And? To be a teacher you need to have a bachelors degree. I train computer scientists for a living, 12 months after graduation (or if they did a co-op, straight out of graduation) they are in the 70-90k a year range with a BSc. If they were teaching they wouldn't get to that point for at least 15 years. Starting teacher salaries are more like 25-40k and creep up from there.
Teachers do get good benefits, government jobs are like that, they get actual pension plans, which is more an indication that everyone else is getting fucked than one that teachers are getting an unfairly awesome deal, and they get health care. They also get the benefit of all of the right time off (march break, summers, chrismas etc. ) so they don't have to pay babysitters for those times like everyone else. But it's not really better paying than any decent job for someone with a bachelors. In fact it's far far far worse pay to be a teacher than to go into the private sector if you are trained in any of the 'STEM' areas.
Now I'll be up front and say I think the biggest problem with teaching salaries (and professor salaries most places) is that everyone is in the same pay bracket regardless of what you were trained in. The market for BA's in English is a LOT worse than the market for BSc's in Computer science, but you get paid the same in both teaching and professorship.
Having standardized teacher pay for a large area is really important because you don't want all of the good teachers to go to big cities in rich neighbourhoods and all of the bad teachers in the poor neighbourhoods and so on.
http://www.teacherportal.com/teacher-salaries-by-state/ actually gives a good look at teacher salaries in the US. The highest are just under 60k average, and I hate to break it to you, but finding someone with a BSc in math/chemistry/physics/comp sci/engineering who will get out of bed for you at 60k with 15 years experience is going to be tough in a lot of places.
It's not like teachers who can get full time gigs are destitute, nor should they be, but it's not some spectacular awesome paying job either. If your area happens to be full of people who scrape by on minimum wage well then maybe you need some better teachers so people will be capable of doing work that warrants more than 35k a year? Maybe you need something to attract people to the area that have decent incomes, so they could have a worthwhile lifestyle and attract and retain more people like that?
Oh and if you compare the link I just gave to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_income, on average teachers are paid about well, average, and actually a little less than average. Admittedly, that doesn't count the benefits package, which is nice, but well, you'd think teachers are supposed to be in the top half of wage earners considering they're required to be in the top 40% of education attainment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States).
And yes, teachers get summers off. I'm not sure if you've ever tried to plan lessons for 5 hours a day for 10 months, but that takes a LOT of work the first few times you do it. During those 10 months you are marking and adjusting and improvising and trying to actually get the shit together for the class, so you have time 'off' where you're expected to independently figure out how to manage things for the 10 months you are at the front of the room, and that is your vacation time, baring some exceptional circumstances you don't get any other time off for a holiday (which is a fair tradeoff, but one should be clear that teachers don't get 4 weeks paid leave on top of the time they already get).
NEVER a right transferred from the people to their rulers.
I phrased it that way specifically because people still live in a fantasy land thinking people give the right to rule to their rulers. Suggesting that the people have some sort of fundamental overarching control is living in an idealized fantasy land. The people who can command the loyalty of the army and police have control, if you're lucky the army and police believe themselves subordinate to the commons or courts (but who trumps who?).
There's no such thing as due process. There is the process the people in power choose to grant and choose to enforce. Have fun watching the Egyptian Army, Courts, and Politicians fight out who is the 'supreme authority' on anything. Most of the rest of the world have solved this problem by convention, but so long as the police and army will go along with whatever scheme you have that becomes the law of the day.
and we were NOT asked!!
nor did you need to be. But it depends where you live, if you can vote in an election you were, to some degree, asked to rubber stamp things. But no, your opinion doesn't factor into this, and never would have, and never will. You can transfer power to a different group of people if you want to take up arms and overthrow the government, but once they're in power they have no obligation to listen to you any more than the current people in power do.
What magic do "real pro financial analysts" have which slashdotters do not have?
Maybe, but my knowledge of video game brands is independent of my knowledge of dishwashers. I think I can easily track a lot more than 300 brands, just not all in the same sector. Hell I could probably pick out 100 + brands that I'm aware of from the grocery store, even though they're all actually sub brands of a handful of big mega corps my bread isn't branded the same as my soup.
But yes, in general that's why there is such a big trend towards walmart style centralization for things where brand doesn't matter, I have no particular attachment to pens or bread or the like, so advertising those products doesn't really matter. But any product where I need to make a deliberate purchase (cultural content, expensive items etc.) there's always going to be a market for ads.
What magic do "real pro financial analysts" have which slashdotters do not have?
The time to read all of facebooks public disclosure documents, and time to pay attention to all of their statements about future revenue, and have the background to actually understand all of the content, which those of us who do real work ignore.
