Seen both sides, reasonably successful in both areas, prefer finance because:
1. Less BS, more meritocracy (surprise!). Science does not have money => in science you need to BS big times to get grants. The outcome of research is often probabilistic and luck could matter more than hard work. When the research is done by a large group often the loudest voice gets most of the credit.
2. Sense of achievement: In science you work on the problem only 100 ppl in the world could understand. The rest are constantly asking: "Why are you wasting your time and taxpayers money doing this?". Seeing B- student making 10X your salary does not help either.
3. It is next to impossible to get fired from govt. lab. After 10-15 years of existence a good part of its workforce is staying there just because they can not find job anywhere else. Working in such environment could be very demotivating ( anyone from NASA or Fermilab want to comment? )
3a. More and more people stay in science just because they can not find job anywhere else or they just afraid to change their field.
4. Immigration issues do not make it better. It is easier to get Green card working in the bank than working in academia.
As a side comment: I few of my friends with PhDs left for Canada, Europe, and Russia within last 3 years. Some from academia some from finance. Some of them were doing top notch research, some were paying >$100K of taxes each year. This country shoots itself in the foot by not keeping PhDs from top schools.
The drawbacks are obvious: 60 hours/week working schedule, little or no vacations, occasional junk from taxi driver that "It is my personal fault that he can not pay his mortgage". Should I explain that most people working in finance are actually serving the society by providing financial services and lowering transaction costs?
Also it is not a closed club. From what I see, vertical mobility in high frequency finance will probably beat other industries.
Anyway, this rant is getting too long. Will appreciate comments.
Happened to work with one of the products of last "Summer of Code" (no fingerpointing). Raw, unfinished, bad coding, no docs. Ended up delegating it to one of my friends in one of the 3rd world country. He wrote it from scratch in 4 weeks for $300.
I guess the value of "Summer of Code" is mostly educational.
The idea is good. The pay is about right. I had a chance to take a look at one of the "finished" projects. About 20K of PHP code which looks like written in last two weeks before the deadline with a lot of copy-paste from other sources.
I guess the idea was not to get a lot of good code but to make more students involved in coding and Open Source. I guess this goal is achieved. I would consider the program as an investment in public education and a good PR.
I had an experience of finding last year homework and exam solutions in Google cash. Also some materials which were published on paper and removed from public domain (publisher requirement). Nobody got sued yet but I guess it will not last for long
>How do we know that an atom, for example, contains >certain sub-atomic particles, instead of our >recombining sub-atomic parts into new particles >that were never part of the atom?
We can not take a look on the proton with a microscope. Instead we bombard it randomly with projectiles and measure the angles of reflection. If atom would be a percfect sphere the reflected projectiles would be evenly distributed over all possible angles. The truth is that they are not.
By looking at the pattern of the reflection one can tell things about the internal structure of the proton. What one can not tell is whether proton had this structure BEFORE we hit it or it is DUE to the hit. But do we really care? Science is all about the things we can observe. We can not observe proton BEFORE we bombard it with something.
This and many other questions are very well addressed by Feyman in his QED.
I totally agree with your comment. Reader should be informed about simplifications.
I've got into the trap most scientists do.:) We overestimate the awareness of the outside community and could easily miss some important things in the explanation. Feynam had a great talent to avoid such a mishaps.
Feyman's QED is quite nice for unprepared reader. It differs from the real QED the same way high school "Intro to Mechanics" is different from graduate level "Theoretical Mechanics". They are both full and consistent but on the different levels of detalization and precision.
Just in case here is the link one more time.
http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/vvc/theory/model.h tm l
Agree.
I just tried to provide a minimum of information required to understand the issue.
for more info on Standard Model:
http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/vvc/theory/model.htm l
Just one more sensation out of misunderstood scientific paper.
I work with the team which confirmed it at Fermi in X(3872) -> J/Psi Pion Pion.
Some background on quarks first:
There are six quarks d, u, s, c, b, t. The heaviest are on the right. And six antiquarks d(bar), u(bar), s(bar)... you've got the idea.
d, s, b have charge -1/3. u, c, t have charge 2/3, antiquarks and quarks have opposite charge.
All the matter consist of the particles which are combinations of quarks. There are several types of observed combinations: Mesons, Barions, Tetraquarks, Pentaquarks. They are correspondingly consist from 2, 3, 4 or 5 quarks.
