Depends on the field. In my field of science, for instance, most conferences - even the best of them - do not publish full proceedings, only abstracts. Even for those that do publish proceedings, I prefer to take my own notes rather than search through thousands of proceedings papers to find details of a few interesting talks. Often, in any case, speakers will mention things that weren't included in the short conference paper they submitted six months before.
I should add: The downside of the Livescribe pen for science conferences is that if you have audio recording on all day, the battery is likely to run flat by the end of the day, unless you recharge at lunchtime. The battery is fine if you only want to record written notes, so I tend to switch on audio recording only for the important talks.
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, and records sound to go with your notes in case you do miss anything. Knowing that means you don't have to write every little thing down, but can stick to key points and jump to the relevant part of the audio simply by pointing to the note with your pen on your paper notes, or clicking on the uploaded version on your computer later. It can even automate most of the conversion of written notes to text.
If you have a smartphone, there are apps that will work this out for you. You can sit on your roof where you expect the panels to be, open the app and see, overlaid on the camera view, where the sun's path would be on any given day of the year.
> 3) Airbags were never designed for use in conjunction with seatbelts
Not entirely true. Airbags in the US are designed to work without seatbelts, and so are larger and faster (and more likely to cause injury) than airbags designed for use with seatbelts (as in Australia, for example) [Ref: http://www.ancap.com.au/faqs ]
Funny you should mention that. I'm in Australia. I spent today in a planning meeting, where we were told that it's a GREAT time for us to recruit senior scientists from Spain, North America and the UK, but not the rest of Europe, since most of the rest of Europe has insulated its research spending somewhat from current economic woes.
The class of 1988 in my college were largely wasted. Maybe 20% actually used their specialized training directly. The rest of us parlayed our critical thinking, analytical training and problem solving skills into completely unrelated careers.
That doesn't sound like a waste to me. Sounds like a good use of the problem solving skills and analytical training you got from (or demonstrated through) your degrees.
Giving up geographic limitations, for many people, means giving up their family.
Even a childless specialist-professional couple with no elder care responsibilities will have geographic limitations. If I can work in my field in Hobart or Hawaii or Massachusetts; while my husband can work in his field in Hobart or Washington or London (but not Hawaii or Massachusetts), that pretty much means we'll both stay in Hobart, stay in our current jobs, and pass up career opportunities that would require either of us to move.
I know a couple of people in CS and programming who have done very well for themselves in just this way: being one of one or two people in the country with a particular specialised skill set. One made a good call on getting into a field just before it exploded; the other did quite the reverse, and held onto coding skills relevant to legacy systems that many corporations still rely upon (and will for years to come), using a niche programming language that fell out of favour two decades ago.
Agreed. I took a few humanities courses (two units of philosophy, one of politics and one of sociology) during my science degree. The science courses had about twice the "contact hours" as the humanities courses, due to lab classes, but the reading and writing workload of the humanities courses far outweighed that of the science, maths and computing courses, so the overall workload was higher on the humanities side.
A caveat is that I took my studies very seriously... things might look different for a student set on skimming through and doing the minimum for a pass grade.
You're assuming that the people reading your post and who might be considering becoming engineers are male.With this as the constant baseline assumption, is it any wonder that women turn away from the field?
I think the parent comment's point in saying "your career is over when you're 40" is that at 40, you have reached the top of your career ladder unless you move into management (in a large corporation).
I'm in science role, and at 38, have reached this point myself. I am in a large corporation, and have started the shift into management, though it isn't something I'm particularly good at or particularly enjoy. In the context of a large organisation, a 45 year old who has avoided management roles is likely to be perceived in some quarters as a failure, and may be first in line for redundancy when the next downturn hits.
I had a grad student last year who stopped showing up after the first few weeks, and eventually had his studentship discontinued.
Being a student here gave him an email address here and one at a university with which we had a collaborative arrangement.
While he had it, he created a LinkedIn profile listing himself as a "Research Scientist" here and a "Software Development Consultant" at the other university. He then proceeded to connect through LinkedIn with others who work at both organisations who didn't know him, but who probably thought they should, given the relevant email address and link requests. He was careful not to try to link this fraudulent account with anyone who did know him and his real position here.
