Oops, before a substantive reply, here's one thread I forgot to connect:
MIT believes that anything very specific they teach you will likely be obsolete before your career has gotten very far
As they should! This is incredibly insightful, and comes as a shock to many students. The teaching method of my undergraduate university seemed to support this, but this philosophy wasn't explicitly laid out to the students as it should have been. While those of us with a hand in industry understood this quite well, there were many students (and if industry is any indication, this isn't unique to one school, but is characteristic of the bright-eyed engineering student) caught flat-footed.
Hmmm; I haven't studied other engineering schools (I'm really a chemist who due to finances ended up programming), but MIT is very explicit about this, in both science and engineering. I distinctly remember being told about it as a freshman, and it being repeated later on.
And it was tied together with the "firehose": one of the things MIT teaches you perforce (or at least insures you can do) is how to learn quickly. In a work world that changes so quickly, it's a necessary career survival trait.
I will note they do ease into this at the freshman level. Today, the first term is still graded pass/fail, and in my time both terms. You are given time for the wrenching adjustment to college life at a boarding school, starting with a whole week up front devoted just to that, and plenty of support and understanding is given, especially if your freshman advisor(s) are any good. But you are expected to "stand and perform" ^_^, as you must, for it will most certainly happen in the real world sooner or later.
Wow, you do realize that by having a chance to collaborate with the quasi-ultimate polymath Jerry Lettvin you are more fortunate than 99.99% of your colleagues? He is a very special person, "quite a personality" indeed ^_^! (I see that I have to add a couple of anecdotes to his Wikipedia entry.)
One data point, one experience, one opinion. I am certainly open to criticism.
Unfortunately, I'm going to move to close debate (after unfairly unloading on you below:-) on the grounds that I don't debate (unless it's truly important) people who debate unfairly. To wit:
[S]tating that a university always cares about substance over prestige is (unintentionally) disingenuous.
That is indeed true. Fortunately, I did not make such a broad statement, and to construe what I said as applying to every member of the MIT community (roughly 30,000 people) for all periods of time is frankly beyond the pale.
Of course there's going to be exceptions; you're an EE, you can even suggest some likely probability distributions. The fact that you had one bad experience with one person in a situation where you admit you may not have projected very well, and to a rather rare bird (at any school), the woman EE---well... I'm pretty much at a loss for words. Surely if you cared enough about this (and I sense in your writing that you do care very much) you could have collected some more data points?
I'm sorry you had such a bad experience with her, but I re-emphasize the point I don't think you quite got. Or rather, let me turn it around. Here's the 99.99% sure way of getting into a grad school: you get one of the professors to say "Admit this person, I'm going to advise and fund him (i.e. bring him into my research group)."
Now, how do you accomplish that? Obviously, the professor has to know you well, or absolutely trust the judgement of someone who knows you well. It's a "web of trust" sort of thing, and yes, it's unfair to schools and departments that are small and obscure, but the professors in a department have to be very careful in who they choose for the limited number of graduate student slots they have (also remember these slots are limited by the funds they can bring in).
And they're very limited in MIT's EECS department, because while MIT doesn't restrict admission based on undergraduate major, and at the time you visited EECS probably had around 40% of the undergraduates (!!!), it's very conservative about letting a department grow before the field has shown it has very long term staying power. Aero/Astro is a very sobering example, for anyone who remembers the early '70s bust, and now EECS looks to be following it.
Yes, research is going to be healthy in the fancy building that was forced upon the CS community, but if they had been allowed to bulk up enough to match the undergraduates they struggled to teach, well, I suspect things would be very ugly today. Even MIT can attract only so much research funding, especially in a secular downturn of the economy and a worse one in these fields.
I wonder if you had approached her with "thus and so professor [at my school] who has done research with thus and so professor [at MIT]" if it might have gone better, except:
Your point that denigrates the concept of people being at the "level of an MIT student" shows you don't "get it", you don't understand something that makes MIT MIT. I personally don't believe MIT has a harsh culture (although I saw many people who through their own lenses perceived it as such), but it is an extremely demanding one.
I would describe MIT's true undergraduate educational philosophy at its base with three words, all equally important: mens, manus and firehose. The first two are from the school motto, "Mens et Manus" (which is Latin for "Mind and Hand"). MIT believes that anythi
A very quick reply, as I need a piece of information before I can make a substantive reply: what field are you in? E.g. EE, CS, MechE?
And I'm sorry to tell you and anyone else this, but if no one knows the professors who taught you as an undergraduate, your chances of getting into a top graduate program in ANY technical field are low, exactly because you are a total unknown, and departments can afford to make only a few such bets. That woman was fully aware of this reality, and that's why you got such treatment: if you were specifically enquiring about grad school at MIT you were wasting her time. At least she was polite about this brutal reality....
The local barely above a community college in my home town sends about one science (biology or chemistry) graduate a generation to MIT, and one of my best chemistry TAs came from such a school, but... engineering is different, we don't agree on hardly as much as the sciences do.
