While there's still obviously (a lot more) testing to be done, it's hilarious how far people who identify as scientifically minded have gone to dismiss this out of hand.
At no point does scientific principle advocate dismissing repeatably testable results merely because it can't be explained by current understanding.
The unexplained is the epitome of everything that makes science exciting and relevant. It is precisely why science is so important.
I loved the quote from the show "Heroes" by the character Mohinder Suresh: "The default position of science is one of skepticism."
So you're one of the swags that believes all physics is right? Puh-leeze lets make up some more shit like dark matter an dark energy to make it so!
Any time you have an assumption based on physical laws, it must be able to be tested and measured and accounted for and predicted, and if the prediction based on those physical "laws" differs from what is observed, one must first, check their math for errors, check their method of measurement and if all of that checks out to be accurate to ask questions along the lines of: "What are the implications of what we have observed and measured and verified here?" or as Einstein asked "What would the universe be like if it operates the way we have observed it to here?" This is what allows science to side step conundrums based on incorrect assumptions and asking poorly worded questions that lead research astray and into asking the "Wrong questions". Before Einstein, the question was "Why does light always seem to be moving the same speed regardless of the point of view or movement of the observer with respect to that light, when we know that it can't?" That is a poorly worded question, because it assumes that what we know, but that we are unable to use to explain what we observe is correct, when it is likely it is not correct. This is why I hate the term "Laws of Physics" because it implies that they way we understand the universe is the way it operates, when these "Laws" are just our shorthand for documenting and understanding what we observe. This is also not to imply that when someone says "This breaks the laws of physics!" that they are pulling a James Dean, rebel attitude and getting something for nothing, it really, most likely means someone does not fully understand the thing they are dealing with and some corrections will be needed to science books of the future. As HAL9000 said in 2001, A Space Odyssey, "The problem can only be attributable to human error."
This reminds me of an article that was posted in Omni magazine back in the 1980s about a company that noticed that an electrically charged metal structure lost weight when it was electrified. The weight loss was not significant but was measurable.(The Omni article called it "antigravity" but it was actually more like electrostatically caused air movement.) The company marketed the technology as an air purifier, seeing as it ionized the air that was passing though the structure and caused an increase of weight in some of the particulate matter in the air.. causing it to either stick to the metal structure or to drop out of the air.
On Youtube there are countless hobbyists who make serpinski style triangular frames of cardboard and aluminum foil and light wires and charge them with an external power supply and note they are "lifters" the amount of thrust is tiny though, not nearly big enough to lift the power source, to say nothing about using it to power a craft to leave the atmosphere or achieve escape velocity. I don't remember where I read it, but I do think it was in Scientific American that the "Lifters" lift was attributed to electrostatic movement of air through the structure and would do nothing in the vacuum of space. (Best buy does have some nice indigo colored fan "rings" that work this way and that are silent because they have no moving parts.I also think that this is the same technology that was supposedly used in the Red October's "Magneto hydrodynamic", "Silent running" drive, and I have heard that something like that was actually used in submarines.) This may be different, though a peer review is needed and some alternative methods of testing are needed to differentiate what is happening here apart from the various notions about what could be happening. This is part of the peer review process to determine what the properties of such a propulsion method are so we can know if it is viable for space travel. My guess is that this is not something that would allow you to build a flying car or anything like warp drive, more like impulse power in theory, but would produce an amount of force close to the weight of a business card on a spacecraft, in Earth gravity, that is.
I am forced to wonder as an electrical engineer, if they are using strain gauges to measure the amount of thrust.. as I understand it, Strain gauges use metal traces that are of a known capacitance the way they are placed on a material and any slight amount of distortion of the surface it is mounted on causes a predictable change in this capacitance, which is how most electronic bathroom scales measure your weight. I wonder if the electrical field of this type of device would mess with the capacitance in their detector.. provided they are using that method of measuring thrust.. it might be a measurement error due to the method they are using to gauge the amount of thrust.
It is funny though, the part of my brain as a kid that loved Doctor Who is forced to wonder, if in a pinch The Doctor could fashion an "impulse thruster" out of the Klystron of an old microwave. I do know this, Those devices are dangerous, point it in the wrong direction, you can cook body parts. Don't try this at home! In a class in my Bachelor's degree we literally "Nuked" grapes in mid air with a Klystron under controlled conditions and, it burned the grape so intensely hot that it created a pinkish glow.. which was Plasma! Don't point this space drive at your junk, was the takeaway I would add. Not to say that all the people that are paranoid about electrical fields from cellular phones and high transmission lines cause cancer are right.. that has been thoroughly debunked. (and I am not interested in hearing from people who believe that I am wrong about that.. The amount of energy put off by a cellular phone transmitting at full power is not even 1/10th of what is needed to even pop a kernel of popcorn.. or even get it perceptibly warm for that matter. It is funny though that they say oh "Cellular phones on planes can cause all kinds of electrical inte
We are your customers and you don't have a business without us!
Don't forget the moment your product or business model steps outside of the lines of what we decide to spend our hard- earned money on, rest assured we will go elsewhere! This is just the nature of the game and you already know this!
>I do believe most of the post WWII UFO sitings, including the Roswell Crash were US Air Force personnel...
I can speak with confidence that this is not true.
What was it that you are confident it was then? Aliens? A claim like that would require way more proof than you probably have to be taken anywhere near seriously.
as far as Nazi research into telekinesis and mind control? just because it was researched does not mean it was real. Hitler was intelligent but by no means sane, and in a regime like that doing real science is problematic at best.. when the leaders think they know what the outcome of the research "Should" be.
Keep in mind that, it was scientists in the Nazi party that claimed, because Einstein was a jew, that "Relativity is a jewish farce".
