I typically get the feeling the young are stuck between a rock and a hard place for STEM careers. On the one hand we are told over and over that these are important jobs. But then when you go to apply for them, you are told you are too young and need more experience and can't hire you. "Well, can you train me?" "No, you just have to get experience, or go back to school." So you go back to school, and they tell you "Well we don't do job training, our focus is how to *think* and learn the principles needed. Go get a job if you want experience." And so you end up in a bizarre catch-22 where everyone expects you to know everything at a young age, but no one is willing to provide the training you need to get there. It's as if they think scientists grow on trees and you just wait for them to ripen and apply for a job, with their analytical skills and knowledge fully formed. Maybe that was possible in some sense during the baby boom, when it was also more patriotic to go into a STEM field to fight the commies, but today you have to work for it and provide incentives. There are less people for each job, not more.
Either these are important jobs employers need to support more (with leniency on the expectations of youth, pair them up with an older mentor, on-job training, etc), or they aren't. Suck it up and pay for it instead of whining. But I am tired of the limbo these fields leave many younger people floating in.
I feel I should also point out that the smaller community colleges were happy to interview and accept me. It was bigger universities that gave me that treatment, even for teaching-position applications. I guess the assumption is that even if you teach, you will still work hard on research to give the university a good name. I can see their point to some degree, but this goes back to my original complaint: even in teaching-focused jobs, they're losing sight of the students.
Wasn't intentional trolling. I meant teaching-focused positions, and threw the word "professor" around a bit casually. What I was saying is that even the teaching-focused jobs seem to have a large emphasis on what research you will bring. It was very hard to get anyone to talk about the academics and curriculum and what I would be expected to teach, for example. Instead, lots of statements like "Well we have lots of researchers in topology here, how would you fit in that?".
That's what I get for trying to compose a comment while thinking of something else. I agree with what you said and was attempting the same statement, but something crossed backwards in my mind. Call it a fit of dyslexia, sorry about what the previous comment.
I sometimes have insomnia in the middle of the night, after awaking from a few hours' rest. At first I was angry that I needed to get up soon and couldn't sleep, but then I started taking it in stride. If I cannot feel sleepy within 15 minutes or so of laying back down, I get up and read or work on a project or something for an hour or two until the sleepiness comes back, or simply nap after work the next day.
Since doing that I feel more relaxed and natural. I am not sure if its biological or simply a state of mind, but I often find it is better not to force sleep if I am not ready for it, it just frustrates me and wastes time. Unfortunately, the way society is set up does not make it easy to run counter to that schedule of course, but I try.
0.8 of a year is about 10 months. So they were told less than 6 months ago to publish more, and now they are upset they haven't when their own guidelines suggested it should take about 10 months on average to get something done? I am confused by your statement.
If it was the only thing you had to do, sure. But a full-time course load (with all of the prep, grading, office hours that come with it), plus advising students on their own research projects or helping recruit students, plus attending the mandatory weekly faculty meetings (I hate those teaching in-service seminars they make us attend, there goes an afternoon) and all of the paperwork involved, etc., really strain your time. You end up maybe having one good day a week to work on something research oriented. It can take a while to find a topic, then to work it, then draft a manuscript, then wait for it to be reviewed, to make changes, etc., all in between your other duties. It's not a terrible requirement, but I do believe it's more than most realize if you are not a teacher.
This is why effectively, you can be a good researcher or a good teacher, but usually not both.
Researchers taking one good result and publishing lots of tiny variations on that result, essentially publishing the same paper over and over again.
This drives me absolutely nuts. I find a list of papers thinking "oh wow, this will be great to find more about the topic!", only to discover none of the papers actually describe the method, but are simply a dozen papers on slight variations of the same problem with no real insight into how the method actually works. Just "Here's another result using my method from 1985, this time I set a=3 instead of a=2!". It never really seems worth publishing, but I guess the reviewers are in the same situation so there's pressure to approve each others' work.
