Yeah but since we can get much cleaner spectra from other galaxies, with far tighter error bars, we're going to learn more from those than we're likely to from the Milky Way. Observing the Milky Way we'll always have the problem that we're looking through the mess of our own dust. Viewing other galaxies we're not doing that and we can extract far cleaner data. I'm not saying that observing the Milky Way is unimportant but I will say that for this issue a large number of clean spectra from other galaxies is going to give us a vastly more usable dataset than a single, messy spectrum from the Milky Way. I'd say everything you say is true except that we don't need to do this from the Milky Way; it's far easier to do it with external galaxies. (Plus we can get hundreds or thousands of those spectra reasonably easily, whereas with the Milky Way we only have one. Since it's a fundamental assumption that physics is the same everywhere -- otherwise we're on an absolute hiding to nothing -- we can learn as much about dark matter in the Milky Way from those as we could were we genuinely able to cleanly observe our own rotation curve.)
More than that we do have a hell of a lot of spectra of other spiral galaxies these days. Unless one takes the unsupportable view that the Milky Way is somehow unique -- compared to the thousands (or tens of thousands, or hundreds - I don't know how many we have) of galaxies we have examined in detail, we can immediately assume that the Milky Way has a similar rotation curve to other galaxies. The *details*, obviously, should be filled in and I'm glad people are examining it so carefully, but a good observation or not of the Milky Way's rotation curve is not actually all that important for a discussion of dark matter given the sheer number of curves that we can measure (and can measure far better than we would ever be able to measure the Milky Way's).
Exactly this. I'm not personally interested about the complexities of reverse-engineering, because I know it's too complex for my feeble brain, but I've a lot of respect for people who can do it even if I'd leave the open source driver another couple of years before using it. (I've no moral compunctions against binary blobs.) But I came to this thread pretty much knowing it was going to have the shit trolled out of it, entirely because of that part of the summary.
Obviously I could, and probably should, have done this, I agree. In future I think I actually will. It was just a lot quicker to quickly drag and drop things around in Finder than to make a load of links - well, by "a lot" I mean "marginally", but it was quicker. It also didn't occur to me that Apple might occasionally need to patch or scan application folders and might assume a set location...
Pity you posted AC, any of those reading this with mod points should probably give you a few.
Within a day of the attack being announced various security blogs (and then Ars Technica) were posting directions for finding if you were infected. Each of those assumed that you'd left Safari and Firefox (and any other browser you might have been using) in the Applications folder. Since I get pissed off wading through jumbled, alphabetical lists of totally different programs, I organise my Applications folder into sub-folders. While I can go and check the programs myself from the command line, from my own experience talking even with other scientists let alone my parents, many others won't be able to do so... but might have the know-how to rearrange their Applications folder.
Does anyone know whether Apple actually search through the installed directories of browers, or just default locations?
Except people keep saying that and I see precious little difference between Vista and 7 (when running on hardware that can cope; one of Microsoft's biggest and most reprehensible mistakes when launching Vista was the "Vista-Ready" fiasco which put it on millions of computers that simply couldn't cope. Paired with the problem with drivers, which itself wasn't strictly Microsoft's fault and which I remember happening to the same degree with XP when they changed the driver model and manufacturers didn't prepare, it left a very bad taste in a lot of people's mouths). Other than the taskbar - and I'm not a fan of 7's taskbar, actually, and prefer Vista's - and the way Microsoft tweaked User Access Control to make it somewhat less secure but at the same time rather less aggravating, they seem very much the same to me. Maybe I'm missing something, though; my home machine runs Vista and I've not spent that long on 7.
Perhaps unfortunately I *have* seen PhD students being primary referee on papers - that might be not always be the technical truth, but it's the practical reality. Not that supervisors often dump PhD students right in on it, but I've seen it the other way round - the PhD student is the primary source of an opinion, while the supervisor is the second pair of eyes. To be fair, I'd say that that's normally in the final year of a PhD; in earlier years it would definitely be that the student submits a report that the supervisor "revises".