The profile is still there. I don't know whether it is to protect his ego (he seems to have problems in that area) or whether he is using it to fraudulently get consulting contracts. Guess I should do something about it, but I don't want to stir up trouble.
If you move about about fairly slowly, but without seeming to be focused on something in particular that you are about to buy, that'd do it. Especially if you are about the expected age of an employee and wear clothes that look like retail work clothes: e.g. cheap button-up shirts coupled with slacks or a skirt.
What I find a little creepy is adult couples who share one email account. My parents do this, and so do a few of my 30-something friends, all simply for convenience. I guess it isn't creepy if you just take it as a clear signal that those who do it tend not to think of email as a primary form of communication and would rather use a telephone or something else for anything but planning details and business communication. For me, email is my preferred medium (other than face to face) for intimate and social conversations. Knowing that a friend shares an email account with her husband means tend not to have those conversations with her. It isn't that I expect her to keep what I say secret from her husband - just that my friendship is not directly with the husband and I wouldn't talk in quite the same way to him myself. And I don't know who will read my emails first.
That's more like the salary of a (poorly paid) postdoc or (extremely well paid) grad student. You need to double that or more to get the FTE cost, to account for overheads.
My organisation does set overheads that high. My salary ($115K/year as senior research scientist (i.e. mid-career) at a major research organisation) plus overheads is costed at $268K/year (this is the cost: we charge much more if we're trying to make a profit on a project). This doesn't include operating costs such as travel, equipment or lab analyses. It does covers my salary, benefits and office, basic computing facilities (anything special needs to be charged separately to the project) plus a percentage of the flotilla of lawyers and contract experts, communications experts, senior managers and bureaucrats that keep my organisation running.
For a postdoc (freshly minted PhD) one FTE is costed at $190K. For a principal research scientist, $375K.
I'm afraid I don't know how it works. I use the 2X setting in iTunes or the 2X or 3X setting in the Audible app. The voices don't sound higher pitched, but the deeper voices are definitely clearer when sped up.
Again, much more hassle for individual donators than a simple online transaction. And perhaps most of their donations originally came from individuals sending $5 or $10 at a time, in which case $4.25 plus postage is big.
I prefer male voices for audiobooks because I can then listen to the books at 3X normal speed, without loss of clarity. Deep female voices (and higher male voices), I listen to at 2X speed. Higher female voices, I have to listen to at 1X, and I try to avoid them.
I suppose you'd just look up "standard business hours" in California just like you'd look up the time-zone difference now, but it still adds an extra layer of complication. "It's 9pm - is it too late to call my friend in Moscow? Let's see, business hours in Moscow finish at 4pm, so it's about 5 hours after that, so I guess she could already be in bed (vs today's "It's 10pm in Moscow, so yes, it's probably too late").
Similarly, universal time makes it easier to work out how long I'll be in transit during my long-haul flight, but makes it harder to figure out what I'll be in for when I arrive: will it be bed-time or time for breakfast? So there's no net advantage.
Unless you can work out on your own how to put numbers on it, your understanding is imperfect. Being able to run some numbers through an equation doesn't mean you understand it even as well as the guy who doesn't know any maths but knows where to stand to catch the ball.
It's easier to predict long-term trends than day-to-day details. I don't know what time it will rain tomorrow (if at all), but I know that it will get warmer in Australia over the next few months because the season is changing. Climate change is a similar, large-scale effect. We can't predict where a hurricane will hit next week (much less 20 years from now), but we can make predictions about global temperature trends and whether hurricanes will become more frequent (or less) in general.
Thanks for the tips. I'm a fan of ABC Radio National shows: All in the Mind (psychology and neurobiology), The Health Report (the latest evidence-based medical news), The Law Report (interesting discussion of legal issues in Australia), Media Watch (keeping an eye on the Australian Media) and Background Briefing (in-depth current affairs).
I also enjoy the BBC radio shows Thinking Allowed (sociology) and In Our Time (history).
But my favourites are probably the fiction podcasts The Drabblecast (strange stories for strange listeners), Escape Pod (science fiction) and Star Ship Sofa (science fiction stories and related nonfiction - I skip the nonfiction in that one, though).
