To be fair, sometimes it is about... well, scare mongering, whether it's racially motivated or not.
Friends who work in computer security* have been mentioning concerns related to compromised hardware for some time. At least in some industries it is standard protocol to assume that any machine that has gone with you to China - certainly any machine that has not been on your person the entire time - is compromised. I don't have information to evaluate the likelihood of these claims myself, but they are from people who I would trust to know the risks fairly well.
That all being said, there is an awful lot of FUD about China out there as well. Whether it be from my neighbors who are afraid that the Chinese are going to take all the manufacturing jobs away (I've spent a lot of time trying to explain Chinese demographics to a few such neighbors) or folks who are worried because they're communists.** Or just because OMG, soon their economy is going to be bigger than ours and the world is going to end if we aren't the richest people everywhere!
* For the record, I have worked in computer security, but not for some time and my current level of knowledge isn't much more than parlour discussion. ** Give me a practical Chinese technocrat who joined the CCP for monetary advantage over a free market idealogue any day.
"From that day forward, people would remember Linus Pauling for one thing: vitamin C. "
So, maybe it's just that I've done a lot of biochemistry, but seriously? I'd heard of the vitamin C bit, but it's so far from the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Pauling that it's almost not on the same list. In fact, putting it in the same category as Newton's occult ramblings is a pretty good analogy for me. I mean, how many scientists kind of go off the deep end at some point(s) in their life? Especially after they get tenure - or more, after they go emeritus?
(Actually, probably the first thing that comes to mind for me is some of his predictions about alpha sheet formation - but that has to do with the a particular lab I worked in, and I wouldn't expect it to be anything like general knowledge.)
The whole idea of a species barrier is not actually that well defined in biology. It gets tossed around a lot, but there is not a hard and fast set of agreed upond definitions of what it means. If you have critters that can breed and produce viable offspring, but under normal circumstances will not because of timing or other issues, are they separate species? Or, for another instance, there are these lizards where successive groups of them occupy a more or less crescent shaped space. Each group can breed with the ones nearest it, but the ones at each end of the crescent can't breed with eachother.
Even if it's ill defined, it's a hard concept to entirely escape from, because breeding pools, and diversity both within and between different breeding pools are pretty hard to get away from. But in the community I don't see people getting particularly excited about the term species nearly as much as I see us getting excited about what is actually going on on the ground.
So, I guess I am a biologist, for what that's worth, though I usually hang out in the neuroethology / biomech side of things. However, back from the days when I thought I was going to be a statistical geneticist* I seem to recall that hymenoptera are haploid/diploid, which is to say that males only have a single set of chromosomes, whereas females have two.
Which leaves me a little confused to what exactly they did, as haploid offspring usually only have a single parent... (And something is totally messed up with my Science subscription, and I just spent half an hour futzing with it, even though I can just log in with my institutional subscription.) Ah, yes. Okay, they crossed the species, producing diploid females, and then the males in question were the F2 haploids. I feel better now. I mean, it kind of had to be that, but...
As a general note, the genetics of sex determination varies a lot. We tend to talk about sex determination in humans because, well, we're humans. But you *really* don't want to generalize. (And, of course, as you get to invertebrates things get particularly crazy. I work with hermaphroditic slugs, for instance...)
* I would still love to be a statistical geneticist, I'm just somewhat easily lead if people wave cool research in front of my face. Ooh! Protein folding and native state mechanics! Ooh! Biomechanics and motor control!
Er, no. In the situation you mention, by removing the books he would have been depriving other people of being able to use them, and (perhaps) harming the books themselves. Not particularly analogous at all. (And this is important, as being able to differentiate between physical and intellectual property is pretty central to having a meaningful discussion of intellectual property.)
He did violate access rules. He *might* have been intending to make the material publicly available - this is broadly asserted, but also disputed.
He also did kill himself.
The response to his actions is what is being questioned, and it even this response mostly is getting attention because of his suicide, the response was pretty crazy and it deserves attention.
This varies an awful lot by field. In my research career so far I've been supported mostly by NIH and some NSF grants, with computer time and hardware supplied at time by the DOE and Microsoft.* The more pure research grants are more competitive... but the coporate stuff is a lot skeevier, especially wrt ownership of intellectual property.
