How many computer science graduates are "well-trained, ready to go" to be software developers? How many future lawyers show up at their first clerkship "well-trained, ready to go"? Architects? Engineers? I'm not sure "IT" is unique in this regard.
I listen to Pandora about half of each day at work. When I reach my 40 hour monthly limit I switch to last.fm. I get exposed to some music I would never have heard on the radio, which is nice, and its almost CD-quality. But I don't actually ever buy any of it. Why should I, when I can listen to it on Pandora/last.fm for free?
You can freeze embryos and implant along the way. Except if space is bad for reproduction then its probably also bad for incubation and in utero development.
Ostensibly I'm a member of this culture, albeit a fringe one. I'm a software developer. I have a math degree. I'm an introvert. I read sci-fi and fantasy literature, but not exclusively. I build my own computers. I frequently don't shave, and I'm not especially fashionable (though not especially unfashionable either). I don't play many graphical computer games, but, unbelievably, I still play a text-based MUD. That said, I find that those who really "embrace" and identify with "geek culture" get on my nerves to a phenomenal degree. Folks who go to ComicCon. Folks who answer "yes" when asked "Are you a 'gamer'?" People who look so stereotypically "nerdy" one wonders if it's intentional. The guy who incessantly quotes Monty Python (or some other geek cult film, e.g. Princess Bride, Firefly, etc.) because he thinks it's funny every dang time. Basically there's a lot of overlap between my interests and those of many "geeks", but I despise "geek culture".
medical less so even if you have employer provided health insurance, and much less so if you don't.
If you don't have employer-provided then often you qualify for Medicaid and/or SCHIP. Though not always.
There's also either daycare or opportunity cost (if one of the parents cares for them instead of working outside the home).
Opportunity cost obviously varies according the earning potential of the spouse who's taking time off. For some folks that will be "high" and for some folks "not that high". Lost income also comes "off the top" of total income meaning it's taxed at the highest rate. Giving up $10,000/year gross may only represent a net loss of $7000/year. Some families may also have access to free child care (from relatives).
A bigger house definitely, even for one or two kids; you _could_ raise kids in a one-bedroom apartment, but you're unlikely to do so.
I'm unlikely to live in a one-bedroom house regardless. Having kids means may mean I have less free space in my home, but not necessarily that I go out and buy a bigger home. Rather than pay more to maintain the same level of luxury, some folks sacrifice the luxury and keep cost constant.
Cost of schooling, either moving to a place where the public schools are decent or paying private schools.
Moving in range of decent schools doesn't necessarily mean paying more. Again, I'm not likely to live in the slums even in the absence of kids. I recognize this isn't true for everyone.
And then there's the non-economic costs. Like all of your time.
True. On the other hand, parents usually have kids because they derive some enjoyment from them, just as they would have the leisure activities "kid time" replace.
Only if they don't turn out to be ungrateful bastards.
True. Then again, the more you have the more you spread around the risk. If you have four kids you can "absorb" one of them checking out and being unwilling to support you in your old age. If you're not a douche parent odds are your kids won't totally shun you in your hour of need.
It's still probably true that kids aren't a net positive, but they're far from the net negative people make them out to be.
Except some of the most popular world religions don't do much in the way of explaining natural phenomena. They cover stuff like "How can my life be meaningful?" and "What happens when I die?" instead of "Why is there thunder after lightning?" and "Why are there tides?"
IMO the studies that try to put a price tag on children are wildly exaggerated. Basically it's food, clothing and medical. You might have to buy a bigger house, but only if you have lots of them. Do it right and they won't have to pay for college. The tax advantages also defray part of the cost. When you're old they act as an insurance policy. The more you have (and the more they have) the greater the pool of resources you can draw on if you find yourself in need of support.
80% of Swedes are atheists only if you define atheism broadly as not believing in "a God". According to wiki only 23% of Swedes believe in "a God" but a whopping 54% believe in a "spirit or life force". I've always thought of "atheism" as not believing in any sort of supernatural power, including a "spirit or life force". Using that definition only 23% of Swedes can properly be called "atheists".
