A hard drive contained records from human resources *and* classified THAAD information? No way that's true. Classified information would be on its own network, and there would never be any reason to copy it to HR. Even if a contractor neglected to destroy or wipe a disk, only one type of information would be found on it, and not both.
People tend to skew things based on their own experiences and extrapolate generalisations from them
True, but you extrapolated based on your own experience when you wrote "The whole programmers need an office cubicle thing is vastly overrated." I agree with you that interesting work is *very* important to productivity, but don't underestimate the noise factor. Plenty of people (perhaps the majority) are able to tune out moderate noise but I'm unable to do it myself. I can't even listen to music, the primary method that people use to tune out noise in cubicle envrionments.
It's been really rough for me personally. Over the past 7 years I've been working in cubes, and I estimate that my output has been 1/4 of what I could have produced in an office with a door (which I enjoyed at a prior job). The more demanding the work, the smaller this fraction becomes. Fortunately in my job I am able to hide the fact that I have unproductive days on account of noise, but it's no fun struggling with it all of the time. When deadlines loom I have to come in on weekends to finish my work in peace and quiet.
One more thing: earplugs work great for short periods of time, but if you wear them for more than a few hours they really make your ears ache. They're not a viable solution for more than a couple of hours a day. Noise cancelling headphones don't work either. They eliminate the HVAC hum but leave the voices loud and clear (with the pair I tried). If anybody has found headphones that do a good job cancelling out voices, please let me know.
But then you're not talking about RSI, are you? The damage was caused by an external agent, not the repetitive stress caused by typing or mousing, the subject of the article.
No it is definitely an RSI. With such injuries there is often a compounding factor that tips it over the edge, and it is difficult to say that the injury is due exclusively to factor X or factor Y. For me, a change in physiology lowered my threshold to injury before I could react. The injury wasn't exactly instantaneous. Like you, I was accustomed to occasional discomfort from typing, but it would be gone by the next day. Then one day the pain never went away, and that was that.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who injure themselves by continuing to type though significant pain for long periods of time, like you pointed out, but there are many cases like mine as well.
You conclude that because your breaks give you time to recover, avoiding RSI should be a matter of common sense for everyone--not so fast pal. Sometimes conditions can change and what was once adequate rest is no longer adequate. When conditions change quickly you have no previous experience to draw upon, and you can do damage even while behaving prudently.
My RSI (a tendinitis, not carpal tunnel) hit me out of the blue when I was 26, and I've never been the same since. Perhaps an infection rendered my tendon sheaths fragile for a few days, or for some reason my collagen production decreased temporarily. But whatever the cause, I was past the point of no return in no time flat. The change was so abrupt that it may not have been possible to avoid at all.
> What was up with those refuling stops?
You had to press a key (I can't remember which one) to slow the up/down speed, otherwise you'd tap on the joystick and slam into the ceiling. There were three speeds as I recall.
That was my favorite game on the TI99/4A, along with Alpine. On Parsec I remember getting up to level 5 or 6, but what I want to know is, what happened after that?
I'm an atheist too, and I always a have been. But lately I've discovered that life as an atheist is hopeless. This change in my thinking has been brought about by health difficulties that are *not* going to get better, ever.
What I've discovered about myself is that that my life as an atheist was OK as long as I had hope for the future, believing that any setback or difficulty (even if fairly substantial) would someday be moot as I recovered and went on to achieve my goals. Without that belief I am doomed. Unfortunately I am still an atheist.
Only three? I can name a million: VMS, OS 360, Windows NT,... Ah, but those couldn't have been OO projects, though no doubt portions of them were built using OO design principles, by whatever name.
My guess is that many military systems qualify as "built by hundreds of OO developers." On the civillian side, I'm going to go with MS Word (which I understand has been substantially rewritten at least once) and Oracle, though I know nothing about them. That's two.
There can be no doubt that age discrimination exists in the IT world, perhaps much more so than in other fields. But there is another reason why older programmers are rare: they get tired of programming after a few years and want to do something else. It is endemic to the profession. Even really good programmers can feel this way. Few people are born to sit in a cube debugging and developing code hours on end, day after day. Programming is a fascinating thing, but to maintain long-term enthusiasm for the subject, one's fascination has to overpower a certain degree of tedium and ever-present mess, while isolated under fluorescent lights. Anecdotally, I would say that enthusiasm starts to run thin after about five years.
This factor could be more important than age discrimination in explaining the paucity of older programmers.
