Either you or the tour guide were very much mistaken. The famous story about the guy in the underground jail cell refers to the May 8, 1902 eruption of Mt. Pelée on Martinique, a different volcano on a different island.
Oh, I completely agree that my name is very associated with my books. If you knew my name, you'd agree. My point is that any noob will screw up copy editing, layout and all the other facets of publishing, when compared with the output of someone who does only each one of these specialties for a living.
This is especially true for material that you've already written yourself. Nobody can do a good job copy editing his own work, or laying out his own book. Look at your bookshelf and I think you'll agree that it's easy to identify the books designed and laid out by the author. One needs independence from the author to do those tasks well.
I do completely and absolutely agree, however, that one must review the work of these specialists with a microscope when the proofs are returned to you, the author, for approval. I have sent text back three and four times until it is exactly the way I want, and that includes the style and substance of the index. Note that in this phase of publication the author is editing the work of the other specialists. That do-but-have-others-verify process is critial to the production of a high-quality text, but it is the author -- and only the author -- who gives the final approval for printing of the galley proofs. It is the author's responsibility to ensure that they are as he wishes them to be for, as you state, it's his name most closely tied to the book. Because he has the final approval (as well as approval at several intermediate steps, like copy editing), the author is in control over what is associated with his name.
One of the contract clauses my attorney inserted into my first contract covered the case of a published text that differed from the galley proof. That clause has never been exercised, for the books alsways have been exactly as I have approved them -- errors and all.
It has been my experience that the difference between "academic" publishers and "technical" publishers, at least as far as their treatment of authors, is zero. I've had technical publishers that were total slimes; one told me that there were many other authors he could get to write the book he wanted on his terms, so there's at least one that wasn't trying for a long-term relationship. (I haven't seen the book in print yet...) My best relationship is, in fact, with an academic publisher; they are constantly pestering me to write another book for them, contrary to your assertion. I think one's relationship with a publisher is an ergodic, independent random variable.
Regardless of whether one's publisher is considered academic or technical, however, I still say that one lives at one's peril in the publishing world without an attorney. One can think one is "cooperating on a project," but never forget that publishing is first and foremost a business.
I've written three technical books, one of which is now going into its third edition, for three different academic publishers. Points I have learned:
1. Publishers don't want you to format your book. That's their job. They want to receive double-spaced plain text, left-justified, with each figure in a separate file and a note in the text where each figure is to be inserted. (The figure captions are typically inserted at the end of the text.) Fancy things like Word cross-references, automatic footnote formating, etc. cause publishers great pain and are to be avoided.
2. MS Word works just fine for writing books. (I also wrote my Ph.D. dissertation in Word.) The only revision control I did was write each chapter as a separate file, and include a date code in the filename (so that I could go back to earlier drafts when needed). Each publisher with which I have dealt has sent me a required template; each of them was in Word. Needless to say, follow your publisher's template!
3. Figures are by far the biggest PITA in book writing and publishing. I ended up in each case sending the publisher pdf files. Get explicit instructions from your publisher about figures before you start (they will usually instruct you about their format preferences).
4. Keep your ms copies in several different media. After you've spent several hundred hours on the ms, the thought of a hard drive crash begins to weigh on your mind.
5. Don't worry about index generation. The publisher does that (via a contractor, usually); but feel free to edit the result.
To be honest, the most useful tool I've used writing books is a simple spreadsheet. It has three columns: a date column, counting down to the date I am contractually obligated to deliver the text; a page completed column, with the total number of pages written by the given date; and a pages per day column, which calculates, based on the date and pages written, how many pages I have to write per day in order to finish. (A rule of thumb is to have 500 manuscript pages for an academic book.) As others have commented, it's too easy not to write one day, then another, and then a week, and then you can't meet your deadline (at least with material to which you're happy seeing your name attached). The spreadsheet was my way of keeping the nose to the grindstone -- if I took time off, I had to write 2.1 pages per day to finish, then 2.2, then 3... but if I wrote 4 pages per day for a week or two, it would go down. It's a motivational tool.
Suff you don't know to ask about: The biggest things one should know about academic writing relate to the business of publishing:
1. GET AN ATTORNEY. The contract the publisher will send you is, of course, biased in the publisher's favor. My attorney requested changes in my first contract -- all of which were accepted by the publisher without any comment at all -- that more than paid for his fee (by several times). He also included clauses that protected me from several problems of which I hadn't thought (like, what happens if the publisher accepts your manuscript but never publishes it? Or, what do I get paid if the book is published in new media, like video or a new electronic format?) GET AN ATTORNEY.
2. Never, ever forget that your relationship with the publisher is a business relationship, not a personal one. This can be easy to forget when dealing with your editor, with whom you will have to work closely for an extended period of time. Authors have forgotten this rule at their peril: Ask Eric Weisstein. GET AN ATTORNEY.
3. Others have written about advances. I don't know anyone who gets an advance for an academic book. You get paid based on sales, after the publisher has paid everyone and everything else. Because of this, consider writing the book so that it is suitable for schools (universities, etc.). All that's required in this case is just some exercises in the back of each chap
After reading the specification, it sure sounds to me like a description of a prototype product on which Apple is trying to get patent protection. Some of the specifics in the specification are just too, well, specific -- for example, the description in [0034] of the use of a Venturi tube, or the parenthetical comment in [0035] about the use of ultrasonic frequencies in the membrane pump.
