I work in areas of quantitive finance and have found the CFA charter to be very worthwhile. It briefly covers some of the subject matter of an MBA but is more oriented toward analysis which may be a good fit to a geek mind-set.
It's not an easy program - first, because it's largely self-study and second, because each of the three successive levels of the test has about a 50% pass rate. However, the self-study aspect also means it's far less expensive than most academic business degrees. Also, the rigorousness of the test makes it a highly-valued credential.
This is an example of The Big Lie in action - blaming Clinton for the excesses of private companies like Countrywide.
The lie goes like this: Clinton passed the CRA (Community Re-investment Act) in 1995, which led to more sub-prime loans that were responsible for the crisis of 2008.
Actually, sub-prime loans constituted only 7% of the mortgage market as of 2001, but went to 21% by 2006 - who was in office then? Additionally, the default rate on CRA sub-prime loans was 1/4 that of non-CRA sub-primes. Not to mention that the CRA was originally passed in 1977 and Clinton's changes to it in 1995 were aimed at making the process more efficient.
But don't listen to me - I'm probably a member of that evidence-based community.
According to Yahoo Finance (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=NU+Profile), the CEO of Northeast Utilities is Thomas J. May. In the past year, he "earned" $3.01 million in salary and exercised $9.99 million in stock options. The chief financial officer, James J. Judge, took home $1.05 million in salary and $2.33 million from exercise of options. Other "key executives" took home more than a million each.
One piece of evidence that's been around for quite a while is that smaller classes are better. However, this translates directly into higher costs, so there's a lot of incentive to ignore this.
As a publicly-traded corporation, Apple has a duty to its shareholders to run the company in a way that benefits them. By keeping so much cash out of the U.S., it is unable to pay it out as a dividend, or use it in other ways to benefit its shareholders.
There is a compelling argument that corporate profits paid as dividends should not be taxed both at the corporate level where they are earned and at the individual level where they are paid out, but that's not the issue here.
According to this: http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/45/Supplement_2/S137.long - "Soaps containing triclosan within the range of concentrations commonly used in the community setting (0.1%–0.45% wt/vol) were no more effective than plain soap at preventing infectious illness symptoms and reducing bacterial levels on the hands."
This has worse problems. They plan to get a useful difficult alogorthm solved for free. (And multiple variations on it too.) This will apparently will require teams weeks of efforts to come up with. That's hundreds even thousands of hours of free unpaid labour.
But try to submit a project plan with an estimate anywhere close to the amount of work being done in a contest like this and you'll be told it's "too much".
Again, APL solved this in the 1960s: any crash saved a debug workspace with all state preserved, halted at the point the error was detected. You could cut back the stack and step through to the error (assuming the code was written with sufficient modularity).
In the case where the money's fake, you should be able to go lower than zero. In fact, this might be a good idea even if we graduate to real money. To remain economic and strive for informational efficiency, we may have to combine these ideas: a positive penny leaves your account and goes into the recipient's, but a negative penny only affects "karma" (both yours and theirs).
Not to go all Godwin but this reminds me of something I noticed recently at a show of photos by Roman Vishniac: apparently one of the laws the Nazis passed in 1933 was to prohibit Jews from taking pictures in public. (Vishniac apparently snuck around this by having his daughter pose next to things he wanted to photograph.) Just a reminder of the sort of people who push for this kind of law....
APL - both as a precursor to things like Mathematica, Matlab, and R but also as _still_ embodying the clearest, most consistent and extensible idea of arrays.
It's depressing to look at a brand-new language and see the concept of arrays is still muddy and hackish - "let's ignore the relation of a scalar to a vector to a matrix to higher-dimensional arrays" & "let's implement a whole set of string functions that parallel - poorly and incompletely - the same sort of array operations we'd also like for vectors of numbers" - compared to what APL outlined 50 years ago. It's not very complex, either. I learned it in less than 15 minutes when I was 13.
The blinkered thinkers posting extreme anti-muslim rants here are helping those extremists against whom they inveigh.
