One of the most fundamental contributory factors to internal security problems in companies is the attitude of many IT departments and IT managers, who would basically like to run their business as a police state. As in "real life", security is always the ideal excuse to give IT managers more power and to downgrade the rights of system users.
Of course, draconic security policies are very rarely backed up by any commitment from IT staff to provide efficient services and smoothly functioning systems. I've seen long documents discussing IT policy that expounded at great length on IT security, but failed to make any mention at all of service quality or system performance.
The natural, logical, entirely human result of this is that users will rebel and take revenge by cheating on security policy. And why not? It is not as if the IT department is of much use to them, anyway, so it doesn't get any sympathy. But when you get to this point, none of your security policies is worth the paper they are carefully filed on, in triplicate. Basically, when you have lost goodwill, you have lost everything. No overload of carefully crafted security polices and security systems is going to help. The IT people will be the first ones to ignore them; they know how to get around the barriers.
Of course IT will react to this by declaring that the users are the problem. Not so. IT is a supporting department, not more. If the users are unhappy and unruly, then IT is the problem; it is a strong indication that the department is failing in its mission.
Rule One of an efficient IT policy is to understand the business your are supporting and its requirements, and to finely tune your policy to achieve the best compromise between security and functionality. When IT is experienced as a burden to users, instead of a support, you've lost the game. It can, and will, only go downhill from there.
Frankly, past a certain point IT policy itself becomes a serious threat to the competitiveness of a company. Most CEOs would balk at giving everyone a 10% raise, but inept IT policy can cost them considerably more than 10% of the time of their workforce. Few of them realize this, because they regard software as too technical to be understood.
The Belgian government has already taken the step of including an electronic ID on its next-generation identity card. For the price 10 euros, every Belgian (for the card is mandatory, although one does not have to activate the electronic signature option) will get an officially issued card with an encryption key and an electronic signature.
For the government, of course, the benefit is in shifting as much official communication (tax forms etc.) from paper to electronic form. But financial institutions, online shops, etc. are also encouraged to use the eID.
Information on the official eID site is mostly in Belgium's three official languages (which do not include English) but there is extensive information in English on the site of Microsoft Benelux eID.
Frankly, I don't see much of a problem with Microsoft. When it comes to making file formats accessible and interchangeable, MS has behaved relatively well.
I expect much more resistance from those software companies that have a business that almost solely exists because of their ability to monopolize file or datastream formats: Adobe with its Acrobat software suite, Apple with Quicktime, and of course Real. Especially the latter two would probably be kicked out of the market swiftly if consumers had an alternative.
Well, it is widely assumed that the very point of publicly funded research is to allow others to build on it. Publicly funded institutions do, and in my opinion should do, fundamental research that has little or no discernible short-term advantage, but is the basis for later applied science and development. They may not reap the big profits, but why should they? Their research is supposed to benefit society as a whole. That's why it is publicly funded. If it were profitable, private enterprise would do it.
What you are arguing is that the publicly funded institutions should do a much larger part of the applied science. But knowing the taxpayer and politicians, that risks all but to obliterate the fundamental research, with potentially dramatic long-term consequences, also for health care. I do not believe that (especially in a time of shrinking scientific funding) the taxpayer will furnish billions of extra money. I would prefer to see (much) more generous funding for fundamental scientific research.
You could (and do) argue that because publicly developed drugs do not need to generate profit, they will be cheaper in the long term for health care. Assuming that public development would be sufficiently efficient, that might be true.
However, drug development is a risky business. The large majority of drug candidates fail. (As opposed, one would hope, to infrastructure projects.) It is one thing to ask the financial markets to support these risks; investors (should) spread their risks and (should) know that the laws of the marketplace correlate higher potential profits with higher risk. (Let us forget about Enron for the moment.) It is, in my opinion, another thing entirely to oblige the taxpayer to do so, allowing others to take big gambles with their money. Clinical trials can cost hundreds of millions and when you have serious side effects such as liver toxicity, the money has basically been thrown away. The CEOs of pharmaceutical companies have to and do make decisions like that; it is their job. I don't trust politicians to do the same.
As for licensing allowing academics to get "something" out of their research, I do have a little first-hand experience of negotiations of this kind, and these days most academic instutions boast serious and tenacious legal teams. My impression is that academics more often than not overestimate the amount of money industry is able and willing to pay, and that negotiations often will be dragged out endlessly until the potential industrial partner just walks away in deep frustration.
Finally, it is beyond doubt that the business if profit driven, but the point is that streamlining the process, allowing for a longer recuperation period, and perhaps even guarantueeing a modest profit margin for a successful development would make many drugs profitable that are economically unviable now. Without huge investments for the taxpayer.
That small step forward, presumably, includes the three years of medicinal chemistry to optimize the compound and find a suitable formulation, the seven years of clinical trails, and compiling the 250,000 page submission file for the FDA?
These days, the cost of developing a drug and getting approval for it is equivalent to the defense budget of a modest country -- say Vietnam or Syria. These procedures are well above the normal levels of academic funding. I doubt that many academics would be really interested in the tedious procedural work; the graduate students and PhDs who do most work in a research environment don't even stay long enough in these jobs to see a project like this to the end.
What academic institutions really want is to license their finds to industry, and get an (as large as possible) financial gain out of their intellectual property without having to do much more work.
A better solution would be some way to guarantuee the cost-effectiveness of the development of even rarely used drugs. Streamlined approval procedures could reduce cost; patent extensions could allow costs to be recovered over a longer period; government contracts (perhaps even on a no-cure-no-pay basis) could share some of the financial burden.
Academic institutions could take advantage from this to the same extent as "Big Pharma", levelling the playing field a bit.
You would not willingly expose children to putrid waste or toxic chemicals, so why expose them to the intellectual pollutions that are called "intelligent design" or "creationism"?
If these concepts would rest purely on religious foundations, that would not be so bad. But in reality they are based on a corrosive mix of religion with intellectual dishonesty, bad logic, and intentional distortions of the truth. People object to the religious influence, but that is merely the innocent of it.
By all means, let us teach children to question statements and make up their own mind about things. So we should confront them with real problems, where both sides of the argument have real merit, and the evidence to decide the argument has not yet been discovered. And teach them to address problems with logic instead of ideology.