Possibly the biggest detail, though -- and the one bit of novelty I think I see in the specification that could form the basis of an allowable patent claim -- is the comment in [0041] that the heat may be coupled to the outside world by a plate behind the display. This is exactly the kind of novelty nugget -- assuming it really is novel -- to which I referred in my earlier comment. One way Apple could get an allowance on this application, after the initial rejection by the examiner, is to include this feature in an independent claim; the invention would then be a liquid-cooled laptop with the heat exchanger behind the display. (Of course, in that case your liquid-cooled laptop that doesn't have the heat exchanger behind the display wouldn't infringe on the resulting patent.)
As I said, assuming that it is a novel feature. PC design is not my specialty. Has anyone seen art before May 22, 2007 -- the filing date of this application -- describing a liquid-cooled laptop with the heat exchanger behind the display?
One doesn't "receive" a patent application; one "makes" one. In the initial application, which is what this is, the claims can say literally anything the applicant wants; during the examination process the applicant can (and usually does) modify the claims to meet the objections of the examiner (who -- in theory, anyway -- is ensuring that anything claimed is supported by text in the original specification portion of the application, and that the resulting invention meets the statutory requirements for utility, novelty, non-obviousness, etc.). A typical tactic on the part of an inventor is to write the initial claims broadly, then narrow their coverage in response to the examiner's objections. Frequently the claims of the final patent bear little resemblance to the initial ones. At the end of the process, one hopes to be left with a description of the invention that still is broad enough to be commercially useful. (One way a patent can be commercially useful, of course, is if it covers a product one is developing for market; in that case, one tries hard to ensure that the claims cover that implementation of the invention.)
With that said, and having read just the initial claims and not the specification -- yet -- I have to agree that there's nothing in the claims that I haven't seen described in public before (setting aside the strange description of a heat pipe coupled to a pump). Since corporations typically do not file patent applications they do not think will result in issued patents -- it's a waste of money and time of people, including the inventor, who have better things to do -- and Apple, for sure, knows the art of PC design, one has to wonder if there is some nugget of novelty, a particular wrinkle or implementation, described in the specification somewhere that is the real reason for the application.
Or maybe they just screwed up. E.g., the PC hardware guys missed the Apple patent committee meeting at which this invention was presented, and the remaining software and UI members of the committee were swayed by a particularly persuasive inventor. (It's been known to happen.)
The researchers haven't come up with "a material to replace lead." They've come up with a material to replace lead zirconate titanate, a.k.a. PZT, a piezoelectric and ferroelectric material with many uses in electronics. Because it has an extremely large piezoelectric constant (meaning that it produces a large voltage under little mechanical stress) and is cheap to produce, it is the ceramic frequently used in transducers, sensors, and resonators. The thing on your motherboard that beeps on boot is very likely made of PZT.
PZT is not, repeat not, used in solder. Wikipedia is one of your many friends.
Finding a ceramic with similar properties, but without the lead, has been a difficult problem for materials scientists, and the UM researchers say they have finally come up with a viable candidate.
I'm increasingly amazed (well, until my amaz-o-meter reached $FF a while back) at the Orwellian policies being established in the home of Orwell. I mean, from traffic cameras to tracking of people in public places, to storing of all types of personal information and communication -- even the Stazi would be impressed.
I haven't been to the UK in several years. Could someone explain how these projects have any kind of public support at all? Even in the US -- hardly a standard-bearer for liberal thought -- the UK proposals would produce an uproar.
What is the underlying sentiment of the people that continues to produce these ideas?
I've heard these ideas for years but, even after RTFA, and the 6Lowpan and ROLL references, I'm still trying to understand the advantage of these proposals over the existing technology (like ZigBee, among others). To be practical at all, the "Internet of Things" would have to be wireless, so there has to be an access point somewhere to the wired Internet. And because IP routing performs poorly in a multihop wireless network, the wireless network will have to use a different routing scheme, but still use the compressed IPv6 headers, while maintaining the low power features needed for battery-powered devices. The access point would have to handle both routing algorithms.
There would be no IP-related economies of scale in the networked devices, since they would need a new, start-from-scratch routing algorithm (e.g., ROLL).
So why is this superior over existing wireless protocols designed for this application? Is it just the gateway design? It doesn't seem like the gateway design of existing protocols would be significantly more complicated but, even if it were, it seems like would be repaid by the simplicity and size reduction in the many "small objects" in the network -- sort of an economic version of Amdahl's law. No?
As we have discussed before, there is an equally significant problem with patent applications that are improperly rejected. Since issued patents enable one to obtain funding to bring new technology to market, this is as least as serious a problem for our society as the more well-known "junk patent" problem.
Baseball Overview (This is a quick overview. I am omitting exceptions and details not needed for pedagogy.)
In baseball, there are two, nine-person teams, and four bases (home, first base, second base, and third base). The offensive team members take turns at batting, one at a time, with the other members off the field and not in play, while all nine members of the defensive team are in the field. The goal in baseball is to hit the ball thrown by the pitcher of the opposing team, then run around the bases, both starting and ending at home ("circling the bases"). This results in a "run," or one point for the batter/runner's team. Once the batter has hit the ball, however, the defensive team in the field can get the batter/runner "out," requiring him to leave the field without scoring, in one of three main ways:
1. By touching him with the ball when the batter/runner is not touching a base; 2. By catching a ball the batter/runner has hit in the air, before it has hit the ground; or 3. By touching a base to which the batter/runner must run (e.g., first base if he's just hit the ball) while holding the ball, before the batter/runner can touch the base.
Definition:: A hit occurs when a batter/runner hits the ball and reaches a base safely (i.e., without being made out). Yes, this can be confusing; it's not sufficient for the batter just to hit (i.e., make contact with) the ball; he has to also reach a base safely as a result.