Also, it is generally the case that MIT students have better things to do with our time than enter into competitions. We are sufficiently connected to industry (from the very start of the Institute), and in a sufficiently "industrial" and entrepreneurial area that we tend to get work or research experience (both of which have formal programs) instead of doing competitions. Perhaps my bias from the foot I have in EECS is showing, but competitions have no weight in those fields at MIT.
The only exception I am familiar with is the solar car group as of the late '80s plus or minus (and that is in part a special case, one of their leaders was a polymath fellow classmate who went on to become a professor), but I'll admit I don't pay much attention to that side of things....
More later after you tell me which field you're in.
I wonder how many brilliant men and women have been denied access to an MIT education based on the delusion that they actually can identify the excellent from paper?
A very large number; I would guess at least a thousand a year. If the figures someone quoted on the quota for women were correct---1 in 4 admitted vs. 1 in 12 for men---rather a lot of men.
The fundamental problem, however, is that MIT just can't admit all the students who are qualified and who would benefit from an MIT education. The people who are involved in admissions (I have a good friend who is, although not in the office) know full well this, and it breaks their hearts, but they only have about a thousand slots.
Ignoring the issue of maintaining quality, MIT simply doesn't have the space or money to significantly bulk up, plus it would be unwise for those who realize its true mission, it's not like science and engineering degrees are rising in perceived value (MIT's decades long hesitation to bulk up EECS is now looking very wise), so this problem will persist.
Anyone who thinks MIT has the "best admissions office in the world" hasn't been paying attention since at least the 1970s (hey, they admitted me in the late 1970s:-)....
how much do you wanna bet that the "anonymous tip" was from a disgruntled student (or parent) who just got rejected from MIT?
Interesting idea, but upon reflection I think it's a lot more likely to be fallout from her book and the national prominence she gained in and around it. It's my guess someone probably was doing some general research for an article on her WRT to all that, and stumbled upon the ugly truth.
For example, it would be awfully... restrained for a disgruntled applicant to merely send in an anonymous tip, although they could have followed up with public disclosure if MIT hadn't acted upon it, and of course the latter possibility was at minimum implicit in calling in a tip in the first place.
Still, with her office rejecting around 11,000 students per year, your theory would probably have become true someday, further underlining the lack of wisdom on her part in perpetuating the lies.
Then again, given that she lied when she didn't have to (her original position did not require any degrees (that's not MIT's style)), well, to me that's very telling. I don't particularly have a dog in this hunt, but it sounds like the right thing (eventually) happened, sad as it all may be.
Why would you need a degree to be dean of admissions for a safety school? [Caltech]
Very funny, but while Caltech is generally considered to be the superior science school (although check out the current USNews ratings of graduate science programs, rather surprising!), it's nothing compared to MIT in engineering, and I don't think either schools even pretend to compete against each other in the latter.
When was the last time you heard of something interesting in the general area of CS come out of Caltech? Only thing I can think of is Wolfram's first mathematics program (SMP, although that came from their Physics department), and Caltech screwed up the licensing of that (in the early '80s) so badly he decamped and eventually rewrote it from scratch.
Sounds a bit like how the U. of Pennsylvania in 1946 destroyed their chance to become a world leader in computer design and development. While a lot of professors don't like MIT's technology licensing program (especially before it got reformed from its total incompetence for all parties concerned) it is at least well established and understood by all parties concerned.
Accreditation organizations and MIT are known to play something like the game of "chicken" with each other. Basically, if one of them, especially in the field of engineering, were to pull MIT's accreditation, it would reflect a lot more on the org than on MIT, and so they tend to work out accommodations when e.g. their educational philosophy/pedagogy significantly differs with MIT's.
One frequent example is whomever accredits the EECS department. At least in times past, they had an obsession with "teaching design". EECS does not believe you can teach design per se, there is no specific design only course, although many that include teaching design in the context of what else the course is teaching. So they run around looking at the required courses and assign design credits to each one, totalling enough to satisfy the org.
I can just imagine MIT's reaction if such an org said of a professor who'd been vetted by his department, school (engineering, science, etc.) and the visiting committee for the department, "I'm sorry, you're just going to have to fire him because he doesn't have sufficient credentials...." ^_^
I wonder how many of the professional SF authors who have taught at the Institute had PhDs in English? Few, if any, I'd suspect. As noted, MIT cares a lot more about what you can do that credentials. MIT for the most part is a place about actually doing things, not piling up credentials, useless papers and books, etc.
hey! Open office has a form designer, with a designer mode too. Should we be rooting for a Microsoft victory to stop this nonsense?
Of course. Software patents are evil! Or do you really think it's more important to smack microsoft than to fight for principles?
"A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money."
The only problem I see here is that now that Microsoft is starting to use patents offensively (against Linux, at least rhetorically), they've lost a lot of their moral standing to complain about software patents. I think there has to be a sea change in opinion before the laws and practices have a change of significant change, and Microsoft can no longer help there. For now a posture of standing back and watching the fun can be justified.