I am thankful that the Nazi's were that dense, as to, due to their own prejudices, hadicapping themselves away from realizing that E=MC^2 was the key piece of info they needed to develop atomic weapons. We are here, living in the free world because they allowed their hatred of the jews to over-ride their desire to understand how the universe actually was structured to a level of sophistication needed to split the atom. THANK GOD!
Looks like you're too lazy to look it up too. We don't know, and can't agree upon, a proper definition of intelligence. And it makes a difference what exact definition is used in a study. The definition of "intelligence" used in this study is IQ, so your link is to the wrong article.
I suspect we won't be able to clearly define intelligence until we create a general AI...
KIDS! please.. adhominems do not allow such a good point to be explored in the discussion so dial it down a notch or two!
I agree that we would need an open ended general definition for what intelligence is otherwise the argument becomes so subjective as to be philosophy and not science. I sometimes wonder if the view such as yours, that we would need to develop a general AI to understand intelligence is semantically, a step that may lead attempts at defining intelligence in a "Nuts and Bolts" way astray. By your very definition, in order to understand the thing, we have to create the thing we don't understand, which sounds like creating an infinite improbability engine.. or something.. Better example, it sounds like painting ourselves in to a corner by the notion that in order to create a widget we would need that widget as a preliminary step to building it, which is as I said painting ourselves into a corner mentally.
There has already been some interesting work along the lines of defining intelligence in a general sense mathematically and a few models exist that attempt to mimic how networks of neurons process information, (back propagation networks with feedback, Dr Jeff Hawkins's Memory prediction model paradigm , as described in his book On Intelligence and my personal favorite: Alex Wissner-Gross's work demonstrating the defining equation: F = T S which states that intelligence is a force which uses it's available energy to maximize its future freedom of action.) None of these definitions are complete but they do give us some interesting and insightful clues as to what the general characteristic intelligent entities should possess are.
1- Intelligent systems should be able to be intelligent independent of outward observable behavior (We can be intelligent just lying around thinking and not outwardly "Doing" anything.) 2- Intelligent systems should gather information in the form of patterns and sequences of patterns, be able to recall them from memory and recognize patterns or partial patterns it has seen before and based on this collection of memory and experience, be able to "Predict" what pieces of information are coming next based on past patterns. Perceptions of these patterns and sequences should therefore be immune to variation in terms of being viewed in different settings, from different angles, and in the presence of noise and conflicting data, incomplete patterns and most importantly be viewed with an awareness of time. 3- Intelligent systems should be able to use the benefits endowed by the characteristics of 1 and 2 in order to use it's available energy, assets and surroundings in order to maximize its future freedom of action , whether that freedom be, winning a game and continuing to play, ensuring it's own survival or the survival of other beings or assets under it's care or achieving a pre-defined objective in the presence of uncertainty.
Again I say that the definition is not complete, because there are certainly aspects that can be added to this that would better describe humans, higher mammals, or advanced autonomous computer systems behavior in such a way as to lead to better understanding of what is going on inside our skulls or that would lead to (in the case of computer, robotic and software systems ) design parameters. To say that we have "No idea" of what intelligence is, at this point in the game.. in 2015 is not entirely true as a lot of serious work is being ap
That actually helps me have a better view. I hope my response didn't come off harshly in retrospect, (occupational hazard I suppose!)
Sometimes those types of questions have underlying personality tests in them, or are tests of critical thinking designed to invoke a wrong answer for intuitive thinkers that is usually wrong.. akin to the question:
"The cost of a bat is one dollar more than the cost of a ball, the ball and bat together cost $1.10. What is the cost of the ball"? It is amazing how many educated people will answer ten cents without thinking, but the answer is 5 cents.. and the correct answer reflects someone who would follow a thought process something like:
Given:
Cost of bat and ball together = $1.10 Difference in cost of bat and ball = $1.00
Cost of ball = ($1.10 - $1.00 ) / 2 = $0.05 Cost of bat = Cost of bat and ball - Cost of ball = $1.10 - $0.05 = $1.05
Your answer makes sense and is actually more of you wanting to see their brain working in a problem solving setting.. cool actually, thanks for clarifying that.
someone had a cool email signature above:
"You can make a Slashdot signature quote seem authoritative by attributing it to a famous person" - Sun Tzu
I am a fan of Sun Tzu, and what you are outlining is akin to his passage in The Art of War, talking about laying plans
"Without constant practice, the officers will be nervous and undecided when mustering for battle; Without constant practice, the General will be wavering and irresolute when the crisis is at hand."
I take this to mean that one should practice their craft not just until they get it right once , but until they can't get it wrong, and that comes from my background as a Jazz guitarist in my early college years, but it is a takeaway that applies elsewhere in life. Your line of questioning does uncover this but requires the skills of articulate communication and an awareness of what the person you are talking to understands, which are also skills you want, but can sometimes be hard to evaluate in a 30-45 minute interview.
In a senior position I agree and have articulated elsewhere in other comments that for a senior position the standard for knowing how to code securely has a bar that is higher than normal so your approach and question about how they can be trusted to protect the customer's data makes more sense now. It is easy for people of differing mindsets and approaches to interpersonal communication to overthink what is being asked and that can lead even very smart and experienced people astray. This is why I quoted the question about the ball and bat, because there is a type of methodical thought process that demonstrates one of many possible systematic approaches to giving the right answer, I think your question can be looked at as an analog to the ball bat question in that there are a range of approaches to answering that question that elegantly , and as your second interviewee demonstrated.
Thanks again for answering Ramone, Your answer has been helpful in an educational sense.