Even in the field of evolution, there are plenty of those. For example the debate about the diet of early humans and the means by which it was gathered, or the still disputed question whether the emergence of a new species requires geographical separation. It may sound a bit difficult, but I believe teachers can find means to explain this and ask relevant questions; at least if they don't have to waste their time on intelligent design and other red herrings.
I like Swing, mainly because it can be easily extended to do things with components they were not originally designed for. You can fairly rapidly build a relatively complicated user interface, with custom components, custom events, and multiple interacting display windows, and still have perfectly manageable, re-usable code. (Well, if you work outside graphical designers, which in my humble opinion should only be used for developing write-only code.)
I agree that it can take an effort to master it, and that developing simple interfaces can take extra time because of the overhead. But Swing's structure is quite ordered and I have found that Swing suits "my" logic; it comes fairly natural to me as a programmer.
I like Swing much more than AWT, which IMHO was not very good at all, mainly because the event handling model was awful. For me the biggest problems with early versions of Swing were in the use of images, and while the image handling libraries are much more powerful and rationally organized now, they are also unpleasantly complex. But it is good enough. I have never tried SWT.
Web interfaces are nice for many applications, but for most of the things I do not really an option. For database applications a pretty good middle way seems to be Java Web Start, which allows you to use a web server to distribute your code, but still to run it as a very flexible application on your desktop.
Well, speaking as a "Science" type: It does become very lonely if you don't have a single co-worker who understands elementary statistics. Having more "science" types around could be a plus.
Not to mention the worrying ease by which it is possible to convince management of nearly anything, if you show them an analysis based on not one parameter, but two -- apparently this is so sophisticated that it must be true.
Hard work, imagination and business practices also matter.
In my experience, many organisations are organized in such way that it is barely possible for scientists to run a project successfully to completion. The more complacent they are, the more dysfunctional they tend to be.
The reason is simple. To get a scientifict project (in fact any project) near its goalpost, you typically need to coordinate a number of elements in an intelligent manner: People, for you do need a certain critical mass of scientific knowledge to get a good team; space, in terms of laboratories and offices; equipment; engineering support; money; computer hardware and software; and so on. One missing element can be enough to ruin your day.
Now look at the typical "professionally" managed organisation and you will see that rather than coordinated, these elements tend to be fragmented, sometimes very highly fragemented, each with its own manager. Who often enough will fiercely defend his turf against any interference and takes care great to ensure that any inter-departemental coordination is only done at the highest possible level.
The theory of it usually is that the scientists need to be "supported" by taking the responsibility for budgets and computer and other circumstantial elements out of their hands, to leave them doing what they are best at, science. Scientists are supposed to be no good at administration. But in practice it only takes two breaths for these "supporting" departments to effectively take over control of the organisation, forcing the scientists to spend more of their time on fighting the system than on research.
It would actually be far more efficient to hire more scientists and to let them improvise things in their own sloppy way, than to hire managers and administrators who are supposed to be more efficient.
A reverence for the written word, regardless of its practical application or not, seems to be one of the most remarkable characteristics of American culture. It is evidently found comforting and enormously important to have things on paper, even if they are not actually applied and it makes very little practical difference.
The origins of this national trait would be worth someone's time to investigate. I suspect that it was a combination of protestantism, with the high importance this religion attaches to the reading of the Holy Scriptures, and the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition with its almost absurd respect for anything that can be established as a precedent.
The result usually is an untangible mass of written procedure, absolutely useless in practice, but important in court. I have only limited experience in SOP writing, but I have noticed that if you want to include any actual useful content in such a document, you have to tag it on in an addendum. There is no place for it in the template.
In that sense, I am inclined to go along with this court decision. Perhaps the loan company did not implement its written procedure; but everybody knows that official written procedure is not practical to be implemented and not really intended to be implemented. The sole reason for its existence is its existence itself.
And then people just follow their common sense, or not, for whatever that is worth. Often not much.
I think the III. Reich lost the propaganda war as well as it lost on the other fronts in the war. Allied propaganda was less blatant and less obtrusive, and therefore attracted less attention; but as far as I know it was far more effective. Throughout Europe people risked their life, including Germans, to listen to the BBC. Especially British propaganda, both "white" and "black", evolved into something much more effective than anything Goebbels produced -- although starting from very crude beginnings indeed.
Allied propaganda produced newspapers for axis soldiers, provided them with sewing kits and other useful items carrying anti-war slogans, and printed Passierscheine encouraging surrender that were reportedly even sold on the (Italian) black markets.
The reality was that Goebbels was unable to repress all external sources of information, and that showed his construction to be the house of cards it really was. By 1945 his propaganda had become a subject for cynical jokes --- "Don't worry; Groefaz will save us."
Lies can buy time; but Lincoln was right -- you can't fool all people all the time.
The history of government propaganda is long and diverse, and includes successes as well as failures. Effective propaganda does not need to be evil. During WWII, Allied propagandists printed newspapers for Axis soldiers, and they were much appreciated by their recipients for being rather more reliable than the official German news sources.
Rule 1 of effective propaganda is telling the truth. At least most of the time. There is nothing that really beats that, when it comes to convincing people.
This view of the scientist as a kind of secular monk, dedicated to his research and nothing else, doesn't work very well in practice. Speaking as a scientist and a workaholic, I am strongly inclined to say that it is nonsense.
The reality is that most science needs resources, i.e. money, space, and equipment. To get that, a scientist needs to be able to prepare his case and defend it; nobody is going to give him or her these without a good reason. After all, there are other people asking for the money as well. Running a laboratory takes scientific as well as communicative ability, and at least some talent for administration as well.
Doing good science often requires the ability to communicate with people outside your own field; an astronomer might really, really need the ability have a meaningful conversation with a biologist or an engineer.
This is pretty much the same for scientists in an academic or an industrial environment. The industrial R&D environment generally has more money and (therefore) less backbiting, but also less scientific freedom.
Besides, many scientists want something to be done with their research. What is the point of you knowing, if everybody else remains ignorant, and worse, makes decisions based on flawed assumptions? Scientists want their publications, read, cited, and used. For this to be the case, the research has to be relevant, and it has to be made understandable. Fame is a sign of success -- it means that people know your work; and the probable (but not necessary) implication of that is that it was correct and useful.
