My first degree is in electronic engineering, I then did a PhD in computer vision. I spent 6 years working in a medical school working on developing novel approaches to analysing MRI data (specifically neuro imaging). I now work for a large Pharmaceutical company working on medically imaging projects.
A lot of my work involves overseeing and developing imaging techniques and software as well as managing analysis projects internally and with numerous collaborators all over the world. It is an incredible interesting job as well as being a rewarding industry, financially but more importantly ethically and morally (people seem to like to dislike drug companies, but how many other industries are trying to cure cancer?)
I think key to this has been that although I like to think of myself as a competent even good programmer (hell I read slashdot don't I!) it isn't the focus of what I do. At heart I'm an engineer and like to see the problem solved and the data analysed just as much as creating an elegant solution. I also just love plotting data, but that's just between me an my therapist. It can be frustrating being surrounded by biologists, chemists and clinicians all speaking a very different languages (even structural chemists appear to have a hard time understanding the organic chemists) particularly during warm afternoon meetings. However, I get a great satisfaction in being a 'fish out of water' so to speak and having something completely different to offer plus I've learnt a lot about the process and science of drug development.
My advice? Definitely use your programming ability as a tool and get in there. You may need to do a conversion course (MSc in Bio-informatics or some such) although we have quite a lot of informatics people who come from all manner of background (e.g. financial). Try and get some statistics training too. On the whole not understanding the biology/chemistry is not as much of a hurdle as not understanding what the data distribution means or how best to summarise it.
One must consider the possibility that this guy isn't using the term 'girlfriend' in any colloquial sense but rather is simply refering to a female friend. More specifically the term 'friend' does not necessarily exclude 'relative'. So indeed he could be refering to his mother.
...buy a lot of onions and carrots and the next time the support guy shows up cook and eat him. Frankly, from my experience, I can't think of any other use for them.
"...a number of knowing smiles around the room from LucasArts employees, followed by the comments: 'We know' and 'We are looking into it'"
probably translates into a number of executives thinking "Shit, that's a great idea why didn't we think of that?". Thats how you become an executive, knowing what to say.
"...and the company expects to be producing at the rate of at least one million litres of the fuel each year from Blenheim by April"
If this catches on large areas that used to look blue from space are gonna start to turn green. Or maybe you can get different coloured algae these days.
The ultimate plan is to liquify the astronaughts using high G, freeze dry them and send them up in packs of 100 for storage on the ISS. Then they can be work rotated simply by boiling the kettle. Great idea so long as no one mixes them up with the food supply.
Yeah but being able to share books freely is the last thing the publishers want isn't it? The nice thing about real books is that they have an inbuilt limit on how many you can share which is directly equivalent to the number you buy! Obviously you could work it so that you can share any book you buy once, but through these little holes greater crackers start to appear. Or even reliquish ownership of the book altogether and have it sit on the server freely available for the next person to download. Again this might scare publishers as it would weaken any DRM software.
I think Sony are trying to establish the e-book equivalent of the iPod (I think they even said that somewhere). Whilst the screen is nicely done (appropriate for the purpose having good text definition, low power requirements whilst foregoing unnecessarily high refresh rates) there is little else innovative about the product. Once you get good connectivity in place, using open standards such as bluetooth or wifi and simple communication ontop (via http and ftp) and the price down dramatically you will create a market where people will find innovative ways to share and exchange all manner of information. Provided the licenses let them.
I like the idea of e-books but they do lack some of the conveniencs of a paper back. The major one being cost. If I leave a £4.99 book on a train I am mostly just upset that I can't read it until I get another copy and then I will have to relocate my position. But if I leave £400 of e-book on a train I probably won't give a stuff about the books! Although if it carries 80 books will my insurance reimburse me for those too? Or will the ebook library let me have another download for free (this kind of thing also applies to DRM linked music too - you might the insurance to pay out for a new music player, but will your current license let you move it to your new, possibly incompatible player?)
In the UK there has been a movement to openly share good paperbacks by leaving them on trains and in other public places, perhaps with a few comments in on what you thought about the book. I think it may have been a BBC idea - sorry no weblink (bad slashdotter, dirty slashdotter, in your bed!). This is great idea and gets people exposed to books they wouldn't have normally read. Could we imagine a digital equivalent? Maybe a random download for every 5 you buy.
Better known as "Ask forgiveness, not permission". or the JFDI - Just Fucking Do It - school of thought. In my experience of working in very large companies it is also highly correlated with "getting things done". Of course you had better not be wrong, so manage your risks. On balance I'd rather employ someone who gets on with stuff and takes (calculated) risks than someone easily paralysed by management.
Web applications have particular characteristics in that they tend to run within a web-browser and use particular sets of technologies for both GUI, data representation and communication. But it is not necessarily the only or even the best way. There is a difference between deploying MS Office local to one machine or running it across a network with the documents on another remote fileserver. Many applications, although installed locally will update versions or load new plugin functionality across the net. The administrator must make many judgements on what characteristics they want including performance, maintainability, security, remote access, user training etc etc. And then decide how best to deploy the application.
