While there have been quite a few negative comments regarding top science fair kids having an "in" with a university scientists or his/her graduate students, or kids "only doing it to get into a top college but being stock brokers later on," let's look at the other side of the coin here: promoting science literacy.
What better way for kids to learn about how science is done than by learning from real scienists? If some of them become Ph.D 5+ years down the road, great. Most won't, but does that really matter? What I think important is that these teens get a taste of how science works so they can become more informed consumers of scientific information. One science fair project is not going to bestow science literacy on these 16 and 17 year olds but it is a start--and a much neglected part in americas education programs IMHO.
If we had a highly science-literate population, would we really be having these intelligent design debates? I tend to doubt it. Furthermore science literacy is becoming more and more necessary just to be an informed voter, informed consumer, and all-around informed decision maker.
Re:No, you are using outdated terms here...
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Genome Surprise
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· Score: 1
Race is a mote concept. It doesn't exist.....
Race is a MOOT concept.... and that's what I get for not proofreading...
No, you are using outdated terms here...
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Genome Surprise
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Rui,
According to the theory that I, most anthrologists, most sociologists and many biologists are collectively espousing, there is no such thing as race.
Race is a term that is taxinomically applied to sub-species for living organisms. A sub-species is a geographically, ecologically or temporally separated group that exhibit pronounded morphological differences from the species.
Modern science agrees that all human beings are of the species Homo sapiens and that there are currently no living subspecies. Neanderthalensis may have been a subspecies or may have been a separate species. The jury is still out on this one but leaning, last I heard toward classifying them as another species since it is now believed that they couldn't successfully interbreed with H. sapiens.
One hundred years ago Anthropologists did a good deal of work attempting to define races in order to show that "whites" were superior to "blacks" based on skull size and such. This worked has long since been tossed in the trash. With it, so went the term race when applied to humans.
But before that happened, various 19th century scientists of European decent classified between three and a dozen races. These ideas were taken up by others who had socio-political ideas about how to utilized the concepts of race in society and now we have lots of lay people who believe in race and no (or almost no) scientists who recognize it.
I don't know where you are from but in the US we often see forms collecting government demographic data that will use the term race (perhaps they have dropped it now? But I grew up with that term on forms) and then list five or so races: caucasian, african/black, asian, american indian, asian indian, hispanic. (And hispanic is clearly an ethnicity!!).
Asian indians (people of India) have been reclassified three times in the past 100 years in the US according to race. If I remember correctly, first as caucasian because of the Indo-Aryan "connection", then as black or asian (not sure which) and then finally as their own "race." There was a period of time when it was not clear among those who classified race if Italians were racially caucasian... Do you smell socio-political motivations here?
There is no such thing as race. There IS such a thing as populations and ethnicities. And no, this isn't substituting one term for another. There are thousands of ethnicities but the highest number of races that were enumerated by naturalists in the 19th century were a dozen.
Race is a mote concept. It doesn't exist.....
On the other topic, which is a separate but related issue: migrations of people.
Sorry, people have been migrating in both small and large numbers for more than 500 years. Some migrations take 1000+ years and others have been done in less than a generation. Trade routes also open up migration routes.
While not, in my opinion, the best account of migrations, check out "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond. His writing style is a bit pedantic (to me, as a trained anthropologist, to the point of complete annoyance; to my friend, a trained mathematician, the writing style was thought provoking -- YMMV). But he tackles the big picture of how people migrated all over the earth, populated it, and how certain populations managed to either interbreed or wipe out others on many different continents over many many more years then you are talking about, sometimes with surprising speed.
All that happened very, very slowly. No single individual travelled across the world (that only started in the 15th century, and only became really common in the 20th). 20 thousand years ago, everyone lived their life in groups of similar people.
Wrong. Perhaps you need a year or two of world history, history of world civilizations and study of pre-history?
I am sorry to say that your view of the world seems to be heavily shaped by a kind of history that starts with the rise of the European powers in the 15th century as they started to shake out of the dark ages. Then, everything before that is looked at as "dark" and "backward."
Just when the Europeans were starting to get their modern sea legs (15th century), the Chinese were undergoing a political decision that changed world history for them -- they decided to retire their great navy. The Chinese had created a great fleet of ships and domintated trade routes along the Asian Pacific and Indian Ocean coasts all the way to Africa.
1000 years ago Vikings sailed to North America, first colonizing Greenland and then attempting to colonize modern day Canada but at least setting up a temporary system of resource harvesting while at the same time trading with people in the middle east. Changing weather conditions seems to be the biggest factor for them giving up on the North Atlantic trade route but they had it open for much longer than a single generation. The Vikings spend a good deal of time trading and had trade routes all over the North Atlantic (across the ocean), Northern Europe and Western Asia. Looking at my globed, they were covering a lot of ground and were doing it in a span of months/years just like the post-15th century Europeans you mentioned. They wrote about their exploits so you can read what they have to say.
Then there is the silk road which is over 2000 years old, creating a trade route from China to Europe.
There is now ample evidence showing that thousands of years ago there were boat-based trade routes going from southwestern India, up the coast and around to the middle east and then down along the coast of Africa.
There were extensive pre-historic trade routes through the middle east, north african coast and mediterranean that extended up the atlantic into Ireland many thousands of years ago.
There have been mass invasions and mass movements of people in one generation (if not 1 to 5 years) all throughout the past 10,000 years, permently changing the ethinic makeup of towns and cities through intermarriage and/or displacement.
It isn't as if in the 15th cent suddenly people started to travel the world, trade with other people and start mass resettlements all in the span of one year or one generation. This has been going on for 10,000 years.
Hit the books!!! You'll find out wonderful things about our history and pre-history. And you'll see the same themes repeated over and over again. LOL!
As people started to travel across continents (which didn't really happen until some four or five hundred years ago), new "races" were created. Some of these combinations of the "traditional" races became so common that they got their own names (ex., a child of a caucasian and a central or southern african is usually called a mestiço or mulato).
?? Until 400 to 500 years ago? Then how did the Americas get populated well over 10,000 years ago? And what about all of those modern humans who came out of Africa to populate the earth more than 40,000 years ago?
Humans are nomadic and have been wandering around the globe on foot, in boats and on horseback for tens of thousands of years. In doing so, we have been mixing here and wiping out populations there and have been doing so for millenia. It is now thought that sub-saharan Africa, which European/Americans saying is "black" in "race," had very distinct "racial" populations (including the red headed ones mentioned in an earlier post). The notion of "Native American" as a "race" is also being falsified because there is suggestive evidence that the first americans came not only over the straights in Alaska but also by sea from Australia. (note: I say "race" in quotes...)
Race, socially, is a culturally constructed concept and most anthropologists and sociologists no longer accept the term as meaningful or valid (e.g. race is semanitically void). From a biological standpoint it is not accepted by all biologists although some find the term convenient when talking about "racial" characteristics such as diseases that have genetic causes and are highly common in certain populations. Race in other species is used to speak about sub-species and there are NO EXISTING SUB-SPECIES among homo sapiens. This lack of race has been supported, so far, by the results of the genome project.
Perhaps a more useful is the term ETHNICITY, of which there are 1000s. As a population isolates itself for a period of generations within an ethnic group, they will have more similar genes than those outside of their ethnic group. This is a meaning when talking about diseases (such as Tay-Sachs among Ashkenazi Jews). Likewise, we can define ethnic supergroups (combining multiple related ethnic groups) when talking about more wide spread genetic correlations.