But, as you say, I'm sure it varies from field to field and group to group. In particular, I'm sure that theory differs quite wildly from experiment, even within physics. And absolutely definitely PhD students should be aiming to publish in peer-reviewed journals. To be honest, in my field you'll struggle to get a job if you don't have two papers in peer-reviewed journals, as a rule of thumb. (I only had one, but fairly well-received for its field. I know of people who had four or five from their PhD, all worthwhile papers. These people scare me...)
I don't know what it's like in other fields - I'd hope it happens a lot less often. In theory it's assumed that once you're halfway through your PhD you should be capable of at least judging if a paper seems accurate or not, and is relevant or not. I don't like it in the slightest, either; people at that level *aren't* ready to judge it, and I've encountered plenty of postdocs who are grossly underqualified for the peer-review they're doing since it's well out of their field, let alone PhD students who will often present their impression of their supervisor's prejudices... without giving them the due attention their supervisor would. A lot of the problem is that we're still a relatively small community, but very productive, and refereeing a paper properly takes a lot of time, so a lot of people will pass on it since they get multiple papers a month (or even a week) they're requested to review. When journals begin to run out of lecturers to ask they move onto postdocs, and then onto PhD students whose names they know - that's if the paper hasn't already been referred on to a postdoc or PhD student.
I'd hope the editors take reports from students with a pinch of salt, but since they're *also* busy people - basically, lecturers who are on the editorial board of a journal, and have many, many other things occupying their time - I'm not sure they always can. Likewise, I think most students do as good a job as they can, but without the experience and the full knowledge of the field they can make mistakes, or overstate a theoretical prejudice their supervisor has against a particular topic.
Well, quite. I've found motivation is the hardest thing to keep up; the initial rush of the research has gone, but you're nowhere near finished, and you're looking at a three, four, five month slog - or more - before you'll even have any results, and then you need to start interpreting them. If you're properly motivated, you push on through it and get it cleared in that time. If you're *not*, and with no-one standing over your shoulder watching you the whole time it's easy not to be, you waste time... so then you have to make it up. You work long hours, 6 or 7 days a week, just to get as much work done, or less, than you would if you only pushed yourself properly during normal office hours.
It really is ludicrous, and it couldn't happen in many other environments. I've been lucky in being hired on jobs where I've been left to pursue very much my own lines of research, which is great for me because I don't have to do work I don't enjoy, but it has a bad flipside, and that's that I'm not monitored at all and have to rely on my own motivation to push through.
And even so, I don't think I'm anything like as bad as many I've seen. I remember someone I did my PhD with who spent almost a *year* turning up at work at 10:30, going straight to the coffee break, then playing a game for an hour, going to lunch, spending maybe twenty or thirty minutes editing a Maple worksheet, and then playing a game until 5 at which point she went home. And she did this five or six days a week. Phenomenal. Oddly enough, she didn't get a postdoc...
Thanks for the report, I'd guess that with minor changes pretty much everything applies well outside of chemistry. Certainly our experiences seem to jibe, even though I've always been in astronomy and physics departments, and normally very theoretical ones at that.
I have to say time management is an issue in theoretical physics, too. There's a strong culture of extremely long hours, but when you look at how people are using those hours, they could be at least as productive (and most likely more so) if they just got into work at 9, left at 5 or 5:30, and applied themselves during that time. There's enormous amounts of time-wasting, goofing off, scanning the internet etc etc -- no different from many office jobs, I know, but unacceptable when you're judged on results and there's such a push for frequent, well-cited papers, which is why you see so many people working late and working weekends. (And I'm no better than many others; this Easter break is the first protracted break from work -- by which I mean more than 15 hours or so -- that I've had in months. This will change, though, I'm fed up of it.)
There's an interesting article on this by Sarah Bridle, a lecturer at University College London, I'll try and find it.
That might be what I was thinking of - it's not actually by Sarah Bridle but it's the result of an interview with her. It's discussing the gender imbalance and the stupid work hours that are very common in our field (cosmology). Actually a very interesting read. She's always refused to play the game the way so many of us have, and she's more successful than many of us, too...
Yes, it is very true. Or it was before the crash - I know that for a while after that the market was glutted with experienced quants who'd just been laid off by their banks, so outsiders didn't get a look-in, but it might have changed back again now.