They provide ammunition for the radical fringe to try to convince the moderate middle that non-muslims are unreasonably opposed to Islam. Also, by raising the level of hysteria, they don't encourage moderates to speak out, especially when their views are subject to attack by their own extreme fringe.
When you chip away at the middle ground, you force more people to move to extremes.
The article mentions how hard-disks fail at this altitude because the heads can't glide over the platters on a layer of air because it's too thin. The thin air also is less effective for cooling. However, it didn't say if there's been any consideration of an increased incidence of high-energy particles from outer space causing random faults even in solid-state components.
I have mod points at the moment but not enough to knock down all the boneheaded arguments of the form "it's a problem of poor (insane) behavior, not the ease with which people can act out" - and the related, equally foolish argument "knives kill people too".
Is there any reason to think that mental health in this country is much worse than anywhere else? Not really.
Is it as easy to kill someone with a tool designed specifically for that purpose or with something else? If you followed the link to the knife attack in China (http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/14/world/asia/china-knife-attack/index.html), you'll see that 22 children were wounded, none reported dead. So, 22 wounded is the same as 27 dead?
There is a valid argument for legal gun ownership, but neither of these come close.
Whatever Ada Lovelace's contributions were, she was not a programmer: programmers write programs to run on actual machines. The actual implementation is the hard part where all the nitty-gritty gets done. At best, she was a systems analyst.
Slashdot Mirror
I work in areas of quantitive finance and have found the CFA charter to be very worthwhile. It briefly covers some of the subject matter of an MBA but is more oriented toward analysis which may be a good fit to a geek mind-set.
It's not an easy program - first, because it's largely self-study and second, because each of the three successive levels of the test has about a 50% pass rate. However, the self-study aspect also means it's far less expensive than most academic business degrees. Also, the rigorousness of the test makes it a highly-valued credential.
You can find out more at the site of the CFA Institute: https://www.cfainstitute.org/pages/index.aspx .
This is an example of The Big Lie in action - blaming Clinton for the excesses of private companies like Countrywide.
The lie goes like this: Clinton passed the CRA (Community Re-investment Act) in 1995, which led to more sub-prime loans that were responsible for the crisis of 2008.
Actually, sub-prime loans constituted only 7% of the mortgage market as of 2001, but went to 21% by 2006 - who was in office then? Additionally, the default rate on CRA sub-prime loans was 1/4 that of non-CRA sub-primes. Not to mention that the CRA was originally passed in 1977 and Clinton's changes to it in 1995 were aimed at making the process more efficient.
But don't listen to me - I'm probably a member of that evidence-based community.
But don't get your hopes too high.
According to Yahoo Finance (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=NU+Profile), the CEO of Northeast Utilities is Thomas J. May. In the past year, he "earned" $3.01 million in salary and exercised $9.99 million in stock options. The chief financial officer, James J. Judge, took home $1.05 million in salary and $2.33 million from exercise of options. Other "key executives" took home more than a million each.
One piece of evidence that's been around for quite a while is that smaller classes are better. However, this translates directly into higher costs, so there's a lot of incentive to ignore this.
You might need it if you use your computer as something other than a toy or care about security or performance.
NYC here, feeling slighted not to have been included on the US tour.
As a publicly-traded corporation, Apple has a duty to its shareholders to run the company in a way that benefits them. By keeping so much cash out of the U.S., it is unable to pay it out as a dividend, or use it in other ways to benefit its shareholders.
There is a compelling argument that corporate profits paid as dividends should not be taxed both at the corporate level where they are earned and at the individual level where they are paid out, but that's not the issue here.
According to this: http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/45/Supplement_2/S137.long -
"Soaps containing triclosan within the range of concentrations commonly used in the community setting (0.1%–0.45% wt/vol) were no more effective than plain soap at preventing infectious illness symptoms and reducing bacterial levels on the hands."
...
This has worse problems. They plan to get a useful difficult alogorthm solved for free. (And multiple variations on it too.) This will apparently will require teams weeks of efforts to come up with. That's hundreds even thousands of hours of free unpaid labour.
But try to submit a project plan with an estimate anywhere close to the amount of work being done in a contest like this and you'll be told it's "too much".
