Is anybody else disturbed by the growth of meaningless, self-aggrandizing jargon in this field? Attack vectors, security posture... Give me a break. These guys do good work, they don't need to puff themselves up with this kind of fantasy verbage like some social scientist or art historian. When did people's egos get so big they need to invent cool sounding words for everything? We've got a serious arms race going on in the "my profession is cooler than yours" wars.
Perhaps, but while Einstein asserted early-on that "God doesn't play dice with the Universe", it appears that in a natural selection paradigm, God ONLY plays dice with the Universe. It does limit the extent to which God has historically affected Earthly progression-- from infinite possibilities to ones where any of His changes stem from earlier steps and are limited by geographic movement and ancestory. I think some religious types find that thought abhorrent.
I see your point, but let me throw out a crazy idea, which I can't prove, but neither can you disprove (which is my point):
Whenever a mutation occurs, it's due to an inexorably complicated set of events, essentially the reactions and motions of molecules interacting countless times. While aggregate statistics of such events are classically understood through statistical mechanics, the specifics of such reactions are, at the bottom, quantum in nature and therefore statistical in a way that is not a function of our lack of knowledge of the situation, but of physics. One could certainly imagine that such a complicated system would be chaotic in the sense of how and when it produces mutations (highly nonlinear and subject to minute perturbations). Furthermore, all we REALLY know about quantum mechanics is aggregate statistics. If we run an experiment enough times, we see that the distribution matches our predictions. So, in principle, a Creator could hide his actions behind the quantum uncertainty of nature, and those actions could have macroscopic repurcussions in a chaotic system. I'm even guessing that there would be no mathematical way to determine when such intervention occurs, even if you knew everything about the system. There may be no way to definitively determine between coincidence and providence.
Is this totally bogus? Probably, but my point is you can't prove it to be so. Physicists long ago gave up trying to come up with underlying reasons and mechanisms. They just know how to predict certain things in nature (a lot, as it turns out) and are happy with that. The biologists should take a lesson and learn the difference between knowledge and imagination.
I can't believe that as an agnostic, I'm defending religion against a baptist, but here goes:
Evolution can't, and doesn't, exclude the possibility of "outside help" (i.e. intelligent design). It's simply a record of a process and a proposal for a mechanism driving it (natural selection). But nobody really knows, as much as they like to flatter themselves into thinking they do, what is really behind everything. There is always the possibility that evolution was helped along by an external force. At the very least it's fair to say we don't completely understand evolution. The idea that the most complicated process generating the most complex things in the universe can be summed up in a single phrase (natural selection) is a joke and an example of human arrogance. So let's not denigrate those who keep a little mystery where others fake certainty. It seems to me that there are those who religiously believe in our current theory of evolution just as religiously as those who believe in creationism.
I knew this would cause a torrent of posts dismissing her accomplishment by people upset to find their career of choice, for which they went to college, is accessible by a 9 year old girl. Just deal with it. This is what you get for majoring in a hobby and pursuing it for a career. You don't see 9 year old kids passing the cerification exams to be an architect or a chemical engineer, do you?
I appreciate your thoughtful and factual response. However, I didn't say they would screw up the signal in one country. I said Africa. Of the top of my head I don't know the "field of view" of a single satellite, but I'd guess it's a significant majority of the hemisphere it's over. However, it would only take screwing up the one or two satellites that are over southern Africa at any given time to mess up the signal for Africa but not much affect Europe, since you need at least 4 to get a good fix. Maybe they'd just say the heck with it and always have some sort of SA turned on for any satellite not usable from America. I don't know, but I'd be surprised if the military COULDN'T do that, and it seems like they would if they could since they are under no obligation to provide anybody but America with a good unencrypted signal (by Clinton's executive order).
I can't argue with anything you said, except for your assertion that the signal isn't degraded over other parts of the world. You don't know that, and it's perfectly possible the US is degrading the signal over Africa. There would be good reason for them to do so, especially over northern Africa. Given that they could, why are you so sure they don't?
What's really funny is that I believe it would actually be cheaper to put the shuttle itself into orbit using a Saturn V than the way things are done now. The whole reason for the miserable idea of the solid boosters married to the liquid fueled shuttle is that it's "sortof" reusable. (If you consider having to spend millions to get the boosters ready again to be reusable.) As a whole, the space shuttle is an unbelievable waste of money and an abject failure, relative to its stated project goals. It's still a damn marvel, though.
