The solution is to directly connect the consumers to their care financially as much as possible. Substituting the government for the insurance companies will do nothing to solve this basic failure.
If the government were to take over management for our _current_ insurance structure, we would have an ungodly mess on our hands. If we tie the consumer directly to their health care, we would also have an ungodly mess on our hands. Either way, the government ends up picking up the tab. We need a comprehensive reform that addresses the entire medical industry. A free market does not do that.
What is needed is pressure to drive the efficiencies up and the prices down. Regulation can provide pressure, but it is inflexible--requires legislation, rule-making, and often court cases. Market competition is a more flexible and powerful way.
The greatest efficiency that we can achieve is a system of preventative care that prevents higher cost treatment later.
How does a market driven health care solve this problem? The short answer is "It doesn't". People don't buy things they think they don't need. The lower middle class and low income people will not shop around for an annual physical. They will rely on the same method they have now: Go to the emergency room for my current illness and let the government pick up the tab.
One certainty of a free market is that anything that permanently upsets the balance of supply and demand will cause the market to go completely out of whack. Having the government gaurantee the payment of a large group of people violates this principle free market. However, you can't have it any other way. The emergency rooms and hospitals must have a gaurantee of payment or they will not operate. Denying medical treatment based on ability to pay would have drastic effects on the rest of our economy because of huge productivity drops as more people are sick.
To increase efficiences in a market, you must have either a drop in demand or an increase in supply so that the market corrects itself. The current medical market has an extremely static demand that is not price sensitive. There is not an increase in supply coming anytime soon since the supply/demand ratio for doctors is screwed up because of dropping doctor salaries. If you want to increase efficiency, it needs to be done on the demand side. The only way to reduce the demand is through preventative care. The free market methodology will not work in increasing preventative care. It would likely cause a drop in demand for private doctors and an increase in demand on the government run emergency rooms and hospitals as more of the middle class runs to the government for support.
- Information - There is no shortage of information available on proper proactive care and the most common illnesses and conditions, as well as their most common and effective treatments. Patients are awash in information today.
However, it is almost impossible to shop around for the best price. We don't know the actual cost of treatment and it is impossible to tell what the cost is going to be upfront. A basic physical at one office may not include the same bloodwork as another office. You can't compare services to get accurate price comparisons.
- Elasticity - The numbers of people who get sick are not dependent on market forces, but where they go is. If people had to pay for their own strep treatment, don't you think they'd drive an extra 15 minutes to the next clinic to save $50? If it's not a life-threatening emergency--and most medical visits are not--then there is elasticity.
This goes back to the information problem. You can't call a doctor's office and ask for a quote on Strep throat treatment. Which antibiotic should I use? Don't know, since I may be alergic to some and not know what is available. Is the doctor going to continue to treat me under the original quote if I have an antibiotic resistant strain? Medicine is too difficult to quote correctly so the information and elasticity argument fall apart. It is the exact reason we have health insurance. We need to smooth out the costs and we do so through shared cost in health insurance.
The second problem with elasticity is the desire to deal with a single doctor regardless of price. This is a business built on relationships and is not extremely price sensitive. If my Doc charges $50 more than the guy down the street, I will probably still go to him because of trust.
- Barriers to entry - Of course it's still hard to get a doctor's license. But it turns out that many of the services above can be performed by nurse practioners or physican assistants. And, this is not an issue with who is paying, but rather with the nature of the service. Many other specialized-skill markets suffer from this deficiency.
Furthermore, it's not like medical care is the only market that has the aspects you describe. In fact the conditions you describe are true for many specialized professions. For instance the legal market suffers from all the same deficiencies in information, elasticity, and barrier to entry. Same with civil engineering.
However, legal and civil engineering are easily priced and compared and not universally needed. I don't think most people in the US have ever used a lawyer or civil engineer. Why should they? Also, the barrier to entry on a cost level for legal and civil engineers are dramatically different than doctor's. The degree is obtained in far fewer years (think med school and internships) and the equipment to run the practice is minimal.
