I am an American currently living in Kunming, P. R. China. My first reaction: Muah hah hah hah hah hah hee tee hee heh heh huaaaaah! No, wait, what did he say? Haw haw hee hee hoo hoo haw! My second reaction: Hey, everyone! Guess what this Chinese official said? Hee hee, he said that, hwah haw haw, hoo hoo hee hee, China doesn't, heh heh, wait for it, wait for it, tee hee hee....
It was a major event when Wikipedia was unblocked a week or two ago. Unfortunately, it's been blocked again.
Another potential problem that the/.ers have not focused on is hijacking of your domain. That is, if your domain is named joeblow.com, some spammer will eventually spoof the domain; i.e., send 100 million spam with "From:" headers aaaaaaa@joeblow.com, aaaaab@joeblow.com, aaaaac@joeblow.com, etc.
However, I've had my own domain for years and heartily recommend it. The up side by far outweighs the down side.
And the fact that anyone will be able to reach you for the rest of your life at that one e-mail address is a pleasant bonus you will reap rewards from in years to come. I've received a number of welcome e-mails from friends I haven't spoken to in years, but who just knew that they had to remember my name to contact me whenever they wanted.
There are many/.ers that are wondering what the big deal is. The big deal is that this is one of those simple applications you don't realize you need until you need it. Then you realize that you really need it.
After I recently finished my Ph.D., I put together over 70 job market packets. For both appearances and efficiency, I needed to generate labels by the dozen.
Much to my surprise, there was an ebuild of gLabels for Gentoo. Even more to my surprise, even though it's in beta, it worked flawlessly. The interface was so well done that I never even needed to look for help files.
The real issue is whether you feel the time savings you gain from installing packages outweighs the increased performance and your own increased knowledge regarding your computing environment you gain from building from source.
You can have the best of both worlds with Gentoo. I began using it about a year ago, and I am sold.
Building from source using Portage is almost as easy as installing a Red Hat package. The community is extremely proactive. (I have only had problems installing or updating a couple of times in the last year, and the problems were remedied within a day or two and the portage trees updated after I submitted a bug report.) And you don't give up variety. The number of ebuilds available in the Portage tree is simply astounding.
I am even using it on my laptop these days and am extremely pleased that it seems to work well as both a server and desktop distribution.
I can understand the spirit of community service that inspires people to volunteer their time and resources to open source localization projects.
But here we have a company with over $60 billion in the bank, pulling in more than $1 billion per month in pure profits, raking in unheard of profit margins on their products, and they are asking local and regional governments to provide them with gratis localization services.
From someone who's cut back considerably over the last few years, my advice is borne of experience.
Try cutting back now but don't sweat it too much. Particularly if you have deadlines looming or other external factors that will make it difficult, trying to kick an addiction when you are under pressure is damn near impossible.
Wait until an opportune moment. You are going on vacation for a week or two. Or spending some time visiting family in another state. It should be some point at which you anticipate pressure will be very low and you will be in a new environment that takes you away from the habits that reinforce your current addiction.
Then as you approach the time away, start cutting back. The idea is to try to wean yourself mostly away from the substance before you depart. Then use the low-stress time away to quit cold turkey.
In 10 days or so you should be over the physical addiction. That is not the hard part but it is an important step.
The hard part comes when you come back. Think about what kinds of things reinforce your addiction, and alter your habits and schedule to minimize your cravings.
Also if you are truly physically addicted, you should probably just accept the fact that you'll be craving the substance to some degree for the rest of your life. However, after 30 days or so, provided you minimize the psychological triggers that tend to contribute to your addiction, the cravings should be manageable.
There is a local coffee shop that put in free wireless here in Boulder, Colorado while Starbucks was still trying to promote some stupid subscription model for wireless access.
The coffee shop's business went through the roof and it seemed that at times half the patrons had a laptop with them. What's more, the patrons who came in with their laptops would generally order the pricier items (lattes, baked goods, etc.).
