You might want to be careful about some of those assumptions.
I know exactly what a graph is, how to create them etc but I find reading them to be extremely hard. I don't think visually at all, I don't dream in pictures etc. For whatever reason when I look at graphs I find it takes a lot of time to read them, the information just does not make a lot of sense to me. However, if I get a table of numbers I have no issues with that at all.
Not everyone thinks and see the world the same way and some things that seem obvious and simple to you can be very difficult for someone else just because of how their brain works. I do have advantages though also. Many problems that other students find difficult because they can't figure out how to visualize them I find trivially easy because I never visualized them in the first place so I find that for many of the harder problems I can solve them far faster than other students but I get slowed down when I have to deal with graphs.
At least for cheme I have NEVER seen an internship or coop that did not pay pretty darn well. I did not think that in the USA it was even legal anymore to do unpaid internships.
I ran into that in some of my math classes also. I one of my classes I heard a student behind me whisper to another student that if they had only one hour left to live they would choose to spend it in that professors class. He would make that last hour seem like an eternity and when death finally came they would be ready for it.
He spent the ENTIRE class period with his back to the class writing on a chalkboard. He had his notes written ahead of time and pretty much just copied them onto the board. Asking questions was pretty much futile. This was an applied math class and the only students in the class were various kinds of engineers. The class was almost completely abstract.
I have liked most of my engineering classes a lot because they tend to be extremely concrete. Most classes end up just being working through one example after another to understand how and why things work and how to approach a problem. I much prefer that to the lecturing formats that most other classes take. It is assumed you have done the readings before class and class is for truly learning how to understand this stuff.
In my material and energy balances class at least 1/3 of the people gave up and switched degrees because they found the material too hard. The professor had a LOT of additional help available and she worked very hard to try and get everyone to pass but many of those students that failed and quit would skip class, not do the homework and then complain that the tests were so hard.
It is true that engineering classes are very hard and do require a lot of time but many of the problems are from the students not the material. You can't spend every weekend partying and slacking off and expect to do well in the courses.
At least with my engineers classes there are a lot of things I can do now but many of them I doubt I would ever say they are easy. Many of the more complex reactor type designs or kinetic simulations are just plain hard even though I can do them. We had some problems in kinetics where we needed to model blood clotting and the effect of various factors. It was about 35 or so ODEs and 75 or so other support equations. I solved it in MATLAB and most others used other similar type programs. However none of them made the problem easy, they just made it solvable.
Many of the things I have learned for balancing various heat reactions with fluids and reaction kinetics are not easy either. I know exactly how to solve them though, I can do them correctly pretty much every time but, they are still hard to solve and can take quite a lot of time.
There are many things I once thought were hard that are not trivially easy but at some point you get to hard things that just stay hard. These things are considered hard even by experts with 20+ years of experience and there is no real getting around it.
Next semester I will have a very interesting class on nanotechnology. It is likely to be EXTREMELY hard. No amount of time is likely to make that class easy either but I do love challenging things like that. Strangely enough though I tend not to like challenging video games very much. After working extremely hard to solve many of these problems when I get done I want to just relax.
I have been using linux for over 10 years for my servers and desktops. I have also use windows since before 3.x. However I recently got a lumia 521 windows 8 phone. In the price range I was looking at none of the android phones ran the current version of android. The lumia 521 was $130 total to buy. It also has wifi calling. In the labs on campus the cell signal is basically non-existant. I needed a phone so I could continue to deal with customers to pay for my going back to school and doing lab work over the summer. With the wifi calling I can send and receive calls, texts etc all transparently anywhere in any of our buildings since they all have wifi.
This phone has worked very well for me and enabled me to spend a lot more time on campus instead of at home or somewhere where I could use a different phone. Sure windows may not often be a good choice but at least some people choose it because it is the right choice given the available options.
Many of these large acts of evil can't happen without a lot of support from average people. So long as the average people in the NSA just doing their jobs help organizations like the NSA to remain staffed an operational they are complicit in the dirty dealings of the organization.
The leaders do share a huge share of the ethical burden but definitely not all of it. They could not do what they do without so many people willing to help them and so many people that consider something to be just a job and don't look at the ethical issues at all.