Mass transit costs not driven by energy
on
Pipeline Mass Transit?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Boring holes through the ground is expensive. Laying train track (or vacuum vessels, as it were) is expensive. Purchasing turnstiles, escalators, and elevators is expensive. Paying personnel is *very* expensive. In contrast, the energy needed to run a train (or vacuum "train") is dirt cheap. Therefore, this project is barking up the wrong tree.
Check out the "about" section on that linked page. It is rare to see such a nice narrarative of a programming project. He explains his motivation for writing the program (it was an excercise), goes on to talk about the design, with nice UML architecture documents, then and wraps up with "lessons learned."
It was a strange situation, and we eventually shut down the practice due to lack of motivation from the prospects that we spoke with.
That's too bad. In any industry, you figure there is some opportunity at the lower-middle end of the market, because even large players have a hard time being everywhere at once, and their cost structures tend to be too high to justify fanning out to pursue smaller clients. But then there is that little problem of smaller customers being backward and stingy!
... Until the IT industry can solve the issues in a reasonable manner, I don't see e-mail becoming a popular means of confidential or private communications.
It seems that some good solutions are being rolled out as we speak. There is a company called Medem that is offering a comprehensive web-based system enabling physicians to interact with patients electronically. It goes far beyond secure communications (via browser SSL) to include a whole infrastructure for "Online Consultations." Although I doubt that particular practice will catch on anytime soon, it looks very interesting. Parts of the service could be useful without buying into their whole vision. Too bad they are offering it for free--just another example of how anything think up is already being given away by somebody else:(
If I may ask one more question...how did you get involved in the business in the first place? I'm curious about this because I am interested in business myself, but I am having trouble making the leap out of my cube (I'm an embedded programmer). I think I need to be working in a field position of some sort (in whatever industry) in order to spot a problem begging for a solution. At this point I don't even care about the size and scope of the potential venture, I need to find some way to get out there and see things.
Often, the records we request do not arrive in time, so my staff will call the referring physician's office when the patient arrives and get records faxed.
Often is right! "Missing records" happens to me at every possible opportunity, except that no one ever bothers with faxing. In that regard, the medical profession appears to be even more screwed up than the service department at my incompetent car dealer.
And since you are in the business...recently I've started thinking about the area of email communication between physicians and patients. My PCP publishes her address on her practice's web site--in stark contrast to my last PCP, who scoffed at my request for her address (this was a couple of years ago). I haven't had the chance to ask many physicians what they think about it. Are they planning to follow suit? Are they worried about being overloaded with gigantic lists of questions from their patients? Would it make sense to limit such email to very specific functions, such as reporting test results? It seems to me that in certain cases, it would be invaluble to a busy doctor, primarly because it is asychronous, i.e. no phone tag headaches just to deliver a short communication that still requires a little interactivity.
Perhaps you are a programmer like me, with little connection to the business side of things in your company, but then again, perhaps you are in a position to have an educated opinion on the issue of secure doctor to patient (and vice versa) email communication. Does your industry expect it to become prevelant soon enough to deliberately target it? Or have people concluded that it is too far off in the future to pursue at this time?
Why did you stop consulting in the area of HIPAA compliance? Was there some overarching issue that made consulting in that area less than lucrative?
When you were in the business, did you hear any talk about doctor-to-patient email (and vice versa)? I'm curious about that area, but I haven't done any research on it aside from a few informal conversations. So far, most physicians seem pretty skeptical that it will catch on, ironically except for my own doctor, who encourages it.
I'm wondering how many people out there have a Primary Care Physician (PCP) willing to communicate with them via email. Mine does, but from what I gather, she is unusual.
It is inevitable that email communication between doctors and patients will become commonplace in the future. No doubt it will be limited at first to a narrow set of circumstances; for example, delivering test results, or detailed instructions for taking medication. (Having said that, my physician hasn't mentioned any limits. But then again, I make sure not to ask her questions that require more than a one-line answer.) Because the physical examination is so central to medicine, email usage might never move beyond this, but I have no doubt that for at least these purposes, it will become standard practice, eventually.
I can think of two factors that will delay its widespread adoption: 1) Older, senior-level physicians resistant to change will probably have to retire before it can become truly standard. 2) Compensation--how will physicians be compensated for writing email? This becomes important if it is to be used for time consuming things like answering detailed questions, etc.