It was clearly more profitable for the cafe to provide the hotspot for free. They paid a local entrepreneur to set up the network and some simple access controls and then pay him a monthly fee to maintain it and it is well worth the price. All this at the expense of Starbucks who, despite their billions of dollars and high-priced executives, haven't yet figured out a decent business model for wireless.
So I would say that no tip jar is needed. If the cafe owner knows the business, he or she should be happy to pay a reasonable rate to have it installed and maintained.
The Scientific American article returns "Error--Page Not Found".
The only two articles the search engine returned for the string "Kasparov" were 1996 and 2001 articles. Is there somewhere else the article can be found?
The Perl Cookbook is one of the top three technical books I've purchased. If the new version improves on the old version, it is a must-have for anyone who does anything with Perl.
Regardless of the religious wars over languages, I have time and again found Perl to simply be the most practical language for the job and continue to enjoy using it for a variety of tasks and watching it mature.
There is no substitute for the CPAN or Perl's ability to get the job done quickly and easily with an active community providing free (and very effective) support. Both Perl and the Perl Cookbook are an integral parts in my toolkit and for anyone who uses it, whether from time to time or regularly, I recommend it.
Since it sounds like you are an experienced programmer but inexperienced in the realm of consulting, I would recommend an hourly rate over a per-project flat fee.
It is often difficult for those who are not used to billing their time to accurately assess the amount of time a feature will take to implement, including time costs such as requirements definition, maintenance etc.
When I started consulting, I took the amount of time I thought something would take and quadrupled it, which seemed to be about right. After many years and much experience, I only double it. However, the point is that even for experienced consultants, predicting time committments is an art frought with uncertainty.
So to prevent yourself from getting into situations where you end up taking four times as much time as you thought you would take and consequently only making a quarter of the rate you thought you would make on an hourly basis, simply charge them on an hourly basis.
A second recommendation is that you not sell yourself short in your hourly rate. As a student, you may not have ever earned $25/hour. However, you have unique knowledge of the product and are doubtless a talented programmer with marketable skills. Don't be afraid to ask a bit higher than you may otherwise be comfortable with and be prepared to negotiate to a midpoint if they balk.
A third recommendation is that as an independent consultant, you document your activities much more thoroughly than you otherwise would. Write down the requirements they specify. Record your hours and what you did during the hours you bill them for. As someone who is not a regular employee, you should endeavor to be able to justify any and all billing questions or other decisions in a way that regular employees would not need to.
Finally (and this is perhaps the most important point), do not let them convince you to sign over your intellectual property as a condition of your employment or take full ownership of intellectual property you create in their employ in a way that compromises your project. Read everything they ask you to sign. Take documents home to read them over, take them to a lawyer, take them to more experienced friends and solicit their advice. If you are uncomfortable with something, cross it out, initial it, and ask a company officer to initial it as well. Everything is negotiable, including intellectual property arrangements.
While the author has obviously spent much time thinking about this topic, he is out of touch with the way economies work. His salient points, that many of today's jobs are taken by folks who require no training and who learn little or no marketable skills, are salient, but you need only think about how much of today's economy is already automated to think about what tomorrow's robotic economy will look like.
Cars are made by robots. Children's toys are made by robots. Many of the products of today's consumption are made by robots. Bookkeeping and most transfer of money today is not done by a bespectacled scribe noting credits and debits in a ledger, but by computers. But are most of today's workers sitting at home with nothing to do? Hardly.
All but the poorest in the developed nations have a television, an asset that was unthinkably expensive a couple of generations ago. Even teenagers who work part-time jobs make enough to buy a car, albeit not a Cadillac, which is far more technologically advanced than our grandparent's automobiles. I stand in line at the grocery store behind folks who live on food stamps, and they buy quantities meat and cheese that our grandparents would consider luxurious. All of this mechanization and automation is making our products cheaper and making the poor in the developed nations richer (in terms of the goods and services available to them) than many of the middle class in developing nations.
So what will we see tomorrow? Much of what we see today, but moreso. Obviously we have deficiencies in what is considered capitalism today that need to be addressed, but I don't think the advent of robotic labor will produce a crisis. It will just make the issues that are already important today more pressing and relevant.