I wish we knew a lot more about these organizations. They should receive positive feedback when they operate the right way and negative when they act the wrong way. Right now they only get negative and I doubt the organization is universally bad but without both reinforcements and greater public awareness along with people unwilling to do these immoral acts it is very hard to get change.
No matter what your personally believe about how good your skills are, how fast you react etc the data is that even professionals foul up FAR more often than a computer does. If you second guess a computer it is most likely you that are wrong. This is true in surgery, diagnosis, flying an airplane etc. Most of the crashes of aircraft where the autopilot and human disagreed the autopilot was right.
I will be happen when humans no longer drive cars. They are bad at it no matter what they personally believe. I don't think it will take any government regulations either. Instead what will happen is as more people switch to self driving cars for insurance reasons the insurance pools will shrink on cars you drive yourself and the rates will go up.
You are more likely to fail than any computer especially in an emergency. There are lots of things humans can do pretty well. Driving is not one of them.
If we had this system imagine how well NASA would be funded right now. How much modern infrastructure would not even exist without NASA but all that happens is they get their budget cut. Right now our system has public investment in technology but then private companies keep all the money and charge us for the technology we paid to develop.
On all my systems I start the system when I boot up and it stays running pretty much indefinitely. When I am done with the system for the day I just hibernate the system. I just care how well the browser works over time and that it doesn't go nuts memory wise. Since my laptop has 16GB of ram I worry very little about the browser.
I do like hardware acceleration a lot though. What I find is that it translates to better battery usage and the system runs faster while also running longer.
Overall I care about performance, standard compliance, security, responsiveness, and to some extent memory usage. At this point though it doesn't really matter if you choose Firefox or Chrome.
Another huge difference is that science and engineering classes are NOT the same. You need the science classes to do engineering but scientists don't take the engineering classes that then give a more physically correct answer.
For instance in chemistry and physical chemistry classes you learn about the ideal gas law, then van der waals equation and finally other equations of state to make predictions about how different gases behave at different temperatures. In engineering classes you learn how to use tables to solve real problem with real fluids based on real data. In our lab classes we even compare the predictions of the various equations of state to charges to see about what level of accuracy can be expected. This gives a good grounding in how accurate a model is in the range you are working in. Sometimes a model is good enough and a lot of training goes into understanding when and why.
In heat transfer we have hundreds of empirical equations that are extremely accurate for their designed usage. You learn that pretty much everything is an approximation, how to determine if the approximation is good enough for your usage, understand when you need to do experiments to get better data etc. The idea that it is all pure facts with one true right answer is pretty misguided.
Although the theory of evolution is interesting when looking backwards the most powerful usage of most scientific theories is looking forwards. The theory of evolution is used every day in genetic engineering to not only design the new organisms but also to figure out how quickly things will become resistant. Sure it may not, and is probably not, completely correct but it does make testable predictions that we use with great success.
We care about fluid mechanics theories not because they allow us to look into the past and figure out how things once flew but because they allow us to build stuff right now and predict how it will fly.
Not believing in evolution is like not believing in bacteria developing resistance to antibiotics. It has no basis in reality.
I just find it sad that so many theories are presented just with the historical aspect to them. I suspect people would have an easier time with evolution if they understood about how it is used everyday to try and improve the lives of people living right now. In fact I am heading to the lab later today to work on some directed evolution in order to try and make it cheaper, easier and faster to detect a drug resistant malarial strain which would save many lives.
Don't the top 5% make far more than 58% of all the income? If they make more than 58% of the income I would expect them to pay at least that high of a percentage of the taxes.
I feel the same way. For doing lab experiments I have been taking pictures of petri dishes so my laptop can count the colonies that have grown on them. It works very well. I don't need anything approaching professional quality and what my phone does is get the job done.
Later I will have it capture video of how fast a pH gradient collapses. The video quality FAR exceeds anything I need for that application. A professional camera or video camera would be vastly overkill and be harder to use due to the greater complexity of those devices.
The whole human augmentation stuff is very cool. Think of what we can do with portable computing devices when you have your eyes replaced and no longer need a screen. How long would a smartphone last if the screen only existed in your mind? How durable would it be? How long would a "laptop" last? That technology is a lot closer than most people think.