So what happens when a child is created by a caucasian and a central or southern african as you suggest? Well, genetically they are the start of a new ethnicity. And this is nothing new -- humans have been doing this for tens of thousands of years.
My experience has been that sci-fi inspired technology rarely 'works' as dramatized on TV. What I mean by 'works' is that even with a perfect system [as simulated by Wizard of Oz experiements], humans will not be impressed by, nor even tolerate, those technolgies.
This sounds like a pretty classic case of "technology for the sake of technology" driving development. Most people are not going to be interested in new technologies if the technology is not expressedly designed to solve one or more of their problems.
I personally think that good money is being thrown away when someone funds the development of sci fi inspired technology when it is just for the sake of doing it because it seems like an interesting product idea at the "bleeding edge" of technology. This is *quite* different from a person leveraging an interesting idea from sci fi when solving an actual problem in which people need a technological solution. In the first case, we don't have a customer, much less a customer with a problem. In the second, we have a customer with a problem and we are accessing our community's collective creativity (where the community include sci fi authors) in order to envision a solution. Big difference.
Speech driven interfaces can be very useful in certain cases. For people with accessability limitations, such technology can be a great aid if properly designed to meet their specific needs.
I just read this to my husband, a Microsoft Lead SDE from Windows NT/2000, with many years of experience shipping that product line. His comment was:
"AAAAGGGGHHHHH! I want to throttle those ad people! What the **** are they thinking. What the **** are we paying them for? We know that our security *SUCKS*. We are working *hard* to improve it. We're the most hacked system and we are trying. AAAAARGH."
My comment:
If only more technically trained people were put in a tight-loop with marketing and advertising..... grrr.
But this gets back to a greater problem... many product advertisements are from outer space when we look at them with a rational mind and, when appropriate, proper scientific background. But truth doesn't necessarily sell products.
Today, CBC national news has been asking that very question and they just took a close look at the language coming out of DC (Rummy, etc.), how the very language used in Washington is being designed to assure americans that these weapons are precion guided and fail to hit civilians.
But meanwhile, Mae Welsh, a freelance journalist working with "friends" in the region (many arab) is in Baghdad and was caught in the middle of a cruise missile attack while in a building occupied by civilians. They ran out of the building and ended up huddled down on a river bank until it was "safe" to get to a car on the street and drive like mad to a safer place. She reported that residential, commercial and government buildings are mixed together and that the city is a very dangerous place to be. Already there have been civilian casualities. Her reports are being aired on CBC television news.
People are fleeing the city. This is not the 'bloodless' surgically technical war that the folks in DC want everyone else to think.... I am quite positive that all of the CNN and other journalists have been pulled out of Baghdad because the US Gov doesn't want people to see the bloodbath that is about to take place.
Understanding how the media is and isn't working during this war definitely falls into the "news for nerds" topics that we regularly discuss here. A lot of information about this war is being distributed through the internet, which is definitely part of our nerd territory. Then there is the whole issue of media censorship and studying the spin and looking at the juxtiposition of words and images. Lot's of media analysis here to keep nerds busy for years. It's all news for nerds in my book.
But we're picking a nit here. The main issue was that I received terrible service that failed to address my problem. The added insult to injury was -- and if I had a tape recording of it you could judge for yourself -- an extremely ANNOYING business manner presented by the customer service techie.
Note -- I never said nor considered his words "excessively polite" -- that is something that you readers came up with on your own. I found his business mannerisms extremely annoying and unprofessional.
This is a cultural thing -- depends on what part of the country/world you are from. It was used at least once if not more in every darn sentence. The ma'am'ing that I was subjected to was extremely overboard, didn't sound the least bit curtious (sounded timid and nervous, to be honest) and came off as boot-licking. The more frustrated I became with his useless answers prefixed AND suffixed by ma'am, the more ma'am'img I got in return. LOL!!!! Sorry, their is true warm genuine courteousy and then there is this... I'll take the real thing, thank you, or else just give me plain ol' business speak....
Back in the 80s there was a lot of management-meets-the-anthropologists training in order to teach US managers how to interact in Japanese society. I think those who outsource their phone service oversees should invest more in cultural training. I know that some companies do (read about it -- but sorry, don't have articles handy), but they make their employees take fake US personas and pretend to live in US cities they have never visited... and that's kind of weird...
Customer-centered design TOO HARD to outsource
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U.S. Jobs Jumping Ship
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I have seen a lot of outsourcing going on, mostly to India, but to be honest, these typically aren't the most interesting jobs. Sure, they are the bread and butter for some of us but they are mostly jobs involving maintaining older code bases, debugging and testing code, doing phone support, internationalizing previously released software, and doing pure programming (not software design/engineering) of problems that have been completely spec'ed out.
IMHO, much of the really interesting work will stay in the US (and Europe) because it requires people to be close to their customers and do innovative problem solving and design. For instance, if your company/team is trying to create a new product to solve problem X for customer Y and the problem is poorly understood and poorly described, you are best off visiting the customer, spending time watching how the customer works, learning what the customer's tasks are like and how you can support them, and involving the customer in tight-loop interative design. This type of work is SO much easier when you are in the same or similar time zone as the customer. The power of being able to hop in the car to drive to their site or take a short flight to the next state (and be home in the evening) means a lot to the management of both the customer and provider.
Scheduling phone conference calls with India is a really pain in the backside. Everyone I know who has to do it gripes and bitches. Flying to India takes a long time, is very expensive and requires way more planning than driving or flying in the US/CA. Finally, if I want to be in regular communication with a customer, complete with multiple site visits, even the distance between the east and west coasts of the US can become a really pain in the rear. The distance between the US and India (the OTHER SIDE OF THE EARTH) is just too damn unbearable. I watched on company attempt to divide innovative design between India and the US and it was an unmitigated disaster, resulting in the company entering death throws.
Oh. Thanks for posting. That explains it. I have been buying dell computers and laptops for years (both through work purchase plans and on my own). I've relied on Dell's Tech Support on and off throughout the years too, perhaps once or twice a year.
Now, the bad thing was that it always took forever (30 to 60 minutes) to be put through the a tech person but the good thing was that once I got through (heck, that's what speaker phone is for;-), I'd get pretty good service. They'd walked me through my problem, answer my questions and generally come off as friendly, knowledgable and helpful people. Personally, I'd give Dell a 4 out of 5 for their service (I'm a tough grader -- they'd get a 5 if I had to wait less than 10 minutes for a techie)
AND THEN CAME MY MOST RECENT PROBLEM... So, I had a problem with a machine about a month back. One of my Inspiron's decided to have a severe disk fault that I couldn't fix and couldn't get it to boot up. So I called Dell Tech Support... and I waited 45 minutes to get someone... and the person I got was a complete boot-licking moron with questionable English.
First off, this techie must stop addressing me (or people like me) as "Yes ma'am" with a subserviant tone. I had enough of that BS with certain Indian grad students when I taught. I am not a ma'am and if anyone really wants to get under my (or most professional women's nerves) just go ahead and say "Yes ma'am" after everything I say. Geeez louise. Waddya think I am, the slave master's wife or something? Modern american convension has us all talk to each other like peers. Honorifics and all sorts of weaseling one's place in the great hierachy is history. Sorry if I sound like mega-bitch here but, man-o-man, I am still pissed about this tech call to Dell...