From Yahoo Finance (hands down my favorite site to get stock quotes, business news, etc.)
SCO Statement on Novell's Recent Actions Wednesday May 28, 10:15 am ET
LINDON, Utah, May 28/PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- The following statement is being issued by SCO (Nasdaq: SCOX - News):
SCO owns the contract rights to the UNIX® operating system. SCO has the contractual right to prevent improper donations of UNIX code, methods or concepts into Linux by any UNIX vendor.
Copyrights and patents are protection against strangers. Contracts are what you use against parties you have relationships with. From a legal standpoint, contracts end up being far stronger than anything you could do with copyrights.
SCO's lawsuit against IBM does not involve patents or copyrights. SCO's complaint specifically alleges breach of contract, and SCO intends to protect and enforce all of the contracts that the company has with more than 6,000 licensees.
We formed SCOsource in January 2003 to enforce our UNIX rights and we intend to aggressively continue in this successful path of operation.
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/19990421/SCOLO GO )
UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
If you have a Mac and you want to try Apple's new (legal) music service, the complementarity between your Mac, the iPod and easy-to-get, legal music would be enticing.
I worked for a company in which the CTO, who would interview all prospective tech candidates, would ask a variety of questions such as, "Name as many ways you can think of to find a needle in a haystack."
He first calibrated against all of the regular employees. Then he used that calibration to benchmark prospective candidates.
I was also involved in the interview process, though my questions would be more like, "What is the directive that throttles the number of Apache processes."
The results of his calibration were pretty close to what we all expected. The candidates we interviewed sometimes surprised us, and one of our best hires (a Ph.D. physicist who decided that he wanted to do something other than physics) pegged the scale.
While it was a useful piece of information, however, I tended to find the technical questions, who really separated the interviewees, were more useful and provided a better correlation to job performance. The technical managers who interviewed the candidates (and who all did technical work in addition to their management duties) could tell inside of 5 minutes whether someone knew what they said they know on their resume and whether they had a "knack" for the work or not.
The "IQ test" questions generally did their job and enabled us to tell who was smarter than whom, but there are alot of really bright people out there who are not necessarily the best employees.
The CTO himself couldn't have answered the technical questions though he was extremely bright and could have pegged the IQ test. So I suppose it was the most effective way for him to evaluate folks. However, when interviewing for a technical position, the best way to evaluate any prospective candidate, in my opinion, is to have other technical people talk the candidate up on technical topics.
Your take on Perl smacks of uninformed biases. No offence.
I have used it extensively for research projects (most of my work involves nonlinear optimization models), gluing together disparate applications and sources of data, and it has worked splendidly.
I also use C when it is appropriate and Java when it is appropriate. Frankly, Perl has time and again proven its worth and has been (for me) more often than not the right choice.
As you say, Perl syntax is looser than more strongly typed languages, but most spaghetti is a result of a poor programmer, not the language. Perl gives you enough rope to hang yourself if you're a hack, but in the hands of an experienced programmer, it is a wonderful tool.
As a scripting language, it seems to suffer pedants such as yourself as the language that "serious" programmers would not use. But my experience is that it has been the best choice for many of my projects and has saved me countless hours and has allowed me to focus more on my research than I would have been able to with another language such as Java, C, or C++.
In other news, the people I know in the VC arena say we're in year three of a six year slump in the IT industry.
And what would these brilliant prognosticators have said in 1999?
$VC =~/lemming/
Re:Another good reason to reach for this
on
The Space Elevator
·
· Score: 1
Not to rain on your parade, but unless there is a clearly identifiable return, merely throwing a bucket of money at a public works project is not the most efficient way to jump start the economy. Unless we can evaluate the project in terms of opportunity costs, we may as well throw $6 billion worth of goods into the ocean.
Your implication that Dubya's proposals to jumpstart the economy have little bang for the buck are absolutely correct. I am a Ph.D. student in economics, and among even the most conservative economists that I work with, the general opinion is that they are foolhardy at best, a distortionary redistribution from the poor to the rich at the sacrifice of future generations at worst.
