I suppose it depends on what you include. NASA is still a pretty strong first, with the European Space Agency in second, when it comes to scientific research in space, e.g. sending probes to other planets, the Hubble space telescope, etc.
Considering it's got cadmium selenide, the current version is pretty toxic [pdf]. I assume the blurb is just trying to find a catchy way of saying that the actual preparation process is not difficult.
In case you're wondering, the current person filling the post is Ron Kirk, appointed by Obama in 2009. Though it doesn't seem that USTR policy differs much under Republican versus Democratic administrations; sadly this one isn't a partisan issue because both parties are generally on the wrong side.
Interesting bit about the solar system and chaos. As far as open-access papers, this seems like an interesting overview, though it's about a decade old now.
That'd be an interesting refinement, attempting to get numbers for typical data loaded after caching. Would be hard to come up with a "typical" user profile to use at various times in history for comparison, though.
To me it's sort of the opposite for the same reason: the amount of personal time I save in not being able to access email, corporate systems, etc. whilst on the move means that I'd pay extra for a non-smart phone...
I believe it's structured as a commission-type deal, where they get a percentage of the AdWords revenue from ad-clicks on searches sent to Google by Firefox, which is a vaguely royalty-type arrangement.
Answering my own question, it looks like it does more or less come out in the reports. Here [pdf] is their financial report for 2009-2010. It reports that they earned "royalties" of $101 million in 2009 and $121 million in 2010, and they explain their royalties as follows:
The Corporation has a contract with a search engine provider for royalties which expires November 2011. Approximately 84% and 86% of royalty revenue for 2010 and 2009, respectively, was derived from this contract.
So that seems to imply that "a search engine provider" paid them around $87 million in 2009, and $102 million in 2010. Of course, the current deal may be substantially higher or lower, but that's probably a ballpark figure. Somehow considerably higher than I expected, but now that I look it seems Mozilla has >600 employees, which is also many more than I expected.
As a non-profit organization, don't these things eventually have to show up in Mozilla's annual filings? Or are they somehow aggregated together in an opaque way by the subsidiary relationship of the Mozilla Foundation vs. the Mozilla Corporation?
Oddly enough, that's what Technical Institutes were intended to be, which is why they have a different name than University, which was more the classic lectures+reading style of education. A.N. Whitehead, better known for his philosophy but also somewhat of an educational theorist, was a big fan of that style of early-20th-century education.
Schools like MIT, Georgia Tech, and even the rather evocatively named Colorado School of Mines have more or less converged to a university model of education, though, I'd guess partly because disciplines got more and more complex to the point where there was significant theory (e.g. engineering today is more about mathematics and less about hands-on work with steel than it was in 1910), and partly for prestige reasons.
In a general sense of an educated society I agree, but I do think these kinds of courses will pose a significant challenge for CS programs outside the top 10. I don't think MIT and Stanford's online course offerings will be purely supplemental education taken in addition to a 4-year CS degree or by people who wouldn't have gotten one anyway, though there will also be some of that. I think they'll to some extent also displace some proportion of traditional CS education. Probably not a lot at first, but to the extent anything makes it easier to get a good tech job via a route other than a traditional 4-year CS degree, which is already possible but not super-easy, I think it may reduce enrollments in 4-year CS programs, especially outside the very top schools.
Put differently, just in supply-and-demand terms, MIT and Stanford professors can now each fulfill a much larger portion of the demand for CS lectures, since they can lecture to students outside their classrooms. Unless the new audiences are 100% new audiences (i.e. they bring new demand for CS lectures in a 1:1 ratio to the demand-for-lectures that they fulfill), it'll reduce demand for lectures from non-MIT/Stanford professors.
I'd guess it's going to be somewhat in between "MIT Certification" and "Internet-U Certification". They're trying to walk a line of ensuring that the regular MIT degree programs are differentiated, while still leveraging the MIT name to distinguish the online course from just any random online course.
Since my day job is CS professor, these kinds of things aren't in my personal interest (unless I land a tenured job at MIT, which is unlikely:P), but I think they have considerable merit. CS, compared to other fields, is already a little bit ambivalent about degrees, and you can get some kinds of jobs by having alternate demonstrations of knowledge, like your Github "resume", or track record of participation in open-source projects. But a lot of companies worry that without a degree you'll lack some theoretical knowledge that will eventually bite you in the ass, because you didn't realize that something was a well-studied problem with an off-the-shelf solution you could've pulled out of one of Knuth's books and implemented, instead of rolling your own buggier, worse one (sometimes this is a founded fear, other times not).
