"Futhark is a small programming language designed to be compiled to efficient parallel code. It is a statically typed, data-parallel, and purely functional array language in the ML family, and comes with a heavily optimising ahead-of-time compiler that presently generates GPU code via CUDA and OpenCL"
the ML family of languages being things like Standard-ML, Haskell, OcaML.
I wish the engineering world worked as you described. And yes, I am an engineer (Master's in geological engineering, and my PE/P.Eng thank you very much).
The sad truth is that there is a hell of lot of engineering time spent on mundane work that can and should be automated away --most of my life was spent pushing around columns in excel, hunting down typos, and debugging god awful analyses written in excel. I jokingly refer to heavy infrastructure engineering (I did landslides, soils, mines, tunnels, rail, etc.) as the place where technology goes to die.
Most of the clients demand cost-reimbursable billed hour contracts, so it's also where efficiency goes to die. Better to have a junior engineer spend 4 weeks pushing data around and billing it out than optimizing that task so the engineer can spend their 'guru time' thinking about concrete loadings, failure modes, gaps in the design. I picked up a lot of fortran, R, python, and even lisp on the job working on automating the garbage tasks that took up 75% of my time so I could spend more time/budget on actual important design implementation issues (so I could sleep easy at night when I stamped designs). Saving 5-10% budget was appreciated (we can win more contracts!) but figuring out how to do something 2x, 3x, 4x as fast was not ("We won't make any money because we aren't billing enough hours!").
This is why I'm back at school doing a Master's in statistics/machine learning --couldn't handle the amount of BS tasks that should have been automated away keeping me away from the interesting and challenging parts of my job, with no improvements in sight. I do not miss nightmares analyses (for an earthquake soils design of an LNG plant) spread across _3,000_ excel sheets and 60+ directories, combining the output of multiple different versions of garbage software run by different teams in different countries. Oh god. Doing the quality control on that? Nope. Nope. Nope. That was two months of my life I'm not getting back. And this was with a well known, highly reputable design firm!
two tons is not that much. Assuming metric, sand/gravel is around 2000 kg / cubic meter, or you know, 2 tonnes. So really the above is saying that you require a cubic meter of sand to create a barrel of oil.
Maybe I would understand this better if it was given to me in library of congresses.
There is more to engineering than electrical engineering.
I'm a geological engineer up in Canada. Lots of demand and we have our finger in a lot of different projects/industries. I deal mostly with rock mechanics, and the world outsources to us basically. I work on projects all over the world. I don't see myself getting the axe any time soon. When shit hits the fan and things are collapsing, you kind of need someone on the ground who knows what to do before your 5 billion dollar open pit mine floods (for example).
Quite a lovely field. When mining booms, there is a lot of work. When infrastructure projects boom, there is a lot of work. When hydropower projects boom, there is a lot of work. You need a few major industries to collapse (mining is tanking a bit right now) for it to unravel completely. Lots of opportunities to turn into a manger, jump ship to a client / operator, etc. And North America is still very much a major player in this industry. Lots of niche markets and employee-owned firms. Decent pay.
Downside: lots of travel in the early days, hard on family/relationship/life.
In schools in Canada you already have to do this. This was true at my school (Queen's) from 2002 - 2006. The problem is they give you the least interesting course list to choose from. There were lots of great courses I wanted to take, such as an english course in science fiction. Not allowed --did not have the pre-req. Instead you pull from the driest of 100 level courses. On top of that, you are taking 6 to 9 STEM courses and dying under the workload. Then you have to find a dry, introduction course that fits into your schedule. This pretty much cuts down the majority of the list. If there was anything interesting, chances are it doesn't fit your schedule. So you treat it like the joke it is --find the easiest one that fits into your schedule because no one gives a shit. Preferably one that you can skip class and still get an A. My favourite quote from the macroeconomics (it was an evening course, so even though I had class from 8 am - 5 pm with no break, I was blessed with an hour off for dinner before returning to campus) professor was right before we wrote the final exam "Most of you don't know this, but I'm your professor!".
I would love to see the humanities take courses in things like basic geology, math, physics, logic, infrastructure, costing, or logic. Most of my humanities friends are woefully ignorant of how the world works, where everything comes from, and the real cost (monetarily, environmentally, etc.) of our society.
I would love to get paid by the hour. My charge out rate runs around $160 USD/hour. I'm always over 100% billable. 40% of my time is spent in the field working 12-16 hour days for 21-28 days straight, sometimes longer. My take home pay is around $75k/year on salary. Last year I billed out over $350,000 in work.
I wish I worked an hour and got paid an hour. Frankly, my employer has me by the balls and squeezes hard every day. This is for a highly specialized job requiring a master's degree and 7+ years of experience. Just the nature of the business. The grass is not greener anywhere else in my field (trust me, I've looked).
I use public transportation to get to and from work (it's actually quicker than driving due to a handy 15 minute foot passenger ferry to short cut two congested bridges) and I would be pissed if my phone company decided that I was 'in motion' while on the bus and thus can't phone/text/etc.