I believe web applications are evolving on the back of web pages and thus on the back of web browsers. We can view traditional web page rendering and navigation as the original web service. As the services get more diverse so the browser will need to provide a greater variety of capabilities, including being designed from the ground up to be maliable via plugins. The browser becoming a lightweight framework into which the right components are loaded from the net to create the application required. See flock for some interesting moves in this direction.
Ultimately will the browser be the web OS? In the same way that windows/linux etc provide an useful abstraction of the hardware, with the browser provide a similar abstraction of the web?
Sorry about this being muddled but I'm writing as I think.
Years ago applications were exepcted to just work - from a user point of view. But with the increased complexity of applications the user is becoming increasingly involved in the later stage testing and development of applications. This is particularly true in open source development, where the development team need to use every possible test scenerio available.
Although this thing isn't vastly developed, I think we are going to see a lot more services available to developers to help them better integrate with their users and to understand their issues with the software. I would like to see some better reporting tools, other than the last 100 exceptions, surely the top 100 exceptions would be more useful?
Sorry, I tend to think about global warming issues on a long timescale, so when I said "soon" I was unclear - I meant 25-50 years. ahhh, crystal ball gazing, a tool of fabulous merit in pseudo-factual discussions. I myself favour the notion that we will all be holidaying on the moon in 2050.
But for CO2 emissions, it comes down to this: if you want to reduce our standard of living, you need to have more guns than we do. That's how it works.
"From my cold, dead hands" I think was the expression Charlton Heston used. Welcome to the terrordome.
Why do most other nations find the Kyoto agreement adequate to sign, yet the worlds biggest producer (by a long way per capita) of carbon emissions finds it so distasteful? Yes it's far from perfect, but what alternative have the US come up with? Yes some nations are missing their targets and just paying the fines. And you think that doesn't help? How long would you let your government put up taxes to cover fines that it could do something about?
From my personal experience the USA is a nation less than the sum of it's parts. I have met some wonderful American people, but put them together and give them a country and they behave like a spoilt child.
Slashdot Mirror
Or is this a trick question?
Not sure this helps but heck...
My first degree is in electronic engineering, I then did a PhD in computer vision. I spent 6 years working in a medical school working on developing novel approaches to analysing MRI data (specifically neuro imaging). I now work for a large Pharmaceutical company working on medically imaging projects.
A lot of my work involves overseeing and developing imaging techniques and software as well as managing analysis projects internally and with numerous collaborators all over the world. It is an incredible interesting job as well as being a rewarding industry, financially but more importantly ethically and morally (people seem to like to dislike drug companies, but how many other industries are trying to cure cancer?)
I think key to this has been that although I like to think of myself as a competent even good programmer (hell I read slashdot don't I!) it isn't the focus of what I do. At heart I'm an engineer and like to see the problem solved and the data analysed just as much as creating an elegant solution. I also just love plotting data, but that's just between me an my therapist. It can be frustrating being surrounded by biologists, chemists and clinicians all speaking a very different languages (even structural chemists appear to have a hard time understanding the organic chemists) particularly during warm afternoon meetings. However, I get a great satisfaction in being a 'fish out of water' so to speak and having something completely different to offer plus I've learnt a lot about the process and science of drug development.
My advice? Definitely use your programming ability as a tool and get in there. You may need to do a conversion course (MSc in Bio-informatics or some such) although we have quite a lot of informatics people who come from all manner of background (e.g. financial). Try and get some statistics training too. On the whole not understanding the biology/chemistry is not as much of a hurdle as not understanding what the data distribution means or how best to summarise it.
One must consider the possibility that this guy isn't using the term 'girlfriend' in any colloquial sense but rather is simply refering to a female friend. More specifically the term 'friend' does not necessarily exclude 'relative'. So indeed he could be refering to his mother.
Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh you weirdo.
...buy a lot of onions and carrots and the next time the support guy shows up cook and eat him. Frankly, from my experience, I can't think of any other use for them.
"...a number of knowing smiles around the room from LucasArts employees, followed by the comments: 'We know' and 'We are looking into it'"
probably translates into a number of executives thinking "Shit, that's a great idea why didn't we think of that?". Thats how you become an executive, knowing what to say.
Would this mix give a similar effect or does the DW bit cause problems? :)
... 'bet they didn't see that coming' gag?! :)
"...and the company expects to be producing at the rate of at least one million litres of the fuel each year from Blenheim by April"
If this catches on large areas that used to look blue from space are gonna start to turn green. Or maybe you can get different coloured algae these days.
Not so. The original food item is an American invention. Unsuprisingly Wikipedia has a rather extensive article on the subject
Lets face it, most guys wear these cause they wanna look like Captain Scarlett!
The ultimate plan is to liquify the astronaughts using high G, freeze dry them and send them up in packs of 100 for storage on the ISS. Then they can be work rotated simply by boiling the kettle. Great idea so long as no one mixes them up with the food supply.
