I have no idea what your education background is like but if you really think asking here is a good idea, I don't know what to say.
My background is that I have a PhD. Are you saying that if you read the comments in this discussion and take it all with a grain of salt, then that won't be helpful information if you are looking to get a PhD?
You certainly should not be dreaming of searchable dataases, trawling university web sites or posting to ask slashdot. That you are doing this does not bode well for your ability to complete a Ph.D.
It bodes perfectly well. Undertaking PhD studies is about learning how to do research, it's not about already knowing how to do everything the right way and then just doing that for three years. If you look at the responses that are coming in this thread, asking Slashdot was the best possible thing he could do and it'll have helped every other person looking to get into a PhD program who comes here from Google in future as well.
In your latest post, I believe you are saying that it is not rational for other passengers to watch Akhmed just because of his name/race/culture. However, because some people associate danger to him, they may well do so anyway. It doesn't make sense for them to do so, yet we are all human and our emotions do not get in line when reason comes knocking, even if often it would be better that way. If that is indeed what you are saying then I agree.
All I can tell is that you have never stated a true or correct thing in your life
Oh yes, this is certainly what good debate is made of. You even state that you believe that pointing something like that out makes you seem more right. That's not how the world works, but thank you for playing.
My personal characteristics is irrelevant and I can't see a reason for you to ask other than because everything is associated with a stereotype and every stereotype has some negative trait that you could then paint me with. Let us see. I have a PhD in a technical field.
It seems like a text-searchable database could be built fairly quickly and maintained by users, saving countless aspiring grad students thousands of clicks through university websites.
Saving the time of graduate students is a non-priority in academia. On the contrary, standing jokes revolve around how other people can waste the time of graduate students in order to save some of their own time. How aggressive a form of this you will meet depends entirely on the culture in the subfield you will be doing research in and on your particular adviser. There are too many graduate students and people looking to be graduate students in comparison to how many permanent jobs there are in the field for people with a PhD (in most fields). So most graduate student's aren't going to stick around in the field after graduation and so it doesn't make sense for people to engage as readily with graduate student's as they do with graduates - though lots of people still do. At the same time every adviser is always looking for exceptionally talented and motivated students, and if you can make a concise and convincing case that you are both of those things, then that makes your life easier.
You would ideally want to have some idea what kind of a human being a given adviser is, though this can be hard with just email. You are going to be stuck with this person having some sort of power over you for three or more years. They will be writing your recommendations for years to come. You want the variety with a positive outlook and some kind of interest in and ability for creating a good environment for their students. You don't want the variety whose main concern is how to turn his or her students into papers that bear the adviser's name.
There is also a question of how independent you are and want to be. Some advisers will simply tell you to go read papers and do something great, which is exactly what you want if you want to be independent. You might be looking to have a lot more guidance than that, in which case there are other advisers who will want to be very involved - though this usually requires that what you do is very similar to what the adviser does. The social skills of people in academia also vary widely, and you can end up with some very blunt and abrasive people, just as you can end up with the kind of people who would just die if they thought they had offended you in any way.
The problem here is that there are lots of people looking to be graduate students, so most advisers are not going to be very interested in engaging in a discussion with you about whether or not they are abrasive people just looking to exploit their students. One way to get some idea about someone who looks promising is to ask that person's former students what they thought of their experience with him as their adviser. People ask advisers for evaluations of their former students all the time (just one more reason to choose well), it's only fair that their former students get asked to evaluate them as well. Don't expect anyone to bad-mouth their former adviser, but you can probably read between the lines if there is a big problem.
To maintain your motivation during your studies, and to perhaps present a better case to an advisor, it also pays off to think about what you might like to do after you graduate. Have a glimpse at offers for post docs right now to see if that sounds at all interesting to you - it's the next step if you are going to stay in academia. You might also look at jobs in industry that might be suited to what you want to do. It's not too important what you think seems good right now, what is important is the activities you have to engage in to be able to have an idea of what seems good, such as looking at job offers. Then it's something you will have in mind so you don't stand there with your thesis in hand three years from now, and then go "oh wait, now I need a job too. I wish I'd started looking for that two years ago." It may also help you to have a more informed opinion about whether studying for a PhD is really what you want to do.