But the bar in many cases is not that high. Even when I've looked for people to work with on, say, a machine-learning project, what I want to know is that they're familiar with the basics of statistics, common techniques and gotchas, correct and incorrect methods of data analysis, etc. This is more likely if they have a degree with some statistics and/or ML courses, but I could see a certificate from a respected course of online instruction being enough to convince me of that, if they keep standards up and it's not easy to cheat.
On the learner's side, it's a really interesting space of possibilities for mixing-and-matching your own education. Since these certificates seem to be much finer granularity than degree programs, if they proliferate and maintain quality, you could more realistically do interdisciplinary programs of study while still being able to prove that you mastered specific things.
Oh I think that's definitely true; there's a reason why, with a lot of scientific breakthroughs, you can find multiple teams within weeks of each other to get the result (e.g. look at the competition to get the first laser working), because it's more a matter of putting everything together, not a bolt-from-the-blue genius.
We'll have to wait to see how it works, but I'm not sure even non-geeks always find "realistic" computers more natural to interact with than computer-ish computers. People are perfectly capable of anthropomorphizing non-human entities if they act in some consistent way, even if they don't exactly mimic human behavior. In fact it's often better to act in a clearly non-human way than to hit the uncanny-valley of sort-of-human.
We're talking about general science training here, not medical school. There are plenty of biology jobs that don't involve cutting up cadavers, so there's no pressing need to "weed out the squeamish". Someone working on bioinformatics is probably better served by early familiarity with computer modeling.
I'm not sure what scientific community you're working in, but he's pretty widely respected in the one I work in. The "working on the shoulders of giants" thing, on the other hand, is pretty widely rejected as overly simplistic, especially given some pretty significant once-respectable dead-ends like phrenology.
With something like chemistry, unlike say mathematics or some parts of computer science that can be done independently, in the present day to make real advances you need a lab, and who has a lab is closely tied in with things like academic promotion. I don't have a link to statistics handy, but I recall reading that the average age at which people become professors in the sciences has increased drastically, as the PhD has gotten longer (from an average of 4 to 6-7 years), and even after that, people now typically do multiple postdocs before becoming professors. So you may not even be settled into your own lab, free to pursue you own research agenda, until late 30s or early 40s. That would tend to mean that most advances come from people >40 independently of mental acuity, because they run all the labs!
Now you might say, you can still do groundbreaking work as a grad student or postdoc, and this does happen, but the credit usually goes to the senior scientist, not the grad student or postdoc in the lab doing the synthesis. So in practice it's very difficult to win a Nobel Prize without first becoming a principal investigator with your own lab, because you won't really get the credit for it even if you do do something groundbreaking.
I'd be interested in seeing a version of this study adjusted for academic position. Are tenured faculty over 40 more productive than the few tenured faculty who are in their 30s? Or are we comparing 45-year-old tenured principal investigators with 35-year-old postdocs? My hypothesis is that the older-scientists-are-productive effect is mainly due to older scientists having more senior academic positions.
And here's their predictions from the end of 2007, which have one year left to come true:
It will be easy for you to be green and save money doing it
Arguably yes in some cases, but not for any of the "smart grid" reasons the explanatory text talks about.
The way you drive will be completely different... The cities you live in will find a cure for congestion using intelligent traffic systems that can make real-time adjustments to traffic lights and divert traffic to alternate routes with ease.
Nope.
You are what you eat, so you will know what you eat... Advancements in computer software and wireless radio sensor technologies will give you access to much more detailed information about the food you are buying and eating. You will know everything from the climate and soil the food was grown in, to the pesticides and pollution it was exposed to, to the energy consumed to create the product, to the temperature and air quality of the shipping containers it traveled through
Sounds cool, but nope. All I know about my imported fruit is the "grown in Chile" sticker.
Your cell phone will be your wallet, your ticket broker, your concierge, your bank, your shopping buddy, and more
Arguably coming close.
Doctors will get enhanced “super-senses” to better diagnose and treat you... An avatar – a 3D representation of your body – will allow doctors to visualize your medical records in an entirely new way, so they can click with the computer mouse on a particular part of the avatar, to trigger a search of your medical records and retrieve information relevant to that part of your body, instead of leafing through pages of notes.