One of the most essential skills is recognizing when you are out of your depth, if you fail to notice it you will sink and likely take a hefty part of your employers budget with you. I would say its generally a good idea to own up if you don't have the foggiest about some area. No shame in not knowing absolutely everything about anything. Many problems don't take kindly to fumbling around, if you don't know, ask an actual expert or even hire the expert to do that part for you. Nobody needs another yes man who claims to know everything.
there is science to support this, Google "Dunning Kruger effect".
On the one hand, I kind of agree, but on the other hand if the problem is to transmit a file securely your first thought really shouldn't be what kind of file type it is. I might never have asked that question, but given such an answer answer I wouldn't hire the guy. I cannot know what the exact problem is, I don't know him after all, be is either missing some very important concepts or the ability to connect the dots.
It depends on what is behind the question. I would phrase it like this:
An attacker can packet sniff and certain file types have a statistical signature that can be fleshed out of a frequency analysis of the packets being sent and all things being equal will show a certain type of curve on a histogram. It can be hard to believe in an intuitive sense, that a histogram can reflect the actual informational pattern of a particular type of file sent over and over but it does, and over time, given enough captures this can defeat even carefully chosen cryptography algorithms. The interviewee is very smart if the reasoning behind his question is with a view to blurring the lines between different file types being able to be deduced over time by use of a rich data capture, frequency analysis and use of a histogram. He did also say that he was interviewing for a senior position, so I would expect him to be expecting that level of sophistication. One could make the argument that asking what type of file type is being sent is irrelevant because the assumption is that if you encrypt something that no matter what it is it is equally unreadable, but that is unfortunately not the case. Most people assume their windows password is secure, but you can download a program that gives you a boot cd that will give you all of the usernames and passwords on a system in less than a couple minutes. Breaking hashes is not nearly as hard as it once was and a senior level applicant that I would hire would be cognizant of that fact, or I wouldn't hire him. I would also pay such a potential employee higher than the average rate for the type of work he would be doing, depending on what their credit report says, what their previous work history says and what their references say about what kind of worker they are.
Such a worker could make a point by packet sniffing the network and then emailing the contents of an email the hiring manager sent out after the interview back to him from your personal email address, and it might be surprisingly easy to do, but that might be about as useful as stealing a bus to try to demonstrate your ability to be a bus driver.. might not end well.
Agreed. People need to have REASONABLE expectations.
While that is true and even a rational viewpoint that most of us on the computer programing and employee side of the employer/employee equation, the basic premise is not all that practical.
The problem here on our side is the expectation of that problem being solved by reasoning, talking, arguing, debating and making correct logical points in an attempt to fix the problem by essentially changing someone else. In my experience, anytime your default approach is to reach out expecting other people to change, you are essentially banging your head against the wall, rather than changing your approach to providing value added to the company without working harder but working smarter. You are right that reasonable expectations would make everything run smoothly but that is out of our control, all we can do is give the employer an unreasonably high level of quality and do it in such a way that we don't overwork ourselves doing it. I mean if they expect to pay you $20.00/hour to do this, 40 hours a week when the going rate is 3-4 times that, spend 1/4 of your time working. Find a way to streamline the process so you spend 10 hours actually working and filing your TPS reports and find a way to productively use the other 30 hours in the week doing something that profits you, such as looking through the job sites for a better job, studying and sharpening your skills or working on your interviewing skills and re-writing your resume.
"So Ted looks like you are quite the Ruby dev. Tell me, What is the caloric requirement for a 3000 member bee hive expressed in acres of orange trees in spring time in the southern hemisphere?"
I've found that about 15-20% of all people in all fields are bad. Medical is one of the few exceptions to that, because of the additional hurdles designed to remove the lower performers. Even certified Engineers (mechanical, electrical), there are many incompetent ones.
What I see with IT is that people demand the top 5% and somehow think that's "average". If 99% of your applicants are incompetent, your standards are the error, not the applicants.
I think there is more of an Occams razor approach here, HR or the hiring managers may not be so good at accurately assessing the skill level of applicants, if they themselves do not possess a proficient skill level in the area for which they are interviewing, per the Dunning Kruger effect. It is interesting and a bit sobering to read about. Have a look...
This one can be insidious because it can cause managers not possessing proficiency to under estimate the skills of workers whilst causing non-proficient employees to overestimate their skill level.
It can be hard for some to accept, but it is certainly true that self-deception is most insidious, because the very act of the deception covers its own tracks. Ask yourself: "how many psychotherapists does it take to change a lightbulb?" The answer is one, with the caveat that the lightbulb has to be willing to change!
Fortunately the situation improves when both groups educate themselves or adopt an objective set of metrics that can measure everyone according to the same sets of criteria.Of course the common view of who has the burden of proof being the person making the claim of having the skill set or the view of the assessments being skewed requires careful handling in environments where constructive criticism is viewed as playing politics, but in that case as well, all things being equal they would have to prove that , but rarely are taken to task, and the corporate world is not a court room nor a academic environment where those rules are more regularly followed. Perhaps that would be a good place to start making improvements to this issue? Anyone agree?
It's not just "we want the top 5%," but "we want the top 5% that will take the median salary for the job title in our particular locale"
That brings up an important point, the whole idea of the "Dunning Kruger effect" that individuals with a low skill level not only are unaware that they have a low skill level compared to the average of individuals possessing that skill set, but lack the ability to distinguish the skill levels of that skill set in others as well.
This is why in a company wide survey asking workers to rate their skill level relative to the rest of the company, something on the order of 35 to 42% of the company judged themselves to be in the top 5%, which, when when taken mathematically, is patently absurd.