Mod up on the travel aspect - if you're not willing to move away from your home country then you're in the wrong field and may well find yourself struggling to get work. If you refuse to move from your home city then you're shit out of luck. Academia is extremely unstable up until you get a permanent position, and there aren't many of them going around and you very rarely get a chance to pick where your permanent position will be. (Exceptions exist; schools like Cambridge and Oxford in Britain have a long history of hiring their own - although even that can't be assumed for Oxbridge graduates, not least because there are so many of them - and I get the impression a few of the Ivy League are similar. But even there, people generally have to move around.)
and so risking repeating others, it seriously isn't that bad. There's a fashion for showing how cynical you are, and how the world's going to hell and everyone's on the make and blah blah blah. It really isn't particularly bad. What you do have is a *lot* of politics, which circles around getting funding if you're a professor, and circles around getting postdoctoral positions if you're not. This does lead to both a conservatism -- which, regardless of what people might tell you is the valid approach for science; something has to be tested to oblivion for people to believe it, even if that means you're likely risking your career doing something too whacky too young -- and to a regrettable amount of brown-nosing and nepotism. There's also a distressing focus on publishing and getting citations, so if you work in a field with a lot of interest but with relatively few people you'll struggle to attract as much attention as someone who picked an easier course. What I've found increasingly annoying recently is that my career is being judged by anonymous referees on journals who clearly just don't know what they're talking about -- I get the very strong impression that they're PhD students very early on in their PhDs -- and I find that offensive. But the point I would make is this is no different from any other field and any other job, and at least in academia you can be sure that the people you're working with are at least as smart as you are. Except some of the referees.
From my experience in academia -- ten years now since I started my PhD -- the people you'll encounter are very smart, dedicated, professional in their attitude to their work; but you'll have to play the game to a certain extent, attending conferences, networking, making sure the right people know who you are, work in fields which are attracting funding but which aren't glutted or flashes in the pan (in my field that was probably braneworld cosmology; it attracted enormous funding for about five years or so and then it died out, and people who focused exclusively on braneworlds during their PhD find it a bit tough to get new positions), and make sure you put a professional face on all your work, and that you can always defend every choice you've made and every bit of work you've done. So, no different from any other job you want to do well in.
As for money, no, this isn't the best-paid job, but I get extremely irritated when people complain about it, because it's also really not that badly paid, and we get fantastic benefits. Unless you're unlucky with your lab you have fairly flexible hours, you're doing a job you love (and you better had, because if you don't love it you'll be very much better off doing something else), and there's enormous opportunity for travel, which is fully funded. If you're lucky you get generous allowances while you're away, too. We got an absurd amount to visit Toronto when there was a conference there in the mid 2000s -- something like $60 a day to eat. So we ate cheap during the day and had plenty in the evenings for a big meal and some drinks. I think we even ended making money on it...
So basically I'd say it's no worse than any other field. It can be very political given the funding situation, but that happens anywhere and in any job, and generally you've got the advantage that your boss isn't a moron, which is sometimes hard to say if you pick other career options.
That only works if you live in the middle of the desert on top of a big hill and your house is a big dome with very clean windows. Otherwise there's all these buildings, clouds, lights and bird shit getting in the way.
I've always thought "quintillion" was a number people use when they can't understand how big a number is. Or "quadrillion", which I'd guess originally meant 10^24 or something like that. Maybe "quintillion" was 10^30.
Yeah but then you get people playing games like using megaseconds to measure a year. (A year is very approximately 30*pi megaseconds, if you don't mind shitty approximations.)
There is this, as well, but it involves taking the extra few seconds or so to estimate whether the number seems reasonable. Though I have to say that the controversy makes me wonder if there are millions of people in Britain who think that their national debt (£900bn or thereabouts) is a thousand times worse than it is, given that the British media - universally, so far as I've noticed - describe such large debts in "billions" (10^9) and "trillions" (10^12).