However, alternatives should involve a considered cost / benefit analysis, incorporating and quantifying risk where possible. I would posit that domestic economic stimulus would be much lower risk and have a much more clearly defined benefit than a space elevator.
I am a very strong supporter of space exploration (and NASA) personally, but I think that the decision-making process behind projects of this magnitude should be based on an analysis that considers what is best for society.
Of course the movie tanked. I think someone concluded that the best way to maximize profits for the Star Trek franchise is to minimize costs (and quality) figuring that the devout fan base would come see whatever schlock they dish out.
The reason they have a franchise in the first place is because there is a long history of positive, intelligent writing. The writing on the latest installment could as well have been for a TV special. Heck, they produce a script a week for the TV show. Did they spend a week or two working on the movie script?
The producers need to do something better to pull movie audiences in. Solicit top-quality writers and spend the time and money to produce an original, engaging, and intelligent script that is not simply a formulaic, rehashed TV episode, then surround it with top-quality production values, and audiences will return.
If they continue to try to extract profits by minimizing cost and effort in the short term, they will find their franchise dwindling and will end up sacrificing profits in the long term.
Grades in mathematics, physics, engineering, and the hard sciences are different because they are not subjective.
When a student is asked to solve a differential equation or calculate the force being applied to an object, the student cannot fudge their way through the answer. They are either right or wrong. And a student who is wrong but told they are right will build bridges that fall down or airplanes that don't fly.
And the objectivity goes both ways. If a grader arbitrarily gives a student an A because, say, the student is particularly attractive and flirtatious (I'm an academic and yes, this happens all the time), an outside reviewer can evaluate that student's answers and determine whether the grader was acting with integrity when they awarded the grade.
In the social sciences, however, grades are much more subjective. The incentives are for the professor to award high grades and there is really no practical way for outside reviewers to challenge the grading policy with regards to, say, English papers.
And when ill-equiped liberal arts students go out into the world, they typically become business types with equally amorphous and subjective performance measures. Rarely can someone objectively say that the company would have earned $1M more in profit because some suit didn't understand the Willa Cather's oblique phallic references.
I have two BAs: One in a liberal arts field and one in a hard science. So I can say from experience that the amount of effort and intelligence required to successfully complete a liberal arts degree is far below that required to complete a technical degree.
So although the liberal arts professors have little incentive to give bad grades and engineering students are probably bummed to compare their grades to their liberal arts brethren, when involved in a hiring process, I would give much more credit to an engineering student with As and Bs than a liberal arts graduate with straight As simply because the engineering grades are a credible signal of ability and determination.
Of course most scientists don't read the entirety of the papers they cite. Is this news?
Sometimes all someone wants is a certain result from a paper. Reading and understanding the full reasoning behind a result rather than the result itself may mean the difference between an afternoon of work and 3 weeks of work. Multiply that by the number of citations a paper has, and a hapless but well-meaning scientist would spend all their time digesting their citations rather than publishing papers and would soon be relieved of their position.
Understanding the details behind cited results is certainly very important, but in the real world there are real tradeoffs that researchers constantly have to evaluate professionally regarding how much time they spend understanding and in how much detail they understand any given result.
This posting is interesting, certainly, but it is not news.
Slashdot Mirror
It was a major event when Wikipedia was unblocked a week or two ago. Unfortunately, it's been blocked again.
However, I've had my own domain for years and heartily recommend it. The up side by far outweighs the down side.
And the fact that anyone will be able to reach you for the rest of your life at that one e-mail address is a pleasant bonus you will reap rewards from in years to come. I've received a number of welcome e-mails from friends I haven't spoken to in years, but who just knew that they had to remember my name to contact me whenever they wanted.
After I recently finished my Ph.D., I put together over 70 job market packets. For both appearances and efficiency, I needed to generate labels by the dozen.
Much to my surprise, there was an ebuild of gLabels for Gentoo. Even more to my surprise, even though it's in beta, it worked flawlessly. The interface was so well done that I never even needed to look for help files.