My view on the matter, having a background in music before taking up computer science as a major, is that this reflects a common trapping of ego in terms of the amount of effort one puts forth in practicing their art. I had a college music instructor that hammered into our heads that "A good musician doesn't just practice a piece until he/she gets it right, they practice that piece until they can't get it wrong!" In the case of music it is rather easy for a non skilled "music listener" to tell a good player from a not so good player, to quote the lines from one of my favorite John Wayne movies: El Dorado:
Robert Mitchum played J,P., a drunken Sheriff who in one scene, walks into a saloon with newly deputized John Wayne and a gunman is hiding behind the piano with Joe, the piano player nervously playing hoping the whole situation blows over without him getting killed in the crossfire: (Reminds me so much of being the tech guy in many companies I might add.)
J.P.: Joe, you're playing a lot of sour notes on that piano. Joe: I know I am. J.P.: You don't look very happy. Joe: I'm certainly not. J.P.: Wouldn't you like to move away from that piano, Joe? Joe: You're darn right I would. J.P.: Well, then, move!
In the case of computer programming it is easy to fool one's self into thinking they have mastered something when they don't write code every day and constantly spend their time building the mind-set to solve problems with a programming language to where it is second nature to them. Someone mentioned the FizzBuzz game, Just for giggles , I tried it and was able to write a java object to do it in 2 minutes while sitting on the toilet and made it compile on the first try. If you have to spend a night figuring that out and getting it to compile and work right.. you have a bit more practice work to do before you are ready to play a perfect "Old Susanna" on the piano while a gunman is hiding behind the piano waiting to ambush John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, whilst not making any mistakes as it were..
Given you're asking such simple questions in an interview I'm now under the impression that you're not very good at what you do either.
The entire industry is bloated with unskilled people. Some kid learns how to do a pivot in Excel and they suddenly think they're gods gift to computing. Below that are many times the amount of people that think knowing where the device manager can be found on a windows system makes them an expert.
Same goes for the older techs that think 20 years of experience is the same as actually knowing what you're doing. Just because you've been doing something for a long time doesn't mean you're any good at it.
In my estimation, less than 1% of people that work in the tech industry are competent and 99% of those are belligerent and nearly impossible to work with.
Ask the question : What do you do in your spare time?
If the answer is anything other than "I spend all my free time learning new tech" then don't bother because there are people that *do* and they have names like John Carmack.
A good tech is a computer scientist and I'd expect them to be as proficient in their field as a brain surgeon is in theirs and I pay them accordingly.
It used to be a mail merge that was the "I AM GOD" skill to have. A pivot? I would have thought it would be a linear regression or something, (A regression is actually really awesomely useful compared to a pivot or even a mail merge, but I guess it depends on who is asking too. Just so long as the kid doesn't refer to the pivot as "An Pivot". If he does that then he qualifies as "An hero".)
Coming from a position of diverse experience on the matter of communication in interviews along with concise communication between professionals who have either come up in education and experience (or both) in two different generations or whose experience is in differing, but compatible areas such as web programing versus old school (mid 1990s) CGI web programing , not to be confused with computer graphics, I am referring to the period terminology for web to credit card transaction mechanisms.) or C ++ application programing versus embedded application C implementations, in an interview conveying to YOU the interviewer, the breadth of my experience and having to guess your particular areas of expertise so that I can speak your particular dialect of terminology to answer your test questions and not make the interview questions needlessly long, is a daunting task of communications ninjutsu to put it mildly.
It is hard for me in interviews due to the fact I am beginning my graduate level education, and have taken two different tracks in my education, Software application programming and Electronics and Electronics at the bachelor's level including embedded systems, microprocessors, satellite communications and different kinds of encryption including Public Key Cryptography, AES Encryption and I did quite a bit of elective work involving quantum encryption and I will tell you what I spent half of my time on Quantum encryption was showing how many ways the human element and security weaknesses in the hardware that is not guarded along it's entire length.. can be defeated by a "Man in the middle" Large pulse attack which, while not disrupting the entanglement Alice and Bob see, can still see what the differences are between the actual bits being sent by being able to determine the orthogonal configurations of Alice and Bob's optical hardware. (I had a series of long interesting discussions on the feasibility of this with my professor who had spent time in the Navy working on such things and he was able to agree that there are indeed vulnerabilities that the designers had not thought of.)
I find that in an interview it is surprisingly difficult to convey what your abilities are, what your experience encompasses and get into enough technical detail that the interviewer is on the same page, without them jumping to conclusions such as me making things up, or just coming off as plain arrogant. (I am not judging you, it is just with generational differences and having worked in a lot of different knowledge domains, You would be surprised how many things have the same basic underlying principles, mathematical patterns and even sometimes are called by the same name but in two different domains have such a different industry jargon associated with the two separate fields that someone such as myself in electronics and software programming still occasionally feels like I need some sort of lexicon to make sure that both people having the discussion are on the same page. I say again I am not judging you, but everyone has different sets of experience and skill sets and in a particular job that is either a tremendous asset or a liability.)
I really feel that this question of yours ramoneThePoolGuy, would be better if it were two way, because I wonder if this isn't something that would be served by reading Dilbert, particularly the "Step one: Identify the problem" series. Just that title is a great reminder to never take anything at face value and that brings me to this point. I don't believe that anyone should be judged as not intelligent or unskilled, especially in a technical field, just by asking questions. You commented that when you asked the interviewee the question: "Suppose you wanted to send me a file with very sensitive information, how would you encrypt it in such a way that I would decrypt it?" and the person started off by asking me if it was an excel file, a PDF etc.. which I can see why you judged as an inexperienced person trying to throw out jargon, but understanding his "angle" on the problem might have been tell
What cracks me up is Ladyada judging other people's designs. She's just a tinkerer that leveraged her gender into re-seling eBay trinkets for a huge markup.
She does have a Masters degree in electronic engineering from MIT, rest assured that is what she is leveraging.
Slashdot Mirror
While there's still obviously (a lot more) testing to be done, it's hilarious how far people who identify as scientifically minded have gone to dismiss this out of hand.