First of all, the Intel compiler only creates processor routing code if so selected by the user. Otherwise, you can target any level of architecture just like any other compiler and no processor forking occurs. Second, when you do use processor routing, it simply forks off to code optimized for the processor you select if it detects that specific processor. For example, if you optimize for a P4, two (at least) branches are created: one optimized for the P4 and one for anything else. The anything else branch isn't "degraded" it's just unavoidably not as optimized. My understanding is that an AMD and P3 would BOTH see the less optimized code if you selected P4 code to be generated.
Translation: don't counter my broken armchair logic with facts.
Your cheap shot betrays your distaste for thinking. One can use "armchair logic" to make educated guesses, and imperfect doesn't mean broken. In this case, I did better with my armchair logic than the people who just blindly took the synopsis of the survey on face value. "Facts" aren't always so. If you dig deeper in the survey, it states that only a minority of PhDs went into faculty positions. Don't criticize me for thinking instead of just mindlessly eating up some industry survey.
One must make assumptions. You're making a lot of assumptions about the survey and your ability to read, for example.
1. The majority of graduating CS PhD students are foreign students on F-1 visas, a great many of whom leave the country afterwards.
Nothing about my argument was local. In fact, it only works if you apply it worldwide.
3. A great many institutions (with faculty, you know) do not have a CS PhD program. Oh, you didn't think of that, did you? Kind of screws up your geometric increase thang, no?
I mentioned that directly in my post, actually.
CS PhDs show up in many other academic departments than CS because of CS's applicability to other fields. It's rare that it happens the other way around.
Now who's pulling facts out of their ass?
I trust from your geometric argument that you're not a CS Professor. (I am!)
I left CS because it had too much bullshit in it (with the exception of the theory people) so if you're trying to earn my respect, you'd do better to just improve your arguments.
Anyway, the survey actually supports my claim. Else where it states directly that less than half of the people graduating with PhDs went into faculty positions. I'm certainly off in my assumptions, but it also shows why it's valid to actually use your brain instead of mindlessly taking every bit of "data" at face value. It seemed ludicrous to me that the majority of PhDs could be getting faculty jobs. It would mean that the mean professor in CS was producing less than one new PhD per year, which seems low, even if you account for all the profs who don't have PhD students.
I don't know how the hell they conducted their survey, but I consider an academic job to mean faculty. My guess is that they considered academic any job taking place at an academic institution, even if it was a programming job on an IT staff. My assertion that most PhDs don't become faculty is based on the fact that faculty positions are essentially constant from year-to-year, and the assumption that most CS faculty oversee more than one PhD student, even if you factor in those at colleges who don't have PhD students. Pretty reasonable, don't you think? After all, wouldn't it be odd for professors to produce more professors than there are professors? The geometric growth of faculty positions would mean the entire country would be CS professors by now. No need to whip out industry surveys.
How many places do theoretical computer science research (i.e. real research, not just extremely novel programming)? I can't think of too many. Computer science research is essentially pure math research, and there's not much of that happening in industry, either. Believe it or not, you just can't make much money in isomorphic polytopes. (No, I have no idea what I just said.)
And only an idiot would hire a PhD for a programming job. That's like hiring an M.D. to run urine tests, or an aerospace engineer to handle luggage at an airport.
Or like hiring a poet to make terrible analogies, when a slashdot user will do it for free. Are you equating programming with a menial, mindless task that can be done by rote recitation?
More to the point: given that the vast majority of PhDs must go into industry (since the universe conserves tenure) what, praytell, are you suggesting a CS PhD do out there in the real world?
Thanks for making Netflix more expensive for those of us that aren't obsessive movie hoarding parasites. By the way, the only thing "interesting" about your post is why somebody would mod it up as interesting in the first place. Odd that your karma should improve by confessing to be a serial leach.
I'm aware of the MIT AI lab's wonderful historical contributions to our overconfidence in computers as a model/solution for everything, but I don't think it's ironic that I'd disagree with them. The AI lab may have represented 50% of the hype coming out of MIT, but they represented less than 1% of the work done at MIT. (Similar numbers probably apply today for the CSAIL and the Media Lab.) I'm sure there are lots of people here who agree with me. Unfortunately, by definition these people aren't working on artificial intelligence or cognitive science because they don't believe it's worth the effort.
Also, I'm aware of the fact that what I said is at odds with cognitive science textbooks, so I agree with what you said. The fact that I think cognitive science textbooks disagree with the obvious is why I dropped out of cognitive science. Not that I have any bloody clue how the brain works, but some things can be ruled out as impossible or highly improbable. And any theory that makes the brain look like it was engineered from the top-down is right out. And given evolution I have no respect for people who decide to impatiently try to understand the human brain before they understand the simplest invertebrate brain.
