There is a formal requirement that the company post a job ad.
I believe that the law says more then that. The employer must make a good faith effort to fill the job with an American citizen. It's a matter of framing. It is perfectly legit for a lawyer to say "Here are the minimal steps you must take to prove a good faith effort". It is not legit for a lawyer to say "Here is how you rig your application process to avoid hiring qualified Americans while preserving the appearance of a good faith effort...". The latter clearly violates the good faith provision and probably a bunch of Bar ethical standards. Lawyers are supposed to be zealous advocates for their clients, but they are also considered agents of the court, and they are not supposed to participate in perpetrating a fraud on the court.
I think you'll find that Great Britain was by no means the most scientifically advanced country in Europe at the time (and we still aren't).
Right. Dirac, Bragg, and Rutherford were total wankers.
Seriously, I don't think there is any single metric that determines "the most scientifically advanced" country. I'm not sure that it is even a well defined concept. Germany, France, GB, Austria, Italy, all had very advanced programs in physics throughout the 19th and 20th century. The US and Russian contributions really began to pick up up at the dawn of the 20th century, with a handful of notable contributions before that. However if you want to take Nobel Prizes in Physics as one measure of scientific productivity, the UK and the US beat everyone else in the 1930s:
Physics Nobel Laureates 1930s UK 3 US 3 Austria 2 India 1 Germany 1 Italy 1
I'm not sure why that would be regarded as pitiful.
Of course in the 20s the German speaking bits of Europe were the place to be for physics.
"The thing is, all of the major advances in physics which made the atomic bomb possible, and physics suddenly important rather than an obscure new branch of philosophy, were made in Europe. All of them."
Prior to WWII the physics community in the US was much smaller and less central then the physics community in Europe, but you are overstating the case. Consider the following list, just off the top of my head: Josiah Gibbs, Albert MIchelson, Robert Millikan, Arthur Compton, Clinton Davisson, Carl Anderson, and Ernest Lawrence. In the 1930s the US tied Great Britan for the number of Nobel prizes in physics.
The two DVDs include not only the DNA sequence, but the raw traces coming out of the sequencing machine. Those are quite bulky, but they allow you to check if the base calls are correct or to find evidence of heterozygosity.
That sounds realist and hard-nosed, but look at how it actually plays out...
There has been a lot of rhetoric about the folks in Guantanamo being prisoners taken on the field of battle. There are some for whom this is literally true, but for other it is true only in the figurative sense that the whole world is a battlefield in the war on terror. In point of fact, some of the folks being held have been turned over by the intelligence forces of countries like Pakistan and Syria. I mean Syria for cripes sake, the same country that is probably passing foreign jihadis into Iraq? Are you really comfortable with holding someone forever in an American prison on the say so of the Pakistani ISI or the Syrian NSD? If we are holding innocent folks in Gitmo do you really think it has no consequences for the U.S.?
Sorry, but he did nothing wrong. What he said was rude and insulting, but not wrong.
Is it your position that free speech protects people saying rude and insulting things, but does not protect complaints about people saying rude and insulting things? I mean that's all anybody except CBS and MSNBC has done: complained that the speech was rude and insulting. Nobody has taken him to court or tried have have him arrested.
CBS and MSNBC fired him because there was a good chance that he was begining to alienate their sponsor's customers. It took CBS two weeks to make the decision. How long do you think it would have taken them to fire him if he'd announced that he was going to take the show in a new direction and read the collected works of Leo Tolstoy over the air in Russian?
What is even wrong with words such as nigga, ho, etc..?
So you walk into a restaurant and the waiter says: "What do you want, asshole?". He brings you your meal, and says "Here you are dirt-bag". Are you going to dine there again? I certainly wouldn't. Obviously the words in and of themselves do no damage to you, but the waiter is sure trying to give you a message, and the message is that you are not welcome there. Now it is possible for the waiter to call you "sir" or "your excellency" and still convey that you are not welcome, but the bare fact of his use of charged words like "asshole" and "dirt-bat" conveys better exactly how un-welcome you are. The waiter knows that calling a stranger a "dirt-bag" is a insult. You know a stranger calling ou a "dirt-bag" is trying to insult you, and the waiter knows you know.
If the words are suitable for carrying a message, be it whatever, then why not use them.