The thing with facebook ads is that for a long time, around here at least, all of their ads were super sketchy, so you wouldn't want to click on them anyway. But times change and facebook is a big serious publicly traded company now with boring companies advertising there. I still might not click on a Car ad on facebook (or a Coke ad) because why would you ever need to click on those ads? I'm not going to buy a car because I saw it advertised on facebook. But those ads serve to maintain a brand image and presence, it's much more about making sure people know when they shop your product exists and they can look at it than it is about directly selling you points to use on a shitty facebook game.
Sure, the points on a shitty facebook game are much easier to track ad clicks to revenue - but that was always doomed to have low value.
Facebook stock is hugely overpriced. Based on current revenue, Facebook is worth about $7 per share. The stock price assumes a huge growth in revenue
Unless you're a real pro financial analyst you can't claim it is overpriced and then immediately point out that it's priced assuming a huge growth model. Just because ads look like they're going to do poorly doesn't mean Facebook can't still see a huge growth in revenue, they have a huge segment of the world economy that has facebook but mostly sketchy shitty ads, they have the option to bundle up your data and sell that, and the more users they have and the more information they have the more they can bundle up and sell that info for. Not to mention some very valuable infrastructure they could sell in some way shape or form to other companies which could be extremely lucrative (think Amazon's cloud). Or some other business plan that may not seem central to Facebook but might have some serious value.
Ads on content have always been 'irrelevant interruptions', but they're also much harder to quantify in value. People aren't going to buy a car because of a magazine or facebook ad, or even likely click on a car ad on facebook. But GM advertising on facebook at least shows they're still in business (which, for a while there, was important to tell people). TV ads were always about trying to convince people they wanted to buy your product, and hammer away at that point with repetition, while at the same time generally keeping people aware of the brand. Ads on searches are, on an individual basis going to have the potential to be much easier to quantify, because you can track clicks and sales per click and you can monitor user behaviour after they clicked on an ad and that sort of thing.
Sealed letters in academia are notoriously easy to freeze, open, read, heat and re-seal
Sealed is more of the old way of doing things. Now the letters are actually sent directly between institutions, at least around here. I'm from the era where we literally sent sealed letters around for me being a grad student, but when I fill out the modern equivalent forms it's all direct department to department.
That is, immediately, a separate problem from one of them just spying on you for their own purposes, selling that information to other people or the like.
Wiretap (and intelligence) are lawfully chartered, you may not like it, but you have to accept that governments can do those things, because they've given themselves the right to. They also tell companies what they can't do, and penalize them for such behaviour if they are so inclined, an entity not attached to country where you have legal standing can basically do whatever the hell it wants to you and you can't do anything about it.
But of course, we _are_ talking about Microsoft in this case
Which comes with benefits too. Microsoft being a big, publicly traded company with offices in all major countries has to follow consumer protection and privacy laws too, and they can be in for a world of hurt if they don't. Using some 'inherently private' setup runs the risk that somewhere along the line that system both has a bug in it, and that bug is being actively exploited against you - and you have no recourse against the company running it (or the peers).
First, it should provide a nice, high-level summary of the research area you're focusing on, perhaps with a nod to related ones
this is the same as 'you know the the material' as in, you know what the current status of the research area is, and who did that work.
A second, intertwined point is that it should provide enough background information for someone who is sufficiently well-versed in that discipline, but not necessarily your topic, to gauge the credibility of your work.
in effect you can't solve this problem with your background research in your own words. You still have to reference the sources of that information anyway, so you are, in effect, pointing people at that work anyway. But yes, I'll grant you part of the idea with a thesis is that it's supposed to be self contained, my point is that idea is not all that necessary in this day and age, or at least not nearly as important as it once was when finding the other sources could be time consuming processes.
Finally, it should explain how what you are doing is sufficient to merit an advanced degree.
Sure, but that's the problem - none of that is about the work you actually did. Trying to use your background section to try and justify why this work warrants and advanced degree *can* be important, it depends on where your work fits relative to other work. I'm just finishing up a paper where I basically say 'go read this book background material that we build on. With what is there you can solve these two problems, but you can't solve this other problem which is what I'm talking about.
It's not that you don't need *any* background, and I'm being somewhat hyperbolic saying 1 sentence, but you could compact 100 pages of work significantly by simply pointing at other work as being what you need to know as the background. Which is how papers do it, you might have a page of background information which basically summarizes multiple papers and books, and then you jump headlong into your own material.
I've had it both ways. Sealed letters in academia can be ruthlessly honest "Do not take this person as a graduate student", but business references, ya they have to worry about defamation, where they seem like a bunch of MBA illiterate waffle.
Even then, there are ways to say bad things without saying bad things./. lets people post anonymously because people value their privacy (cough they're cowards and have something to hide cough) sort of thing. If you put someones name down as a reference you need to be absolutely sure they're not going to say something you don't like, because sometimes they can and will.
Who cares unless he will be your boss in that future time.