How about some people take some personal responsibility and maybe just don't text and drive like idiots?
You make it sound like all the diamond mines in Canada are a sham. What is with the quotations? I find that to be a very odd stance as I've worked in one of those aforementioned "mines" and it's not a bunch of people blowing rainbows out of their ass waiting for the next plane full of conflict diamonds to land on the ice road.
Up here in Canada where I went to there were regulated and unregulated programs, defined by some government board. Regulated meant that they could only raise tuition a certain amount per year (2% or something like that) and unregulated meant they could pretty much charge whatever they want. I used to go to tuition forecasting that the Dean put on every year as it was a fascinating look at how the university operated. It turns out that they run a lot of the humanities / arts programs in the red because they are not allowed to raise the tuition to an amount that keeps them out of it. The solution was to charge business / engineering / law / medicine more, not just because they are more expensive, but also to subsidize the humanities / arts programs that were not able to break even due to government controls. Even within engineering, there was a huge difference between the amount of money various programs costed. Mech and electrical engineering were actually quite cheap due to the amount of students in them. Over in geological engineering (mine) it costed a lot more per student due to classes with less than 20 students in the program per year, expensive road trips (can't learn that much geology sitting inside), and a high number of faculty.
It's annoying to hear some film major bitch about his a $100 increase to his $1800 tuition when you are busy paying $8-9k/year (on the expensive side for Canada).
as a renter, I view this situation with a measure of caution.
I suspect my unit suffers from leaky-condo-syndrome, with likely a good chunk of the rest of the building. The windows let in quite a lot of water during winter storms here (west coast, so mostly rain). This pools on the windowsill and causes all sorts of water damage plus lets nasty things grow. It's extremely hard to keep on top of (aka: I don't have time to sit there and mop every crevice of every window every time it rains, which is often daily during the wintertime). I also travel for work and am away for weeks at a time. Funny how it never seems to happen when, you know, it's not raining outside.
The landlords solution? Blame me for not using the shower fan while I shower. Seriously. This isn't a cheap place either --it's a $1600/mo apartment. Meanwhile, I have a rather long email trail as well as photographs of it (often) in case he tries to stiff me for damages later (which he probably will).
Can't wait until my lease is up so I can get the hell out of there.
You come across a bit arrogant here that the plebs shouldn't be allowed to write code because they aren't trained to do it. These are undergrads in physics, chemistry, engineering --the majority of whom are not going to end up as programmers. They need enough to get by and anything beyond that is probably a bonus for their employer.
I am an engineer and I certainly don't use the language I learned in school (java in my first year, fortran in my third) because they aren't applicable to my problems. The majority of work I do is on commercial available packages (CAD, specialized 3D CAD, and problem/industry specific modelling software). I'm not out there writing my own finite-element tunnel stability software. I need to be able to parse a variety of different files and do something useful with the output --translate them into various scripts for different projects, drive various programs through COM, etc. Basically ugly little hack scripts or project-specific programs that deal with any of a number of odd file formats or input data the client gives us --and in mining, every client is different and it is a mess.
One piece of in-house software is written in vbscript. It's ugly as sin and I could care less --it works. It cuts out a disgusting amount of hours of work I would have to do if I had to do it by hand. At the end of the day, as an engineer and not a software developer, I need to get my work done. If I need to write programs and occasionally cobble together some in-house tools to assist me then I will, in whatever language I have on hand, regardless of the fact I've had only a "few" months training. Get off your high horse --not everyone is a software developer.
In canada there is another option through the NSERC (natural sciences and engineering research council) scholarship.
There are two kinds, one of which I'm talking about here: The industrial partnership scholarship.
You get a company to sponsor you (and a project) for at least $6k/year, and the government more or less chips in $18k/year. You have to spend 20% of your time with the company working on things related to your thesis (there are some rules about billable time and not taking advantage of you because you (e.g. they can't charge out your time to your clients)). There are no strings attached either (nothing saying you have to work for them when you finish your degree). So you end up with a very focused, industry-relevant thesis , your foot in the door with a company, and a good chunk of change to do research with.
They are easy to get if you have a brain as they seem to be rubber stamped by the government --if you can agree to get a company to give you $12k over 2 years for research then probably aren't a tool. This is how I did my Masters and the topic I focused on and real world problem I was working on gave me very marketable skills.
Masters vary by country. I have found a Masters in North America is a very different beast than a Masters in Europe or Australia. Some places it means just a year or two of pure coursework. Some degrees are like that. Some places it means few classes, but a hell of a lot of research (thesis). It is not a well-defined term
Personally, for me, my masters got me a pay raise (compared to when I shopped for a job before I did my masters) and the pick of the litter for jobs from the companies where I live. Then again, I did a thesis and very few classes, which got me some skills that very few people with an undergrad would be able to get (some of the advanced modelling software I learned is a) expensive b) time intensive --so no job is really going to pay the money to handhold you the 6 months it takes to learn how to use it on even a basic level).