There are lots of other ways the batter can be made out, but the most significant is the "strike out," the rules for which I won't bore you with now, but involve an inability to hit the ball thrown by the pitcher to begin with. Much of the strategy, and resulting fascination with the game, involves the game-within-a-game between the pitcher and the hitter.
When the defensive team has made three batter/runners out it is called a half-inning, and the teams exchange places (i.e., the offensive team takes the field and becomes the defensive team). Not surprisingly, when both teams have made three outs it is called an inning and, by rule, there are nine innings in a baseball game. As a result, every member of each team will be able to bat a minimum of three times per game; the average is something over four, I think. Thus, a batter has an opportunity to get a hit between four and five times per game.
A Hitting Streak Definition: A hitting streak is a streak of consecutive games in which a particular batter gets at least one hit. As it happens, at the professional level only the very best players get a hit three out of every ten times they go to bat (a success rate, or "batting average," of 0.300); such "three hundred" hitters are greatly sought, even though even they fail at their job 70% of the time. (It's a hard game to play well; this is one reason baseball is called "the game of failure.") A typical player might have a batting average of 0.275. Another of the fascinations with the game is how this trivial batting average difference between the great and average player, 0.025, or a difference of one hit every forty times at bat, significantly affects play. But I digress.
A three-hundred hitter has a likelihood of 1 - (0.700)^4.5 = 1 - 0.201 = 0.799 of getting at least one hit in an average game (if we assume that he is at-bat an average of 4.5 times per game). His chance of doing so in 56 consecutive games, however, is (0.799)^56 = 3.52E-6. As others have mentioned, however, there are additional subtleties in the game. For example, if a pitcher is good, the opposing team will get few hits and quickly get its three outs per half-inning. This means, however, that there is a feedback effect: The average number of at-bats a player will have against a good pitcher is less than against a poor one, because his teammates are making outs instead of their own hits. This makes it harder for him to get the hit in the game to keep his streak alive -- instead of his 4.5 at-bats, he may get onl
To celebrate this anniversary, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Amateur Radio Club, W6VIO, is offering a commemorative Explorer I QSL card for each contact made through February 4th. See their operating schedule for times and frequencies of operation.
There are always additional forces in play that didn't exist 40 years ago. The forces on the engineering profession in 1968 didn't exist in 1928, and forty years from now there will be forces in play that don't exist today. The fact that there are additional forces in play will never change, though the forces themselves will.
Taking the long view in a career does not mean identifying a particular high demand area of the economy, entering it, and then going on cruise control until retirement, for no economic area remains in high demand over a career. Ask airline pilots, or doctors, or anyone else whose profession was in high demand in the 1980s how they'd feel about having their kid enter the same profession today. Taking the long view means understanding that, like any other commodity, the value of your services in the market will rise and fall over the years as the forces of supply and demand vary. Fortunately, engineering is a broad enough discipline that specialties within it are often economically independent. Your job, as the manager of your career, is to anticipate changes in supply and demand -- whether caused by Congress or not -- by moving out of specialties with increasing supply and/or decreasing demand, into specialties with decreasing supply and/or increasing demand, as the economics warrant. To do otherwise is to stand in the rain (and perhaps complain about water's high latent heat of vaporization) while others notice the approaching storm and go indoors until it passes. You may be correct in identifying the cause of your difficulty, but others, with a more pragmatic approach, will be more successful in the long run.
Thinking that the issues affecting your job today will still be there in 40 years is, IMHO, not good advice to those entering the profession, for it implies that the job market is static. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The names change, but the cycles, and the fact that external forces affect technologists, do not. Do you really think the next generation will be discussing these issues? If offshoring and H1-Bs cause a shortage of engineers, in ten years there'll be a crash program, maybe like the one that followed Sputnik, to promote the profession again. I won't bore you with the problematic social and economic forces affecting technologists when my father and I held entry-level positions, decades ago, except to state that, while at the time they were at least as important as the effects of offshoring today, they're now totally irrelevant. In fact, you'd laugh at most of them.
It's important in career planning to take the long view. College graduates entering the job market today will be retiring in the 2050s. Whatever problems they will have then -- and they will have problems -- they won't be with outsourcing and H1-B visas.
This is not the first time entry-level people have thought times were tougher on them than the preceeding generation.
In the mid-1960s my father worked for a contractor on the Apollo space program. Realizing that once the moon rocket design was substantially complete, engineers would be superfluous (a Briton would say redundant), in 1968 he transfered, within his company, out of the space program to a group in another state designing time-shared mainframes for business applications. It was the best decision of his career, but one that was very controversial at the time ("you're leaving the space program?!?").
I will carry the memory of the period that followed to my grave. Some time after the transfer, the NASA cuts began, and we started getting phone calls (at home!) from my father's former coworkers, looking for work -- any work, any where, in any field. More than 20,000 engineers, scientists, and technicians in the state of Florida alone -- and probably 100,000 or more around the country -- were laid of as fast as the mimeograph machines could reproduce the pink slips. Engineers were driving taxis and bagging groceries in the towns around the Kennedy Space Center.
The ultimate was when my father returned to the dinner table from another call to announce that the caller had been his former boss's boss's boss, looking for any work -- even a drafting position (six levels down the corporate ladder, and one that did not require a college degree). Like all the other callers, he had a wife, x young children, and a mortgage to support. (Homes were essentially unsellable in the areas around the major contractors' plants; the mortgages were greater than their market value, so foreclosures were the norm.) I hope I have sufficiently expressed the desperate nature of the situation.
And yet...