* Kind of a funny situation. I had just left MS, was and thrilled to kick that windows dust off my boots... and then they were funding my research right out of the gate. Which just meant it was a couple more years before I kicked that windows dust off my boots. Despite this, I had a lot of fun.
I decided to go for the PhD myself, but that was in large part because I didn't want to only do programming. (Having a background in programming, finding positions was not difficult, however.)
There are also a number of variants, including getting a staff position and then taking a couple of classes on the side (many universities offer a certain number of credits as a perq of employment.
How exactly do you mean direct access to academia?
You won't be able to bypass the traditional academic route, but from some of these positions you will be able to publish, and you might be involved in the interesting parts of planning. At the very least, this all will be very helpful if you do at some point want to enter a graduate program. (Or, conversely, it might be very helpful in giving you enough familiarity with the territory that you know you really don't want to enter a graduate program, ever.)
One size doesn't fit all. That's why I cheerfully began annual mammograms when I was 33 - because I am in a high risk group, and for me there is a clear benefit.
And for others, there isn't, and generally speaking what has been considered to be a clear benefit from these tests is being reconsidered as the cost of having the test run becomes better known. Breast cancer is, in fact, one of the more involved and contentious ones (as well as the one that impacts me the most directly.) The cost benefit analysis (and again, I'm talking health costs, not financial costs) aren't trivial, but they're also not that difficult. And it only gets more involved from there, because current evidence suggests pretty strongly that a lot of breast cancers, particularly those found in routine screenings, most likely including my mother's, are neither quick growing or dire, and all the early interventions are not decreasing the incidence of later stage cancers. If getting them early means they never turn into later stage cancers, one would not expect that.
When I was in my early teens, I took care of my mother while she went through a fairly mild course of chemo, and her hair fell out and she lost damn near a quarter of her body weight, and entered menopause early from the experience. It's easy to talk about being safe is always the best course... but this isn't just about being safe. Radiation treatment carries a substantial risk of causing cancers downstream, and no, not just cancers that would have happened anyway. This is much more true of the kind of doses used when treating a late stage aggressive cancer - so if you're otherwise looking at weeks or months to live, it probably seems like a decent trade. But you damn well don't want to undertake this kind of treatment by mistake.
That's not the precise argument, at least in a medical context. If the tests themselves and the responses to false positive have no significant medical downside, that's one thing.
But, let's say we starting giving all women yearly mammograms at age 16. Now, while this might reveal a very tiny number of additional breast abnormalities (many of which won't be cancerous) it's going to expose a lot of women to increased amounts of radiation, and while that amount of radiation is slight, that is likely to lead to a measurable increase in rates of cancer. If you're causing more cancer than you're catching, it's a stupid test, right?*
In addition, the response to false positives needs to be taken into question. Further procedures have their own medical costs. If you have a high rate of false positives leading to painful and hazardous procedures, that cost, too, has to be weighed against the value of catching those cancers early.... and I will stop here as the breast cancer analogy in particular is one I can babble on about for a very long time. (My mother is a breast cancer survivor, and was diagnosed fairly young, which puts me in a high risk category.)
* One could make the argument that this is a very tight analogy, as if surveillance is increasing hostility towards the government by US citizens, and towards the country overall abroad, we could be creating a worse situation than we're addressing. I think this is a pretty strong argument applied to some of our foreign wars.
And I do highly agree with you. Money may not buy happiness - but it can buy a lot more room for happiness. And so many undergrads choose their degrees for really stupid reasons because they just don't have a clue. (I think a lot of people would do well to spend a few years working before going to the university.)
Also: "you're going to get Bs and Cs in some of these classes. In the long run nobody cares." is just generally a good life lesson. One of the problems of being bright is that you don't learn how to apply yourself and make something work even if it's not coming easily to you. I'm not saying that the end result of this is being lazy - it's that you end up not having faith in your own ability to just kep going and get through on sweat, blood and tears. (Also, it's easy to come through it lacking a sense of proportion. It took me a long time to learn not to halfway kill myself on a project when I was in software. I mean, I did good work, but it was pretty stupid and unsustainable in the long run.)