At no point does scientific principle advocate dismissing repeatably testable results merely because it can't be explained by current understanding.
The unexplained is the epitome of everything that makes science exciting and relevant. It is precisely why science is so important.
I loved the quote from the show "Heroes" by the character Mohinder Suresh: "The default position of science is one of skepticism."
So you're one of the swags that believes all physics is right? Puh-leeze lets make up some more shit like dark matter an dark energy to make it so!
Any time you have an assumption based on physical laws, it must be able to be tested and measured and accounted for and predicted, and if the prediction based on those physical "laws" differs from what is observed, one must first, check their math for errors, check their method of measurement and if all of that checks out to be accurate to ask questions along the lines of: "What are the implications of what we have observed and measured and verified here?" or as Einstein asked "What would the universe be like if it operates the way we have observed it to here?" This is what allows science to side step conundrums based on incorrect assumptions and asking poorly worded questions that lead research astray and into asking the "Wrong questions". Before Einstein, the question was "Why does light always seem to be moving the same speed regardless of the point of view or movement of the observer with respect to that light, when we know that it can't?" That is a poorly worded question, because it assumes that what we know, but that we are unable to use to explain what we observe is correct, when it is likely it is not correct. This is why I hate the term "Laws of Physics" because it implies that they way we understand the universe is the way it operates, when these "Laws" are just our shorthand for documenting and understanding what we observe. This is also not to imply that when someone says "This breaks the laws of physics!" that they are pulling a James Dean, rebel attitude and getting something for nothing, it really, most likely means someone does not fully understand the thing they are dealing with and some corrections will be needed to science books of the future. As HAL9000 said in 2001, A Space Odyssey, "The problem can only be attributable to human error."
This reminds me of an article that was posted in Omni magazine back in the 1980s about a company that noticed that an electrically charged metal structure lost weight when it was electrified. The weight loss was not significant but was measurable.(The Omni article called it "antigravity" but it was actually more like electrostatically caused air movement.) The company marketed the technology as an air purifier, seeing as it ionized the air that was passing though the structure and caused an increase of weight in some of the particulate matter in the air.. causing it to either stick to the metal structure or to drop out of the air.
On Youtube there are countless hobbyists who make serpinski style triangular frames of cardboard and aluminum foil and light wires and charge them with an external power supply and note they are "lifters" the amount of thrust is tiny though, not nearly big enough to lift the power source, to say nothing about using it to power a craft to leave the atmosphere or achieve escape velocity. I don't remember where I read it, but I do think it was in Scientific American that the "Lifters" lift was attributed to electrostatic movement of air through the structure and would do nothing in the vacuum of space. (Best buy does have some nice indigo colored fan "rings" that work this way and that are silent because they have no moving parts.I also think that this is the same technology that was supposedly used in the Red October's "Magneto hydrodynamic", "Silent running" drive, and I have heard that something like that was actually used in submarines.) This may be different, though a peer review is needed and some alternative methods of testing are needed to differentiate what is happening here apart from the various notions about what could be happening. This is part of the peer review process to determine what the properties of such a propulsion method are so we can know if it is viable for space travel. My guess is that this is not something that would allow you to build a flying car or anything like warp drive, more like impulse power in theory, but would produce an amount of force close to the weight of a business card on a spacecraft, in Earth gravity, that is.
I am forced to wonder as an electrical engineer, if they are using strain gauges to measure the amount of thrust.. as I understand it, Strain gauges use metal traces that are of a known capacitance the way they are placed on a material and any slight amount of distortion of the surface it is mounted on causes a predictable change in this capacitance, which is how most electronic bathroom scales measure your weight. I wonder if the electrical field of this type of device would mess with the capacitance in their detector.. provided they are using that method of measuring thrust.. it might be a measurement error due to the method they are using to gauge the amount of thrust.
It is funny though, the part of my brain as a kid that loved Doctor Who is forced to wonder, if in a pinch The Doctor could fashion an "impulse thruster" out of the Klystron of an old microwave. I do know this, Those devices are dangerous, point it in the wrong direction, you can cook body parts. Don't try this at home! In a class in my Bachelor's degree we literally "Nuked" grapes in mid air with a Klystron under controlled conditions and, it burned the grape so intensely hot that it created a pinkish glow.. which was Plasma! Don't point this space drive at your junk, was the takeaway I would add. Not to say that all the people that are paranoid about electrical fields from cellular phones and high transmission lines cause cancer are right.. that has been thoroughly debunked. (and I am not interested in hearing from people who believe that I am wrong about that.. The amount of energy put off by a cellular phone transmitting at full power is not even 1/10th of what is needed to even pop a kernel of popcorn.. or even get it perceptibly warm for that matter. It is funny though that they say oh "Cellular phones on planes can cause all kinds of electrical inte
Impulse Power Mr Cuthulu!
Dont't tell us what to do!
We are your customers and you don't have a business without us!
Don't forget the moment your product or business model steps outside of the lines of what we decide to spend our hard- earned money on, rest assured we will go elsewhere! This is just the nature of the game and you already know this!
>I do believe most of the post WWII UFO sitings, including the Roswell Crash were US Air Force personnel ...
I can speak with confidence that this is not true.
What was it that you are confident it was then? Aliens? A claim like that would require way more proof than you probably have to be taken anywhere near seriously.
as far as Nazi research into telekinesis and mind control? just because it was researched does not mean it was real. Hitler was intelligent but by no means sane, and in a regime like that doing real science is problematic at best.. when the leaders think they know what the outcome of the research "Should" be.
Keep in mind that, it was scientists in the Nazi party that claimed, because Einstein was a jew, that "Relativity is a jewish farce".