Second, this guy had no clue whatsoever about what my problem was. I ended up telling him after I got other people on the phone (another line, another phone, my other ear) and then used their info to search google, then search through MS's tech support website. Which then came down to me asking the Dell techie (I was livid by now) -- "ok, like how many people still have the original boot disks for their laptop after moving 2x in one year? So, if this special tool I need is on the boot/repair CD, can you FEDEX me a new one RIGHT NOW? Just send me to a purchasing agent if you have to, I'll give you my account number." My answer from him was.... after leaving me hanging to talk to his manager for a while... "Yes ma'am, that is not possible, ma'am.".... (Yes, it is not possible... yes it is not possible that I am still wasting my time after over an hour and a half...)
This had me wrankling with him for another 5 minutes to find out if this tool was something available only on the Dell CD or if I could get it off of ANY Win2000pro CD. Finally, he said any CD would do. Problem solved. Grrrr.
Really.... my issue here is that Tech Support should staff competant people who can SPEAK WITH CONFIDENCE about their product. Sure, I know people go through training, no problem. But I find it really insulting to talk with someone who has zero confidence in what they are doing and who treats the customer with such diffidence because they think of themselves as, I dunno, perhaps more lowly positioned or something because they do service for big customers. Basically, I want my tech support people to act like peers -- friendly, helpful, knowledgable, concerned, serious-about-their-job peers. Sigh.
Well, I had to vent. That Dell experience made me revise my tech service grade for them to 1 out of 5. It just plain sucked and it wasted 105 minutes of my time.
(So I went to the store the next day, and now I am typing on my sparklin' new unix-powered PowerBook G4 Apple... so sweeeeet...)
Let us not forget that a lot of modern building techniques create air-tight homes lined with primo mold-growing materials. I don't know about the rest of this (beyond Formaldehyde outgassing - cheap new carpet causes all sorts of health problems and IS NOT recommended in a house with children/babies or young pets) but the MOLD problem is very real and a very bad health hazard. If you are lucky, you'll just feel like you have a cold, are spaced-out and slighty drunk while in a moldy building. If you are unlucky, you will get life long asthma, increased allergies, various pulminary and neurological diseases plus potential loss of all your belongings.
Moldy homes are a real problem and the cause of many environmental illnesses.
Note -- a lot of insurance companies are no longer covering mold damage in policies (because it has become such an epidemic) so you need to be very vigilant. Keep your basements dry, fix leaks and replace wall board completely if it becomes infected.
As consumers, we'd like to think that all business plans are driven by the goal of satisfying customer demand but unfortunately there are many other forces that drive business plans.
At microsoft, one of the big things that gets talked about all the time is making applications "sticky." While microsoft may not be the most innovative company on the block, it has been extremely successful at making their products sticky through integration and bundling. We might (rightfully!) complain about microsoft's "not invented here" strategy yet this is mode of operations has been very useful for creating strong coupling between technologies, enhancing their stickiness. And this is just one example of business goals that are driven by something *other* than satisfying customer demand. One's business goals may also include making an entry into a market that other companies already have a foothold in -- something definitely true in IEs case.
But I have to agree with you solidily on the last point that you made: techies getting wrapped up in what they think is a great innovation. Because software is to cheap and easy to develop (compared to a car or a building, for instance), there's an awful lot of software that is based more on hype and wizz-bang ideas than on solid evaluation of what users want and need. If any of you are studying comp sci or out there making software for living, I'd highly recommend that you take some user-centered design courses (for the record, I'm taking an evening certificate program at U of Washington on UCD and it is really excellent). If you aren't familiar with UCD, google "user-centered design" and do an info-dive.)
In the very large research university I used to teach at we had senior/grad AI and Graphics courses that introduced a number of skills directly useful in the games industry. Right around the time I left to move west (and just down the street from DigiPen), a group of undergrads formed a club for game designers. Meanwhile, a professor in our Media Study Dept. received a few years of NSF funding to create video games for girls. Finally, behind the scenes, we were working on a proposal to start up an entertainment technology degree program.
So, I can tell you all that it is coming. There are people at universities who realize that this is a big deal.
BTW, besides DigiPen as an all-games U, there was Tech BC (three degree programs, all in entertainment technology) in Surrey, British Columbia... but they recently shut down and transferred all of the courses over to Simon Fraser U.:-\
While the difference of 5 to 10 degrees may not sound like much given the range of temperatures that we experience in Europe or North America just in a single day much less throughout the year, an average drop of 5 to 10 degrees is very significant and would create agricultural havok.
Crop plants are very sensitive to climative changes and have particular temperature/rainfall ranges in which they thrive. Make the local weather a little too hot, a little too cold, a little too wet or a little too dry and suddenly your fruit trees fail to produce, your vegetables wilt and your grains fail to pests, if they growq at all. Minor changes in the average temperature greatly effects the success of fungus and insects in damaging crops, allowing them to spread into new regions.
To put this into better perspective, during the peak of the last ice age, 18,000 to 20,000 years ago, the average temperature in was about 9 to 12F cooler than today. Even an average change half of that would create dramatic changes in natural plant distribution.
During the so called Little Ice Age from 1650-1850, a 3F temperature drop caused serious crop failure in Europe, leading to famine and disease. And that is just a 3F degree average drop.
Animals are also effected my temperature changes. Here on the Pacific NW coast, salmon require stream temperatures to be within a very delicate range in order to spawn. This is why cutting down trees (which shade the streams) causes a decline in salmon runs. That's just one of many examples.
Humans are much more adaptable to climate change than most other plants and animals. But with 6 billion+ mouths to feed, its not quite clear how we'd adapt to a climatic problem of this kind of scale.
As for the ocean conveyor belt, it naturally seems to have some tiny warming and cooling cycles which in turn effect rainfall and storm formation in many parts of the world. For a nice overview, go here: Climate Rides on Ocean Conveyor Belt. Over the past century+ a 20-year cycle of minor warming and cooling has been found in the conveyor belt, and supposedly the conveyor belt should be in a strong cycle right now, based of previous trends. But is it?
If global warming (natural cycles or man-made) causes too much melting of the Greenland glaciers, all of that extra fresh water poses quite a risk to the ocean conveyor belt.
Perhaps what we should be saying about the steady warming that has happened over the past 150 years is "enjoy it while it lasts."
Clearly from your posts, Mr. Razzbuten, you either are unaware of the global effect or think it your god given right to use and pollute natural resources at a rate above and beyond what the earth itself can sustain.
The total world-wide human environmental footprint is now so large that we use up resources at a rate faster than the biosphere can regenerate. The original report at the PNAS is here (you need a subscription to read the entire text) Tracking the Ecological Overshoot of the human economy. The story was summarized in news papers about a month or so ago (sorry, can't find now) but the basic message is that overall we are annually using up 120% of what the earth can regenerate. The typical American is using up 22 acres of resources, topping the list by far. If everyone on the planet lived like an American, we would need a biosphere at least 5 times as large. For comparison, there are only 4.5 acres per person for use given our *current* population.
Glaciers and large meteors are also forces of nature and look what they have done. I personally can make choices and so can you. I'm in the process of a massive yet completely doable and non-ascetic lifestyle change by selling my oversized mansion of a house, moving onto a bus line and close to an in-city farmer's market. According to the Ecological Footprint Quiz at earthday.org, the differences between my old and new dwelling, my car vs. bus use and shopping habits will have me reduce my footprint from 33 (!!) acres to 14. (I probably still fly too much on airplanes).