This was me, except I didn't go to highschool (or I did, but only for a year, and only after getting in a fight with the administration of my program my first year at the university).
It wasn't even a problem with concepts, it was just that there was too much homework* and I had no clue whatesoever how to deal with it. (And a lot of it was kind of stupid, so I was pretty cranky. I don't mind working hard if something is actually hard, but working hard to prove a point seemed ridiculous.)
* Dude, I was thirteen and suddenly taking a 20 credit load, and I'd never learned study skills.
It's more complicated than that, and some of it comes back to funding.
Large format classes - y'know, the big lecture classes, are relatively inexpensive for the university, but it's really hard to do them well and a lot of how to do this best is still under active research. (And when we know how, it's can be pretty difficult to implement, especially if you're, say, junior faculty and already overwhelmed. And teaching isn't what will get you tenure. I am not saying I agree with a lot of the institutional structures that make this so) If you have a fairly well defined amount of material that you want covered*, you can adjust how you're going to grade different amounts of succeeding to learn that, but to some extent, people are learning the material, or they aren't, and often if you don't learn the lower level material you're pretty much screwed for the upper.
You have a lot more flexibility with small format classes... but they're expensive. And if you have a lot of students in your department (say, you're a biology department flooded by premeds) you might still not have the money to bring in enough faculty to get the class sizes down.
* This is often an open question. I mean, yes, for many math based subjects, there is often a lot of concepts builts on prior concepts. But for something like physiology... you can teach a very memorization heavy physiology, of you can teach a very critical thinking heavy physiology, where you might cover less material overall, but you have a far better understanding of that material, and how to go about understanding further material.
I can only agree. That and the whole weed-out method generally. (And I teach a lot of pre-meds, who can at times be frustrating enough to make a weed out class seem appealing. Except that what I find frustrating is pursuing grades instead of knowledge, and I don't think weed out classes remedy that.)
I don't think the value of a degree is necessarily in that you can make money with it,* but I rather like the rigor of some of the science courses. That is to say when it's rigor, rather than cruelty. (Well, and I've helped teach a class that was just chaotic - I enjoyed it a great deal, but I felt bad for what a wild ride. It's one thing if the subject matter is unpredictable - it's another if you never get your homework back, and the math that is required for the work is more than what is a prerequisite for the course. I handled the programming portions, and those were rather steadier.)
* Much of my undergrad work was in Chinese Language and Literature - no grade inflation or easy As there, let me assure you. But there is a reason I spent the next several years as a software engineer.
I think there is something of a grades / work problem for many students. And I suspect that if bright students were more accustomed to classes where they could work fairly hard and not make As, undergraduate science classes would be less of a shock. A lot of the kids I see* turning away aren't doing badly - they're just used to doing so much better with so much less effort. Which is more or less what they've been trained to expect, after all.
And people commonly attribute far more to talent than to hard work. So many kids look at the first physics exam where they've gotten a 67 (which is the lowest grade they've ever gotten in their lives, even if it was the third highest grade in the class) and become convinced that they're just not good at this stuff. I mean, their friends who are psych majors are pulling 4.0, and there they are with a 3.2 even though they spend an order of magnitude more time on their homework. Meanwhile, their parents are asking why their grades have fallen so much since highschool. (Okay, while all these are examples from people I know, they're not all the same person.)
I was at Microsoft, we were trying to get him over on to Flight Sim, but that was not where I was;-) (I mostly worked on high capacity internet servers and distributed systems.)
Grab a friend who knows you well (and who doesn't run you down just for grins.) Have some food, and a couple of beers (or split a bottle of wine) and meanwhile brainstorm and jot down all the possibly applicable experience you can think of. Also, and maybe more important, talk about the things that you are really good at - not just skillswise, but what kind of person you are and what you excell at. And then think of stories that really illustrate each of those.
Have fun. Be silly. No one should try to do this stage of resume writing alone, generally speaking we're all far too trained to discount our skills and put ourself down. Aim for ten pages or so of semi-coherent scrawl. Don't try to edit, editing is easy, and it's for later. Getting enough material down in the first place is what this is about.