I am thankful that the Nazi's were that dense, as to, due to their own prejudices, hadicapping themselves away from realizing that E=MC^2 was the key piece of info they needed to develop atomic weapons. We are here, living in the free world because they allowed their hatred of the jews to over-ride their desire to understand how the universe actually was structured to a level of sophistication needed to split the atom. THANK GOD!
You're too lazy to look it up?
Looks like you're too lazy to look it up too. We don't know, and can't agree upon, a proper definition of intelligence. And it makes a difference what exact definition is used in a study. The definition of "intelligence" used in this study is IQ, so your link is to the wrong article.
I suspect we won't be able to clearly define intelligence until we create a general AI...
KIDS! please.. adhominems do not allow such a good point to be explored in the discussion so dial it down a notch or two!
I agree that we would need an open ended general definition for what intelligence is otherwise the argument becomes so subjective as to be philosophy and not science. I sometimes wonder if the view such as yours, that we would need to develop a general AI to understand intelligence is semantically, a step that may lead attempts at defining intelligence in a "Nuts and Bolts" way astray. By your very definition, in order to understand the thing, we have to create the thing we don't understand, which sounds like creating an infinite improbability engine.. or something.. Better example, it sounds like painting ourselves in to a corner by the notion that in order to create a widget we would need that widget as a preliminary step to building it, which is as I said painting ourselves into a corner mentally.
There has already been some interesting work along the lines of defining intelligence in a general sense mathematically and a few models exist that attempt to mimic how networks of neurons process information, (back propagation networks with feedback, Dr Jeff Hawkins's Memory prediction model paradigm , as described in his book On Intelligence and my personal favorite: Alex Wissner-Gross's work demonstrating the defining equation: F = T S which states that intelligence is a force which uses it's available energy to maximize its future freedom of action.) None of these definitions are complete but they do give us some interesting and insightful clues as to what the general characteristic intelligent entities should possess are.
1- Intelligent systems should be able to be intelligent independent of outward observable behavior (We can be intelligent just lying around thinking and not outwardly "Doing" anything.)
2- Intelligent systems should gather information in the form of patterns and sequences of patterns, be able to recall them from memory and recognize patterns or partial patterns it has seen before and based on this collection of memory and experience, be able to "Predict" what pieces of information are coming next based on past patterns. Perceptions of these patterns and sequences should therefore be immune to variation in terms of being viewed in different settings, from different angles, and in the presence of noise and conflicting data, incomplete patterns and most importantly be viewed with an awareness of time.
3- Intelligent systems should be able to use the benefits endowed by the characteristics of 1 and 2 in order to use it's available energy, assets and surroundings in order to maximize its future freedom of action , whether that freedom be, winning a game and continuing to play, ensuring it's own survival or the survival of other beings or assets under it's care or achieving a pre-defined objective in the presence of uncertainty.
Again I say that the definition is not complete, because there are certainly aspects that can be added to this that would better describe humans, higher mammals, or advanced autonomous computer systems behavior in such a way as to lead to better understanding of what is going on inside our skulls or that would lead to (in the case of computer, robotic and software systems ) design parameters. To say that we have "No idea" of what intelligence is, at this point in the game.. in 2015 is not entirely true as a lot of serious work is being ap
Thanks Ramone for responding!
That actually helps me have a better view. I hope my response didn't come off harshly in retrospect, (occupational hazard I suppose!)
Sometimes those types of questions have underlying personality tests in them, or are tests of critical thinking designed to invoke a wrong answer for intuitive thinkers that is usually wrong.. akin to the question:
"The cost of a bat is one dollar more than the cost of a ball, the ball and bat together cost $1.10. What is the cost of the ball"?
It is amazing how many educated people will answer ten cents without thinking, but the answer is 5 cents.. and the correct answer reflects someone who would follow a thought process something like:
Given:
Cost of bat and ball together = $1.10
Difference in cost of bat and ball = $1.00
Cost of ball = ($1.10 - $1.00 ) / 2 = $0.05
Cost of bat = Cost of bat and ball - Cost of ball = $1.10 - $0.05 = $1.05
Your answer makes sense and is actually more of you wanting to see their brain working in a problem solving setting.. cool actually, thanks for clarifying that.
someone had a cool email signature above:
"You can make a Slashdot signature quote seem authoritative by attributing it to a famous person" - Sun Tzu
I am a fan of Sun Tzu, and what you are outlining is akin to his passage in The Art of War, talking about laying plans
"Without constant practice, the officers will be nervous and undecided when mustering for battle; Without constant practice, the General will be wavering and irresolute when the crisis is at hand."
I take this to mean that one should practice their craft not just until they get it right once , but until they can't get it wrong, and that comes from my background as a Jazz guitarist in my early college years, but it is a takeaway that applies elsewhere in life. Your line of questioning does uncover this but requires the skills of articulate communication and an awareness of what the person you are talking to understands, which are also skills you want, but can sometimes be hard to evaluate in a 30-45 minute interview.
In a senior position I agree and have articulated elsewhere in other comments that for a senior position the standard for knowing how to code securely has a bar that is higher than normal so your approach and question about how they can be trusted to protect the customer's data makes more sense now. It is easy for people of differing mindsets and approaches to interpersonal communication to overthink what is being asked and that can lead even very smart and experienced people astray. This is why I quoted the question about the ball and bat, because there is a type of methodical thought process that demonstrates one of many possible systematic approaches to giving the right answer, I think your question can be looked at as an analog to the ball bat question in that there are a range of approaches to answering that question that elegantly , and as your second interviewee demonstrated.
Thanks again for answering Ramone, Your answer has been helpful in an educational sense.
Take care, and good luck!