My understanding is that cancer cells massively over express that surface protein, even if the marker binds equally it would be selective towards the cancer cells. The immune system will also trigger healing responses in nearbye cells so losing some non-cancer cells but having an immediate repair response in the area should not be a problem.
I definitely want to see human studies though. I am not really very happy with mouse models. Pigs would be a better model.
For some reason I couldn't find the article again about the eradication rate. There is so much search pollution on this subject it is often hard to find things.
The production problems is just what I heard from a professor that has worked on making these kinds of drugs.
That is one of the examples at least. Last I read it was very hard to make but is showing amazing results. I have not found out yet if the phase 1 trials happened and how they have gone.
Productions problems seem to be a fairly common things for nanomedicines right now.
I have been a programmer for about 10 years but I got tired of not really making any kind of a difference with programming. I decided to go back to school to do chemical and biological engineering so I could work on turning new nanotech/biotech treatments for various diseases like cancer into actual shipping products. There are been some lab bench cancer treatments that show 99%+ eradication of cancer within a few days of treatment but apparently it takes several people a year to make one dose. It is just not industrial scale stuff yet.
About a month after I decided to go back to school I found out that my business partner had pancreatic cancer and he died not too long after I started classes. I now have one year left and when I graduate I will hopefully get a job working on turning these cures into real shipping products. I know I may need to move to places like Canada or a western European country to work on real cures since the current profit motive in the USA does not really favor cures.
I just find it sad that this kind of thing continues to happen. We spend so much money and effort on killing people but if we spent even 5% of what we spent on the military we could cure a heck of a lot of these problems.
It is very sad that he died but it does provide yet another piece of incentive for what I will be doing next and I hope it will encourage other people to do the same.
If you are in a mobile setting and need OpenCl acceleration it is very very hard to beat an AMD laptop. I get good battery life and still have nice gpu acceleration. If I switch to the dedicated gpu the battery life drops quite a lot on both Intel and AMD systems so it is nice to have the APU for doing GPU acceleration with OpenCl.
Other countries though are working on more persistent systems. The holy grail is to encode how to make the nanobot into your DNA. That way the fix would be permanent and inheritable. We are still a good ways off on that but making progress.
The USA is going to have to adopt better medical standards or they will be left far behind as Canada, Europe and other socialized medical care countries largely get rid of their medical costs.
Ideal would be if you could make the system sexually transmitted also. It would very quickly reach people provide the nanobots. It would also be completely non-viable to prevent anyone in the USA from having sex with anyone that had gained these upgrades so everyone would have it in time.
The issue I see is that movies and tv have taught people a value of normal healthy that is actually too thin to be healthy. Too many people are chasing an idea of unrealistically thin and they do a lot of damage to themselves in the process.
I do think it is not very healthy to be overweight or fat however depending on how far overweight you are the health problems actually tend to be pretty minor. Doctors believe a lot of things that medical studies don't actually back up. Many of them still believe there is a connection between eating fat and being fat while research mostly shows that eating more things like breads, pasta etc is much more likely to make you fat.
You do need to exercise, eat well etc but the advice that doctors give is often not very helpful for that.
Mostly though we need to have real guidelines for what is a healthy weight with actual medical evidence behind it, not what someone thinks looks unhealthy.
We do have flying cars though and have had them for a while. We just realized that there is a difference between the technology to make the cars and the technology required for the average user to use them. We still can't manage to get people to stop talking and texting while driving even though that is continually shown to be more dangerous than drunk driving. At least now the vehicles mostly crash into other vehicles or things close to roads. Imagine what people would crash into while texting in their flying cars.
We definitely make faster progress on scientific developments through cooperation instead of competition. Overall I think we have a lot of growing up to do as a species and especially as a society. Other countries that have gone for cooperation for medical treatment instead of competition are doing better per resources used than we are. Competition has a high overhead.
The transition is likely to SUCK HARD. Before we make this transition there will be riots, wars, and probably a lot of deaths among the haves and have nots. I just don't see this as being a nice and peaceful transition. I think it is inevitable that we are going to hit this change point fairly soon and I suspect that we will survive it as a species.
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You might want to be careful about some of those assumptions.
I know exactly what a graph is, how to create them etc but I find reading them to be extremely hard. I don't think visually at all, I don't dream in pictures etc. For whatever reason when I look at graphs I find it takes a lot of time to read them, the information just does not make a lot of sense to me. However, if I get a table of numbers I have no issues with that at all.