I only do cardio. I know I should do strength training, but it's dull - music alone isn't enough to change that for me and you are right, strength training takes too much attention for audiobooks.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on the field. In my field of science, for instance, most conferences - even the best of them - do not publish full proceedings, only abstracts. Even for those that do publish proceedings, I prefer to take my own notes rather than search through thousands of proceedings papers to find details of a few interesting talks. Often, in any case, speakers will mention things that weren't included in the short conference paper they submitted six months before.
I should add: The downside of the Livescribe pen for science conferences is that if you have audio recording on all day, the battery is likely to run flat by the end of the day, unless you recharge at lunchtime. The battery is fine if you only want to record written notes, so I tend to switch on audio recording only for the important talks.
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, and records sound to go with your notes in case you do miss anything. Knowing that means you don't have to write every little thing down, but can stick to key points and jump to the relevant part of the audio simply by pointing to the note with your pen on your paper notes, or clicking on the uploaded version on your computer later. It can even automate most of the conversion of written notes to text.
If you have a smartphone, there are apps that will work this out for you. You can sit on your roof where you expect the panels to be, open the app and see, overlaid on the camera view, where the sun's path would be on any given day of the year.
> 3) Airbags were never designed for use in conjunction with seatbelts
Not entirely true. Airbags in the US are designed to work without seatbelts, and so are larger and faster (and more likely to cause injury) than airbags designed for use with seatbelts (as in Australia, for example) [Ref: http://www.ancap.com.au/faqs ]
Funny you should mention that. I'm in Australia. I spent today in a planning meeting, where we were told that it's a GREAT time for us to recruit senior scientists from Spain, North America and the UK, but not the rest of Europe, since most of the rest of Europe has insulated its research spending somewhat from current economic woes.
The class of 1988 in my college were largely wasted. Maybe 20% actually used their specialized training directly. The rest of us parlayed our critical thinking, analytical training and problem solving skills into completely unrelated careers.
That doesn't sound like a waste to me. Sounds like a good use of the problem solving skills and analytical training you got from (or demonstrated through) your degrees.
Giving up geographic limitations, for many people, means giving up their family.
Even a childless specialist-professional couple with no elder care responsibilities will have geographic limitations. If I can work in my field in Hobart or Hawaii or Massachusetts; while my husband can work in his field in Hobart or Washington or London (but not Hawaii or Massachusetts), that pretty much means we'll both stay in Hobart, stay in our current jobs, and pass up career opportunities that would require either of us to move.
Mod parent up.
I know a couple of people in CS and programming who have done very well for themselves in just this way: being one of one or two people in the country with a particular specialised skill set. One made a good call on getting into a field just before it exploded; the other did quite the reverse, and held onto coding skills relevant to legacy systems that many corporations still rely upon (and will for years to come), using a niche programming language that fell out of favour two decades ago.
Agreed. I took a few humanities courses (two units of philosophy, one of politics and one of sociology) during my science degree. The science courses had about twice the "contact hours" as the humanities courses, due to lab classes, but the reading and writing workload of the humanities courses far outweighed that of the science, maths and computing courses, so the overall workload was higher on the humanities side.
A caveat is that I took my studies very seriously... things might look different for a student set on skimming through and doing the minimum for a pass grade.
You're assuming that the people reading your post and who might be considering becoming engineers are male.With this as the constant baseline assumption, is it any wonder that women turn away from the field?
I think the parent comment's point in saying "your career is over when you're 40" is that at 40, you have reached the top of your career ladder unless you move into management (in a large corporation).
I'm in science role, and at 38, have reached this point myself. I am in a large corporation, and have started the shift into management, though it isn't something I'm particularly good at or particularly enjoy. In the context of a large organisation, a 45 year old who has avoided management roles is likely to be perceived in some quarters as a failure, and may be first in line for redundancy when the next downturn hits.
I had a grad student last year who stopped showing up after the first few weeks, and eventually had his studentship discontinued.
Being a student here gave him an email address here and one at a university with which we had a collaborative arrangement.
While he had it, he created a LinkedIn profile listing himself as a "Research Scientist" here and a "Software Development Consultant" at the other university. He then proceeded to connect through LinkedIn with others who work at both organisations who didn't know him, but who probably thought they should, given the relevant email address and link requests. He was careful not to try to link this fraudulent account with anyone who did know him and his real position here.
