying to is doing (e.g. knowing what a hedge fund is) in general and you should be prepared to answer questions like 'How do you handle your finances?' in a respectable manner.
It's on page 22. It's not spelled out but it seems to be close to that number on the chart. Not sure how they got to the 24% though - in the text they cite 13 removal and recall actions. The closest number of total software attributable recalls would then be 3 - which is 23.07% of 13.
On a side note - is it really that alarming that 3 out of a total of 13 recalled system were due to software error? If anything, it is a surprisingly low number.
You misunderstand the fallacy. Of course you can be easily identifiable as a Scotsman. The point of it is though that there is no clear definition for a 'True Scotsman'
From Wikipedia entry on the matter:
Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the "Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again." Hamish is shocked and declares that "No Scotsman would do such a thing." The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again and this time finds an article about an Aberdeen man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says, "No true Scotsman would do such a thing."
My experience is completely different.
I work for an industrial MegaCorp and the process is very simple. True, the bottom line is profit and growth but it is by no means quarterly - at least not for the development because it takes a lot more time than 4 months to implement a new iteration of industrial equipment and bring it into the field.
The process starts with defining new requirements - of course ones that will either increase sales or decrease costs. Then development budgets and timelines are established and after that the development tech people come - engineers, coders, testers... In our company these people are indispensable. If a couple of them leave during a project, your timeline is blown. You're never going to hire replacements in time. And if the milestones are not reached, management gets some really hard time from somebody up the stream.
While Google might have scores of talented people lining up to work for them, your local (and global) assembly line (medical device, power plants etc.) manufacturer does not. Well, there are plenty of people who can do web pages, but try finding somebody experienced in embedded software and robotics or in parallel programming and high-availability platforms or a GUI expert for government regulated medical environment.
You can consider yourself very lucky if you find somebody like that. Generally the only way is to hire a graduate (which is hard enough since they don't tend to look for assembly line development jobs) and school him over a couple of years and if he leaves, you are fucked.
So if you are treated like dirt, you are either working for the wrong company, or you've chosen a branch of IT where you are easily replaceable. At the same time there are industries killing themselves to find professionals who are just not there because the field is not hip enough.
And on a side note - to find a capable manager for these fields is even much much harder
None of the Ponzi scheme-makers have ever "known" whether it catches or not.
The Ponzi scheme-makers don't put money into the scheme (other than initial promotion), just collect the revenues.
The Ponzi scheme "shares" are only valuable if people are buying them - identical to Bitcoin.
No, Bitcoins are valuable if people are using it as a currency. If you find nobody that would buy your bitcoin (as in - pay you for it in USD) but you can still use it to buy goods and services online, it will still have value - and consequently - there will be people willing to pay USD for it. This is how any fiat currency works. It is not how a Ponzi scheme works.
Ponzi scheme works on the basis of fraud - what you are getting is not what you think. You think you are getting an investment vehicle that gets valuated by a reputable financial institution. Instead you are getting an ever diminishing share of what other people are putting into the scheme.
With Bitcoin, there is no such fraud involved. You know what you are getting - a currency that is only worth something as long as people keep using it. If there is a general feeling that people might stop accepting it, its price will fall. This is no different from how other currencies work. The only difference is that there is no central issuing authority and no law to require it being accepted by anyone. Yes, that might be a big difference but it's one that you are aware of when you adopt it. Therefore it is not a Ponzi scheme.
No you don't.
Bitcoin is meant to be means of exchange. It is only valuable if people are using it for exchange. Early adopters could not have known whether bitcoin would catch on and find a large base of adopters. They were taking all the risk. Now that bit-coin has a larger base, each additional adopter experiences a smaller risk of bit-coin going bust. That's why its value grows.
Ponzi scheme works the other way around. Each additional adopter has a greater chance that he's going to end up being the sucker - without even realizing it.
why smart people are often more likely to make cognitive errors than stupid people.
The article is not talking about any cognitive errors. It is talking about problems that are specifically designed to induce these kind of errors. If the tests comprised of questions like "the bat and the ball cost together $1.13. The bat costs $87. How much does the ball cost?" you would find that those 'stupid' people would make more mistakes.
Furthermore the research itself seems dishonest. They state that knowing about these biases does not help a person to avoid them. So did they make a test where they warned the participants that the questions were specifically designed to provoke wrong answers? If they did, they forgot to mention the results.
is the hype in medical and industrial devices. it involves datamining techniques to discover and report a possible future fault in a device. the end effect is tha for example a CT scanner has 99% uptime and a much lower chance of something going wrong during a patient scan. This stuff is being implemented for assembly lines offshore wind farms, AC units, airplanes, pretty much anything...
Unlike others here I don't think you should fire your sales staff and let the tech people handle all the talking. It's not realistic and it's not efficient.
Instead, let the sales people know their limits and when they reach them while talking to the customer, let them propose to organize a meeting between the potential customer and a developer. Have them say "Look, I'm not a coder myself so there's only so much I can tell you about the details of our product but if you are really interested, you could talk to one of our developers."
I love to hear that as a customer - I can tell when a salesperson is out of his/her depth and it's great to see they realize it and are open about it.
Have your developers do consulting duties where they do these kind of talks - you'll have to coach them a bit about what to avoid when talking to a customer - but unlike teaching your salespeople how to code, this is doable.
You can also push the limits of what the salespeople understand up to a point - you'll have to discover what that point is for yourself - after that it's a waste of time and money. You can probably make them do some simple hands-on on coding just so they see what the difference is between code and a binary and how you get one from the other and such things.
Math is not science. At least not in commonly accepted Popper's model and not according to definitions that resulted from the discussions in the Scopes Trial.
In math it makes sense to say 'prove that this statement is true in all possible cases'. In science this is meaningless because it does not build upon a complete set of axioms.
A teacher should always be prepared to explain kids what kind of experiments were made so far to try to disprove a theory and why they failed.