All the Mesons consist of quark and antiquark. Examples:
Proton =(u, u, d );//charge +1 Neutron =(d, d, u );//charge 0 Antiproton =(u(bar), u(bar), d(bar));//charge -1
You may continue it yourself for Tetraquarks and Pentaquarks. Make sure the total charge of the particle is integer.
Heavy quarks want to decay to a ligter ones. Eventually to u, d, u(bar), d(bar) and also leptons (electron, muon) neutrinos and photons.
Some people think that X(3872) is one of the exited states of (c, c(bar)). Some people think that it could be a tetraquark (c, c(bar), u, u(bar)). We should observe other modes to know for sure. I am looking for X(3872) -> DD (bar). No luck so far.
It is definitely very exiting to see a new particle like it would be exiting to see a new chemical element. As far as I know it fit quite nicely in the standard model - the analog of the Mendeleev table for particle physics.
Grid is good for science where people intend to share data and results. I doubt that big industry or military would trust their tasks to a world distributed network.
For the rest of the people the power of one PC is still enough. There is no "killer application" which would make them use home delivered computer
power and pay for it (unless MS will decide to add some extra features:))
Entertainment industry and gaming with heavy MMORG worlds simulations are probably a good candidates.
It targets only a small group of geek-news readers.
1. It is too long and sophisticated.
Most of the people will read only a few
paragraphs. 2. It does not contain an explicit threat/gain.
That makes SCO reports more popular among the
general public.:)
OS community still have to learn how to make a buzz. This war is not about the law it is about public attention.
Thanks a lot.
The article makes more sense now.
Do you have publicly available TDR?
I would appreciate a link.
The idea is good the article is bull@#$%.
on
Space Elevator Going Up
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It has some obvious mistakes like:
> At about a third of the way along the cable - > 36,000km from Earth - objects take a year to >complete a full orbit.
Should be : 24 hour to complete a full orbit
>The biggest hazard could be space junk, but Dr >Edwards said the floating platform would be moved >around to steer the cable out of the way
Hmm. I would like to see them:
1. Tracing space junk ~0.01-1mm in size
which flies around with a speed ~10km/sec.
2. Moving platform fast enough on the ground
to avoid collision at the altitude
~200 -1000 km . At those altitudes junk
has the maximum density.
> Edwards, who estimates it would take about $7bn > (4.4bn) to turn the concept into reality
This thing should weight no less then ISS. Most of it flies much higher orbit: 36,000-100,000km compare to ~500km for ISS,- READ: more expensive to get there. Now check the web about ISS price tag.
Reminds me the story with cheap Space Shuttle for $5.6 +/- 1.0 bn.
Either article is bad or this guy is full of @#$%.
1. 1967. Soyuz first flight. Parachute entanglement during reentry. The only pilot died.
2. 1972 Soyuz 11 . Airlock failure when decoupling from Salyut space station. The crew of 3 died without oxigen. They did not use space suits in that mission.
I am currently using 2 copies of Mandrake 9.1. Could you please send me one of your invoices. I am going to cell it on the Ebay as a souvenir after your company will become a history.
Most of the cources online contain only the list of the literaure and the homeworks without solutions. It will not help much.
Many of the MIT professors have their own very nice sets of lectures which are usually provided to the listeners for free. They are not represented online. I guess the main reason is that publishers require to remove all the copies from the web to increase sales.
I think someone has to start GPL movement in
education.:)
We have a good deal of beowulf clusters here
mostly for data taking and data handling purposes.
Data handling cluster will have about 1000 nodes
in the final setup. We plan to upgrade them
every 3 years. Now they are mostly Athlon 2000
duals running linux 2.4, divided into the
small blocks of 8-16 nodes with a devoted 2Tb
data server per block. All of them are connected
together with T100 and the Gigabit ethernet.
We have several head/gateway nodes to submit the
jobs and some lab written software distributing
the load between the nodes.
Lab is thinking about throwinig away
all the old SGI supercomputers. It cost too much
to obtain and upgrade.