No university dropped its engineering program; freshout engineering graduates appeared, just as they always had, at the end of every semester. And all of them needed jobs. Entry-level jobs. All of these people entered school at the height of the space program, only to find when they graduated that the job market was considerably more difficult than they had expected. Having a difficult entry-level job market is not a new thing.
One of the pleasures of age is that one sees the world as dynamic, rather than static. A young person sees a constant world, for it's the only one he's ever known. With age, however, one sees things change, and can evaluate, say, the first derivative of the world function. With greater age, one can see the rate of change change, and appreciate the second derivative; at that point, one can begin modeling the dynamics of social structures.
The shortage of engineers in the 1960s led to the glut of engineers in the 1970s. However, because of the 4- to 6-year delay between entering and completing engineering school, the system is not necessarily stable; the glut of the 1970s led to such an engineering shortage by the early 1980s that separate, higher, salary ladders were established at major corporations for entry-level engineers (creating salary compression that demotivated experienced engineers, but that's a different thread). The system continues to oscillate today; the point is, it's oscillating through values we've seen before.
I have more than 35 issued US patents, with at least 15 applications presently on file with the USPTO -- no software or business-method patents, thank you very much! -- and the biggest problem I experience is the opposite from that most frequently mentioned here. While examiners do allow worthless patent applications (hopefully none of mine qualify...), my biggest headache is that they also reject patent applications for technically incorrect reasons, usually based on an incomplete understanding of either the present application or the prior art.
The root cause of this, however, is the same -- lack of time available to read the relevant material in depth. Not only can the present examiner not read my application carefully, but the fact that his predecessor had the same problem led him to quit, so the reviewer of my application today has less experience than he might otherwise -- a two-fold impact. The fact that I have to respond to the incorrect rejection, often to the point of entering the formal patent appeals process, only adds workload to an already-overworked system.
My point is that the examination process is a decision point and that rushed, inexperienced examiners can err in both directions. Yes, they can allow applications that should be rejected, but they can also reject applications that should be allowed. And while the former gets a lot of press (we've all seen the patent for the child's swing), the latter is just as bad for innovation: If a patent troll can take an inadvisedly-issued patent and take down an industry, an improperly-rejected patent can delay or deny funding to the startup trying to build an industry in the first place.
The other half of the story is that, even if one considers just circuits that can be made in a single process, there is an economically optimum number of transistors that can be placed on one chip. If you go back and read Gordon Moore's original "Moore's Law" paper, you'll find that that's exactly what it says (despite all the other stuff you hear). If you put too few transistors on a chip (so that the chip area is too small), the number of chips you make per wafer goes up, and your testing, packaging and handling costs go up. If you put too many transistors on a chip (so that the chip area is too large), the number of fully-functioning chips you get per wafer (your yield) goes down, and your sales revenue falls. (Moore's Law is the observation that this economically optimum number increases over time as chipmaking technology improves.)
So even if you consider just one type of chip function, logic, putting all of the functions on one chip is likely to be past the economically optimum size, and therefore too expensive (even for Apple!).
Additionally, the manufacturing numbers for the iPhone, while (presumably) large by consumer electronic standards, are still very small by semiconductor standards. Most semi companies don't get interested in an ASIC (custom) design unless unit sales larger than 10 million units per year are mentioned, in order to recover their design costs. Smaller volumes typically require the payment of upfront NRE (Non-Recurring Engineering) fees.
...but the policy would apply to all housing students. I don't know how many students are housed at UIC, but if 10,000 students paid cash in the last few days before the deadline (a not unrealistic situation at a large state university which may have 20,000 housed students), the housing authority could be holding $1 million in cash, in small bills. The security required for this, both physical (i.e., safes, cameras, limited access to certain areas) and financial (receipts, auditing, etc.) would be a major pain. (I know that if I were managing that department, establishing a no-cash policy would be my first act.) There are often valid legal (liability -- after all, this is the U.S. -- corporate structure, etc.) and accounting reasons for separating university housing (or even specific fees) from the university bursar, so the fact that he can't just have the bursar -- who may be able to accept cash -- debit his account isn't surprising, either.
One of the main functions of college is to prepare young people for the Real World(tm) -- a place where you will often face people and entities that are not the slightest bit interested in what you want. Considering the needs of others, and not just your own desires, has a name: Maturity.
I agree with the earlier post that a laptop would be more of a liability than an asset, but I've not backpacked in many moons. Have you inquired at the most traveled people website? It seems like they would at least have an informed opinion.
If you want to try just one hamfest, the Dayton Hamvention, in Dayton, Ohio, is (somewhat improbably, I always thought) by far the world's largest, and is coming up in a couple of months (it's May 18-20 this year). If you don't find what you need there, it's likely you'll meet people or organizations that can help you look.
I guess the GP should read, "No matter what you do...life makes you look like an idiot on Slashdot."
I had read the University of Florida press release on Wednesday at 1000 UTC, and the warning was already there, though there were as yet no media reports of the fires. So, naturally, I thought...
PLEASE NOTE: To guard against the risk of fire, people who wish to sterilize their sponges at home must ensure the sponge is completely wet. Two minutes of microwaving is sufficient for most sterilization. Sponges should also have no metallic content. Last, people should be careful when removing the sponge from the microwave as it will be hot.
The story in Boca Raton, Florida, location of the original engineering design team, was that "XM" stood for "Ex-Motorolan," since a very large fraction of the engineers and engineering management came from a Motorola plant in nearby Boynton Beach that had just gone through several rounds of layoffs. (The Motorola plant has since been closed, sold and razed, replaced with condominiums.)
I'm pretty sure the story is apocryphal, but it's too good not to repeat.
