Writing assignments is not that hard. And I say that having just finished preparing the tutorial and assignment for the class I'm teaching tomorrow.
This is true. Professors that use online homework because they do not want to bother are incredibly lazy in my opinion. I write my own assignments to tailor them to our lecture discussions. I will even revise homeworks based on unique questions I get every semester. I applaud you for making your own tutorial for your class. I feel this is what everyone should really do... if they had the time.
The lack of time is partly also due to the overcrowding of schools. I have known instructors to get overloaded during semesters because the university doesn't want to pay to hire another adjunct (or to make someone full-time, etc). Not condoning it, but I can sympathize, having had overloaded semesters myself. Not even necessarily overloaded with classes, but the class sizes have become so huge that maintaining your own assignments and grading them by hand is an all day affair and you simply run out of time. At some point, I just have to stop grading because I realize I haven't eaten all day, or the laundry needs done, or dishes washed, or hell, sometimes I just want to be a human and spend some time with the wife or the cats.
I like being able to give direct feedback, and to know how my class is doing myself (in an online machine-graded course, all you have is statistics, but students can cheat or get the right answer by the wrong reasoning sometimes, and you cannot have any clue what they are truly thinking unless you sit and read their papers and grade by hand), but again I can sympathize with the lack of time to do such things. There's a lot of problem with this whole education system all the way up the chain, and while I am not happy with the proliferation of shitty textbooks and online testing systems, I think we should recognize that in many cases, this is not the sign of a lazy professor but an overworked professor. We need to overhaul everything, and I will be on record stating I do not mind paying more in taxes if it goes to fund professors directly to allow class sizes to be smaller, and instructional material to be more unique. Perhaps it will only begin to change if we all start to send statements to this effect to our congresscritters.
This kind of obvious grab at making money off of poor college kids (and the districts/states that pay taxes for those kids behind the scenes) makes me unbelievably angry.
Personally, I would love to start writing textbooks and self-publish them to get around this system. I've already done some basic lecture notes in certain subjects and given them to students, I can try to write it up during free time. Are there good creative-commons or similarly licensed projects to start textbooks in many college disciplines? I would like to contribute to such a thing and "evangelize" for them, for lack of a better term.
I suppose a major roadblock to this idea is that professors/departments/universities need to be able to choose the book for the course, and need to know alternatives, and need to know they are just as good if not better. I feel like part of the stagnation is the idea that a certain text is the "ideal" for a class. When I was in graduate school, we ran into that problem a lot. Professors taught from certain books because "it is the standard, even when I was in school!". They treated it like a right of passage, even though the texts were often the worst pieces of shit I've ever read. Or rather, tried to read. They weren't readable at all. They basically taught out of reference books that assumed you already knew the subject. How do we convince them that, perhaps the book is ok as reference, but as a first taste of a subject, we need better materials? Better in content as well as price. I have already tried to argue this point with colleagues, but often they simply respond "Well this is the standard in the rest of the country". It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's used because its used. It's popular because its popular.
Kids get way too much work and never have time to be curious and learn new things that interest them.
My suggestion would be, keep school going year-round (with perhaps 2 week breaks between quarters), but SHORTEN the day. Make school 8-noon or something. Then after lunch, they have time to do homework while still enrolling in an extracurricular -- a sport, karate, ballet, robotics team, etc -- and having the time to enjoy it. Or parents can opt out of extracurriculars, and simply help their kids with homework or take them to a park/zoo/aquarium/science center/museum here and there.
For that matter, I feel like careers should be similar. 40+ hr work weeks are awful. By the time you get home and eat dinner and handle laundry, it's time to go to sleep to get up early to get ready to go back to work. There's no life in that. Our work days should be shorter too for similar reasons; time to better yourself, seek more training, be involved in politics. And as a comment above pointed out, especially in winter, WHY does EVERYONE have to work/school during the precious 8-5ish time frame while the sun is up?! We need vitamin D! But this is slightly offtopic.
I think KDE is (was?) trying to hard to emulate Windows, which places the start menu at the bottom left and clock at bottom right. Windows isn't exactly maximizing usage of those prime screen locations either.
I think KDE works fantastically if you simply move the entire panel (or whatever its called that houses the K-menu, active windows list, toolbar, clock, etc) the top of the screen. Then the menu is in top left, clock is in top right (prime real estate!), and you can treat the active windows as if they were tabs on top. The activities widget sits beneath (I haven't used it much yet, but I get the feeling its not a bad idea in general to have a one-click button to open all the programs I need at once). My workflow is so much better, and my eyes appreciate not having to look down all the time to find things. I have wondered why this isn't the default, but maybe I'm weird, or maybe they're trying to keep up with Windows feel too much still.
I had similar occur to me when I started my graduate work. In a hurry, I joined the project that seemed the most interesting to me without many questions for the supervisor about him and his work. I stupidly thought because it was interesting on paper, I would like to do it.