Besides, if you want to be rich, you should study law or economics, not science. What scientists hope to get from their careers is a claim to immortal fame, however modest. And perhaps the rather exaggerated respect many people show to someone with a scientific degree.
That said, I hope that the kids who go to science fairs with stem cell research projects do not pick up a bad habit. When scientific subjects really become fashionable, that often means that --- in a scientific sense --- it is too late to jump on the bandwaggon. Nobody wants to read a "me too!" paper. The science that makes good careers is the kind of science most people outside an university have not yet heard of.
No, intelligent design cannot pass for a scientific theory. It has, however, all the characteristics of a pseudo-scientific theory -- or, to put it less politely, mumbo-jumbo.
The two are actually fairly easy to tell apart. A scientific theory is developed to provide the best possible explanation of the available observations. That does not make the theory a fact; on the contrary it is a characteristic of any scientific theory that it is falsifiable by contrary obsverations. It does make the theory a framework that provides a logical explanation for facts and predicts others. Newton's theory of gravity provided an explanation for the fact that apples fall and planets revolve around the sun -- not an entirely correct explanation, as we now know, but till one that allowed the outcome of experiments to be predicted.
A pseudo-scientific theory on the other hand is constructed to avoid the facts. It bases itself not on what we know, but on what we don't know, and weaves a winding path around those observations that cannot be contradicted. A pseudo-scientific theory is a framework that allows its adherents to declare that something might be true despite the facts. A pseudo-scientific theory does not contribute a prediction for the outcome of any experiment, and therefore is not falsifiable.
A good example of this is the debate around homeopathy. Hanhemann's last followers don't have any fact-based theory to offer on how their form of medicine could actually work, nor can they really argue against 200 years of progress in biology, chemistry and physics. So as their way out they postulate the existence of a mysterious and undefined form of energy that science has not discovered yet, and that would explain homeopathy.
Creationism has always been pseudo-scientific to the core. It was never a coherent theory that offered a rational explanation of observations; it was a set of assumptions that allowed fundamentalist believers to stick to their belief despite the scientific observations. As all pseudo-scientific theories, it existed not to explain, but to explain away.
Intelligent Design is little more than the final rearguard action of the creationists. It accepts the existing observations on evolution and the history of our planet, does not contribute an explanation of a single additional scientific observation, but allows its adherent to retain a cherised belief regardless of these observations. That is it's whole point. It is not a scientific theory and it never will be.
We have had compulsory ID cards for years and frankly, I find it rather artificial that such a fuss is made about the principle of introduction in the UK. In reality people already need to carry some document that allows them to identify themselves, if only to their banker, even in the UK and USA. The practical difference with having an official "identify card" is minute.
This is all about symbolic value. Both the US and UK government have summarily granted themselves the power to lock people in jail without any form of trial, or at least restrict their movements; to snoop in people's communications and to fill the streets with security cameras. These are far more outrageous attacks on civil liberty than a compulsory ID card. The reason civil liberty groups focus on ID cards is simply that they are both universal and material and therefore have the potential to concern everybody; not that they are enormously problematic.
But this focus on matters of principle and symbolism is highly counterproductive. While libertarians are wasting their time fighting a lost battle, the British government is quietly getting away with storing vast amounts of information on the chip in the identity card -- no less than 49 different types of information, and vastly more than is necessary just to ascertain someone's identity; the UK legislation opens the possibility to store a lengthy record of all interactions someone has had with the government on the card, from work permits to health insurance. It even includes, lugubriously, "date of death" -- apparently even the corpses will have to carry an identity card!
It is there that the real matter for concern rests.
My card carries my family name, first names, gender, nationality, date and place of birth, address, photograph and signature, identity card number and date of expiry. That is really all such a card should be allowed to hold. When I get a digital card this will include an electronic signature, the government having had the idea -- on which diverse views are possible -- to issue every citizen with an electronic signature for computer transactions.
Actually, because of its insistence on machine-readable codes, arrival and departure records, pictures, fingerprints, and in the future biometric data as well, the US government probably holds a far more intrusive dossier on me than my own government, and without any opportunity for me to have a say in this.
It depends on what your standard is. I have NAV on my own computer, and regard it as far, far better than the IT-department installation of McAfee on my work computer.
Granted, the two hardware configurations are quite different, and probably the software configuration as well; but the latter is enough to keep anyone unfortunate enough to have to work with in a state of permanent rage.
I think McAfee needs to be regarded as a serious health & safety risk -- high blood pressure, teeth gnashing, and all that.
That is true; the marketing budget is about twice as high as the R&D budget.
However, there is a very simple reason for this: The marketing pays itself back. As I have heard one CEO of a pharma company put it, the marking people ultimately bring in more than they spend, and they do so even if there are more marketeers than patients in a doctor's waiting room.
Whereas R&D returns on a new project are typically ten or more years away, and often very uncertain: The vast majority of all R&D projects fails to produce results. Only a tiny minority produces a very profitable "blockbuster" drug.
So it makes business sense, unfortunately, to spend a lot of money on marketing to maximize profit from the limited number of profitable drugs that a company has, in the limited time before the patent rights expire.
Re:A few lines of code? wtf?
on
Anatomy of a Virus
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· Score: 4, Informative
No conventional microscope is involved: A transmission electron microscope is used for this kind of work, with samples that are rapidly cooled to liquid nitrogen temperature to vitrify them. Then complex 3D image reconstruction techniques are used on the images to generate the result.
Typically this involves finding the images of the viruses in the field of view, alignment and centering, similarity clustering of the (grainy) images, averaging of the clusters, determining their relative orientation, 3D reconstruction, and back-projection to compare the result with the input images. Symmetry helps a lot.
I actually have some experience in trying to control a microscope by its software: A day of this and you understand why you could not hire someone to do it for you, even at $750 an hour. A week of this cures you from any possible aversion you ever had for Microsoft. A month of this may drive you to suicide.
I would sincerely admire the people at Purdue if they had achieved this. However, as the better informed reader of the article will discover, they did something that probably was a lot easier and less frustrating...
I am by no means a specialist in this field and of course I do not know whether your project actually allows this approach.