I am afraid to be repetetive, but the main
positive features of the beovulf clusters:
1. It is cheap.
2. It does not require special knowledge to build and mantain.
3. It does not require special knowledge to write a new software.
4. It is scalable.
5. There is a competition between the vendors.
The only minus I can find is that the racks with
PCs do not look as sexy as a SGI purple refrigerators.:)
The part of the cable above the geosynchronous orbit is pulled away with centrifugal force. The part below this orbit is pulled toward the earth with the force of gravity. The stable position for the cable is EXACLY along the radius.
To prevent cable from moving ALONG the radius the Earth end should be anchored and the far end should be pulled away with a centrifugal force acting on some big mass on the end (Terminal station:)).
While you elevating your cabine along the cable its transverce speed (along the earth equator) increases from ~400 meters per second on the surface to ~2 km per second on geosynchronous orbit. Either you accelerate it with the special engine or hope that your cable is strong enough to hold a sufficient transverce tension (Coriolis force)
In order to get to a geosynchronous orbit with such an elevator you do not have to use an intermediate lower orbit and accelerate your satellite to 10 km per second.
I know some software developers who work for MS in Russia. They usually get ~$500/month compare to ~$5000/month earned by american fellow doing the same job in US.Is it fare to ask them to pay the same $200 for the product they develop?
Slashdot Mirror
Disclamer: see subj.
Seen both sides, reasonably successful in both areas, prefer finance because:
1. Less BS, more meritocracy (surprise!). Science does not have money => in science you need to BS big times to get grants. The outcome of research is often probabilistic and luck could matter more than hard work. When the research is done by a large group often the loudest voice gets most of the credit.
2. Sense of achievement: In science you work on the problem only 100 ppl in the world could understand. The rest are constantly asking: "Why are you wasting your time and taxpayers money doing this?". Seeing B- student making 10X your salary does not help either.
3. It is next to impossible to get fired from govt. lab. After 10-15 years of existence a good part of its workforce is staying there just because they can not find job anywhere else. Working in such environment could be very demotivating ( anyone from NASA or Fermilab want to comment? )
3a. More and more people stay in science just because they can not find job anywhere else or they just afraid to change their field.
4. Immigration issues do not make it better. It is easier to get Green card working in the bank than working in academia.
As a side comment: I few of my friends with PhDs left for Canada, Europe, and Russia within last 3 years. Some from academia some from finance. Some of them were doing top notch research, some were paying >$100K of taxes each year. This country shoots itself in the foot by not keeping PhDs from top schools.
5. Just for Slashdot: It is easier to get laid. :)
http://www.fashionmeetsfinance.com/
The drawbacks are obvious: 60 hours/week working schedule, little or no vacations, occasional junk from taxi driver that "It is my personal fault that he can not pay his mortgage". Should I explain that most people working in finance are actually serving the society by providing financial services and lowering transaction costs?
Also it is not a closed club. From what I see, vertical mobility in high frequency finance will probably beat other industries.
Anyway, this rant is getting too long. Will appreciate comments.
> So is the lack of a common language their problem - or ours?
:)
It depends on who is paying.
Happened to work with one of the products of last "Summer of Code" (no fingerpointing). Raw, unfinished, bad coding, no docs. Ended up delegating it to one of my friends in one of the 3rd world country. He wrote it from scratch in 4 weeks for $300.
I guess the value of "Summer of Code" is mostly educational.
The idea is good. The pay is about right. I had a chance to take a look at one of the "finished" projects. About 20K of PHP code which looks like written in last two weeks before the deadline with a lot of copy-paste from other sources.
I guess the idea was not to get a lot of good code but to make more students involved in coding and Open Source. I guess this goal is achieved. I would consider the program as an investment in public education and a good PR.
I had an experience of finding last year homework
and exam solutions in Google cash. Also some
materials which were published on paper and removed
from public domain (publisher requirement).
Nobody got sued yet but I guess it will not last for long
>In the end, there's a lot of marketing involved in all of this...
:)
Call things names: marketing == bull$#!& most of the time
It is quite nice to know that there are people :)
:) ) to work in science instead of
outside the lab who finds our results interesting.
It gives a lot of motivation (apart from the
curiocity
just going to Wall Street for money.
Thanks a lot.
LISA
Total cost $500M. 1/5 of just one submarine or five days of war in Iraq.
The other example is the Hubble space telescope ~$2B.