Unfortunately, what actually happened was that since I was the new researcher of the group, I got many terrible assignments including coming in overnight and weekends to check on things or fix equipment. When this wasn't always possible (due to schedule, etc.), I slowly gained negative reports, despite my constant communication with him regarding my situation (often I couldn't make it in, and sometimes when I did, I would be waiting for data or a report or something from another professor, whom wouldn't give it to me, and so I was sitting around twiddling thumbs as far as his project was concerned; I studied more while waiting to see if I could find my own direction, which sometimes I arrived at a conclusion which conflicted with the mentor's plan when I suggested it). One day the mentor called me in the office, effectively said he felt I wasn't committed to the project or interested in it, and he would no longer take me as a student. Thankfully I had backup contacts in the department that helped me salvage the degree under different stewardship, but it is a bitter memory.
I highly advise learning about your mentor/supervisor as much as you can up front. Ask research students how he/she acts and behaves, what work is expected and when; ask students in his/her class their opinion of them. Ask SPECIFICALLY what you will work on and what your job role/responsibilities will be. Make sure you find a relaxed environment that offers a bit of autonomy and flexibility, but a mentor that cares enough to help when you get stuck. I was with one that thought more like a manager, constantly breathing down your neck about deadlines and work to meet HIS grant deadline. Didn't give a shit about me pursuing my interests, or helping me get there. Don't get stuck in that like I did.
This has baffled me as well. Actually ODT is reasonable (can export ODT with decent success), but Google Presentation has no idea wtf an ODP is. I do not get it. Any googlers out there, please add support asap!
Nokia bought Trolltech (the original Qt developers) in 2008. I vaguely remember the articles at the time saying the reason was indeed so that Nokia could develop new GUIs for their phones. The new CEO of Nokia, Stephen Elop, became so in late 2010. Not long afterward is when the announcements started about going toward the WP7, and one by one stopping the other phone OS projects. Guess where Elop worked before taking over Nokia? Microsoft.
It's a shame that Qt has been passed around when it is such a terrific framework. I am not much of a programmer by trade, but I am by hobby, and it has been a joy to use on my personal projects. That modern KDE is so streamlined and adaptable is a testament to its abilities, and Qt 5 sounds like it will be a big leap forward.
Thankfully it is GPL, but without work, it will stagnate. I am sure many would love to contribute to it, but it is not practical to continue develop on it as hobby. Redesigning modules and all takes lots of time, and when are you supposed to do all that around your other jobs that you need to make money? I hope some corporate sponsors pick it up in some form, if not outright buying the assets/company, then at least sponsoring some hackers to work full-time on the open source version. Maybe a few KDE-centered distros will help out (SUSE?), if not KDE itself?. I'd be happy to buy a copy of the next SUSE to support development of a good distro and continued development of Qt/KDE.
I would like to know where you are so I can go teach there. Here the class sizes are going up (I've got around 40 in class at the moment), I don't get a laptops or tablets (though there is a projector and one computer for the teacher in SOME classrooms), and I WISH my salary was six figures. I'm lucky if I make six figures as a total of several years of salaries.
I guess different states, counties, districts are different, and of course there's differences between high school and post-secondary. But in my area, ALL of it is low paying and low prestige. So where are you that things sound so nice? Or is that just what you think school districts are doing?
Government should never coerce, and should have let all those fine gentlemen hang on to their way of life and their slaves in the 1800s.
For the most part, I completely agree with you. We should be free to make our own decisions and live our lives as we wish as much as is possible. But there are some issues that are bigger than us, some personal decisions that affect society as a whole, and we need someone/thing strong to make the good happen for all of society over enormous cultural resistance. It is unfortunate that humanity is so good at getting itself stuck in habits and behaviors that are self-destructive, but that is the reality, and sometimes we need a social push to get passed that limitation.
Is it going up *directly* because of the ruling, or because the perception that it will cause prices to go up and so no one will question corporate's attempt to get more money out of you for doing nothing? You bitch about government taxing you while they keep the profit and laugh. And if you fight it in government and get it repealed and give businesses/insurance companies more power to deny people that need help, they still win. They win either way. We should be more upset about the culture of greed surrounding a very humanitarian need than government taxes.
It is starting to get longer ago than I like to admit, but not terribly so... but I remember my high school days complaining about similar thing. The teachers were very keen on taking me and a few other students and forcing us into more classroom time with teachers to focus on test prep, while the other students (largely poorer; granted I wasn't exactly rich, but not badly off) had some physical education freebee or pep rally or something.
I asked the teacher once why I had to be indoors doing test prep instead of taking that time to go work on a project (I and a few friends were involved in a electronics club). She was honest and said "because the school district needs higher scores, so you need to perform better". I said "Well, wouldn't it be easier to get a higher school average if EVERYONE practices? A large number of people doing slightly better will tip the average more than me and a few others getting perfect scores.". She didn't really have a response. True story; I actually I refused to do more test prep and was sent to detention for causing a scene and disobeying... but after the administrators were gone, the teacher expressed sympathy and let me sneak out.
Anyway, I still feel that today. The smart are going to keep learning if you give them the resources and get out of their way. Why not spend more time with the people that actually the need the help?
This makes me wonder: if they do not have the time to keep up on the progress of the research groups they "manage", why should they have the authority to make decisions like tenure in the first place? i.e., more tweaks to the bureaucracy are needed, not just promotion policies.