What many people do is look at the medical system and envision a system that is mostly provided by government, with some private service on top. But that system sucks when it comes to flexibility and innovation. A better system is one that is mostly private markets, with the governement picking up the few at the bottom, who the market does not serve. It works for food and housing and legal care.
Actually, it works fairly well for legal services since they aren't universally required, but works horribly for food and housing. If it worked so well, why do we have a huge number of homeless and hungry people? The traditional answer is mental "health" problems of the people on the streets, but you have backed yourself into a corner with that argument.
Basically, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the Global Positioning System. It does not use the signal from the GPS satellites. It does not use any kind of GPS receiver.
This is an underwater positioning system using acoustic ranging from a prepositioned devices on the sea floor which has an accurate position. The obvious question is how do you get the position of the base station. This could possibly be done with GPS using a sea surface GPS based bouy, but there is no specifics on this.
Remember, GPS is a PASSIVE system. Nothing is sent to the satellite.
I am a firm believer in the ability to break the law of gravity.
I was out surfing and paddled into a wave. When I jumped up to my feet, I missed the sweet spot of the wave and ended up on the breaking part instead (ie. not a good location). To this day I swear the wave dropped out from under me followed by the board while I hung there in midair. Misquoting Douglas Adams, "gravity finally looked my way and wondered what the hell I was doing" and down I went. The couple of people who saw it were sure I was surfing a board made by "Acme".
It was a really bizarre physical sensation I have not been able to adequately explain. (or recreate).
Well, the typical home purchasing decision these days is: "buy the biggest damn house with the biggest lot that will fit my monthly income."
I would argue that having empty rooms no one occupies does not really increase the standard of living. In fact, it decreases it because you have more to clean.
Agreed! very stupid approach.
To add to that, I'm actually comparing to investments such as UDPSX, which uses leveraged investing to give returns closer to 18% than to 10% for something like the S&P. Put that number into the equation, and you almost certainly are better off renting--even with exactly identical properties.
I wish you could count on that. I certainly don't.
For anyone except savvy investors, I would suggest the stability of a home. Most people do not understand the stock market well enough to get the 10% historical return through long term investment.
Over the past 10 years, my ROI from my home's (percentage wise) is 10 times that of my stock market investing. I got lucky since my mortgage company forced me to sell all of my stock holdings on Mar 15, 2000 to get enough liquidity to cover a house purchase. Yep, I sold two days before the stock market crash of 2000 and moved into the property market when it took off.
You have veered outside of investing to lifestyle choice. That is a different thing altogether.
I have friends who spend about as much on maintenance (painting, mowing, sump pumps, insurance, dishwasher, etc.) as I pay in rent. This is NOT overly simplistic (unlike your contribution, which was simplistic way past being wrong). So they lose 100% of that money as I lose 100% of my rent. We are equal so far.
Do you have the equivalent property? ie. Are you renting a 3 bedroom home and comparing your rental expense with the 3 bedrom home your friends own? I am guessing that you are trying to compare the rental of a smaller apartment and the ownership of a house.
Without comparing like size properties in the same neighborhood, it is not worth pretending this is an investment issue. You are paying less for less and using your savings to invest in the stock market. This is a valid approach that has a good return, but it certainly isn't a valid comparison of renting vs. owning of a piece of property.
When you run the numbers on the same property of renting vs. owning, owning wins hands down. Why? because a landlord will build up the rent of the property to cover their cash expenses to stay cash flow neutral and let his assets build while the renter covers his expenses. ie. renting the same home as your friends will cost at least as much as they are paying and you get no tax benefits.
If you are advocating frugal living by renting a small apartment in a less desirable area and investing the savings in the stock market, you will see a good return.
However, when you try to do investment analysis, make sure you know what you are holding constant. This exercise was about the return on an investment of renting vs buying. This assumes you are renting/buying the same property and calculating that return.
After deducting maintenance vs. rent, suppose we each have $2k/month left over. In 30 years, homeowners would have about $2M, while stock investors would have $4.3M. BOOM! It's way better to rent.
