I think this is a fine example of something I suspect goes on a lot: employers think that each piece of technology and language and protocol that has a name or acronym should be listed on a candidate's resume, while smart potential employees think it's not worth diluting their resume with all the 'obvious' things. I mean, my resume doesn't have 'writing' or 'soldering' or give any clue that I can eat or drive a car or have been potty trained.
Potential Boss: So, your resume doesn't list "potty-trained." Can you comment on that? Candidate (blushing): Um, yeah, well this is kinda embarrassing, but, er, my parents, uh, never actually...
So maybe it's wise for smart people to add something like 'can figure out new and unknown electronic protocols pretty darn quick' but then a hundred other 'can figure out...' type things deserve just as well to be written. A resume full of mush like that, however true, becomes unfocused.
It's really more a matter of employers understanding the word 'smart' better.
I've always been fascinated by that time in the mid-20th Century known as the Space Age. The public was excited about "atomic power" as it was known then, breaking the sound barrier, the moon race, and all that. That, and certain strands of modern art combined to make architectural elements echoing the themes of space and atomic/nuclear physics - orbits, star shapes, etc. These memes escaped their birthnests and could be found all over - restaurants, gas stations, signage, furniture, etc. Regular Joes and their families bought "transistor radios" - cool stuff back then! Color TV became real for most people in the 1960s or 1970s. Computers and anything NASA did were the ultimate in coolness. There was a lot to be excited about. (And of course, plenty of stuff best left ignored, as in any era.)
Now that I think about it, seems like many areas of engineering and science made contributions that lead to product ideas that lead to stuff everyone could get in their hands or see while driving about town.
Yeah, STEM needs to be cool and resume giving things to the people.
What new gadgets, or imagined gadgets, does everyone yearn for? Tablets and smartphones, okay, those are cool. These are wonderful for practical reasons, but somehow not as amazing as small radios were fifty years ago, only the logical next step in miniaturizing known technology. We have amazing TVs/monitors now, too. What are the big itches to explore we can all rally together under? Orbit the Earth? Been there done that. What next? Deep sea exploration impresses some people, but hasn't influenced the arts or architecture or much of anything else.
Any/. subscriber knows there's no shortage of awesome science and new technology today. But much of it is so remote from practicality, very abstract. Our most important ideas don't translate as easily into physical expression. What can a architect or industrial designer do with the idea of Higgs bosons? Have we made a decent effort with that? How 'bout nanotechnology memes incorporated into architectural decorations? Sadly, architecture has been lacking in any decorative drive the last couple decades (see Against the Architects of Empire, essay by theorist Nikos Salingaros) That needs to change.
Everyone, your missions are to think up things that are amazing and that can, in principle, lead to something practical that Regular Joe can hold in hand or see while driving about on errands or weekend trips. Do the science, or invent something from the science, or find ways to express the key ideas in some artsy way within reach of the general population. Stuff on the internet doesn't count. Actual physical reality needs to carry the banner of Current Hot Science Ideas.
Never been up one either. Watching on video gives me enough of a taste. See Dirty Jobs, Season 3 Episode 31 "Wind Farm Technician" (according to that reliable fount of knowledge, wikipedia.)
Specifically, we're dealing with the arrangment of the wave in space, the phase relations of different portions of the wavefront. The additional channel capacity comes from having (in principle) unlimited transverse space for the wavefront to occupy.
It's sort of as if several straight narrow beams of radiation (e.g laser beams) were side by side. One beam is limited in information content as usual, but it's parallel buddy can carry independent information. Have as many parallel beams as you like. Now this isn't really practical, but by adding different linear combinations of beams, you can create orthogonal states with well-defined rotational (about the axis of propagation) properties.
Example: just add all the parallel beams in-phase. This is one big fat beam with zero angular momentum.
Another example: add all the beams on the left side of the bunch and subtract all the ones on the right side (putting it crudely) to get a fat beam that changes sign when rotated 180 deg about its axis. It has a partner, top half minus bottom half, so they are like sine and cosine. Add and subtract these two with complex coefficients, to be 90 degrees out of phase, for +1 and -1 states of angular momentum.