These form superviser requests are bad enough that I get them too every once in a while, and I'm just a student myself with no access to the supervising that the emails ask for. They also incorrectly refer to me as "professor", and the requests are in fields I know nothing of.
Why can't we use people in prison for low level cheap phone centers?
"That's an awfully nice computer you just described to me. Sure would be a shame if someone came by and crushed it. Are you interested in an extended warranty?"
"Are you talking to me? Are are you talking to me? I will destroy you!!!"
"Oh hello little girl, sure I'll help you. You know, I'm in here for being a friend to a little girl just like you."
"How the hell should I know, I steal 'em, I don't fix 'em"
The number of terrorists in the world is a tiny, tiny proportion of all people, so the risk that Akhmed is bad is likewise tiny
That is true, and in a sane world we shouldn't care. However this is not a sane world.
I don't understand this argument.
Besides, there are two factors that eat into your argument:
The risk is small, but the consequences are severe. This is why nuclear plants have containment domes, and that's why the Shuttle has three independent computers.
Passengers have nothing else to do, so their investment of time into watching for suspicious activity is not a loss.
It is true that the consequences are severe, but the consequences of Alice blowing you up are equally severe and you don't advocate watching her. Because the risk is tiny, yet the risk of Akhmed is tiny as well. Also, many people are productive while traveling, if not in their business then reading a book, watching a movie or having pleasant conversation - perhaps even with Akhmed! The price of your suggestion also includes harming every Akhmed out there with massive negative attention. Besides, from this argument you should want to watch everyone you can see, not just Akhmed, because you can perfectly well do that without losing track of Akhmed.
Also, terrorists are everywhere. You should watch everyone around you all the time - after all, the consequences are severe, so why take the chance. How would you argue against an argument like that, presupposing that you don't support this contention?
Let me rephrase your own scenario:
"You are locked in a very large prison, for life. The warden tells you that he lost a key somewhere. You can walk anywhere within the prison. If you find that key you are free to walk out. Will you look for that key, as opposed to sitting on the bed in your unlocked cell until you die from old age?"
This is an analogy that is based on you already being the target of terrorism, and then given a choice of dying or having a small chance of getting out of it. That is not the situation you are in when you get on a plane. If this is truly your mindset then I can understand that you want to watch Akhmed, and your health and general well-being would benefit greatly from relaxing into a more realistic view of the situation. Also, if we are following this analogy, you should want to watch everyone around you, not just Akhmed.
This is just another illustration of the principle that low odds alone are not a good reason to abandon some attempt.
No one here disputes that.
Profiling can make sense, but if all you have to go on is that the guy is named Akhmed, I hope you will hold your distrust and vigilance until you have a lot more than that to go on.
Nobody advocates preemptive beatings yet (since W left the White House.) But Akhmed will likely notice that many people are looking at him. Sucks to be him, and this isn't what I'd like to have. But too many of his compatriots tried to attack innocents. The best way to stop profiling is to stop breaking the statistical pattern.
I think you are putting the blame for Akhmed's trouble partially on Akhmed himself, but I can't quite tell. Are you?
I haven't read anything of these reports, but I'm going to but in and say that the presence of a reference in a scientific manuscript says nothing on its own about how that reference was used. E.g. if you are going to say that the there has been a large amount of worry about something in the media, then it is entirely appropriate to reference articles in the media that show that worry, and it's entirely appropriate to reference 20 of them just to really make your point. So it depends on how those references were used. In this case they were used poorly - the question is how any other references to non-peer reviewed sources were used.
I understand your argument to be that Akhmed is more likely to be bad than Alice is, so we should watch Akhmed as passengers to make sure he isn't doing anything funny. Correct me if that is wrong.
I say that it doesn't matter if Akhmed is more likely to be bad than Alice is. What matters is just the risk that Akhmed is bad - Alice is irrelevant to whether or not we should treat Akhmed with distrust. The number of terrorists in the world is a tiny, tiny proportion of all people, so the risk that Akhmed is bad is likewise tiny. Even if we say that Akhmed has an elevated chance of being a terrorist because of his race, you can still fly with a new Akhmed every day and likely by the end of your life you'll never have met a terrorist (I didn't do the math - feel free to do it if you doubt my claim), and you are certainly extremely unlikely to ever meet an Akhmed about to kill you in a terrorist act that day. That is why I don't consider it an improvement if we end up treating every Akhmed with distrust that he did nothing to earn.