The other part of the masters is the life experience. The school and learning was fine, but the real great part was putting my life on hold for 2 years, starting over in a new city, and finding myself with a shocking amount of free time. Sometimes the masters was way more work than a regular job, sometimes there were lulls where hey, why don't I just piss off and go skiing for 2 weeks straight. Lots of fun times, lots of great people. Don't discount the social part of a masters. You're poor (science research doesn't pay well) but it was a lot of fun.
I live downtown in Vancouver, which is notorious for high prices (to own). Rent seems comparable to other major cities.
No car. Decent transit system ($1200 / year for me, if work was a few blocks closer it would be $600, stupid 2 zone).
I figure the money I save by not having a car more than makes up for the amount I pay for increased rent (living downtown close to work) with the added benefit of living downtown in a major city. It's not a setup for life, but isn't a bad place to be in your twenties. Walking distance to great shops, restaurants, beach. Transit to local mountains / whistler is pretty cheap (easy to hitch a ride off of someone you know going as well).
It's actually cheaper for me to live in Vancouver, than to live in some other major cities in Canada due to placement of offices for my line work --I would need to own a car and the amount of money I save in rent is nothing compared to the price of a car + insurance + gas.
I wasn't coding, mostly doing inspections and updating the support design using this horrible buggy CAD software on toughbooks.
Except I'm in the (mostly) dark, breathing through an airstream helmet (with lovely huge battery to tote around all day), usually in a pool of water (underground is wet), above 500 m down. Toss in the fact that it's a uranium deposit (therefor a higher geothermal gradient) + any air that was getting pipped in was surface temperature (40C+), it got really nasty fast.
Still not as bad as the day they pumped the septic tanks in the underground mechanic bay. God, it stank for weeks underground if you got in any tunnels even remotely close to that place.
When I did my undergrad (in geological engineering which shared a lot of classes with the geologists) there was an older gentleman who really had his stuff together. He was an incredible lab partner, as well as the one who asked the most interesting questions during lecture.
I'm not sure what happened to him --but I'm sure he's successful somewhere.
The tough part with geology is the field work --which gets harder the older you are. Not because you're old, just that you have more responsibilities. It's easy for me to disappear 3-4 weeks to a site for some field work but it's more difficult when you have stuff tying you down in the city. Then again, that can be the appeal!
Best of luck with the geology degree --some of the geology classes were my favorite things in school. I really enjoyed geomorphology (taught by a 93 year old prof who still played on the departments hockey team) and a class on extreme value statistics (natural hazard risk assessment). 3D visualization / GIS out of the geography department was also really interesting --not for the technical knowledge but exposure to really neat urban planning / pysch / early CS papers from the late sixties.
I work in the mining industry as an engineer.
On paper, I travel to exotic places --south america, australia, mongolia. Hell, even Northern Canada sounds exotic and certain times of the year (it can be quite gorgeous).
The sad reality? I pass through all those places, it's often lonely (if I'm the only english speaker on site) and stressful work. Days are 12-14 hours and field tours last 25-35 days straight. Catch a cold? Suck it up. Don't like the food? Suck it up. Only cold water in shower stalls that are growing mushrooms? Suck it up. I certainly don't see the tourist parts or laze up on a beach someplace drinking and eating good food.
That being said, some places have been neat. But they have been neat for the adventure or the thrill of seeing places that most people never get to see --off the beaten path helicopter access only type places. The weather and the other people you are stuck with can make or break the place. Northern alaska on clear nights (nightshift is a reality)? Gorgeous. Northern Alaska in -10 to 0 C rain/snow mixtures while rocking trench foot in both your feet for the past two weeks? Garbage.
I like the field/travel aspect sometimes, but lots can be said for having standard hours and a set work week. It's not like they pay you out the nose to tough it out in the field and muck up your life because you are out of town for 1/3-1/2 the year.
A necessary evil of my job. Occasionally fun, occasionally a toil.
One of my favorite things to do is still to pound the pavement at a local used bookstore. I dislike buying books online as some of the best finds I've had were just from browsing and stacks and looking what catches my eye. You can't do that with a giant internet store --it's only good if you know what you are looking for.
There are several in my area, with the main one being Pulp Fiction books. They have a "incoming" section that rotates all the new stock through and I pop my head in at least once a week. Loads of stuff I would have never read if I was buying online. Add in a helpful staff, all with various likes and dislikes and expertise, and I've gotten to have a good rapport with them. They point me to interesting stuff I may like based off my previous purchases --except the stuff they recommend is far better than the stuff that comes out of amazon's automated system. We trade books, interesting links, jokes, movie thoughts, etc.
I wouldn't trade it for the world. I happily buy 10-15 books a month from these guys. They've started up really trading a lot of used graphic novels and the collection is looking promising.
Brick and mortar shops are NOT dead and I hope mine stays around for a long time to come.
I once saw William Gibson perusing the stacks in it --try that at an online store.
I'm also a first-generation university graduate.