Slashdot Mirror
Either you or the tour guide were very much mistaken. The famous story about the guy in the underground jail cell refers to the May 8, 1902 eruption of Mt. Pelée on Martinique, a different volcano on a different island.
Oh, I completely agree that my name is very associated with my books. If you knew my name, you'd agree. My point is that any noob will screw up copy editing, layout and all the other facets of publishing, when compared with the output of someone who does only each one of these specialties for a living.
This is especially true for material that you've already written yourself. Nobody can do a good job copy editing his own work, or laying out his own book. Look at your bookshelf and I think you'll agree that it's easy to identify the books designed and laid out by the author. One needs independence from the author to do those tasks well.
I do completely and absolutely agree, however, that one must review the work of these specialists with a microscope when the proofs are returned to you, the author, for approval. I have sent text back three and four times until it is exactly the way I want, and that includes the style and substance of the index. Note that in this phase of publication the author is editing the work of the other specialists. That do-but-have-others-verify process is critial to the production of a high-quality text, but it is the author -- and only the author -- who gives the final approval for printing of the galley proofs. It is the author's responsibility to ensure that they are as he wishes them to be for, as you state, it's his name most closely tied to the book. Because he has the final approval (as well as approval at several intermediate steps, like copy editing), the author is in control over what is associated with his name.
One of the contract clauses my attorney inserted into my first contract covered the case of a published text that differed from the galley proof. That clause has never been exercised, for the books alsways have been exactly as I have approved them -- errors and all.
It has been my experience that the difference between "academic" publishers and "technical" publishers, at least as far as their treatment of authors, is zero. I've had technical publishers that were total slimes; one told me that there were many other authors he could get to write the book he wanted on his terms, so there's at least one that wasn't trying for a long-term relationship. (I haven't seen the book in print yet...) My best relationship is, in fact, with an academic publisher; they are constantly pestering me to write another book for them, contrary to your assertion. I think one's relationship with a publisher is an ergodic, independent random variable.
Regardless of whether one's publisher is considered academic or technical, however, I still say that one lives at one's peril in the publishing world without an attorney. One can think one is "cooperating on a project," but never forget that publishing is first and foremost a business.
I've written three technical books, one of which is now going into its third edition, for three different academic publishers. Points I have learned:
1. Publishers don't want you to format your book. That's their job. They want to receive double-spaced plain text, left-justified, with each figure in a separate file and a note in the text where each figure is to be inserted. (The figure captions are typically inserted at the end of the text.) Fancy things like Word cross-references, automatic footnote formating, etc. cause publishers great pain and are to be avoided.
2. MS Word works just fine for writing books. (I also wrote my Ph.D. dissertation in Word.) The only revision control I did was write each chapter as a separate file, and include a date code in the filename (so that I could go back to earlier drafts when needed). Each publisher with which I have dealt has sent me a required template; each of them was in Word. Needless to say, follow your publisher's template!
3. Figures are by far the biggest PITA in book writing and publishing. I ended up in each case sending the publisher pdf files. Get explicit instructions from your publisher about figures before you start (they will usually instruct you about their format preferences).
4. Keep your ms copies in several different media. After you've spent several hundred hours on the ms, the thought of a hard drive crash begins to weigh on your mind.
5. Don't worry about index generation. The publisher does that (via a contractor, usually); but feel free to edit the result.
To be honest, the most useful tool I've used writing books is a simple spreadsheet. It has three columns: a date column, counting down to the date I am contractually obligated to deliver the text; a page completed column, with the total number of pages written by the given date; and a pages per day column, which calculates, based on the date and pages written, how many pages I have to write per day in order to finish. (A rule of thumb is to have 500 manuscript pages for an academic book.) As others have commented, it's too easy not to write one day, then another, and then a week, and then you can't meet your deadline (at least with material to which you're happy seeing your name attached). The spreadsheet was my way of keeping the nose to the grindstone -- if I took time off, I had to write 2.1 pages per day to finish, then 2.2, then 3 ... but if I wrote 4 pages per day for a week or two, it would go down. It's a motivational tool.
Suff you don't know to ask about: The biggest things one should know about academic writing relate to the business of publishing:
1. GET AN ATTORNEY. The contract the publisher will send you is, of course, biased in the publisher's favor. My attorney requested changes in my first contract -- all of which were accepted by the publisher without any comment at all -- that more than paid for his fee (by several times). He also included clauses that protected me from several problems of which I hadn't thought (like, what happens if the publisher accepts your manuscript but never publishes it? Or, what do I get paid if the book is published in new media, like video or a new electronic format?) GET AN ATTORNEY.
2. Never, ever forget that your relationship with the publisher is a business relationship, not a personal one. This can be easy to forget when dealing with your editor, with whom you will have to work closely for an extended period of time. Authors have forgotten this rule at their peril: Ask Eric Weisstein. GET AN ATTORNEY.
3. Others have written about advances. I don't know anyone who gets an advance for an academic book. You get paid based on sales, after the publisher has paid everyone and everything else. Because of this, consider writing the book so that it is suitable for schools (universities, etc.). All that's required in this case is just some exercises in the back of each chap
After reading the specification, it sure sounds to me like a description of a prototype product on which Apple is trying to get patent protection. Some of the specifics in the specification are just too, well, specific -- for example, the description in [0034] of the use of a Venturi tube, or the parenthetical comment in [0035] about the use of ultrasonic frequencies in the membrane pump.