And then, a few days later, come back and prune. This isn't time to prune super heavily - what you're looking to create is a superset resume - more than you'd sent out for any one job, but containing most of what you'd send out for anything. Keep in mind that a resume isn't just about skills, it should be about what kind of person you are and what you're like to work with. There are a lot of formats out there, but don't be enslaved to them - while it should be tight and professional, a resume isn't a form application but a creative document that should present you in the best light. (It should go without say that lying is incredibly stupid.) I do strongly recommend looking at it in terms of narrative - whatever you want people to know about you, include a (briefly worded) story that demonstrates it.
Not only does this make resumes more informative, it makes them a heck of a lot less boring. (When I was doing hiring, reading resumes was often tortuous, because they didn't tell me most of the things that were most important, beyond some basic skills lists that weren't that reliable.) Make a resume that represents you well - because you want the manager you absolutely would hate to work for to look at it and say "I don't want this guy" just as much as you want the right folks to recognize you. Truth in advertising is a good thing.
I concur with what a lot of people are saying. I'd look at Boeing if I were you (a friend designs flight simulators for their military aircraft - I suspect you'd do well in that kind of environment). (For that matter, my former father in law - also a Boeing engineer*flew planes for the airforce for many years and eventually ended up at Boeing. I almost managed to get him over to Microsoft when I was there, on Flight Simulator.)
I'd also do what you can in the intervening time to brush up on skills that are going to support the direction you want to go in from here. Start reading up on security. Pick up a new language. Buy yourself a bunch of toys off sparkfun. What people are saying about your skills being out of date is possibly a problem... if they are, in fact, out of date. So make sure they aren't. It sounds like you have a lot going for you, especially with a little polishing and fine tuning.
Yes. My recollection is this is the canonical method circumventing Tor - and the US government has always been the actor in the best position to do this.
Running Tor is good. Running Tor exit nodes is even better, but you probably don't want to do that at home, at least at home in the US.
The worst thing, of course, is that it kind of does matter. Depending on which issues are important to you. And often the choices are pretty soul destroying.
When it came to civil liberties issues, the major party presidential candidates did not appear to substantially differ. On other issues (civil rights, social policy, economic policy, hell, foreign policy) they did. I live in Ohio, which is to say that I live in a state that was in play. So giving my vote to a third party candidate* could have pretty bad consequences if I had strong preferences for the policies of one over the other. And yet, that got weighed against being ethically opposed to casting my vote for either main party candidate.
* Finding a third party candidate is another problem, but let's leave that for the moment.
Especially considering the number of students who are in the process of talking themselves out of careers in science because they think they aren't good at math. (Many of them are, but either have friends who have taken more math and belittle them, or lousy math teachers.) Yeesh. I think a lot of the problem is that we still have a culture where it's expected that most people won't ever manage much more than high school algebra... maybe calculus, and likely that by the skin of their teeth.
In my experience, the same is often true of programming - a lot of people decide they just suck at it because it was presented poorly. (I think teaching memory management to people who have never written a line of code in their lives is abusive.) If you can get them past them, and get them writing some simple code to make their lives better... they get traction, they go on learning, and all's good. Yeah, some of them might not turn out to be wonderful programmers, but they won't be clueless or cowed, and they can work independently. (And others do amazing things.)
(Note: I'm a neuobiologist, and I spend a lot of time working with undergrads. My lab does both wet lab work and modelling - and I was a software engineer before I went into research, though I personally like an even split. So I may be personally on the more mathy / computational side of biologist - I was a computational biochemist before I went into neuro - but I also see that there's room for people with a variety of skills.
Yeah, no one should be stats illiterate. And people who are great at writing code but no crap all about biology aren't that useful either. But in the meantime, people do tend to prefer / do better in some area than others. And that's fine.)
Slashdot Mirror
They are losing relevance. But they have a lot of relevance to lose, so expect them to be significantly relevant for a while yet.
(May the Lord Bless and Keep Ballmer - far, far away from us.)
To be fair, sometimes it is about... well, scare mongering, whether it's racially motivated or not.