I watched my parents bust their ass with two jobs each to make ends meet, so you know, I could have food and a roof over my head.
My first job out of university paid more than both my parents income combined.
How could I not avoid going into debt? Even in Canada, where school is cheap compared to you US folks --say 8-9k/year tuition + living expenses, books, etc. I did a degree in Engineering (geological) and had no time for a part time job. It wasn't worth it. I could bust my ass and get more scholarship money with marks than I could by shafting my studies and getting some garbage part-time job during the year. I worked every summer between terms, often in not-nice-but-money-grabbing jobs. A term of field work for DeBeers (aka: lugging rocks on my back, 6 days a week, 10-12 hours a day), uranium mining in the middle of nowhere in Australia (don't get me started), and working nightshift (7pm - 7am) on the rigs in central Alaska.
I had a mild, mild surplus of money at the end of my B.Sc. Maybe a few thousand. Job market was good but I took a dive to grad school. Fast forward two years, just started work at the worst possible time with 30k of debt on the books. Could I have done anything different? Probably not. The fact that I have a master's is saving me from the chopping block currently vs. the other juniors (even the ones with 2 years experience).
Some people's parents don't have the money to send their kids to school.
Provided the metal market stops crashing, I should be good shape. But in today's market, with all the cuts going on, you think the people who didn't get to University are getting jobs either? Hell no.
Specialists often get paid more and school is not getting any cheaper.
What is a generalist anyways?
I do geological engineering, in itself a pretty 'specialized' type of engineering compared to the rest (I know nothing of steel, concrete, electronics, etc)
Within my own fairly 'specialized' field there are are further specialties in:
soils, earthquake engineering (ground), permafrost engineering, rock, slope stability, landslides, tunnel engineering [which further divides into underground mining vs. civil tunnels], subsurface contamination, earth embankment dams [also: tailing impoundments]..
You, generally, can't do all of those and be any good at it. I've been doing this for 6 years and I have no experience in half of those, and a quarter of those my only experience was the classroom (e.g. negligible). Companies hire specialists for this reason, often at high cost.
And often in today's market, if you don't specialize then you're the first one on the chopping block when money is tight.
I also fail to see the whizbang neato section.
Also.. limited by the effect of the flash.
Modern photogrammetrical methods are, quite frankly, astounding. I was recently at a photogrammetry and LIDAR conference for imaging pit slopes and it was fascinating. Some software relied on using a simple digital camera and a decent lens (which was calibrated to account for radial distortion) and could return shockingly good results with good accuracy. In these cases, the distance to the object (the pit face) being shot can be significant and a flash would not have had a hope in hell of finding this.
Mind you, this stuff is being used for picking our orientations of joints/faults/bedding for generation of stereonets. Accuracy is getting down there though and is beginning to be used to see the total slope deformation over time.
Not sure.... but it is in the same stretch where a smaller rock fall (half size? maybe) came down and killed some folks sometime in the sixties.
It definitely looks structurally controlled so even if it was the granite... doesn't matter if it's just big heavy blocks sliding on a rough surface (think highschool physics class). Friction angles on those things can range quite heavily (15-40?) depending on the roughness, undulation, infilling (something low friction like chlorite..). I'll look into it, harass my supervisors who are working it.
This is actually what I do for a living --assess the stability of rock slopes. Those guys in vests you see going in before anyone else does, that's me. Though I did not work on this particular case and I usually look at larger scale failures in open pit mines.
In all honesty, they've done what they can. There is no way of 100% securing that highway, or frankly any mountainous highway in difficult terrain. The highway is as safe as reasonably achievable and is inherited from the 60's when our understanding of geomaterials was significantly less than what it is now. Would a tunnel in places be better now? Probably. But it comes down to money and what people are willing to pay. Quoted 3-4 billion for a new route and you can be damn sure there would be budget overruns. It's one of those assumed risks for living in an area with high natural hazard risks.
Hey, the big earthquake that is supposed to be hitting Vancouver any day now could happen during the Olympics. Hell, one could hit china. The world isn't a 100% thing as much as we think we can understand it and it's very true in natural rock slopes where you are dealing with limited data (strength, joint network, etc) of a highly variable system (properties can be difficult to impossible to measure, vary wildly, and have an insane amount of scale effects). You can get the intact strength of rock out of UCS/triaxial tests, you can get the shear strength along discontinuities. Extrapolating that to the entire slope for the complex interaction of sliding surfaces (joints, where you have a guess of what's there but you don't know 100% because it's buried), block movement/crushing/aspherity removal, natrual processes (weathering, frost jacking, tree roots, animal burrowing, strain softening, etc) is difficult and not 100%
If you don't want to have to deal with road closures due to the fact you live somewhere gorgeous in the mountains and have to drive on a road where there IS a risk of rock falls --tough, go live in the Prairies.
Slashdot Mirror
Futhark looks cool: https://futhark-lang.org/ and promising in this realm.