With N parallel beams, you can define N different "twisted beam" states. The hope is that these states, or at least a good fraction of them, survive the usual impediments to propagation - scattering, multipath interference etc - without mixing together. That's how we would carry "unlimited" capacity, although it's really limited by the size of the receiving array in terms of wavelength, necessary to distinguish these twisted beam states.
Orbital angular momentum of a wave is unrelated to its polarization. It's like the difference between an electron's spin and its orbiting about a nucleus. Or, for an astronomy analogy, confusing polarization with the wavefront's angular momentum is like confusing days with years. Of course we're dealing with a broad wave spread throughout space in one case vs. a compact hard body in the other. But same distinction - a built-in symmetry in the naure of an object or field vs. a symmetry due to how it's arranged or moving in space.
Absolutely! To run a business, and I mean run it successfully not run it into the ground, one must be open to all manner of products, brands, philosophies, etc according to what good paying customers want, at least within the range of whatever market the business inhabits. Pushing or promoting a philosophy, such as open source, is for religion, politics and blogging. It would take some sophisticated and deft marketing to sway the customers' thinking, and even then must start with where the customer already are and what they already use. The OP doesn't seem like that sort of thinker.
You have tickled a few of my neurons that haven't had anything to do since 1994.
Really, what kind of company would want to test someone on such things? * a computer museum * a BIOS engineering firm * a company too cheap to upgrade to Windows95 - even now (if it ain't broke...) * a company too ignorant to develop or pay for or otherwise obtain a way to test candidates on contemporary computing knowledge
Unless you're a BIOS engineer or it's a very well funded and lively musuem, just say no.
This is a good point. I have a friend who understands marketing and sales, and we both worked for the same astronomer one year. We both have contacts in several industries and have seen things from different sides. Most scientists suck at marketing. It's not that they need to push products on hesitant buyers, run price wars, or watch the average $/sqft of their retail spaces. Marketing is about understanding the overlap of what someone wants and what can be offered. Scientists who are successful in landing grants, who handle larger grants or multiple grants, are better at making their work known and explaining why it's relevant in terms that are interesting to the grant providers and other supporters.
One misconception common among many engineers and scientists is that career success comes from having a brilliant idea, then patenting it, start making it, maybe starting a company and selling it for profit, all one-way. In real life, it takes starting with the market, knowing what is needed, and always getting feedback along the way. This does not mean simply giving potential customers what they say they want - as Henry Ford noted long ago, if it were up to the customers they'd ask only for faster horses and carriages. A sharp marketer will note that what is really in demand is faster, easier, cheaper travel, and that certain engineers have contraption that, with development, could meet that need in some way. A great wealth-generating world-changing product might not even involve a 'brilliant idea' or genuinely fresh invention.
Marketing is the field in which we gain wisdom and practical skills in such things. It applies as well to fundamental science as it does to engineering.
As a cousin of one of those afflicted darlings, I can tell you she does indeed know about squares and inverses, and is overall rather high in IQ and college educated. Her dad (now deceased) was an electronics instructor, and two uncles were engineers.
I don't know anything about the other afflicted darlings, however.
Unless you want to work in two or more wildly unrelated fields, a CS degree probably isn't the most useful choice. A CS degree means spending time on database theory and operating system theory and language theory and networks of the sort used only by large organizations not car engines or solar panel farms, and other abstractions that won't be useful. Go for it if you find it interesting, but most of it isn't going to overlap.
The biggest area of software knowledge you'll use will probably be for device control, instrumentation and data acquisition, embedded and such, and for those things often EEs do better than CS majors, at least as far as I've seen. (Disclaimer: I do not know all or see all...but I have worked in industry and academia.) CS probably won't cover at all SCADA, GPIB, OBD2 and dozens of other interface and bus technologies useful in engine development or the energy industry. (And these are much more fun to work with than most other things in computing - my personal opinion.)
In dealing with the real world, where energy and safety are at stake, engineers and physicists seem to do better with avoiding overdesigning software (except when they get carried away with some software development fad) while CS majors tend to go off to la-la land with class hierarchies and overgeneralized designs. There are exceptions, of course.