Your post raises a lot of questions in your interview techniques themselves. First, as another poster has mentioned, "Is friendship inherited?" and "...how do you find the missing number?" are not particularly useful indicators in language and algorithmic knowledge.
The second question raised is that you have two technical interviews and a final interview covering, I assume, more HR-styled and team-based questions. At most, you are probably talking about 3 hours (assuming each interview is 1 hr rather than 30 or 45 minutes), and that in practice is often not enough time to tell if a person interviewing well is going to work out. Sure, you can spot an obvious dud in 15 minutes or less but identifying a false positive takes the better part of an afternoon. For example, at Microsoft, a programmer typically has an HR interview followed by 4 1-hour technical/team interview, one as-appropriate, and one more return trip to HR. That's the entire day when lunch is tacked in. (Although, not everyone in the MS interview loop is as skilled as others... but that is another matter).
First, sort out the garbage candidate by doing 30 to 45 minute phone interview. Spend 5 minutes going over their overall background (right off their resume). Many people OUTRIGHT LIE on their resumes and this is much more true of students than long time professionals. Young graduate students who are about to leave with a masters degree and who have never had real job experience are famous for padding their resumes with crap. If someone says on their resume that they know Java, ask them how long they have programmed in it and what they have used it for. Don't forget to turn on your bullsh*t detector before they start speaking. After the background stuff, ask a couple of "simple" technical questions regarding data structures and algorithms. Remember, this is over the phone so you can't get too hairy where you will need a shared work surface (blackboard, whiteboard, piece of paper). Just make sure that they can verbally describe how to traverse a binary tree in order (or pre-order, or post-order) or something to that effect. If the person breezes through this in one minute, ask one question that is relevant to THE AREA OF EXPERTISE REQUIRED BY THE JOB: (multithreading and deadlock; rule-based logic programming, etc...). If the person resume need not be garbaged collected at this point, spend the final 15 minutes on the phone talking to them about your company and the job that they are applying for. Ask them if they have any questions about the job although keep things brief. Invite the 5 (give or take) most promising and inquisitive candidates to interview and assume that you will push one person through per day -- this will take an entire week.
On site interview: bring in the candidate for the better part of the day. Think 10am through 4pm. Schedule lunch with one or two team members included. You can learn a lot about someone over lunch regarding how they will fit in. Not including lunch, schedule 30 minutes to 1 hour of HR-styled interview, 2 to 3 hours of technical interview, and 1 to 2 hours of "here's how we operate" interview (which can be schedule as appropriate based on how well they have done so far).
Technical interview: DON'T waste your time with puzzles or brain teasers. DON'T waste time on programming language trivia. Instead, do the following three things: give them one _warm_up_ algorithms/data structures questions based on something that you or your team really had to implement. If someone really needed to implement a linked list and then perform some search, sort, delete, or insert and this really exists in your code base, ask them to pseudocode on the whiteboard some functions that maintain a linked list. Note, I didn't say what kind of linked list or what it will be used for. LET THEM ASK YOU for the specifications. There should be conversation about what is needed while the pseudo code is being composed on the white board. A good candidate will get through this in 15 minutes or less.
That leaves the 45 minutes left in the first of two technical interviews to ask real questions regarding the kind of code your team is implementing. I can't tell you want to ask here -- you need to figure this out yourself but, does your programmer need to do a lot of design work or will s/he being implementing from godly detailed specs handed over by someone else (who really has the time to dot the i's and cross the t's -- heck, you may be in aerospace!;-) ?? You need someone who can handle tricky multi-threaded code? Do you need someone who knows how to design and implement an interpreter? Work with natural language processing? Write fast and responsive graphical tools? Are they going to be doing API design? Ask real-world questions that mirror your own business practices to find out if the person either has the knowledge base in their head that they'll need on the job technically OR if they have related knowledge *plus* the knowing what they need to brush up on and how. I personally would prefer someone who knows how to learn and is willing to educate themselves than someone who is a one trick pony.
The second technical interview, done by someone else, can go more or less the same way. The idea is to have two different people assess the candidate's technical abilities. If you require that a person can hit the ground running in a specific language, the second technical interview can focus more on programming language skills. Ask a few straight forward questions about proper use of the language (Java: what is the difference between an abstract class and an interface? When do you use one over the other?) and pose then some straight forward design questions that can be solved with 15 minutes of code writing. Again, pick something relevant to your business. Assuming that there is time left over, pose a coding problem that you (the interviewer) recently got stuck on and just talk it out to see what they would do with it.
Third technical interview: ask the person about a recent project that they contributed to. Have them explain to you what the problem was, what the requirements were, how the solved the problem, how the solution was implemented and (if relevant) how the team worked together and how the code was maintained. Listen, ask questions. And ask yourself -- can this person explain things such that I (and others) can understand what the heck they are talking about? This trips up a lot of techical wizzes. Sure, they can code but they can't communicate. Can you afford to hire someone who can't explain things to other team members?
Heres-how-we-operate interview: Explain the job. Explain what the team does. Explain how the team operates. Explain what this person will be expected to do. Do they have questions? Are they excited about what you are telling them? Are they picking up on the subtle difficulties inherent in the position? (spent 20 to 40 minutes on this)
NEXT, tell them what their first assignment would be (or make up a real-world first assignment that is similar in nature to their actual first assignment). Ask them how they would go about attacking the problem. Schedule 20 to 45+ minutes to talk about this. Make sure that there is a conversation going on rather than them just scribbling on paper or looking off into space. You want to know HOW they think and how they plan to contribute. Talk through with them as they formulate a plan of attack.
I have greatly enjoyed prior KSR novels and I bought this one as soon as it came out rather than waiting for paperback, as I usually do. Right now I am more than half way through.
Although the premise is interesting and the book must of required a great deal of research and planning, I do not find myself terribly sympathetic to any of the characters' problems. You need to get through (or plod through) the first few chapters (the end of book 1; the novel is divided into multiple books) before you actually figure out what is the driving motivation behind the characters -- that the character who is always reincarnated as someone with a "K" name needs to work together with the others in his/her reincarnation family (jati) in order for them to all progress. While the K character isn't terribly likable, the rest of the members of the jati don't do anything that makes me want to root for their successes or get concerned for their failures. The only thing that keeps me reading is to see how the alternate history turns out, but that alone does not make a good novel.
For what it is worth, I am pretty knowledgable about world history, cultures and religions. I don't know if I would enjoy the book at all without my background knowledge.
As for the person who posted above that the writing style of the first chapter was terrible, the novel is broken down into 10 (or so) books, each with its own style, presumably reflecting the period in which it is told. Unfortunately, I feel like he only commits half-heartedly to these stylistic efforts.
Bad Idea, try a twiddler instead
on
Virtual Keyboard
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· Score: 1
From a CHI standpoint, they must handle some notion of "virtual" tactile feedback, else, how will I know where my fingers are? I can touch type quite fast on a keyboard because my fingers can FEEL the keys. I can feel the ridges on the sides of keys and indents in the middle and thus I know when I my hands are sliding out of position. I can feel the bumps on the "J" and "F" keys with my index fingers, letting me know that I am back in home position. But I often need to glance down when I am trying to strike a non-standard key. Oh yes, I have been touch typing for 20 years. What will the poor person do if they don't touch type? Most people I know don't.
As for the noise factor of keyboard clatter, I have a 2-lbs sub-notebook that is nearly silent. The sound of the air filtering system in most lecture halls or boardrooms is much louder.