On the other hand, replace Ballmer and things could change, and this is a very long game we're playing. I'm not sure I should expect real patent reform in my lifetime....
*The fundamental problem with Extreme Programming is that it proceeds from the assumption
that no one on the team is a good software designer. Which is sometimes true. But when it
isn't true, Waterfall (or _any_ other methodology**) + Good Designer will absolutely beat the ever
living shit out of Extreme Programming + No Design.
But the problem with other methods is a bit worse: in which of them do the people who can design well end up doing the design? The Antipatterns book stated that only one in five programmers "get" abstraction (the authors gave no citation, but that roughly agrees with what I've observed), and noted that in "democratic" processes, these people get out-voted by the ones who can't abstract.
Perhaps all in all you're better off with a process that doesn't demand a Good Designer because in most real world situations you won't end up with one doing the design.
I was going to mention Peopleware but neonux beat me to it. However, no matter how popular, well reasoned, etc. that book (and others) are, it's been out since 1987 and pretty much all of the industry ignores its messages on productivity.
I think the only overall answer to this problem is a variant of Natural Selection. Companies like gasp Microsoft (despite all their internal/architectural/legacy problems), and I hear Google as well, manage to beat companies that don't "get it". And this is not just a component of why, but evidence of the understanding their management has about at least some of the things that are important.
2. Turn down multi-million(billion?) dollar offers
3. Get overshadowed by copycat
You left out a few steps:
2a. Accept venture capital and quickly get fired, with no long term CEOs to follow.
2b. Build a system that gets overwhelmed by success, and don't focus on and/or succeed in fixing this for three years. (Also don't add new features because they'd only slow down the system.)
I'm surprised they're still alive; I'm not surprised to find another failure with significant technical problems as a major cause.
While the literal translation of the phrase was indeed "We'll attend your funeral", a Russian explained to me the connotation is more like "We will dance at your funeral", and the real meaning is more like "Eat s*** and die"....
What goes on at 77 Mass Ave? (Genuinely curious: 77 Mass Ave in Cambridge is an MIT address, isn't it?)
It's the canonical and offical MIT address. Look at the bottom of MIT's home page.
T.J. Rodgers says to lawyers: "Make my day"
on
Red Hat Vs. The Lawyers
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
For a view of pure laissez faire capitalism, red of tooth and claw, you can do no better than to read T.J. Rodgers, head of Cypress Semiconductor, who has dealt with these lawyer scams before. Money quote from his first experience:
Unfortunately for the lawyers who attacked us, Cypress has one of the fighting 4 percent CEOs, not one of the 96 percent capitulating CEOs. On my way to work one morning, I traveled behind a beat-up pickup truck, which apparently belonged to an NRA member. The bumper sticker stated, "They will take my gun away from me when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers."
Shortly after I arrived at work, the inevitable offer to settle came through. The plaintiffs indicated that they had the memo that would do us in, but that they were generously prepared to negotiate. I sent my response back through our lawyers: "The plaintiffs will get their first nickel out of me when they pry it out of my cold, dead fingers." I refused even to meet with the class-action lawyers, whom I consider to be a low-life form, somewhere below pond scum.
I recommend reading most anything on his home page. You won't agree with all of it, but he gets you to think, and you have to admire his spirit.
I at least have The King's English (the Oxford Language Classics reprint) right next to my HTML reference on my bookshelf.
Of course, using that ancient reference (the first edition was in 1906) makes me a troglodyte of another sort.
But: it's good, still relevent, and reading of the various classics (reference and general) plus a lot of practice at writing will sharpen you up to the point where you won't drive poor JessLeah crazy.
I don't have hard figures, but it's well known that many if not most tech acquisitions "fail", in the sense that the acquired technology "dies", for a host of internal political, conceptual ("what is it that we bought???") etc. reasons I'm sure most of us are all to familiar with.
So, to the extent that this prediction comes true and a number of closed source companies get bought, does this mean the closed source ecosystem is going to get somewhat smaller?
The standard 9-track 2400 foot open reel tape served the computer industry for about 30 years, providing a standard storage and interchange mechanism for pretty much every computer larger than a PC.
Except it wasn't that standard: early on were 7 track tapes (probably proceeding 9 track, since 7 was used by IBM's decimal business line preceding the 360, and 7 was natural for the 36 bit scientific computers and PDP-10s), and there were a number of density upgrades.
Don't you remember the excitement of using a 6250 bpi auto loading (ha, ha) high speed high end tape drive? ^_^
Sounds rather like the DLT story to me (they have a track record, shall I say ^_^, and e.g. LTO plans to maintain 2 generations minimum of backwards compatibility, and I would assume further if the market demands it), except for the transition from 7 to 9 tracks... which cuts against your point....
[me]
and unfortunately effective stopping often results in killing, but that's not the intent
Oh, so that's why everyone carries and uses nonlethal weapons which are just as effective and much less risky. Oh wait, they don't, and you're just spouting semantic bullshit.