Kudos to the gLabels team!
You can have the best of both worlds with Gentoo. I began using it about a year ago, and I am sold.
Building from source using Portage is almost as easy as installing a Red Hat package. The community is extremely proactive. (I have only had problems installing or updating a couple of times in the last year, and the problems were remedied within a day or two and the portage trees updated after I submitted a bug report.) And you don't give up variety. The number of ebuilds available in the Portage tree is simply astounding.
I am even using it on my laptop these days and am extremely pleased that it seems to work well as both a server and desktop distribution.
Hope this helps
But here we have a company with over $60 billion in the bank, pulling in more than $1 billion per month in pure profits, raking in unheard of profit margins on their products, and they are asking local and regional governments to provide them with gratis localization services.
Shameful.
To take from the old economist joke, it sounds as if they will be considered successful if they predict at least 9 of the next 5 earthquakes.
Try cutting back now but don't sweat it too much. Particularly if you have deadlines looming or other external factors that will make it difficult, trying to kick an addiction when you are under pressure is damn near impossible.
Wait until an opportune moment. You are going on vacation for a week or two. Or spending some time visiting family in another state. It should be some point at which you anticipate pressure will be very low and you will be in a new environment that takes you away from the habits that reinforce your current addiction.
Then as you approach the time away, start cutting back. The idea is to try to wean yourself mostly away from the substance before you depart. Then use the low-stress time away to quit cold turkey.
In 10 days or so you should be over the physical addiction. That is not the hard part but it is an important step.
The hard part comes when you come back. Think about what kinds of things reinforce your addiction, and alter your habits and schedule to minimize your cravings.
Also if you are truly physically addicted, you should probably just accept the fact that you'll be craving the substance to some degree for the rest of your life. However, after 30 days or so, provided you minimize the psychological triggers that tend to contribute to your addiction, the cravings should be manageable.
Good luck!
The coffee shop's business went through the roof and it seemed that at times half the patrons had a laptop with them. What's more, the patrons who came in with their laptops would generally order the pricier items (lattes, baked goods, etc.).
It was clearly more profitable for the cafe to provide the hotspot for free. They paid a local entrepreneur to set up the network and some simple access controls and then pay him a monthly fee to maintain it and it is well worth the price. All this at the expense of Starbucks who, despite their billions of dollars and high-priced executives, haven't yet figured out a decent business model for wireless.
So I would say that no tip jar is needed. If the cafe owner knows the business, he or she should be happy to pay a reasonable rate to have it installed and maintained.
The only two articles the search engine returned for the string "Kasparov" were 1996 and 2001 articles. Is there somewhere else the article can be found?
Or 2 lines of Perl?
It means "if I remember / recall correctly."
Regardless of the religious wars over languages, I have time and again found Perl to simply be the most practical language for the job and continue to enjoy using it for a variety of tasks and watching it mature.
There is no substitute for the CPAN or Perl's ability to get the job done quickly and easily with an active community providing free (and very effective) support. Both Perl and the Perl Cookbook are an integral parts in my toolkit and for anyone who uses it, whether from time to time or regularly, I recommend it.
It is often difficult for those who are not used to billing their time to accurately assess the amount of time a feature will take to implement, including time costs such as requirements definition, maintenance etc.
When I started consulting, I took the amount of time I thought something would take and quadrupled it, which seemed to be about right. After many years and much experience, I only double it. However, the point is that even for experienced consultants, predicting time committments is an art frought with uncertainty.
So to prevent yourself from getting into situations where you end up taking four times as much time as you thought you would take and consequently only making a quarter of the rate you thought you would make on an hourly basis, simply charge them on an hourly basis.
A second recommendation is that you not sell yourself short in your hourly rate. As a student, you may not have ever earned $25/hour. However, you have unique knowledge of the product and are doubtless a talented programmer with marketable skills. Don't be afraid to ask a bit higher than you may otherwise be comfortable with and be prepared to negotiate to a midpoint if they balk.