Friends who work in computer security* have been mentioning concerns related to compromised hardware for some time. At least in some industries it is standard protocol to assume that any machine that has gone with you to China - certainly any machine that has not been on your person the entire time - is compromised. I don't have information to evaluate the likelihood of these claims myself, but they are from people who I would trust to know the risks fairly well.
That all being said, there is an awful lot of FUD about China out there as well. Whether it be from my neighbors who are afraid that the Chinese are going to take all the manufacturing jobs away (I've spent a lot of time trying to explain Chinese demographics to a few such neighbors) or folks who are worried because they're communists.** Or just because OMG, soon their economy is going to be bigger than ours and the world is going to end if we aren't the richest people everywhere!
* For the record, I have worked in computer security, but not for some time and my current level of knowledge isn't much more than parlour discussion.
** Give me a practical Chinese technocrat who joined the CCP for monetary advantage over a free market idealogue any day.
Well, and let's talk about the US record of viruses (as I believe that's better documented than anything else out there)...
"From that day forward, people would remember Linus Pauling for one thing: vitamin C. "
So, maybe it's just that I've done a lot of biochemistry, but seriously? I'd heard of the vitamin C bit, but it's so far from the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Pauling that it's almost not on the same list. In fact, putting it in the same category as Newton's occult ramblings is a pretty good analogy for me. I mean, how many scientists kind of go off the deep end at some point(s) in their life? Especially after they get tenure - or more, after they go emeritus?
(Actually, probably the first thing that comes to mind for me is some of his predictions about alpha sheet formation - but that has to do with the a particular lab I worked in, and I wouldn't expect it to be anything like general knowledge.)
The forms of vitamins in fortified foods have been far more rigorously test than those sold in supplements which are less regulated. FWIW.
The whole idea of a species barrier is not actually that well defined in biology. It gets tossed around a lot, but there is not a hard and fast set of agreed upond definitions of what it means. If you have critters that can breed and produce viable offspring, but under normal circumstances will not because of timing or other issues, are they separate species? Or, for another instance, there are these lizards where successive groups of them occupy a more or less crescent shaped space. Each group can breed with the ones nearest it, but the ones at each end of the crescent can't breed with eachother.
Even if it's ill defined, it's a hard concept to entirely escape from, because breeding pools, and diversity both within and between different breeding pools are pretty hard to get away from. But in the community I don't see people getting particularly excited about the term species nearly as much as I see us getting excited about what is actually going on on the ground.
So, I guess I am a biologist, for what that's worth, though I usually hang out in the neuroethology / biomech side of things. However, back from the days when I thought I was going to be a statistical geneticist* I seem to recall that hymenoptera are haploid/diploid, which is to say that males only have a single set of chromosomes, whereas females have two.
Which leaves me a little confused to what exactly they did, as haploid offspring usually only have a single parent... (And something is totally messed up with my Science subscription, and I just spent half an hour futzing with it, even though I can just log in with my institutional subscription.) Ah, yes. Okay, they crossed the species, producing diploid females, and then the males in question were the F2 haploids. I feel better now. I mean, it kind of had to be that, but...
As a general note, the genetics of sex determination varies a lot. We tend to talk about sex determination in humans because, well, we're humans. But you *really* don't want to generalize. (And, of course, as you get to invertebrates things get particularly crazy. I work with hermaphroditic slugs, for instance...)
* I would still love to be a statistical geneticist, I'm just somewhat easily lead if people wave cool research in front of my face. Ooh! Protein folding and native state mechanics! Ooh! Biomechanics and motor control!
Er, no. In the situation you mention, by removing the books he would have been depriving other people of being able to use them, and (perhaps) harming the books themselves. Not particularly analogous at all. (And this is important, as being able to differentiate between physical and intellectual property is pretty central to having a meaningful discussion of intellectual property.)
He did violate access rules. He *might* have been intending to make the material publicly available - this is broadly asserted, but also disputed.
He also did kill himself.
The response to his actions is what is being questioned, and it even this response mostly is getting attention because of his suicide, the response was pretty crazy and it deserves attention.