Yeah, I agree on the last point, though pragmatically I made somewhat of a distinction between tenured and untenured faculty. If you're untenured at a place like MIT, there's huge pressure to get publicity and do Earthshattering Research, so I can cut overhyping some slack. I hold tenured faculty to a higher standard, though, because they don't have to overhype their research to keep their job. Looks like in this case one of the faculty co-authors is untenured, so maybe should get some slack on account of his journeyman status.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose it depends on what you include. NASA is still a pretty strong first, with the European Space Agency in second, when it comes to scientific research in space, e.g. sending probes to other planets, the Hubble space telescope, etc.
If they get to play with mercury, I'd consider moving, because mercury is awesome.
Considering it's got cadmium selenide, the current version is pretty toxic [pdf]. I assume the blurb is just trying to find a catchy way of saying that the actual preparation process is not difficult.
In case you're wondering, the current person filling the post is Ron Kirk, appointed by Obama in 2009. Though it doesn't seem that USTR policy differs much under Republican versus Democratic administrations; sadly this one isn't a partisan issue because both parties are generally on the wrong side.
Interesting bit about the solar system and chaos. As far as open-access papers, this seems like an interesting overview, though it's about a decade old now.
That'd be an interesting refinement, attempting to get numbers for typical data loaded after caching. Would be hard to come up with a "typical" user profile to use at various times in history for comparison, though.
To me it's sort of the opposite for the same reason: the amount of personal time I save in not being able to access email, corporate systems, etc. whilst on the move means that I'd pay extra for a non-smart phone...
Non-trollish first posts are actually patented, which is why you don't see many of them, since not many people are willing to license the technology.
Not to mention, say, "the North American power grid" or "the global fiber optic network".
There's some progress on that, though still probably some years out from having something available.
I believe it's structured as a commission-type deal, where they get a percentage of the AdWords revenue from ad-clicks on searches sent to Google by Firefox, which is a vaguely royalty-type arrangement.
Answering my own question, it looks like it does more or less come out in the reports. Here [pdf] is their financial report for 2009-2010. It reports that they earned "royalties" of $101 million in 2009 and $121 million in 2010, and they explain their royalties as follows:
So that seems to imply that "a search engine provider" paid them around $87 million in 2009, and $102 million in 2010. Of course, the current deal may be substantially higher or lower, but that's probably a ballpark figure. Somehow considerably higher than I expected, but now that I look it seems Mozilla has >600 employees, which is also many more than I expected.
As a non-profit organization, don't these things eventually have to show up in Mozilla's annual filings? Or are they somehow aggregated together in an opaque way by the subsidiary relationship of the Mozilla Foundation vs. the Mozilla Corporation?
Oddly enough, that's what Technical Institutes were intended to be, which is why they have a different name than University, which was more the classic lectures+reading style of education. A.N. Whitehead, better known for his philosophy but also somewhat of an educational theorist, was a big fan of that style of early-20th-century education.
Schools like MIT, Georgia Tech, and even the rather evocatively named Colorado School of Mines have more or less converged to a university model of education, though, I'd guess partly because disciplines got more and more complex to the point where there was significant theory (e.g. engineering today is more about mathematics and less about hands-on work with steel than it was in 1910), and partly for prestige reasons.
In a general sense of an educated society I agree, but I do think these kinds of courses will pose a significant challenge for CS programs outside the top 10. I don't think MIT and Stanford's online course offerings will be purely supplemental education taken in addition to a 4-year CS degree or by people who wouldn't have gotten one anyway, though there will also be some of that. I think they'll to some extent also displace some proportion of traditional CS education. Probably not a lot at first, but to the extent anything makes it easier to get a good tech job via a route other than a traditional 4-year CS degree, which is already possible but not super-easy, I think it may reduce enrollments in 4-year CS programs, especially outside the very top schools.
Put differently, just in supply-and-demand terms, MIT and Stanford professors can now each fulfill a much larger portion of the demand for CS lectures, since they can lecture to students outside their classrooms. Unless the new audiences are 100% new audiences (i.e. they bring new demand for CS lectures in a 1:1 ratio to the demand-for-lectures that they fulfill), it'll reduce demand for lectures from non-MIT/Stanford professors.
I'd guess it's going to be somewhat in between "MIT Certification" and "Internet-U Certification". They're trying to walk a line of ensuring that the regular MIT degree programs are differentiated, while still leveraging the MIT name to distinguish the online course from just any random online course.