If people want a SMALL keyboard that is pretty quite, they should instead try a chording "keyboard" like the Twiddler. It's quite, small, unobtrusive and it is easy to learn how to use it with a training program.
As a graphics researcher, it is important for me to be able to take demos on the road (and home, while on vacation, etc.)... And a 15.1" screen really isn't that small although I can always hook up to a larger display or projection display if needed. As for batteries, I only use them while on the airplane. I have been putting off buying a new laptop just because I have been waiting for something more powerful than the GeForce2 Go!
Slashdot Mirror
While there have been quite a few negative comments regarding top science fair kids having an "in" with a university scientists or his/her graduate students, or kids "only doing it to get into a top college but being stock brokers later on," let's look at the other side of the coin here: promoting science literacy.
What better way for kids to learn about how science is done than by learning from real scienists? If some of them become Ph.D 5+ years down the road, great. Most won't, but does that really matter? What I think important is that these teens get a taste of how science works so they can become more informed consumers of scientific information. One science fair project is not going to bestow science literacy on these 16 and 17 year olds but it is a start--and a much neglected part in americas education programs IMHO.
If we had a highly science-literate population, would we really be having these intelligent design debates? I tend to doubt it. Furthermore science literacy is becoming more and more necessary just to be an informed voter, informed consumer, and all-around informed decision maker.
Race is a mote concept. It doesn't exist. ....
Race is a MOOT concept.... and that's what I get for not proofreading...
Rui,
....
According to the theory that I, most anthrologists, most sociologists and many biologists are collectively espousing, there is no such thing as race.
Race is a term that is taxinomically applied to sub-species for living organisms. A sub-species is a geographically, ecologically or temporally separated group that exhibit pronounded morphological differences from the species.
Modern science agrees that all human beings are of the species Homo sapiens and that there are currently no living subspecies. Neanderthalensis may have been a subspecies or may have been a separate species. The jury is still out on this one but leaning, last I heard toward classifying them as another species since it is now believed that they couldn't successfully interbreed with H. sapiens.
One hundred years ago Anthropologists did a good deal of work attempting to define races in order to show that "whites" were superior to "blacks" based on skull size and such. This worked has long since been tossed in the trash. With it, so went the term race when applied to humans.
But before that happened, various 19th century scientists of European decent classified between three and a dozen races. These ideas were taken up by others who had socio-political ideas about how to utilized the concepts of race in society and now we have lots of lay people who believe in race and no (or almost no) scientists who recognize it.
I don't know where you are from but in the US we often see forms collecting government demographic data that will use the term race (perhaps they have dropped it now? But I grew up with that term on forms) and then list five or so races: caucasian, african/black, asian, american indian, asian indian, hispanic. (And hispanic is clearly an ethnicity!!).
Asian indians (people of India) have been reclassified three times in the past 100 years in the US according to race. If I remember correctly, first as caucasian because of the Indo-Aryan "connection", then as black or asian (not sure which) and then finally as their own "race." There was a period of time when it was not clear among those who classified race if Italians were racially caucasian... Do you smell socio-political motivations here?
There is no such thing as race. There IS such a thing as populations and ethnicities. And no, this isn't substituting one term for another. There are thousands of ethnicities but the highest number of races that were enumerated by naturalists in the 19th century were a dozen.
Race is a mote concept. It doesn't exist.
On the other topic, which is a separate but related issue: migrations of people.
Sorry, people have been migrating in both small and large numbers for more than 500 years. Some migrations take 1000+ years and others have been done in less than a generation. Trade routes also open up migration routes.
While not, in my opinion, the best account of migrations, check out "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond. His writing style is a bit pedantic (to me, as a trained anthropologist, to the point of complete annoyance; to my friend, a trained mathematician, the writing style was thought provoking -- YMMV). But he tackles the big picture of how people migrated all over the earth, populated it, and how certain populations managed to either interbreed or wipe out others on many different continents over many many more years then you are talking about, sometimes with surprising speed.
Good day.
All that happened very, very slowly. No single individual travelled across the world (that only started in the 15th century, and only became really common in the 20th). 20 thousand years ago, everyone lived their life in groups of similar people.
Wrong. Perhaps you need a year or two of world history, history of world civilizations and study of pre-history?
I am sorry to say that your view of the world seems to be heavily shaped by a kind of history that starts with the rise of the European powers in the 15th century as they started to shake out of the dark ages. Then, everything before that is looked at as "dark" and "backward."
Just when the Europeans were starting to get their modern sea legs (15th century), the Chinese were undergoing a political decision that changed world history for them -- they decided to retire their great navy. The Chinese had created a great fleet of ships and domintated trade routes along the Asian Pacific and Indian Ocean coasts all the way to Africa.
1000 years ago Vikings sailed to North America, first colonizing Greenland and then attempting to colonize modern day Canada but at least setting up a temporary system of resource harvesting while at the same time trading with people in the middle east. Changing weather conditions seems to be the biggest factor for them giving up on the North Atlantic trade route but they had it open for much longer than a single generation. The Vikings spend a good deal of time trading and had trade routes all over the North Atlantic (across the ocean), Northern Europe and Western Asia. Looking at my globed, they were covering a lot of ground and were doing it in a span of months/years just like the post-15th century Europeans you mentioned. They wrote about their exploits so you can read what they have to say.
Then there is the silk road which is over 2000 years old, creating a trade route from China to Europe.
There is now ample evidence showing that thousands of years ago there were boat-based trade routes going from southwestern India, up the coast and around to the middle east and then down along the coast of Africa.
There were extensive pre-historic trade routes through the middle east, north african coast and mediterranean that extended up the atlantic into Ireland many thousands of years ago.
There have been mass invasions and mass movements of people in one generation (if not 1 to 5 years) all throughout the past 10,000 years, permently changing the ethinic makeup of towns and cities through intermarriage and/or displacement.
It isn't as if in the 15th cent suddenly people started to travel the world, trade with other people and start mass resettlements all in the span of one year or one generation. This has been going on for 10,000 years.
Hit the books!!! You'll find out wonderful things about our history and pre-history. And you'll see the same themes repeated over and over again. LOL!
As people started to travel across continents (which didn't really happen until some four or five hundred years ago), new "races" were created. Some of these combinations of the "traditional" races became so common that they got their own names (ex., a child of a caucasian and a central or southern african is usually called a mestiço or mulato).
?? Until 400 to 500 years ago? Then how did the Americas get populated well over 10,000 years ago? And what about all of those modern humans who came out of Africa to populate the earth more than 40,000 years ago?
Humans are nomadic and have been wandering around the globe on foot, in boats and on horseback for tens of thousands of years. In doing so, we have been mixing here and wiping out populations there and have been doing so for millenia. It is now thought that sub-saharan Africa, which European/Americans saying is "black" in "race," had very distinct "racial" populations (including the red headed ones mentioned in an earlier post). The notion of "Native American" as a "race" is also being falsified because there is suggestive evidence that the first americans came not only over the straights in Alaska but also by sea from Australia. (note: I say "race" in quotes...)
Race, socially, is a culturally constructed concept and most anthropologists and sociologists no longer accept the term as meaningful or valid (e.g. race is semanitically void). From a biological standpoint it is not accepted by all biologists although some find the term convenient when talking about "racial" characteristics such as diseases that have genetic causes and are highly common in certain populations. Race in other species is used to speak about sub-species and there are NO EXISTING SUB-SPECIES among homo sapiens. This lack of race has been supported, so far, by the results of the genome project.