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah but since we can get much cleaner spectra from other galaxies, with far tighter error bars, we're going to learn more from those than we're likely to from the Milky Way. Observing the Milky Way we'll always have the problem that we're looking through the mess of our own dust. Viewing other galaxies we're not doing that and we can extract far cleaner data. I'm not saying that observing the Milky Way is unimportant but I will say that for this issue a large number of clean spectra from other galaxies is going to give us a vastly more usable dataset than a single, messy spectrum from the Milky Way. I'd say everything you say is true except that we don't need to do this from the Milky Way; it's far easier to do it with external galaxies. (Plus we can get hundreds or thousands of those spectra reasonably easily, whereas with the Milky Way we only have one. Since it's a fundamental assumption that physics is the same everywhere -- otherwise we're on an absolute hiding to nothing -- we can learn as much about dark matter in the Milky Way from those as we could were we genuinely able to cleanly observe our own rotation curve.)
More than that we do have a hell of a lot of spectra of other spiral galaxies these days. Unless one takes the unsupportable view that the Milky Way is somehow unique -- compared to the thousands (or tens of thousands, or hundreds - I don't know how many we have) of galaxies we have examined in detail, we can immediately assume that the Milky Way has a similar rotation curve to other galaxies. The *details*, obviously, should be filled in and I'm glad people are examining it so carefully, but a good observation or not of the Milky Way's rotation curve is not actually all that important for a discussion of dark matter given the sheer number of curves that we can measure (and can measure far better than we would ever be able to measure the Milky Way's).
No, it doesn't. Screw this, I'm done with shitty summaries and half-arsed ad-harvesting.
Exactly this. I'm not personally interested about the complexities of reverse-engineering, because I know it's too complex for my feeble brain, but I've a lot of respect for people who can do it even if I'd leave the open source driver another couple of years before using it. (I've no moral compunctions against binary blobs.) But I came to this thread pretty much knowing it was going to have the shit trolled out of it, entirely because of that part of the summary.
Obviously I could, and probably should, have done this, I agree. In future I think I actually will. It was just a lot quicker to quickly drag and drop things around in Finder than to make a load of links - well, by "a lot" I mean "marginally", but it was quicker. It also didn't occur to me that Apple might occasionally need to patch or scan application folders and might assume a set location...
Pity you posted AC, any of those reading this with mod points should probably give you a few.
But... I don't *have* any Mac support people! Maybe I should go and get some - I'd hate to disappoint them.
Within a day of the attack being announced various security blogs (and then Ars Technica) were posting directions for finding if you were infected. Each of those assumed that you'd left Safari and Firefox (and any other browser you might have been using) in the Applications folder. Since I get pissed off wading through jumbled, alphabetical lists of totally different programs, I organise my Applications folder into sub-folders. While I can go and check the programs myself from the command line, from my own experience talking even with other scientists let alone my parents, many others won't be able to do so... but might have the know-how to rearrange their Applications folder.
Does anyone know whether Apple actually search through the installed directories of browers, or just default locations?
It's also slow as fuck and pisses me off every time I have to log into my account, but it's an unescapable evil.
If you're running W2k you need antivirus.
Of course, these two statements are not mutually exclusive.
Except people keep saying that and I see precious little difference between Vista and 7 (when running on hardware that can cope; one of Microsoft's biggest and most reprehensible mistakes when launching Vista was the "Vista-Ready" fiasco which put it on millions of computers that simply couldn't cope. Paired with the problem with drivers, which itself wasn't strictly Microsoft's fault and which I remember happening to the same degree with XP when they changed the driver model and manufacturers didn't prepare, it left a very bad taste in a lot of people's mouths). Other than the taskbar - and I'm not a fan of 7's taskbar, actually, and prefer Vista's - and the way Microsoft tweaked User Access Control to make it somewhat less secure but at the same time rather less aggravating, they seem very much the same to me. Maybe I'm missing something, though; my home machine runs Vista and I've not spent that long on 7.
If you run a light off the same battery it'll last for less time than that, too.
Perhaps unfortunately I *have* seen PhD students being primary referee on papers - that might be not always be the technical truth, but it's the practical reality. Not that supervisors often dump PhD students right in on it, but I've seen it the other way round - the PhD student is the primary source of an opinion, while the supervisor is the second pair of eyes. To be fair, I'd say that that's normally in the final year of a PhD; in earlier years it would definitely be that the student submits a report that the supervisor "revises".