Of course, because the property owner decided to spend the money up front to increase their standard of living. This is not an investment decision. It is a lifestyle decision. With like properties, the balance definitely tips toward the owner.
I loved customizing my computers 10-15 years ago. It was fun and the end product was a cool computer. That was the end product.
The end product now is a system of interconnected devices.
Computer, phone, stereo, television, DVR, camera, video, IPod, game system, internet. These are the components of the new system. You would buy slightly different versions of each one to customize your complete system, but you don't worry about customizing each component. You only worry how the component will work with all of your other components.
Apple wins hands down on integrating into this newer interconnected system.
The best thing I ever did in College was buy subscriptions to the lecture notes for my classes that offered them. At UC San Diego, a student who had taken the class before (and got an A) would attend class and take notes. These notes were cleaned up and made available each week. I could take cursory notes of what I thought was important and fill in the rest with the lecture notes from someone who already understood the material.
Unfortunately, some professors did not want the service in their classroom since they thought students would skip class. These were usually the same professors who got upset that the entire class was busy scribbling away writing verbatim notes. I found that the lecture notes were not a replacement for going to class. Often the class time had more participation and discussion that was as important as the notes.
We turned off our electric radiant ceiling heat in our condo after the first months bill. When a couple of drunk, cold friends decided to turn it on one night, we turned it off at the circuit breaker.
The US supported the building of Galileo. The EU specifically chose a frequency to get political concessions from the US in unrelated areas (ie. agriculture). The US has every right to get upset when their defensive systems are held hostage by allied countries as a negotiating ploy.
The more interesting part of the story is the difference in accuracy between GPS and Galileo. By the time Galileo has enough birds in the sky in 2014, GPS will have included L1C ( GPS Modernization ) which will have accuracy on par with the galileo satellites. Having gone to the planning meetings on the L1C project almost 18 months ago, I can tell you that Galileo was a big topic of conversation and that it drove the choice of signal modulation for the new code.
This is really old news and extremely complex. The galileo/GPS compatibility was negotiated between the EU and the US State Department over a very long period. The EU deliberately picked an incompatible code to force concessions from the US before the EU consented and went with the better frequency.
This is a great example of technology driven politics.
I had ditched the class just before the midterm when they announced a change to the room for the test. I showed up at the wrong room at 8:30am and had to wait for the Economics office to open at 9am to get the correct room. Started the test at 9:15.
The test was a total of 20 questions worth 10 points each. I put down partial answers for 8 of the questions over the next 2:15. 10 of the questions I did not understand, at all. Not even a hint of what the hell it was talking about.
I arrive to get my scores and was told that the breakdown of the class was as follows:
A : 35-200 (total of 6 students)
B : 30-34 (total of 10 students)
C : 25-29 (total of 10 students)
D : 20-24 (total of 12 students)
F : 0-19 (total of 75 students, 40 had 0)
I was one of the 40 that got a zero. Changed my major from Economics to computer science that day. One day I'll tell the story of how I got my cognitive science degree:P
GPS is used extensively at Volcanos. In fact, some of my software is used to download the GPS receivers at the Hawaiin Volcano Observatory. However, real time assessment of the deformation is not used as much. Luckily, A volcano is a fairly small area and real time kinematic (RTK) GPS can be used with accurate results. The only requirement is a static GPS site installed outside the area of the deformation zone.
RTK is not a useful in an earthquake region since it requires a site to remain stable and for the other sites to reference it. An earthquake involves such a large area, that your stable reference site will also move and corrupt your solution.
Actually, the GPS units on the ground are used to feed into the seismic streams so that a more accurate assessment of the earthquake can be made. If the seismic instruments tell you 8.0, but a GPS receiver 300km away moved by a certain amount, you can be certain that the location or size is wrong. If you have an accurate deformation field 100's of km away, you can assess the results of the seismic instruments quickly. There is a big difference between an 8.0 and a 9.0 EQ.