But that's exactly the point. Words have a denotation and and a connotation. Effective communication is all about finding the word with the correct connotation. Black and nigger have the same denotation, but they have very different connotations. In the US for about the last 75 years, a white person choosing to address a black person as a nigger was definitely sending a message, and the message was hostile and intimidating. A black person ignored the connotation at their peril.
You may decide to make up your own connotations for words, but then you shouldn't be surprised then if you are completely misunderstood. Language is only useful insofar as it is shared.
I don't agree with what Imus said but I'll defend his RIGHT to say it.
Imus isn't in jail. No court has issued a restraining order enjoining him from making rude or insulting comments. CBS yielded to pressure from the sponsors and fired him. Are you suggesting that CBS and the sponsors are obliged to pay for Imus's salary and his air time? We're the folks who boycotted the Dixie Chicks obliged to buy their albums? I'd love to have a national radio show, and I'd charge a lot less then Imus. Why would CBS be obliged to provide Imus a platform but not me?
Imus is an entertainer. For the last couple of decades there has been a pretty good audience for folks who like shocking and abusive hosts. That seems to be waning a bit, and I think you're confusing the playing out of an entertainment fad with the death of free speech. Imus isn't fighting for his right to speak, he has that. He could print flyers, set up a blog, or a stream a web cast entirely devoted to insulting the Rutgers basketball team , George Bush, or Hillary Clinton, or calling for the re-institution of slavery. He can do that, and no one can stop him. But do you really think he will? Is it really the speech that's vital to him or is it the matter of getting paid handsomely for it?
But I fail to see how giving out a draft report offers protection
Because it offered them the chance to get their legal challenges rolling before the information was disemenated to the wider public.
Moreover, it seems that he helped anyone who appealed to her for help (this is what regulatory agencies should do), not just certain people.
But helping certain people and not others was is exactly what she's accused of doing. From the Washington Post article:
MacDonald acknowledged to Devaney that the policy document would not have been released under a Freedom of Information Act request but "said that did not mean she could not release it to a personal friend, the PLF attorney, as long as the attorney would not post the document on the PLF's Web site.
It seems to me that a public official treating her friends differently from other citizens is completly inimical to the notion of equal protection under the law.
but I don't see why it was wrong for her to disclose a draft report to the private sector
If she'd simply made the draft public that would be fine, but that's not what she is accused of doing. She'd accused of leaking the information to a select handful of organizations. Other organizations and the public were not informed until the final report was issued. Under the equal protection clause the governement is not allowed to play favorites like that.
The "programming whiz" part of Bill Gates resume is pure padding.
Actually he was a fairly skilled programmer back in the 70s. Writing the MITS Basic interpreter was not a particularly noteworthy achievement, but to write the interpreter he and Allen first had to write an 8080 emulator on the Harvard mainframe. Writing an emulator that was good enough that the BASIC interpreter ran the first time when put on the actual hardware was not too shabby for an 18 year old.
If you explore these areas, and find out that the HIV has actually never been seen
As other have pointed out this is simply not true. We have plenty of electron micrographs of HIV, not to mention the sequence of its genome. It is also a complete non-sequiter. We developed very effective vaccines against smallpox, rabies, and polio before we had pictures of them. Hell, the smallpox vaccine was invented before we had the germ theory of disease, let alone electron microscopes. It doesn't hurt to be able to visualize a pathogen, but it isn't absolutely essential.
Things get nasty when folks mingle the cogent (but IMHO long since answered) questions of Duesberg with blatant lies like "The HIV virus has never been seen".
maybe I shoulda taken the post belows advice and just sat back and read
Most classes suffer because the students sit like bumps on a log, and don't even respond to direct questions. I'd say ask the questions that occur to you, but keep them brief, and germane, simply out of respect for your fellow students. They are all paying 15G a semester too. If you already know the material in a class, then for gosh sake, see if you can challenge it or test out of it.
I still don't feel I am learning anything college almost seems like a toll you gotta pay for a job interview.
It is possible to sleepwalk through a college career, checking off requirements until you get the degree. It is also possible to test out of intro courses, do independent study, study abroad, or start your own research project. However, unless you are going to a very small school, nobody is going to come and grab you and tell you: "Hey, you are working way below your capacity, I've signed you up to test out of that intro course, and I've transfered you into my upper-division seminar." If you're bored with the standard course it's up to you to seek out more challenging material.