I think it payed off well with:
A GOOD part of $2B is invested in related fields. Optics, materials, communications etc.
Hundreds of grads and undergrads who work on this project will apply their skills
in some other fields.
Millions of kids got their first interest in science from Hubble space images.
Millions of adults consider discovery channel as a good rest after work. (Hopefully :))
:)
I will not discuss the difference of LISA from Michelson-Morley. You are not surprized that Power plant is more expensive than windmill don't you. ?
The questions is quite philosophical. :)
>How do we know that an atom, for example, contains
>certain sub-atomic particles, instead of our
>recombining sub-atomic parts into new particles
>that were never part of the atom?
We can not take a look on the proton with a microscope.
Instead we bombard it randomly with projectiles
and measure the angles of reflection. If atom
would be a percfect sphere the reflected
projectiles would be evenly distributed over
all possible angles. The truth is that they are not.
By looking at the pattern of the reflection one can tell
things about the internal structure of the proton.
What one can not tell is whether proton had this
structure BEFORE we hit it or it is DUE to
the hit. But do we really care? Science is all
about the things we can observe. We can not
observe proton BEFORE we bombard it with something.
This and many other questions are very
well addressed by Feyman in his QED.
I totally agree with your comment. Reader should be informed about simplifications.
h tm l
I've got into the trap most scientists do.:) We overestimate the awareness of the outside community and could easily miss some important things in the explanation. Feynam had a great talent to avoid such a mishaps.
Feyman's QED is quite nice for unprepared reader. It differs from the real QED the same way high school "Intro to Mechanics" is different from graduate level "Theoretical Mechanics". They are both full and consistent but on the different levels of detalization and precision.
Just in case here is the link one more time.
http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/vvc/theory/model.
Thanks a lot for the comment.
(c, c(bar), u, d(bar)) //charge +1.
.
Fits the SM and should go by EM to D D*+
Agree. I just tried to provide a minimum of information required to understand the issue. for more info on Standard Model: http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/vvc/theory/model.htm l
Just one more sensation out of misunderstood
//charge +1 //charge -1 //charge 0 //charge 0 //charge 0
//charge +1 //charge 0 //charge -1
scientific paper.
I work with the team which confirmed it at Fermi in X(3872) -> J/Psi Pion Pion.
Some background on quarks first:
There are six quarks d, u, s, c, b, t. The heaviest are on the right.
And six antiquarks d(bar), u(bar), s(bar)... you've got the idea.
d, s, b have charge -1/3.
u, c, t have charge 2/3,
antiquarks and quarks have opposite charge.
All the matter consist of the particles which
are combinations of quarks. There are several
types of observed combinations: Mesons, Barions,
Tetraquarks, Pentaquarks. They are correspondingly
consist from 2, 3, 4 or 5 quarks.
All the Mesons consist of quark and antiquark. Examples:
Pion = (u, d(bar));
Kaon =(s, u(bar));
J/Psi =(c, c(bar));
D =(c, u(bar));
D(bar)=(c(bar), u);
Barions consist of 3 quarks. Examples:
Proton =(u, u, d );
Neutron =(d, d, u );
Antiproton =(u(bar), u(bar), d(bar));
You may continue it yourself for Tetraquarks and Pentaquarks.
Make sure the total charge of the particle is integer.
Heavy quarks want to decay to a ligter ones.
Eventually to u, d, u(bar), d(bar) and also
leptons (electron, muon) neutrinos and photons.
Some people think that X(3872) is one of the exited states of (c, c(bar)). Some people think
that it could be a tetraquark (c, c(bar), u, u(bar)). We should observe other modes
to know for sure. I am looking for X(3872) -> DD (bar).
No luck so far.
It is definitely very exiting to see a new particle like it would be exiting
to see a new chemical element. As far as I know it fit quite nicely
in the standard model - the analog of the Mendeleev table for particle physics.
There is no market for this thing (yet).
:))
Grid is good for science where people intend to
share data and results. I doubt that big industry
or military would trust their tasks to a world
distributed network.
For the rest of the people the power of one PC
is still enough. There is no "killer application"
which would make them use home delivered computer
power and pay for it (unless MS will decide to
add some extra features
Entertainment industry and gaming with heavy
MMORG worlds simulations are probably a good
candidates.
It targets only a small group of geek-news readers.