Indeed. I recently interviewed for professor positions. I often seem to get blank/unimpressed expressions when I describe that my interest is teaching, making a good connection with students, and researching teaching methods to make my work more effective and beneficial to students. Personally, I love it. Fun job, and while my students don't believe me, I often learn as much as they do. It's wonderful to view subjects with fresh eyes, vicariously through my students. It also forces me to re-evaluate my own understanding when answering questions. I find it much more satisfying profession that research or industry work.
The come back to this statement is usually "Well what research did you do for your doctorate, what research are you in now? What papers do you have published? Do you have industry experience?". I usually tell them the relevant info, followed by "...but that's not my primary interest, I enjoy working with students better than working in a lab".
That never seems to go over well so far, but I feel like I need to stick to my guns on this subject. Universities and colleges should be focused on the students. This doesn't mean you can't do research part of the time, but students are what pay the bills, and ultimately I want enough students to come after me to continue any work I start long after I'm gone. What's the point of all of our hard work in research if we do not have a next generation to pass it to? If the next generation cannot understand it or further the research? In any case, I definitely feel like its harder to get in the door if you aren't obsessively focused on research.
Quick Anecdote: I remember during graduate school, most of the professors that were "well-known" effectively ignored me and did their best not to give me time and answer questions or help in any manner. They just gave commandments about what to do in lab for them so they could publish more papers and get their name thrown around more; if you're lucky, they might include you as a co-author. My favorite professors, the ones I actually sat and had conversation with and learned what I know now from, were the ones that spent a lot of time on teaching, but in conversation I found out they constantly had to justify their existence to the bean-counters in the administration office; being a teacher or even doing teaching research wasn't enough. They had to come up with all sorts of things -- faculty sponsor of club/organization, etc. -- to prevent themselves from ending up on the chopping block. And now i find myself in the same situation. It's a sad state of affairs, really. Why can't we be allowed to do our job without side project interference?
NASA works in that area with the Navy/NOAA. It may not be a strictly NASA data center. I know they do a lot of hurricane research, plus the gulf oil spill, etc. I guess NASA provides the satellites etc for use in research.
I think/. simply ate the greater-than and less-than signs and everything in between, thinking it was an html tag.
Re:Pause after click fixed?
on
KDE 4.8 Released
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· Score: 5, Informative
Probably. I am running KDE 4.7 (actually just updated to 4.8 today, so haven't much experience with the updates yet), and it goes swimmingly on my old dell laptop (about 7 years old, maxxed out the RAM at 1 GB). No real hang ups or delays. Runs just fine. I think a lot of the hangups were the older versions of Nepomuk/Akonadi and friends, but the last few releases have really dramatically improved performance and integration, to the point where you don't even notice they exist (as far as resource usage; I'm growing to appreciate the semantic tags on files more and more as time goes on).
I find in my classes that in general, people are alright with history to some degree. Interesting knowledge, but not super motivational to do it on its own.
However, the women in the class really get more talkative once I point out important women in the history of computing and science. It's such a male dominated field that I think it encourages them that there's nothing wrong with having an interest in it. Men do not perceive the same bias in the workplace and so are less influenced by the personal stories of struggle and success.
Wikipedia provides a lot of information if you know what to do with it, but frankly it doesn't often have good example problems, walkthroughs, or other insight that is useful to applying mathematics to solving problems. Wikipedia just gives statements of definitions, maybe with some proofs mixed in. Good as reference, not helpful to a newbie. However, with those additions, Wikipedia is a good first step to a "write once, distribute to all" math text for a large spectrum of mathematics courses.
What really is required IMO is not so much a textbook (since as you pointed out, the information already exists out there), but rather an open free set of very good sample exercises, prompts, and projects that teachers may use in their courses. It's very difficult to find good homework problems that engage a student to think about what they are doing (and not simply apply formulas by rote), and even more so to find a more long-term project to test their understanding of the material in a way that holds their interest. Sample topics for in-class discussions are another good one; finding interesting problems to get the students talking with each other and the instructor is also hard to do, but every once in a while you find a gem that gets students arguing with each other over the best way to proceed before we work out a solution together. A catalog of things like that would be fantastic.