But if I were asked to do this, I would take a database (a stable release of MySql is what I would choose) and use it both as the persistent object storage and communication module. The GUI and the number-crunching module(s) would be set up to primarily communicate through the database, rather than directly with each other. A task state/queue table in the database would inform the modules what tasks have not been assigned yet, are running, are complete, have not returned in the expected time, or have failed. This would make it asynchronous and highly traceable; databases are (supposed to be) good at managing the interactions between multiple user processes and still maintaining data integrity. Admittedly this is not the best approach if you want your results real-time.
The central managament of the processes could be kept minimalistic and simple, and "therefore" robust: Some very simple communication with number-crushing processes to test whether they are alive (a TCP/IP socket read-write might do), re-opening a task that has not returned in an expected time period (if its process still returns later, the newly started process will have to detect that its work was already done, and discard its results instead of writing them back), and perhaps signalling critical task completion to users (by GUI message, e-mail, text message,...). The central management would not have the startup responsibility for distributed number-crunching modules, that would remain with the local servers they are running on. Such a process can then "knock on the door" of the database, register its presence, and take the next available task, or wait until one is available.
The persistent form of the core data structures would be in database tables, but the modules would of course have their share of the data in memory as class representations of the data structures, defined to be initialized from the database tables and written back to them. These class representations of the data structures then could be in a common library shared by the different modules, but alternatively you might opt for different class representations for e.g. the GUI and the number-crunching modules if that is more efficient (it often is) and even write them in different languages if that is more convenient. I admit that that adds to the amount of code and therefore to the amount of bugs. On the other hand, you could write two "completely" independent implementations of the same task.
If your number-crunching is complex and long, then evaluate whether you can write back intermediate states to the database as a recovery point, or even split the calculations in completely independent modules, each one starting and ending with a given database state. The desirability of this depends, of course, on the balance between I/O and processing costs. If you have modules that are relatively simple and safe but need to work quickly through a large amount of data, you could consider database stored methods for these; not very distributed but it reduces the amount of I/O and they can easily be called by client processes.
The database does not care in what language the different modules are written, so you can then write every one in the language that is most appropriate. For example, there may be no reason at all to write (parts of) the GUI in C++ -- and that is something I would try to avoid. If performance allows it, I would use Java for the GUI, both for portability and simply to avoid the mess of writing user interfaces in C++; in my experience that does not tend to be the most stable solution.
For the C++ part I would start by structuring pretty strongly; write a large number of simple classes instead of a smaller number of complex ones, and test every class before you move on to the next level. The "salami approach" works well if you plan it well. It is perfectly possible to write very ro
... and its boss should not be someone who understands your work.
That should be, evidently: its boss should be someone who understands your work. Originally I wrote that its boss should not be an IT person, but perhaps that was too unfair.
A first suggestion: Try to explain your requirements better. The IT support people are (too) often narrow specialists in entirely separate teams, with only a tenuous understanding of what the company actually does, and business goals that are more or less independent of it. If you are a technology person outside IT infrastructure, issues that seem obvious for you may actually be nearly impossible to understand for them. Take the time to explain your problem, repeatedly and in very simple terms, until you are sure that they understand. Even in the best cases it can be very trying; but getting an understanding of the problem is the first step towards cooperation.
If you have an IT department with the primary task of maintaining office infrastructure, then try convincing management to create a second IT team for the technology IT support. It should have an independent reporting line to management and its boss should not be someone who understands your work. The two tasks are so different that it actually is very difficult for the same people to handle both. A five-star restaurant and McDonalds both qualify (at least nominally) as food suppliers, but you would not (be able to) hire the same people for both jobs.
Sadly, I have to agree that IT departments harbour far too many control freaks with meticulous attention for every regulation that gives them a bit more power, and that over time their bureaucracy does indeed tend to get completely out of control. The first victims of this are of course the people in IT themselves, and that can be your lever to change the situation: You can often find allies within the group, if you look for them.
And if you really need to break through an obstructionist attitude, it can be very useful to do a reality check. That IT declares that security system X is absolutely vital to have, does not mean that you have to believe this, or that they have actually implemented it everywhere. Don't just believe what they say, check what they do. IT departments are often very absolutist and alarmist in their declarations, but as economic with the truth as any politician. Especially if their management is weak.
Singers, movies stars and gangsters may influence youth culture; they always have. And your complaint about society glorifying such people might have been spoken by Cato the Elder. Indeed, it probably was.
But kids did not set their own educational standards. Balding bureaucrats in three-piece suits (probably wearing horn-rimmed glasses, and looking down with contempt on modern singers) did it for them.
And their standards reflected what serious people of their time considered to be important skills; and that, basically, the ability to read a balance sheet. Such was the culture of the 1980s.
There was a time when engineers and trailblazers were popular heroes. But a lot of damage was done in the 1980s and 1990s, when there was a culture of outright greed and everybody's dream was to be a fat-cat manager. Education reflected this, and children were trained to be capable pen-pushers, perhaps also possesing relational and organisational skills. (It was not all bad.) Politicians listened to business leaders, and business leaders naturally emphasised the type of skills they themselves had.
However, the people who did this forgot that management does not create ideas or value. Problem-solving, creative and scientific skills took a back seat; some of this was an understandable reaction to the way education was organized in the 1970s. But they were also considered less important because they were not culturally appreciated and besides, they were not the kind of skills a professional human resources department was looking for.
The result has been a loss of cognitive ability, in part a lack of creativity, but to substantial degree a loss of interpretative ability. The generation that was still educated in Latin and Old Greek may have wasted time on subjects managers now consider unimportant, but they did have a knack for extracting meaning from obscure and incomplete evidence.
Speaking as a non-American scientist, I have to regard the refusal of the Bush government to take any effective measures to curb the enormous amount of pollution the USA is sending in the air, as a clear and present danger to our most vital interests, i.e. our very survival.
If scientists who speak out against such a behaviour are silenced by official pressure, that is not merely a worry; it is appalling and undermines every hope that a meaningful agreement to protect the climate can be reached.
The question we have to ponder is what other measures we can take to stop US pollution, if the USA itself refuses to cooperate. Maybe we should consider punitive taxation on all imports from the USA, or an agreement with the oil-procuding nations to restrict their exports to the USA.