In your analogy, it's like knowing that there is a one in a million chance that you will find your car keys under the bushes in someone's back yard, and if they aren't there they are forever lost. Are you going to nose around the backyard of some stranger because of that information? It's true that at that point it then makes even less sense to go to someone else's backyard and start looking there, and yet that does nothing to change the fact that your car keys are lost and you aren't going to find them.
Profiling can make sense, but if all you have to go on is that the guy is named Akhmed, I hope you will hold your distrust and vigilance until you have a lot more than that to go on. The only thing you will accomplish otherwise is making Akhmed feel your hostile eyes on him.
When I was in the US, I saw lots of people on the street whose sole occupation seemed to be to beg for money or food. So those people actually do have housing and a sufficient income to support themselves from government aid? In that case they are even more of a nuisance than I had thought.
In short, your contention that the government leaves the poor to starve is laughable.
The word contention implies that I was stating something. In fact I said what my impression was and then asked if that was right. Thus there is no contention.
I agree that it is fortunate that people are less likely to cooperate with hijackers. However I don't count this as a good thing:
Now Ahkmed may be a fine upstanding man but passengers will watch him the whole flight and if he does something out of the ordinary will do something about it for self preservation.
Ahkmed hasn't deserved that kind of hostile attention, and it runs the risk of mistaken vigilantism. If someone is trying to light something on fire or is running around with a gun in an airplane, that's when you know that action is needed no matter if it's Akhmed or Alice doing it.
I can't tell if you are trying to make a joke of your own, but in case you are not, here goes: He is informing you that your post makes it clear that you don't understand what the post you replied to said. Probably someone thought his way of putting it was funny, yet funny mods don't give karma, so they went with informative instead.
Your posts have increasingly attributed opinions to me that I don't hold. Your latest post has finally achieved perfection in being 100% not about what I actually think. Good job.
I like that you are taking action in defense of the ideas that you believe in. I think that starting off with "Let me explain a few things to you, since you seem to have wrong information regarding "copyright" and other fictitious concepts." may predispose him to be unreceptive to whatever comes after it, and also be more unreceptive to other people presenting such ideas. I know that I personally would be a lot more receptive to someone starting off with "I read the story XYZ, and in it I can't help noticing some underlying assumptions about the nature of copyright being made. I hope to challenge some of those assumptions in this email." Even better to first point out something that you like or a point where you are sympathetic to his situation.
If you are watching a video about doing something in HTML and Javascript, then I'd expect that the comments could have quite a few script tags in them that the submitters fully expect to be displayed without malicious intent.
This isn't a simple mistake, it's a sign of pure incompetence since the developer put no forethought into the uses of the tool he was developing and blindly trusted user input from a textarea. User input is dirty, dirty dirty and any developer who does not clean and sanitize it before consuming it is not doing his/her job.
The summary states that the first script tag was escaped as it should be. It was a bug, not a lack of foresight.
Also a company may use that money to automate some of their production. Automation means more capital and less labour, ie. less jobs.
That's true, though investments by the government can have the same effect. E.g. researchers are paid more than bricklayers, I'm guessing, so government spending on research generates fewer jobs than if that money would have gone to build houses.
C# is really more sort of the averaging of Java and C++ than anything else,
C# is just like Java except without some of the problems and with some good things added. E.g. Java generics aren't really worthy of the name, while C# generics are pretty spiffy.
The only situation where I can see that your line of reasoning succeeds is if the banks are simply holding the money and doing nothing with it - i.e. the bank is putting the money it has in a mattress and that's it. Is that what is going on on a large scale?
If you define a mattress as "the least risky investments available" you'll basically have the shape of it.
I don't define mattress like that. I define it as holding the money and doing nothing with it, simply letting it decrease in value from inflation while getting 0% return from it. If the banks invest it in something, just anything, it finds its way somewhere else so that the chain is unbroken - the chain of passing the money on until eventually it most likely creates jobs. What am I missing?