I like your infrastructure take. That is mostly how I view it; much as government takes care of roads, communications, water, and mandates rules for things like electricity, I think the next big wave is going to be information in general. The internet needs to be regulated (in the sense of network neutrality and rules that all citizens should have access; the internet is simply too important to our lives at this point, and much work and commerce can be done online), and when it comes to scientific research, perhaps what is needed is an agency strictly in charge of cataloging our nation's research information. A government backed publisher, essentially. Post documents online for free, offer print copies mailed to you for a nominal fee. Universities already pay tons to publishers; if they re-appropriated a good fraction of that cost to government to run a public server to host it, perhaps you won't even need to raise any taxes or the like. Hell, once the server infrastructure is set up, it would probably be a huge net savings to universities and therefore the states and the general public.
Most reviewers aren't paid; I imagine many professors would gladly volunteer for a non-profit entity than the publishers to which they already volunteer. Really what makes journals great are the editors and quality of the reviewers; if you can get these quickly, then the government publisher will really take off and break the stranglehold on publishing from the titans. They will then be forced to adapt their practices if they want to continue to exist into the long term.
That's the idea that's been kicking in my head anyway.
An anecdote: I judged at a middle and high school science/engineering fair myself once, a few years ago now. It was an... interesting experience. Before the judging began, we held a meeting in which the lead judge reminded jurors to "pick winners based on creativity and hard work of the CHILD, not the parents". Whenever possible, we tried to interview the kids to see if they had any inkling of the project contents; this was usually the best way to determine if the parents did the project or not.
From what I saw that day, I would say half at best did the work themselves. One kid even admitted that his dad was an engineer and came up with the design, and he more or less just watched and took down notes (the parents had walked off when I came to his booth, so I guess they weren't around to stop him from being an honest little kid). I didn't even get the impression that he liked it much; more that the parents pushed him to doing it.
I did not want to discourage interest in science, especially if the parents are really trying hard to encourage their kids, but at the end of the day I awarded my votes to the less visually impressive projects that were very obviously done by the kids. One was a simple experiment with growing plants in certain soil conditions. I can't remember exactly what the additive was. But nothing fancy. But here we got to the booth and the kid was beaming and excited to show off the plants, and demonstrated a decent grasp of scientific method (trying to control conditions, etc.). I gave her more points than the equivalent of the "quantum qubits" project.
I haven't tried doing it again since then because honestly it made me feel discouraged. There were very few students truly interested in doing a science project, that were able to find a project interesting to them. Most of the projects struck me as either "completely cobbled together last minute in order to prevent a failing grade in science class", or "forced to do a particular project by overbearing parents that want the most spectacular project possible". I can see where it is very hard to judge in that environment because the helicopter parents will demand 1st prize when their kids don't deserve it. The fact that I was allowed to be a "secret" judge helped a bit that particular time. I imagine most people just thought I was a curious parent wandering around asking basic questions.
I have a question that I haven't been able to get anyone to directly answer without some vague hand-waving of "no one will go for it" or "I think that's illegal".
To say the best social program is a job, makes a lot of sense. It's true. The problem comes in when jobs cannot be found. Businesses will do what's in their best interest and take care of themselves, which might mean NOT hiring anyone to keep their bottom line doing well. So how do you force people to get jobs when you can't find them? First-hand and second-hand, I know that hard-working perfectly qualified people are being turned away because of lack of funds, lack of interest, or simply oversupply of qualified people. It is hard to get a job when you are just starting out when there are older people with 30 years experience competing with you for the same job, for example.
My Point: why does it have to be a free government handout? Why not a stopgap where, in order to earn your welfare/unemployment check, you submit documentation to your city/county/state that you performed say 20 hrs of community service that week? Work as a school cross guard, pick up trash from the highways, clean up parks and build new playground equipment for the kids, be a mentor, something. Even better, how about work a few hours a week repairing/building roads, bridges, other infrastructure needed. Effectively, until businesses want to hire, why not let government hire temporary workers to deal with all of the problems in the country? Two birds with one stone.
5) idiots in HR demand degrees to apply for the job even though a Degree has no use for the position.
I wish it was that simple. Not only do they require degrees, but most of the hiring managers I have spoken with seem to have this delusion that someone in their 20s can have 10 years of experience in a technical field. I realize it's a bit of a wish list in a sense (as in, they'll ultimately take someone with less experience if hard-pressed), but that's exactly the issue -- they have to be hard-pressed to find someone before they take a youngin'. So the youngin' never finds a quality job in a technical field, and so doesn't build up the experience to even go back and apply for that job a couple years later after some field experience. Instead, the long-term outlook feels more like "stuck at whatever minimal job you can get". You can't even save up money to move where there are better jobs or anything, because you have a low-paying entry-level non-technical job that doesn't give holidays, benefits, or enough money to do much more than pay the rent and a minimal payment on your student loans.
It is incredibly depressing to be young in this climate, especially when you see (as is evident in the discussion on this article) that the elder generation of the country doesn't seem to think it's a problem.
I don't know if it was just the local branch or if its nationwide policy, but I know 1st-hand and 2nd-hand (people that worked there, etc.) that the managers were incredibly pushy on the sales reps to essentially harass customers and find out how much money they had, then upsell as much as possible. Especially for people obviously not knowledgeable on the topic. If you didn't push the more expensive version or the extended warranty or whatever, the managers came down hard on you. Terrible environment. I refuse to ever shop there again.