You care, because one thing you do not want to find out is that the person you are applying for a new job with knows someone who knows your old boss. For the same reason you don't bad mouth your old boss in a job interview - no potential future boss wants a whiner on their staff.
My GF has a particularly bad boss, who, as it happens, is very well known in both the community and in their field. Guess how likely it is that they're going to get a call when my GF is looking for work.
But yes, you hit the nail on the head with
Just skip the exit interview and get on with your life.
unless you have a very specific reason to help them improve, don't. E.g. if your job was never intended to be permanent and you're moving on to somewhere else then sure, you can gently provide generic feedback, but generally you're going to get yourself in trouble opening your mouth.
No, it isn't. Sciences have plagiarism too. You can just *also* fake data. That's a problem that has been around since the advent of science and will persist forever. But there's a mechanism in place to deal with faked data, which is that you try and reproduce the results - and if you can't you now know something is fishy.
Faked data is also, I would argue, fundamentally a more serious problem. If I pasted the statement Running scientific experiments is, frankly, a pain in the ass without attribution (the first line of the article you linked) I'm merely misrepresenting the work I did, not the correctness of the work itself. If I faked data not only did I not contribute any new knowledge (plagiarism) I contributed negative knowledge.
The thing is, with faked data, eventually someone else will probably try and re-run the experiment if it's worth doing (which, for example, the experiments in my MSc aren't worth repeating because they were technology specific, and technology has plodded along to the point that none of that work is relevant) and find out if you were lying. Plagiarism that I'm talking about is only found if someone bothers to look into the irrelevant portion of your work.
True, although the old argument that no one but your committee reads a PhD thesis generally applies. My MSc in comp sci was I think 180 or so pages. Of that probably 100 were menial background information, now days I catch people copying that section from wikipedia because it takes a long time to write and doesn't actually convey much useful information. Congratulations you can write on a topic anyone can look up on the internet or from a book. The actual work of the thesis, writing software and analysing how it behaved I couldn't have plagiarized because well, my boss watched me write it day after day for months, and we did a lot of analysis that turned out to be useless and had to be tossed and so on.
With political science (and the arts in general) I would think it's a lot harder. What 'work' are you doing that couldn't just be written down by someone else already anyway? Your whole work could always be in question, certainly cases like that crop up in sciences, but it's much harder to steal someone else's work when you have to be doing the work in a lab full of people. For them, you have a position, you argue it with evidence, which is hard to distinguish from found an argument you like, you copied it, and found work that supports it and copied that too.
I suppose this growing plagiarism problem highlights what's wrong with the dissertation format of masters and PhD's, which is that there's a lot of information in there which no one cares about, isn't really yours anymore than you're just re-writing it for the sake of demonstrating that you know the information exists, and that could probably be cut entirely from the process and not negate much. Let people replace 1 line with "this textbook or these articles cover all of the relevant background information'. Obviously you don't really want people graduating who can't (and don't) follow relatively simple rules, but at the same time, asking people to regurgitate 100 pages of material they just pulled out of a book isn't working to well, especially as grad students are relatively poorer, and don't really want to be wasting type typing something that isn't their own work anyway.
And yes, learning to say what someone else did in your own way is a skill, but one you should be working on and demonstrating in your undergraduate thesis.
Where I am now offers a 'Papers only' PhD, where you staple together 4 published papers and call that your thesis basically, which comes with its own problems related to when you've submitted your last paper but have no work to do, and no PhD and are stuck waiting around on low pay for feedback when you could be doing something useful that pays something, but I think that general idea is the future. If someone is going to plagiarize that work they're going to end up taking their supervisor who is usually a coauthor with them, and that person has a vested interest in keeping you honest.
Makes sense. He's figuring that he's making no money on this version. Better to buy your way into marketshare and hope the next version sells for something. That might be a terrible plan that will fail horribly, but much bigger companies have tried strategies of losing money to get marketshare (AMD for example).
For whatever he was getting before, which was probably in the single thousands of dollars, he has gotten free press on the android version (more players = more potential buyers of the next version), and he's made iphone sales for a few thousand blogger/journalist types who want to be able to talk intelligently about what the game actually is but only have iPhones (and after all, who cares about a dollar, so rather than walking all the way to the end of the hall to pick up a droid for testing you can just download this and go).
That's the case with most mobile development (by number of titles). Mobile is low investment, low risk. If your game completely fails and you sell 5000 copies you're only out a few tens of thousands of dollars or small hundreds of thousands, which can be recouped by a single title doing very well. Make 20 games for 100k each and hope one makes you 2 million dollars sort of thing.
Part of game development is the creative exercise of trying to tell a story or come up with a compelling mechanic. The risk of open source is that everyone wants to be the guy who decides the story, or the gameplay etc. and why not just make your own game for next to nothing that you sell in the app store for next to nothing in that scenario?