This varies an awful lot by field. In my research career so far I've been supported mostly by NIH and some NSF grants, with computer time and hardware supplied at time by the DOE and Microsoft.* The more pure research grants are more competitive... but the coporate stuff is a lot skeevier, especially wrt ownership of intellectual property.
* Kind of a funny situation. I had just left MS, was and thrilled to kick that windows dust off my boots... and then they were funding my research right out of the gate. Which just meant it was a couple more years before I kicked that windows dust off my boots. Despite this, I had a lot of fun.
I decided to go for the PhD myself, but that was in large part because I didn't want to only do programming. (Having a background in programming, finding positions was not difficult, however.)
There are also a number of variants, including getting a staff position and then taking a couple of classes on the side (many universities offer a certain number of credits as a perq of employment.
Whereas I am old and mostly full of vi.
How exactly do you mean direct access to academia?
You won't be able to bypass the traditional academic route, but from some of these positions you will be able to publish, and you might be involved in the interesting parts of planning. At the very least, this all will be very helpful if you do at some point want to enter a graduate program. (Or, conversely, it might be very helpful in giving you enough familiarity with the territory that you know you really don't want to enter a graduate program, ever.)
One size doesn't fit all. That's why I cheerfully began annual mammograms when I was 33 - because I am in a high risk group, and for me there is a clear benefit.
And for others, there isn't, and generally speaking what has been considered to be a clear benefit from these tests is being reconsidered as the cost of having the test run becomes better known. Breast cancer is, in fact, one of the more involved and contentious ones (as well as the one that impacts me the most directly.) The cost benefit analysis (and again, I'm talking health costs, not financial costs) aren't trivial, but they're also not that difficult. And it only gets more involved from there, because current evidence suggests pretty strongly that a lot of breast cancers, particularly those found in routine screenings, most likely including my mother's, are neither quick growing or dire, and all the early interventions are not decreasing the incidence of later stage cancers. If getting them early means they never turn into later stage cancers, one would not expect that.
When I was in my early teens, I took care of my mother while she went through a fairly mild course of chemo, and her hair fell out and she lost damn near a quarter of her body weight, and entered menopause early from the experience. It's easy to talk about being safe is always the best course... but this isn't just about being safe. Radiation treatment carries a substantial risk of causing cancers downstream, and no, not just cancers that would have happened anyway. This is much more true of the kind of doses used when treating a late stage aggressive cancer - so if you're otherwise looking at weeks or months to live, it probably seems like a decent trade. But you damn well don't want to undertake this kind of treatment by mistake.
That's not the precise argument, at least in a medical context. If the tests themselves and the responses to false positive have no significant medical downside, that's one thing.
But, let's say we starting giving all women yearly mammograms at age 16. Now, while this might reveal a very tiny number of additional breast abnormalities (many of which won't be cancerous) it's going to expose a lot of women to increased amounts of radiation, and while that amount of radiation is slight, that is likely to lead to a measurable increase in rates of cancer. If you're causing more cancer than you're catching, it's a stupid test, right?*
In addition, the response to false positives needs to be taken into question. Further procedures have their own medical costs. If you have a high rate of false positives leading to painful and hazardous procedures, that cost, too, has to be weighed against the value of catching those cancers early. ... and I will stop here as the breast cancer analogy in particular is one I can babble on about for a very long time. (My mother is a breast cancer survivor, and was diagnosed fairly young, which puts me in a high risk category.)
* One could make the argument that this is a very tight analogy, as if surveillance is increasing hostility towards the government by US citizens, and towards the country overall abroad, we could be creating a worse situation than we're addressing. I think this is a pretty strong argument applied to some of our foreign wars.
And I do highly agree with you. Money may not buy happiness - but it can buy a lot more room for happiness. And so many undergrads choose their degrees for really stupid reasons because they just don't have a clue. (I think a lot of people would do well to spend a few years working before going to the university.)
Also: "you're going to get Bs and Cs in some of these classes. In the long run nobody cares." is just generally a good life lesson. One of the problems of being bright is that you don't learn how to apply yourself and make something work even if it's not coming easily to you. I'm not saying that the end result of this is being lazy - it's that you end up not having faith in your own ability to just kep going and get through on sweat, blood and tears. (Also, it's easy to come through it lacking a sense of proportion. It took me a long time to learn not to halfway kill myself on a project when I was in software. I mean, I did good work, but it was pretty stupid and unsustainable in the long run.)