TFA seems to suggest some sort of heads-up display or control panel in a car that gives you a warning "hey, watch the cross street before going after the light turns green, we detect someone very likely to be a jackass approaching". Doesn't exactly penalize the other driver (although getting a violation/ticket due to a camera light or whatever would help a bit), but it keeps *you* personally more safe. I appreciate that.
True, provided every person gets the training to be exploring and creating. If an "elite" class forms such that a handful get to explore and create while the masses are starving and unable to develop the skills necessary to explore (effectively, stuck at their current class level), then I think there are some moral issues involved that we need to work out. Sure exploring and doing science and art is fantastic, but at a basic level, it's far more important that everyone live safely, healthily, and happily.
Same here, my parents were supportive but refused to do anything for me, I had to learn. But I had no idea how common the "helicopter parent" was until I started working in the office.
No kidding. Though the parents are quite guilty of this. I can't tell you how many times my old university got calls from parents, "my son/daughter wants to enroll in such and such, what does she need to do?". From both sides they are treated like children, so no wonder so many treat college like a blow-off and playground. They do not have the expectation of growing up yet.
...less time trying to band-aid it with virus protection!"
I would tend to agree, except at this point I think consumers have been trained to believe they are not safe without anti-virus. It could very well be that the OS is incredibly more secure than any previous OS, but as a marketing move, they are adding what amounts to a pop up window that says "Your antivirus is up to date and protecting you!". Even if said window actually never updates, scans or really does anything, the average user wouldnt know this difference, and it allows them to put an extra feature on the box and make the average computer user feel better (i.e., convince them to upgrade to Win8, because hey, antivirus is expensive and if its included in the OS now, i'm 'saving' money!).
Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"
on
Occupy Flash?
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· Score: 3, Funny
"Occupy" is teetering on the edge of really jumping the shark here.
I'm absolutely electrified to see the results of this experiment! I would be shocked if he doesn't get enough funding to try it.
Kidding aside, I too am curious about why lightning can exist at lower voltages. Do longer distances allow for more pathways in the air, where enough variances in humidity etc, to allow lower dielectric breakdown on average?
I'm sure there's a lot of propaganda in any such statement. It's probably a "made-up" number very close to intelligence estimates in order to be kind of a "we know what you're doing" sort of statement, meant to shake up targets and hopefully make them more willing to negotiate first. The actually specifications are almost assuredly not what was released.
I am curious about the btrfs filesystem and the Snapper (file snapshots and backup/restoration) usage, but I have been a bit afraid to use it as my main fs since I do not believe I have seen an official stable btrfs and tools release. Does anyone have experience with btrfs, is it production ready? (not necessarily for a server, but you know, would hate to lose any of my personal data - sure I can make backups but I prefer reliable things)
The butterfly effect is a statement of chaos, which from a mathematical perspective is mostly described as "extreme sensitivity to conditions". In other words, using the same mathematical model and equation to predict weather a week from now, but with two different but very similar starting conditions (say, the temperature is 74 F vs 75 F one day, but all other conditions the same), after a sufficient amount of time, the two solutions (for each initial condition) to the equation, or predictions if you want to call them that, appear so wildly different that you probably wouldn't even realize they were solutions of the same equation if no one told you. "A butterfly flapping its wings" is a bit hyperbolic, but the idea is the same -- the small changes in pressure (due to the butterfly flapping, presumably) in the initial conditions of your model evolve to become a radical difference in predictions long-run. How long-run is long-run is another story, but eventually your solutions will diverge wildly. You can make these statements precise in a mathematical sense if you know some analysis.
But, this is a confirmed mathematical phenomena that exists in many useful equations. It's not well-understood in general terms (i.e., there's no general theory on predicting the behavior of equations for arbitrary conditions), but it definitely exists. The protoypical example is the Lorenz equations if you would like to read more.