"Futhark is a small programming language designed to be compiled to efficient parallel code. It is a statically typed, data-parallel, and purely functional array language in the ML family, and comes with a heavily optimising ahead-of-time compiler that presently generates GPU code via CUDA and OpenCL"
the ML family of languages being things like Standard-ML, Haskell, OcaML.
I wish the engineering world worked as you described. And yes, I am an engineer (Master's in geological engineering, and my PE/P.Eng thank you very much).
The sad truth is that there is a hell of lot of engineering time spent on mundane work that can and should be automated away --most of my life was spent pushing around columns in excel, hunting down typos, and debugging god awful analyses written in excel. I jokingly refer to heavy infrastructure engineering (I did landslides, soils, mines, tunnels, rail, etc.) as the place where technology goes to die.
Most of the clients demand cost-reimbursable billed hour contracts, so it's also where efficiency goes to die. Better to have a junior engineer spend 4 weeks pushing data around and billing it out than optimizing that task so the engineer can spend their 'guru time' thinking about concrete loadings, failure modes, gaps in the design. I picked up a lot of fortran, R, python, and even lisp on the job working on automating the garbage tasks that took up 75% of my time so I could spend more time/budget on actual important design implementation issues (so I could sleep easy at night when I stamped designs). Saving 5-10% budget was appreciated (we can win more contracts!) but figuring out how to do something 2x, 3x, 4x as fast was not ("We won't make any money because we aren't billing enough hours!").
This is why I'm back at school doing a Master's in statistics/machine learning --couldn't handle the amount of BS tasks that should have been automated away keeping me away from the interesting and challenging parts of my job, with no improvements in sight. I do not miss nightmares analyses (for an earthquake soils design of an LNG plant) spread across _3,000_ excel sheets and 60+ directories, combining the output of multiple different versions of garbage software run by different teams in different countries. Oh god. Doing the quality control on that? Nope. Nope. Nope. That was two months of my life I'm not getting back. And this was with a well known, highly reputable design firm!
two tons is not that much. Assuming metric, sand/gravel is around 2000 kg / cubic meter, or you know, 2 tonnes. So really the above is saying that you require a cubic meter of sand to create a barrel of oil.
Maybe I would understand this better if it was given to me in library of congresses.
qd.
There is more to engineering than electrical engineering.
I'm a geological engineer up in Canada. Lots of demand and we have our finger in a lot of different projects/industries. I deal mostly with rock mechanics, and the world outsources to us basically. I work on projects all over the world. I don't see myself getting the axe any time soon. When shit hits the fan and things are collapsing, you kind of need someone on the ground who knows what to do before your 5 billion dollar open pit mine floods (for example).
Quite a lovely field. When mining booms, there is a lot of work. When infrastructure projects boom, there is a lot of work. When hydropower projects boom, there is a lot of work. You need a few major industries to collapse (mining is tanking a bit right now) for it to unravel completely. Lots of opportunities to turn into a manger, jump ship to a client / operator, etc. And North America is still very much a major player in this industry. Lots of niche markets and employee-owned firms. Decent pay.
Downside: lots of travel in the early days, hard on family/relationship/life.
-qd
Here is how it works folks:
In schools in Canada you already have to do this. This was true at my school (Queen's) from 2002 - 2006. The problem is they give you the least interesting course list to choose from. There were lots of great courses I wanted to take, such as an english course in science fiction. Not allowed --did not have the pre-req. Instead you pull from the driest of 100 level courses. On top of that, you are taking 6 to 9 STEM courses and dying under the workload. Then you have to find a dry, introduction course that fits into your schedule. This pretty much cuts down the majority of the list. If there was anything interesting, chances are it doesn't fit your schedule. So you treat it like the joke it is --find the easiest one that fits into your schedule because no one gives a shit. Preferably one that you can skip class and still get an A. My favourite quote from the macroeconomics (it was an evening course, so even though I had class from 8 am - 5 pm with no break, I was blessed with an hour off for dinner before returning to campus) professor was right before we wrote the final exam "Most of you don't know this, but I'm your professor!".
I would love to see the humanities take courses in things like basic geology, math, physics, logic, infrastructure, costing, or logic. Most of my humanities friends are woefully ignorant of how the world works, where everything comes from, and the real cost (monetarily, environmentally, etc.) of our society.
I would love to get paid by the hour. My charge out rate runs around $160 USD/hour. I'm always over 100% billable. 40% of my time is spent in the field working 12-16 hour days for 21-28 days straight, sometimes longer. My take home pay is around $75k/year on salary. Last year I billed out over $350,000 in work.
I wish I worked an hour and got paid an hour. Frankly, my employer has me by the balls and squeezes hard every day. This is for a highly specialized job requiring a master's degree and 7+ years of experience. Just the nature of the business. The grass is not greener anywhere else in my field (trust me, I've looked).
I use public transportation to get to and from work (it's actually quicker than driving due to a handy 15 minute foot passenger ferry to short cut two congested bridges) and I would be pissed if my phone company decided that I was 'in motion' while on the bus and thus can't phone/text/etc.