Then there is the issue of electronic privacy (i.e. the need for encryption), which is why my question is vaguely relevent to HIPAA and this article
I've been thinking about this trend a lot recently, and I am very disturbed by it. I've tried to come up with a catchy, sinister sounding phrase for a poster/sticker campaign. I propose the term "automated justice" and the campaign "Americans Against Automated Justice" (for those of us in America, of course). The logo could be a surveillance camera. So what do you think? Will the average man on the street get it?
We have the same problem with "study abroad" programs in the U.S. (and probably everywhere else in the world too). Typically, a non-science/engineering student attending a private college (i.e. upper middle class folks) will spend a semester studying at a college in another country. Science and engineering students can forget about it. The curriculum is too packed with requirements--a one-semester detour would push back graduation by a whole year.
Of course, that is only one segment of the college population. I went to a working class state university where everybody was struggling to pay tuition. Even the French majors didn't get to do a semester abroad.
Arguing against wasting a year at your peak level of mental functioning is a pretty interesting way of looking at it (certainly a college student does not have much use for his/her peak level of *physical* functioning--except perhaps to attract the opposite sex, and of course varsity athletes). I don't think I've ever heard that argument before.
Mental processing speed and memory performance *will* begin to decrease in your late 20's. A quick search will turn up nice graphs showing the decline. It's an interesting topic, because while mental horsepower drops as one ages (we're talking very substantial drops in speed by 40), mental *algorithms* continue to improve because of experience. For certain mental tasks, having a good algorithm is far more important that raw mental horspower, just as is the case with software and computer hardware. That is probably why a lot of older people still manage to crank out great work. Now that I'm in my mid 30's, I sure hope my algorithms continue to improve at a good clip!
The "group velocity", as the article points out, is not faster than light,...
That is incorrect. The group velocity *is* faster than light, but like you said, that is not the same as energy or information travelling faster than light.
BTW, does "rsidd" have anything to do with Repetitive Stress Injury?
Except for the most basic physics, there can be almost no meaningful discussion about the subject without college level math. There are many physics books written for the layman dealing with relativity, quantum mechanics, and other "modern physics" topics, but any critical reader will be disappointed by them. All these books can do is describe physics by way of analogy, and frankly, the analogies just don't cut it. Even *with* a little college level math thrown in, it would be tough to cover these subjects in any meaningful way without something resembling a textbook. Physics is based on a hierarchy of definitions and related mathematical machinery, and although the final laws are often expressed as very simple equations, knowing what they mean requires a discussion of the lower level concepts.
Despite that, it *is* possible to explain *some* of the concepts without math. One example would be the nature of quantum mechanical uncertainly, known as the Copenhagen interpretation of the wave function. There is value in understanding that, though it isn't enough to get the big picture.
I have read many layman's physics books, written both by famous and unknown authors, and there is only one I recommend:
_The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics As the Language of Nature_, by Heinz R. Pagels.
This relatively unknown book is a real gem. You can buy it at Amazon for eight bucks.
Slashdot Mirror
A hard drive contained records from human resources *and* classified THAAD information? No way that's true. Classified information would be on its own network, and there would never be any reason to copy it to HR. Even if a contractor neglected to destroy or wipe a disk, only one type of information would be found on it, and not both.
True, but you extrapolated based on your own experience when you wrote "The whole programmers need an office cubicle thing is vastly overrated." I agree with you that interesting work is *very* important to productivity, but don't underestimate the noise factor. Plenty of people (perhaps the majority) are able to tune out moderate noise but I'm unable to do it myself. I can't even listen to music, the primary method that people use to tune out noise in cubicle envrionments.
It's been really rough for me personally. Over the past 7 years I've been working in cubes, and I estimate that my output has been 1/4 of what I could have produced in an office with a door (which I enjoyed at a prior job). The more demanding the work, the smaller this fraction becomes. Fortunately in my job I am able to hide the fact that I have unproductive days on account of noise, but it's no fun struggling with it all of the time. When deadlines loom I have to come in on weekends to finish my work in peace and quiet.
One more thing: earplugs work great for short periods of time, but if you wear them for more than a few hours they really make your ears ache. They're not a viable solution for more than a couple of hours a day. Noise cancelling headphones don't work either. They eliminate the HVAC hum but leave the voices loud and clear (with the pair I tried). If anybody has found headphones that do a good job cancelling out voices, please let me know.
I never really liked lamb. I miss fish quit a bit, however.