(Getting off topic, but might as well play this thread out.)
If you could cite some "just as effective" or even somewhat effective non-lethal weapons, I'm all ears, I'd really like an option more gentle then a.45 230gr Golddot travelling at 800fps. But to my knowledge there aren't any (discounting shotgun launched "beanbags", which you can't carry concealed, I'm sure can still be lethal, and are otherwise impractical for daily carry by police or civilian).
But it's not "semantic bullshit"; there are roughly three ways to "stop" someone, in order of increasing effectiveness: will, blood, and CNS.
It would appear that most of the time, the threat of getting killed stops a criminal. E.g. something more than 90% of the time a threat alone works (I've seen this with my own eyes in the Boston area subway system). Also, it's my impression (I'm sure the statistics can be found) that most times a perp is hit, he doesn't die; the rule of thumb for handguns is only a fourth of those hit in the torso will die, and there are a lot of non-torso hits (which are still dangerous!).
There are plenty of situations where one hit stops the perp because (I assume) he loses the will to continue his threat.
Now things get really messy, and there's also disagreement in the field of "terminal ballistics"; I'm with Fackler.
One or more hits to the center of mass that penetrate will cause enough blood loss to stop someone. Unfortunately, this can take 1-2 minutes, during which a moral wound can be delivered to you. That's why you keep firing until the perp is down....:-(
Loss of blood doesn't automatically result in death, but absent quick treatment at a good trauma center....
Finally, "best" of all (when narrowly looked at from the viewpoint of stopping) is a Central Nervous System (CNS) hit: spine or brain. That's another reason you shoot at the center of mass, you may get lucky and get a (non-fatal, perhaps) spine hit.
Of course the perp will likely be paralyzed for life, but... in all these cases there's a reason why you (civilian or police) must be justified in using lethal force in the first place.
Anyway, at least we are agreed on this:
Guns don't kill people; people wielding guns kill people.
Handguns have a functional purpose other than to kill human beings?
Absolutely.
In fact, in the US at least, civilians and the police are explicitly forbidden to kill. for any reason whatsoever.
We are allowed to use "lethal force" to stop someone in certain situations (and unfortunately effective stopping often results in killing, but that's not the intent). I can go into details, but that's the basic principle.
It's about 90 minutes away, so at 250 Kbps that's over one terabit in storage on the way out there, and another terabit on the way back.
You laugh, but before Project Whirlwind (which created the physical modern computer as we know it) settled for 16-64 bit CRTs (DRAMs, I suppose?:-) and then invented 3D core memory, they seriously considered leasing a micro-wave line to do exactly that.
At the very beginning, people were really hard up for memory solutions; e.g. the first Univac model used mercury delay lines, a variant on this concept.
(The out of print Project Whirlwind: The History of a Pioneer Computer
by Kent C. Redmond is recommended if you're interested in this area of history.)
The bottom line is that you are facing what's called an "inefficient market", one that is not good at matching supply to demand (i.e. people to positions). But for people at the entry level, there are solutions.
Part of the problem is that serious experience is needed to do a number of difficult jobs. In some cases, you won't be "good enough" until you've worked for a decade (at which time you'll be 35 or so and finding a job will be truly challenging...).
Another problem is the over-specification of positions; the best explanation I've heard for this (beside HR only being able to match words and not concepts) is that technically weak managers have to hire specific skill sets because they are not capable of mentoring and otherwise growing "merely" talented people.
This essay is where I got that concept, and the entire site is highly recommended for its advice in finding a job.
To try to answer your questions, what I've gathered is that you simply have to get the experience: for you, stay in your current job for a couple of years, or jump now, since leaving after six months doesn't look too bad. But you want your first or second job to be a minimum two years in duration.
And get experience in the specific areas you're interested in (hopefully your company actually does some of them:-). For people who are still in school, be sure to get some industry experience before you graduate; if it's not on your resume as such you have some fast talking/networking to do....
Don't panic, but do realize this "market" of people and jobs is really messed up right now, and you're going to have to work hard to keep a career (unless you want to become a manager, and then you're still going to have to work hard since good management is just as hard in its own ways).
I used to develop systems to do this sort of thing ("document imaging"), so here are a few basic principles:
The quality of the scaning is obviously important; get or borrow the best scanner you can. The point made about putting a black backing onto a flatbed scanner is important. Also important is adjusting the scanner settings so that you get minimum noise (random black dots) without degrading the stuff you want to keep.
For this sort of thing you almost certainly want to do it bi-level/B&W/one bit deep (hopefully there are no shaded pictures, but you can use screening for those), and to my knowledge nothing has been developed that compresses these images better than CCITT Group IV (fax machines use Group III). You almost certainly don't want to use grey-scale, at least not for your final images.
You should see if you can find some post-processing software; we used to use ScanFix, which would straighten the image (which makes Group IV compression a lot better) and depending on settings clean it up as well. You also need to decide upon the size of the final images; you want to scan at 200 to 300 or even 400DPI, but you don't have to have final versions at those high resolutions.