But yes lots of mobile games are basically shitty flash games that seem like student projects, because a lot of them are. The school I'm at produces 2 or 3 student project games a year, plus we do part of the university mobile app etc.
But what is the cost of a large unemployed population ?
Find them new, more creative jobs to do (make movies books and games), let them work less hours so they can enjoy 8 weeks of vacation every year and actually see some of the fascinating world we live in?
Use human for much more experimental work, where you design and build dozens of variants of the same basic car, or let people who buy cars customize them in much more diverse ways (it takes labour to document those choices and explain them to customers). Rather than working an assembly line mindlessly gluing things together they can engage with other human beings and help them find products that meet their needs, and teach them how to use them.
Without a doubt that transition is going to suck, and we will need to do a whole lot more work in education to figure out what people can be knowledgeable about and how to convert that into value that can be sold, but in the long run not needing people to do mindless manual labour is probably a good thing.
Right. A couple of sizes, a couple of capacities, a couple of colours or a 'deluxe' edition with per-bundled goodies or a cross promotion with a pre -installed set of software and you can easily hit half a dozen SKU's.
If I were to guess, it's two sizes, then with/without 3g and then a version with extra memory and 3g or something similar.
No, some of them are elite hackers, some of them are just trying to keep up with the mischief elite hackers are going to be creating or trying to feel like they're part of the culture.
Higher cost does not excuse us from responsibility for reasonably predictable consequences.
No, it means what you're going to say on a topic has to be on topic, and concise, you state in one sentence as part of your statement what it applies to. You don't belabour the point like a/. post hammering away at it. That would simply be wasteful because every paper would end up full of disclaimers and clarifications, which simply detracts from their ability to convey information and support discussion of topics.
I picked the AI in a game vs. trying to run a state to be illustrative. The fact that you didn't understand that shows why you're struggling with what is essentially a simple concept. When you do studies for a living you know that 1. the media will interpret it wrong, and 2. trying to correct them is a waste of time, especially if they have a 'narrative'. Sure, the media are behaving like fascists (or just generically authoritarian) trying to spew a narrative, but quite honestly people with brains don't listen to those idiots anyway, and I only have so much time to do things like write/. posts to correct people who come up with nonsense statements about the credibility of research or how researchers are supposed to spend their time.
And with ALL forms of attack, the purpose is not just to directly destroy
sure, they're destroying the ability to organize, annihilation is a long ago rejected concept. Although that was, for a long time, the accepted motivation for attack, and occasionally you have a disciple of de Jomini in command somewhere who tries that.
That's because the french were basically executing bottom level people who were easily replaced. The US killed a LOT of those guys in afghanistan and in Iraq. And it doesn't actually get you much. Drone strikes go after the relative safe havens for training where the particularly valuable people might be.
Also, if you read Triquiers "modern warfare" which is pre-eminent text on the algerian war, he advocated torture - and guess what, torture doesn't exactly make you friends. Especially so when you've signed conventions agreeing you won't do it.
Normally when you publish you either have a page limit, or have to pay for more pages (this may not be true in social sciences, I'm not sure). Adding a dozen disclaimers costs you money. It's your responsibility, as this guys work does, to state what your work is applicable to, and that generally happens.
If I write an AI paper on how to build and AI to manage an economy in a game - which is a particularly strong constraint, and then the media decides that means I'm trying to use computers to run a communist state then there's only so much you can do. The author in this case, and in general, are pretty clear about when their work applies or what it applies to. You can't get published without that usually. Putting a EULA on a paper would be about as useful as the EULA on software is today.
Studies cost money. When someone pays for a study, they usually have a desired outcome in mind.
I do studies for a living. This statement is pure bullshit and factually not true. The study might be wrong, I don't doubt that possibility, but academia starts to unravel pretty quickly if it becomes 'pay for result'. The Author is http://www.bryancprice.com/C.V.html. he's an active member of the US armed forces, so I'll grant you that there is a perception of saying what wants to be said, but if you can't read the research yourself and actually judge the quality of the work on its own then you have to leave it up to people who can, and not just claim it's a lie because it has a result you don't like.
Haven't we killed the #2 al queda guy about 47 times now? How has that been working out for us in terror organization reduction?
That's actually part of what is addressed in the paper. It is by whatever metrics he's decided to use, been working out pretty well. Although 'the egyptian' Ayman al-Zawahiri was the #2 for years until Bin Laden was killed, so it's probably the #2 in Iraq or the the #3 Al Qaeda that you're thinking of, I take your point.
You have be careful with your reaching conclusion that
studies and their derivative press releases and press pickups are intended to do.
which simply doesn't connect with the research - he specifically talks about the type of organization that can be taken apart by drones. Whether the media fabricates that into a garbage narrative isn't his fault.