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One of the most fundamental contributory factors to internal security problems in companies is the attitude of many IT departments and IT managers, who would basically like to run their business as a police state. As in "real life", security is always the ideal excuse to give IT managers more power and to downgrade the rights of system users.
Of course, draconic security policies are very rarely backed up by any commitment from IT staff to provide efficient services and smoothly functioning systems. I've seen long documents discussing IT policy that expounded at great length on IT security, but failed to make any mention at all of service quality or system performance.
The natural, logical, entirely human result of this is that users will rebel and take revenge by cheating on security policy. And why not? It is not as if the IT department is of much use to them, anyway, so it doesn't get any sympathy. But when you get to this point, none of your security policies is worth the paper they are carefully filed on, in triplicate. Basically, when you have lost goodwill, you have lost everything. No overload of carefully crafted security polices and security systems is going to help. The IT people will be the first ones to ignore them; they know how to get around the barriers.
Of course IT will react to this by declaring that the users are the problem. Not so. IT is a supporting department, not more. If the users are unhappy and unruly, then IT is the problem; it is a strong indication that the department is failing in its mission.
Rule One of an efficient IT policy is to understand the business your are supporting and its requirements, and to finely tune your policy to achieve the best compromise between security and functionality. When IT is experienced as a burden to users, instead of a support, you've lost the game. It can, and will, only go downhill from there.
Frankly, past a certain point IT policy itself becomes a serious threat to the competitiveness of a company. Most CEOs would balk at giving everyone a 10% raise, but inept IT policy can cost them considerably more than 10% of the time of their workforce. Few of them realize this, because they regard software as too technical to be understood.
The Belgian government has already taken the step of including an electronic ID on its next-generation identity card. For the price 10 euros, every Belgian (for the card is mandatory, although one does not have to activate the electronic signature option) will get an officially issued card with an encryption key and an electronic signature.
For the government, of course, the benefit is in shifting as much official communication (tax forms etc.) from paper to electronic form. But financial institutions, online shops, etc. are also encouraged to use the eID.
Information on the official eID site is mostly in Belgium's three official languages (which do not include English) but there is extensive information in English on the site of Microsoft Benelux eID.
Frankly, I don't see much of a problem with Microsoft. When it comes to making file formats accessible and interchangeable, MS has behaved relatively well.
I expect much more resistance from those software companies that have a business that almost solely exists because of their ability to monopolize file or datastream formats: Adobe with its Acrobat software suite, Apple with Quicktime, and of course Real. Especially the latter two would probably be kicked out of the market swiftly if consumers had an alternative.
Well, it is widely assumed that the very point of publicly funded research is to allow others to build on it. Publicly funded institutions do, and in my opinion should do, fundamental research that has little or no discernible short-term advantage, but is the basis for later applied science and development. They may not reap the big profits, but why should they? Their research is supposed to benefit society as a whole. That's why it is publicly funded. If it were profitable, private enterprise would do it.
What you are arguing is that the publicly funded institutions should do a much larger part of the applied science. But knowing the taxpayer and politicians, that risks all but to obliterate the fundamental research, with potentially dramatic long-term consequences, also for health care. I do not believe that (especially in a time of shrinking scientific funding) the taxpayer will furnish billions of extra money. I would prefer to see (much) more generous funding for fundamental scientific research.
You could (and do) argue that because publicly developed drugs do not need to generate profit, they will be cheaper in the long term for health care. Assuming that public development would be sufficiently efficient, that might be true.
However, drug development is a risky business. The large majority of drug candidates fail. (As opposed, one would hope, to infrastructure projects.) It is one thing to ask the financial markets to support these risks; investors (should) spread their risks and (should) know that the laws of the marketplace correlate higher potential profits with higher risk. (Let us forget about Enron for the moment.) It is, in my opinion, another thing entirely to oblige the taxpayer to do so, allowing others to take big gambles with their money. Clinical trials can cost hundreds of millions and when you have serious side effects such as liver toxicity, the money has basically been thrown away. The CEOs of pharmaceutical companies have to and do make decisions like that; it is their job. I don't trust politicians to do the same.
As for licensing allowing academics to get "something" out of their research, I do have a little first-hand experience of negotiations of this kind, and these days most academic instutions boast serious and tenacious legal teams. My impression is that academics more often than not overestimate the amount of money industry is able and willing to pay, and that negotiations often will be dragged out endlessly until the potential industrial partner just walks away in deep frustration.
Finally, it is beyond doubt that the business if profit driven, but the point is that streamlining the process, allowing for a longer recuperation period, and perhaps even guarantueeing a modest profit margin for a successful development would make many drugs profitable that are economically unviable now. Without huge investments for the taxpayer.
That small step forward, presumably, includes the three years of medicinal chemistry to optimize the compound and find a suitable formulation, the seven years of clinical trails, and compiling the 250,000 page submission file for the FDA?
These days, the cost of developing a drug and getting approval for it is equivalent to the defense budget of a modest country -- say Vietnam or Syria. These procedures are well above the normal levels of academic funding. I doubt that many academics would be really interested in the tedious procedural work; the graduate students and PhDs who do most work in a research environment don't even stay long enough in these jobs to see a project like this to the end.
What academic institutions really want is to license their finds to industry, and get an (as large as possible) financial gain out of their intellectual property without having to do much more work.
A better solution would be some way to guarantuee the cost-effectiveness of the development of even rarely used drugs. Streamlined approval procedures could reduce cost; patent extensions could allow costs to be recovered over a longer period; government contracts (perhaps even on a no-cure-no-pay basis) could share some of the financial burden.
Academic institutions could take advantage from this to the same extent as "Big Pharma", levelling the playing field a bit.
You would not willingly expose children to putrid waste or toxic chemicals, so why expose them to the intellectual pollutions that are called "intelligent design" or "creationism"?
If these concepts would rest purely on religious foundations, that would not be so bad. But in reality they are based on a corrosive mix of religion with intellectual dishonesty, bad logic, and intentional distortions of the truth. People object to the religious influence, but that is merely the innocent of it.
By all means, let us teach children to question statements and make up their own mind about things. So we should confront them with real problems, where both sides of the argument have real merit, and the evidence to decide the argument has not yet been discovered. And teach them to address problems with logic instead of ideology.