Yeah. Except not. I would wager that highly religious people actually have less free time than their irreligious counterparts. There's all that time spent at church and on church-related activities. Religious people (depending on the religion, but I would guess this is true for most) either value children more. So they have more of them. A few religious folk probably also believe contraception is verboten, and I can't imagine any irreligious person thinking that.
When it comes to the poor, I'm thinking the key factor there is irresponsibility. Generally speaking that's why many people are poor to begin with. I highly doubt "amount of free time" plays a part in either case.
They don't differentiate between offerings from each ISP. An ISP the majority of whose users are on slow 1.5 Mb/s connections (but with a few on super-fast 20 Mb/s connections) would fare poorly in this exercise compared to a competitor with of its users on mediocre 4.0 Mb/s connections. As a consumer interested in bandwidth, though, I'm going with the first ISP assuming their backbone is capable enough to actually feed that 20 Mb/s pipe.
Where I live the two highest-performing options are Time Warner (Roadrunner Extreme) at 20 Mb/s for $50/mo and AT&T's U-Verse (Max Turbo) at 24 Mb/s for $65/mo. Currently I have AT&T's "Elite" DSL service which is 6 Mb/s for $40/mo. What I would find interesting is whether each of those can support the full 4800 kb/s Netflix stream, or if backbone issues crop up.
The United States places ninth in the world in access to high broadband connectivity, at 34% of users...
I wonder how many of these users have access to faster broadband but simply decline to purchase it? Based on my experience, the only users with faster-than-modem access that isn't also faster-than-5Mb/s are DSL users with low-end plans. Most standard cable plans start at 6 Mb/s. If someone has a low-end DSL plan then it is most likely the case that they could upgrade to a high-end DSL plan for more money that would put them above the 5 Mb/s threshold.
If it is true that low-end plans explain some of the reason for the low U.S. numbers, one easy (but ultimately stupid) way to juice the U.S. stats would be to forbid providers from selling plans with less than 5 Mb/s bandwidth. This would force all the folks with slow plans to either drop internet altogether or switch to a plan that qualifies as "fast". Of course this would represent screwing consumers just to rig the stats. Which is dumb.
Pay people based on their utility (current and future) and ignore the rest. Old guy may not have all the experience with emerging tech, but odds are he has at least some accumulated wisdom/skill from being in the field as long as he has. Maybe he's more reliable. Maybe he's better able to estimate how long it will take him to complete tasks. Maybe he just writes cleaner/better code. Maybe he's really bright and could pick up the new tech if required to it but hasn't been asked to do so. If he can get up to speed in a matter of weeks then it's silly to pay the young guy significantly more. Then again, if old guy really has no advantages over young guy and young guy has the relevant experience, then go ahead and pay young guy more.
There must be something missing from this summary. What boss in his right mind expects salaried employees to work 30% more hours without getting paid more or earning some equity? Is the job market just absolutely terrible where you're located (i.e. they have no other options, so won't quit)? Are they, in fact, being paid above-market salaries? Are you working on something so incredibly cool (though it would be hard to imagine what) that they're likely to comply with your boss's request? If none of these things are true, then tell your boss, "If you do this they will quit. Maybe not immediately, but as soon as they can find something better. And most things will be 'better'."
Facebook seems to have more penetration than MySpace or Friendster ever did. It also has those retarded games that (some) people seem to love and seems to be making inroads into communities outside the U.S. at a faster clip than its predecessors. Here I'm ignoring the fact that Friendster eventually became popular in Asia even as it died in the U.S. None of this means Facebook it will last forever, but it may have more positive inertia, meaning it will last longer before falling apart. AOL fell by the wayside because people realized you could get everything it offered (plus some) from a raw pipe to the Internet. What is "the next Facebook" going to have in terms of features that's so much better than what the current Facebook already offers?
I'm 10 years out of college and make at the low end of that range, though I live somewhere that's relatively cheap compared to most hotbeds of software development. I work 40 hours a week (sometimes a few less) and probably spend 25% of that not doing anything productive in a work-related sense. So from a "money per unit effort" sense I'm pretty well off. From a "doing something that is intrinsically rewarding and gives me a sense of pride and accomplishment"...not so much.