Possibly the biggest detail, though -- and the one bit of novelty I think I see in the specification that could form the basis of an allowable patent claim -- is the comment in [0041] that the heat may be coupled to the outside world by a plate behind the display. This is exactly the kind of novelty nugget -- assuming it really is novel -- to which I referred in my earlier comment. One way Apple could get an allowance on this application, after the initial rejection by the examiner, is to include this feature in an independent claim; the invention would then be a liquid-cooled laptop with the heat exchanger behind the display. (Of course, in that case your liquid-cooled laptop that doesn't have the heat exchanger behind the display wouldn't infringe on the resulting patent.)
As I said, assuming that it is a novel feature. PC design is not my specialty. Has anyone seen art before May 22, 2007 -- the filing date of this application -- describing a liquid-cooled laptop with the heat exchanger behind the display?
One doesn't "receive" a patent application; one "makes" one. In the initial application, which is what this is, the claims can say literally anything the applicant wants; during the examination process the applicant can (and usually does) modify the claims to meet the objections of the examiner (who -- in theory, anyway -- is ensuring that anything claimed is supported by text in the original specification portion of the application, and that the resulting invention meets the statutory requirements for utility, novelty, non-obviousness, etc.). A typical tactic on the part of an inventor is to write the initial claims broadly, then narrow their coverage in response to the examiner's objections. Frequently the claims of the final patent bear little resemblance to the initial ones. At the end of the process, one hopes to be left with a description of the invention that still is broad enough to be commercially useful. (One way a patent can be commercially useful, of course, is if it covers a product one is developing for market; in that case, one tries hard to ensure that the claims cover that implementation of the invention.)
With that said, and having read just the initial claims and not the specification -- yet -- I have to agree that there's nothing in the claims that I haven't seen described in public before (setting aside the strange description of a heat pipe coupled to a pump). Since corporations typically do not file patent applications they do not think will result in issued patents -- it's a waste of money and time of people, including the inventor, who have better things to do -- and Apple, for sure, knows the art of PC design, one has to wonder if there is some nugget of novelty, a particular wrinkle or implementation, described in the specification somewhere that is the real reason for the application.
Or maybe they just screwed up. E.g., the PC hardware guys missed the Apple patent committee meeting at which this invention was presented, and the remaining software and UI members of the committee were swayed by a particularly persuasive inventor. (It's been known to happen.)
The researchers haven't come up with "a material to replace lead." They've come up with a material to replace lead zirconate titanate, a.k.a. PZT, a piezoelectric and ferroelectric material with many uses in electronics. Because it has an extremely large piezoelectric constant (meaning that it produces a large voltage under little mechanical stress) and is cheap to produce, it is the ceramic frequently used in transducers, sensors, and resonators. The thing on your motherboard that beeps on boot is very likely made of PZT.
PZT is not, repeat not, used in solder. Wikipedia is one of your many friends.
Finding a ceramic with similar properties, but without the lead, has been a difficult problem for materials scientists, and the UM researchers say they have finally come up with a viable candidate.
I'm increasingly amazed (well, until my amaz-o-meter reached $FF a while back) at the Orwellian policies being established in the home of Orwell. I mean, from traffic cameras to tracking of people in public places, to storing of all types of personal information and communication -- even the Stazi would be impressed.
I haven't been to the UK in several years. Could someone explain how these projects have any kind of public support at all? Even in the US -- hardly a standard-bearer for liberal thought -- the UK proposals would produce an uproar.
What is the underlying sentiment of the people that continues to produce these ideas?
I've heard these ideas for years but, even after RTFA, and the 6Lowpan and ROLL references, I'm still trying to understand the advantage of these proposals over the existing technology (like ZigBee, among others). To be practical at all, the "Internet of Things" would have to be wireless, so there has to be an access point somewhere to the wired Internet. And because IP routing performs poorly in a multihop wireless network, the wireless network will have to use a different routing scheme, but still use the compressed IPv6 headers, while maintaining the low power features needed for battery-powered devices. The access point would have to handle both routing algorithms.
There would be no IP-related economies of scale in the networked devices, since they would need a new, start-from-scratch routing algorithm (e.g., ROLL).
So why is this superior over existing wireless protocols designed for this application? Is it just the gateway design? It doesn't seem like the gateway design of existing protocols would be significantly more complicated but, even if it were, it seems like would be repaid by the simplicity and size reduction in the many "small objects" in the network -- sort of an economic version of Amdahl's law. No?
See 6LoWPAN. Or here.
Bacterial fuel cell.
As we have discussed before, there is an equally significant problem with patent applications that are improperly rejected. Since issued patents enable one to obtain funding to bring new technology to market, this is as least as serious a problem for our society as the more well-known "junk patent" problem.
Baseball Overview
(This is a quick overview. I am omitting exceptions and details not needed for pedagogy.)
In baseball, there are two, nine-person teams, and four bases (home, first base, second base, and third base). The offensive team members take turns at batting, one at a time, with the other members off the field and not in play, while all nine members of the defensive team are in the field. The goal in baseball is to hit the ball thrown by the pitcher of the opposing team, then run around the bases, both starting and ending at home ("circling the bases"). This results in a "run," or one point for the batter/runner's team. Once the batter has hit the ball, however, the defensive team in the field can get the batter/runner "out," requiring him to leave the field without scoring, in one of three main ways:
1. By touching him with the ball when the batter/runner is not touching a base;
2. By catching a ball the batter/runner has hit in the air, before it has hit the ground; or
3. By touching a base to which the batter/runner must run (e.g., first base if he's just hit the ball) while holding the ball, before the batter/runner can touch the base.
Definition:: A hit occurs when a batter/runner hits the ball and reaches a base safely (i.e., without being made out). Yes, this can be confusing; it's not sufficient for the batter just to hit (i.e., make contact with) the ball; he has to also reach a base safely as a result.