Check out SCIGN (Southern California Integrated GPS Network for more information and links.
This is survey grade GPS units which go for about $6k (quite a bit less in quantity). Generally Ashtech MicroZ, Trimble NetRS and others. The Dorne Margolin choke ring antenna we use costs about $3k. It is possible to put together a survey grade site for about $11k. This was done in Southern California years ago at a cost of $20k/site.
A single frequency GPS receiver that you use in a car would be worthless for this application.
Check out the Southern California Integrated GPS Network for an example of highly accurate (sub millimeter) uses of GPS over a large area. The receivers being used in this network are 10 years old and still returning excellent data which we can use to compute annual tectonic plate motion. In 1999, after the Hector mine earthquake, we were able to determine 17cm of slip at a sight 40km away from the epicenter. This was done in a few hours.
I'm not quite 40 yet, but I am approaching it in the next couple of years.
I don't really enjoy coding as much as I used to. I want to go home to my family and friends. I want interpersonal relationships that enhance my life. I don't want to dedicate my life to learning the increasing amount of new technologies. I can accomplish more by making sure the people working for me are coding well and producing good work. I would argue that coding is a dead end job unless you are one of the best. Algorithm development, program design, project management and debugging are much more fun and take more skill than writing code to a spec. Solving complex problems and working in complex personal relationships are rewarding and fun. They don't allow time for the attention necessary for good coding. However, you can't be really good at these roles without a coding background
As you get more experience, you are called on to do more and more things and have less time to devote to coding. Also, I have found that I enjoy it less and less. I like working with people and tackling problems that are more complex and involve human interaction. I haven't found a good reason to keep my skills perfectly up to date, since I can accomplish more work by making a good design and saving other people's time.
Also, I want to work on my own projects, not the coding assignment that somebody else hands me.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn...
I was in such a rush to show off my superior skills that I didn't proofread.
I'll do better next time (yeah, right).
--Keith
$ ls -l
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 700560 2007-04-11 09:32
$ ln
$ ls -l foo
-rwxr-xr-x 2 root root 700560 2007-04-11 09:32 foo
Uhhh, why is a regular user allowed to create a file owned by root? Apparently, you don't know what a hard link is.
You haven't created a file owned by root. You've created an i-node pointing to the data blocks of a file owned by root.
If root were to rm
Your way, I could do the following on a file with 600 permission:
cd
ln
chmod 666 mine
cat mine
Nice and easy way to get around a 600 permission.
The behavior is correct, not a bug.
Regards,
--Keith
The solution is to directly connect the consumers to their care financially as much as possible. Substituting the government for the insurance companies will do nothing to solve this basic failure.
If the government were to take over management for our _current_ insurance structure, we would have an ungodly mess on our hands. If we tie the consumer directly to their health care, we would also have an ungodly mess on our hands. Either way, the government ends up picking up the tab. We need a comprehensive reform that addresses the entire medical industry. A free market does not do that.
What is needed is pressure to drive the efficiencies up and the prices down. Regulation can provide pressure, but it is inflexible--requires legislation, rule-making, and often court cases. Market competition is a more flexible and powerful way.
The greatest efficiency that we can achieve is a system of preventative care that prevents higher cost treatment later.
How does a market driven health care solve this problem? The short answer is "It doesn't". People don't buy things they think they don't need. The lower middle class and low income people will not shop around for an annual physical. They will rely on the same method they have now: Go to the emergency room for my current illness and let the government pick up the tab.
One certainty of a free market is that anything that permanently upsets the balance of supply and demand will cause the market to go completely out of whack. Having the government gaurantee the payment of a large group of people violates this principle free market. However, you can't have it any other way. The emergency rooms and hospitals must have a gaurantee of payment or they will not operate. Denying medical treatment based on ability to pay would have drastic effects on the rest of our economy because of huge productivity drops as more people are sick.