I might add "the aesthete". I'm somewhat guilty of this one myself. This guy is tasked with maintaining legitimately poor code and has to constantly resist the temptation to refactor pieces that are outside the scope of his actual tasks. He hates it when other people make changes to code he's written because they often "mess it up" or produce a result that's no longer "clean" and "elegant". If he can manage to exercise some self-control, though, and not go nuts fixing stuff that hasn't yet been identified as "broken", then he can be a valuable contributor.
With respect to lower scores, are you suggesting a scenario where scores are lower because cheating is effectively eliminated? In that case just curve the results so that you have whatever distribution you feel you need to have. This still ends up being a net win for people who don't cheat.
With respect to annoying students, yes there would be some annoyances but they'd also provide certain payoffs. First, a student who doesn't cheat could feel confident that his or her performance in a class wasn't affected detrimentally by other students' cheating. Second, the draconian policies might confer extra significance on high marks from such an institution, since they would be less likely to have resulted from cheating.
If I'm choosing between two students who graduated summa cum laude from their respective colleges and those colleges are comparably selective, but I know that one is rife with cheating and the other has next to no cheating, I'm going to prefer the student from the "no cheating" school because I can be more certain that his high marks were fairly won.
1. Jam cell phone traffic during exams. If it's not legal then make it legal. More feasible for large college courses than high school exams due to cost.
2. Zero tolerance policies. If you're shown without a doubt to have cheated then you not only fail the course, you're expelled.
3. Keep exams short, possibly in sections spread out over multiple days, and stipulate that if you leave the exam room for any reason (including to use the bathroom), your work for that day is invalidated and you must re-take an "alternate" version of that day's exam.
4. Design exams such that they're resistant to cheating. Use essay or short answer questions instead of multiple choice. If you must use multiple choice then generate different exam versions in which the answers are ordered differently. No two students in proximity to one another should have the same exam version.
5. Structure classes in a such a way that exams are taken individually, with very little opportunity for cheating. I took a self-paced digital logic class that used this format. To advance to the next unit a student had to get a perfect score on a six-question 30 minute quiz taken in the presence of a proctor. After the student had finished the proctor would denote any incorrect answers and the student had 10 minutes to correct them. If he failed to get all questions correct then he had to wait 3 days before re-testing on that unit.
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How many computer science graduates are "well-trained, ready to go" to be software developers? How many future lawyers show up at their first clerkship "well-trained, ready to go"? Architects? Engineers? I'm not sure "IT" is unique in this regard.
I listen to Pandora about half of each day at work. When I reach my 40 hour monthly limit I switch to last.fm. I get exposed to some music I would never have heard on the radio, which is nice, and its almost CD-quality. But I don't actually ever buy any of it. Why should I, when I can listen to it on Pandora/last.fm for free?
You can freeze embryos and implant along the way. Except if space is bad for reproduction then its probably also bad for incubation and in utero development.
Is he collecting unemployment payments? If so, he should have taken the job.
Physician: heal thyself.
Ostensibly I'm a member of this culture, albeit a fringe one. I'm a software developer. I have a math degree. I'm an introvert. I read sci-fi and fantasy literature, but not exclusively. I build my own computers. I frequently don't shave, and I'm not especially fashionable (though not especially unfashionable either). I don't play many graphical computer games, but, unbelievably, I still play a text-based MUD. That said, I find that those who really "embrace" and identify with "geek culture" get on my nerves to a phenomenal degree. Folks who go to ComicCon. Folks who answer "yes" when asked "Are you a 'gamer'?" People who look so stereotypically "nerdy" one wonders if it's intentional. The guy who incessantly quotes Monty Python (or some other geek cult film, e.g. Princess Bride, Firefly, etc.) because he thinks it's funny every dang time. Basically there's a lot of overlap between my interests and those of many "geeks", but I despise "geek culture".
Am I the only one?
Some thoughts:
If you don't have employer-provided then often you qualify for Medicaid and/or SCHIP. Though not always.
Opportunity cost obviously varies according the earning potential of the spouse who's taking time off. For some folks that will be "high" and for some folks "not that high". Lost income also comes "off the top" of total income meaning it's taxed at the highest rate. Giving up $10,000/year gross may only represent a net loss of $7000/year. Some families may also have access to free child care (from relatives).
