As to the FDA, they are heavily involved in the development and oversight of the testing methods and criteria.
Of course. They are just not involved in sharing the cost. Saying that taxpayers pay for clinical trials because the FDA is "involved" in them is what's "bullshit".
It is not testing (and that could be handled entirely by the FDA, without their involvement at all. A lot of it already is. Big Pharma does not pay for the FDA. You and I do.)
That, my friend, is pure bullshit. The FDA does not do any testing, their purpose is to monitor the testing that the evil pharma companies do. And yes, those pharma companies spend a formidable amount of money on advertising, but it's not more than testing and development.
Fund the universities well to develop the drugs.
Universities are good at research, they are not good at developing drugs. They are already well funded and fully dedicated to research that is (for the most part) not commercially motivated; and most people who work there are very much into the whole "make the world a better place" mentality. Notice how ready-to-pop pills aren't really pouring out of those places?
Have the FDA entirely in charge of testing
Ah yes, because having a government agency in charge will eliminate all inefficiency and any hint of impropriety.
show empirically through tests that it's effective and reasonably safe
The FDA would hurt itself laughing if you came to them with that. It doesn't matter if it's the most effective treatment you've ever seen - if you don't have a mechanism of action, you don't have anything.
As hard as it is to believe, only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies, or the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
That's true, but entirely misleading. The cost of bringing these drugs to market absolutely dwarfs the cost of the research they were "based on". The total cost of getting a major drug to market is nearing $1 billion; I don't have a handy break-down of the various stages of the process, but I know that the average burn rate for a pure-research biotech of 50-75 people will be about $10-12 million a year. So, if after 5-7 years, having already done all the "innovative" work, such a company hands off a promising target or compound to big pharma, they haven't really put that big of a dent into the total cost of the drug. Not to mention that a large portion of such research is still financed by big pharma through various licensing deals (example/disclaimer: where I work, not a few salaries are currently being paid by none other than Merck).
The sad truth is that this is what it takes to fund medical research - developing a drug is a long, ridiculously expensive, and ridiculously risky process (from what I remember, less than 5% of all initiated drug programs make it to market; and that's actual drug programs, which is pretty far along from a research perspective). Without phenomenal payoffs there would not be any incentive to do it.
But everybody loves pure, unadulterated capitalism, right?
(btw, I have no problem with what the Brazilian government is doing here)
I think it is time that the copyrights from 1920 or so expire for the enjoyment of all.
Yeah, not bloody likely. Disney is the reason no copyright will ever expire again. Since they have "property" that would expire once the latest copyright extension they purchased rolls around, they have no choice but to purchase another one.
And why should these things expire? Since it's your "intellectual property", shouldn't it be yours forever? And when "you" are a company, "forever" can actually mean forever.
Wow, I know interview questions can be annoying, but you were being kind of a dick about it. I mean, it would've taken about 2 seconds to just tell the guy what he wanted to hear.
BTW - the second question there was a bit meaningless - how can you 'sort a 100MB file'?
I think that was the whole point of these questions - get the general gist without getting bogged down in the details. In this case the reasonable assumption is that the files contains some kind of comparable records (what's most likely to happen in the real world), and the size is much larger than your RAM, so you know you have to go to disk, so you know it's some variant of radix sort.
There's a cool way I can think of that would sort up to 10 million 7 digit numbers in 2MB RAM - but it would need 12MB to sort any number of 8 digit numbers - and this would rely on the numbers being unique, which isn't specified
He said you only need to sort a million 8 digit numbers, so you are good. I would've said a trie, but really, a number of different trees would do the job; the possibility that they are non-unique didn't occur to me, but you could always tack on a leaf that stores the number of occurrences.
If only it was 40,000,000 numbers and 6MB RAM - then it'd be count sort; but it's never count sort...
I wonder what they were getting at with the requirement that you can't send any data until you are done sorting - seems kind of implicit in the whole "sort the numbers" requirement.
Needless to say, the interview didn't go very well and ended with him saying "Well.. I've heard enough. Buh-bye."
I actually don't see why it's "needless to say" how it went from there - did you just find the questions too wanky? (but then, I hear lots of large companies rely on even wankier questions).