I suspect the original press release and the articles on Science Daily and PhysOrg are FUBAR. I think an article in the Washington Post is probably more accurate. Unfortunately the Phys. Rev. Letter web site doesn't seem to have the actual paper publicly available yet.
rom what I can gather the important part of the article is that they have been able to slow down each photon in order to buffer it.
The original press release is very poorly writen. A better article is in the Washington Post. Also, the title of the actual peer-reviewed article is on Howell's publication page as "All-optical delay of images using slow light" Ryan M. Camacho, Curtis Broadbent, Irfan Ali Khan and John C. Howell, Phys. Rev. Lett (in press). As you say, the centeral acheivement is in their ability to slow down the photons. Unfortunately the actual paper doesn't yet seem to be available as the Phys Rev Letter website. I think the business of encoding an image on a single photon is a confabulation by the author of the press release.
Perhaps your insurance plan rocks. Unfortunately, others aren't as fortunate.
Believe me, I understand how costly and disastrous illness can be. When I was a teenager my family was almost bankrupted when my father developed heart disease. I'm very lucky, I have a good job, good health insurance, and good savings. I'm keenly aware that others lack those resources, and the lack may mean suffering and an early death. Yet last year I made $3000 in charitable donations and spent twice that on a new computer. Why didn't I donate more money to help some of those folks in desperate need of medical care? Am I any less culpable then the pharmaceutical companies?
What I'm objecting to is the notion that this could all be fixed if only some faceless entity called big pharma would be more charitable. I want to know who exactly is being called on to make the sacrifices, and what our moral basis is for assigning the sacrifice to them rather then to ourselves. Yes, big pharma is greedy and charges whatever the traffic will bear, but this is true of most of us living in capitalist economies.
Yes, sadly the purpose of a drug company and drug research is not to help people and cure diseases, its to pad the bottom line of the drug company shareholders.
I am not a libertarian, but I am suspicious of demands that "those other people should be more self-sacrificing". Everybody complains about greedy drug companies, but except in rare cases, the folks complaining aren't taking 2nd jobs so they can donate the extra income to support medical research. It seems that it's somebody else's responsibility to make sacrifices.
Who exactly should be making the sacrifice? Should the unions that hold stock in the drug companies cut their pensions? Should the scientists and doctors doing the research take pay cuts? How about the folks who wash the glassware and tend the mice? Maybe the graphic designers who create the advertising? We could spread the sacrifice across the board by raising taxes, but most of the US seems convinced that they are already overtaxed.
Why does one take a job in ANY field? Yep, for the money. No other reason.
This is only a weak rule of thumb, not an economic law. I personally have turned down higher paying jobs because other aspects of the lower paying job were more important to me. For many people income simply does not have a infinitely elastic demand curve. If a bioinformatics job pays $15,000/year and an e-commerce job pays $70,000/year I will take the e-commerce job. If a bioinformatics jobs pay $40,000/year and e-commerce jobs still pays $70,000/year, I will take the bioinformatics job.
And this is to say nothing of the thousands of people who quit paying jobs to do unpaid volunteer work in difficult conditions because of their religious or political convictions.
Regrettably, most politicians (and some journals like the "Wall Street Journal") cater to certain segments of the population and outright lie about how economic laws work.
Looking back, I am dumfounded that I got to be 40 years old before I figured out that folks like Milken, Boesky, the Hunts, Ken Lay, and Archer-Daniels talk a great line about the miracles of the free market, but are actuallly entirely inimical to it. What they reallly want is for they and theirs to get rich and powerful by having the market in their hip pocket. Their talk about free markets is strictly for the rubes.
I'll amend my assertion to state that instead of (a year of) calculus, undergrads should be required to have (a year of) probability and statistics.
Umm... I think you'll find that a serious stat course will require a year of calculus as a prerequisite. Yes, most universities do offer something called "descriptive statistics" that doesn't require calculus, but I don't think is it would be very helpful to C. S. students. The important notions about continuous distributions and confidence intervals are taught much more easily after you've don first year calculus.