The profile is still there. I don't know whether it is to protect his ego (he seems to have problems in that area) or whether he is using it to fraudulently get consulting contracts. Guess I should do something about it, but I don't want to stir up trouble.
If you move about about fairly slowly, but without seeming to be focused on something in particular that you are about to buy, that'd do it. Especially if you are about the expected age of an employee and wear clothes that look like retail work clothes: e.g. cheap button-up shirts coupled with slacks or a skirt.
What I find a little creepy is adult couples who share one email account. My parents do this, and so do a few of my 30-something friends, all simply for convenience. I guess it isn't creepy if you just take it as a clear signal that those who do it tend not to think of email as a primary form of communication and would rather use a telephone or something else for anything but planning details and business communication. For me, email is my preferred medium (other than face to face) for intimate and social conversations. Knowing that a friend shares an email account with her husband means tend not to have those conversations with her. It isn't that I expect her to keep what I say secret from her husband - just that my friendship is not directly with the husband and I wouldn't talk in quite the same way to him myself. And I don't know who will read my emails first.
That's more like the salary of a (poorly paid) postdoc or (extremely well paid) grad student. You need to double that or more to get the FTE cost, to account for overheads.
My organisation does set overheads that high. My salary ($115K/year as senior research scientist (i.e. mid-career) at a major research organisation) plus overheads is costed at $268K/year (this is the cost: we charge much more if we're trying to make a profit on a project). This doesn't include operating costs such as travel, equipment or lab analyses. It does covers my salary, benefits and office, basic computing facilities (anything special needs to be charged separately to the project) plus a percentage of the flotilla of lawyers and contract experts, communications experts, senior managers and bureaucrats that keep my organisation running.
For a postdoc (freshly minted PhD) one FTE is costed at $190K. For a principal research scientist, $375K.
I'm afraid I don't know how it works. I use the 2X setting in iTunes or the 2X or 3X setting in the Audible app. The voices don't sound higher pitched, but the deeper voices are definitely clearer when sped up.
Again, much more hassle for individual donators than a simple online transaction. And perhaps most of their donations originally came from individuals sending $5 or $10 at a time, in which case $4.25 plus postage is big.
I prefer male voices for audiobooks because I can then listen to the books at 3X normal speed, without loss of clarity. Deep female voices (and higher male voices), I listen to at 2X speed. Higher female voices, I have to listen to at 1X, and I try to avoid them.
I suppose you'd just look up "standard business hours" in California just like you'd look up the time-zone difference now, but it still adds an extra layer of complication. "It's 9pm - is it too late to call my friend in Moscow? Let's see, business hours in Moscow finish at 4pm, so it's about 5 hours after that, so I guess she could already be in bed (vs today's "It's 10pm in Moscow, so yes, it's probably too late").
Similarly, universal time makes it easier to work out how long I'll be in transit during my long-haul flight, but makes it harder to figure out what I'll be in for when I arrive: will it be bed-time or time for breakfast? So there's no net advantage.
Unless you can work out on your own how to put numbers on it, your understanding is imperfect. Being able to run some numbers through an equation doesn't mean you understand it even as well as the guy who doesn't know any maths but knows where to stand to catch the ball.
It's easier to predict long-term trends than day-to-day details. I don't know what time it will rain tomorrow (if at all), but I know that it will get warmer in Australia over the next few months because the season is changing. Climate change is a similar, large-scale effect. We can't predict where a hurricane will hit next week (much less 20 years from now), but we can make predictions about global temperature trends and whether hurricanes will become more frequent (or less) in general.
Thanks for the tips. I'm a fan of ABC Radio National shows: All in the Mind (psychology and neurobiology), The Health Report (the latest evidence-based medical news), The Law Report (interesting discussion of legal issues in Australia), Media Watch (keeping an eye on the Australian Media) and Background Briefing (in-depth current affairs).
I also enjoy the BBC radio shows Thinking Allowed (sociology) and In Our Time (history).
But my favourites are probably the fiction podcasts The Drabblecast (strange stories for strange listeners), Escape Pod (science fiction) and Star Ship Sofa (science fiction stories and related nonfiction - I skip the nonfiction in that one, though).
I only do cardio. I know I should do strength training, but it's dull - music alone isn't enough to change that for me and you are right, strength training takes too much attention for audiobooks.