This was me, except I didn't go to highschool (or I did, but only for a year, and only after getting in a fight with the administration of my program my first year at the university).
It wasn't even a problem with concepts, it was just that there was too much homework* and I had no clue whatesoever how to deal with it. (And a lot of it was kind of stupid, so I was pretty cranky. I don't mind working hard if something is actually hard, but working hard to prove a point seemed ridiculous.)
* Dude, I was thirteen and suddenly taking a 20 credit load, and I'd never learned study skills.
It's more complicated than that, and some of it comes back to funding.
Large format classes - y'know, the big lecture classes, are relatively inexpensive for the university, but it's really hard to do them well and a lot of how to do this best is still under active research. (And when we know how, it's can be pretty difficult to implement, especially if you're, say, junior faculty and already overwhelmed. And teaching isn't what will get you tenure. I am not saying I agree with a lot of the institutional structures that make this so) If you have a fairly well defined amount of material that you want covered*, you can adjust how you're going to grade different amounts of succeeding to learn that, but to some extent, people are learning the material, or they aren't, and often if you don't learn the lower level material you're pretty much screwed for the upper.
You have a lot more flexibility with small format classes... but they're expensive. And if you have a lot of students in your department (say, you're a biology department flooded by premeds) you might still not have the money to bring in enough faculty to get the class sizes down.
* This is often an open question. I mean, yes, for many math based subjects, there is often a lot of concepts builts on prior concepts. But for something like physiology... you can teach a very memorization heavy physiology, of you can teach a very critical thinking heavy physiology, where you might cover less material overall, but you have a far better understanding of that material, and how to go about understanding further material.
I can only agree. That and the whole weed-out method generally. (And I teach a lot of pre-meds, who can at times be frustrating enough to make a weed out class seem appealing. Except that what I find frustrating is pursuing grades instead of knowledge, and I don't think weed out classes remedy that.)
I don't think the value of a degree is necessarily in that you can make money with it,* but I rather like the rigor of some of the science courses. That is to say when it's rigor, rather than cruelty. (Well, and I've helped teach a class that was just chaotic - I enjoyed it a great deal, but I felt bad for what a wild ride. It's one thing if the subject matter is unpredictable - it's another if you never get your homework back, and the math that is required for the work is more than what is a prerequisite for the course. I handled the programming portions, and those were rather steadier.)
* Much of my undergrad work was in Chinese Language and Literature - no grade inflation or easy As there, let me assure you. But there is a reason I spent the next several years as a software engineer.
I think there is something of a grades / work problem for many students. And I suspect that if bright students were more accustomed to classes where they could work fairly hard and not make As, undergraduate science classes would be less of a shock. A lot of the kids I see* turning away aren't doing badly - they're just used to doing so much better with so much less effort. Which is more or less what they've been trained to expect, after all.
And people commonly attribute far more to talent than to hard work. So many kids look at the first physics exam where they've gotten a 67 (which is the lowest grade they've ever gotten in their lives, even if it was the third highest grade in the class) and become convinced that they're just not good at this stuff. I mean, their friends who are psych majors are pulling 4.0, and there they are with a 3.2 even though they spend an order of magnitude more time on their homework. Meanwhile, their parents are asking why their grades have fallen so much since highschool. (Okay, while all these are examples from people I know, they're not all the same person.)
* I teach biology and neuroscience.
Ah, grammar fail on my part!
I was at Microsoft, we were trying to get him over on to Flight Sim, but that was not where I was ;-) (I mostly worked on high capacity internet servers and distributed systems.)
Grab a friend who knows you well (and who doesn't run you down just for grins.) Have some food, and a couple of beers (or split a bottle of wine) and meanwhile brainstorm and jot down all the possibly applicable experience you can think of. Also, and maybe more important, talk about the things that you are really good at - not just skillswise, but what kind of person you are and what you excell at. And then think of stories that really illustrate each of those.