The first one is annoyingly vague (what the hell does "effective" even mean in this context?), but the second two are straight out of the second chapter of any algorithms book (ie "Sorting"); from the "virtually never used" section.
Is this really all they asked you, or is that just how far the interview went?
You mean there are still people who don't work at Google?
From the sheer number of articles about or relating to the Google hiring process and corporate culture I just assumed that they would have hired the entire qualified workforce by now.
(though they do have some really nice sounding quality of life type perks...)
I do most of my work in Perl, and the lack of a good chart package has been annoying for a very long time. GD::Graph will give you very basic (and not terribly ugly) line and bar charts relatively quickly, but that's about it; it's missing even rudimentary features that make it less than useful (eg error bars).
There just isn't a general purpose charting package for Perl that would even come close to JFreeChart. Grace can produce some nice results, but the Perl interface to it is just a wrapper around their terrible command line interface (maybe it's improved in the last few years, but when I tried it it was almost entirely undocumented and nigh-unusable).
So, if you want publication quality charts you basically still have to learn gnuplot, which is great, but sometimes just a little too involved.
At least this thread gives a nice summary of what the other languages have to offer: the PHP and Ruby packages aren't faring any better, but Python's matplotlib looks freaking beautiful.
If years of watching sci-fi TV shows has taught me anything, it's a that a wormhole is a convenient plot device able to accomplish absolutely anything. They are rather like the deflector array polarity in that way.
Clearly these guys are drawing on the same source material in their "science".
It is just people that confuse things by thinking their "observations" are important and moving QM into the realm of "if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound".
Very true. Even more unfortunately, too often those people are the ones proposing the various QM interpretations in the first place:)
The distinction between a 'theory' and its 'interpretation' is not that clear.
I was using "theory" in the sense that F = G (m1m2) / r^2 is the theory of gravity, and this is a major part of the theory of QM. And, apparently, Newton didn't offer a philosophical "interpretation" for gravity*, while for QM we have "infinite number of worlds with consistently inconsistent histories entangling while moving backwards in time, located everywhere at once and communicating instantly", or whatever your favorite is:)
I am not saying that that part isn't important - Newton's theory was superseded by one rooted in such a theoretical/philosophical concept ("curved spacetime"), after all. Just saying that these theoretical models only become useful when they start making testable predictions.
* Came across this great quote from him in Wikipedia:
I have not yet been able to discover the cause of these properties of gravity from phenomena and I feign no hypotheses... It is enough that gravity does really exist and acts according to the laws I have explained, and that it abundantly serves to account for all the motions of celestial bodies. That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.
And general relativity takes a similar position, it describes how matter/energy curves spacetime, but makes no attempts to explain why that would happen.
To put it another way - I agree with what you said.
Quantum mechanics is an actual scientific theory based on empirical evidence, it's the interpretation of it that quickly gets into the whole area of "philosophy, but with complex equations". And yes, a lot of it will turn out to be a bunch of hooey, but that's the nature of theoretical research. It would help if the people studying it didn't make grand pronouncements about the nature of existence every five minutes, but I guess that's why they wanted to be in that particular field to begin with.
Note that when biodiversity goes down in a species, that's not good, biologically speaking. Less diversity means less chance of a species being able to survive a catastrophic event.
Eh? TFA is talking about the overall biodiversity of the Earth - ie the total number of species.
Take it for what you want, but all those people laughing about having to wait 64 million years, my point is, I don't necessarily think you have to wait all that long.
Yeah, could be as little as 2-3 million years. The point is, it really doesn't make much sense to worry about things that are measured on the geologic scale. The PT extinction took 5 million years - it's not like they all just dropped dead at some point.
Slashdot Mirror
As to the FDA, they are heavily involved in the development and oversight of the testing methods and criteria.
Of course. They are just not involved in sharing the cost. Saying that taxpayers pay for clinical trials because the FDA is "involved" in them is what's "bullshit".
It is not testing (and that could be handled entirely by the FDA, without their involvement at all. A lot of it already is. Big Pharma does not pay for the FDA. You and I do.)