Even in the field of evolution, there are plenty of those. For example the debate about the diet of early humans and the means by which it was gathered, or the still disputed question whether the emergence of a new species requires geographical separation. It may sound a bit difficult, but I believe teachers can find means to explain this and ask relevant questions; at least if they don't have to waste their time on intelligent design and other red herrings.
I like Swing, mainly because it can be easily extended to do things with components they were not originally designed for. You can fairly rapidly build a relatively complicated user interface, with custom components, custom events, and multiple interacting display windows, and still have perfectly manageable, re-usable code. (Well, if you work outside graphical designers, which in my humble opinion should only be used for developing write-only code.)
I agree that it can take an effort to master it, and that developing simple interfaces can take extra time because of the overhead. But Swing's structure is quite ordered and I have found that Swing suits "my" logic; it comes fairly natural to me as a programmer.
I like Swing much more than AWT, which IMHO was not very good at all, mainly because the event handling model was awful. For me the biggest problems with early versions of Swing were in the use of images, and while the image handling libraries are much more powerful and rationally organized now, they are also unpleasantly complex. But it is good enough. I have never tried SWT.
Web interfaces are nice for many applications, but for most of the things I do not really an option. For database applications a pretty good middle way seems to be Java Web Start, which allows you to use a web server to distribute your code, but still to run it as a very flexible application on your desktop.
Well, speaking as a "Science" type: It does become very lonely if you don't have a single co-worker who understands elementary statistics. Having more "science" types around could be a plus.
Not to mention the worrying ease by which it is possible to convince management of nearly anything, if you show them an analysis based on not one parameter, but two -- apparently this is so sophisticated that it must be true.
Hard work, imagination and business practices also matter.
In my experience, many organisations are organized in such way that it is barely possible for scientists to run a project successfully to completion. The more complacent they are, the more dysfunctional they tend to be.
The reason is simple. To get a scientifict project (in fact any project) near its goalpost, you typically need to coordinate a number of elements in an intelligent manner: People, for you do need a certain critical mass of scientific knowledge to get a good team; space, in terms of laboratories and offices; equipment; engineering support; money; computer hardware and software; and so on. One missing element can be enough to ruin your day.
Now look at the typical "professionally" managed organisation and you will see that rather than coordinated, these elements tend to be fragmented, sometimes very highly fragemented, each with its own manager. Who often enough will fiercely defend his turf against any interference and takes care great to ensure that any inter-departemental coordination is only done at the highest possible level.
The theory of it usually is that the scientists need to be "supported" by taking the responsibility for budgets and computer and other circumstantial elements out of their hands, to leave them doing what they are best at, science. Scientists are supposed to be no good at administration. But in practice it only takes two breaths for these "supporting" departments to effectively take over control of the organisation, forcing the scientists to spend more of their time on fighting the system than on research.
It would actually be far more efficient to hire more scientists and to let them improvise things in their own sloppy way, than to hire managers and administrators who are supposed to be more efficient.
A reverence for the written word, regardless of its practical application or not, seems to be one of the most remarkable characteristics of American culture. It is evidently found comforting and enormously important to have things on paper, even if they are not actually applied and it makes very little practical difference.
The origins of this national trait would be worth someone's time to investigate. I suspect that it was a combination of protestantism, with the high importance this religion attaches to the reading of the Holy Scriptures, and the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition with its almost absurd respect for anything that can be established as a precedent.
The result usually is an untangible mass of written procedure, absolutely useless in practice, but important in court. I have only limited experience in SOP writing, but I have noticed that if you want to include any actual useful content in such a document, you have to tag it on in an addendum. There is no place for it in the template.
In that sense, I am inclined to go along with this court decision. Perhaps the loan company did not implement its written procedure; but everybody knows that official written procedure is not practical to be implemented and not really intended to be implemented. The sole reason for its existence is its existence itself.
And then people just follow their common sense, or not, for whatever that is worth. Often not much.
Well, Goebbels was on the losing side, wasn't he?
I think the III. Reich lost the propaganda war as well as it lost on the other fronts in the war. Allied propaganda was less blatant and less obtrusive, and therefore attracted less attention; but as far as I know it was far more effective. Throughout Europe people risked their life, including Germans, to listen to the BBC. Especially British propaganda, both "white" and "black", evolved into something much more effective than anything Goebbels produced -- although starting from very crude beginnings indeed.
Allied propaganda produced newspapers for axis soldiers, provided them with sewing kits and other useful items carrying anti-war slogans, and printed Passierscheine encouraging surrender that were reportedly even sold on the (Italian) black markets.
The reality was that Goebbels was unable to repress all external sources of information, and that showed his construction to be the house of cards it really was. By 1945 his propaganda had become a subject for cynical jokes --- "Don't worry; Groefaz will save us."
Lies can buy time; but Lincoln was right -- you can't fool all people all the time.
The history of government propaganda is long and diverse, and includes successes as well as failures. Effective propaganda does not need to be evil. During WWII, Allied propagandists printed newspapers for Axis soldiers, and they were much appreciated by their recipients for being rather more reliable than the official German news sources.
Rule 1 of effective propaganda is telling the truth. At least most of the time. There is nothing that really beats that, when it comes to convincing people.
This view of the scientist as a kind of secular monk, dedicated to his research and nothing else, doesn't work very well in practice. Speaking as a scientist and a workaholic, I am strongly inclined to say that it is nonsense.
The reality is that most science needs resources, i.e. money, space, and equipment. To get that, a scientist needs to be able to prepare his case and defend it; nobody is going to give him or her these without a good reason. After all, there are other people asking for the money as well. Running a laboratory takes scientific as well as communicative ability, and at least some talent for administration as well.
Doing good science often requires the ability to communicate with people outside your own field; an astronomer might really, really need the ability have a meaningful conversation with a biologist or an engineer.
This is pretty much the same for scientists in an academic or an industrial environment. The industrial R&D environment generally has more money and (therefore) less backbiting, but also less scientific freedom.
Besides, many scientists want something to be done with their research. What is the point of you knowing, if everybody else remains ignorant, and worse, makes decisions based on flawed assumptions? Scientists want their publications, read, cited, and used. For this to be the case, the research has to be relevant, and it has to be made understandable. Fame is a sign of success -- it means that people know your work; and the probable (but not necessary) implication of that is that it was correct and useful.