Slashdot Mirror
I have no idea what your education background is like but if you really think asking here is a good idea, I don't know what to say.
My background is that I have a PhD. Are you saying that if you read the comments in this discussion and take it all with a grain of salt, then that won't be helpful information if you are looking to get a PhD?
You certainly should not be dreaming of searchable dataases, trawling university web sites or posting to ask slashdot. That you are doing this does not bode well for your ability to complete a Ph.D.
It bodes perfectly well. Undertaking PhD studies is about learning how to do research, it's not about already knowing how to do everything the right way and then just doing that for three years. If you look at the responses that are coming in this thread, asking Slashdot was the best possible thing he could do and it'll have helped every other person looking to get into a PhD program who comes here from Google in future as well.
In your latest post, I believe you are saying that it is not rational for other passengers to watch Akhmed just because of his name/race/culture. However, because some people associate danger to him, they may well do so anyway. It doesn't make sense for them to do so, yet we are all human and our emotions do not get in line when reason comes knocking, even if often it would be better that way. If that is indeed what you are saying then I agree.
All I can tell is that you have never stated a true or correct thing in your life
Oh yes, this is certainly what good debate is made of. You even state that you believe that pointing something like that out makes you seem more right. That's not how the world works, but thank you for playing.
My personal characteristics is irrelevant and I can't see a reason for you to ask other than because everything is associated with a stereotype and every stereotype has some negative trait that you could then paint me with. Let us see. I have a PhD in a technical field.
It seems like a text-searchable database could be built fairly quickly and maintained by users, saving countless aspiring grad students thousands of clicks through university websites.
Saving the time of graduate students is a non-priority in academia. On the contrary, standing jokes revolve around how other people can waste the time of graduate students in order to save some of their own time. How aggressive a form of this you will meet depends entirely on the culture in the subfield you will be doing research in and on your particular adviser. There are too many graduate students and people looking to be graduate students in comparison to how many permanent jobs there are in the field for people with a PhD (in most fields). So most graduate student's aren't going to stick around in the field after graduation and so it doesn't make sense for people to engage as readily with graduate student's as they do with graduates - though lots of people still do. At the same time every adviser is always looking for exceptionally talented and motivated students, and if you can make a concise and convincing case that you are both of those things, then that makes your life easier.
You would ideally want to have some idea what kind of a human being a given adviser is, though this can be hard with just email. You are going to be stuck with this person having some sort of power over you for three or more years. They will be writing your recommendations for years to come. You want the variety with a positive outlook and some kind of interest in and ability for creating a good environment for their students. You don't want the variety whose main concern is how to turn his or her students into papers that bear the adviser's name.
There is also a question of how independent you are and want to be. Some advisers will simply tell you to go read papers and do something great, which is exactly what you want if you want to be independent. You might be looking to have a lot more guidance than that, in which case there are other advisers who will want to be very involved - though this usually requires that what you do is very similar to what the adviser does. The social skills of people in academia also vary widely, and you can end up with some very blunt and abrasive people, just as you can end up with the kind of people who would just die if they thought they had offended you in any way.
The problem here is that there are lots of people looking to be graduate students, so most advisers are not going to be very interested in engaging in a discussion with you about whether or not they are abrasive people just looking to exploit their students. One way to get some idea about someone who looks promising is to ask that person's former students what they thought of their experience with him as their adviser. People ask advisers for evaluations of their former students all the time (just one more reason to choose well), it's only fair that their former students get asked to evaluate them as well. Don't expect anyone to bad-mouth their former adviser, but you can probably read between the lines if there is a big problem.
To maintain your motivation during your studies, and to perhaps present a better case to an advisor, it also pays off to think about what you might like to do after you graduate. Have a glimpse at offers for post docs right now to see if that sounds at all interesting to you - it's the next step if you are going to stay in academia. You might also look at jobs in industry that might be suited to what you want to do. It's not too important what you think seems good right now, what is important is the activities you have to engage in to be able to have an idea of what seems good, such as looking at job offers. Then it's something you will have in mind so you don't stand there with your thesis in hand three years from now, and then go "oh wait, now I need a job too. I wish I'd started looking for that two years ago." It may also help you to have a more informed opinion about whether studying for a PhD is really what you want to do.