Since my day job is CS professor, these kinds of things aren't in my personal interest (unless I land a tenured job at MIT, which is unlikely :P), but I think they have considerable merit. CS, compared to other fields, is already a little bit ambivalent about degrees, and you can get some kinds of jobs by having alternate demonstrations of knowledge, like your Github "resume", or track record of participation in open-source projects. But a lot of companies worry that without a degree you'll lack some theoretical knowledge that will eventually bite you in the ass, because you didn't realize that something was a well-studied problem with an off-the-shelf solution you could've pulled out of one of Knuth's books and implemented, instead of rolling your own buggier, worse one (sometimes this is a founded fear, other times not).
But the bar in many cases is not that high. Even when I've looked for people to work with on, say, a machine-learning project, what I want to know is that they're familiar with the basics of statistics, common techniques and gotchas, correct and incorrect methods of data analysis, etc. This is more likely if they have a degree with some statistics and/or ML courses, but I could see a certificate from a respected course of online instruction being enough to convince me of that, if they keep standards up and it's not easy to cheat.
On the learner's side, it's a really interesting space of possibilities for mixing-and-matching your own education. Since these certificates seem to be much finer granularity than degree programs, if they proliferate and maintain quality, you could more realistically do interdisciplinary programs of study while still being able to prove that you mastered specific things.
Oh I think that's definitely true; there's a reason why, with a lot of scientific breakthroughs, you can find multiple teams within weeks of each other to get the result (e.g. look at the competition to get the first laser working), because it's more a matter of putting everything together, not a bolt-from-the-blue genius.
We'll have to wait to see how it works, but I'm not sure even non-geeks always find "realistic" computers more natural to interact with than computer-ish computers. People are perfectly capable of anthropomorphizing non-human entities if they act in some consistent way, even if they don't exactly mimic human behavior. In fact it's often better to act in a clearly non-human way than to hit the uncanny-valley of sort-of-human.
We're talking about general science training here, not medical school. There are plenty of biology jobs that don't involve cutting up cadavers, so there's no pressing need to "weed out the squeamish". Someone working on bioinformatics is probably better served by early familiarity with computer modeling.
I don't think postmodernists much like Kuhn; try Feyerabend.
I'm not sure what scientific community you're working in, but he's pretty widely respected in the one I work in. The "working on the shoulders of giants" thing, on the other hand, is pretty widely rejected as overly simplistic, especially given some pretty significant once-respectable dead-ends like phrenology.
With something like chemistry, unlike say mathematics or some parts of computer science that can be done independently, in the present day to make real advances you need a lab, and who has a lab is closely tied in with things like academic promotion. I don't have a link to statistics handy, but I recall reading that the average age at which people become professors in the sciences has increased drastically, as the PhD has gotten longer (from an average of 4 to 6-7 years), and even after that, people now typically do multiple postdocs before becoming professors. So you may not even be settled into your own lab, free to pursue you own research agenda, until late 30s or early 40s. That would tend to mean that most advances come from people >40 independently of mental acuity, because they run all the labs!
Now you might say, you can still do groundbreaking work as a grad student or postdoc, and this does happen, but the credit usually goes to the senior scientist, not the grad student or postdoc in the lab doing the synthesis. So in practice it's very difficult to win a Nobel Prize without first becoming a principal investigator with your own lab, because you won't really get the credit for it even if you do do something groundbreaking.
I'd be interested in seeing a version of this study adjusted for academic position. Are tenured faculty over 40 more productive than the few tenured faculty who are in their 30s? Or are we comparing 45-year-old tenured principal investigators with 35-year-old postdocs? My hypothesis is that the older-scientists-are-productive effect is mainly due to older scientists having more senior academic positions.
And here's their predictions from the end of 2007, which have one year left to come true:
Arguably yes in some cases, but not for any of the "smart grid" reasons the explanatory text talks about.
Nope.
Sounds cool, but nope. All I know about my imported fruit is the "grown in Chile" sticker.
Arguably coming close.
Pretty sure this ain't happening.
Yeah, I agree on the last point, though pragmatically I made somewhat of a distinction between tenured and untenured faculty. If you're untenured at a place like MIT, there's huge pressure to get publicity and do Earthshattering Research, so I can cut overhyping some slack. I hold tenured faculty to a higher standard, though, because they don't have to overhype their research to keep their job. Looks like in this case one of the faculty co-authors is untenured, so maybe should get some slack on account of his journeyman status.