Killing animals for food under modern circumstances is nothing short of evil.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who injure themselves by continuing to type though significant pain for long periods of time, like you pointed out, but there are many cases like mine as well.
You conclude that because your breaks give you time to recover, avoiding RSI should be a matter of common sense for everyone--not so fast pal. Sometimes conditions can change and what was once adequate rest is no longer adequate. When conditions change quickly you have no previous experience to draw upon, and you can do damage even while behaving prudently.
My RSI (a tendinitis, not carpal tunnel) hit me out of the blue when I was 26, and I've never been the same since. Perhaps an infection rendered my tendon sheaths fragile for a few days, or for some reason my collagen production decreased temporarily. But whatever the cause, I was past the point of no return in no time flat. The change was so abrupt that it may not have been possible to avoid at all.
> What was up with those refuling stops? You had to press a key (I can't remember which one) to slow the up/down speed, otherwise you'd tap on the joystick and slam into the ceiling. There were three speeds as I recall.
"Amazing" was a great game! I can't beleive I forgot about it. The high-pitched shriek of the mouse being eaten was hilarious.
That was my favorite game on the TI99/4A, along with Alpine. On Parsec I remember getting up to level 5 or 6, but what I want to know is, what happened after that?
I'm an atheist too, and I always a have been. But lately I've discovered that life as an atheist is hopeless. This change in my thinking has been brought about by health difficulties that are *not* going to get better, ever.
What I've discovered about myself is that that my life as an atheist was OK as long as I had hope for the future, believing that any setback or difficulty (even if fairly substantial) would someday be moot as I recovered and went on to achieve my goals. Without that belief I am doomed. Unfortunately I am still an atheist.
Only three? I can name a million: VMS, OS 360, Windows NT, ... Ah, but those couldn't have been OO projects, though no doubt portions of them were built using OO design principles, by whatever name.
My guess is that many military systems qualify as "built by hundreds of OO developers." On the civillian side, I'm going to go with MS Word (which I understand has been substantially rewritten at least once) and Oracle, though I know nothing about them. That's two.
There can be no doubt that age discrimination exists in the IT world, perhaps much more so than in other fields. But there is another reason why older programmers are rare: they get tired of programming after a few years and want to do something else. It is endemic to the profession. Even really good programmers can feel this way. Few people are born to sit in a cube debugging and developing code hours on end, day after day. Programming is a fascinating thing, but to maintain long-term enthusiasm for the subject, one's fascination has to overpower a certain degree of tedium and ever-present mess, while isolated under fluorescent lights. Anecdotally, I would say that enthusiasm starts to run thin after about five years.
This factor could be more important than age discrimination in explaining the paucity of older programmers.
Boring holes through the ground is expensive. Laying train track (or vacuum vessels, as it were) is expensive. Purchasing turnstiles, escalators, and elevators is expensive. Paying personnel is *very* expensive. In contrast, the energy needed to run a train (or vacuum "train") is dirt cheap. Therefore, this project is barking up the wrong tree.
Check out the "about" section on that linked page. It is rare to see such a nice narrarative of a programming project. He explains his motivation for writing the program (it was an excercise), goes on to talk about the design, with nice UML architecture documents, then and wraps up with "lessons learned."
If I may ask one more question...how did you get involved in the business in the first place? I'm curious about this because I am interested in business myself, but I am having trouble making the leap out of my cube (I'm an embedded programmer). I think I need to be working in a field position of some sort (in whatever industry) in order to spot a problem begging for a solution. At this point I don't even care about the size and scope of the potential venture, I need to find some way to get out there and see things.
Often is right! "Missing records" happens to me at every possible opportunity, except that no one ever bothers with faxing. In that regard, the medical profession appears to be even more screwed up than the service department at my incompetent car dealer.
And since you are in the business...recently I've started thinking about the area of email communication between physicians and patients. My PCP publishes her address on her practice's web site--in stark contrast to my last PCP, who scoffed at my request for her address (this was a couple of years ago). I haven't had the chance to ask many physicians what they think about it. Are they planning to follow suit? Are they worried about being overloaded with gigantic lists of questions from their patients? Would it make sense to limit such email to very specific functions, such as reporting test results? It seems to me that in certain cases, it would be invaluble to a busy doctor, primarly because it is asychronous, i.e. no phone tag headaches just to deliver a short communication that still requires a little interactivity.