Wisdom teeth for one. One of mine never broke thru the gum, so my dentist x-rayed me to see where it was because I had such awful jaw pains. It was sideways! Literally sideways pressing into the tooth next to it. I obviously had oral surgery not long after that. I wish I had a picture of that xray, it really amused me.
I think that's his point. Lots of people want IT-type jobs, and go for a CS degree because they mistakenly leave off the word "science" when they read "computer science". "Oh a degree in computers! That's what I want to do". You can get an associates learning networking and programming and the like, CS will make you do a lot more theory that isn't really the goal of many students in the program. They just don't understand the difference, or that several options exist depending on goals and interests.
We really do a terrible job in the US of explaining to students the possibilities and letting them go with the best option. It's easier to funnel people into pet programs I suppose, than give any real academic advising.
I believe part of the problem with the BP oil spill was that it wasn't supposed to happen either. I remember reading reports and attending a few seminars (from researchers studying the event and effects on the gulf coast) where all the evidence pointed to the fact that the disaster may not have happened if basic safety protocols were followed.
In other words, it was a disaster once it got to the point of spraying all over the ocean floor. But there were several safety valves and sensors and even people taking shifts to monitor equipment that weren't utilized properly or installed properly that could have signaled something was happening and allowed a safe shut off before it was out of control.
tl;dr: It was within our capability to prevent, but poor decisions and planning caused it to happen anyway.
I think it's justified to ask for even more protections before agreeing to a pipeline. If they kick and scream, tell them we would have been glad to let the industry self-regulate more but they've proven themselves untrustworthy and have to earn it back.
I believe that is pretty typical -- again somewhat anecdotal, based on me and my family/friends. But especially in the current job climate, it is hard to pay the bills, I don't have 100s of dollars to throw around at a few new books, no matter how much I like them. I wouldn't mind tossing $3-5 at a book here and there though. So that's 0 books to several a year if they dropped ebook prices a good $10 (or more, depending on title of course).
You can have the best book in existence, but if no one hears about it, no one will ever buy it. It's entirely possible to publish on your own, on a personal website, with a paypal or visa shopping cart or something attached to take orders. What publishers do is get exposure. Even just on amazon.com, maybe they don't directly advertise you, but if someone searches for books, yours will pop up in there somewhere. How do people know to go to your personal website if you are a new unknown author?
It is feasible to do entirely on your own when you are a popular author, but someone starting out new still needs an advertising boost of some sort, or at least listed in a catalog most people know about to make it somewhat easier to discover. However, ebooks should be incredibly cheaper, given that as you pointed out, "publishers" don't really have to publish (or even edit, in some cases) anything. They simply add you to the catalog and handle the sales, and send you royalties. Their cut for something that is essentially automatic (handled by servers) should be much lower than the companies seem to think they deserve.
He's talking Radeon and Catalyst, that's AMD stuff not NVIDIA. The AMD drivers have been horrible for me every time I've ever used them. I haven't bought an AMD card in a few years because of that nonsense.
I have terrific experience with NVIDIA in linux, both the open source driver and proprietary driver. On OpenSUSE, NVIDIA has repositories set up that go with the current kernel of SUSE. Updates flawlessly when you do a dist upgrade. Really terrific. When I installed 12.1 though I left the default open source driver as i didn't need the fancier driver for 3D much. So maybe its changed in past few months, but I have always appreciated the effort they seem to put in.
That is a partial assessment, but one must keep in mind how voting is done. I'm sure it varies county to county and what not, but typically you get one day to vote, usually in the middle of the week (Tuesday) when everyone is working, and the polls don't even stay open that long after the typical 5pm end of work shift.
What you can end up with is people that are willing to be involved but are discouraged from participating, and sometimes even completely unable to participate. I have known people to get scheduled for double-shifts quite easily, and without election day being a federal/state/local holiday, plenty work the entire day from before the polls open to after they close.
When elections are a mandated holiday of some sort, or at the least spread out to an entire weekend (probably makes more sense for weekends than weekdays anyway, the majority of people would have some free time at some point during a weekend), and the voter turnout is STILL lower than 50%, then we can go with your assessment. But until then, I can't help but feel a large segment of the population is shut out from a say -- and these are students that work crap jobs to get by (but fairly well educated, and remember that non-traditional students make up a large part of education now, I am not talking about just 18 year olds out of high school), or people that are well-educated but simply can't make enough money to pay the bills (several of my family members and friends have degrees but have had to settle for various side-jobs or low-paying jobs until a good one comes through, meaning often that you have to take up two or three jobs to pay all the bills and loans off and keep the family fed). It's not a simple situation.
Of course, being available to vote is one thing. But a holiday won't help if those people have 3 jobs normally and never have time to keep on political developments and learn enough information to have a good say. I would advocate some sort of holiday weekend where no one is allowed to work more than say 10 hours the entire weekend, supplement people with unemployment or tax breaks or something, and encourage them to spend free time that weekend attending caucus-type meetings at their local library, or at least read the paper and have discussion groups. Follow that up with an observed Monday holiday to vote, and maybe will start to swing things. I don't claim to have a complete answer, naturally there's lots of logistics, but hey maybe this will get the ball rolling on a good idea.
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Writing assignments is not that hard. And I say that having just finished preparing the tutorial and assignment for the class I'm teaching tomorrow.