Again, APL solved this in the 1960s: any crash saved a debug workspace with all state preserved, halted at the point the error was detected. You could cut back the stack and step through to the error (assuming the code was written with sufficient modularity).
I've wondered this since I started programming in APL in 1972. Maybe mainstream programmers are (slowly) starting to catch up?
More like "Welcome to 1966": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)
Wow - a dozen or so messages and not yet one from quantum-entanglement (QE) deniers.
In the case where the money's fake, you should be able to go lower than zero. In fact, this might be a good idea even if we graduate to real money. To remain economic and strive for informational efficiency, we may have to combine these ideas: a positive penny leaves your account and goes into the recipient's, but a negative penny only affects "karma" (both yours and theirs).
Not to go all Godwin but this reminds me of something I noticed recently at a show of photos by Roman Vishniac: apparently one of the laws the Nazis passed in 1933 was to prohibit Jews from taking pictures in public. (Vishniac apparently snuck around this by having his daughter pose next to things he wanted to photograph.) Just a reminder of the sort of people who push for this kind of law....
APL - both as a precursor to things like Mathematica, Matlab, and R but also as _still_ embodying the clearest, most consistent and extensible idea of arrays.
It's depressing to look at a brand-new language and see the concept of arrays is still muddy and hackish - "let's ignore the relation of a scalar to a vector to a matrix to higher-dimensional arrays" & "let's implement a whole set of string functions that parallel - poorly and incompletely - the same sort of array operations we'd also like for vectors of numbers" - compared to what APL outlined 50 years ago. It's not very complex, either. I learned it in less than 15 minutes when I was 13.
If you're interested, I touch on this simple, elegant concept in some of my blog entries: http://thoughttools.blogspot.com/2012/05/shapely-conversation-i-went-to.html .
The blinkered thinkers posting extreme anti-muslim rants here are helping those extremists against whom they inveigh.
They provide ammunition for the radical fringe to try to convince the moderate middle that non-muslims are unreasonably opposed to Islam. Also, by raising the level of hysteria, they don't encourage moderates to speak out, especially when their views are subject to attack by their own extreme fringe.
When you chip away at the middle ground, you force more people to move to extremes.
It's kind of funny to hear the gun-nuts or their fellow travelers talking about looking at evidence for the effects of guns when the NRA has made it a top priority to prevent any such research for the past 20 years or so: http://www.readabstracts.com/Health/Fight-over-federal-agency-pits-medicine-vs-NRA-funding-for-research-on-firearms-injuries-at-issue.html and http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/01/11/1435291/biden-confirms-white-house-will-fight-nras-war-on-science/?mobile=nc .
It's one thing to not care about evidence but worse to actively fight against gathering it because you're afraid of what it might say.
Without indirection, via pointers or some equivalent, you can't create variable-sized data structures.
Unless you use one of the many languages with dynamic data structures, like J, etc. But that would be too easy...
1) Download J from jsoftware.com and install it.
2) Open the interactive command line and start programming.
3) Profit.
The article mentions how hard-disks fail at this altitude because the heads can't glide over the platters on a layer of air because it's too thin. The thin air also is less effective for cooling. However, it didn't say if there's been any consideration of an increased incidence of high-energy particles from outer space causing random faults even in solid-state components.
I thought gun owners were proud of what they are, not poor fraidy-cats who need to threaten those who let people know about them.
I have mod points at the moment but not enough to knock down all the boneheaded arguments of the form "it's a problem of poor (insane) behavior, not the ease with which people can act out" - and the related, equally foolish argument "knives kill people too".
Is there any reason to think that mental health in this country is much worse than anywhere else? Not really.
Is it as easy to kill someone with a tool designed specifically for that purpose or with something else? If you followed the link to the knife attack in China (http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/14/world/asia/china-knife-attack/index.html), you'll see that 22 children were wounded, none reported dead. So, 22 wounded is the same as 27 dead?
There is a valid argument for legal gun ownership, but neither of these come close.
Whatever Ada Lovelace's contributions were, she was not a programmer: programmers write programs to run on actual machines. The actual implementation is the hard part where all the nitty-gritty gets done. At best, she was a systems analyst.