The other big use for software in the areas of energy efficiency, engines, and such, is simulation. Simulations that take into account more real-world effects, higher resolution detail, and provide ways for engineers to try more design variations per unit time to find the optimum tradeoffs. While a good simulation app takes serious software engineering, much of the work is done by physicists. OTOH, many physicists write crappy spaghetti code. Efforts like Software Carpentry are helping to improve things.
But really, the area of systems engineering might overall be the best for the goals you describe. It connects the other areas of engineering, economics, and knowing physics and software development wouldn't hurt for being a good systems engineer.
I know many scientists and engineers who are good at software, never took a class or very few from the CS departments, and are the key players in the software they use for practical cutting edge R&D and production. Depth and breadth of engineering, science and a bit of business seems to have been worth more in their careers.
So if it's up for a vote, I say Systems Engineering, or as a second choice Physics.
Now I know where in the country to direct my next job hunt... this is the good stuff that's been so hard to find open positions for the last few years!
Yeah, I have suffered a job working on code like that, very over-done OO. While it is common to observe that scientists/whoever write messy unmaintainable code, the very worst I'd ever seen was written by CS majors fresh with a degree, or others new into the career of software development, and eager to harshly apply all those design patterns and rules of thumb.
Funny, how ideas meant to make software work go better has the opposite effect in eager young hands.
"You can immediately look at code and tell who was trained to program by/as a scientist and who actually learned as a programmer"
Would a scientist and a professional programmer be equally good at detecting the difference?
In my own twisted career started out in physics, electronics and math, then got into video production, photography and fine art, but for most of my life, software work paid the rent despite flat zero formal education in software/CS. I'm not quite either category, scientist or programmer, but really in a third category - artsy creative - and of course there are many other styles of thinking.
Looking at a scientist's code and professional software engineer's code, they'd be just "different kinds of messes" to my right-brained spatial-artsy-impressionistic way of mentation. I certainly don't see professional programmer's code as any more "readable" than other code. OTOH I'd expect anyone with a real software/CS education to see a big difference.
Maybe it would be a good career-fit test to ask a candidate if they discern any difference between the work of talented people in their desired field and the work of talented practitioners of other fields who must attempt work in that field. Someone who doesn't see a difference should look for work in different field...
Although, no matter what else, I will agree, most physicists write atrocious code!
We physicists and EEs also need...
on
Happy Tau Day
·
· Score: 1
exp(2 pi i x) where x is some simple expression of time or distance occurs a *lot*. Years ago, I invented a symbol for exp(2pi*i): a one with a tilde superimposed in the middle. e^(2pi*i) does indeed compute to 1.0, but taken to some power x, of course we don't mean (1)^x but what exp(2 pi i x) normally means. A one with a tilde superimposed reminds us to do this. This notation makes many formulas involving Fourier transforms, waves, AC circuit analysis, and quantum mechanics nice and elegant, and 1 with the tilde is not a challenge for Latex or Lout.
For 2pi, I sometimes use a circle with a dot at the center. Tau is way too overloaded, as has been pointed out already.
I'm confused as to whether Ubuntu is trying to be Microsoft or trying to be Apple. Either way, they're departing from the ideals of Linux and unix in general.
I no longer think of Ubuntu as yet another Linux distro; Ubuntu is really its own operating system, at the level of Windows, OS X, Linux/gnu, BSD. So it happens to use the Linux kernel, Debian packaging, etc. Compare it to BeOS, also unixy under the hood but really its own operating system even if a lot of the common gnu software was used on it.
Yeah, the deuling libraries is part of it. Also, the choice between D1 vs D2, 32 bit vs 64 bit platforms, and some other issues I've forgotten about - these are not orthogonal choices. Only certain combinations of library, 64bit etc exist. My project needed a combination that wasn't available at the time. So we wait...
There's no difference between available and compulsory if you spend any time at all fixing and adding to code written by someone else. That would be about 99% of all of us.
Slashdot Mirror
Oooh! Hire me!!
I think this is a fine example of something I suspect goes on a lot: employers think that each piece of technology and language and protocol that has a name or acronym should be listed on a candidate's resume, while smart potential employees think it's not worth diluting their resume with all the 'obvious' things. I mean, my resume doesn't have 'writing' or 'soldering' or give any clue that I can eat or drive a car or have been potty trained.
Potential Boss: So, your resume doesn't list "potty-trained." Can you comment on that?