Serious probability is going to be best served with a healthy dose of measure theory that is going to be well in advance of what a student is going to get from a calculus course or two
Boy, I really disagree. Measure theory is critical for foundational issues in probability, but is rarely helpful to the practicing statistician, and still less useful to a practicing software engineer. In my experience the topics that are important are the common continuous and discrete probability distributions, the fundamentals of statistical inference including p-values and confidence intervals, and a whole lot of practice with Bayes Theorem. All of those things are accessible after a solid year of calculus. I'm sure some of the important results can be proved rigorously and in their full generality only by using measure theory, but for the most part you only need 1st year calculus to understand the practical applications.
we should try and make those few courses the most generally useful to CS and SE students.
A worthy goal. I think we just disagree slightly on which courses will be the most generally useful.
I've seen a lot of jobs where linear algebra and statistics were important. I can't say I've ever seen abstract algebra or category theory crop up. That doesn't mean that they don't exist, just that they must be pretty rare. I'm arguing from my personal experience here, which is extensive (MS in Applied math and 20 years as a software developer), but obviously not omniscient.
What areas of CS or SE would you see a need for calculus?
Any area that depends heavily on probability theory or statistics. Calculus is a prerequisite for the serious probability and stat courses. Fields like machine learning have one foot in CS and one foot in statistics.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that the law says more then that. The employer must make a good faith effort to fill the job with an American citizen. It's a matter of framing. It is perfectly legit for a lawyer to say "Here are the minimal steps you must take to prove a good faith effort". It is not legit for a lawyer to say "Here is how you rig your application process to avoid hiring qualified Americans while preserving the appearance of a good faith effort
You need to find a more honest crowd of people to hang out with.
Right. Dirac, Bragg, and Rutherford were total wankers.
Seriously, I don't think there is any single metric that determines "the most scientifically advanced" country. I'm not sure that it is even a well defined concept. Germany, France, GB, Austria, Italy, all had very advanced programs in physics throughout the 19th and 20th century. The US and Russian contributions really began to pick up up at the dawn of the 20th century, with a handful of notable contributions before that. However if you want to take Nobel Prizes in Physics as one measure of scientific productivity, the UK and the US beat everyone else in the 1930s:
Physics Nobel Laureates 1930s
UK 3
US 3
Austria 2
India 1
Germany 1
Italy 1
I'm not sure why that would be regarded as pitiful.
Of course in the 20s the German speaking bits of Europe were the place to be for physics.
Prior to WWII the physics community in the US was much smaller and less central then the physics community in Europe, but you are overstating the case. Consider the following list, just off the top of my head: Josiah Gibbs, Albert MIchelson, Robert Millikan, Arthur Compton, Clinton Davisson, Carl Anderson, and Ernest Lawrence. In the 1930s the US tied Great Britan for the number of Nobel prizes in physics.
The two DVDs include not only the DNA sequence, but the raw traces coming out of the sequencing machine. Those are quite bulky, but they allow you to check if the base calls are correct or to find evidence of heterozygosity.
It's not a torrent, but you can in fact download the complete sequence and traces.
That sounds realist and hard-nosed, but look at how it actually plays out ...
There has been a lot of rhetoric about the folks in Guantanamo being prisoners taken on the field of battle. There are some for whom this is literally true, but for other it is true only in the figurative sense that the whole world is a battlefield in the war on terror. In point of fact, some of the folks being held have been turned over by the intelligence forces of countries like Pakistan and Syria. I mean Syria for cripes sake, the same country that is probably passing foreign jihadis into Iraq? Are you really comfortable with holding someone forever in an American prison on the say so of the Pakistani ISI or the Syrian NSD? If we are holding innocent folks in Gitmo do you really think it has no consequences for the U.S.?
Is it your position that free speech protects people saying rude and insulting things, but does not protect complaints about people saying rude and insulting things? I mean that's all anybody except CBS and MSNBC has done: complained that the speech was rude and insulting. Nobody has taken him to court or tried have have him arrested.
CBS and MSNBC fired him because there was a good chance that he was begining to alienate their sponsor's customers. It took CBS two weeks to make the decision. How long do you think it would have taken them to fire him if he'd announced that he was going to take the show in a new direction and read the collected works of Leo Tolstoy over the air in Russian?