How about some people take some personal responsibility and maybe just don't text and drive like idiots?
You make it sound like all the diamond mines in Canada are a sham. What is with the quotations? I find that to be a very odd stance as I've worked in one of those aforementioned "mines" and it's not a bunch of people blowing rainbows out of their ass waiting for the next plane full of conflict diamonds to land on the ice road.
I just want to say that you have given one of the best replies I have ever read on Slashdot.
Thank you.
It depends on the school.
Up here in Canada where I went to there were regulated and unregulated programs, defined by some government board. Regulated meant that they could only raise tuition a certain amount per year (2% or something like that) and unregulated meant they could pretty much charge whatever they want. I used to go to tuition forecasting that the Dean put on every year as it was a fascinating look at how the university operated. It turns out that they run a lot of the humanities / arts programs in the red because they are not allowed to raise the tuition to an amount that keeps them out of it. The solution was to charge business / engineering / law / medicine more, not just because they are more expensive, but also to subsidize the humanities / arts programs that were not able to break even due to government controls. Even within engineering, there was a huge difference between the amount of money various programs costed. Mech and electrical engineering were actually quite cheap due to the amount of students in them. Over in geological engineering (mine) it costed a lot more per student due to classes with less than 20 students in the program per year, expensive road trips (can't learn that much geology sitting inside), and a high number of faculty.
It's annoying to hear some film major bitch about his a $100 increase to his $1800 tuition when you are busy paying $8-9k/year (on the expensive side for Canada).
as a renter, I view this situation with a measure of caution.
I suspect my unit suffers from leaky-condo-syndrome, with likely a good chunk of the rest of the building. The windows let in quite a lot of water during winter storms here (west coast, so mostly rain). This pools on the windowsill and causes all sorts of water damage plus lets nasty things grow. It's extremely hard to keep on top of (aka: I don't have time to sit there and mop every crevice of every window every time it rains, which is often daily during the wintertime). I also travel for work and am away for weeks at a time. Funny how it never seems to happen when, you know, it's not raining outside.
The landlords solution? Blame me for not using the shower fan while I shower. Seriously. This isn't a cheap place either --it's a $1600/mo apartment. Meanwhile, I have a rather long email trail as well as photographs of it (often) in case he tries to stiff me for damages later (which he probably will).
Can't wait until my lease is up so I can get the hell out of there.
Revolutionary. It will be resistant to terrorists attacks because it will obviously be _guarded_ by tornadoes.
You come across a bit arrogant here that the plebs shouldn't be allowed to write code because they aren't trained to do it. These are undergrads in physics, chemistry, engineering --the majority of whom are not going to end up as programmers. They need enough to get by and anything beyond that is probably a bonus for their employer.
I am an engineer and I certainly don't use the language I learned in school (java in my first year, fortran in my third) because they aren't applicable to my problems. The majority of work I do is on commercial available packages (CAD, specialized 3D CAD, and problem/industry specific modelling software). I'm not out there writing my own finite-element tunnel stability software. I need to be able to parse a variety of different files and do something useful with the output --translate them into various scripts for different projects, drive various programs through COM, etc. Basically ugly little hack scripts or project-specific programs that deal with any of a number of odd file formats or input data the client gives us --and in mining, every client is different and it is a mess.
One piece of in-house software is written in vbscript. It's ugly as sin and I could care less --it works. It cuts out a disgusting amount of hours of work I would have to do if I had to do it by hand. At the end of the day, as an engineer and not a software developer, I need to get my work done. If I need to write programs and occasionally cobble together some in-house tools to assist me then I will, in whatever language I have on hand, regardless of the fact I've had only a "few" months training. Get off your high horse --not everyone is a software developer.
Cheers
In canada there is another option through the NSERC (natural sciences and engineering research council) scholarship.
There are two kinds, one of which I'm talking about here: The industrial partnership scholarship.
You get a company to sponsor you (and a project) for at least $6k/year, and the government more or less chips in $18k/year. You have to spend 20% of your time with the company working on things related to your thesis (there are some rules about billable time and not taking advantage of you because you (e.g. they can't charge out your time to your clients)). There are no strings attached either (nothing saying you have to work for them when you finish your degree). So you end up with a very focused, industry-relevant thesis , your foot in the door with a company, and a good chunk of change to do research with.
They are easy to get if you have a brain as they seem to be rubber stamped by the government --if you can agree to get a company to give you $12k over 2 years for research then probably aren't a tool. This is how I did my Masters and the topic I focused on and real world problem I was working on gave me very marketable skills.
Masters vary by country. I have found a Masters in North America is a very different beast than a Masters in Europe or Australia. Some places it means just a year or two of pure coursework. Some degrees are like that. Some places it means few classes, but a hell of a lot of research (thesis). It is not a well-defined term
Personally, for me, my masters got me a pay raise (compared to when I shopped for a job before I did my masters) and the pick of the litter for jobs from the companies where I live. Then again, I did a thesis and very few classes, which got me some skills that very few people with an undergrad would be able to get (some of the advanced modelling software I learned is a) expensive b) time intensive --so no job is really going to pay the money to handhold you the 6 months it takes to learn how to use it on even a basic level).