Not everyone thinks and see the world the same way and some things that seem obvious and simple to you can be very difficult for someone else just because of how their brain works. I do have advantages though also. Many problems that other students find difficult because they can't figure out how to visualize them I find trivially easy because I never visualized them in the first place so I find that for many of the harder problems I can solve them far faster than other students but I get slowed down when I have to deal with graphs.
At least for cheme I have NEVER seen an internship or coop that did not pay pretty darn well. I did not think that in the USA it was even legal anymore to do unpaid internships.
I ran into that in some of my math classes also. I one of my classes I heard a student behind me whisper to another student that if they had only one hour left to live they would choose to spend it in that professors class. He would make that last hour seem like an eternity and when death finally came they would be ready for it.
He spent the ENTIRE class period with his back to the class writing on a chalkboard. He had his notes written ahead of time and pretty much just copied them onto the board. Asking questions was pretty much futile. This was an applied math class and the only students in the class were various kinds of engineers. The class was almost completely abstract.
I have liked most of my engineering classes a lot because they tend to be extremely concrete. Most classes end up just being working through one example after another to understand how and why things work and how to approach a problem. I much prefer that to the lecturing formats that most other classes take. It is assumed you have done the readings before class and class is for truly learning how to understand this stuff.
In my material and energy balances class at least 1/3 of the people gave up and switched degrees because they found the material too hard. The professor had a LOT of additional help available and she worked very hard to try and get everyone to pass but many of those students that failed and quit would skip class, not do the homework and then complain that the tests were so hard.
It is true that engineering classes are very hard and do require a lot of time but many of the problems are from the students not the material. You can't spend every weekend partying and slacking off and expect to do well in the courses.
At least with my engineers classes there are a lot of things I can do now but many of them I doubt I would ever say they are easy. Many of the more complex reactor type designs or kinetic simulations are just plain hard even though I can do them. We had some problems in kinetics where we needed to model blood clotting and the effect of various factors. It was about 35 or so ODEs and 75 or so other support equations. I solved it in MATLAB and most others used other similar type programs. However none of them made the problem easy, they just made it solvable.
Many of the things I have learned for balancing various heat reactions with fluids and reaction kinetics are not easy either. I know exactly how to solve them though, I can do them correctly pretty much every time but, they are still hard to solve and can take quite a lot of time.
There are many things I once thought were hard that are not trivially easy but at some point you get to hard things that just stay hard. These things are considered hard even by experts with 20+ years of experience and there is no real getting around it.
Next semester I will have a very interesting class on nanotechnology. It is likely to be EXTREMELY hard. No amount of time is likely to make that class easy either but I do love challenging things like that. Strangely enough though I tend not to like challenging video games very much. After working extremely hard to solve many of these problems when I get done I want to just relax.
I have been using linux for over 10 years for my servers and desktops. I have also use windows since before 3.x. However I recently got a lumia 521 windows 8 phone. In the price range I was looking at none of the android phones ran the current version of android. The lumia 521 was $130 total to buy. It also has wifi calling. In the labs on campus the cell signal is basically non-existant. I needed a phone so I could continue to deal with customers to pay for my going back to school and doing lab work over the summer. With the wifi calling I can send and receive calls, texts etc all transparently anywhere in any of our buildings since they all have wifi.
This phone has worked very well for me and enabled me to spend a lot more time on campus instead of at home or somewhere where I could use a different phone. Sure windows may not often be a good choice but at least some people choose it because it is the right choice given the available options.
Many of these large acts of evil can't happen without a lot of support from average people. So long as the average people in the NSA just doing their jobs help organizations like the NSA to remain staffed an operational they are complicit in the dirty dealings of the organization.
The leaders do share a huge share of the ethical burden but definitely not all of it. They could not do what they do without so many people willing to help them and so many people that consider something to be just a job and don't look at the ethical issues at all.
I wish we knew a lot more about these organizations. They should receive positive feedback when they operate the right way and negative when they act the wrong way. Right now they only get negative and I doubt the organization is universally bad but without both reinforcements and greater public awareness along with people unwilling to do these immoral acts it is very hard to get change.