Besides, if you want to be rich, you should study law or economics, not science. What scientists hope to get from their careers is a claim to immortal fame, however modest. And perhaps the rather exaggerated respect many people show to someone with a scientific degree.
That said, I hope that the kids who go to science fairs with stem cell research projects do not pick up a bad habit. When scientific subjects really become fashionable, that often means that --- in a scientific sense --- it is too late to jump on the bandwaggon. Nobody wants to read a "me too!" paper. The science that makes good careers is the kind of science most people outside an university have not yet heard of.
No, intelligent design cannot pass for a scientific theory. It has, however, all the characteristics of a pseudo-scientific theory -- or, to put it less politely, mumbo-jumbo.
The two are actually fairly easy to tell apart. A scientific theory is developed to provide the best possible explanation of the available observations. That does not make the theory a fact; on the contrary it is a characteristic of any scientific theory that it is falsifiable by contrary obsverations. It does make the theory a framework that provides a logical explanation for facts and predicts others. Newton's theory of gravity provided an explanation for the fact that apples fall and planets revolve around the sun -- not an entirely correct explanation, as we now know, but till one that allowed the outcome of experiments to be predicted.
A pseudo-scientific theory on the other hand is constructed to avoid the facts. It bases itself not on what we know, but on what we don't know, and weaves a winding path around those observations that cannot be contradicted. A pseudo-scientific theory is a framework that allows its adherents to declare that something might be true despite the facts. A pseudo-scientific theory does not contribute a prediction for the outcome of any experiment, and therefore is not falsifiable.
A good example of this is the debate around homeopathy. Hanhemann's last followers don't have any fact-based theory to offer on how their form of medicine could actually work, nor can they really argue against 200 years of progress in biology, chemistry and physics. So as their way out they postulate the existence of a mysterious and undefined form of energy that science has not discovered yet, and that would explain homeopathy.
Creationism has always been pseudo-scientific to the core. It was never a coherent theory that offered a rational explanation of observations; it was a set of assumptions that allowed fundamentalist believers to stick to their belief despite the scientific observations. As all pseudo-scientific theories, it existed not to explain, but to explain away.
Intelligent Design is little more than the final rearguard action of the creationists. It accepts the existing observations on evolution and the history of our planet, does not contribute an explanation of a single additional scientific observation, but allows its adherent to retain a cherised belief regardless of these observations. That is it's whole point. It is not a scientific theory and it never will be.
We have had compulsory ID cards for years and frankly, I find it rather artificial that such a fuss is made about the principle of introduction in the UK. In reality people already need to carry some document that allows them to identify themselves, if only to their banker, even in the UK and USA. The practical difference with having an official "identify card" is minute.
This is all about symbolic value. Both the US and UK government have summarily granted themselves the power to lock people in jail without any form of trial, or at least restrict their movements; to snoop in people's communications and to fill the streets with security cameras. These are far more outrageous attacks on civil liberty than a compulsory ID card. The reason civil liberty groups focus on ID cards is simply that they are both universal and material and therefore have the potential to concern everybody; not that they are enormously problematic.
But this focus on matters of principle and symbolism is highly counterproductive. While libertarians are wasting their time fighting a lost battle, the British government is quietly getting away with storing vast amounts of information on the chip in the identity card -- no less than 49 different types of information, and vastly more than is necessary just to ascertain someone's identity; the UK legislation opens the possibility to store a lengthy record of all interactions someone has had with the government on the card, from work permits to health insurance. It even includes, lugubriously, "date of death" -- apparently even the corpses will have to carry an identity card!
It is there that the real matter for concern rests.
My card carries my family name, first names, gender, nationality, date and place of birth, address, photograph and signature, identity card number and date of expiry. That is really all such a card should be allowed to hold. When I get a digital card this will include an electronic signature, the government having had the idea -- on which diverse views are possible -- to issue every citizen with an electronic signature for computer transactions.
Actually, because of its insistence on machine-readable codes, arrival and departure records, pictures, fingerprints, and in the future biometric data as well, the US government probably holds a far more intrusive dossier on me than my own government, and without any opportunity for me to have a say in this.
It depends on what your standard is. I have NAV on my own computer, and regard it as far, far better than the IT-department installation of McAfee on my work computer.
Granted, the two hardware configurations are quite different, and probably the software configuration as well; but the latter is enough to keep anyone unfortunate enough to have to work with in a state of permanent rage.
I think McAfee needs to be regarded as a serious health & safety risk -- high blood pressure, teeth gnashing, and all that.
That is true; the marketing budget is about twice as high as the R&D budget.
However, there is a very simple reason for this: The marketing pays itself back. As I have heard one CEO of a pharma company put it, the marking people ultimately bring in more than they spend, and they do so even if there are more marketeers than patients in a doctor's waiting room.
Whereas R&D returns on a new project are typically ten or more years away, and often very uncertain: The vast majority of all R&D projects fails to produce results. Only a tiny minority produces a very profitable "blockbuster" drug.
So it makes business sense, unfortunately, to spend a lot of money on marketing to maximize profit from the limited number of profitable drugs that a company has, in the limited time before the patent rights expire.
No conventional microscope is involved: A transmission electron microscope is used for this kind of work, with samples that are rapidly cooled to liquid nitrogen temperature to vitrify them. Then complex 3D image reconstruction techniques are used on the images to generate the result.
Typically this involves finding the images of the viruses in the field of view, alignment and centering, similarity clustering of the (grainy) images, averaging of the clusters, determining their relative orientation, 3D reconstruction, and back-projection to compare the result with the input images. Symmetry helps a lot.
I actually have some experience in trying to control a microscope by its software: A day of this and you understand why you could not hire someone to do it for you, even at $750 an hour. A week of this cures you from any possible aversion you ever had for Microsoft. A month of this may drive you to suicide.
I would sincerely admire the people at Purdue if they had achieved this. However, as the better informed reader of the article will discover, they did something that probably was a lot easier and less frustrating...
I am by no means a specialist in this field and of course I do not know whether your project actually allows this approach.
