I used to do this when I was a student. A very light fabric such as cheesecloth or a light sarong works better than a bedsheet, as there's some airflow through it. But it still doesn't work very well. Just spraying water as a fine mist into the air works better, as long as it isn't humid.
Taking a cool shower when you get too hot helps.
Going out and staying in larger buildings (e.g. at work or supermarkets) helps if the heatwave and power outage haven't been going for more than a few days.
Sleeping outside can be an option if insects and personal safety aren't problems in your area.
Agreed. I am also in Canberra, and tried both Optus and Vodafone before switching to Telstra. Vodfone had very poor coverage both in my home suburb and at my workplace (only a couple of kilometres from the city centre -- but probably affected by local hills). Even where the coverage seemed good, data speeds were very slow. Telstra has much more reliable and very much faster coverage, and better service these days, too.
Search for "scientific programmer". The HPC and CUDA bits are likely to be implied between the lines rather than mentioned in the ads.
You have rare and important skills for environmental modelling and I very much doubt you'd need prior experience specifically in that context to get a good job in a research support position. You'd be working with scientists with that experience and expertise, and using your own expertise to provide skills that they probably don't have.
Yes, you be in a research support position rather than a research scientist or lecturing position -- at least initially (people do move from one to the other, with or without PhDs). But the sort of work you say you want to do mostly sounds like a research support role rather than an academic role. it wouldn't make you a second-class citizen.
PS - OP, please leave a comment below if you'd like to get in touch with a scientific programmer or three who are working with oceanographers, so you can hear from them directly what the work is really like and how rewarding it is. I'll send you some contact details.
As an oceanographer, I absolutely agree. People with the OP's skills in the earth sciences rare and very highly valued.
These roles are not generally highly paid compared with what you could be getting in gaming, because research just doesn't pay as well as commercial work. On the other hand, there's a good chance you'll get to play with high level HPC and a near certainty that you'll be contributing in a very tangible way to research with public good outcomes.
Probably more valuable than becoming a researcher yourself would be to take on a research support role, and work with scientists. The job title might be something along the lines of "scientific programmer".
As a research student, you don't take classes, but you still cost money: almost certainly more than undergraduates cost, though you are doubtless also giving back a great deal of value through your productive research.
Costs include (at very least) the cost of your advisors' time (probably more time than you think), the cost of your office space and furniture, IT, HR, and HSE support and library services, as well as little things like access to counselling and other student/staff services. You may not use any of these much, but they need to be funded and there for you anyway. Probably also research operating costs and travel costs.
Don't forget that lots of highly skilled people want to work in another country for a while, but have no intention of living there permanently.
My brother in law worked happily in the US for a few years on well over $150K/year, but after he and his wife had a daughter, they wanted to move back to NZ to bring her up. He found a job back home (at a considerable paycut) and left the US after 4 years, 10 months. His US colleagues thought he was mad to leave a good job so close to getting a green card, but he had no interest in a green card. Living in the US forever had never been in his plan.
I have several other friends who have worked in the US for a year or three after getting their PhDs, just for some overseas experience before heading home. It's pretty common among younger, highly educated people.
This is a complete misunderstanding of the chemistry involved.
Increased dissolved CO2 concentrations (pCO2) make it much HARDER, not easier for corals and shellfish to fix calcium carbonate.
The reaction is: Ca2+ + 2HCO3- CaCo3 + H2O + CO2 This reaction can go in either direction. It needs to run from left to right to create coral and shells. Increase the concentration of CO2 in the water and you increase the pressure in the other direction (right to left, i.e. dissolution of CaCO3 rather than accretion).
Doesn't Australia have the same "might is right" style of employment laws we have in the US where they can just fire him for not being a team player or spending too much time in the can?
I see the email to HR and the council as self-righteous and attempting to undermine my authority.
I see a "reply all" in a situation like this as friendly and open discussion - as long as it is diplomatically worded and not in legalese. A private email to me or (separately) to the person who sent the email would also be good, but further action would then be needed to undo the damage. If was anonymous, it would signal a lack of trust, which I'd find disturbing, but understandable.
The question isn't whether you have sympathy for the companies and individuals who will be directly affected. The question is: how much will YOU be affected by all the companies and individuals who are too lazy or ignorant to take steps 1,2 or 3? Might you have given your credit card details to one of those companies? Might you depend on another in some business sense? Might a few tens of thousands of those individuals have their computers turned into parts of botnets that will be used to attack your systems, or systems you rely on?