Have fun. Be silly. No one should try to do this stage of resume writing alone, generally speaking we're all far too trained to discount our skills and put ourself down. Aim for ten pages or so of semi-coherent scrawl. Don't try to edit, editing is easy, and it's for later. Getting enough material down in the first place is what this is about.
And then, a few days later, come back and prune. This isn't time to prune super heavily - what you're looking to create is a superset resume - more than you'd sent out for any one job, but containing most of what you'd send out for anything. Keep in mind that a resume isn't just about skills, it should be about what kind of person you are and what you're like to work with. There are a lot of formats out there, but don't be enslaved to them - while it should be tight and professional, a resume isn't a form application but a creative document that should present you in the best light. (It should go without say that lying is incredibly stupid.) I do strongly recommend looking at it in terms of narrative - whatever you want people to know about you, include a (briefly worded) story that demonstrates it.
Not only does this make resumes more informative, it makes them a heck of a lot less boring. (When I was doing hiring, reading resumes was often tortuous, because they didn't tell me most of the things that were most important, beyond some basic skills lists that weren't that reliable.) Make a resume that represents you well - because you want the manager you absolutely would hate to work for to look at it and say "I don't want this guy" just as much as you want the right folks to recognize you. Truth in advertising is a good thing.
I concur with what a lot of people are saying. I'd look at Boeing if I were you (a friend designs flight simulators for their military aircraft - I suspect you'd do well in that kind of environment). (For that matter, my former father in law - also a Boeing engineer*flew planes for the airforce for many years and eventually ended up at Boeing. I almost managed to get him over to Microsoft when I was there, on Flight Simulator.)
I'd also do what you can in the intervening time to brush up on skills that are going to support the direction you want to go in from here. Start reading up on security. Pick up a new language. Buy yourself a bunch of toys off sparkfun. What people are saying about your skills being out of date is possibly a problem... if they are, in fact, out of date. So make sure they aren't. It sounds like you have a lot going for you, especially with a little polishing and fine tuning.
* Hey, I grew up in Seattle, what can I say?
Yes. My recollection is this is the canonical method circumventing Tor - and the US government has always been the actor in the best position to do this.
Running Tor is good. Running Tor exit nodes is even better, but you probably don't want to do that at home, at least at home in the US.
The worst thing, of course, is that it kind of does matter. Depending on which issues are important to you. And often the choices are pretty soul destroying.
When it came to civil liberties issues, the major party presidential candidates did not appear to substantially differ. On other issues (civil rights, social policy, economic policy, hell, foreign policy) they did. I live in Ohio, which is to say that I live in a state that was in play. So giving my vote to a third party candidate* could have pretty bad consequences if I had strong preferences for the policies of one over the other. And yet, that got weighed against being ethically opposed to casting my vote for either main party candidate.
* Finding a third party candidate is another problem, but let's leave that for the moment.
Especially considering the number of students who are in the process of talking themselves out of careers in science because they think they aren't good at math. (Many of them are, but either have friends who have taken more math and belittle them, or lousy math teachers.) Yeesh. I think a lot of the problem is that we still have a culture where it's expected that most people won't ever manage much more than high school algebra... maybe calculus, and likely that by the skin of their teeth.
In my experience, the same is often true of programming - a lot of people decide they just suck at it because it was presented poorly. (I think teaching memory management to people who have never written a line of code in their lives is abusive.) If you can get them past them, and get them writing some simple code to make their lives better... they get traction, they go on learning, and all's good. Yeah, some of them might not turn out to be wonderful programmers, but they won't be clueless or cowed, and they can work independently. (And others do amazing things.)
(Note: I'm a neuobiologist, and I spend a lot of time working with undergrads. My lab does both wet lab work and modelling - and I was a software engineer before I went into research, though I personally like an even split. So I may be personally on the more mathy / computational side of biologist - I was a computational biochemist before I went into neuro - but I also see that there's room for people with a variety of skills.
Yeah, no one should be stats illiterate. And people who are great at writing code but no crap all about biology aren't that useful either. But in the meantime, people do tend to prefer / do better in some area than others. And that's fine.)