So you walk into a restaurant and the waiter says: "What do you want, asshole?". He brings you your meal, and says "Here you are dirt-bag". Are you going to dine there again? I certainly wouldn't. Obviously the words in and of themselves do no damage to you, but the waiter is sure trying to give you a message, and the message is that you are not welcome there. Now it is possible for the waiter to call you "sir" or "your excellency" and still convey that you are not welcome, but the bare fact of his use of charged words like "asshole" and "dirt-bat" conveys better exactly how un-welcome you are. The waiter knows that calling a stranger a "dirt-bag" is a insult. You know a stranger calling ou a "dirt-bag" is trying to insult you, and the waiter knows you know.
But that's exactly the point. Words have a denotation and and a connotation. Effective communication is all about finding the word with the correct connotation. Black and nigger have the same denotation, but they have very different connotations. In the US for about the last 75 years, a white person choosing to address a black person as a nigger was definitely sending a message, and the message was hostile and intimidating. A black person ignored the connotation at their peril.
You may decide to make up your own connotations for words, but then you shouldn't be surprised then if you are completely misunderstood. Language is only useful insofar as it is shared.
Imus isn't in jail. No court has issued a restraining order enjoining him from making rude or insulting comments. CBS yielded to pressure from the sponsors and fired him. Are you suggesting that CBS and the sponsors are obliged to pay for Imus's salary and his air time? We're the folks who boycotted the Dixie Chicks obliged to buy their albums? I'd love to have a national radio show, and I'd charge a lot less then Imus. Why would CBS be obliged to provide Imus a platform but not me?
Imus is an entertainer. For the last couple of decades there has been a pretty good audience for folks who like shocking and abusive hosts. That seems to be waning a bit, and I think you're confusing the playing out of an entertainment fad with the death of free speech. Imus isn't fighting for his right to speak, he has that. He could print flyers, set up a blog, or a stream a web cast entirely devoted to insulting the Rutgers basketball team , George Bush, or Hillary Clinton, or calling for the re-institution of slavery. He can do that, and no one can stop him. But do you really think he will? Is it really the speech that's vital to him or is it the matter of getting paid handsomely for it?
Because it offered them the chance to get their legal challenges rolling before the information was disemenated to the wider public.
But helping certain people and not others was is exactly what she's accused of doing. From the Washington Post article:
It seems to me that a public official treating her friends differently from other citizens is completly inimical to the notion of equal protection under the law.
If she'd simply made the draft public that would be fine, but that's not what she is accused of doing. She'd accused of leaking the information to a select handful of organizations. Other organizations and the public were not informed until the final report was issued. Under the equal protection clause the governement is not allowed to play favorites like that.
Sure. Allen invited Gates into the project and split the company with him just because he's so pretty.
Actually he was a fairly skilled programmer back in the 70s. Writing the MITS Basic interpreter was not a particularly noteworthy achievement,
but to write the interpreter he and Allen first had to write an 8080 emulator on the Harvard mainframe. Writing an emulator that was good enough that the BASIC interpreter ran the first time when put on the actual hardware was not too shabby for an 18 year old.
As other have pointed out this is simply not true. We have plenty of electron micrographs of HIV, not to mention the sequence of its genome. It is also a complete non-sequiter. We developed very effective vaccines against smallpox, rabies, and polio before we had pictures of them. Hell, the smallpox vaccine was invented before we had the germ theory of disease, let alone electron microscopes. It doesn't hurt to be able to visualize a pathogen, but it isn't absolutely essential.
Peter Duesberg is a very smart guy, but he is not an oracle. There is a long line of very good scientists who have made bizzarely wrongheaded pronouncments. See for example Lord Kelvin (heavier then air flight is impossible) Philipp Lenard (the special theory of relativity is "jewish physics")
Things get nasty when folks mingle the cogent (but IMHO long since answered) questions of Duesberg with blatant lies like "The HIV virus has never been seen".
Most classes suffer because the students sit like bumps on a log, and don't even respond to direct questions. I'd say ask the questions that occur to you, but keep them brief, and germane, simply out of respect for your fellow students. They are all paying 15G a semester too. If you already know the material in a class, then for gosh sake, see if you can challenge it or test out of it. It is possible to sleepwalk through a college career, checking off requirements until you get the degree. It is also possible to test out of intro courses, do independent study, study abroad, or start your own research project. However, unless you are going to a very small school, nobody is going to come and grab you and tell you: "Hey, you are working way below your capacity, I've signed you up to test out of that intro course, and I've transfered you into my upper-division seminar." If you're bored with the standard course it's up to you to seek out more challenging material.