During my first cogsci class I could increasingly smell the strong stench of bullshit. It's a field that seems to be populated by people who think science should primarily be a source of cocktail banter for the practitioner, with correctness and use to society of secondary concern.
This reminds of an old joke about the definition of a social scientist (and despite their claims otherwise, people studying human cognition should be considered social scientists as long as they study human intelligence while there are people still working to really understand worm intelligence):
A social scientist is somebody who is constantly amazed by the obvious.
The idea that our chemical/electronic brain operates continuously and without binary information seems to me to be the overriding assumption anybody would, and has always, taken. Did they think anybody was under the impression that we all had timing clocks in us? And anybody who's tried to order a dessert at a restaurant knows damn well the human brain is analog.
The question I'd like to see answered is why there has been such a recent surge in funding for this kind of bullshit science. Let's figure out how a rat works first, ok? There's a ton of "results" coming out of this field, but nothing of any use. Didn't we try this already with AI in the 70s?
This reminds of an old joke about the definition of a social scientist (and despite their claims otherwise, people studying human cognition should be considered social scientists as long as they study human intelligence while there are people still working to really understand worm intelligence):
A social scientist is somebody who is constantly amazed by the obvious.
The idea that our chemical/electronic brain operates continuously and without binary information seems to me to be the overriding assumption anybody would, and has always, taken. Did they think anybody was under the impression that we all had timing clocks in us? And anybody who's tried to order a dessert at a restaurant knows damn well the human brain is analog.
The question I'd like to see answered is why there has been such a recent surge in funding for this kind of bullshit science. Let's figure out how a friggin rat works first, ok? There's a ton of "results" coming out of this field, but nothing of any use. Didn't we try this already with AI in the 70s?
Most single engine general aviation aircraft (eg, Cessnas, Pipers, etc) typically cruise around 100-120mph
Just to defend my beloved small airplanes: those are a little low. Single engine GA planes go from about 100 mph, for a tiny two-place plane (Cessna 152) to over 200 mph for a good four place touring plane like a Cessna 210. These days you can buy single engine planes that will do over 250 mph. But I'd say a typical speed for a single engine plane is probably somewhere around 140-150 mph.
There's another problem: local governments. Amtrak can't even get it's one existing high-speed train up to full speed since every little town along the right of way has the ability (and apparently the obnoxious incliniation) to require the train to slow down as it passes through their hamlet. I can't imagine how this would work on a larger scale.
Basically, town exists because of rail road, but town bitches about rail road sending trains through at high speed. Welcome to America, home of the NIMBY.
I concur. WorldWind is great, and very nice of NASA to give it away for free, unlike the EU model which is tax for the development, and charge for the release. At least their taxes are lower. Oh, wait...
Slashdot Mirror
Is anybody else disturbed by the growth of meaningless, self-aggrandizing jargon in this field? Attack vectors, security posture... Give me a break. These guys do good work, they don't need to puff themselves up with this kind of fantasy verbage like some social scientist or art historian. When did people's egos get so big they need to invent cool sounding words for everything? We've got a serious arms race going on in the "my profession is cooler than yours" wars.
I see your point, but let me throw out a crazy idea, which I can't prove, but neither can you disprove (which is my point):
Whenever a mutation occurs, it's due to an inexorably complicated set of events, essentially the reactions and motions of molecules interacting countless times. While aggregate statistics of such events are classically understood through statistical mechanics, the specifics of such reactions are, at the bottom, quantum in nature and therefore statistical in a way that is not a function of our lack of knowledge of the situation, but of physics. One could certainly imagine that such a complicated system would be chaotic in the sense of how and when it produces mutations (highly nonlinear and subject to minute perturbations). Furthermore, all we REALLY know about quantum mechanics is aggregate statistics. If we run an experiment enough times, we see that the distribution matches our predictions. So, in principle, a Creator could hide his actions behind the quantum uncertainty of nature, and those actions could have macroscopic repurcussions in a chaotic system. I'm even guessing that there would be no mathematical way to determine when such intervention occurs, even if you knew everything about the system. There may be no way to definitively determine between coincidence and providence.
Is this totally bogus? Probably, but my point is you can't prove it to be so. Physicists long ago gave up trying to come up with underlying reasons and mechanisms. They just know how to predict certain things in nature (a lot, as it turns out) and are happy with that. The biologists should take a lesson and learn the difference between knowledge and imagination.