One of the most essential skills is recognizing when you are out of your depth, if you fail to notice it you will sink and likely take a hefty part of your employers budget with you. I would say its generally a good idea to own up if you don't have the foggiest about some area. No shame in not knowing absolutely everything about anything. Many problems don't take kindly to fumbling around, if you don't know, ask an actual expert or even hire the expert to do that part for you. Nobody needs another yes man who claims to know everything.
there is science to support this, Google "Dunning Kruger effect".
On the one hand, I kind of agree, but on the other hand if the problem is to transmit a file securely your first thought really shouldn't be what kind of file type it is. I might never have asked that question, but given such an answer answer I wouldn't hire the guy. I cannot know what the exact problem is, I don't know him after all, be is either missing some very important concepts or the ability to connect the dots.
It depends on what is behind the question. I would phrase it like this:
An attacker can packet sniff and certain file types have a statistical signature that can be fleshed out of a frequency analysis of the packets being sent and all things being equal will show a certain type of curve on a histogram. It can be hard to believe in an intuitive sense, that a histogram can reflect the actual informational pattern of a particular type of file sent over and over but it does, and over time, given enough captures this can defeat even carefully chosen cryptography algorithms. The interviewee is very smart if the reasoning behind his question is with a view to blurring the lines between different file types being able to be deduced over time by use of a rich data capture, frequency analysis and use of a histogram. He did also say that he was interviewing for a senior position, so I would expect him to be expecting that level of sophistication. One could make the argument that asking what type of file type is being sent is irrelevant because the assumption is that if you encrypt something that no matter what it is it is equally unreadable, but that is unfortunately not the case. Most people assume their windows password is secure, but you can download a program that gives you a boot cd that will give you all of the usernames and passwords on a system in less than a couple minutes. Breaking hashes is not nearly as hard as it once was and a senior level applicant that I would hire would be cognizant of that fact, or I wouldn't hire him. I would also pay such a potential employee higher than the average rate for the type of work he would be doing, depending on what their credit report says, what their previous work history says and what their references say about what kind of worker they are.
Such a worker could make a point by packet sniffing the network and then emailing the contents of an email the hiring manager sent out after the interview back to him from your personal email address, and it might be surprisingly easy to do, but that might be about as useful as stealing a bus to try to demonstrate your ability to be a bus driver.. might not end well.
Agreed. People need to have REASONABLE expectations.
While that is true and even a rational viewpoint that most of us on the computer programing and employee side of the employer /employee equation, the basic premise is not all that practical.
The problem here on our side is the expectation of that problem being solved by reasoning, talking, arguing, debating and making correct logical points in an attempt to fix the problem by essentially changing someone else. In my experience, anytime your default approach is to reach out expecting other people to change, you are essentially banging your head against the wall, rather than changing your approach to providing value added to the company without working harder but working smarter. You are right that reasonable expectations would make everything run smoothly but that is out of our control, all we can do is give the employer an unreasonably high level of quality and do it in such a way that we don't overwork ourselves doing it. I mean if they expect to pay you $20.00 /hour to do this, 40 hours a week when the going rate is 3-4 times that, spend 1/4 of your time working. Find a way to streamline the process so you spend 10 hours actually working and filing your TPS reports and find a way to productively use the other 30 hours in the week doing something that profits you, such as looking through the job sites for a better job, studying and sharpening your skills or working on your interviewing skills and re-writing your resume.
"So Ted looks like you are quite the Ruby dev. Tell me, What is the caloric requirement for a 3000 member bee hive expressed in acres of orange trees in spring time in the southern hemisphere?"
African or South American Variety?
I've found that about 15-20% of all people in all fields are bad. Medical is one of the few exceptions to that, because of the additional hurdles designed to remove the lower performers. Even certified Engineers (mechanical, electrical), there are many incompetent ones.
What I see with IT is that people demand the top 5% and somehow think that's "average". If 99% of your applicants are incompetent, your standards are the error, not the applicants.
I think there is more of an Occams razor approach here, HR or the hiring managers may not be so good at accurately assessing the skill level of applicants, if they themselves do not possess a proficient skill level in the area for which they are interviewing, per the Dunning Kruger effect. It is interesting and a bit sobering to read about. Have a look...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...–Kruger_effect
This one can be insidious because it can cause managers not possessing proficiency to under estimate the skills of workers whilst causing non-proficient employees to overestimate their skill level.
It can be hard for some to accept, but it is certainly true that self-deception is most insidious, because the very act of the deception covers its own tracks. Ask yourself: "how many psychotherapists does it take to change a lightbulb?" The answer is one, with the caveat that the lightbulb has to be willing to change!
Fortunately the situation improves when both groups educate themselves or adopt an objective set of metrics that can measure everyone according to the same sets of criteria.Of course the common view of who has the burden of proof being the person making the claim of having the skill set or the view of the assessments being skewed requires careful handling in environments where constructive criticism is viewed as playing politics, but in that case as well, all things being equal they would have to prove that , but rarely are taken to task, and the corporate world is not a court room nor a academic environment where those rules are more regularly followed. Perhaps that would be a good place to start making improvements to this issue? Anyone agree?
I would agree.
It's not just "we want the top 5%," but "we want the top 5% that will take the median salary for the job title in our particular locale"
That brings up an important point, the whole idea of the "Dunning Kruger effect" that individuals with a low skill level not only are unaware that they have a low skill level compared to the average of individuals possessing that skill set, but lack the ability to distinguish the skill levels of that skill set in others as well.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/q...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
This is why in a company wide survey asking workers to rate their skill level relative to the rest of the company, something on the order of 35 to 42% of the company judged themselves to be in the top 5%, which, when when taken mathematically, is patently absurd.