The other part of the masters is the life experience. The school and learning was fine, but the real great part was putting my life on hold for 2 years, starting over in a new city, and finding myself with a shocking amount of free time. Sometimes the masters was way more work than a regular job, sometimes there were lulls where hey, why don't I just piss off and go skiing for 2 weeks straight. Lots of fun times, lots of great people. Don't discount the social part of a masters. You're poor (science research doesn't pay well) but it was a lot of fun.
I live downtown in Vancouver, which is notorious for high prices (to own). Rent seems comparable to other major cities. No car. Decent transit system ($1200 / year for me, if work was a few blocks closer it would be $600, stupid 2 zone).
I figure the money I save by not having a car more than makes up for the amount I pay for increased rent (living downtown close to work) with the added benefit of living downtown in a major city. It's not a setup for life, but isn't a bad place to be in your twenties. Walking distance to great shops, restaurants, beach. Transit to local mountains / whistler is pretty cheap (easy to hitch a ride off of someone you know going as well).
It's actually cheaper for me to live in Vancouver, than to live in some other major cities in Canada due to placement of offices for my line work --I would need to own a car and the amount of money I save in rent is nothing compared to the price of a car + insurance + gas.
It all depends where you live though.
I wasn't coding, mostly doing inspections and updating the support design using this horrible buggy CAD software on toughbooks.
Except I'm in the (mostly) dark, breathing through an airstream helmet (with lovely huge battery to tote around all day), usually in a pool of water (underground is wet), above 500 m down. Toss in the fact that it's a uranium deposit (therefor a higher geothermal gradient) + any air that was getting pipped in was surface temperature (40C+), it got really nasty fast.
Still not as bad as the day they pumped the septic tanks in the underground mechanic bay. God, it stank for weeks underground if you got in any tunnels even remotely close to that place.
Go for the geology degree!
When I did my undergrad (in geological engineering which shared a lot of classes with the geologists) there was an older gentleman who really had his stuff together. He was an incredible lab partner, as well as the one who asked the most interesting questions during lecture.
I'm not sure what happened to him --but I'm sure he's successful somewhere.
The tough part with geology is the field work --which gets harder the older you are. Not because you're old, just that you have more responsibilities. It's easy for me to disappear 3-4 weeks to a site for some field work but it's more difficult when you have stuff tying you down in the city. Then again, that can be the appeal!
Best of luck with the geology degree --some of the geology classes were my favorite things in school. I really enjoyed geomorphology (taught by a 93 year old prof who still played on the departments hockey team) and a class on extreme value statistics (natural hazard risk assessment). 3D visualization / GIS out of the geography department was also really interesting --not for the technical knowledge but exposure to really neat urban planning / pysch / early CS papers from the late sixties.
I work in the mining industry as an engineer. On paper, I travel to exotic places --south america, australia, mongolia. Hell, even Northern Canada sounds exotic and certain times of the year (it can be quite gorgeous).
The sad reality? I pass through all those places, it's often lonely (if I'm the only english speaker on site) and stressful work. Days are 12-14 hours and field tours last 25-35 days straight. Catch a cold? Suck it up. Don't like the food? Suck it up. Only cold water in shower stalls that are growing mushrooms? Suck it up. I certainly don't see the tourist parts or laze up on a beach someplace drinking and eating good food.
That being said, some places have been neat. But they have been neat for the adventure or the thrill of seeing places that most people never get to see --off the beaten path helicopter access only type places. The weather and the other people you are stuck with can make or break the place. Northern alaska on clear nights (nightshift is a reality)? Gorgeous. Northern Alaska in -10 to 0 C rain/snow mixtures while rocking trench foot in both your feet for the past two weeks? Garbage.
I like the field/travel aspect sometimes, but lots can be said for having standard hours and a set work week. It's not like they pay you out the nose to tough it out in the field and muck up your life because you are out of town for 1/3-1/2 the year.
A necessary evil of my job. Occasionally fun, occasionally a toil.
One of my favorite things to do is still to pound the pavement at a local used bookstore. I dislike buying books online as some of the best finds I've had were just from browsing and stacks and looking what catches my eye. You can't do that with a giant internet store --it's only good if you know what you are looking for.
There are several in my area, with the main one being Pulp Fiction books. They have a "incoming" section that rotates all the new stock through and I pop my head in at least once a week. Loads of stuff I would have never read if I was buying online. Add in a helpful staff, all with various likes and dislikes and expertise, and I've gotten to have a good rapport with them. They point me to interesting stuff I may like based off my previous purchases --except the stuff they recommend is far better than the stuff that comes out of amazon's automated system. We trade books, interesting links, jokes, movie thoughts, etc.
I wouldn't trade it for the world. I happily buy 10-15 books a month from these guys. They've started up really trading a lot of used graphic novels and the collection is looking promising.