I'm unlikely to live in a one-bedroom house regardless. Having kids means may mean I have less free space in my home, but not necessarily that I go out and buy a bigger home. Rather than pay more to maintain the same level of luxury, some folks sacrifice the luxury and keep cost constant.
Moving in range of decent schools doesn't necessarily mean paying more. Again, I'm not likely to live in the slums even in the absence of kids. I recognize this isn't true for everyone.
True. On the other hand, parents usually have kids because they derive some enjoyment from them, just as they would have the leisure activities "kid time" replace.
True. Then again, the more you have the more you spread around the risk. If you have four kids you can "absorb" one of them checking out and being unwilling to support you in your old age. If you're not a douche parent odds are your kids won't totally shun you in your hour of need.
It's still probably true that kids aren't a net positive, but they're far from the net negative people make them out to be.
Except some of the most popular world religions don't do much in the way of explaining natural phenomena. They cover stuff like "How can my life be meaningful?" and "What happens when I die?" instead of "Why is there thunder after lightning?" and "Why are there tides?"
IMO the studies that try to put a price tag on children are wildly exaggerated. Basically it's food, clothing and medical. You might have to buy a bigger house, but only if you have lots of them. Do it right and they won't have to pay for college. The tax advantages also defray part of the cost. When you're old they act as an insurance policy. The more you have (and the more they have) the greater the pool of resources you can draw on if you find yourself in need of support.
80% of Swedes are atheists only if you define atheism broadly as not believing in "a God". According to wiki only 23% of Swedes believe in "a God" but a whopping 54% believe in a "spirit or life force". I've always thought of "atheism" as not believing in any sort of supernatural power, including a "spirit or life force". Using that definition only 23% of Swedes can properly be called "atheists".
Yeah. Except not. I would wager that highly religious people actually have less free time than their irreligious counterparts. There's all that time spent at church and on church-related activities. Religious people (depending on the religion, but I would guess this is true for most) either value children more. So they have more of them. A few religious folk probably also believe contraception is verboten, and I can't imagine any irreligious person thinking that.
When it comes to the poor, I'm thinking the key factor there is irresponsibility. Generally speaking that's why many people are poor to begin with. I highly doubt "amount of free time" plays a part in either case.
I foresee lots of starving birds and bats.
They don't differentiate between offerings from each ISP. An ISP the majority of whose users are on slow 1.5 Mb/s connections (but with a few on super-fast 20 Mb/s connections) would fare poorly in this exercise compared to a competitor with of its users on mediocre 4.0 Mb/s connections. As a consumer interested in bandwidth, though, I'm going with the first ISP assuming their backbone is capable enough to actually feed that 20 Mb/s pipe.
Where I live the two highest-performing options are Time Warner (Roadrunner Extreme) at 20 Mb/s for $50/mo and AT&T's U-Verse (Max Turbo) at 24 Mb/s for $65/mo. Currently I have AT&T's "Elite" DSL service which is 6 Mb/s for $40/mo. What I would find interesting is whether each of those can support the full 4800 kb/s Netflix stream, or if backbone issues crop up.
I wonder how many of these users have access to faster broadband but simply decline to purchase it? Based on my experience, the only users with faster-than-modem access that isn't also faster-than-5Mb/s are DSL users with low-end plans. Most standard cable plans start at 6 Mb/s. If someone has a low-end DSL plan then it is most likely the case that they could upgrade to a high-end DSL plan for more money that would put them above the 5 Mb/s threshold.
If it is true that low-end plans explain some of the reason for the low U.S. numbers, one easy (but ultimately stupid) way to juice the U.S. stats would be to forbid providers from selling plans with less than 5 Mb/s bandwidth. This would force all the folks with slow plans to either drop internet altogether or switch to a plan that qualifies as "fast". Of course this would represent screwing consumers just to rig the stats. Which is dumb.
Good luck trying to hire CS graduates from reputable universities at $7.25 USD/hour + epsilon.
Pay people based on their utility (current and future) and ignore the rest. Old guy may not have all the experience with emerging tech, but odds are he has at least some accumulated wisdom/skill from being in the field as long as he has. Maybe he's more reliable. Maybe he's better able to estimate how long it will take him to complete tasks. Maybe he just writes cleaner/better code. Maybe he's really bright and could pick up the new tech if required to it but hasn't been asked to do so. If he can get up to speed in a matter of weeks then it's silly to pay the young guy significantly more. Then again, if old guy really has no advantages over young guy and young guy has the relevant experience, then go ahead and pay young guy more.