This is true. Professors that use online homework because they do not want to bother are incredibly lazy in my opinion. I write my own assignments to tailor them to our lecture discussions. I will even revise homeworks based on unique questions I get every semester. I applaud you for making your own tutorial for your class. I feel this is what everyone should really do... if they had the time.
The lack of time is partly also due to the overcrowding of schools. I have known instructors to get overloaded during semesters because the university doesn't want to pay to hire another adjunct (or to make someone full-time, etc). Not condoning it, but I can sympathize, having had overloaded semesters myself. Not even necessarily overloaded with classes, but the class sizes have become so huge that maintaining your own assignments and grading them by hand is an all day affair and you simply run out of time. At some point, I just have to stop grading because I realize I haven't eaten all day, or the laundry needs done, or dishes washed, or hell, sometimes I just want to be a human and spend some time with the wife or the cats.
I like being able to give direct feedback, and to know how my class is doing myself (in an online machine-graded course, all you have is statistics, but students can cheat or get the right answer by the wrong reasoning sometimes, and you cannot have any clue what they are truly thinking unless you sit and read their papers and grade by hand), but again I can sympathize with the lack of time to do such things. There's a lot of problem with this whole education system all the way up the chain, and while I am not happy with the proliferation of shitty textbooks and online testing systems, I think we should recognize that in many cases, this is not the sign of a lazy professor but an overworked professor. We need to overhaul everything, and I will be on record stating I do not mind paying more in taxes if it goes to fund professors directly to allow class sizes to be smaller, and instructional material to be more unique. Perhaps it will only begin to change if we all start to send statements to this effect to our congresscritters.
This kind of obvious grab at making money off of poor college kids (and the districts/states that pay taxes for those kids behind the scenes) makes me unbelievably angry.
Personally, I would love to start writing textbooks and self-publish them to get around this system. I've already done some basic lecture notes in certain subjects and given them to students, I can try to write it up during free time. Are there good creative-commons or similarly licensed projects to start textbooks in many college disciplines? I would like to contribute to such a thing and "evangelize" for them, for lack of a better term.
I suppose a major roadblock to this idea is that professors/departments/universities need to be able to choose the book for the course, and need to know alternatives, and need to know they are just as good if not better. I feel like part of the stagnation is the idea that a certain text is the "ideal" for a class. When I was in graduate school, we ran into that problem a lot. Professors taught from certain books because "it is the standard, even when I was in school!". They treated it like a right of passage, even though the texts were often the worst pieces of shit I've ever read. Or rather, tried to read. They weren't readable at all. They basically taught out of reference books that assumed you already knew the subject. How do we convince them that, perhaps the book is ok as reference, but as a first taste of a subject, we need better materials? Better in content as well as price. I have already tried to argue this point with colleagues, but often they simply respond "Well this is the standard in the rest of the country". It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's used because its used. It's popular because its popular.
Kids get way too much work and never have time to be curious and learn new things that interest them.
My suggestion would be, keep school going year-round (with perhaps 2 week breaks between quarters), but SHORTEN the day. Make school 8-noon or something. Then after lunch, they have time to do homework while still enrolling in an extracurricular -- a sport, karate, ballet, robotics team, etc -- and having the time to enjoy it. Or parents can opt out of extracurriculars, and simply help their kids with homework or take them to a park/zoo/aquarium/science center/museum here and there.
For that matter, I feel like careers should be similar. 40+ hr work weeks are awful. By the time you get home and eat dinner and handle laundry, it's time to go to sleep to get up early to get ready to go back to work. There's no life in that. Our work days should be shorter too for similar reasons; time to better yourself, seek more training, be involved in politics. And as a comment above pointed out, especially in winter, WHY does EVERYONE have to work/school during the precious 8-5ish time frame while the sun is up?! We need vitamin D! But this is slightly offtopic.
I think KDE is (was?) trying to hard to emulate Windows, which places the start menu at the bottom left and clock at bottom right. Windows isn't exactly maximizing usage of those prime screen locations either.
I think KDE works fantastically if you simply move the entire panel (or whatever its called that houses the K-menu, active windows list, toolbar, clock, etc) the top of the screen. Then the menu is in top left, clock is in top right (prime real estate!), and you can treat the active windows as if they were tabs on top. The activities widget sits beneath (I haven't used it much yet, but I get the feeling its not a bad idea in general to have a one-click button to open all the programs I need at once). My workflow is so much better, and my eyes appreciate not having to look down all the time to find things. I have wondered why this isn't the default, but maybe I'm weird, or maybe they're trying to keep up with Windows feel too much still.
I had similar occur to me when I started my graduate work. In a hurry, I joined the project that seemed the most interesting to me without many questions for the supervisor about him and his work. I stupidly thought because it was interesting on paper, I would like to do it.
Unfortunately, what actually happened was that since I was the new researcher of the group, I got many terrible assignments including coming in overnight and weekends to check on things or fix equipment. When this wasn't always possible (due to schedule, etc.), I slowly gained negative reports, despite my constant communication with him regarding my situation (often I couldn't make it in, and sometimes when I did, I would be waiting for data or a report or something from another professor, whom wouldn't give it to me, and so I was sitting around twiddling thumbs as far as his project was concerned; I studied more while waiting to see if I could find my own direction, which sometimes I arrived at a conclusion which conflicted with the mentor's plan when I suggested it). One day the mentor called me in the office, effectively said he felt I wasn't committed to the project or interested in it, and he would no longer take me as a student. Thankfully I had backup contacts in the department that helped me salvage the degree under different stewardship, but it is a bitter memory.