My view on the matter, having a background in music before taking up computer science as a major, is that this reflects a common trapping of ego in terms of the amount of effort one puts forth in practicing their art. I had a college music instructor that hammered into our heads that "A good musician doesn't just practice a piece until he/she gets it right, they practice that piece until they can't get it wrong!" In the case of music it is rather easy for a non skilled "music listener" to tell a good player from a not so good player, to quote the lines from one of my favorite John Wayne movies: El Dorado:
Robert Mitchum played J,P., a drunken Sheriff who in one scene, walks into a saloon with newly deputized John Wayne and a gunman is hiding behind the piano with Joe, the piano player nervously playing hoping the whole situation blows over without him getting killed in the crossfire: (Reminds me so much of being the tech guy in many companies I might add.)
J.P.: Joe, you're playing a lot of sour notes on that piano.
Joe: I know I am.
J.P.: You don't look very happy.
Joe: I'm certainly not.
J.P.: Wouldn't you like to move away from that piano, Joe?
Joe: You're darn right I would.
J.P.: Well, then, move!
In the case of computer programming it is easy to fool one's self into thinking they have mastered something when they don't write code every day and constantly spend their time building the mind-set to solve problems with a programming language to where it is second nature to them. Someone mentioned the FizzBuzz game, Just for giggles , I tried it and was able to write a java object to do it in 2 minutes while sitting on the toilet and made it compile on the first try. If you have to spend a night figuring that out and getting it to compile and work right.. you have a bit more practice work to do before you are ready to play a perfect "Old Susanna" on the piano while a gunman is hiding behind the piano waiting to ambush John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, whilst not making any mistakes as it were..
Given you're asking such simple questions in an interview I'm now under the impression that you're not very good at what you do either.
The entire industry is bloated with unskilled people. Some kid learns how to do a pivot in Excel and they suddenly think they're gods gift to computing. Below that are many times the amount of people that think knowing where the device manager can be found on a windows system makes them an expert.
Same goes for the older techs that think 20 years of experience is the same as actually knowing what you're doing. Just because you've been doing something for a long time doesn't mean you're any good at it.
In my estimation, less than 1% of people that work in the tech industry are competent and 99% of those are belligerent and nearly impossible to work with.
Ask the question : What do you do in your spare time?
If the answer is anything other than "I spend all my free time learning new tech" then don't bother because there are people that *do* and they have names like John Carmack.
A good tech is a computer scientist and I'd expect them to be as proficient in their field as a brain surgeon is in theirs and I pay them accordingly.
It used to be a mail merge that was the "I AM GOD" skill to have. A pivot? I would have thought it would be a linear regression or something, (A regression is actually really awesomely useful compared to a pivot or even a mail merge, but I guess it depends on who is asking too. Just so long as the kid doesn't refer to the pivot as "An Pivot". If he does that then he qualifies as "An hero".)
Coming from a position of diverse experience on the matter of communication in interviews along with concise communication between professionals who have either come up in education and experience (or both) in two different generations or whose experience is in differing, but compatible areas such as web programing versus old school (mid 1990s) CGI web programing , not to be confused with computer graphics, I am referring to the period terminology for web to credit card transaction mechanisms.) or C ++ application programing versus embedded application C implementations, in an interview conveying to YOU the interviewer, the breadth of my experience and having to guess your particular areas of expertise so that I can speak your particular dialect of terminology to answer your test questions and not make the interview questions needlessly long, is a daunting task of communications ninjutsu to put it mildly. It is hard for me in interviews due to the fact I am beginning my graduate level education, and have taken two different tracks in my education, Software application programming and Electronics and Electronics at the bachelor's level including embedded systems, microprocessors, satellite communications and different kinds of encryption including Public Key Cryptography, AES Encryption and I did quite a bit of elective work involving quantum encryption and I will tell you what I spent half of my time on Quantum encryption was showing how many ways the human element and security weaknesses in the hardware that is not guarded along it's entire length.. can be defeated by a "Man in the middle" Large pulse attack which, while not disrupting the entanglement Alice and Bob see, can still see what the differences are between the actual bits being sent by being able to determine the orthogonal configurations of Alice and Bob's optical hardware. (I had a series of long interesting discussions on the feasibility of this with my professor who had spent time in the Navy working on such things and he was able to agree that there are indeed vulnerabilities that the designers had not thought of.) I find that in an interview it is surprisingly difficult to convey what your abilities are, what your experience encompasses and get into enough technical detail that the interviewer is on the same page, without them jumping to conclusions such as me making things up, or just coming off as plain arrogant. (I am not judging you, it is just with generational differences and having worked in a lot of different knowledge domains, You would be surprised how many things have the same basic underlying principles, mathematical patterns and even sometimes are called by the same name but in two different domains have such a different industry jargon associated with the two separate fields that someone such as myself in electronics and software programming still occasionally feels like I need some sort of lexicon to make sure that both people having the discussion are on the same page. I say again I am not judging you, but everyone has different sets of experience and skill sets and in a particular job that is either a tremendous asset or a liability.) I really feel that this question of yours ramoneThePoolGuy, would be better if it were two way, because I wonder if this isn't something that would be served by reading Dilbert, particularly the "Step one: Identify the problem" series. Just that title is a great reminder to never take anything at face value and that brings me to this point. I don't believe that anyone should be judged as not intelligent or unskilled, especially in a technical field, just by asking questions. You commented that when you asked the interviewee the question: "Suppose you wanted to send me a file with very sensitive information, how would you encrypt it in such a way that I would decrypt it?" and the person started off by asking me if it was an excel file, a PDF etc.. which I can see why you judged as an inexperienced person trying to throw out jargon, but understanding his "angle" on the problem might have been tell
What cracks me up is Ladyada judging other people's designs. She's just a tinkerer that leveraged her gender into re-seling eBay trinkets for a huge markup.
She does have a Masters degree in electronic engineering from MIT, rest assured that is what she is leveraging.