Perhaps a more useful is the term ETHNICITY, of which there are 1000s. As a population isolates itself for a period of generations within an ethnic group, they will have more similar genes than those outside of their ethnic group. This is a meaning when talking about diseases (such as Tay-Sachs among Ashkenazi Jews). Likewise, we can define ethnic supergroups (combining multiple related ethnic groups) when talking about more wide spread genetic correlations.
So what happens when a child is created by a caucasian and a central or southern african as you suggest? Well, genetically they are the start of a new ethnicity. And this is nothing new -- humans have been doing this for tens of thousands of years.
My experience has been that sci-fi inspired technology rarely 'works' as dramatized on TV. What I mean by 'works' is that even with a perfect system [as simulated by Wizard of Oz experiements], humans will not be impressed by, nor even tolerate, those technolgies.
This sounds like a pretty classic case of "technology for the sake of technology" driving development. Most people are not going to be interested in new technologies if the technology is not expressedly designed to solve one or more of their problems.
I personally think that good money is being thrown away when someone funds the development of sci fi inspired technology when it is just for the sake of doing it because it seems like an interesting product idea at the "bleeding edge" of technology. This is *quite* different from a person leveraging an interesting idea from sci fi when solving an actual problem in which people need a technological solution. In the first case, we don't have a customer, much less a customer with a problem. In the second, we have a customer with a problem and we are accessing our community's collective creativity (where the community include sci fi authors) in order to envision a solution. Big difference.
Speech driven interfaces can be very useful in certain cases. For people with accessability limitations, such technology can be a great aid if properly designed to meet their specific needs.
I just read this to my husband, a Microsoft Lead SDE from Windows NT/2000, with many years of experience shipping that product line. His comment was:
"AAAAGGGGHHHHH! I want to throttle those ad people! What the **** are they thinking. What the **** are we paying them for? We know that our security *SUCKS*. We are working *hard* to improve it. We're the most hacked system and we are trying. AAAAARGH."
My comment:
If only more technically trained people were put in a tight-loop with marketing and advertising..... grrr.
But this gets back to a greater problem... many product advertisements are from outer space when we look at them with a rational mind and, when appropriate, proper scientific background. But truth doesn't necessarily sell products.
Are your sure they are percision weapons?
... I am quite positive that all of the CNN and other journalists have been pulled out of Baghdad because the US Gov doesn't want people to see the bloodbath that is about to take place.
Today, CBC national news has been asking that very question and they just took a close look at the language coming out of DC (Rummy, etc.), how the very language used in Washington is being designed to assure americans that these weapons are precion guided and fail to hit civilians.
But meanwhile, Mae Welsh, a freelance journalist working with "friends" in the region (many arab) is in Baghdad and was caught in the middle of a cruise missile attack while in a building occupied by civilians. They ran out of the building and ended up huddled down on a river bank until it was "safe" to get to a car on the street and drive like mad to a safer place. She reported that residential, commercial and government buildings are mixed together and that the city is a very dangerous place to be. Already there have been civilian casualities. Her reports are being aired on CBC television news.
People are fleeing the city. This is not the 'bloodless' surgically technical war that the folks in DC want everyone else to think.
Understanding how the media is and isn't working during this war definitely falls into the "news for nerds" topics that we regularly discuss here. A lot of information about this war is being distributed through the internet, which is definitely part of our nerd territory. Then there is the whole issue of media censorship and studying the spin and looking at the juxtiposition of words and images. Lot's of media analysis here to keep nerds busy for years. It's all news for nerds in my book.
But we're picking a nit here. The main issue was that I received terrible service that failed to address my problem. The added insult to injury was -- and if I had a tape recording of it you could judge for yourself -- an extremely ANNOYING business manner presented by the customer service techie.
Note -- I never said nor considered his words "excessively polite" -- that is something that you readers came up with on your own. I found his business mannerisms extremely annoying and unprofessional.
PS -- I love your Rocket Scientiest sig! LOL!!
This is a cultural thing -- depends on what part of the country/world you are from. It was used at least once if not more in every darn sentence. The ma'am'ing that I was subjected to was extremely overboard, didn't sound the least bit curtious (sounded timid and nervous, to be honest) and came off as boot-licking. The more frustrated I became with his useless answers prefixed AND suffixed by ma'am, the more ma'am'img I got in return. LOL!!!! Sorry, their is true warm genuine courteousy and then there is this... I'll take the real thing, thank you, or else just give me plain ol' business speak. ...
Back in the 80s there was a lot of management-meets-the-anthropologists training in order to teach US managers how to interact in Japanese society. I think those who outsource their phone service oversees should invest more in cultural training. I know that some companies do (read about it -- but sorry, don't have articles handy), but they make their employees take fake US personas and pretend to live in US cities they have never visited... and that's kind of weird...
I have seen a lot of outsourcing going on, mostly to India, but to be honest, these typically aren't the most interesting jobs. Sure, they are the bread and butter for some of us but they are mostly jobs involving maintaining older code bases, debugging and testing code, doing phone support, internationalizing previously released software, and doing pure programming (not software design/engineering) of problems that have been completely spec'ed out.
IMHO, much of the really interesting work will stay in the US (and Europe) because it requires people to be close to their customers and do innovative problem solving and design. For instance, if your company/team is trying to create a new product to solve problem X for customer Y and the problem is poorly understood and poorly described, you are best off visiting the customer, spending time watching how the customer works, learning what the customer's tasks are like and how you can support them, and involving the customer in tight-loop interative design. This type of work is SO much easier when you are in the same or similar time zone as the customer. The power of being able to hop in the car to drive to their site or take a short flight to the next state (and be home in the evening) means a lot to the management of both the customer and provider.
Scheduling phone conference calls with India is a really pain in the backside. Everyone I know who has to do it gripes and bitches. Flying to India takes a long time, is very expensive and requires way more planning than driving or flying in the US/CA. Finally, if I want to be in regular communication with a customer, complete with multiple site visits, even the distance between the east and west coasts of the US can become a really pain in the rear. The distance between the US and India (the OTHER SIDE OF THE EARTH) is just too damn unbearable. I watched on company attempt to divide innovative design between India and the US and it was an unmitigated disaster, resulting in the company entering death throws.
Oh. Thanks for posting. That explains it. I have been buying dell computers and laptops for years (both through work purchase plans and on my own). I've relied on Dell's Tech Support on and off throughout the years too, perhaps once or twice a year.
;-), I'd get pretty good service. They'd walked me through my problem, answer my questions and generally come off as friendly, knowledgable and helpful people. Personally, I'd give Dell a 4 out of 5 for their service (I'm a tough grader -- they'd get a 5 if I had to wait less than 10 minutes for a techie)
... and I waited 45 minutes to get someone ... and the person I got was a complete boot-licking moron with questionable English.
.... after leaving me hanging to talk to his manager for a while ... "Yes ma'am, that is not possible, ma'am." .... (Yes, it is not possible... yes it is not possible that I am still wasting my time after over an hour and a half...)