Candidate (blushing): Um, yeah, well this is kinda embarrassing, but, er, my parents, uh, never actually...
So maybe it's wise for smart people to add something like 'can figure out new and unknown electronic protocols pretty darn quick' but then a hundred other 'can figure out...' type things deserve just as well to be written. A resume full of mush like that, however true, becomes unfocused.
It's really more a matter of employers understanding the word 'smart' better.
I've always been fascinated by that time in the mid-20th Century known as the Space Age. The public was excited about "atomic power" as it was known then, breaking the sound barrier, the moon race, and all that. That, and certain strands of modern art combined to make architectural elements echoing the themes of space and atomic/nuclear physics - orbits, star shapes, etc. These memes escaped their birthnests and could be found all over - restaurants, gas stations, signage, furniture, etc. Regular Joes and their families bought "transistor radios" - cool stuff back then! Color TV became real for most people in the 1960s or 1970s. Computers and anything NASA did were the ultimate in coolness. There was a lot to be excited about. (And of course, plenty of stuff best left ignored, as in any era.)
Now that I think about it, seems like many areas of engineering and science made contributions that lead to product ideas that lead to stuff everyone could get in their hands or see while driving about town.
Yeah, STEM needs to be cool and resume giving things to the people.
What new gadgets, or imagined gadgets, does everyone yearn for? Tablets and smartphones, okay, those are cool. These are wonderful for practical reasons, but somehow not as amazing as small radios were fifty years ago, only the logical next step in miniaturizing known technology. We have amazing TVs/monitors now, too. What are the big itches to explore we can all rally together under? Orbit the Earth? Been there done that. What next? Deep sea exploration impresses some people, but hasn't influenced the arts or architecture or much of anything else.
Any /. subscriber knows there's no shortage of awesome science and new technology today. But much of it is so remote from practicality, very abstract. Our most important ideas don't translate as easily into physical expression. What can a architect or industrial designer do with the idea of Higgs bosons? Have we made a decent effort with that? How 'bout nanotechnology memes incorporated into architectural decorations? Sadly, architecture has been lacking in any decorative drive the last couple decades (see Against the Architects of Empire, essay by theorist Nikos Salingaros) That needs to change.
Everyone, your missions are to think up things that are amazing and that can, in principle, lead to something practical that Regular Joe can hold in hand or see while driving about on errands or weekend trips. Do the science, or invent something from the science, or find ways to express the key ideas in some artsy way within reach of the general population. Stuff on the internet doesn't count. Actual physical reality needs to carry the banner of Current Hot Science Ideas.
...there are a few really loud influential people...
'Religions are like swimming pools: most of the noise comes from the shallow end.'
- Bishop Shelby Spong
Never been up one either. Watching on video gives me enough of a taste. See Dirty Jobs, Season 3 Episode 31 "Wind Farm Technician" (according to that reliable fount of knowledge, wikipedia.)
I want "Antenna Cancellation to Exploit Spatial Diversity" on a coffee mug and/or t-shirt.
Specifically, we're dealing with the arrangment of the wave in space, the phase relations of different portions of the wavefront. The additional channel capacity comes from having (in principle) unlimited transverse space for the wavefront to occupy.
It's sort of as if several straight narrow beams of radiation (e.g laser beams) were side by side. One beam is limited in information content as usual, but it's parallel buddy can carry independent information. Have as many parallel beams as you like. Now this isn't really practical, but by adding different linear combinations of beams, you can create orthogonal states with well-defined rotational (about the axis of propagation) properties.
Example: just add all the parallel beams in-phase. This is one big fat beam with zero angular momentum.
Another example: add all the beams on the left side of the bunch and subtract all the ones on the right side (putting it crudely) to get a fat beam that changes sign when rotated 180 deg about its axis. It has a partner, top half minus bottom half, so they are like sine and cosine. Add and subtract these two with complex coefficients, to be 90 degrees out of phase, for +1 and -1 states of angular momentum.
With N parallel beams, you can define N different "twisted beam" states. The hope is that these states, or at least a good fraction of them, survive the usual impediments to propagation - scattering, multipath interference etc - without mixing together. That's how we would carry "unlimited" capacity, although it's really limited by the size of the receiving array in terms of wavelength, necessary to distinguish these twisted beam states.