To increase efficiences in a market, you must have either a drop in demand or an increase in supply so that the market corrects itself. The current medical market has an extremely static demand that is not price sensitive. There is not an increase in supply coming anytime soon since the supply/demand ratio for doctors is screwed up because of dropping doctor salaries. If you want to increase efficiency, it needs to be done on the demand side. The only way to reduce the demand is through preventative care. The free market methodology will not work in increasing preventative care. It would likely cause a drop in demand for private doctors and an increase in demand on the government run emergency rooms and hospitals as more of the middle class runs to the government for support.
--Keith
- Information - There is no shortage of information available on proper proactive care and the most common illnesses and conditions, as well as their most common and effective treatments. Patients are awash in information today.
However, it is almost impossible to shop around for the best price. We don't know the actual cost of treatment and it is impossible to tell what the cost is going to be upfront. A basic physical at one office may not include the same bloodwork as another office. You can't compare services to get accurate price comparisons.
- Elasticity - The numbers of people who get sick are not dependent on market forces, but where they go is. If people had to pay for their own strep treatment, don't you think they'd drive an extra 15 minutes to the next clinic to save $50? If it's not a life-threatening emergency--and most medical visits are not--then there is elasticity.
This goes back to the information problem. You can't call a doctor's office and ask for a quote on Strep throat treatment. Which antibiotic should I use? Don't know, since I may be alergic to some and not know what is available. Is the doctor going to continue to treat me under the original quote if I have an antibiotic resistant strain? Medicine is too difficult to quote correctly so the information and elasticity argument fall apart. It is the exact reason we have health insurance. We need to smooth out the costs and we do so through shared cost in health insurance.
The second problem with elasticity is the desire to deal with a single doctor regardless of price. This is a business built on relationships and is not extremely price sensitive. If my Doc charges $50 more than the guy down the street, I will probably still go to him because of trust.
- Barriers to entry - Of course it's still hard to get a doctor's license. But it turns out that many of the services above can be performed by nurse practioners or physican assistants. And, this is not an issue with who is paying, but rather with the nature of the service. Many other specialized-skill markets suffer from this deficiency.
Furthermore, it's not like medical care is the only market that has the aspects you describe. In fact the conditions you describe are true for many specialized professions. For instance the legal market suffers from all the same deficiencies in information, elasticity, and barrier to entry. Same with civil engineering.
However, legal and civil engineering are easily priced and compared and not universally needed. I don't think most people in the US have ever used a lawyer or civil engineer. Why should they? Also, the barrier to entry on a cost level for legal and civil engineers are dramatically different than doctor's. The degree is obtained in far fewer years (think med school and internships) and the equipment to run the practice is minimal.
What many people do is look at the medical system and envision a system that is mostly provided by government, with some private service on top. But that system sucks when it comes to flexibility and innovation. A better system is one that is mostly private markets, with the governement picking up the few at the bottom, who the market does not serve. It works for food and housing and legal care.
Actually, it works fairly well for legal services since they aren't universally required, but works horribly for food and housing. If it worked so well, why do we have a huge number of homeless and hungry people? The traditional answer is mental "health" problems of the people on the streets, but you have backed yourself into a corner with that argument.
--Keith
Basically, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the Global Positioning System. It does not use the signal from the GPS satellites. It does not use any kind of GPS receiver.
This is an underwater positioning system using acoustic ranging from a prepositioned devices on the sea floor which has an accurate position. The obvious question is how do you get the position of the base station. This could possibly be done with GPS using a sea surface GPS based bouy, but there is no specifics on this.
Remember, GPS is a PASSIVE system. Nothing is sent to the satellite.
--keith
Oh no! why did I post this on a geek forum. Everyone is trying to offer scientific explanations that could shatter my entire set of beliefs.
:)
No! I will continue to believe that I am impervious to the "theory" of gravity despite your attempts to use science. It's only a theory anyway.
--Keith
I am a firm believer in the ability to break the law of gravity.