But if I were asked to do this, I would take a database (a stable release of MySql is what I would choose) and use it both as the persistent object storage and communication module. The GUI and the number-crunching module(s) would be set up to primarily communicate through the database, rather than directly with each other. A task state/queue table in the database would inform the modules what tasks have not been assigned yet, are running, are complete, have not returned in the expected time, or have failed. This would make it asynchronous and highly traceable; databases are (supposed to be) good at managing the interactions between multiple user processes and still maintaining data integrity. Admittedly this is not the best approach if you want your results real-time.
The central managament of the processes could be kept minimalistic and simple, and "therefore" robust: Some very simple communication with number-crushing processes to test whether they are alive (a TCP/IP socket read-write might do), re-opening a task that has not returned in an expected time period (if its process still returns later, the newly started process will have to detect that its work was already done, and discard its results instead of writing them back), and perhaps signalling critical task completion to users (by GUI message, e-mail, text message, ...). The central management would not have the startup responsibility for distributed number-crunching modules, that would remain with the local servers they are running on. Such a process can then "knock on the door" of the database, register its presence, and take the next available task, or wait until one is available.
The persistent form of the core data structures would be in database tables, but the modules would of course have their share of the data in memory as class representations of the data structures, defined to be initialized from the database tables and written back to them. These class representations of the data structures then could be in a common library shared by the different modules, but alternatively you might opt for different class representations for e.g. the GUI and the number-crunching modules if that is more efficient (it often is) and even write them in different languages if that is more convenient. I admit that that adds to the amount of code and therefore to the amount of bugs. On the other hand, you could write two "completely" independent implementations of the same task.
If your number-crunching is complex and long, then evaluate whether you can write back intermediate states to the database as a recovery point, or even split the calculations in completely independent modules, each one starting and ending with a given database state. The desirability of this depends, of course, on the balance between I/O and processing costs. If you have modules that are relatively simple and safe but need to work quickly through a large amount of data, you could consider database stored methods for these; not very distributed but it reduces the amount of I/O and they can easily be called by client processes.
The database does not care in what language the different modules are written, so you can then write every one in the language that is most appropriate. For example, there may be no reason at all to write (parts of) the GUI in C++ -- and that is something I would try to avoid. If performance allows it, I would use Java for the GUI, both for portability and simply to avoid the mess of writing user interfaces in C++; in my experience that does not tend to be the most stable solution.
For the C++ part I would start by structuring pretty strongly; write a large number of simple classes instead of a smaller number of complex ones, and test every class before you move on to the next level. The "salami approach" works well if you plan it well. It is perfectly possible to write very ro
That should be, evidently: its boss should be someone who understands your work. Originally I wrote that its boss should not be an IT person, but perhaps that was too unfair.
I have had similar experiences.
A first suggestion: Try to explain your requirements better. The IT support people are (too) often narrow specialists in entirely separate teams, with only a tenuous understanding of what the company actually does, and business goals that are more or less independent of it. If you are a technology person outside IT infrastructure, issues that seem obvious for you may actually be nearly impossible to understand for them. Take the time to explain your problem, repeatedly and in very simple terms, until you are sure that they understand. Even in the best cases it can be very trying; but getting an understanding of the problem is the first step towards cooperation.
If you have an IT department with the primary task of maintaining office infrastructure, then try convincing management to create a second IT team for the technology IT support. It should have an independent reporting line to management and its boss should not be someone who understands your work. The two tasks are so different that it actually is very difficult for the same people to handle both. A five-star restaurant and McDonalds both qualify (at least nominally) as food suppliers, but you would not (be able to) hire the same people for both jobs.
Sadly, I have to agree that IT departments harbour far too many control freaks with meticulous attention for every regulation that gives them a bit more power, and that over time their bureaucracy does indeed tend to get completely out of control. The first victims of this are of course the people in IT themselves, and that can be your lever to change the situation: You can often find allies within the group, if you look for them.
And if you really need to break through an obstructionist attitude, it can be very useful to do a reality check. That IT declares that security system X is absolutely vital to have, does not mean that you have to believe this, or that they have actually implemented it everywhere. Don't just believe what they say, check what they do. IT departments are often very absolutist and alarmist in their declarations, but as economic with the truth as any politician. Especially if their management is weak.
Singers, movies stars and gangsters may influence youth culture; they always have. And your complaint about society glorifying such people might have been spoken by Cato the Elder. Indeed, it probably was.
But kids did not set their own educational standards. Balding bureaucrats in three-piece suits (probably wearing horn-rimmed glasses, and looking down with contempt on modern singers) did it for them.
And their standards reflected what serious people of their time considered to be important skills; and that, basically, the ability to read a balance sheet. Such was the culture of the 1980s.
This is very unsurprising.
There was a time when engineers and trailblazers were popular heroes. But a lot of damage was done in the 1980s and 1990s, when there was a culture of outright greed and everybody's dream was to be a fat-cat manager. Education reflected this, and children were trained to be capable pen-pushers, perhaps also possesing relational and organisational skills. (It was not all bad.) Politicians listened to business leaders, and business leaders naturally emphasised the type of skills they themselves had.
However, the people who did this forgot that management does not create ideas or value. Problem-solving, creative and scientific skills took a back seat; some of this was an understandable reaction to the way education was organized in the 1970s. But they were also considered less important because they were not culturally appreciated and besides, they were not the kind of skills a professional human resources department was looking for.
The result has been a loss of cognitive ability, in part a lack of creativity, but to substantial degree a loss of interpretative ability. The generation that was still educated in Latin and Old Greek may have wasted time on subjects managers now consider unimportant, but they did have a knack for extracting meaning from obscure and incomplete evidence.
Speaking as a non-American scientist, I have to regard the refusal of the Bush government to take any effective measures to curb the enormous amount of pollution the USA is sending in the air, as a clear and present danger to our most vital interests, i.e. our very survival.
If scientists who speak out against such a behaviour are silenced by official pressure, that is not merely a worry; it is appalling and undermines every hope that a meaningful agreement to protect the climate can be reached.
The question we have to ponder is what other measures we can take to stop US pollution, if the USA itself refuses to cooperate. Maybe we should consider punitive taxation on all imports from the USA, or an agreement with the oil-procuding nations to restrict their exports to the USA.