Now, the bad thing was that it always took forever (30 to 60 minutes) to be put through the a tech person but the good thing was that once I got through (heck, that's what speaker phone is for
AND THEN CAME MY MOST RECENT PROBLEM... So, I had a problem with a machine about a month back. One of my Inspiron's decided to have a severe disk fault that I couldn't fix and couldn't get it to boot up. So I called Dell Tech Support
First off, this techie must stop addressing me (or people like me) as "Yes ma'am" with a subserviant tone. I had enough of that BS with certain Indian grad students when I taught. I am not a ma'am and if anyone really wants to get under my (or most professional women's nerves) just go ahead and say "Yes ma'am" after everything I say. Geeez louise. Waddya think I am, the slave master's wife or something? Modern american convension has us all talk to each other like peers. Honorifics and all sorts of weaseling one's place in the great hierachy is history. Sorry if I sound like mega-bitch here but, man-o-man, I am still pissed about this tech call to Dell...
Second, this guy had no clue whatsoever about what my problem was. I ended up telling him after I got other people on the phone (another line, another phone, my other ear) and then used their info to search google, then search through MS's tech support website. Which then came down to me asking the Dell techie (I was livid by now) -- "ok, like how many people still have the original boot disks for their laptop after moving 2x in one year? So, if this special tool I need is on the boot/repair CD, can you FEDEX me a new one RIGHT NOW? Just send me to a purchasing agent if you have to, I'll give you my account number." My answer from him was
This had me wrankling with him for another 5 minutes to find out if this tool was something available only on the Dell CD or if I could get it off of ANY Win2000pro CD. Finally, he said any CD would do. Problem solved. Grrrr.
Really.... my issue here is that Tech Support should staff competant people who can SPEAK WITH CONFIDENCE about their product. Sure, I know people go through training, no problem. But I find it really insulting to talk with someone who has zero confidence in what they are doing and who treats the customer with such diffidence because they think of themselves as, I dunno, perhaps more lowly positioned or something because they do service for big customers. Basically, I want my tech support people to act like peers -- friendly, helpful, knowledgable, concerned, serious-about-their-job peers. Sigh.
Well, I had to vent. That Dell experience made me revise my tech service grade for them to 1 out of 5. It just plain sucked and it wasted 105 minutes of my time.
(So I went to the store the next day, and now I am typing on my sparklin' new unix-powered PowerBook G4 Apple... so sweeeeet...)
Let us not forget that a lot of modern building techniques create air-tight homes lined with primo mold-growing materials. I don't know about the rest of this (beyond Formaldehyde outgassing - cheap new carpet causes all sorts of health problems and IS NOT recommended in a house with children/babies or young pets) but the MOLD problem is very real and a very bad health hazard. If you are lucky, you'll just feel like you have a cold, are spaced-out and slighty drunk while in a moldy building. If you are unlucky, you will get life long asthma, increased allergies, various pulminary and neurological diseases plus potential loss of all your belongings.
Moldy homes are a real problem and the cause of many environmental illnesses.
Note -- a lot of insurance companies are no longer covering mold damage in policies (because it has become such an epidemic) so you need to be very vigilant. Keep your basements dry, fix leaks and replace wall board completely if it becomes infected.
As consumers, we'd like to think that all business plans are driven by the goal of satisfying customer demand but unfortunately there are many other forces that drive business plans.
At microsoft, one of the big things that gets talked about all the time is making applications "sticky." While microsoft may not be the most innovative company on the block, it has been extremely successful at making their products sticky through integration and bundling. We might (rightfully!) complain about microsoft's "not invented here" strategy yet this is mode of operations has been very useful for creating strong coupling between technologies, enhancing their stickiness. And this is just one example of business goals that are driven by something *other* than satisfying customer demand. One's business goals may also include making an entry into a market that other companies already have a foothold in -- something definitely true in IEs case.
But I have to agree with you solidily on the last point that you made: techies getting wrapped up in what they think is a great innovation. Because software is to cheap and easy to develop (compared to a car or a building, for instance), there's an awful lot of software that is based more on hype and wizz-bang ideas than on solid evaluation of what users want and need. If any of you are studying comp sci or out there making software for living, I'd highly recommend that you take some user-centered design courses (for the record, I'm taking an evening certificate program at U of Washington on UCD and it is really excellent). If you aren't familiar with UCD, google "user-centered design" and do an info-dive.)
In the very large research university I used to teach at we had senior/grad AI and Graphics courses that introduced a number of skills directly useful in the games industry. Right around the time I left to move west (and just down the street from DigiPen), a group of undergrads formed a club for game designers.
... but they recently shut down and transferred all of the courses over to Simon Fraser U. :-\
Meanwhile, a professor in our Media Study Dept. received a few years of NSF funding to create video games for girls. Finally, behind the scenes, we were working on a proposal to start up an entertainment technology degree program.
So, I can tell you all that it is coming. There are people at universities who realize that this is a big deal.
BTW, besides DigiPen as an all-games U, there was Tech BC (three degree programs, all in entertainment technology) in Surrey, British Columbia
So true. The US has lost any notion of what left wing politics are. Today a centrist in the US is call a liberal leftist.
Wow! We can actually afford to buy a house and move out of this rental hole! Whooopeee!
2) We're in the longest bear market in 60 years.
Oh... but then there is the current value of our stock options. Never mind...
While the difference of 5 to 10 degrees may not sound like much given the range of temperatures that we experience in Europe or North America just in a single day much less throughout the year, an average drop of 5 to 10 degrees is very significant and would create agricultural havok.
Crop plants are very sensitive to climative changes and have particular temperature/rainfall ranges in which they thrive. Make the local weather a little too hot, a little too cold, a little too wet or a little too dry and suddenly your fruit trees fail to produce, your vegetables wilt and your grains fail to pests, if they growq at all. Minor changes in the average temperature greatly effects the success of fungus and insects in damaging crops, allowing them to spread into new regions.
To put this into better perspective, during the peak of the last ice age, 18,000 to 20,000 years ago, the average temperature in was about 9 to 12F cooler than today. Even an average change half of that would create dramatic changes in natural plant distribution.
During the so called Little Ice Age from 1650-1850, a 3F temperature drop caused serious crop failure in Europe, leading to famine and disease. And that is just a 3F degree average drop.
Animals are also effected my temperature changes. Here on the Pacific NW coast, salmon require stream temperatures to be within a very delicate range in order to spawn. This is why cutting down trees (which shade the streams) causes a decline in salmon runs. That's just one of many examples.
Humans are much more adaptable to climate change than most other plants and animals. But with 6 billion+ mouths to feed, its not quite clear how we'd adapt to a climatic problem of this kind of scale.
As for the ocean conveyor belt, it naturally seems to have some tiny warming and cooling cycles which in turn effect rainfall and storm formation in many parts of the world. For a nice overview, go here: Climate Rides on Ocean Conveyor Belt. Over the past century+ a 20-year cycle of minor warming and cooling has been found in the conveyor belt, and supposedly the conveyor belt should be in a strong cycle right now, based of previous trends. But is it?
If global warming (natural cycles or man-made) causes too much melting of the Greenland glaciers, all of that extra fresh water poses quite a risk to the ocean conveyor belt.
Perhaps what we should be saying about the steady warming that has happened over the past 150 years is "enjoy it while it lasts."
Funny, I have been laughing at you all afternoon and you don't seem to get the joke.
Human activity is now effecting the planet's ecology at levels never seen before NYTIMES: Forget Nature. Even Eden is Engineered..
The total world-wide human environmental footprint is now so large that we use up resources at a rate faster than the biosphere can regenerate. The original report at the PNAS is here (you need a subscription to read the entire text) Tracking the Ecological Overshoot of the human economy. The story was summarized in news papers about a month or so ago (sorry, can't find now) but the basic message is that overall we are annually using up 120% of what the earth can regenerate. The typical American is using up 22 acres of resources, topping the list by far. If everyone on the planet lived like an American, we would need a biosphere at least 5 times as large. For comparison, there are only 4.5 acres per person for use given our *current* population.