Really, just report them (#2). There's nothing they can do in retaliation without it costing them $$$.
Sure they can. They can give lukewarm (accurate but unenthusiastic) performance evaluations and references. They can choose not to put your name forward when asked to identify rising stars to whom others in the organization should be paying attention. They can listen less carefully to the proposals you put forward and give your training requests just a little less priority. They can not invite you to after-work drinks where you'd hear about opportunities ("Z will be putting out a call for proposals next week - get started now if you have an idea, because you won't have much time once the call goes out") or the kind of office gossip that could help you to work around office politics (e.g. "X doesn't get on with Y, so don't get Y involved if you want X's support on a project"). It happens all the time. It can happen without them even setting out to give you a hard time, or realizing that they are doing it. If you don't get out quickly, it's enough to jettison a career.
I guess you'd need to know the personalities involved. If someone on my team sent the email you suggested, I'd tag them as hostile, difficult to work with, not to be trusted, and a game-player. Yes, I'd be scrabbling to put out the fire and make sure Marketing knew it had done the wrong thing, but I'd also be looking for ways to avoid having to rely on the person who had sent that email in future. Am I oversensitive? Perhaps, but I'd be anticipating trouble from them.
If someone on my team sent the version I suggested, I'd say "Yeah, good catch. Thanks." I'd make sure it was passed on to whoever had sent or received the original email, if they hadn't already seen it and hope that was the end of it. Am I working in an organisation that would encourage astroturfing in the first place? No, but I have to believe that most people in management even in those companies - like most people anywhere - are just trying to get by and do the right thing.
This strikes me as a very aggressive email and would only be appropriate if the work environment is already strained and management has shown that it can't be trusted to handle suggestions or discussion in a fair and open manner. Escalating the matter to HR and the general council before even opening a discussion is hostile.
Better to clarify first, go in friendly and assume ignorance rather than evil is behind the request. Maybe "reply all" something along the lines of "we might want to be careful since this could be seen as astroturfing [link to wikipedia article]. Honest recommendations of the app from those who use it are a good, but let's not go too far."
Perhaps it would be worth you getting the earpiece microphones? That would move the point of recording away from the pen and also gives you stereo sound. It would be an odd look, to have earphones in during a meeting, so I haven't invested in them myself, but it might be good in some contexts - lectures, perhaps.
Which is why a smartpen like the Livescribe helps. It is just pen and paper to operate, but it lets you upload your notes afterwards, makes them searchable
How exactly does this improve on taking notes on a paper and scanning them afterwards?
For one thing, the OCR is much, much better (especially if you have poor handwriting, like I do), since it has the order and timing of the pen strokes to help it along. For another, it's much quicker and easier than scanning, running the scans through OCR, saving and organising the files. It's even quicker and easier that photographing each page directly into Evernote, which is what I was doing before I had the Livescribe.
For another, the matched sound recording is very useful: it makes your notes much more complete while letting you concentrate on listening rather than trying to write down every little point.
It's not the microphone that sucks, but the speaker built into the pen. When I play back recorded sound on the pen itself, the pen scraping sound often dominates, but if I plug in some earphones or play it back on my computer, the sound quality is good.
Again, this depends on your field. In my field, conferences are where you present your latest results before you submit them as a journal paper, or while they are being considered for publication by a journal, or are in press, or occasionally, have just recently been published in a journal.
In my field, conference papers are worth nothing on your CV unless you are a student and they are the only publications you have. It is considered poor practice to cite conference papers (even from peer-reviewed proceedings) if there is a journal paper that you could cite instead. In general, published conference papers are read only by those who attended the conference, so they are for the most part a waste of everyone's time.
Yes, or to make animal noises or set up and solve sudoku grids or write "beer" and have it translated into six languages. I have that pen. I love the pen, but the novelty of those applications wears off after the first day.
Two more advantages of a smartpen: 1) it's less distracting for others than a laptop or tablet. Most people just think it's a fountain pen. 2) It's less distracting for me. I can't check my email on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Adblock Plus doesn't work nearly as well in Chrome as in Firefox. That's what holds me back from switching to Chrome.
On a recent visit to China, I noticed payphones there also operated as wifi hotspots for customers of the phone company.