There must be something missing from this summary. What boss in his right mind expects salaried employees to work 30% more hours without getting paid more or earning some equity? Is the job market just absolutely terrible where you're located (i.e. they have no other options, so won't quit)? Are they, in fact, being paid above-market salaries? Are you working on something so incredibly cool (though it would be hard to imagine what) that they're likely to comply with your boss's request? If none of these things are true, then tell your boss, "If you do this they will quit. Maybe not immediately, but as soon as they can find something better. And most things will be 'better'."
Facebook seems to have more penetration than MySpace or Friendster ever did. It also has those retarded games that (some) people seem to love and seems to be making inroads into communities outside the U.S. at a faster clip than its predecessors. Here I'm ignoring the fact that Friendster eventually became popular in Asia even as it died in the U.S. None of this means Facebook it will last forever, but it may have more positive inertia, meaning it will last longer before falling apart. AOL fell by the wayside because people realized you could get everything it offered (plus some) from a raw pipe to the Internet. What is "the next Facebook" going to have in terms of features that's so much better than what the current Facebook already offers?
I'm 10 years out of college and make at the low end of that range, though I live somewhere that's relatively cheap compared to most hotbeds of software development. I work 40 hours a week (sometimes a few less) and probably spend 25% of that not doing anything productive in a work-related sense. So from a "money per unit effort" sense I'm pretty well off. From a "doing something that is intrinsically rewarding and gives me a sense of pride and accomplishment"...not so much.
I'm sensing many organizations may defer it until 2014. No special reason.
I might add "the aesthete". I'm somewhat guilty of this one myself. This guy is tasked with maintaining legitimately poor code and has to constantly resist the temptation to refactor pieces that are outside the scope of his actual tasks. He hates it when other people make changes to code he's written because they often "mess it up" or produce a result that's no longer "clean" and "elegant". If he can manage to exercise some self-control, though, and not go nuts fixing stuff that hasn't yet been identified as "broken", then he can be a valuable contributor.
Without digging for any additional information, it bugs me that this chip has 1000 cores and not 1024.
Oddly, more spam than usual has been getting past Gmail's filters in the past couple weeks. At least for me. Less spam but smarter I guess.
With respect to lower scores, are you suggesting a scenario where scores are lower because cheating is effectively eliminated? In that case just curve the results so that you have whatever distribution you feel you need to have. This still ends up being a net win for people who don't cheat.
With respect to annoying students, yes there would be some annoyances but they'd also provide certain payoffs. First, a student who doesn't cheat could feel confident that his or her performance in a class wasn't affected detrimentally by other students' cheating. Second, the draconian policies might confer extra significance on high marks from such an institution, since they would be less likely to have resulted from cheating.
If I'm choosing between two students who graduated summa cum laude from their respective colleges and those colleges are comparably selective, but I know that one is rife with cheating and the other has next to no cheating, I'm going to prefer the student from the "no cheating" school because I can be more certain that his high marks were fairly won.
Some ideas:
1. Jam cell phone traffic during exams. If it's not legal then make it legal. More feasible for large college courses than high school exams due to cost.
2. Zero tolerance policies. If you're shown without a doubt to have cheated then you not only fail the course, you're expelled.
3. Keep exams short, possibly in sections spread out over multiple days, and stipulate that if you leave the exam room for any reason (including to use the bathroom), your work for that day is invalidated and you must re-take an "alternate" version of that day's exam.
4. Design exams such that they're resistant to cheating. Use essay or short answer questions instead of multiple choice. If you must use multiple choice then generate different exam versions in which the answers are ordered differently. No two students in proximity to one another should have the same exam version.
5. Structure classes in a such a way that exams are taken individually, with very little opportunity for cheating. I took a self-paced digital logic class that used this format. To advance to the next unit a student had to get a perfect score on a six-question 30 minute quiz taken in the presence of a proctor. After the student had finished the proctor would denote any incorrect answers and the student had 10 minutes to correct them. If he failed to get all questions correct then he had to wait 3 days before re-testing on that unit.