Brick and mortar shops are NOT dead and I hope mine stays around for a long time to come. I once saw William Gibson perusing the stacks in it --try that at an online store.
I'm also a first-generation university graduate. I watched my parents bust their ass with two jobs each to make ends meet, so you know, I could have food and a roof over my head.
My first job out of university paid more than both my parents income combined.
How could I not avoid going into debt? Even in Canada, where school is cheap compared to you US folks --say 8-9k/year tuition + living expenses, books, etc. I did a degree in Engineering (geological) and had no time for a part time job. It wasn't worth it. I could bust my ass and get more scholarship money with marks than I could by shafting my studies and getting some garbage part-time job during the year. I worked every summer between terms, often in not-nice-but-money-grabbing jobs. A term of field work for DeBeers (aka: lugging rocks on my back, 6 days a week, 10-12 hours a day), uranium mining in the middle of nowhere in Australia (don't get me started), and working nightshift (7pm - 7am) on the rigs in central Alaska.
I had a mild, mild surplus of money at the end of my B.Sc. Maybe a few thousand. Job market was good but I took a dive to grad school. Fast forward two years, just started work at the worst possible time with 30k of debt on the books. Could I have done anything different? Probably not. The fact that I have a master's is saving me from the chopping block currently vs. the other juniors (even the ones with 2 years experience).
Some people's parents don't have the money to send their kids to school.
Provided the metal market stops crashing, I should be good shape. But in today's market, with all the cuts going on, you think the people who didn't get to University are getting jobs either? Hell no.
Specialists often get paid more and school is not getting any cheaper.
..
What is a generalist anyways?
I do geological engineering, in itself a pretty 'specialized' type of engineering compared to the rest (I know nothing of steel, concrete, electronics, etc)
Within my own fairly 'specialized' field there are are further specialties in: soils, earthquake engineering (ground), permafrost engineering, rock, slope stability, landslides, tunnel engineering [which further divides into underground mining vs. civil tunnels], subsurface contamination, earth embankment dams [also: tailing impoundments]
You, generally, can't do all of those and be any good at it. I've been doing this for 6 years and I have no experience in half of those, and a quarter of those my only experience was the classroom (e.g. negligible). Companies hire specialists for this reason, often at high cost.
And often in today's market, if you don't specialize then you're the first one on the chopping block when money is tight.
I also fail to see the whizbang neato section. Also.. limited by the effect of the flash. Modern photogrammetrical methods are, quite frankly, astounding. I was recently at a photogrammetry and LIDAR conference for imaging pit slopes and it was fascinating. Some software relied on using a simple digital camera and a decent lens (which was calibrated to account for radial distortion) and could return shockingly good results with good accuracy. In these cases, the distance to the object (the pit face) being shot can be significant and a flash would not have had a hope in hell of finding this.
Mind you, this stuff is being used for picking our orientations of joints/faults/bedding for generation of stereonets. Accuracy is getting down there though and is beginning to be used to see the total slope deformation over time.
Not sure.... but it is in the same stretch where a smaller rock fall (half size? maybe) came down and killed some folks sometime in the sixties. It definitely looks structurally controlled so even if it was the granite... doesn't matter if it's just big heavy blocks sliding on a rough surface (think highschool physics class). Friction angles on those things can range quite heavily (15-40?) depending on the roughness, undulation, infilling (something low friction like chlorite..). I'll look into it, harass my supervisors who are working it.
This is actually what I do for a living --assess the stability of rock slopes. Those guys in vests you see going in before anyone else does, that's me. Though I did not work on this particular case and I usually look at larger scale failures in open pit mines.
In all honesty, they've done what they can. There is no way of 100% securing that highway, or frankly any mountainous highway in difficult terrain. The highway is as safe as reasonably achievable and is inherited from the 60's when our understanding of geomaterials was significantly less than what it is now. Would a tunnel in places be better now? Probably. But it comes down to money and what people are willing to pay. Quoted 3-4 billion for a new route and you can be damn sure there would be budget overruns. It's one of those assumed risks for living in an area with high natural hazard risks.
Hey, the big earthquake that is supposed to be hitting Vancouver any day now could happen during the Olympics. Hell, one could hit china. The world isn't a 100% thing as much as we think we can understand it and it's very true in natural rock slopes where you are dealing with limited data (strength, joint network, etc) of a highly variable system (properties can be difficult to impossible to measure, vary wildly, and have an insane amount of scale effects). You can get the intact strength of rock out of UCS/triaxial tests, you can get the shear strength along discontinuities. Extrapolating that to the entire slope for the complex interaction of sliding surfaces (joints, where you have a guess of what's there but you don't know 100% because it's buried), block movement/crushing/aspherity removal, natrual processes (weathering, frost jacking, tree roots, animal burrowing, strain softening, etc) is difficult and not 100%
If you don't want to have to deal with road closures due to the fact you live somewhere gorgeous in the mountains and have to drive on a road where there IS a risk of rock falls --tough, go live in the Prairies.