The standard used to be TIFF images with Group IV compression, but not every image viewer can read them, or display them well (esp. if the image needs resizing, and I doubt you can assume everyone reading these has their monitor at a high resolution).
If PDF will accept and display images compressed with Group IV compression, you're probably best off with that, since Acrobat Reader is ubiquitous and fairly easy to use.
PNG is a nice format that I use by preference for > 1 bit deep images, but a quick check of some PNG documentation says that Group IV "often" compresses a lot better than 1 bit "greyscale" PNG; it was simply not designed for document imaging. And you also want to avoid JPEG, it's a lossy (will introduce artifacts) system that also wasn't designed for bi-level images.
That's all well and good, but their X-BOX division isn't even profitable. Why haven't they cut it off like their WiFi products?
Well, it has been said that Microsoft keeps these money losing units around in part so that it can manage its official profits. If its going to have a bad year, it can kill off one or of them and improve it's bottom line. In the meanwhile, with its virtue of persistence (in the current US business climate, you have to give them a lot of credit there), one or more of these units like the X-Box just might become a big hit that they could really use....
[...] I had heard that Japan has a conviction rate around 99%, but never seen an explanation for why (for those too lazy to read the link, probably because prosecutors are underfunded, and so only go after the low hanging fruit). One thing that was implied that I just want to clear up: do judges issue verdicts in Japan? Is there no jury system?
Bingo; judges issue verdicts, and judges who don't convict don't get promoted. (Less reliably I've heard that usually the major objective of defense lawyers is to avoid upsetting the judges....)
But judges don't see most cases; the coerced "confession" rate is (from memory) over 80%, the total combined confession/conviction rate is 99+%. Bascially, if you aren't powerful, you're totally at the mercy of the police; if they decide to charge you that's almost always "it".
(As a side note, this uniquely polite police state also has the usual corruptions: the police are lazy (e.g. they didn't seriously investigate the early nerve gas test by the cult, they don't need to be careful about finding the right perp since it doesn't affect their case closure rate, etc. etc.), and they don't have very much power, so the powerful are usually off limits, including the yakuza (organized crime, which cut a deal with the LDP in the '50s to keep the unions in line and Communist free (the latter was important back then)...).
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm; I haven't studied other engineering schools (I'm really a chemist who due to finances ended up programming), but MIT is very explicit about this, in both science and engineering. I distinctly remember being told about it as a freshman, and it being repeated later on.
And it was tied together with the "firehose": one of the things MIT teaches you perforce (or at least insures you can do) is how to learn quickly. In a work world that changes so quickly, it's a necessary career survival trait.
I will note they do ease into this at the freshman level. Today, the first term is still graded pass/fail, and in my time both terms. You are given time for the wrenching adjustment to college life at a boarding school, starting with a whole week up front devoted just to that, and plenty of support and understanding is given, especially if your freshman advisor(s) are any good. But you are expected to "stand and perform" ^_^, as you must, for it will most certainly happen in the real world sooner or later.
More later after I wake up.
Wow, you do realize that by having a chance to collaborate with the quasi-ultimate polymath Jerry Lettvin you are more fortunate than 99.99% of your colleagues? He is a very special person, "quite a personality" indeed ^_^! (I see that I have to add a couple of anecdotes to his Wikipedia entry.)
Unfortunately, I'm going to move to close debate (after unfairly unloading on you below :-) on the grounds that I don't debate (unless it's truly important) people who debate unfairly. To wit:
That is indeed true. Fortunately, I did not make such a broad statement, and to construe what I said as applying to every member of the MIT community (roughly 30,000 people) for all periods of time is frankly beyond the pale.
Of course there's going to be exceptions; you're an EE, you can even suggest some likely probability distributions. The fact that you had one bad experience with one person in a situation where you admit you may not have projected very well, and to a rather rare bird (at any school), the woman EE---well ... I'm pretty much at a loss for words. Surely if you cared enough about this (and I sense in your writing that you do care very much) you could have collected some more data points?
I'm sorry you had such a bad experience with her, but I re-emphasize the point I don't think you quite got. Or rather, let me turn it around. Here's the 99.99% sure way of getting into a grad school: you get one of the professors to say "Admit this person, I'm going to advise and fund him (i.e. bring him into my research group)."
Now, how do you accomplish that? Obviously, the professor has to know you well, or absolutely trust the judgement of someone who knows you well. It's a "web of trust" sort of thing, and yes, it's unfair to schools and departments that are small and obscure, but the professors in a department have to be very careful in who they choose for the limited number of graduate student slots they have (also remember these slots are limited by the funds they can bring in).
And they're very limited in MIT's EECS department, because while MIT doesn't restrict admission based on undergraduate major, and at the time you visited EECS probably had around 40% of the undergraduates (!!!), it's very conservative about letting a department grow before the field has shown it has very long term staying power. Aero/Astro is a very sobering example, for anyone who remembers the early '70s bust, and now EECS looks to be following it.