Slashdot Mirror
And? To be a teacher you need to have a bachelors degree. I train computer scientists for a living, 12 months after graduation (or if they did a co-op, straight out of graduation) they are in the 70-90k a year range with a BSc. If they were teaching they wouldn't get to that point for at least 15 years. Starting teacher salaries are more like 25-40k and creep up from there.
Teachers do get good benefits, government jobs are like that, they get actual pension plans, which is more an indication that everyone else is getting fucked than one that teachers are getting an unfairly awesome deal, and they get health care. They also get the benefit of all of the right time off (march break, summers, chrismas etc. ) so they don't have to pay babysitters for those times like everyone else. But it's not really better paying than any decent job for someone with a bachelors. In fact it's far far far worse pay to be a teacher than to go into the private sector if you are trained in any of the 'STEM' areas.
Now I'll be up front and say I think the biggest problem with teaching salaries (and professor salaries most places) is that everyone is in the same pay bracket regardless of what you were trained in. The market for BA's in English is a LOT worse than the market for BSc's in Computer science, but you get paid the same in both teaching and professorship.
Having standardized teacher pay for a large area is really important because you don't want all of the good teachers to go to big cities in rich neighbourhoods and all of the bad teachers in the poor neighbourhoods and so on.
http://www.teacherportal.com/teacher-salaries-by-state/ actually gives a good look at teacher salaries in the US. The highest are just under 60k average, and I hate to break it to you, but finding someone with a BSc in math/chemistry/physics/comp sci/engineering who will get out of bed for you at 60k with 15 years experience is going to be tough in a lot of places.
It's not like teachers who can get full time gigs are destitute, nor should they be, but it's not some spectacular awesome paying job either. If your area happens to be full of people who scrape by on minimum wage well then maybe you need some better teachers so people will be capable of doing work that warrants more than 35k a year? Maybe you need something to attract people to the area that have decent incomes, so they could have a worthwhile lifestyle and attract and retain more people like that?
Oh and if you compare the link I just gave to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_income, on average teachers are paid about well, average, and actually a little less than average. Admittedly, that doesn't count the benefits package, which is nice, but well, you'd think teachers are supposed to be in the top half of wage earners considering they're required to be in the top 40% of education attainment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States).
And yes, teachers get summers off. I'm not sure if you've ever tried to plan lessons for 5 hours a day for 10 months, but that takes a LOT of work the first few times you do it. During those 10 months you are marking and adjusting and improvising and trying to actually get the shit together for the class, so you have time 'off' where you're expected to independently figure out how to manage things for the 10 months you are at the front of the room, and that is your vacation time, baring some exceptional circumstances you don't get any other time off for a holiday (which is a fair tradeoff, but one should be clear that teachers don't get 4 weeks paid leave on top of the time they already get).
NEVER a right transferred from the people to their rulers.
I phrased it that way specifically because people still live in a fantasy land thinking people give the right to rule to their rulers. Suggesting that the people have some sort of fundamental overarching control is living in an idealized fantasy land. The people who can command the loyalty of the army and police have control, if you're lucky the army and police believe themselves subordinate to the commons or courts (but who trumps who?).
There's no such thing as due process. There is the process the people in power choose to grant and choose to enforce. Have fun watching the Egyptian Army, Courts, and Politicians fight out who is the 'supreme authority' on anything. Most of the rest of the world have solved this problem by convention, but so long as the police and army will go along with whatever scheme you have that becomes the law of the day.
and we were NOT asked!!
nor did you need to be. But it depends where you live, if you can vote in an election you were, to some degree, asked to rubber stamp things. But no, your opinion doesn't factor into this, and never would have, and never will. You can transfer power to a different group of people if you want to take up arms and overthrow the government, but once they're in power they have no obligation to listen to you any more than the current people in power do.
What magic do "real pro financial analysts" have which slashdotters do not have?
Maybe, but my knowledge of video game brands is independent of my knowledge of dishwashers. I think I can easily track a lot more than 300 brands, just not all in the same sector. Hell I could probably pick out 100 + brands that I'm aware of from the grocery store, even though they're all actually sub brands of a handful of big mega corps my bread isn't branded the same as my soup.
But yes, in general that's why there is such a big trend towards walmart style centralization for things where brand doesn't matter, I have no particular attachment to pens or bread or the like, so advertising those products doesn't really matter. But any product where I need to make a deliberate purchase (cultural content, expensive items etc.) there's always going to be a market for ads.
What magic do "real pro financial analysts" have which slashdotters do not have?
The time to read all of facebooks public disclosure documents, and time to pay attention to all of their statements about future revenue, and have the background to actually understand all of the content, which those of us who do real work ignore.