Orbital angular momentum of a wave is unrelated to its polarization. It's like the difference between an electron's spin and its orbiting about a nucleus. Or, for an astronomy analogy, confusing polarization with the wavefront's angular momentum is like confusing days with years. Of course we're dealing with a broad wave spread throughout space in one case vs. a compact hard body in the other. But same distinction - a built-in symmetry in the naure of an object or field vs. a symmetry due to how it's arranged or moving in space.
"...not put in a new medical school for over 30 years..."
What about this at Univ. of Central Florida? http://med.ucf.edu/about/
Absolutely! To run a business, and I mean run it successfully not run it into the ground, one must be open to all manner of products, brands, philosophies, etc according to what good paying customers want, at least within the range of whatever market the business inhabits. Pushing or promoting a philosophy, such as open source, is for religion, politics and blogging. It would take some sophisticated and deft marketing to sway the customers' thinking, and even then must start with where the customer already are and what they already use. The OP doesn't seem like that sort of thinker.
You have tickled a few of my neurons that haven't had anything to do since 1994.
Really, what kind of company would want to test someone on such things?
* a computer museum
* a BIOS engineering firm
* a company too cheap to upgrade to Windows95 - even now (if it ain't broke...)
* a company too ignorant to develop or pay for or otherwise obtain a way to test candidates on contemporary computing knowledge
Unless you're a BIOS engineer or it's a very well funded and lively musuem, just say no.
This is a good point. I have a friend who understands marketing and sales, and we both worked for the same astronomer one year. We both have contacts in several industries and have seen things from different sides. Most scientists suck at marketing. It's not that they need to push products on hesitant buyers, run price wars, or watch the average $/sqft of their retail spaces. Marketing is about understanding the overlap of what someone wants and what can be offered. Scientists who are successful in landing grants, who handle larger grants or multiple grants, are better at making their work known and explaining why it's relevant in terms that are interesting to the grant providers and other supporters.
One misconception common among many engineers and scientists is that career success comes from having a brilliant idea, then patenting it, start making it, maybe starting a company and selling it for profit, all one-way. In real life, it takes starting with the market, knowing what is needed, and always getting feedback along the way. This does not mean simply giving potential customers what they say they want - as Henry Ford noted long ago, if it were up to the customers they'd ask only for faster horses and carriages. A sharp marketer will note that what is really in demand is faster, easier, cheaper travel, and that certain engineers have contraption that, with development, could meet that need in some way. A great wealth-generating world-changing product might not even involve a 'brilliant idea' or genuinely fresh invention.
Marketing is the field in which we gain wisdom and practical skills in such things. It applies as well to fundamental science as it does to engineering.
Yup. That happened to me twice in the last few years. A few million people and I would like to see firing be made more difficult.
By then, enough leap seconds will have accumulated that maybe it won't be a Sunday.
Some schools are especially good for blowing up stuff. Look at New Mexico Tech in Socorro NM. They have Explosives Camp.
As a cousin of one of those afflicted darlings, I can tell you she does indeed know about squares and inverses, and is overall rather high in IQ and college educated. Her dad (now deceased) was an electronics instructor, and two uncles were engineers.
I don't know anything about the other afflicted darlings, however.
That's what I'd bet on. Such a situation came to exist among small moons of Saturn. Surely it can happen among larger objects around a star.
Unless you want to work in two or more wildly unrelated fields, a CS degree probably isn't the most useful choice. A CS degree means spending time on database theory and operating system theory and language theory and networks of the sort used only by large organizations not car engines or solar panel farms, and other abstractions that won't be useful. Go for it if you find it interesting, but most of it isn't going to overlap.
The biggest area of software knowledge you'll use will probably be for device control, instrumentation and data acquisition, embedded and such, and for those things often EEs do better than CS majors, at least as far as I've seen. (Disclaimer: I do not know all or see all...but I have worked in industry and academia.) CS probably won't cover at all SCADA, GPIB, OBD2 and dozens of other interface and bus technologies useful in engine development or the energy industry. (And these are much more fun to work with than most other things in computing - my personal opinion.)