I can't believe that as an agnostic, I'm defending religion against a baptist, but here goes:
Evolution can't, and doesn't, exclude the possibility of "outside help" (i.e. intelligent design). It's simply a record of a process and a proposal for a mechanism driving it (natural selection). But nobody really knows, as much as they like to flatter themselves into thinking they do, what is really behind everything. There is always the possibility that evolution was helped along by an external force. At the very least it's fair to say we don't completely understand evolution. The idea that the most complicated process generating the most complex things in the universe can be summed up in a single phrase (natural selection) is a joke and an example of human arrogance. So let's not denigrate those who keep a little mystery where others fake certainty. It seems to me that there are those who religiously believe in our current theory of evolution just as religiously as those who believe in creationism.
I knew this would cause a torrent of posts dismissing her accomplishment by people upset to find their career of choice, for which they went to college, is accessible by a 9 year old girl. Just deal with it. This is what you get for majoring in a hobby and pursuing it for a career. You don't see 9 year old kids passing the cerification exams to be an architect or a chemical engineer, do you?
I appreciate your thoughtful and factual response. However, I didn't say they would screw up the signal in one country. I said Africa. Of the top of my head I don't know the "field of view" of a single satellite, but I'd guess it's a significant majority of the hemisphere it's over. However, it would only take screwing up the one or two satellites that are over southern Africa at any given time to mess up the signal for Africa but not much affect Europe, since you need at least 4 to get a good fix. Maybe they'd just say the heck with it and always have some sort of SA turned on for any satellite not usable from America. I don't know, but I'd be surprised if the military COULDN'T do that, and it seems like they would if they could since they are under no obligation to provide anybody but America with a good unencrypted signal (by Clinton's executive order).
I can't argue with anything you said, except for your assertion that the signal isn't degraded over other parts of the world. You don't know that, and it's perfectly possible the US is degrading the signal over Africa. There would be good reason for them to do so, especially over northern Africa. Given that they could, why are you so sure they don't?
Actually, that would be a much nicer and subtler sign than the ones he's been giving so far.
What's really funny is that I believe it would actually be cheaper to put the shuttle itself into orbit using a Saturn V than the way things are done now. The whole reason for the miserable idea of the solid boosters married to the liquid fueled shuttle is that it's "sortof" reusable. (If you consider having to spend millions to get the boosters ready again to be reusable.) As a whole, the space shuttle is an unbelievable waste of money and an abject failure, relative to its stated project goals. It's still a damn marvel, though.
First of all, the Intel compiler only creates processor routing code if so selected by the user. Otherwise, you can target any level of architecture just like any other compiler and no processor forking occurs. Second, when you do use processor routing, it simply forks off to code optimized for the processor you select if it detects that specific processor. For example, if you optimize for a P4, two (at least) branches are created: one optimized for the P4 and one for anything else. The anything else branch isn't "degraded" it's just unavoidably not as optimized. My understanding is that an AMD and P3 would BOTH see the less optimized code if you selected P4 code to be generated.
Your cheap shot betrays your distaste for thinking. One can use "armchair logic" to make educated guesses, and imperfect doesn't mean broken. In this case, I did better with my armchair logic than the people who just blindly took the synopsis of the survey on face value. "Facts" aren't always so. If you dig deeper in the survey, it states that only a minority of PhDs went into faculty positions. Don't criticize me for thinking instead of just mindlessly eating up some industry survey.
One must make assumptions. You're making a lot of assumptions about the survey and your ability to read, for example.
1. The majority of graduating CS PhD students are foreign students on F-1 visas, a great many of whom leave the country afterwards.
Nothing about my argument was local. In fact, it only works if you apply it worldwide.
3. A great many institutions (with faculty, you know) do not have a CS PhD program. Oh, you didn't think of that, did you? Kind of screws up your geometric increase thang, no?
I mentioned that directly in my post, actually.
CS PhDs show up in many other academic departments than CS because of CS's applicability to other fields. It's rare that it happens the other way around.
Now who's pulling facts out of their ass?
I trust from your geometric argument that you're not a CS Professor. (I am!)
I left CS because it had too much bullshit in it (with the exception of the theory people) so if you're trying to earn my respect, you'd do better to just improve your arguments.
Anyway, the survey actually supports my claim. Else where it states directly that less than half of the people graduating with PhDs went into faculty positions. I'm certainly off in my assumptions, but it also shows why it's valid to actually use your brain instead of mindlessly taking every bit of "data" at face value. It seemed ludicrous to me that the majority of PhDs could be getting faculty jobs. It would mean that the mean professor in CS was producing less than one new PhD per year, which seems low, even if you account for all the profs who don't have PhD students.
Point taken. I agree I was being too narrow in what I was envisioning.