The thing with facebook ads is that for a long time, around here at least, all of their ads were super sketchy, so you wouldn't want to click on them anyway. But times change and facebook is a big serious publicly traded company now with boring companies advertising there. I still might not click on a Car ad on facebook (or a Coke ad) because why would you ever need to click on those ads? I'm not going to buy a car because I saw it advertised on facebook. But those ads serve to maintain a brand image and presence, it's much more about making sure people know when they shop your product exists and they can look at it than it is about directly selling you points to use on a shitty facebook game.
Sure, the points on a shitty facebook game are much easier to track ad clicks to revenue - but that was always doomed to have low value.
Facebook stock is hugely overpriced. Based on current revenue, Facebook is worth about $7 per share. The stock price assumes a huge growth in revenue
Unless you're a real pro financial analyst you can't claim it is overpriced and then immediately point out that it's priced assuming a huge growth model. Just because ads look like they're going to do poorly doesn't mean Facebook can't still see a huge growth in revenue, they have a huge segment of the world economy that has facebook but mostly sketchy shitty ads, they have the option to bundle up your data and sell that, and the more users they have and the more information they have the more they can bundle up and sell that info for. Not to mention some very valuable infrastructure they could sell in some way shape or form to other companies which could be extremely lucrative (think Amazon's cloud). Or some other business plan that may not seem central to Facebook but might have some serious value.
Ads on content have always been 'irrelevant interruptions', but they're also much harder to quantify in value. People aren't going to buy a car because of a magazine or facebook ad, or even likely click on a car ad on facebook. But GM advertising on facebook at least shows they're still in business (which, for a while there, was important to tell people). TV ads were always about trying to convince people they wanted to buy your product, and hammer away at that point with repetition, while at the same time generally keeping people aware of the brand. Ads on searches are, on an individual basis going to have the potential to be much easier to quantify, because you can track clicks and sales per click and you can monitor user behaviour after they clicked on an ad and that sort of thing.
Sealed letters in academia are notoriously easy to freeze, open, read, heat and re-seal
Sealed is more of the old way of doing things. Now the letters are actually sent directly between institutions, at least around here. I'm from the era where we literally sent sealed letters around for me being a grad student, but when I fill out the modern equivalent forms it's all direct department to department.
caught assisting the gov't
That is, immediately, a separate problem from one of them just spying on you for their own purposes, selling that information to other people or the like.
Wiretap (and intelligence) are lawfully chartered, you may not like it, but you have to accept that governments can do those things, because they've given themselves the right to. They also tell companies what they can't do, and penalize them for such behaviour if they are so inclined, an entity not attached to country where you have legal standing can basically do whatever the hell it wants to you and you can't do anything about it.
But of course, we _are_ talking about Microsoft in this case
Which comes with benefits too. Microsoft being a big, publicly traded company with offices in all major countries has to follow consumer protection and privacy laws too, and they can be in for a world of hurt if they don't. Using some 'inherently private' setup runs the risk that somewhere along the line that system both has a bug in it, and that bug is being actively exploited against you - and you have no recourse against the company running it (or the peers).
First, it should provide a nice, high-level summary of the research area you're focusing on, perhaps with a nod to related ones
this is the same as 'you know the the material' as in, you know what the current status of the research area is, and who did that work.
A second, intertwined point is that it should provide enough background information for someone who is sufficiently well-versed in that discipline, but not necessarily your topic, to gauge the credibility of your work.
in effect you can't solve this problem with your background research in your own words. You still have to reference the sources of that information anyway, so you are, in effect, pointing people at that work anyway. But yes, I'll grant you part of the idea with a thesis is that it's supposed to be self contained, my point is that idea is not all that necessary in this day and age, or at least not nearly as important as it once was when finding the other sources could be time consuming processes.
Finally, it should explain how what you are doing is sufficient to merit an advanced degree.
Sure, but that's the problem - none of that is about the work you actually did. Trying to use your background section to try and justify why this work warrants and advanced degree *can* be important, it depends on where your work fits relative to other work. I'm just finishing up a paper where I basically say 'go read this book background material that we build on. With what is there you can solve these two problems, but you can't solve this other problem which is what I'm talking about.
It's not that you don't need *any* background, and I'm being somewhat hyperbolic saying 1 sentence, but you could compact 100 pages of work significantly by simply pointing at other work as being what you need to know as the background. Which is how papers do it, you might have a page of background information which basically summarizes multiple papers and books, and then you jump headlong into your own material.
I've had it both ways. Sealed letters in academia can be ruthlessly honest "Do not take this person as a graduate student", but business references, ya they have to worry about defamation, where they seem like a bunch of MBA illiterate waffle.
Even then, there are ways to say bad things without saying bad things. /. lets people post anonymously because people value their privacy (cough they're cowards and have something to hide cough) sort of thing. If you put someones name down as a reference you need to be absolutely sure they're not going to say something you don't like, because sometimes they can and will.
Who cares unless he will be your boss in that future time.