Yes, research is going to be healthy in the fancy building that was forced upon the CS community, but if they had been allowed to bulk up enough to match the undergraduates they struggled to teach, well, I suspect things would be very ugly today. Even MIT can attract only so much research funding, especially in a secular downturn of the economy and a worse one in these fields.
I wonder if you had approached her with "thus and so professor [at my school] who has done research with thus and so professor [at MIT]" if it might have gone better, except:
Your point that denigrates the concept of people being at the "level of an MIT student" shows you don't "get it", you don't understand something that makes MIT MIT. I personally don't believe MIT has a harsh culture (although I saw many people who through their own lenses perceived it as such), but it is an extremely demanding one.
I would describe MIT's true undergraduate educational philosophy at its base with three words, all equally important: mens, manus and firehose. The first two are from the school motto, "Mens et Manus" (which is Latin for "Mind and Hand"). MIT believes that anythi
A very quick reply, as I need a piece of information before I can make a substantive reply: what field are you in? E.g. EE, CS, MechE?
And I'm sorry to tell you and anyone else this, but if no one knows the professors who taught you as an undergraduate, your chances of getting into a top graduate program in ANY technical field are low, exactly because you are a total unknown, and departments can afford to make only a few such bets. That woman was fully aware of this reality, and that's why you got such treatment: if you were specifically enquiring about grad school at MIT you were wasting her time. At least she was polite about this brutal reality....
The local barely above a community college in my home town sends about one science (biology or chemistry) graduate a generation to MIT, and one of my best chemistry TAs came from such a school, but ... engineering is different, we don't agree on hardly as much as the sciences do.
Also, it is generally the case that MIT students have better things to do with our time than enter into competitions. We are sufficiently connected to industry (from the very start of the Institute), and in a sufficiently "industrial" and entrepreneurial area that we tend to get work or research experience (both of which have formal programs) instead of doing competitions. Perhaps my bias from the foot I have in EECS is showing, but competitions have no weight in those fields at MIT.
The only exception I am familiar with is the solar car group as of the late '80s plus or minus (and that is in part a special case, one of their leaders was a polymath fellow classmate who went on to become a professor), but I'll admit I don't pay much attention to that side of things....
More later after you tell me which field you're in.
A very large number; I would guess at least a thousand a year. If the figures someone quoted on the quota for women were correct---1 in 4 admitted vs. 1 in 12 for men---rather a lot of men.
The fundamental problem, however, is that MIT just can't admit all the students who are qualified and who would benefit from an MIT education. The people who are involved in admissions (I have a good friend who is, although not in the office) know full well this, and it breaks their hearts, but they only have about a thousand slots.
Ignoring the issue of maintaining quality, MIT simply doesn't have the space or money to significantly bulk up, plus it would be unwise for those who realize its true mission, it's not like science and engineering degrees are rising in perceived value (MIT's decades long hesitation to bulk up EECS is now looking very wise), so this problem will persist.
Anyone who thinks MIT has the "best admissions office in the world" hasn't been paying attention since at least the 1970s (hey, they admitted me in the late 1970s :-)....
Interesting idea, but upon reflection I think it's a lot more likely to be fallout from her book and the national prominence she gained in and around it. It's my guess someone probably was doing some general research for an article on her WRT to all that, and stumbled upon the ugly truth.
For example, it would be awfully ... restrained for a disgruntled applicant to merely send in an anonymous tip, although they could have followed up with public disclosure if MIT hadn't acted upon it, and of course the latter possibility was at minimum implicit in calling in a tip in the first place.
Still, with her office rejecting around 11,000 students per year, your theory would probably have become true someday, further underlining the lack of wisdom on her part in perpetuating the lies.
Then again, given that she lied when she didn't have to (her original position did not require any degrees (that's not MIT's style)), well, to me that's very telling. I don't particularly have a dog in this hunt, but it sounds like the right thing (eventually) happened, sad as it all may be.
Very funny, but while Caltech is generally considered to be the superior science school (although check out the current USNews ratings of graduate science programs, rather surprising!), it's nothing compared to MIT in engineering, and I don't think either schools even pretend to compete against each other in the latter.
When was the last time you heard of something interesting in the general area of CS come out of Caltech? Only thing I can think of is Wolfram's first mathematics program (SMP, although that came from their Physics department), and Caltech screwed up the licensing of that (in the early '80s) so badly he decamped and eventually rewrote it from scratch.
Sounds a bit like how the U. of Pennsylvania in 1946 destroyed their chance to become a world leader in computer design and development. While a lot of professors don't like MIT's technology licensing program (especially before it got reformed from its total incompetence for all parties concerned) it is at least well established and understood by all parties concerned.
Accreditation organizations and MIT are known to play something like the game of "chicken" with each other. Basically, if one of them, especially in the field of engineering, were to pull MIT's accreditation, it would reflect a lot more on the org than on MIT, and so they tend to work out accommodations when e.g. their educational philosophy/pedagogy significantly differs with MIT's.