This I disagree with entirely.
No matter what your personally believe about how good your skills are, how fast you react etc the data is that even professionals foul up FAR more often than a computer does. If you second guess a computer it is most likely you that are wrong. This is true in surgery, diagnosis, flying an airplane etc. Most of the crashes of aircraft where the autopilot and human disagreed the autopilot was right.
I will be happen when humans no longer drive cars. They are bad at it no matter what they personally believe. I don't think it will take any government regulations either. Instead what will happen is as more people switch to self driving cars for insurance reasons the insurance pools will shrink on cars you drive yourself and the rates will go up.
You are more likely to fail than any computer especially in an emergency. There are lots of things humans can do pretty well. Driving is not one of them.
If we had this system imagine how well NASA would be funded right now. How much modern infrastructure would not even exist without NASA but all that happens is they get their budget cut. Right now our system has public investment in technology but then private companies keep all the money and charge us for the technology we paid to develop.
On all my systems I start the system when I boot up and it stays running pretty much indefinitely. When I am done with the system for the day I just hibernate the system. I just care how well the browser works over time and that it doesn't go nuts memory wise. Since my laptop has 16GB of ram I worry very little about the browser.
I do like hardware acceleration a lot though. What I find is that it translates to better battery usage and the system runs faster while also running longer.
Overall I care about performance, standard compliance, security, responsiveness, and to some extent memory usage. At this point though it doesn't really matter if you choose Firefox or Chrome.
Another huge difference is that science and engineering classes are NOT the same. You need the science classes to do engineering but scientists don't take the engineering classes that then give a more physically correct answer.
For instance in chemistry and physical chemistry classes you learn about the ideal gas law, then van der waals equation and finally other equations of state to make predictions about how different gases behave at different temperatures. In engineering classes you learn how to use tables to solve real problem with real fluids based on real data. In our lab classes we even compare the predictions of the various equations of state to charges to see about what level of accuracy can be expected. This gives a good grounding in how accurate a model is in the range you are working in. Sometimes a model is good enough and a lot of training goes into understanding when and why.
In heat transfer we have hundreds of empirical equations that are extremely accurate for their designed usage. You learn that pretty much everything is an approximation, how to determine if the approximation is good enough for your usage, understand when you need to do experiments to get better data etc. The idea that it is all pure facts with one true right answer is pretty misguided.
Although the theory of evolution is interesting when looking backwards the most powerful usage of most scientific theories is looking forwards. The theory of evolution is used every day in genetic engineering to not only design the new organisms but also to figure out how quickly things will become resistant. Sure it may not, and is probably not, completely correct but it does make testable predictions that we use with great success.
We care about fluid mechanics theories not because they allow us to look into the past and figure out how things once flew but because they allow us to build stuff right now and predict how it will fly.
Not believing in evolution is like not believing in bacteria developing resistance to antibiotics. It has no basis in reality.
I just find it sad that so many theories are presented just with the historical aspect to them. I suspect people would have an easier time with evolution if they understood about how it is used everyday to try and improve the lives of people living right now. In fact I am heading to the lab later today to work on some directed evolution in order to try and make it cheaper, easier and faster to detect a drug resistant malarial strain which would save many lives.
Don't the top 5% make far more than 58% of all the income? If they make more than 58% of the income I would expect them to pay at least that high of a percentage of the taxes.
I feel the same way. For doing lab experiments I have been taking pictures of petri dishes so my laptop can count the colonies that have grown on them. It works very well. I don't need anything approaching professional quality and what my phone does is get the job done.
Later I will have it capture video of how fast a pH gradient collapses. The video quality FAR exceeds anything I need for that application. A professional camera or video camera would be vastly overkill and be harder to use due to the greater complexity of those devices.
The whole human augmentation stuff is very cool. Think of what we can do with portable computing devices when you have your eyes replaced and no longer need a screen. How long would a smartphone last if the screen only existed in your mind? How durable would it be? How long would a "laptop" last? That technology is a lot closer than most people think.
My understanding is that cancer cells massively over express that surface protein, even if the marker binds equally it would be selective towards the cancer cells. The immune system will also trigger healing responses in nearbye cells so losing some non-cancer cells but having an immediate repair response in the area should not be a problem.