I was out surfing and paddled into a wave. When I jumped up to my feet, I missed the sweet spot of the wave and ended up on the breaking part instead (ie. not a good location). To this day I swear the wave dropped out from under me followed by the board while I hung there in midair. Misquoting Douglas Adams, "gravity finally looked my way and wondered what the hell I was doing" and down I went. The couple of people who saw it were sure I was surfing a board made by "Acme".
It was a really bizarre physical sensation I have not been able to adequately explain. (or recreate).
--Keith
Well, the typical home purchasing decision these days is: "buy the biggest damn house with the biggest lot that will fit my monthly income."
I would argue that having empty rooms no one occupies does not really increase the standard of living. In fact, it decreases it because you have more to clean.
Agreed! very stupid approach.
To add to that, I'm actually comparing to investments such as UDPSX, which uses leveraged investing to give returns closer to 18% than to 10% for something like the S&P. Put that number into the equation, and you almost certainly are better off renting--even with exactly identical properties.
I wish you could count on that. I certainly don't.
For anyone except savvy investors, I would suggest the stability of a home. Most people do not understand the stock market well enough to get the 10% historical return through long term investment.
Over the past 10 years, my ROI from my home's (percentage wise) is 10 times that of my stock market investing. I got lucky since my mortgage company forced me to sell all of my stock holdings on Mar 15, 2000 to get enough liquidity to cover a house purchase. Yep, I sold two days before the stock market crash of 2000 and moved into the property market when it took off.
Luck is even better than savvy investing.
--Keith
Investing 102 for you:
You have veered outside of investing to lifestyle choice. That is a different thing altogether.
I have friends who spend about as much on maintenance (painting, mowing, sump pumps, insurance, dishwasher, etc.) as I pay in rent. This is NOT overly simplistic (unlike your contribution, which was simplistic way past being wrong). So they lose 100% of that money as I lose 100% of my rent. We are equal so far.
Do you have the equivalent property? ie. Are you renting a 3 bedroom home and comparing your rental expense with the 3 bedrom home your friends own? I am guessing that you are trying to compare the rental of a smaller apartment and the ownership of a house.
Without comparing like size properties in the same neighborhood, it is not worth pretending this is an investment issue. You are paying less for less and using your savings to invest in the stock market. This is a valid approach that has a good return, but it certainly isn't a valid comparison of renting vs. owning of a piece of property.
When you run the numbers on the same property of renting vs. owning, owning wins hands down. Why? because a landlord will build up the rent of the property to cover their cash expenses to stay cash flow neutral and let his assets build while the renter covers his expenses. ie. renting the same home as your friends will cost at least as much as they are paying and you get no tax benefits.
If you are advocating frugal living by renting a small apartment in a less desirable area and investing the savings in the stock market, you will see a good return.
However, when you try to do investment analysis, make sure you know what you are holding constant. This exercise was about the return on an investment of renting vs buying. This assumes you are renting/buying the same property and calculating that return.
After deducting maintenance vs. rent, suppose we each have $2k/month left over. In 30 years, homeowners would have about $2M, while stock investors would have $4.3M. BOOM! It's way better to rent.
Of course, because the property owner decided to spend the money up front to increase their standard of living. This is not an investment decision. It is a lifestyle decision. With like properties, the balance definitely tips toward the owner.
--Keith
And while the stock market appreciates on average 10%/year, the real estate market is only 6%/year. Equity in real estate is wasted money.
Umm.. Investing 101 for you:
Invest $120,000 as 50% down in a $240,000 margin account: $24,000/year increase in assets.
Invest $120,000 as 20% down in a $600,000 house at 6%: $36,000/year increase in assets.
Even if you pay $1,000 extra/month in mortgage + upkeep in your home vs cost of renting, you still have an increase of $24,000/year.
Also, the risk of buying property is significantly less than the risk of owning stock.
I know this is overly simplistic and doesn't take into account tax breaks for the mortgage.
--Keith
A story about Microsoft calling a truce with the GPL followed by the RIAA saying P2P is not a problem.
/. has been hacked and someone is posting bogus stories.
It's not April 1st.