To learn more about sustainable living, check out Redifining Progress.
Glaciers and large meteors are also forces of nature and look what they have done. I personally can make choices and so can you. I'm in the process of a massive yet completely doable and non-ascetic lifestyle change by selling my oversized mansion of a house, moving onto a bus line and close to an in-city farmer's market. According to the Ecological Footprint Quiz at earthday.org, the differences between my old and new dwelling, my car vs. bus use and shopping habits will have me reduce my footprint from 33 (!!) acres to 14. (I probably still fly too much on airplanes).
Your post raises a lot of questions in your interview techniques themselves. First, as another poster has mentioned, "Is friendship inherited?" and "...how do you find the missing number?" are not particularly useful indicators in language and algorithmic knowledge.
The second question raised is that you have two technical interviews and a final interview covering, I assume, more HR-styled and team-based questions. At most, you are probably talking about 3 hours (assuming each interview is 1 hr rather than 30 or 45 minutes), and that in practice is often not enough time to tell if a person interviewing well is going to work out. Sure, you can spot an obvious dud in 15 minutes or less but identifying a false positive takes the better part of an afternoon. For example, at Microsoft, a programmer typically has an HR interview followed by 4 1-hour technical/team interview, one as-appropriate, and one more return trip to HR. That's the entire day when lunch is tacked in. (Although, not everyone in the MS interview loop is as skilled as others
First, sort out the garbage candidate by doing 30 to 45 minute phone interview. Spend 5 minutes going over their overall background (right off their resume). Many people OUTRIGHT LIE on their resumes and this is much more true of students than long time professionals. Young graduate students who are about to leave with a masters degree and who have never had real job experience are famous for padding their resumes with crap. If someone says on their resume that they know Java, ask them how long they have programmed in it and what they have used it for. Don't forget to turn on your bullsh*t detector before they start speaking. After the background stuff, ask a couple of "simple" technical questions regarding data structures and algorithms. Remember, this is over the phone so you can't get too hairy where you will need a shared work surface (blackboard, whiteboard, piece of paper). Just make sure that they can verbally describe how to traverse a binary tree in order (or pre-order, or post-order) or something to that effect. If the person breezes through this in one minute, ask one question that is relevant to THE AREA OF EXPERTISE REQUIRED BY THE JOB: (multithreading and deadlock; rule-based logic programming, etc...). If the person resume need not be garbaged collected at this point, spend the final 15 minutes on the phone talking to them about your company and the job that they are applying for. Ask them if they have any questions about the job although keep things brief. Invite the 5 (give or take) most promising and inquisitive candidates to interview and assume that you will push one person through per day -- this will take an entire week.
On site interview: bring in the candidate for the better part of the day. Think 10am through 4pm. Schedule lunch with one or two team members included. You can learn a lot about someone over lunch regarding how they will fit in. Not including lunch, schedule 30 minutes to 1 hour of HR-styled interview, 2 to 3 hours of technical interview, and 1 to 2 hours of "here's how we operate" interview (which can be schedule as appropriate based on how well they have done so far).
Technical interview: DON'T waste your time with puzzles or brain teasers. DON'T waste time on programming language trivia. Instead, do the following three things: give them one _warm_up_ algorithms/data structures questions based on something that you or your team really had to implement. If someone really needed to implement a linked list and then perform some search, sort, delete, or insert and this really exists in your code base, ask them to pseudocode on the whiteboard some functions that maintain a linked list. Note, I didn't say what kind of linked list or what it will be used for. LET THEM ASK YOU for the specifications. There should be conversation about what is needed while the pseudo code is being composed on the white board. A good candidate will get through this in 15 minutes or less.
That leaves the 45 minutes left in the first of two technical interviews to ask real questions regarding the kind of code your team is implementing. I can't tell you want to ask here -- you need to figure this out yourself but, does your programmer need to do a lot of design work or will s/he being implementing from godly detailed specs handed over by someone else (who really has the time to dot the i's and cross the t's -- heck, you may be in aerospace!
The second technical interview, done by someone else, can go more or less the same way. The idea is to have two different people assess the candidate's technical abilities. If you require that a person can hit the ground running in a specific language, the second technical interview can focus more on programming language skills. Ask a few straight forward questions about proper use of the language (Java: what is the difference between an abstract class and an interface? When do you use one over the other?) and pose then some straight forward design questions that can be solved with 15 minutes of code writing. Again, pick something relevant to your business. Assuming that there is time left over, pose a coding problem that you (the interviewer) recently got stuck on and just talk it out to see what they would do with it.
Third technical interview: ask the person about a recent project that they contributed to. Have them explain to you what the problem was, what the requirements were, how the solved the problem, how the solution was implemented and (if relevant) how the team worked together and how the code was maintained. Listen, ask questions. And ask yourself -- can this person explain things such that I (and others) can understand what the heck they are talking about? This trips up a lot of techical wizzes. Sure, they can code but they can't communicate. Can you afford to hire someone who can't explain things to other team members?
Heres-how-we-operate interview: Explain the job. Explain what the team does. Explain how the team operates. Explain what this person will be expected to do. Do they have questions? Are they excited about what you are telling them? Are they picking up on the subtle difficulties inherent in the position? (spent 20 to 40 minutes on this)
NEXT, tell them what their first assignment would be (or make up a real-world first assignment that is similar in nature to their actual first assignment). Ask them how they would go about attacking the problem. Schedule 20 to 45+ minutes to talk about this. Make sure that there is a conversation going on rather than them just scribbling on paper or looking off into space. You want to know HOW they think and how they plan to contribute. Talk through with them as they formulate a plan of attack.
Good luck!!
Although the premise is interesting and the book must of required a great deal of research and planning, I do not find myself terribly sympathetic to any of the characters' problems. You need to get through (or plod through) the first few chapters (the end of book 1; the novel is divided into multiple books) before you actually figure out what is the driving motivation behind the characters -- that the character who is always reincarnated as someone with a "K" name needs to work together with the others in his/her reincarnation family (jati) in order for them to all progress. While the K character isn't terribly likable, the rest of the members of the jati don't do anything that makes me want to root for their successes or get concerned for their failures. The only thing that keeps me reading is to see how the alternate history turns out, but that alone does not make a good novel.
For what it is worth, I am pretty knowledgable about world history, cultures and religions. I don't know if I would enjoy the book at all without my background knowledge.
As for the person who posted above that the writing style of the first chapter was terrible, the novel is broken down into 10 (or so) books, each with its own style, presumably reflecting the period in which it is told. Unfortunately, I feel like he only commits half-heartedly to these stylistic efforts.
As for the noise factor of keyboard clatter, I have a 2-lbs sub-notebook that is nearly silent. The sound of the air filtering system in most lecture halls or boardrooms is much louder.
If people want a SMALL keyboard that is pretty quite, they should instead try a chording "keyboard" like the Twiddler. It's quite, small, unobtrusive and it is easy to learn how to use it with a training program.
As a graphics researcher, it is important for me to be able to take demos on the road (and home, while on vacation, etc.) ... And a 15.1" screen really isn't that small although I can always hook up to a larger display or projection display if needed. As for batteries, I only use them while on the airplane. I have been putting off buying a new laptop just because I have been waiting for something more powerful than the GeForce2 Go!