Slashdot Mirror
I typically get the feeling the young are stuck between a rock and a hard place for STEM careers. On the one hand we are told over and over that these are important jobs. But then when you go to apply for them, you are told you are too young and need more experience and can't hire you. "Well, can you train me?" "No, you just have to get experience, or go back to school." So you go back to school, and they tell you "Well we don't do job training, our focus is how to *think* and learn the principles needed. Go get a job if you want experience." And so you end up in a bizarre catch-22 where everyone expects you to know everything at a young age, but no one is willing to provide the training you need to get there. It's as if they think scientists grow on trees and you just wait for them to ripen and apply for a job, with their analytical skills and knowledge fully formed. Maybe that was possible in some sense during the baby boom, when it was also more patriotic to go into a STEM field to fight the commies, but today you have to work for it and provide incentives. There are less people for each job, not more.
Either these are important jobs employers need to support more (with leniency on the expectations of youth, pair them up with an older mentor, on-job training, etc), or they aren't. Suck it up and pay for it instead of whining. But I am tired of the limbo these fields leave many younger people floating in.
I feel I should also point out that the smaller community colleges were happy to interview and accept me. It was bigger universities that gave me that treatment, even for teaching-position applications. I guess the assumption is that even if you teach, you will still work hard on research to give the university a good name. I can see their point to some degree, but this goes back to my original complaint: even in teaching-focused jobs, they're losing sight of the students.
Wasn't intentional trolling. I meant teaching-focused positions, and threw the word "professor" around a bit casually. What I was saying is that even the teaching-focused jobs seem to have a large emphasis on what research you will bring. It was very hard to get anyone to talk about the academics and curriculum and what I would be expected to teach, for example. Instead, lots of statements like "Well we have lots of researchers in topology here, how would you fit in that?".
That's what I get for trying to compose a comment while thinking of something else. I agree with what you said and was attempting the same statement, but something crossed backwards in my mind. Call it a fit of dyslexia, sorry about what the previous comment.
I sometimes have insomnia in the middle of the night, after awaking from a few hours' rest. At first I was angry that I needed to get up soon and couldn't sleep, but then I started taking it in stride. If I cannot feel sleepy within 15 minutes or so of laying back down, I get up and read or work on a project or something for an hour or two until the sleepiness comes back, or simply nap after work the next day. Since doing that I feel more relaxed and natural. I am not sure if its biological or simply a state of mind, but I often find it is better not to force sleep if I am not ready for it, it just frustrates me and wastes time. Unfortunately, the way society is set up does not make it easy to run counter to that schedule of course, but I try.
0.8 of a year is about 10 months. So they were told less than 6 months ago to publish more, and now they are upset they haven't when their own guidelines suggested it should take about 10 months on average to get something done? I am confused by your statement.
If it was the only thing you had to do, sure. But a full-time course load (with all of the prep, grading, office hours that come with it), plus advising students on their own research projects or helping recruit students, plus attending the mandatory weekly faculty meetings (I hate those teaching in-service seminars they make us attend, there goes an afternoon) and all of the paperwork involved, etc., really strain your time. You end up maybe having one good day a week to work on something research oriented. It can take a while to find a topic, then to work it, then draft a manuscript, then wait for it to be reviewed, to make changes, etc., all in between your other duties. It's not a terrible requirement, but I do believe it's more than most realize if you are not a teacher.
This is why effectively, you can be a good researcher or a good teacher, but usually not both.
Researchers taking one good result and publishing lots of tiny variations on that result, essentially publishing the same paper over and over again.
This drives me absolutely nuts. I find a list of papers thinking "oh wow, this will be great to find more about the topic!", only to discover none of the papers actually describe the method, but are simply a dozen papers on slight variations of the same problem with no real insight into how the method actually works. Just "Here's another result using my method from 1985, this time I set a=3 instead of a=2!". It never really seems worth publishing, but I guess the reviewers are in the same situation so there's pressure to approve each others' work.