Hmmm... Only logical explanation is that
--Keith
I loved customizing my computers 10-15 years ago. It was fun and the end product was a cool computer. That was the end product.
The end product now is a system of interconnected devices.
Computer, phone, stereo, television, DVR, camera, video, IPod, game system, internet. These are the components of the new system. You would buy slightly different versions of each one to customize your complete system, but you don't worry about customizing each component. You only worry how the component will work with all of your other components.
Apple wins hands down on integrating into this newer interconnected system.
--Keith
The best thing I ever did in College was buy subscriptions to the lecture notes for my classes that offered them. At UC San Diego, a student who had taken the class before (and got an A) would attend class and take notes. These notes were cleaned up and made available each week. I could take cursory notes of what I thought was important and fill in the rest with the lecture notes from someone who already understood the material.
Unfortunately, some professors did not want the service in their classroom since they thought students would skip class. These were usually the same professors who got upset that the entire class was busy scribbling away writing verbatim notes. I found that the lecture notes were not a replacement for going to class. Often the class time had more participation and discussion that was as important as the notes.
--Keith
Agreed,
We turned off our electric radiant ceiling heat in our condo after the first months bill. When a couple of drunk, cold friends decided to turn it on one night, we turned it off at the circuit breaker.
--Keith
The US supported the building of Galileo. The EU specifically chose a frequency to get political concessions from the US in unrelated areas (ie. agriculture). The US has every right to get upset when their defensive systems are held hostage by allied countries as a negotiating ploy.
--Keith
L1C Short Report
--Keith
This is really old news and extremely complex. The galileo/GPS compatibility was negotiated between the EU and the US State Department over a very long period. The EU deliberately picked an incompatible code to force concessions from the US before the EU consented and went with the better frequency.
This is a great example of technology driven politics.
--Keith
The test was a total of 20 questions worth 10 points each. I put down partial answers for 8 of the questions over the next 2:15. 10 of the questions I did not understand, at all. Not even a hint of what the hell it was talking about.
I arrive to get my scores and was told that the breakdown of the class was as follows:
I was one of the 40 that got a zero. Changed my major from Economics to computer science that day. One day I'll tell the story of how I got my cognitive science degree
--Keith
The postprocessing software is GAMIT (GPS at MIT)
--Keith
Hmmm... Give me a call, we can work $omething out ;-)
--Keith
RTK is not a useful in an earthquake region since it requires a site to remain stable and for the other sites to reference it. An earthquake involves such a large area, that your stable reference site will also move and corrupt your solution.
--Keith
Check out SCIGN (Southern California Integrated GPS Network for more information and links.
--Keith
--Keith
Check out the Southern California Integrated GPS Network for an example of highly accurate (sub millimeter) uses of GPS over a large area. The receivers being used in this network are 10 years old and still returning excellent data which we can use to compute annual tectonic plate motion. In 1999, after the Hector mine earthquake, we were able to determine 17cm of slip at a sight 40km away from the epicenter. This was done in a few hours.
Also, take a look at the Plate Boundary Observatory which is being built now.
--Keith
I don't really enjoy coding as much as I used to. I want to go home to my family and friends. I want interpersonal relationships that enhance my life. I don't want to dedicate my life to learning the increasing amount of new technologies. I can accomplish more by making sure the people working for me are coding well and producing good work. I would argue that coding is a dead end job unless you are one of the best. Algorithm development, program design, project management and debugging are much more fun and take more skill than writing code to a spec. Solving complex problems and working in complex personal relationships are rewarding and fun. They don't allow time for the attention necessary for good coding. However, you can't be really good at these roles without a coding background
As you get more experience, you are called on to do more and more things and have less time to devote to coding. Also, I have found that I enjoy it less and less. I like working with people and tackling problems that are more complex and involve human interaction. I haven't found a good reason to keep my skills perfectly up to date, since I can accomplish more work by making a good design and saving other people's time.
Also, I want to work on my own projects, not the coding assignment that somebody else hands me.
--Keith