Perhaps you are a programmer like me, with little connection to the business side of things in your company, but then again, perhaps you are in a position to have an educated opinion on the issue of secure doctor to patient (and vice versa) email communication. Does your industry expect it to become prevelant soon enough to deliberately target it? Or have people concluded that it is too far off in the future to pursue at this time?
Why did you stop consulting in the area of HIPAA compliance? Was there some overarching issue that made consulting in that area less than lucrative?
When you were in the business, did you hear any talk about doctor-to-patient email (and vice versa)? I'm curious about that area, but I haven't done any research on it aside from a few informal conversations. So far, most physicians seem pretty skeptical that it will catch on, ironically except for my own doctor, who encourages it.
I'm wondering how many people out there have a Primary Care Physician (PCP) willing to communicate with them via email. Mine does, but from what I gather, she is unusual.
It is inevitable that email communication between doctors and patients will become commonplace in the future. No doubt it will be limited at first to a narrow set of circumstances; for example, delivering test results, or detailed instructions for taking medication. (Having said that, my physician hasn't mentioned any limits. But then again, I make sure not to ask her questions that require more than a one-line answer.) Because the physical examination is so central to medicine, email usage might never move beyond this, but I have no doubt that for at least these purposes, it will become standard practice, eventually.
I can think of two factors that will delay its widespread adoption: 1) Older, senior-level physicians resistant to change will probably have to retire before it can become truly standard. 2) Compensation--how will physicians be compensated for writing email? This becomes important if it is to be used for time consuming things like answering detailed questions, etc.
Then there is the issue of electronic privacy (i.e. the need for encryption), which is why my question is vaguely relevent to HIPAA and this article
I've been thinking about this trend a lot recently, and I am very disturbed by it. I've tried to come up with a catchy, sinister sounding phrase for a poster/sticker campaign. I propose the term "automated justice" and the campaign "Americans Against Automated Justice" (for those of us in America, of course). The logo could be a surveillance camera. So what do you think? Will the average man on the street get it?
We have the same problem with "study abroad" programs in the U.S. (and probably everywhere else in the world too). Typically, a non-science/engineering student attending a private college (i.e. upper middle class folks) will spend a semester studying at a college in another country. Science and engineering students can forget about it. The curriculum is too packed with requirements--a one-semester detour would push back graduation by a whole year.
Of course, that is only one segment of the college population. I went to a working class state university where everybody was struggling to pay tuition. Even the French majors didn't get to do a semester abroad.
Arguing against wasting a year at your peak level of mental functioning is a pretty interesting way of looking at it (certainly a college student does not have much use for his/her peak level of *physical* functioning--except perhaps to attract the opposite sex, and of course varsity athletes). I don't think I've ever heard that argument before.
Mental processing speed and memory performance *will* begin to decrease in your late 20's. A quick search will turn up nice graphs showing the decline. It's an interesting topic, because while mental horsepower drops as one ages (we're talking very substantial drops in speed by 40), mental *algorithms* continue to improve because of experience. For certain mental tasks, having a good algorithm is far more important that raw mental horspower, just as is the case with software and computer hardware. That is probably why a lot of older people still manage to crank out great work. Now that I'm in my mid 30's, I sure hope my algorithms continue to improve at a good clip!
That was pretty funny.
That is incorrect. The group velocity *is* faster than light, but like you said, that is not the same as energy or information travelling faster than light.
BTW, does "rsidd" have anything to do with Repetitive Stress Injury?
Except for the most basic physics, there can be almost no meaningful discussion about the subject without college level math. There are many physics books written for the layman dealing with relativity, quantum mechanics, and other "modern physics" topics, but any critical reader will be disappointed by them. All these books can do is describe physics by way of analogy, and frankly, the analogies just don't cut it. Even *with* a little college level math thrown in, it would be tough to cover these subjects in any meaningful way without something resembling a textbook. Physics is based on a hierarchy of definitions and related mathematical machinery, and although the final laws are often expressed as very simple equations, knowing what they mean requires a discussion of the lower level concepts.
Despite that, it *is* possible to explain *some* of the concepts without math. One example would be the nature of quantum mechanical uncertainly, known as the Copenhagen interpretation of the wave function. There is value in understanding that, though it isn't enough to get the big picture.
I have read many layman's physics books, written both by famous and unknown authors, and there is only one I recommend:
_The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics As the Language of Nature_, by Heinz R. Pagels.
This relatively unknown book is a real gem. You can buy it at Amazon for eight bucks.