I don't know how the hell they conducted their survey, but I consider an academic job to mean faculty. My guess is that they considered academic any job taking place at an academic institution, even if it was a programming job on an IT staff. My assertion that most PhDs don't become faculty is based on the fact that faculty positions are essentially constant from year-to-year, and the assumption that most CS faculty oversee more than one PhD student, even if you factor in those at colleges who don't have PhD students. Pretty reasonable, don't you think? After all, wouldn't it be odd for professors to produce more professors than there are professors? The geometric growth of faculty positions would mean the entire country would be CS professors by now. No need to whip out industry surveys.
How many places do theoretical computer science research (i.e. real research, not just extremely novel programming)? I can't think of too many. Computer science research is essentially pure math research, and there's not much of that happening in industry, either. Believe it or not, you just can't make much money in isomorphic polytopes. (No, I have no idea what I just said.)
Or like hiring a poet to make terrible analogies, when a slashdot user will do it for free. Are you equating programming with a menial, mindless task that can be done by rote recitation?
More to the point: given that the vast majority of PhDs must go into industry (since the universe conserves tenure) what, praytell, are you suggesting a CS PhD do out there in the real world?
Thanks for making Netflix more expensive for those of us that aren't obsessive movie hoarding parasites. By the way, the only thing "interesting" about your post is why somebody would mod it up as interesting in the first place. Odd that your karma should improve by confessing to be a serial leach.
I'm aware of the MIT AI lab's wonderful historical contributions to our overconfidence in computers as a model/solution for everything, but I don't think it's ironic that I'd disagree with them. The AI lab may have represented 50% of the hype coming out of MIT, but they represented less than 1% of the work done at MIT. (Similar numbers probably apply today for the CSAIL and the Media Lab.) I'm sure there are lots of people here who agree with me. Unfortunately, by definition these people aren't working on artificial intelligence or cognitive science because they don't believe it's worth the effort.
Also, I'm aware of the fact that what I said is at odds with cognitive science textbooks, so I agree with what you said. The fact that I think cognitive science textbooks disagree with the obvious is why I dropped out of cognitive science. Not that I have any bloody clue how the brain works, but some things can be ruled out as impossible or highly improbable. And any theory that makes the brain look like it was engineered from the top-down is right out. And given evolution I have no respect for people who decide to impatiently try to understand the human brain before they understand the simplest invertebrate brain.
During my first cogsci class I could increasingly smell the strong stench of bullshit. It's a field that seems to be populated by people who think science should primarily be a source of cocktail banter for the practitioner, with correctness and use to society of secondary concern.
A social scientist is somebody who is constantly amazed by the obvious.
The idea that our chemical/electronic brain operates continuously and without binary information seems to me to be the overriding assumption anybody would, and has always, taken. Did they think anybody was under the impression that we all had timing clocks in us? And anybody who's tried to order a dessert at a restaurant knows damn well the human brain is analog.
The question I'd like to see answered is why there has been such a recent surge in funding for this kind of bullshit science. Let's figure out how a rat works first, ok? There's a ton of "results" coming out of this field, but nothing of any use. Didn't we try this already with AI in the 70s?
I'll say. That was wierd. Not sure how I managed to do that.
A social scientist is somebody who is constantly amazed by the obvious.
The idea that our chemical/electronic brain operates continuously and without binary information seems to me to be the overriding assumption anybody would, and has always, taken. Did they think anybody was under the impression that we all had timing clocks in us? And anybody who's tried to order a dessert at a restaurant knows damn well the human brain is analog.
The question I'd like to see answered is why there has been such a recent surge in funding for this kind of bullshit science. Let's figure out how a friggin rat works first, ok? There's a ton of "results" coming out of this field, but nothing of any use. Didn't we try this already with AI in the 70s?
Who's Richard Feinmen? You should learn to spell the names of your superheros you schmuck.
I know you didn't expect this answer on /. and I don't want to blow your mind, but maybe he BOUGHT them? Check out www.teach12.com.
Just to defend my beloved small airplanes: those are a little low. Single engine GA planes go from about 100 mph, for a tiny two-place plane (Cessna 152) to over 200 mph for a good four place touring plane like a Cessna 210. These days you can buy single engine planes that will do over 250 mph. But I'd say a typical speed for a single engine plane is probably somewhere around 140-150 mph.
There's another problem: local governments. Amtrak can't even get it's one existing high-speed train up to full speed since every little town along the right of way has the ability (and apparently the obnoxious incliniation) to require the train to slow down as it passes through their hamlet. I can't imagine how this would work on a larger scale.
Basically, town exists because of rail road, but town bitches about rail road sending trains through at high speed. Welcome to America, home of the NIMBY.
I concur. WorldWind is great, and very nice of NASA to give it away for free, unlike the EU model which is tax for the development, and charge for the release. At least their taxes are lower. Oh, wait...