A third recommendation is that as an independent consultant, you document your activities much more thoroughly than you otherwise would. Write down the requirements they specify. Record your hours and what you did during the hours you bill them for. As someone who is not a regular employee, you should endeavor to be able to justify any and all billing questions or other decisions in a way that regular employees would not need to.
Finally (and this is perhaps the most important point), do not let them convince you to sign over your intellectual property as a condition of your employment or take full ownership of intellectual property you create in their employ in a way that compromises your project. Read everything they ask you to sign. Take documents home to read them over, take them to a lawyer, take them to more experienced friends and solicit their advice. If you are uncomfortable with something, cross it out, initial it, and ask a company officer to initial it as well. Everything is negotiable, including intellectual property arrangements.
Good luck!
Cars are made by robots. Children's toys are made by robots. Many of the products of today's consumption are made by robots. Bookkeeping and most transfer of money today is not done by a bespectacled scribe noting credits and debits in a ledger, but by computers. But are most of today's workers sitting at home with nothing to do? Hardly.
All but the poorest in the developed nations have a television, an asset that was unthinkably expensive a couple of generations ago. Even teenagers who work part-time jobs make enough to buy a car, albeit not a Cadillac, which is far more technologically advanced than our grandparent's automobiles. I stand in line at the grocery store behind folks who live on food stamps, and they buy quantities meat and cheese that our grandparents would consider luxurious. All of this mechanization and automation is making our products cheaper and making the poor in the developed nations richer (in terms of the goods and services available to them) than many of the middle class in developing nations.
So what will we see tomorrow? Much of what we see today, but moreso. Obviously we have deficiencies in what is considered capitalism today that need to be addressed, but I don't think the advent of robotic labor will produce a crisis. It will just make the issues that are already important today more pressing and relevant.
SCO Statement on Novell's Recent Actions
Wednesday May 28, 10:15 am ET
LINDON, Utah, May 28
SCO owns the contract rights to the UNIX® operating system. SCO has the contractual right to prevent improper donations of UNIX code, methods or concepts into Linux by any UNIX vendor.
Copyrights and patents are protection against strangers. Contracts are what you use against parties you have relationships with. From a legal standpoint, contracts end up being far stronger than anything you could do with copyrights.
SCO's lawsuit against IBM does not involve patents or copyrights. SCO's complaint specifically alleges breach of contract, and SCO intends to protect and enforce all of the contracts that the company has with more than 6,000 licensees.
We formed SCOsource in January 2003 to enforce our UNIX rights and we intend to aggressively continue in this successful path of operation.
If you have a Mac and you want to try Apple's new (legal) music service, the complementarity between your Mac, the iPod and easy-to-get, legal music would be enticing.
Think about it.
He first calibrated against all of the regular employees. Then he used that calibration to benchmark prospective candidates.
I was also involved in the interview process, though my questions would be more like, "What is the directive that throttles the number of Apache processes."
The results of his calibration were pretty close to what we all expected. The candidates we interviewed sometimes surprised us, and one of our best hires (a Ph.D. physicist who decided that he wanted to do something other than physics) pegged the scale.
While it was a useful piece of information, however, I tended to find the technical questions, who really separated the interviewees, were more useful and provided a better correlation to job performance. The technical managers who interviewed the candidates (and who all did technical work in addition to their management duties) could tell inside of 5 minutes whether someone knew what they said they know on their resume and whether they had a "knack" for the work or not.
The "IQ test" questions generally did their job and enabled us to tell who was smarter than whom, but there are alot of really bright people out there who are not necessarily the best employees.
The CTO himself couldn't have answered the technical questions though he was extremely bright and could have pegged the IQ test. So I suppose it was the most effective way for him to evaluate folks. However, when interviewing for a technical position, the best way to evaluate any prospective candidate, in my opinion, is to have other technical people talk the candidate up on technical topics.
Then again, he was a CTO and I was not
I have used it extensively for research projects (most of my work involves nonlinear optimization models), gluing together disparate applications and sources of data, and it has worked splendidly.