These form superviser requests are bad enough that I get them too every once in a while, and I'm just a student myself with no access to the supervising that the emails ask for. They also incorrectly refer to me as "professor", and the requests are in fields I know nothing of.
Why can't we use people in prison for low level cheap phone centers?
"That's an awfully nice computer you just described to me. Sure would be a shame if someone came by and crushed it. Are you interested in an extended warranty?"
"Are you talking to me? Are are you talking to me? I will destroy you!!!"
"Oh hello little girl, sure I'll help you. You know, I'm in here for being a friend to a little girl just like you."
"How the hell should I know, I steal 'em, I don't fix 'em"
The number of terrorists in the world is a tiny, tiny proportion of all people, so the risk that Akhmed is bad is likewise tiny
That is true, and in a sane world we shouldn't care. However this is not a sane world.
I don't understand this argument.
Besides, there are two factors that eat into your argument:
It is true that the consequences are severe, but the consequences of Alice blowing you up are equally severe and you don't advocate watching her. Because the risk is tiny, yet the risk of Akhmed is tiny as well. Also, many people are productive while traveling, if not in their business then reading a book, watching a movie or having pleasant conversation - perhaps even with Akhmed! The price of your suggestion also includes harming every Akhmed out there with massive negative attention. Besides, from this argument you should want to watch everyone you can see, not just Akhmed, because you can perfectly well do that without losing track of Akhmed.
Also, terrorists are everywhere. You should watch everyone around you all the time - after all, the consequences are severe, so why take the chance. How would you argue against an argument like that, presupposing that you don't support this contention?
Let me rephrase your own scenario:
"You are locked in a very large prison, for life. The warden tells you that he lost a key somewhere. You can walk anywhere within the prison. If you find that key you are free to walk out. Will you look for that key, as opposed to sitting on the bed in your unlocked cell until you die from old age?"
This is an analogy that is based on you already being the target of terrorism, and then given a choice of dying or having a small chance of getting out of it. That is not the situation you are in when you get on a plane. If this is truly your mindset then I can understand that you want to watch Akhmed, and your health and general well-being would benefit greatly from relaxing into a more realistic view of the situation. Also, if we are following this analogy, you should want to watch everyone around you, not just Akhmed.
This is just another illustration of the principle that low odds alone are not a good reason to abandon some attempt.
No one here disputes that.
Profiling can make sense, but if all you have to go on is that the guy is named Akhmed, I hope you will hold your distrust and vigilance until you have a lot more than that to go on.
Nobody advocates preemptive beatings yet (since W left the White House.) But Akhmed will likely notice that many people are looking at him. Sucks to be him, and this isn't what I'd like to have. But too many of his compatriots tried to attack innocents. The best way to stop profiling is to stop breaking the statistical pattern.
I think you are putting the blame for Akhmed's trouble partially on Akhmed himself, but I can't quite tell. Are you?
I haven't read anything of these reports, but I'm going to but in and say that the presence of a reference in a scientific manuscript says nothing on its own about how that reference was used. E.g. if you are going to say that the there has been a large amount of worry about something in the media, then it is entirely appropriate to reference articles in the media that show that worry, and it's entirely appropriate to reference 20 of them just to really make your point. So it depends on how those references were used. In this case they were used poorly - the question is how any other references to non-peer reviewed sources were used.
Wouldn't the same argument say that eating healthy food to prolong life is pointless, since it cannot completely stop aging?
I understand your argument to be that Akhmed is more likely to be bad than Alice is, so we should watch Akhmed as passengers to make sure he isn't doing anything funny. Correct me if that is wrong.
I say that it doesn't matter if Akhmed is more likely to be bad than Alice is. What matters is just the risk that Akhmed is bad - Alice is irrelevant to whether or not we should treat Akhmed with distrust. The number of terrorists in the world is a tiny, tiny proportion of all people, so the risk that Akhmed is bad is likewise tiny. Even if we say that Akhmed has an elevated chance of being a terrorist because of his race, you can still fly with a new Akhmed every day and likely by the end of your life you'll never have met a terrorist (I didn't do the math - feel free to do it if you doubt my claim), and you are certainly extremely unlikely to ever meet an Akhmed about to kill you in a terrorist act that day. That is why I don't consider it an improvement if we end up treating every Akhmed with distrust that he did nothing to earn.