There are lots of other ways the batter can be made out, but the most significant is the "strike out," the rules for which I won't bore you with now, but involve an inability to hit the ball thrown by the pitcher to begin with. Much of the strategy, and resulting fascination with the game, involves the game-within-a-game between the pitcher and the hitter.
When the defensive team has made three batter/runners out it is called a half-inning, and the teams exchange places (i.e., the offensive team takes the field and becomes the defensive team). Not surprisingly, when both teams have made three outs it is called an inning and, by rule, there are nine innings in a baseball game. As a result, every member of each team will be able to bat a minimum of three times per game; the average is something over four, I think. Thus, a batter has an opportunity to get a hit between four and five times per game.
A Hitting Streak
Definition: A hitting streak is a streak of consecutive games in which a particular batter gets at least one hit. As it happens, at the professional level only the very best players get a hit three out of every ten times they go to bat (a success rate, or "batting average," of 0.300); such "three hundred" hitters are greatly sought, even though even they fail at their job 70% of the time. (It's a hard game to play well; this is one reason baseball is called "the game of failure.") A typical player might have a batting average of 0.275. Another of the fascinations with the game is how this trivial batting average difference between the great and average player, 0.025, or a difference of one hit every forty times at bat, significantly affects play. But I digress.
A three-hundred hitter has a likelihood of 1 - (0.700)^4.5 = 1 - 0.201 = 0.799 of getting at least one hit in an average game (if we assume that he is at-bat an average of 4.5 times per game). His chance of doing so in 56 consecutive games, however, is (0.799)^56 = 3.52E-6. As others have mentioned, however, there are additional subtleties in the game. For example, if a pitcher is good, the opposing team will get few hits and quickly get its three outs per half-inning. This means, however, that there is a feedback effect: The average number of at-bats a player will have against a good pitcher is less than against a poor one, because his teammates are making outs instead of their own hits. This makes it harder for him to get the hit in the game to keep his streak alive -- instead of his 4.5 at-bats, he may get onl
To celebrate this anniversary, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Amateur Radio Club, W6VIO, is offering a commemorative Explorer I QSL card for each contact made through February 4th. See their operating schedule for times and frequencies of operation.
There are always additional forces in play that didn't exist 40 years ago. The forces on the engineering profession in 1968 didn't exist in 1928, and forty years from now there will be forces in play that don't exist today. The fact that there are additional forces in play will never change, though the forces themselves will.
Taking the long view in a career does not mean identifying a particular high demand area of the economy, entering it, and then going on cruise control until retirement, for no economic area remains in high demand over a career. Ask airline pilots, or doctors, or anyone else whose profession was in high demand in the 1980s how they'd feel about having their kid enter the same profession today. Taking the long view means understanding that, like any other commodity, the value of your services in the market will rise and fall over the years as the forces of supply and demand vary. Fortunately, engineering is a broad enough discipline that specialties within it are often economically independent. Your job, as the manager of your career, is to anticipate changes in supply and demand -- whether caused by Congress or not -- by moving out of specialties with increasing supply and/or decreasing demand, into specialties with decreasing supply and/or increasing demand, as the economics warrant. To do otherwise is to stand in the rain (and perhaps complain about water's high latent heat of vaporization) while others notice the approaching storm and go indoors until it passes. You may be correct in identifying the cause of your difficulty, but others, with a more pragmatic approach, will be more successful in the long run.
Thinking that the issues affecting your job today will still be there in 40 years is, IMHO, not good advice to those entering the profession, for it implies that the job market is static. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The names change, but the cycles, and the fact that external forces affect technologists, do not. Do you really think the next generation will be discussing these issues? If offshoring and H1-Bs cause a shortage of engineers, in ten years there'll be a crash program, maybe like the one that followed Sputnik, to promote the profession again. I won't bore you with the problematic social and economic forces affecting technologists when my father and I held entry-level positions, decades ago, except to state that, while at the time they were at least as important as the effects of offshoring today, they're now totally irrelevant. In fact, you'd laugh at most of them.
It's important in career planning to take the long view. College graduates entering the job market today will be retiring in the 2050s. Whatever problems they will have then -- and they will have problems -- they won't be with outsourcing and H1-B visas.
This is not the first time entry-level people have thought times were tougher on them than the preceeding generation.
In the mid-1960s my father worked for a contractor on the Apollo space program. Realizing that once the moon rocket design was substantially complete, engineers would be superfluous (a Briton would say redundant), in 1968 he transfered, within his company, out of the space program to a group in another state designing time-shared mainframes for business applications. It was the best decision of his career, but one that was very controversial at the time ("you're leaving the space program?!?").
I will carry the memory of the period that followed to my grave. Some time after the transfer, the NASA cuts began, and we started getting phone calls (at home!) from my father's former coworkers, looking for work -- any work, any where, in any field. More than 20,000 engineers, scientists, and technicians in the state of Florida alone -- and probably 100,000 or more around the country -- were laid of as fast as the mimeograph machines could reproduce the pink slips. Engineers were driving taxis and bagging groceries in the towns around the Kennedy Space Center.
The ultimate was when my father returned to the dinner table from another call to announce that the caller had been his former boss's boss's boss, looking for any work -- even a drafting position (six levels down the corporate ladder, and one that did not require a college degree). Like all the other callers, he had a wife, x young children, and a mortgage to support. (Homes were essentially unsellable in the areas around the major contractors' plants; the mortgages were greater than their market value, so foreclosures were the norm.) I hope I have sufficiently expressed the desperate nature of the situation.