I also use C when it is appropriate and Java when it is appropriate. Frankly, Perl has time and again proven its worth and has been (for me) more often than not the right choice.
As you say, Perl syntax is looser than more strongly typed languages, but most spaghetti is a result of a poor programmer, not the language. Perl gives you enough rope to hang yourself if you're a hack, but in the hands of an experienced programmer, it is a wonderful tool.
As a scripting language, it seems to suffer pedants such as yourself as the language that "serious" programmers would not use.
But my experience is that it has been the best choice for many of my projects and has saved me countless hours and has allowed me to focus more on my research than I would have been able to with another language such as Java, C, or C++.
The extra desktop sales alone would justify his salary.
Red Hat, are you listening? SuSE? IBM? Sun? Anyone, anyone, Beuller?
And what would these brilliant prognosticators have said in 1999?
$VC =~
Your implication that Dubya's proposals to jumpstart the economy have little bang for the buck are absolutely correct. I am a Ph.D. student in economics, and among even the most conservative economists that I work with, the general opinion is that they are foolhardy at best, a distortionary redistribution from the poor to the rich at the sacrifice of future generations at worst.
However, alternatives should involve a considered cost / benefit analysis, incorporating and quantifying risk where possible. I would posit that domestic economic stimulus would be much lower risk and have a much more clearly defined benefit than a space elevator.
I am a very strong supporter of space exploration (and NASA) personally, but I think that the decision-making process behind projects of this magnitude should be based on an analysis that considers what is best for society.
The reason they have a franchise in the first place is because there is a long history of positive, intelligent writing. The writing on the latest installment could as well have been for a TV special. Heck, they produce a script a week for the TV show. Did they spend a week or two working on the movie script?
The producers need to do something better to pull movie audiences in. Solicit top-quality writers and spend the time and money to produce an original, engaging, and intelligent script that is not simply a formulaic, rehashed TV episode, then surround it with top-quality production values, and audiences will return.
If they continue to try to extract profits by minimizing cost and effort in the short term, they will find their franchise dwindling and will end up sacrificing profits in the long term.
When a student is asked to solve a differential equation or calculate the force being applied to an object, the student cannot fudge their way through the answer. They are either right or wrong. And a student who is wrong but told they are right will build bridges that fall down or airplanes that don't fly.
And the objectivity goes both ways. If a grader arbitrarily gives a student an A because, say, the student is particularly attractive and flirtatious (I'm an academic and yes, this happens all the time), an outside reviewer can evaluate that student's answers and determine whether the grader was acting with integrity when they awarded the grade.
In the social sciences, however, grades are much more subjective. The incentives are for the professor to award high grades and there is really no practical way for outside reviewers to challenge the grading policy with regards to, say, English papers.
And when ill-equiped liberal arts students go out into the world, they typically become business types with equally amorphous and subjective performance measures. Rarely can someone objectively say that the company would have earned $1M more in profit because some suit didn't understand the Willa Cather's oblique phallic references.
I have two BAs: One in a liberal arts field and one in a hard science. So I can say from experience that the amount of effort and intelligence required to successfully complete a liberal arts degree is far below that required to complete a technical degree.
So although the liberal arts professors have little incentive to give bad grades and engineering students are probably bummed to compare their grades to their liberal arts brethren, when involved in a hiring process, I would give much more credit to an engineering student with As and Bs than a liberal arts graduate with straight As simply because the engineering grades are a credible signal of ability and determination.
Sometimes all someone wants is a certain result from a paper. Reading and understanding the full reasoning behind a result rather than the result itself may mean the difference between an afternoon of work and 3 weeks of work. Multiply that by the number of citations a paper has, and a hapless but well-meaning scientist would spend all their time digesting their citations rather than publishing papers and would soon be relieved of their position.
Understanding the details behind cited results is certainly very important, but in the real world there are real tradeoffs that researchers constantly have to evaluate professionally regarding how much time they spend understanding and in how much detail they understand any given result.
This posting is interesting, certainly, but it is not news.