Indeed. I recently interviewed for professor positions. I often seem to get blank/unimpressed expressions when I describe that my interest is teaching, making a good connection with students, and researching teaching methods to make my work more effective and beneficial to students. Personally, I love it. Fun job, and while my students don't believe me, I often learn as much as they do. It's wonderful to view subjects with fresh eyes, vicariously through my students. It also forces me to re-evaluate my own understanding when answering questions. I find it much more satisfying profession that research or industry work.
The come back to this statement is usually "Well what research did you do for your doctorate, what research are you in now? What papers do you have published? Do you have industry experience?". I usually tell them the relevant info, followed by "...but that's not my primary interest, I enjoy working with students better than working in a lab".
That never seems to go over well so far, but I feel like I need to stick to my guns on this subject. Universities and colleges should be focused on the students. This doesn't mean you can't do research part of the time, but students are what pay the bills, and ultimately I want enough students to come after me to continue any work I start long after I'm gone. What's the point of all of our hard work in research if we do not have a next generation to pass it to? If the next generation cannot understand it or further the research? In any case, I definitely feel like its harder to get in the door if you aren't obsessively focused on research.
Quick Anecdote: I remember during graduate school, most of the professors that were "well-known" effectively ignored me and did their best not to give me time and answer questions or help in any manner. They just gave commandments about what to do in lab for them so they could publish more papers and get their name thrown around more; if you're lucky, they might include you as a co-author. My favorite professors, the ones I actually sat and had conversation with and learned what I know now from, were the ones that spent a lot of time on teaching, but in conversation I found out they constantly had to justify their existence to the bean-counters in the administration office; being a teacher or even doing teaching research wasn't enough. They had to come up with all sorts of things -- faculty sponsor of club/organization, etc. -- to prevent themselves from ending up on the chopping block. And now i find myself in the same situation. It's a sad state of affairs, really. Why can't we be allowed to do our job without side project interference?
NASA works in that area with the Navy/NOAA. It may not be a strictly NASA data center. I know they do a lot of hurricane research, plus the gulf oil spill, etc. I guess NASA provides the satellites etc for use in research.
I think /. simply ate the greater-than and less-than signs and everything in between, thinking it was an html tag.
Probably. I am running KDE 4.7 (actually just updated to 4.8 today, so haven't much experience with the updates yet), and it goes swimmingly on my old dell laptop (about 7 years old, maxxed out the RAM at 1 GB). No real hang ups or delays. Runs just fine. I think a lot of the hangups were the older versions of Nepomuk/Akonadi and friends, but the last few releases have really dramatically improved performance and integration, to the point where you don't even notice they exist (as far as resource usage; I'm growing to appreciate the semantic tags on files more and more as time goes on).
I find in my classes that in general, people are alright with history to some degree. Interesting knowledge, but not super motivational to do it on its own. However, the women in the class really get more talkative once I point out important women in the history of computing and science. It's such a male dominated field that I think it encourages them that there's nothing wrong with having an interest in it. Men do not perceive the same bias in the workplace and so are less influenced by the personal stories of struggle and success.
Wikipedia provides a lot of information if you know what to do with it, but frankly it doesn't often have good example problems, walkthroughs, or other insight that is useful to applying mathematics to solving problems. Wikipedia just gives statements of definitions, maybe with some proofs mixed in. Good as reference, not helpful to a newbie. However, with those additions, Wikipedia is a good first step to a "write once, distribute to all" math text for a large spectrum of mathematics courses.
What really is required IMO is not so much a textbook (since as you pointed out, the information already exists out there), but rather an open free set of very good sample exercises, prompts, and projects that teachers may use in their courses. It's very difficult to find good homework problems that engage a student to think about what they are doing (and not simply apply formulas by rote), and even more so to find a more long-term project to test their understanding of the material in a way that holds their interest. Sample topics for in-class discussions are another good one; finding interesting problems to get the students talking with each other and the instructor is also hard to do, but every once in a while you find a gem that gets students arguing with each other over the best way to proceed before we work out a solution together. A catalog of things like that would be fantastic.