In your analogy, it's like knowing that there is a one in a million chance that you will find your car keys under the bushes in someone's back yard, and if they aren't there they are forever lost. Are you going to nose around the backyard of some stranger because of that information? It's true that at that point it then makes even less sense to go to someone else's backyard and start looking there, and yet that does nothing to change the fact that your car keys are lost and you aren't going to find them.
Profiling can make sense, but if all you have to go on is that the guy is named Akhmed, I hope you will hold your distrust and vigilance until you have a lot more than that to go on. The only thing you will accomplish otherwise is making Akhmed feel your hostile eyes on him.
When I was in the US, I saw lots of people on the street whose sole occupation seemed to be to beg for money or food. So those people actually do have housing and a sufficient income to support themselves from government aid? In that case they are even more of a nuisance than I had thought.
In short, your contention that the government leaves the poor to starve is laughable.
The word contention implies that I was stating something. In fact I said what my impression was and then asked if that was right. Thus there is no contention.
Now Ahkmed may be a fine upstanding man but passengers will watch him the whole flight and if he does something out of the ordinary will do something about it for self preservation.
Ahkmed hasn't deserved that kind of hostile attention, and it runs the risk of mistaken vigilantism. If someone is trying to light something on fire or is running around with a gun in an airplane, that's when you know that action is needed no matter if it's Akhmed or Alice doing it.
I can't tell if you are trying to make a joke of your own, but in case you are not, here goes: He is informing you that your post makes it clear that you don't understand what the post you replied to said. Probably someone thought his way of putting it was funny, yet funny mods don't give karma, so they went with informative instead.
Your posts have increasingly attributed opinions to me that I don't hold. Your latest post has finally achieved perfection in being 100% not about what I actually think. Good job.
I like that you are taking action in defense of the ideas that you believe in. I think that starting off with "Let me explain a few things to you, since you seem to have wrong information regarding "copyright" and other fictitious concepts." may predispose him to be unreceptive to whatever comes after it, and also be more unreceptive to other people presenting such ideas. I know that I personally would be a lot more receptive to someone starting off with "I read the story XYZ, and in it I can't help noticing some underlying assumptions about the nature of copyright being made. I hope to challenge some of those assumptions in this email." Even better to first point out something that you like or a point where you are sympathetic to his situation.
If you are watching a video about doing something in HTML and Javascript, then I'd expect that the comments could have quite a few script tags in them that the submitters fully expect to be displayed without malicious intent.
Yes, because I'm being too direct about your errors, forcing you to address them.
If you believe that, then you are farther gone than I had thought, and that's pretty far gone already.
This isn't a simple mistake, it's a sign of pure incompetence since the developer put no forethought into the uses of the tool he was developing and blindly trusted user input from a textarea. User input is dirty, dirty dirty and any developer who does not clean and sanitize it before consuming it is not doing his/her job.
The summary states that the first script tag was escaped as it should be. It was a bug, not a lack of foresight.
Also a company may use that money to automate some of their production. Automation means more capital and less labour, ie. less jobs.
That's true, though investments by the government can have the same effect. E.g. researchers are paid more than bricklayers, I'm guessing, so government spending on research generates fewer jobs than if that money would have gone to build houses.
C# is really more sort of the averaging of Java and C++ than anything else,
C# is just like Java except without some of the problems and with some good things added. E.g. Java generics aren't really worthy of the name, while C# generics are pretty spiffy.
The only situation where I can see that your line of reasoning succeeds is if the banks are simply holding the money and doing nothing with it - i.e. the bank is putting the money it has in a mattress and that's it. Is that what is going on on a large scale?
If you define a mattress as "the least risky investments available" you'll basically have the shape of it.
I don't define mattress like that. I define it as holding the money and doing nothing with it, simply letting it decrease in value from inflation while getting 0% return from it. If the banks invest it in something, just anything, it finds its way somewhere else so that the chain is unbroken - the chain of passing the money on until eventually it most likely creates jobs. What am I missing?
I think it has more to do with getting votes from married people and a religious Christian notion that marriage is good.
Except my argument doesn't work because pedophilia isn't a sexual orientation.