I used to do this when I was a student. A very light fabric such as cheesecloth or a light sarong works better than a bedsheet, as there's some airflow through it. But it still doesn't work very well. Just spraying water as a fine mist into the air works better, as long as it isn't humid.
Taking a cool shower when you get too hot helps.
Going out and staying in larger buildings (e.g. at work or supermarkets) helps if the heatwave and power outage haven't been going for more than a few days.
Sleeping outside can be an option if insects and personal safety aren't problems in your area.
Agreed. I am also in Canberra, and tried both Optus and Vodafone before switching to Telstra. Vodfone had very poor coverage both in my home suburb and at my workplace (only a couple of kilometres from the city centre -- but probably affected by local hills). Even where the coverage seemed good, data speeds were very slow. Telstra has much more reliable and very much faster coverage, and better service these days, too.
Search for "scientific programmer". The HPC and CUDA bits are likely to be implied between the lines rather than mentioned in the ads.
You have rare and important skills for environmental modelling and I very much doubt you'd need prior experience specifically in that context to get a good job in a research support position. You'd be working with scientists with that experience and expertise, and using your own expertise to provide skills that they probably don't have.
Yes, you be in a research support position rather than a research scientist or lecturing position -- at least initially (people do move from one to the other, with or without PhDs). But the sort of work you say you want to do mostly sounds like a research support role rather than an academic role. it wouldn't make you a second-class citizen.
PS - OP, please leave a comment below if you'd like to get in touch with a scientific programmer or three who are working with oceanographers, so you can hear from them directly what the work is really like and how rewarding it is. I'll send you some contact details.
As an oceanographer, I absolutely agree. People with the OP's skills in the earth sciences rare and very highly valued.
These roles are not generally highly paid compared with what you could be getting in gaming, because research just doesn't pay as well as commercial work. On the other hand, there's a good chance you'll get to play with high level HPC and a near certainty that you'll be contributing in a very tangible way to research with public good outcomes.
Probably more valuable than becoming a researcher yourself would be to take on a research support role, and work with scientists. The job title might be something along the lines of "scientific programmer".
As a research student, you don't take classes, but you still cost money: almost certainly more than undergraduates cost, though you are doubtless also giving back a great deal of value through your productive research.
Costs include (at very least) the cost of your advisors' time (probably more time than you think), the cost of your office space and furniture, IT, HR, and HSE support and library services, as well as little things like access to counselling and other student/staff services. You may not use any of these much, but they need to be funded and there for you anyway. Probably also research operating costs and travel costs.
Ah but there's a danger in that. So many young men who move to OZ end up marrying Australians and never make it home. My husband is one of them :)
Don't forget that lots of highly skilled people want to work in another country for a while, but have no intention of living there permanently.
My brother in law worked happily in the US for a few years on well over $150K/year, but after he and his wife had a daughter, they wanted to move back to NZ to bring her up. He found a job back home (at a considerable paycut) and left the US after 4 years, 10 months. His US colleagues thought he was mad to leave a good job so close to getting a green card, but he had no interest in a green card. Living in the US forever had never been in his plan.
I have several other friends who have worked in the US for a year or three after getting their PhDs, just for some overseas experience before heading home. It's pretty common among younger, highly educated people.
This is a complete misunderstanding of the chemistry involved.
Increased dissolved CO2 concentrations (pCO2) make it much HARDER, not easier for corals and shellfish to fix calcium carbonate.
The reaction is:
Ca2+ + 2HCO3- CaCo3 + H2O + CO2
This reaction can go in either direction. It needs to run from left to right to create coral and shells. Increase the concentration of CO2 in the water and you increase the pressure in the other direction (right to left, i.e. dissolution of CaCO3 rather than accretion).
Doesn't Australia have the same "might is right" style of employment laws we have in the US where they can just fire him for not being a team player or spending too much time in the can?
No. http://www.fairwork.gov.au/
I see the email to HR and the council as self-righteous and attempting to undermine my authority.
I see a "reply all" in a situation like this as friendly and open discussion - as long as it is diplomatically worded and not in legalese. A private email to me or (separately) to the person who sent the email would also be good, but further action would then be needed to undo the damage. If was anonymous, it would signal a lack of trust, which I'd find disturbing, but understandable.