One frequent example is whomever accredits the EECS department. At least in times past, they had an obsession with "teaching design". EECS does not believe you can teach design per se, there is no specific design only course, although many that include teaching design in the context of what else the course is teaching. So they run around looking at the required courses and assign design credits to each one, totalling enough to satisfy the org.
I can just imagine MIT's reaction if such an org said of a professor who'd been vetted by his department, school (engineering, science, etc.) and the visiting committee for the department, "I'm sorry, you're just going to have to fire him because he doesn't have sufficient credentials...." ^_^
I wonder how many of the professional SF authors who have taught at the Institute had PhDs in English? Few, if any, I'd suspect. As noted, MIT cares a lot more about what you can do that credentials. MIT for the most part is a place about actually doing things, not piling up credentials, useless papers and books, etc.
"A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money."
The only problem I see here is that now that Microsoft is starting to use patents offensively (against Linux, at least rhetorically), they've lost a lot of their moral standing to complain about software patents. I think there has to be a sea change in opinion before the laws and practices have a change of significant change, and Microsoft can no longer help there. For now a posture of standing back and watching the fun can be justified.
On the other hand, replace Ballmer and things could change, and this is a very long game we're playing. I'm not sure I should expect real patent reform in my lifetime....
Perhaps all in all you're better off with a process that doesn't demand a Good Designer because in most real world situations you won't end up with one doing the design.
I think the only overall answer to this problem is a variant of Natural Selection. Companies like gasp Microsoft (despite all their internal/architectural/legacy problems), and I hear Google as well, manage to beat companies that don't "get it". And this is not just a component of why, but evidence of the understanding their management has about at least some of the things that are important.
You left out a few steps:
2a. Accept venture capital and quickly get fired, with no long term CEOs to follow.
2b. Build a system that gets overwhelmed by success, and don't focus on and/or succeed in fixing this for three years. (Also don't add new features because they'd only slow down the system.)
I'm surprised they're still alive; I'm not surprised to find another failure with significant technical problems as a major cause.
While the literal translation of the phrase was indeed "We'll attend your funeral", a Russian explained to me the connotation is more like "We will dance at your funeral", and the real meaning is more like "Eat s*** and die"....
I recommend reading most anything on his home page. You won't agree with all of it, but he gets you to think, and you have to admire his spirit.
I at least have The King's English (the Oxford Language Classics reprint) right next to my HTML reference on my bookshelf.
Of course, using that ancient reference (the first edition was in 1906) makes me a troglodyte of another sort.
But: it's good, still relevent, and reading of the various classics (reference and general) plus a lot of practice at writing will sharpen you up to the point where you won't drive poor JessLeah crazy.
So, to the extent that this prediction comes true and a number of closed source companies get bought, does this mean the closed source ecosystem is going to get somewhat smaller?
Except it wasn't that standard: early on were 7 track tapes (probably proceeding 9 track, since 7 was used by IBM's decimal business line preceding the 360, and 7 was natural for the 36 bit scientific computers and PDP-10s), and there were a number of density upgrades.
Don't you remember the excitement of using a 6250 bpi auto loading (ha, ha) high speed high end tape drive? ^_^
Sounds rather like the DLT story to me (they have a track record, shall I say ^_^, and e.g. LTO plans to maintain 2 generations minimum of backwards compatibility, and I would assume further if the market demands it), except for the transition from 7 to 9 tracks ... which cuts against your point....
(Getting off topic, but might as well play this thread out.)
If you could cite some "just as effective" or even somewhat effective non-lethal weapons, I'm all ears, I'd really like an option more gentle then a .45 230gr Golddot travelling at 800fps. But to my knowledge there aren't any (discounting shotgun launched "beanbags", which you can't carry concealed, I'm sure can still be lethal, and are otherwise impractical for daily carry by police or civilian).
But it's not "semantic bullshit"; there are roughly three ways to "stop" someone, in order of increasing effectiveness: will, blood, and CNS.
It would appear that most of the time, the threat of getting killed stops a criminal. E.g. something more than 90% of the time a threat alone works (I've seen this with my own eyes in the Boston area subway system). Also, it's my impression (I'm sure the statistics can be found) that most times a perp is hit, he doesn't die; the rule of thumb for handguns is only a fourth of those hit in the torso will die, and there are a lot of non-torso hits (which are still dangerous!).
There are plenty of situations where one hit stops the perp because (I assume) he loses the will to continue his threat.
Now things get really messy, and there's also disagreement in the field of "terminal ballistics"; I'm with Fackler.
One or more hits to the center of mass that penetrate will cause enough blood loss to stop someone. Unfortunately, this can take 1-2 minutes, during which a moral wound can be delivered to you. That's why you keep firing until the perp is down.... :-(
Loss of blood doesn't automatically result in death, but absent quick treatment at a good trauma center....