But, as you say, I'm sure it varies from field to field and group to group. In particular, I'm sure that theory differs quite wildly from experiment, even within physics. And absolutely definitely PhD students should be aiming to publish in peer-reviewed journals. To be honest, in my field you'll struggle to get a job if you don't have two papers in peer-reviewed journals, as a rule of thumb. (I only had one, but fairly well-received for its field. I know of people who had four or five from their PhD, all worthwhile papers. These people scare me...)
I don't know what it's like in other fields - I'd hope it happens a lot less often. In theory it's assumed that once you're halfway through your PhD you should be capable of at least judging if a paper seems accurate or not, and is relevant or not. I don't like it in the slightest, either; people at that level *aren't* ready to judge it, and I've encountered plenty of postdocs who are grossly underqualified for the peer-review they're doing since it's well out of their field, let alone PhD students who will often present their impression of their supervisor's prejudices... without giving them the due attention their supervisor would. A lot of the problem is that we're still a relatively small community, but very productive, and refereeing a paper properly takes a lot of time, so a lot of people will pass on it since they get multiple papers a month (or even a week) they're requested to review. When journals begin to run out of lecturers to ask they move onto postdocs, and then onto PhD students whose names they know - that's if the paper hasn't already been referred on to a postdoc or PhD student.
I'd hope the editors take reports from students with a pinch of salt, but since they're *also* busy people - basically, lecturers who are on the editorial board of a journal, and have many, many other things occupying their time - I'm not sure they always can. Likewise, I think most students do as good a job as they can, but without the experience and the full knowledge of the field they can make mistakes, or overstate a theoretical prejudice their supervisor has against a particular topic.
It's far from ideal, I agree, but there we go.
Well, quite. I've found motivation is the hardest thing to keep up; the initial rush of the research has gone, but you're nowhere near finished, and you're looking at a three, four, five month slog - or more - before you'll even have any results, and then you need to start interpreting them. If you're properly motivated, you push on through it and get it cleared in that time. If you're *not*, and with no-one standing over your shoulder watching you the whole time it's easy not to be, you waste time... so then you have to make it up. You work long hours, 6 or 7 days a week, just to get as much work done, or less, than you would if you only pushed yourself properly during normal office hours.
It really is ludicrous, and it couldn't happen in many other environments. I've been lucky in being hired on jobs where I've been left to pursue very much my own lines of research, which is great for me because I don't have to do work I don't enjoy, but it has a bad flipside, and that's that I'm not monitored at all and have to rely on my own motivation to push through.
And even so, I don't think I'm anything like as bad as many I've seen. I remember someone I did my PhD with who spent almost a *year* turning up at work at 10:30, going straight to the coffee break, then playing a game for an hour, going to lunch, spending maybe twenty or thirty minutes editing a Maple worksheet, and then playing a game until 5 at which point she went home. And she did this five or six days a week. Phenomenal. Oddly enough, she didn't get a postdoc...
Thanks for the report, I'd guess that with minor changes pretty much everything applies well outside of chemistry. Certainly our experiences seem to jibe, even though I've always been in astronomy and physics departments, and normally very theoretical ones at that.
I have to say time management is an issue in theoretical physics, too. There's a strong culture of extremely long hours, but when you look at how people are using those hours, they could be at least as productive (and most likely more so) if they just got into work at 9, left at 5 or 5:30, and applied themselves during that time. There's enormous amounts of time-wasting, goofing off, scanning the internet etc etc -- no different from many office jobs, I know, but unacceptable when you're judged on results and there's such a push for frequent, well-cited papers, which is why you see so many people working late and working weekends. (And I'm no better than many others; this Easter break is the first protracted break from work -- by which I mean more than 15 hours or so -- that I've had in months. This will change, though, I'm fed up of it.)
There's an interesting article on this by Sarah Bridle, a lecturer at University College London, I'll try and find it.
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2010_08_20/caredit.a1000082
That might be what I was thinking of - it's not actually by Sarah Bridle but it's the result of an interview with her. It's discussing the gender imbalance and the stupid work hours that are very common in our field (cosmology). Actually a very interesting read. She's always refused to play the game the way so many of us have, and she's more successful than many of us, too...