You care, because one thing you do not want to find out is that the person you are applying for a new job with knows someone who knows your old boss. For the same reason you don't bad mouth your old boss in a job interview - no potential future boss wants a whiner on their staff.
My GF has a particularly bad boss, who, as it happens, is very well known in both the community and in their field. Guess how likely it is that they're going to get a call when my GF is looking for work.
But yes, you hit the nail on the head with
Just skip the exit interview and get on with your life.
unless you have a very specific reason to help them improve, don't. E.g. if your job was never intended to be permanent and you're moving on to somewhere else then sure, you can gently provide generic feedback, but generally you're going to get yourself in trouble opening your mouth.
No, it isn't. Sciences have plagiarism too. You can just *also* fake data. That's a problem that has been around since the advent of science and will persist forever. But there's a mechanism in place to deal with faked data, which is that you try and reproduce the results - and if you can't you now know something is fishy.
Faked data is also, I would argue, fundamentally a more serious problem. If I pasted the statement Running scientific experiments is, frankly, a pain in the ass without attribution (the first line of the article you linked) I'm merely misrepresenting the work I did, not the correctness of the work itself. If I faked data not only did I not contribute any new knowledge (plagiarism) I contributed negative knowledge.
The thing is, with faked data, eventually someone else will probably try and re-run the experiment if it's worth doing (which, for example, the experiments in my MSc aren't worth repeating because they were technology specific, and technology has plodded along to the point that none of that work is relevant) and find out if you were lying. Plagiarism that I'm talking about is only found if someone bothers to look into the irrelevant portion of your work.
Also, I apparently suck at proofreading /. posts.
True, although the old argument that no one but your committee reads a PhD thesis generally applies. My MSc in comp sci was I think 180 or so pages. Of that probably 100 were menial background information, now days I catch people copying that section from wikipedia because it takes a long time to write and doesn't actually convey much useful information. Congratulations you can write on a topic anyone can look up on the internet or from a book. The actual work of the thesis, writing software and analysing how it behaved I couldn't have plagiarized because well, my boss watched me write it day after day for months, and we did a lot of analysis that turned out to be useless and had to be tossed and so on.
With political science (and the arts in general) I would think it's a lot harder. What 'work' are you doing that couldn't just be written down by someone else already anyway? Your whole work could always be in question, certainly cases like that crop up in sciences, but it's much harder to steal someone else's work when you have to be doing the work in a lab full of people. For them, you have a position, you argue it with evidence, which is hard to distinguish from found an argument you like, you copied it, and found work that supports it and copied that too.
I suppose this growing plagiarism problem highlights what's wrong with the dissertation format of masters and PhD's, which is that there's a lot of information in there which no one cares about, isn't really yours anymore than you're just re-writing it for the sake of demonstrating that you know the information exists, and that could probably be cut entirely from the process and not negate much. Let people replace 1 line with "this textbook or these articles cover all of the relevant background information'. Obviously you don't really want people graduating who can't (and don't) follow relatively simple rules, but at the same time, asking people to regurgitate 100 pages of material they just pulled out of a book isn't working to well, especially as grad students are relatively poorer, and don't really want to be wasting type typing something that isn't their own work anyway.
And yes, learning to say what someone else did in your own way is a skill, but one you should be working on and demonstrating in your undergraduate thesis.
Where I am now offers a 'Papers only' PhD, where you staple together 4 published papers and call that your thesis basically, which comes with its own problems related to when you've submitted your last paper but have no work to do, and no PhD and are stuck waiting around on low pay for feedback when you could be doing something useful that pays something, but I think that general idea is the future. If someone is going to plagiarize that work they're going to end up taking their supervisor who is usually a coauthor with them, and that person has a vested interest in keeping you honest.
Makes sense. He's figuring that he's making no money on this version. Better to buy your way into marketshare and hope the next version sells for something. That might be a terrible plan that will fail horribly, but much bigger companies have tried strategies of losing money to get marketshare (AMD for example).
For whatever he was getting before, which was probably in the single thousands of dollars, he has gotten free press on the android version (more players = more potential buyers of the next version), and he's made iphone sales for a few thousand blogger/journalist types who want to be able to talk intelligently about what the game actually is but only have iPhones (and after all, who cares about a dollar, so rather than walking all the way to the end of the hall to pick up a droid for testing you can just download this and go).
That's the case with most mobile development (by number of titles). Mobile is low investment, low risk. If your game completely fails and you sell 5000 copies you're only out a few tens of thousands of dollars or small hundreds of thousands, which can be recouped by a single title doing very well. Make 20 games for 100k each and hope one makes you 2 million dollars sort of thing.
Part of game development is the creative exercise of trying to tell a story or come up with a compelling mechanic. The risk of open source is that everyone wants to be the guy who decides the story, or the gameplay etc. and why not just make your own game for next to nothing that you sell in the app store for next to nothing in that scenario?