Finally, "best" of all (when narrowly looked at from the viewpoint of stopping) is a Central Nervous System (CNS) hit: spine or brain. That's another reason you shoot at the center of mass, you may get lucky and get a (non-fatal, perhaps) spine hit.
Of course the perp will likely be paralyzed for life, but ... in all these cases there's a reason why you (civilian or police) must be justified in using lethal force in the first place.
Anyway, at least we are agreed on this:
Absolutely.
In fact, in the US at least, civilians and the police are explicitly forbidden to kill. for any reason whatsoever.
We are allowed to use "lethal force" to stop someone in certain situations (and unfortunately effective stopping often results in killing, but that's not the intent). I can go into details, but that's the basic principle.
You laugh, but before Project Whirlwind (which created the physical modern computer as we know it) settled for 16-64 bit CRTs (DRAMs, I suppose? :-) and then invented 3D core memory, they seriously considered leasing a micro-wave line to do exactly that.
At the very beginning, people were really hard up for memory solutions; e.g. the first Univac model used mercury delay lines, a variant on this concept.
(The out of print Project Whirlwind: The History of a Pioneer Computer by Kent C. Redmond is recommended if you're interested in this area of history.)
Part of the problem is that serious experience is needed to do a number of difficult jobs. In some cases, you won't be "good enough" until you've worked for a decade (at which time you'll be 35 or so and finding a job will be truly challenging...).
Another problem is the over-specification of positions; the best explanation I've heard for this (beside HR only being able to match words and not concepts) is that technically weak managers have to hire specific skill sets because they are not capable of mentoring and otherwise growing "merely" talented people.
This essay is where I got that concept, and the entire site is highly recommended for its advice in finding a job.
To try to answer your questions, what I've gathered is that you simply have to get the experience: for you, stay in your current job for a couple of years, or jump now, since leaving after six months doesn't look too bad. But you want your first or second job to be a minimum two years in duration.
And get experience in the specific areas you're interested in (hopefully your company actually does some of them :-). For people who are still in school, be sure to get some industry experience before you graduate; if it's not on your resume as such you have some fast talking/networking to do....
Don't panic, but do realize this "market" of people and jobs is really messed up right now, and you're going to have to work hard to keep a career (unless you want to become a manager, and then you're still going to have to work hard since good management is just as hard in its own ways).
Good luck!
The quality of the scaning is obviously important; get or borrow the best scanner you can. The point made about putting a black backing onto a flatbed scanner is important. Also important is adjusting the scanner settings so that you get minimum noise (random black dots) without degrading the stuff you want to keep.
For this sort of thing you almost certainly want to do it bi-level/B&W/one bit deep (hopefully there are no shaded pictures, but you can use screening for those), and to my knowledge nothing has been developed that compresses these images better than CCITT Group IV (fax machines use Group III). You almost certainly don't want to use grey-scale, at least not for your final images.
You should see if you can find some post-processing software; we used to use ScanFix, which would straighten the image (which makes Group IV compression a lot better) and depending on settings clean it up as well. You also need to decide upon the size of the final images; you want to scan at 200 to 300 or even 400DPI, but you don't have to have final versions at those high resolutions.
The standard used to be TIFF images with Group IV compression, but not every image viewer can read them, or display them well (esp. if the image needs resizing, and I doubt you can assume everyone reading these has their monitor at a high resolution).
If PDF will accept and display images compressed with Group IV compression, you're probably best off with that, since Acrobat Reader is ubiquitous and fairly easy to use.
PNG is a nice format that I use by preference for > 1 bit deep images, but a quick check of some PNG documentation says that Group IV "often" compresses a lot better than 1 bit "greyscale" PNG; it was simply not designed for document imaging. And you also want to avoid JPEG, it's a lossy (will introduce artifacts) system that also wasn't designed for bi-level images.
Hope this helps.
Well, it has been said that Microsoft keeps these money losing units around in part so that it can manage its official profits. If its going to have a bad year, it can kill off one or of them and improve it's bottom line. In the meanwhile, with its virtue of persistence (in the current US business climate, you have to give them a lot of credit there), one or more of these units like the X-Box just might become a big hit that they could really use....
Bingo; judges issue verdicts, and judges who don't convict don't get promoted. (Less reliably I've heard that usually the major objective of defense lawyers is to avoid upsetting the judges....)
But judges don't see most cases; the coerced "confession" rate is (from memory) over 80%, the total combined confession/conviction rate is 99+%. Bascially, if you aren't powerful, you're totally at the mercy of the police; if they decide to charge you that's almost always "it".
(As a side note, this uniquely polite police state also has the usual corruptions: the police are lazy (e.g. they didn't seriously investigate the early nerve gas test by the cult, they don't need to be careful about finding the right perp since it doesn't affect their case closure rate, etc. etc.), and they don't have very much power, so the powerful are usually off limits, including the yakuza (organized crime, which cut a deal with the LDP in the '50s to keep the unions in line and Communist free (the latter was important back then)...).