Yes, it is very true. Or it was before the crash - I know that for a while after that the market was glutted with experienced quants who'd just been laid off by their banks, so outsiders didn't get a look-in, but it might have changed back again now.
Mod up on the travel aspect - if you're not willing to move away from your home country then you're in the wrong field and may well find yourself struggling to get work. If you refuse to move from your home city then you're shit out of luck. Academia is extremely unstable up until you get a permanent position, and there aren't many of them going around and you very rarely get a chance to pick where your permanent position will be. (Exceptions exist; schools like Cambridge and Oxford in Britain have a long history of hiring their own - although even that can't be assumed for Oxbridge graduates, not least because there are so many of them - and I get the impression a few of the Ivy League are similar. But even there, people generally have to move around.)
and so risking repeating others, it seriously isn't that bad. There's a fashion for showing how cynical you are, and how the world's going to hell and everyone's on the make and blah blah blah. It really isn't particularly bad. What you do have is a *lot* of politics, which circles around getting funding if you're a professor, and circles around getting postdoctoral positions if you're not. This does lead to both a conservatism -- which, regardless of what people might tell you is the valid approach for science; something has to be tested to oblivion for people to believe it, even if that means you're likely risking your career doing something too whacky too young -- and to a regrettable amount of brown-nosing and nepotism. There's also a distressing focus on publishing and getting citations, so if you work in a field with a lot of interest but with relatively few people you'll struggle to attract as much attention as someone who picked an easier course. What I've found increasingly annoying recently is that my career is being judged by anonymous referees on journals who clearly just don't know what they're talking about -- I get the very strong impression that they're PhD students very early on in their PhDs -- and I find that offensive. But the point I would make is this is no different from any other field and any other job, and at least in academia you can be sure that the people you're working with are at least as smart as you are. Except some of the referees.
From my experience in academia -- ten years now since I started my PhD -- the people you'll encounter are very smart, dedicated, professional in their attitude to their work; but you'll have to play the game to a certain extent, attending conferences, networking, making sure the right people know who you are, work in fields which are attracting funding but which aren't glutted or flashes in the pan (in my field that was probably braneworld cosmology; it attracted enormous funding for about five years or so and then it died out, and people who focused exclusively on braneworlds during their PhD find it a bit tough to get new positions), and make sure you put a professional face on all your work, and that you can always defend every choice you've made and every bit of work you've done. So, no different from any other job you want to do well in.
As for money, no, this isn't the best-paid job, but I get extremely irritated when people complain about it, because it's also really not that badly paid, and we get fantastic benefits. Unless you're unlucky with your lab you have fairly flexible hours, you're doing a job you love (and you better had, because if you don't love it you'll be very much better off doing something else), and there's enormous opportunity for travel, which is fully funded. If you're lucky you get generous allowances while you're away, too. We got an absurd amount to visit Toronto when there was a conference there in the mid 2000s -- something like $60 a day to eat. So we ate cheap during the day and had plenty in the evenings for a big meal and some drinks. I think we even ended making money on it...
So basically I'd say it's no worse than any other field. It can be very political given the funding situation, but that happens anywhere and in any job, and generally you've got the advantage that your boss isn't a moron, which is sometimes hard to say if you pick other career options.
I stand corrected, you're quite right.
alas, poor yocto. i knew him, horatio.
Yes, I don't know why I wrote 30 pi instead of 10 pi. Idiocy, most likely.
That only works if you live in the middle of the desert on top of a big hill and your house is a big dome with very clean windows. Otherwise there's all these buildings, clouds, lights and bird shit getting in the way.
I've always thought "quintillion" was a number people use when they can't understand how big a number is. Or "quadrillion", which I'd guess originally meant 10^24 or something like that. Maybe "quintillion" was 10^30.
Yeah but then you get people playing games like using megaseconds to measure a year. (A year is very approximately 30*pi megaseconds, if you don't mind shitty approximations.)
There is this, as well, but it involves taking the extra few seconds or so to estimate whether the number seems reasonable. Though I have to say that the controversy makes me wonder if there are millions of people in Britain who think that their national debt (£900bn or thereabouts) is a thousand times worse than it is, given that the British media - universally, so far as I've noticed - describe such large debts in "billions" (10^9) and "trillions" (10^12).