The question isn't whether you have sympathy for the companies and individuals who will be directly affected. The question is: how much will YOU be affected by all the companies and individuals who are too lazy or ignorant to take steps 1,2 or 3? Might you have given your credit card details to one of those companies? Might you depend on another in some business sense? Might a few tens of thousands of those individuals have their computers turned into parts of botnets that will be used to attack your systems, or systems you rely on?
Really, just report them (#2). There's nothing they can do in retaliation without it costing them $$$.
Sure they can. They can give lukewarm (accurate but unenthusiastic) performance evaluations and references. They can choose not to put your name forward when asked to identify rising stars to whom others in the organization should be paying attention. They can listen less carefully to the proposals you put forward and give your training requests just a little less priority. They can not invite you to after-work drinks where you'd hear about opportunities ("Z will be putting out a call for proposals next week - get started now if you have an idea, because you won't have much time once the call goes out") or the kind of office gossip that could help you to work around office politics (e.g. "X doesn't get on with Y, so don't get Y involved if you want X's support on a project"). It happens all the time. It can happen without them even setting out to give you a hard time, or realizing that they are doing it. If you don't get out quickly, it's enough to jettison a career.
I guess you'd need to know the personalities involved.
If someone on my team sent the email you suggested, I'd tag them as hostile, difficult to work with, not to be trusted, and a game-player. Yes, I'd be scrabbling to put out the fire and make sure Marketing knew it had done the wrong thing, but I'd also be looking for ways to avoid having to rely on the person who had sent that email in future. Am I oversensitive? Perhaps, but I'd be anticipating trouble from them.
If someone on my team sent the version I suggested, I'd say "Yeah, good catch. Thanks." I'd make sure it was passed on to whoever had sent or received the original email, if they hadn't already seen it and hope that was the end of it. Am I working in an organisation that would encourage astroturfing in the first place? No, but I have to believe that most people in management even in those companies - like most people anywhere - are just trying to get by and do the right thing.
This strikes me as a very aggressive email and would only be appropriate if the work environment is already strained and management has shown that it can't be trusted to handle suggestions or discussion in a fair and open manner. Escalating the matter to HR and the general council before even opening a discussion is hostile.
Better to clarify first, go in friendly and assume ignorance rather than evil is behind the request. Maybe "reply all" something along the lines of "we might want to be careful since this could be seen as astroturfing [link to wikipedia article]. Honest recommendations of the app from those who use it are a good, but let's not go too far."
I've checked the box. It didn't help.
Perhaps it would be worth you getting the earpiece microphones? That would move the point of recording away from the pen and also gives you stereo sound. It would be an odd look, to have earphones in during a meeting, so I haven't invested in them myself, but it might be good in some contexts - lectures, perhaps.
Marine science.
Which is why a smartpen like the Livescribe helps. It is just pen and paper to operate, but it lets you upload your notes afterwards, makes them searchable
How exactly does this improve on taking notes on a paper and scanning them afterwards?
For one thing, the OCR is much, much better (especially if you have poor handwriting, like I do), since it has the order and timing of the pen strokes to help it along.
For another, it's much quicker and easier than scanning, running the scans through OCR, saving and organising the files. It's even quicker and easier that photographing each page directly into Evernote, which is what I was doing before I had the Livescribe.
For another, the matched sound recording is very useful: it makes your notes much more complete while letting you concentrate on listening rather than trying to write down every little point.
It's not the microphone that sucks, but the speaker built into the pen. When I play back recorded sound on the pen itself, the pen scraping sound often dominates, but if I plug in some earphones or play it back on my computer, the sound quality is good.
Again, this depends on your field. In my field, conferences are where you present your latest results before you submit them as a journal paper, or while they are being considered for publication by a journal, or are in press, or occasionally, have just recently been published in a journal.
In my field, conference papers are worth nothing on your CV unless you are a student and they are the only publications you have. It is considered poor practice to cite conference papers (even from peer-reviewed proceedings) if there is a journal paper that you could cite instead. In general, published conference papers are read only by those who attended the conference, so they are for the most part a waste of everyone's time.
Yes, or to make animal noises or set up and solve sudoku grids or write "beer" and have it translated into six languages. I have that pen. I love the pen, but the novelty of those applications wears off after the first day.
Two more advantages of a smartpen: 1) it's less distracting for others than a laptop or tablet. Most people just think it's a fountain pen. 2) It's less distracting for me. I can't check my email on it.