But yes lots of mobile games are basically shitty flash games that seem like student projects, because a lot of them are. The school I'm at produces 2 or 3 student project games a year, plus we do part of the university mobile app etc.
But what is the cost of a large unemployed population ?
Find them new, more creative jobs to do (make movies books and games), let them work less hours so they can enjoy 8 weeks of vacation every year and actually see some of the fascinating world we live in?
Use human for much more experimental work, where you design and build dozens of variants of the same basic car, or let people who buy cars customize them in much more diverse ways (it takes labour to document those choices and explain them to customers). Rather than working an assembly line mindlessly gluing things together they can engage with other human beings and help them find products that meet their needs, and teach them how to use them.
Without a doubt that transition is going to suck, and we will need to do a whole lot more work in education to figure out what people can be knowledgeable about and how to convert that into value that can be sold, but in the long run not needing people to do mindless manual labour is probably a good thing.
Google Wants You to Stop Commenting on YouTube
There, fixed the summary headline.
Right. A couple of sizes, a couple of capacities, a couple of colours or a 'deluxe' edition with per-bundled goodies or a cross promotion with a pre -installed set of software and you can easily hit half a dozen SKU's.
If I were to guess, it's two sizes, then with/without 3g and then a version with extra memory and 3g or something similar.
These are the elite
No, some of them are elite hackers, some of them are just trying to keep up with the mischief elite hackers are going to be creating or trying to feel like they're part of the culture.
Higher cost does not excuse us from responsibility for reasonably predictable consequences.
No, it means what you're going to say on a topic has to be on topic, and concise, you state in one sentence as part of your statement what it applies to. You don't belabour the point like a /. post hammering away at it. That would simply be wasteful because every paper would end up full of disclaimers and clarifications, which simply detracts from their ability to convey information and support discussion of topics.
I picked the AI in a game vs. trying to run a state to be illustrative. The fact that you didn't understand that shows why you're struggling with what is essentially a simple concept. When you do studies for a living you know that 1. the media will interpret it wrong, and 2. trying to correct them is a waste of time, especially if they have a 'narrative'. Sure, the media are behaving like fascists (or just generically authoritarian) trying to spew a narrative, but quite honestly people with brains don't listen to those idiots anyway, and I only have so much time to do things like write /. posts to correct people who come up with nonsense statements about the credibility of research or how researchers are supposed to spend their time.
And with ALL forms of attack, the purpose is not just to directly destroy
sure, they're destroying the ability to organize, annihilation is a long ago rejected concept. Although that was, for a long time, the accepted motivation for attack, and occasionally you have a disciple of de Jomini in command somewhere who tries that.
That's because the french were basically executing bottom level people who were easily replaced. The US killed a LOT of those guys in afghanistan and in Iraq. And it doesn't actually get you much. Drone strikes go after the relative safe havens for training where the particularly valuable people might be.
Also, if you read Triquiers "modern warfare" which is pre-eminent text on the algerian war, he advocated torture - and guess what, torture doesn't exactly make you friends. Especially so when you've signed conventions agreeing you won't do it.
Normally when you publish you either have a page limit, or have to pay for more pages (this may not be true in social sciences, I'm not sure). Adding a dozen disclaimers costs you money. It's your responsibility, as this guys work does, to state what your work is applicable to, and that generally happens.
If I write an AI paper on how to build and AI to manage an economy in a game - which is a particularly strong constraint, and then the media decides that means I'm trying to use computers to run a communist state then there's only so much you can do. The author in this case, and in general, are pretty clear about when their work applies or what it applies to. You can't get published without that usually. Putting a EULA on a paper would be about as useful as the EULA on software is today.
Studies cost money. When someone pays for a study, they usually have a desired outcome in mind.
I do studies for a living. This statement is pure bullshit and factually not true. The study might be wrong, I don't doubt that possibility, but academia starts to unravel pretty quickly if it becomes 'pay for result'. The Author is http://www.bryancprice.com/C.V.html. he's an active member of the US armed forces, so I'll grant you that there is a perception of saying what wants to be said, but if you can't read the research yourself and actually judge the quality of the work on its own then you have to leave it up to people who can, and not just claim it's a lie because it has a result you don't like.
Haven't we killed the #2 al queda guy about 47 times now? How has that been working out for us in terror organization reduction?
That's actually part of what is addressed in the paper. It is by whatever metrics he's decided to use, been working out pretty well. Although 'the egyptian' Ayman al-Zawahiri was the #2 for years until Bin Laden was killed, so it's probably the #2 in Iraq or the the #3 Al Qaeda that you're thinking of, I take your point.
You have be careful with your reaching conclusion that
studies and their derivative press releases and press pickups are intended to do.
which simply doesn't connect with the research - he specifically talks about the type of organization that can be taken apart by drones. Whether the media fabricates that into a garbage narrative isn't his fault.