I highly advise learning about your mentor/supervisor as much as you can up front. Ask research students how he/she acts and behaves, what work is expected and when; ask students in his/her class their opinion of them. Ask SPECIFICALLY what you will work on and what your job role/responsibilities will be. Make sure you find a relaxed environment that offers a bit of autonomy and flexibility, but a mentor that cares enough to help when you get stuck. I was with one that thought more like a manager, constantly breathing down your neck about deadlines and work to meet HIS grant deadline. Didn't give a shit about me pursuing my interests, or helping me get there. Don't get stuck in that like I did.
This has baffled me as well. Actually ODT is reasonable (can export ODT with decent success), but Google Presentation has no idea wtf an ODP is. I do not get it. Any googlers out there, please add support asap!
When you read the history, it makes more sense.
Nokia bought Trolltech (the original Qt developers) in 2008. I vaguely remember the articles at the time saying the reason was indeed so that Nokia could develop new GUIs for their phones. The new CEO of Nokia, Stephen Elop, became so in late 2010. Not long afterward is when the announcements started about going toward the WP7, and one by one stopping the other phone OS projects. Guess where Elop worked before taking over Nokia? Microsoft.
It's a shame that Qt has been passed around when it is such a terrific framework. I am not much of a programmer by trade, but I am by hobby, and it has been a joy to use on my personal projects. That modern KDE is so streamlined and adaptable is a testament to its abilities, and Qt 5 sounds like it will be a big leap forward.
Thankfully it is GPL, but without work, it will stagnate. I am sure many would love to contribute to it, but it is not practical to continue develop on it as hobby. Redesigning modules and all takes lots of time, and when are you supposed to do all that around your other jobs that you need to make money? I hope some corporate sponsors pick it up in some form, if not outright buying the assets/company, then at least sponsoring some hackers to work full-time on the open source version. Maybe a few KDE-centered distros will help out (SUSE?), if not KDE itself?. I'd be happy to buy a copy of the next SUSE to support development of a good distro and continued development of Qt/KDE.
I would like to know where you are so I can go teach there. Here the class sizes are going up (I've got around 40 in class at the moment), I don't get a laptops or tablets (though there is a projector and one computer for the teacher in SOME classrooms), and I WISH my salary was six figures. I'm lucky if I make six figures as a total of several years of salaries.
I guess different states, counties, districts are different, and of course there's differences between high school and post-secondary. But in my area, ALL of it is low paying and low prestige. So where are you that things sound so nice? Or is that just what you think school districts are doing?
Government should never coerce, and should have let all those fine gentlemen hang on to their way of life and their slaves in the 1800s.
For the most part, I completely agree with you. We should be free to make our own decisions and live our lives as we wish as much as is possible. But there are some issues that are bigger than us, some personal decisions that affect society as a whole, and we need someone/thing strong to make the good happen for all of society over enormous cultural resistance. It is unfortunate that humanity is so good at getting itself stuck in habits and behaviors that are self-destructive, but that is the reality, and sometimes we need a social push to get passed that limitation.
I'm pretty sure women are also paying premiums, some of which ultimately go to your future prostate exams.
Is it going up *directly* because of the ruling, or because the perception that it will cause prices to go up and so no one will question corporate's attempt to get more money out of you for doing nothing? You bitch about government taxing you while they keep the profit and laugh. And if you fight it in government and get it repealed and give businesses/insurance companies more power to deny people that need help, they still win. They win either way. We should be more upset about the culture of greed surrounding a very humanitarian need than government taxes.
It is starting to get longer ago than I like to admit, but not terribly so... but I remember my high school days complaining about similar thing. The teachers were very keen on taking me and a few other students and forcing us into more classroom time with teachers to focus on test prep, while the other students (largely poorer; granted I wasn't exactly rich, but not badly off) had some physical education freebee or pep rally or something.
I asked the teacher once why I had to be indoors doing test prep instead of taking that time to go work on a project (I and a few friends were involved in a electronics club). She was honest and said "because the school district needs higher scores, so you need to perform better". I said "Well, wouldn't it be easier to get a higher school average if EVERYONE practices? A large number of people doing slightly better will tip the average more than me and a few others getting perfect scores.". She didn't really have a response. True story; I actually I refused to do more test prep and was sent to detention for causing a scene and disobeying... but after the administrators were gone, the teacher expressed sympathy and let me sneak out.
Anyway, I still feel that today. The smart are going to keep learning if you give them the resources and get out of their way. Why not spend more time with the people that actually the need the help?
This makes me wonder: if they do not have the time to keep up on the progress of the research groups they "manage", why should they have the authority to make decisions like tenure in the first place? i.e., more tweaks to the bureaucracy are needed, not just promotion policies.