I suspect the original press release and the articles on Science Daily and PhysOrg are FUBAR. I think an article in the Washington Post is probably more accurate. Unfortunately the Phys. Rev. Letter web site doesn't seem to have the actual paper publicly available yet.
Believe me, I understand how costly and disastrous illness can be. When I was a teenager my family was almost bankrupted when my father developed heart disease. I'm very lucky, I have a good job, good health insurance, and good savings. I'm keenly aware that others lack those resources, and the lack may mean suffering and an early death. Yet last year I made $3000 in charitable donations and spent twice that on a new computer. Why didn't I donate more money to help some of those folks in desperate need of medical care? Am I any less culpable then the pharmaceutical companies?
What I'm objecting to is the notion that this could all be fixed if only some faceless entity called big pharma would be more charitable. I want to know who exactly is being called on to make the sacrifices, and what our moral basis is for assigning the sacrifice to them rather then to ourselves. Yes, big pharma is greedy and charges whatever the traffic will bear, but this is true of most of us living in capitalist economies.
I am not a libertarian, but I am suspicious of demands that "those other people should be more self-sacrificing". Everybody complains about greedy drug companies, but except in rare cases, the folks complaining aren't taking 2nd jobs so they can donate the extra income to support medical research. It seems that it's somebody else's responsibility to make sacrifices.
Who exactly should be making the sacrifice? Should the unions that hold stock in the drug companies cut their pensions? Should the scientists and doctors doing the research take pay cuts? How about the folks who wash the glassware and tend the mice? Maybe the graphic designers who create the advertising? We could spread the sacrifice across the board by raising taxes, but most of the US seems convinced that they are already overtaxed.
This is only a weak rule of thumb, not an economic law. I personally have turned down higher paying jobs because other aspects of the lower paying job were more important to me. For many people income simply does not have a infinitely elastic demand curve. If a bioinformatics job pays $15,000/year and an e-commerce job pays $70,000/year I will take the e-commerce job. If a bioinformatics jobs pay $40,000/year and e-commerce jobs still pays $70,000/year, I will take the bioinformatics job.
And this is to say nothing of the thousands of people who quit paying jobs to do unpaid volunteer work in difficult conditions because of their religious or political convictions.
Looking back, I am dumfounded that I got to be 40 years old before I figured out that folks like Milken, Boesky, the Hunts, Ken Lay, and Archer-Daniels talk a great line about the miracles of the free market, but are actuallly entirely inimical to it. What they reallly want is for they and theirs to get rich and powerful by having the market in their hip pocket. Their talk about free markets is strictly for the rubes.
Umm... I think you'll find that a serious stat course will require a year of calculus as a prerequisite. Yes, most universities do offer something called "descriptive statistics" that doesn't require calculus, but I don't think is it would be very helpful to C. S. students. The important notions about continuous distributions and confidence intervals are taught much more easily after you've don first year calculus.
Boy, I really disagree. Measure theory is critical for foundational issues in probability, but is rarely helpful to the practicing statistician, and still less useful to a practicing software engineer. In my experience the topics that are important are the common continuous and discrete probability distributions, the fundamentals of statistical inference including p-values and confidence intervals, and a whole lot of practice with Bayes Theorem. All of those things are accessible after a solid year of calculus. I'm sure some of the important results can be proved rigorously and in their full generality only by using measure theory, but for the most part you only need 1st year calculus to understand the practical applications.
A worthy goal. I think we just disagree slightly on which courses will be the most generally useful.
I've seen a lot of jobs where linear algebra and statistics were important. I can't say I've ever seen abstract algebra or category theory crop up. That doesn't mean that they don't exist, just that they must be pretty rare. I'm arguing from my personal experience here, which is extensive (MS in Applied math and 20 years as a software developer), but obviously not omniscient.
Any area that depends heavily on probability theory or statistics. Calculus is a prerequisite for the serious probability and stat courses. Fields like machine learning have one foot in CS and one foot in statistics.