:)
:)
1. It is too long and sophisticated.
Most of the people will read only a few
paragraphs.
2. It does not contain an explicit threat/gain.
That makes SCO reports more popular among the
general public.
OS community still have to learn how to make a buzz. This war is not about the law it is about
public attention.
BTW FNAL(DOE) is also ~80% linux.
Pessimist is a well informed optimist.
Thanks a lot. The article makes more sense now. Do you have publicly available TDR? I would appreciate a link.
It has some obvious mistakes like:
> At about a third of the way along the cable -
> 36,000km from Earth - objects take a year to
>complete a full orbit.
Should be : 24 hour to complete a full orbit
>The biggest hazard could be space junk, but Dr
>Edwards said the floating platform would be moved
>around to steer the cable out of the way
Hmm. I would like to see them:
1. Tracing space junk ~0.01-1mm in size
which flies around with a speed ~10km/sec.
2. Moving platform fast enough on the ground
to avoid collision at the altitude
~200 -1000 km . At those altitudes junk
has the maximum density.
> Edwards, who estimates it would take about $7bn
> (4.4bn) to turn the concept into reality
This thing should weight no less then ISS.
Most of it flies much higher orbit:
36,000-100,000km compare to ~500km for ISS,-
READ: more expensive to get there.
Now check the web about ISS price tag.
Reminds me the story with cheap Space
Shuttle for $5.6 +/- 1.0 bn.
Either article is bad or this guy is full of @#$%.
Pessimist is a well informed optimist.
It failed twice.
1. 1967. Soyuz first flight. Parachute entanglement during reentry. The only pilot died.
2. 1972 Soyuz 11 . Airlock failure when decoupling from Salyut space station. The crew of 3 died without oxigen. They did not use space suits in that mission.
I am currently using 2 copies of Mandrake 9.1. .
Could you please send me one of your invoices.
I am going to cell it on the Ebay as a souvenir
after your company will become a history
Sincerely.
Most of the cources online contain only
:)
the list of the literaure and the homeworks
without solutions. It will not help much.
Many of the MIT professors have their own
very nice sets of lectures which are usually
provided to the listeners for free. They are
not represented online. I guess the main reason
is that publishers require to remove all the
copies from the web to increase sales.
I think someone has to start GPL movement in
education.
We have a good deal of beowulf clusters here mostly for data taking and data handling purposes. Data handling cluster will have about 1000 nodes in the final setup. We plan to upgrade them every 3 years. Now they are mostly Athlon 2000 duals running linux 2.4, divided into the small blocks of 8-16 nodes with a devoted 2Tb data server per block. All of them are connected together with T100 and the Gigabit ethernet. We have several head/gateway nodes to submit the jobs and some lab written software distributing the load between the nodes. Lab is thinking about throwinig away all the old SGI supercomputers. It cost too much to obtain and upgrade. I am afraid to be repetetive, but the main positive features of the beovulf clusters: 1. It is cheap. 2. It does not require special knowledge to build and mantain. 3. It does not require special knowledge to write a new software. 4. It is scalable. 5. There is a competition between the vendors. The only minus I can find is that the racks with PCs do not look as sexy as a SGI purple refrigerators. :)
Already done by Galileo. http://galileo.jpl.nasa.gov/images/europa/eurimage s.html
Not quite right.
:)).
The part of the cable above the geosynchronous orbit is pulled away with centrifugal force. The part below this orbit is pulled toward the earth with the force of gravity. The stable position for the cable is EXACLY along the radius.
To prevent cable from moving ALONG the radius the Earth end should be anchored and the far end should be pulled away with a centrifugal force acting on some big mass on the end (Terminal station
While you elevating your cabine along the cable its transverce speed (along the earth equator) increases from ~400 meters per second on the surface to ~2 km per second on geosynchronous orbit. Either you accelerate it with the special engine or hope that your cable is strong enough to hold a sufficient transverce tension (Coriolis force)
In order to get to a geosynchronous orbit with such an elevator you do not have to use an intermediate lower orbit and accelerate your satellite to 10 km per second.
I know some software developers who work for MS
in Russia. They usually get ~$500/month
compare to ~$5000/month earned by american fellow
doing the same job in US.Is it fare to ask them
to pay the same $200 for the product they develop?