Yeah but being able to share books freely is the last thing the publishers want isn't it? The nice thing about real books is that they have an inbuilt limit on how many you can share which is directly equivalent to the number you buy! Obviously you could work it so that you can share any book you buy once, but through these little holes greater crackers start to appear. Or even reliquish ownership of the book altogether and have it sit on the server freely available for the next person to download. Again this might scare publishers as it would weaken any DRM software.
I think Sony are trying to establish the e-book equivalent of the iPod (I think they even said that somewhere). Whilst the screen is nicely done (appropriate for the purpose having good text definition, low power requirements whilst foregoing unnecessarily high refresh rates) there is little else innovative about the product. Once you get good connectivity in place, using open standards such as bluetooth or wifi and simple communication ontop (via http and ftp) and the price down dramatically you will create a market where people will find innovative ways to share and exchange all manner of information. Provided the licenses let them.
I like the idea of e-books but they do lack some of the conveniencs of a paper back. The major one being cost. If I leave a £4.99 book on a train I am mostly just upset that I can't read it until I get another copy and then I will have to relocate my position. But if I leave £400 of e-book on a train I probably won't give a stuff about the books! Although if it carries 80 books will my insurance reimburse me for those too? Or will the ebook library let me have another download for free (this kind of thing also applies to DRM linked music too - you might the insurance to pay out for a new music player, but will your current license let you move it to your new, possibly incompatible player?)
In the UK there has been a movement to openly share good paperbacks by leaving them on trains and in other public places, perhaps with a few comments in on what you thought about the book. I think it may have been a BBC idea - sorry no weblink (bad slashdotter, dirty slashdotter, in your bed!). This is great idea and gets people exposed to books they wouldn't have normally read. Could we imagine a digital equivalent? Maybe a random download for every 5 you buy.
...this really news? It' been out a while and Yahoo! bought Konfabulator sometime ago as was reported on here.
Better known as "Ask forgiveness, not permission". or the JFDI - Just Fucking Do It - school of thought. In my experience of working in very large companies it is also highly correlated with "getting things done". Of course you had better not be wrong, so manage your risks. On balance I'd rather employ someone who gets on with stuff and takes (calculated) risks than someone easily paralysed by management.
What was he doing there anyway?
Web applications have particular characteristics in that they tend to run within a web-browser and use particular sets of technologies for both GUI, data representation and communication. But it is not necessarily the only or even the best way. There is a difference between deploying MS Office local to one machine or running it across a network with the documents on another remote fileserver. Many applications, although installed locally will update versions or load new plugin functionality across the net. The administrator must make many judgements on what characteristics they want including performance, maintainability, security, remote access, user training etc etc. And then decide how best to deploy the application.
I believe web applications are evolving on the back of web pages and thus on the back of web browsers. We can view traditional web page rendering and navigation as the original web service. As the services get more diverse so the browser will need to provide a greater variety of capabilities, including being designed from the ground up to be maliable via plugins. The browser becoming a lightweight framework into which the right components are loaded from the net to create the application required. See flock for some interesting moves in this direction.
Ultimately will the browser be the web OS? In the same way that windows/linux etc provide an useful abstraction of the hardware, with the browser provide a similar abstraction of the web?
Sorry about this being muddled but I'm writing as I think.
Yeah that's an interesting point. I had kinda assumed that most were the same.
Does this mean that at last we can get charts which really reflect what people are listening to?
blimey you were right. Burn the witch!
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but when will they do something really useful like keysearch. I never loose my blog, but I'm forever misplacing my keys!
Years ago applications were exepcted to just work - from a user point of view. But with the increased complexity of applications the user is becoming increasingly involved in the later stage testing and development of applications. This is particularly true in open source development, where the development team need to use every possible test scenerio available.
Although this thing isn't vastly developed, I think we are going to see a lot more services available to developers to help them better integrate with their users and to understand their issues with the software. I would like to see some better reporting tools, other than the last 100 exceptions, surely the top 100 exceptions would be more useful?
Sorry, I tend to think about global warming issues on a long timescale, so when I said "soon" I was unclear - I meant 25-50 years.
ahhh, crystal ball gazing, a tool of fabulous merit in pseudo-factual discussions. I myself favour the notion that we will all be holidaying on the moon in 2050.
But for CO2 emissions, it comes down to this: if you want to reduce our standard of living, you need to have more guns than we do. That's how it works.
"From my cold, dead hands" I think was the expression Charlton Heston used. Welcome to the terrordome.
...It doesn't meaningfully affect India or China, each soon to dwarf the US in emissions...
ok, wikipedia must have it wrong then...
Why do most other nations find the Kyoto agreement adequate to sign, yet the worlds biggest producer (by a long way per capita) of carbon emissions finds it so distasteful? Yes it's far from perfect, but what alternative have the US come up with? Yes some nations are missing their targets and just paying the fines. And you think that doesn't help? How long would you let your government put up taxes to cover fines that it could do something about?
From my personal experience the USA is a nation less than the sum of it's parts. I have met some wonderful American people, but put them together and give them a country and they behave like a spoilt child.
Yes, sorry my mistake. It's obvious to me now. How silly. Thanks for putting me right.