I definitely want to see human studies though. I am not really very happy with mouse models. Pigs would be a better model.
For some reason I couldn't find the article again about the eradication rate. There is so much search pollution on this subject it is often hard to find things.
The production problems is just what I heard from a professor that has worked on making these kinds of drugs.
http://www.medicaldaily.com/articles/14434/20130328/cancer-treatment-cd47-miracle-bullet-breast-colon-bladder-antibody-eat-macrophage-immune.htm
That is one of the examples at least. Last I read it was very hard to make but is showing amazing results. I have not found out yet if the phase 1 trials happened and how they have gone.
Productions problems seem to be a fairly common things for nanomedicines right now.
I have been a programmer for about 10 years but I got tired of not really making any kind of a difference with programming. I decided to go back to school to do chemical and biological engineering so I could work on turning new nanotech/biotech treatments for various diseases like cancer into actual shipping products. There are been some lab bench cancer treatments that show 99%+ eradication of cancer within a few days of treatment but apparently it takes several people a year to make one dose. It is just not industrial scale stuff yet.
About a month after I decided to go back to school I found out that my business partner had pancreatic cancer and he died not too long after I started classes. I now have one year left and when I graduate I will hopefully get a job working on turning these cures into real shipping products. I know I may need to move to places like Canada or a western European country to work on real cures since the current profit motive in the USA does not really favor cures.
I just find it sad that this kind of thing continues to happen. We spend so much money and effort on killing people but if we spent even 5% of what we spent on the military we could cure a heck of a lot of these problems.
It is very sad that he died but it does provide yet another piece of incentive for what I will be doing next and I hope it will encourage other people to do the same.
If you are in a mobile setting and need OpenCl acceleration it is very very hard to beat an AMD laptop. I get good battery life and still have nice gpu acceleration. If I switch to the dedicated gpu the battery life drops quite a lot on both Intel and AMD systems so it is nice to have the APU for doing GPU acceleration with OpenCl.
Other countries though are working on more persistent systems. The holy grail is to encode how to make the nanobot into your DNA. That way the fix would be permanent and inheritable. We are still a good ways off on that but making progress.
The USA is going to have to adopt better medical standards or they will be left far behind as Canada, Europe and other socialized medical care countries largely get rid of their medical costs.
Ideal would be if you could make the system sexually transmitted also. It would very quickly reach people provide the nanobots. It would also be completely non-viable to prevent anyone in the USA from having sex with anyone that had gained these upgrades so everyone would have it in time.
The issue I see is that movies and tv have taught people a value of normal healthy that is actually too thin to be healthy. Too many people are chasing an idea of unrealistically thin and they do a lot of damage to themselves in the process.
I do think it is not very healthy to be overweight or fat however depending on how far overweight you are the health problems actually tend to be pretty minor. Doctors believe a lot of things that medical studies don't actually back up. Many of them still believe there is a connection between eating fat and being fat while research mostly shows that eating more things like breads, pasta etc is much more likely to make you fat.
You do need to exercise, eat well etc but the advice that doctors give is often not very helpful for that.
Mostly though we need to have real guidelines for what is a healthy weight with actual medical evidence behind it, not what someone thinks looks unhealthy.
This is on reason that I reason that you need actual engineers. Knowledge of heat transfer matters a lot when trying to scale a system up.
Heat transfer actually becomes a dominant concern of nearly all chemical reactors especially the bioreactors.
We do have flying cars though and have had them for a while. We just realized that there is a difference between the technology to make the cars and the technology required for the average user to use them. We still can't manage to get people to stop talking and texting while driving even though that is continually shown to be more dangerous than drunk driving. At least now the vehicles mostly crash into other vehicles or things close to roads. Imagine what people would crash into while texting in their flying cars.
We definitely make faster progress on scientific developments through cooperation instead of competition. Overall I think we have a lot of growing up to do as a species and especially as a society. Other countries that have gone for cooperation for medical treatment instead of competition are doing better per resources used than we are. Competition has a high overhead.
The transition is likely to SUCK HARD. Before we make this transition there will be riots, wars, and probably a lot of deaths among the haves and have nots. I just don't see this as being a nice and peaceful transition. I think it is inevitable that we are going to hit this change point fairly soon and I suspect that we will survive it as a species.