And yet...
No university dropped its engineering program; freshout engineering graduates appeared, just as they always had, at the end of every semester. And all of them needed jobs. Entry-level jobs. All of these people entered school at the height of the space program, only to find when they graduated that the job market was considerably more difficult than they had expected. Having a difficult entry-level job market is not a new thing.
One of the pleasures of age is that one sees the world as dynamic, rather than static. A young person sees a constant world, for it's the only one he's ever known. With age, however, one sees things change, and can evaluate, say, the first derivative of the world function. With greater age, one can see the rate of change change, and appreciate the second derivative; at that point, one can begin modeling the dynamics of social structures.
The shortage of engineers in the 1960s led to the glut of engineers in the 1970s. However, because of the 4- to 6-year delay between entering and completing engineering school, the system is not necessarily stable; the glut of the 1970s led to such an engineering shortage by the early 1980s that separate, higher, salary ladders were established at major corporations for entry-level engineers (creating salary compression that demotivated experienced engineers, but that's a different thread). The system continues to oscillate today; the point is, it's oscillating through values we've seen before.
I have more than 35 issued US patents, with at least 15 applications presently on file with the USPTO -- no software or business-method patents, thank you very much! -- and the biggest problem I experience is the opposite from that most frequently mentioned here. While examiners do allow worthless patent applications (hopefully none of mine qualify...), my biggest headache is that they also reject patent applications for technically incorrect reasons, usually based on an incomplete understanding of either the present application or the prior art.
The root cause of this, however, is the same -- lack of time available to read the relevant material in depth. Not only can the present examiner not read my application carefully, but the fact that his predecessor had the same problem led him to quit, so the reviewer of my application today has less experience than he might otherwise -- a two-fold impact. The fact that I have to respond to the incorrect rejection, often to the point of entering the formal patent appeals process, only adds workload to an already-overworked system.
My point is that the examination process is a decision point and that rushed, inexperienced examiners can err in both directions. Yes, they can allow applications that should be rejected, but they can also reject applications that should be allowed. And while the former gets a lot of press (we've all seen the patent for the child's swing), the latter is just as bad for innovation: If a patent troll can take an inadvisedly-issued patent and take down an industry, an improperly-rejected patent can delay or deny funding to the startup trying to build an industry in the first place.
The other half of the story is that, even if one considers just circuits that can be made in a single process, there is an economically optimum number of transistors that can be placed on one chip. If you go back and read Gordon Moore's original "Moore's Law" paper, you'll find that that's exactly what it says (despite all the other stuff you hear). If you put too few transistors on a chip (so that the chip area is too small), the number of chips you make per wafer goes up, and your testing, packaging and handling costs go up. If you put too many transistors on a chip (so that the chip area is too large), the number of fully-functioning chips you get per wafer (your yield) goes down, and your sales revenue falls. (Moore's Law is the observation that this economically optimum number increases over time as chipmaking technology improves.)
So even if you consider just one type of chip function, logic, putting all of the functions on one chip is likely to be past the economically optimum size, and therefore too expensive (even for Apple!).
Additionally, the manufacturing numbers for the iPhone, while (presumably) large by consumer electronic standards, are still very small by semiconductor standards. Most semi companies don't get interested in an ASIC (custom) design unless unit sales larger than 10 million units per year are mentioned, in order to recover their design costs. Smaller volumes typically require the payment of upfront NRE (Non-Recurring Engineering) fees.
...but the policy would apply to all housing students. I don't know how many students are housed at UIC, but if 10,000 students paid cash in the last few days before the deadline (a not unrealistic situation at a large state university which may have 20,000 housed students), the housing authority could be holding $1 million in cash, in small bills. The security required for this, both physical (i.e., safes, cameras, limited access to certain areas) and financial (receipts, auditing, etc.) would be a major pain. (I know that if I were managing that department, establishing a no-cash policy would be my first act.) There are often valid legal (liability -- after all, this is the U.S. -- corporate structure, etc.) and accounting reasons for separating university housing (or even specific fees) from the university bursar, so the fact that he can't just have the bursar -- who may be able to accept cash -- debit his account isn't surprising, either.
One of the main functions of college is to prepare young people for the Real World(tm) -- a place where you will often face people and entities that are not the slightest bit interested in what you want. Considering the needs of others, and not just your own desires, has a name: Maturity.
I agree with the earlier post that a laptop would be more of a liability than an asset, but I've not backpacked in many moons. Have you inquired at the most traveled people website? It seems like they would at least have an informed opinion.
If you want to try just one hamfest, the Dayton Hamvention, in Dayton, Ohio, is (somewhat improbably, I always thought) by far the world's largest, and is coming up in a couple of months (it's May 18-20 this year). If you don't find what you need there, it's likely you'll meet people or organizations that can help you look.
I guess the GP should read, "No matter what you do...life makes you look like an idiot on Slashdot."
I had read the University of Florida press release on Wednesday at 1000 UTC, and the warning was already there, though there were as yet no media reports of the fires. So, naturally, I thought...
Oh, never mind.
The story in Boca Raton, Florida, location of the original engineering design team, was that "XM" stood for "Ex-Motorolan," since a very large fraction of the engineers and engineering management came from a Motorola plant in nearby Boynton Beach that had just gone through several rounds of layoffs. (The Motorola plant has since been closed, sold and razed, replaced with condominiums.)
I'm pretty sure the story is apocryphal, but it's too good not to repeat.
Real-time X-ray flux data is available here. A good site (for BOFHs or just curious laypeople) on this subject is SpaceWeather.