That, my friend, is pure bullshit. The FDA does not do any testing, their purpose is to monitor the testing that the evil pharma companies do. And yes, those pharma companies spend a formidable amount of money on advertising, but it's not more than testing and development.
Fund the universities well to develop the drugs.
Universities are good at research, they are not good at developing drugs. They are already well funded and fully dedicated to research that is (for the most part) not commercially motivated; and most people who work there are very much into the whole "make the world a better place" mentality. Notice how ready-to-pop pills aren't really pouring out of those places?
Have the FDA entirely in charge of testing
Ah yes, because having a government agency in charge will eliminate all inefficiency and any hint of impropriety.
show empirically through tests that it's effective and reasonably safe
The FDA would hurt itself laughing if you came to them with that. It doesn't matter if it's the most effective treatment you've ever seen - if you don't have a mechanism of action, you don't have anything.
As hard as it is to believe, only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies, or the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
That's true, but entirely misleading. The cost of bringing these drugs to market absolutely dwarfs the cost of the research they were "based on". The total cost of getting a major drug to market is nearing $1 billion; I don't have a handy break-down of the various stages of the process, but I know that the average burn rate for a pure-research biotech of 50-75 people will be about $10-12 million a year. So, if after 5-7 years, having already done all the "innovative" work, such a company hands off a promising target or compound to big pharma, they haven't really put that big of a dent into the total cost of the drug. Not to mention that a large portion of such research is still financed by big pharma through various licensing deals (example/disclaimer: where I work, not a few salaries are currently being paid by none other than Merck).
The sad truth is that this is what it takes to fund medical research - developing a drug is a long, ridiculously expensive, and ridiculously risky process (from what I remember, less than 5% of all initiated drug programs make it to market; and that's actual drug programs, which is pretty far along from a research perspective). Without phenomenal payoffs there would not be any incentive to do it.
But everybody loves pure, unadulterated capitalism, right?
(btw, I have no problem with what the Brazilian government is doing here)
I read that as "Creating a Hebrew Industrial Process Monitor?"
Really wouldn't know where to begin with that one.
For day to day management use a dragon.
If a whole dragon seems overkill, remember that hypercontiguating two minus-dragons produces 0.6 dragon.
Everything about Second Life is ridiculous.
Slight correction.
I think it is time that the copyrights from 1920 or so expire for the enjoyment of all.
Yeah, not bloody likely. Disney is the reason no copyright will ever expire again. Since they have "property" that would expire once the latest copyright extension they purchased rolls around, they have no choice but to purchase another one.
And why should these things expire? Since it's your "intellectual property", shouldn't it be yours forever? And when "you" are a company, "forever" can actually mean forever.
Wow, I know interview questions can be annoying, but you were being kind of a dick about it. I mean, it would've taken about 2 seconds to just tell the guy what he wanted to hear.
BTW - the second question there was a bit meaningless - how can you 'sort a 100MB file'?
I think that was the whole point of these questions - get the general gist without getting bogged down in the details. In this case the reasonable assumption is that the files contains some kind of comparable records (what's most likely to happen in the real world), and the size is much larger than your RAM, so you know you have to go to disk, so you know it's some variant of radix sort.
There's a cool way I can think of that would sort up to 10 million 7 digit numbers in 2MB RAM - but it would need 12MB to sort any number of 8 digit numbers - and this would rely on the numbers being unique, which isn't specified
He said you only need to sort a million 8 digit numbers, so you are good. I would've said a trie, but really, a number of different trees would do the job; the possibility that they are non-unique didn't occur to me, but you could always tack on a leaf that stores the number of occurrences.
Third question: Binary weighted tree in memory.
If only it was 40,000,000 numbers and 6MB RAM - then it'd be count sort; but it's never count sort...
I wonder what they were getting at with the requirement that you can't send any data until you are done sorting - seems kind of implicit in the whole "sort the numbers" requirement.
Needless to say, the interview didn't go very well and ended with him saying "Well.. I've heard enough. Buh-bye."
I actually don't see why it's "needless to say" how it went from there - did you just find the questions too wanky? (but then, I hear lots of large companies rely on even wankier questions).