In dealing with the real world, where energy and safety are at stake, engineers and physicists seem to do better with avoiding overdesigning software (except when they get carried away with some software development fad) while CS majors tend to go off to la-la land with class hierarchies and overgeneralized designs. There are exceptions, of course.
The other big use for software in the areas of energy efficiency, engines, and such, is simulation. Simulations that take into account more real-world effects, higher resolution detail, and provide ways for engineers to try more design variations per unit time to find the optimum tradeoffs. While a good simulation app takes serious software engineering, much of the work is done by physicists. OTOH, many physicists write crappy spaghetti code. Efforts like Software Carpentry are helping to improve things.
But really, the area of systems engineering might overall be the best for the goals you describe. It connects the other areas of engineering, economics, and knowing physics and software development wouldn't hurt for being a good systems engineer.
I know many scientists and engineers who are good at software, never took a class or very few from the CS departments, and are the key players in the software they use for practical cutting edge R&D and production. Depth and breadth of engineering, science and a bit of business seems to have been worth more in their careers.
So if it's up for a vote, I say Systems Engineering, or as a second choice Physics.
Ctrl-Z! I use that 10,000 times per day! If I could bottle some of my mindless ctrl-z using habit and sell it, would anyone buy it?
Now I know where in the country to direct my next job hunt... this is the good stuff that's been so hard to find open positions for the last few years!
Yeah, I have suffered a job working on code like that, very over-done OO. While it is common to observe that scientists/whoever write messy unmaintainable code, the very worst I'd ever seen was written by CS majors fresh with a degree, or others new into the career of software development, and eager to harshly apply all those design patterns and rules of thumb.
Funny, how ideas meant to make software work go better has the opposite effect in eager young hands.
"You can immediately look at code and tell who was trained to program by/as a scientist and who actually learned as a programmer"
Would a scientist and a professional programmer be equally good at detecting the difference?
In my own twisted career started out in physics, electronics and math, then got into video production, photography and fine art, but for most of my life, software work paid the rent despite flat zero formal education in software/CS. I'm not quite either category, scientist or programmer, but really in a third category - artsy creative - and of course there are many other styles of thinking.
Looking at a scientist's code and professional software engineer's code, they'd be just "different kinds of messes" to my right-brained spatial-artsy-impressionistic way of mentation. I certainly don't see professional programmer's code as any more "readable" than other code. OTOH I'd expect anyone with a real software/CS education to see a big difference.
Maybe it would be a good career-fit test to ask a candidate if they discern any difference between the work of talented people in their desired field and the work of talented practitioners of other fields who must attempt work in that field. Someone who doesn't see a difference should look for work in different field...
Although, no matter what else, I will agree, most physicists write atrocious code!
exp(2 pi i x) where x is some simple expression of time or distance occurs a *lot*. Years ago, I invented a symbol for exp(2pi*i): a one with a tilde superimposed in the middle. e^(2pi*i) does indeed compute to 1.0, but taken to some power x, of course we don't mean (1)^x but what exp(2 pi i x) normally means. A one with a tilde superimposed reminds us to do this. This notation makes many formulas involving Fourier transforms, waves, AC circuit analysis, and quantum mechanics nice and elegant, and 1 with the tilde is not a challenge for Latex or Lout.
For 2pi, I sometimes use a circle with a dot at the center. Tau is way too overloaded, as has been pointed out already.
I'm confused as to whether Ubuntu is trying to be Microsoft or trying to be Apple. Either way, they're departing from the ideals of Linux and unix in general.
I no longer think of Ubuntu as yet another Linux distro; Ubuntu is really its own operating system, at the level of Windows, OS X, Linux/gnu, BSD. So it happens to use the Linux kernel, Debian packaging, etc. Compare it to BeOS, also unixy under the hood but really its own operating system even if a lot of the common gnu software was used on it.
Yeah, the deuling libraries is part of it. Also, the choice between D1 vs D2, 32 bit vs 64 bit platforms, and some other issues I've forgotten about - these are not orthogonal choices. Only certain combinations of library, 64bit etc exist. My project needed a combination that wasn't available at the time. So we wait...
There's no difference between available and compulsory if you spend any time at all fixing and adding to code written by someone else. That would be about 99% of all of us.