I like your infrastructure take. That is mostly how I view it; much as government takes care of roads, communications, water, and mandates rules for things like electricity, I think the next big wave is going to be information in general. The internet needs to be regulated (in the sense of network neutrality and rules that all citizens should have access; the internet is simply too important to our lives at this point, and much work and commerce can be done online), and when it comes to scientific research, perhaps what is needed is an agency strictly in charge of cataloging our nation's research information. A government backed publisher, essentially. Post documents online for free, offer print copies mailed to you for a nominal fee. Universities already pay tons to publishers; if they re-appropriated a good fraction of that cost to government to run a public server to host it, perhaps you won't even need to raise any taxes or the like. Hell, once the server infrastructure is set up, it would probably be a huge net savings to universities and therefore the states and the general public.
Most reviewers aren't paid; I imagine many professors would gladly volunteer for a non-profit entity than the publishers to which they already volunteer. Really what makes journals great are the editors and quality of the reviewers; if you can get these quickly, then the government publisher will really take off and break the stranglehold on publishing from the titans. They will then be forced to adapt their practices if they want to continue to exist into the long term.
That's the idea that's been kicking in my head anyway.
An anecdote: I judged at a middle and high school science/engineering fair myself once, a few years ago now. It was an ... interesting experience. Before the judging began, we held a meeting in which the lead judge reminded jurors to "pick winners based on creativity and hard work of the CHILD, not the parents". Whenever possible, we tried to interview the kids to see if they had any inkling of the project contents; this was usually the best way to determine if the parents did the project or not.
From what I saw that day, I would say half at best did the work themselves. One kid even admitted that his dad was an engineer and came up with the design, and he more or less just watched and took down notes (the parents had walked off when I came to his booth, so I guess they weren't around to stop him from being an honest little kid). I didn't even get the impression that he liked it much; more that the parents pushed him to doing it.
I did not want to discourage interest in science, especially if the parents are really trying hard to encourage their kids, but at the end of the day I awarded my votes to the less visually impressive projects that were very obviously done by the kids. One was a simple experiment with growing plants in certain soil conditions. I can't remember exactly what the additive was. But nothing fancy. But here we got to the booth and the kid was beaming and excited to show off the plants, and demonstrated a decent grasp of scientific method (trying to control conditions, etc.). I gave her more points than the equivalent of the "quantum qubits" project.
I haven't tried doing it again since then because honestly it made me feel discouraged. There were very few students truly interested in doing a science project, that were able to find a project interesting to them. Most of the projects struck me as either "completely cobbled together last minute in order to prevent a failing grade in science class", or "forced to do a particular project by overbearing parents that want the most spectacular project possible". I can see where it is very hard to judge in that environment because the helicopter parents will demand 1st prize when their kids don't deserve it. The fact that I was allowed to be a "secret" judge helped a bit that particular time. I imagine most people just thought I was a curious parent wandering around asking basic questions.
I have a question that I haven't been able to get anyone to directly answer without some vague hand-waving of "no one will go for it" or "I think that's illegal".
To say the best social program is a job, makes a lot of sense. It's true. The problem comes in when jobs cannot be found. Businesses will do what's in their best interest and take care of themselves, which might mean NOT hiring anyone to keep their bottom line doing well. So how do you force people to get jobs when you can't find them? First-hand and second-hand, I know that hard-working perfectly qualified people are being turned away because of lack of funds, lack of interest, or simply oversupply of qualified people. It is hard to get a job when you are just starting out when there are older people with 30 years experience competing with you for the same job, for example.
My Point: why does it have to be a free government handout? Why not a stopgap where, in order to earn your welfare/unemployment check, you submit documentation to your city/county/state that you performed say 20 hrs of community service that week? Work as a school cross guard, pick up trash from the highways, clean up parks and build new playground equipment for the kids, be a mentor, something. Even better, how about work a few hours a week repairing/building roads, bridges, other infrastructure needed. Effectively, until businesses want to hire, why not let government hire temporary workers to deal with all of the problems in the country? Two birds with one stone.
5) idiots in HR demand degrees to apply for the job even though a Degree has no use for the position.
I wish it was that simple. Not only do they require degrees, but most of the hiring managers I have spoken with seem to have this delusion that someone in their 20s can have 10 years of experience in a technical field. I realize it's a bit of a wish list in a sense (as in, they'll ultimately take someone with less experience if hard-pressed), but that's exactly the issue -- they have to be hard-pressed to find someone before they take a youngin'. So the youngin' never finds a quality job in a technical field, and so doesn't build up the experience to even go back and apply for that job a couple years later after some field experience. Instead, the long-term outlook feels more like "stuck at whatever minimal job you can get". You can't even save up money to move where there are better jobs or anything, because you have a low-paying entry-level non-technical job that doesn't give holidays, benefits, or enough money to do much more than pay the rent and a minimal payment on your student loans.
It is incredibly depressing to be young in this climate, especially when you see (as is evident in the discussion on this article) that the elder generation of the country doesn't seem to think it's a problem.
I don't know if it was just the local branch or if its nationwide policy, but I know 1st-hand and 2nd-hand (people that worked there, etc.) that the managers were incredibly pushy on the sales reps to essentially harass customers and find out how much money they had, then upsell as much as possible. Especially for people obviously not knowledgeable on the topic. If you didn't push the more expensive version or the extended warranty or whatever, the managers came down hard on you. Terrible environment. I refuse to ever shop there again.