The first one is annoyingly vague (what the hell does "effective" even mean in this context?), but the second two are straight out of the second chapter of any algorithms book (ie "Sorting"); from the "virtually never used" section.
Is this really all they asked you, or is that just how far the interview went?
You mean there are still people who don't work at Google?
From the sheer number of articles about or relating to the Google hiring process and corporate culture I just assumed that they would have hired the entire qualified workforce by now.
(though they do have some really nice sounding quality of life type perks...)
Dude, you find the oddest shit to be all superior about.
I do most of my work in Perl, and the lack of a good chart package has been annoying for a very long time. GD::Graph will give you very basic (and not terribly ugly) line and bar charts relatively quickly, but that's about it; it's missing even rudimentary features that make it less than useful (eg error bars).
There just isn't a general purpose charting package for Perl that would even come close to JFreeChart. Grace can produce some nice results, but the Perl interface to it is just a wrapper around their terrible command line interface (maybe it's improved in the last few years, but when I tried it it was almost entirely undocumented and nigh-unusable).
So, if you want publication quality charts you basically still have to learn gnuplot, which is great, but sometimes just a little too involved.
At least this thread gives a nice summary of what the other languages have to offer: the PHP and Ruby packages aren't faring any better, but Python's matplotlib looks freaking beautiful.
It's a 75% increase, but when you buy the thing, the "tax" is ~43% of the cost.
In that theory, all of space is filled with matter, and space itself expands, carrying the matter with it. There is no "edge".
Hang on, I thought it was matter/energy that carried space(-time) with it, not the other way around?
If years of watching sci-fi TV shows has taught me anything, it's a that a wormhole is a convenient plot device able to accomplish absolutely anything. They are rather like the deflector array polarity in that way.
Clearly these guys are drawing on the same source material in their "science".
Did they fix that thing where it always sacrifices data integrity for speed?
(I'm not even trolling, I do want to know if they fixed that)
It is just people that confuse things by thinking their "observations" are important and moving QM into the realm of "if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound".
:)
Very true. Even more unfortunately, too often those people are the ones proposing the various QM interpretations in the first place
I think it's mostly because the backronym is contrived and silly.
I was using "theory" in the sense that F = G (m1m2) / r^2 is the theory of gravity, and this is a major part of the theory of QM. And, apparently, Newton didn't offer a philosophical "interpretation" for gravity*, while for QM we have "infinite number of worlds with consistently inconsistent histories entangling while moving backwards in time, located everywhere at once and communicating instantly", or whatever your favorite is
I am not saying that that part isn't important - Newton's theory was superseded by one rooted in such a theoretical/philosophical concept ("curved spacetime"), after all. Just saying that these theoretical models only become useful when they start making testable predictions.
* Came across this great quote from him in Wikipedia: And general relativity takes a similar position, it describes how matter/energy curves spacetime, but makes no attempts to explain why that would happen.
To put it another way - I agree with what you said.
Quantum mechanics is an actual scientific theory based on empirical evidence, it's the interpretation of it that quickly gets into the whole area of "philosophy, but with complex equations". And yes, a lot of it will turn out to be a bunch of hooey, but that's the nature of theoretical research. It would help if the people studying it didn't make grand pronouncements about the nature of existence every five minutes, but I guess that's why they wanted to be in that particular field to begin with.
Note that when biodiversity goes down in a species, that's not good, biologically speaking. Less diversity means less chance of a species being able to survive a catastrophic event.
Eh? TFA is talking about the overall biodiversity of the Earth - ie the total number of species.
Take it for what you want, but all those people laughing about having to wait 64 million years, my point is, I don't necessarily think you have to wait all that long.
Yeah, could be as little as 2-3 million years. The point is, it really doesn't make much sense to worry about things that are measured on the geologic scale. The PT extinction took 5 million years - it's not like they all just dropped dead at some point.
If background radiation rose, organisms would simply evolve more robust DNA repair mechanisms.
Hmm... thereby decreasing the amount of mutation, leading to less biodiversity... wait, which side are you arguing?
(for the record, I think TFA is a bunch of hooey)