TFA seems to suggest some sort of heads-up display or control panel in a car that gives you a warning "hey, watch the cross street before going after the light turns green, we detect someone very likely to be a jackass approaching". Doesn't exactly penalize the other driver (although getting a violation/ticket due to a camera light or whatever would help a bit), but it keeps *you* personally more safe. I appreciate that.
DHCP server providing option 66
What did the Jedi ever do to your DHCP server? That seems a bit harsh.
True, provided every person gets the training to be exploring and creating. If an "elite" class forms such that a handful get to explore and create while the masses are starving and unable to develop the skills necessary to explore (effectively, stuck at their current class level), then I think there are some moral issues involved that we need to work out. Sure exploring and doing science and art is fantastic, but at a basic level, it's far more important that everyone live safely, healthily, and happily.
Same here, my parents were supportive but refused to do anything for me, I had to learn. But I had no idea how common the "helicopter parent" was until I started working in the office.
No kidding. Though the parents are quite guilty of this. I can't tell you how many times my old university got calls from parents, "my son/daughter wants to enroll in such and such, what does she need to do?". From both sides they are treated like children, so no wonder so many treat college like a blow-off and playground. They do not have the expectation of growing up yet.
...less time trying to band-aid it with virus protection!"
I would tend to agree, except at this point I think consumers have been trained to believe they are not safe without anti-virus. It could very well be that the OS is incredibly more secure than any previous OS, but as a marketing move, they are adding what amounts to a pop up window that says "Your antivirus is up to date and protecting you!". Even if said window actually never updates, scans or really does anything, the average user wouldnt know this difference, and it allows them to put an extra feature on the box and make the average computer user feel better (i.e., convince them to upgrade to Win8, because hey, antivirus is expensive and if its included in the OS now, i'm 'saving' money!).
"Occupy" is teetering on the edge of really jumping the shark here.
I believe the term is "nuking the fridge" now.
I'm absolutely electrified to see the results of this experiment! I would be shocked if he doesn't get enough funding to try it.
Kidding aside, I too am curious about why lightning can exist at lower voltages. Do longer distances allow for more pathways in the air, where enough variances in humidity etc, to allow lower dielectric breakdown on average?
I'm sure there's a lot of propaganda in any such statement. It's probably a "made-up" number very close to intelligence estimates in order to be kind of a "we know what you're doing" sort of statement, meant to shake up targets and hopefully make them more willing to negotiate first. The actually specifications are almost assuredly not what was released.
I am curious about the btrfs filesystem and the Snapper (file snapshots and backup/restoration) usage, but I have been a bit afraid to use it as my main fs since I do not believe I have seen an official stable btrfs and tools release. Does anyone have experience with btrfs, is it production ready? (not necessarily for a server, but you know, would hate to lose any of my personal data - sure I can make backups but I prefer reliable things)
The butterfly effect is a statement of chaos, which from a mathematical perspective is mostly described as "extreme sensitivity to conditions". In other words, using the same mathematical model and equation to predict weather a week from now, but with two different but very similar starting conditions (say, the temperature is 74 F vs 75 F one day, but all other conditions the same), after a sufficient amount of time, the two solutions (for each initial condition) to the equation, or predictions if you want to call them that, appear so wildly different that you probably wouldn't even realize they were solutions of the same equation if no one told you. "A butterfly flapping its wings" is a bit hyperbolic, but the idea is the same -- the small changes in pressure (due to the butterfly flapping, presumably) in the initial conditions of your model evolve to become a radical difference in predictions long-run. How long-run is long-run is another story, but eventually your solutions will diverge wildly. You can make these statements precise in a mathematical sense if you know some analysis.
But, this is a confirmed mathematical phenomena that exists in many useful equations. It's not well-understood in general terms (i.e., there's no general theory on predicting the behavior of equations for arbitrary conditions), but it definitely exists. The protoypical example is the Lorenz equations if you would like to read more.