Wisdom teeth for one. One of mine never broke thru the gum, so my dentist x-rayed me to see where it was because I had such awful jaw pains. It was sideways! Literally sideways pressing into the tooth next to it. I obviously had oral surgery not long after that. I wish I had a picture of that xray, it really amused me.
I think that's his point. Lots of people want IT-type jobs, and go for a CS degree because they mistakenly leave off the word "science" when they read "computer science". "Oh a degree in computers! That's what I want to do". You can get an associates learning networking and programming and the like, CS will make you do a lot more theory that isn't really the goal of many students in the program. They just don't understand the difference, or that several options exist depending on goals and interests.
We really do a terrible job in the US of explaining to students the possibilities and letting them go with the best option. It's easier to funnel people into pet programs I suppose, than give any real academic advising.
I believe part of the problem with the BP oil spill was that it wasn't supposed to happen either. I remember reading reports and attending a few seminars (from researchers studying the event and effects on the gulf coast) where all the evidence pointed to the fact that the disaster may not have happened if basic safety protocols were followed.
In other words, it was a disaster once it got to the point of spraying all over the ocean floor. But there were several safety valves and sensors and even people taking shifts to monitor equipment that weren't utilized properly or installed properly that could have signaled something was happening and allowed a safe shut off before it was out of control.
tl;dr: It was within our capability to prevent, but poor decisions and planning caused it to happen anyway.
I think it's justified to ask for even more protections before agreeing to a pipeline. If they kick and scream, tell them we would have been glad to let the industry self-regulate more but they've proven themselves untrustworthy and have to earn it back.
I believe that is pretty typical -- again somewhat anecdotal, based on me and my family/friends. But especially in the current job climate, it is hard to pay the bills, I don't have 100s of dollars to throw around at a few new books, no matter how much I like them. I wouldn't mind tossing $3-5 at a book here and there though. So that's 0 books to several a year if they dropped ebook prices a good $10 (or more, depending on title of course).
You can have the best book in existence, but if no one hears about it, no one will ever buy it. It's entirely possible to publish on your own, on a personal website, with a paypal or visa shopping cart or something attached to take orders. What publishers do is get exposure. Even just on amazon.com, maybe they don't directly advertise you, but if someone searches for books, yours will pop up in there somewhere. How do people know to go to your personal website if you are a new unknown author?
It is feasible to do entirely on your own when you are a popular author, but someone starting out new still needs an advertising boost of some sort, or at least listed in a catalog most people know about to make it somewhat easier to discover. However, ebooks should be incredibly cheaper, given that as you pointed out, "publishers" don't really have to publish (or even edit, in some cases) anything. They simply add you to the catalog and handle the sales, and send you royalties. Their cut for something that is essentially automatic (handled by servers) should be much lower than the companies seem to think they deserve.
He's talking Radeon and Catalyst, that's AMD stuff not NVIDIA. The AMD drivers have been horrible for me every time I've ever used them. I haven't bought an AMD card in a few years because of that nonsense.
I have terrific experience with NVIDIA in linux, both the open source driver and proprietary driver. On OpenSUSE, NVIDIA has repositories set up that go with the current kernel of SUSE. Updates flawlessly when you do a dist upgrade. Really terrific. When I installed 12.1 though I left the default open source driver as i didn't need the fancier driver for 3D much. So maybe its changed in past few months, but I have always appreciated the effort they seem to put in.
That is a partial assessment, but one must keep in mind how voting is done. I'm sure it varies county to county and what not, but typically you get one day to vote, usually in the middle of the week (Tuesday) when everyone is working, and the polls don't even stay open that long after the typical 5pm end of work shift.
What you can end up with is people that are willing to be involved but are discouraged from participating, and sometimes even completely unable to participate. I have known people to get scheduled for double-shifts quite easily, and without election day being a federal/state/local holiday, plenty work the entire day from before the polls open to after they close.
When elections are a mandated holiday of some sort, or at the least spread out to an entire weekend (probably makes more sense for weekends than weekdays anyway, the majority of people would have some free time at some point during a weekend), and the voter turnout is STILL lower than 50%, then we can go with your assessment. But until then, I can't help but feel a large segment of the population is shut out from a say -- and these are students that work crap jobs to get by (but fairly well educated, and remember that non-traditional students make up a large part of education now, I am not talking about just 18 year olds out of high school), or people that are well-educated but simply can't make enough money to pay the bills (several of my family members and friends have degrees but have had to settle for various side-jobs or low-paying jobs until a good one comes through, meaning often that you have to take up two or three jobs to pay all the bills and loans off and keep the family fed). It's not a simple situation.
Of course, being available to vote is one thing. But a holiday won't help if those people have 3 jobs normally and never have time to keep on political developments and learn enough information to have a good say. I would advocate some sort of holiday weekend where no one is allowed to work more than say 10 hours the entire weekend, supplement people with unemployment or tax breaks or something, and encourage them to spend free time that weekend attending caucus-type meetings at their local library, or at least read the paper and have discussion groups. Follow that up with an observed Monday holiday to vote, and maybe will start to swing things. I don't claim to have a complete answer, naturally there's lots of logistics, but hey maybe this will get the ball rolling on a good idea.