Maybe he works for a major bank or investment house? Those companies really do consider the ability to mess with the source code as a major advantage. I think Google like the access to the source too.
Good point. As a former scientist myself, I left the academic world for a number of reasons:
1) Being poorly paid, commensurate to the qualifications, experience, and quality/scale of work. If I did what I did for a company, I would have been a senior executive on a large bonus. As it was, we got no performance pay to increase motivation, no bonuses whatsoever, few holidays, and we were packed into a cramped office fighting over crumbling PCs). Did I mention that HR considered it a good days work to start us off on the bottom of the pay scale regardless of experience, talent or qualifications. 2) Spending half of my research time applying for grants and maybe 10-15% of what was left to complete mystifying administration work (hint: perhaps the admin staff could help us out by doing something useful rather than just giving leaflets out or showing presentations). 3) Ethics committees being too PC and panicking any time we approached the public. I had to submit a 52 page questionnaire before I could issue a paper-based survey to people even if I just asked them anonymously what their favourite colour was. 4) Low status - "rock star" professors are all well and good, but plain researchers get relegated to the bottom of the heap beneath administration in terms of resources if you can believe it. I once requisitioned a pair of headphones for an experiment. 18 months later, I had finished my thesis and still had no headphones. You guessed it - I had bought my own because it was easier). 5) Little chance of advancement regardless of talent or accomplishments. 6) Bad security - researchers live on temporary contracts and a permanent one is extremely rare. The problem is that with a family, I need a place to live etc and at least some idea that I might be able to stay in the same place for a few years rather than just 6 months. 7) Having senior staff with inferior knowledge of methods tell you to change your design to one that is compromised. Admittedly this is rare, but annoying nonetheless.
The points about lack of advancement, lack of pay, poor conditions etc, all seem to stem from management cocking it up. Because we didn't produce anything with a price tag on it, we couldn't demonstrate our worth in terms that they can understand. Instead, I left academia with my ideas and training and I am going to make them work for me. I tried the university's business start-up service, but they wanted a large percentage, control over how everything was run (if it's anything like the university then be prepared for another SCO), but they weren't interested because I was just a research fellow and therefore unimportant. Once they realised what my position was, they didn't even ask me what the idea was.
The business isn't properly started yet, but we're getting there; and it's a very big market. We're just hoping to scrape by until the product begins to get momentum.
In case you're interested, this was a UK university.
I think the Jedi as religion was a bit of a joke (similar to a protest vote) done for censuses. I'm not sure if people really and truly consider it as a religion.
When I was 8, Star Wars came out. I went crazy for it just like most of my friends. We really wanted to see it and queued up for hours in the rain when it finally came to our cinemas. We bought the toys, played at Star Wars in the playground, and lived and breathed it.
But finally, after a few years, we just grew up a bit more and got into other things like other movies, girls, books, drinking, working, etc. My younger brother was mad keen on the return of the jedi a few years later; for him, it was his formative film, but since then, he also has grown up and sold off his toys.
We both have soft spots for our formative films and have happy memories of watching them and playing them, but to revere them as one of the biggest global cultural events is a little bit silly. It really is just entertainment with a bit of pseudo-religious babble mixed in there. People might recognise the Darth Vader sound, but it doesn't run their lives. They don't do things like quake in terror and get shocked like I a saw a elderly French woman do when she suddenly saw a dummy dressed in an SS uniform during an exhibition once.
In all of my travels, Star Wars has changed the world only for a small handful for people. For most, it really is just a movie and nothing else.
You can't be a serious psychologist without having statistics training. It's the central and most important tool available to psychs. This applies even in clinical psychology which probably has the lowest amount of stats of any of the sub-fields. Personally, I think she needs more training. Is she practicing / researching?
I haven't found this in my experience but then it might depend upon what kind of circles you move in. If it's the "lower end" of the scale in terms of ability, then yes I would agree but the same probably goes for any subject. Otherwise, I would disagree. I majored in psych and did a PhD in the topic. My external examiner for my viva was a Cambridge statistician and ex-math olympian (Alan Dix if you're curious) who focused his interests in human-computer interaction I think because of the challenges he got in the field that math or stats didn't provide.
I have found though that when it comes to "certain numerical rituals associated with null hypothesis significance testing", I have found far more problems in the hard sciences: biologists turning data into z-scores for comparison and then performing inferential analyses on those normalized data is one example.
Perhaps it might have been more accurate to say that "poor / less able psychology researchers are often averse to math and tolerate math errors in papers"
My former uni (Univ Cardiff) had a big thing about Blackboard but the lecturers didn't like it at all. Neither did those students who had used anything else as a VLE. In our dept, we used a completely different system for our extensive postgrad courses which was much satisfactory (despite CSS being replicated many times in each page of code)
This is slightly off-topic, but the best experience I had on a flight (apart from being bumped up to business a couple of times - the free champagne!) was on a delayed flight. Weather caused the planes to back up before it was safe to take off and we were sat on the runway. The captain them came onto the tannoy to tell us what was causing the delays, and then said, "...and we apologise for the delays. So we have a little time to spare, and there's something I've always wanted to do."
And then he sang...
"Come fly with me, let's fly, let's fly away!"
All the passengers were in fits of laughter about this. Strangely enough, it made the delay seem more bearable.
I don't want to sound negative but (and assuming this is a commercial gig) you may need to get someone who knows how to design UIs in to do the job. After all, would you hire a HCI specialist to produce C code? It's good that you want to learn about UI design (and best of luck), but it's a surprisingly large area with lots of work being done (even so called specialists aren't aware of the research that goes on).
Reading books and style-guides is a start but then so is employing programmers with a basic certificate in programming. If you had some difficult coding to do, would you employ a UI designer who had read a dummies guide to C to do the job?
If it fails, then I guess that's evolution - it wasn't fit to survive in its environment. Perhaps some nice creationist being will be kind enough to make them survive market forces.
Absolutely. Just make sure that you link into someone elses already open sourced libraries and you can say, "sorry, all of my code needs to be under the GPL too." I've found that excuse useful already but hey, the organisation didn't contribute anything to the work so why should they get the goods?
As a PhD, I have to quote someone who told me something useful before my thesis was accepted: "A PhD is a test of endurance, not intelligence." A PhD doesn't show that you are more intelligent than anyone, but it does show that you can dedicate yourself to a single question over several years and persevere with it.
But also, a lot of PhD work does count as experience. Quite often, it is everyday work, not study.
That's true. It seems that empoyers want nothing more than a drop-in replacement or perfectly working employee without having to invest in all that training. Of course, it is perfectly possible for colleges and universities to fulfill this need, but when Java falls out of favour, what jobs are the people they taught going to do? Without a broad background in computer science and with a concentration upon a single language, they are going to be unemployable and their degree could be worthless unless they move into HR or management. I can see a day when a persons employability lasts for a shorter period than their education took.
I think employers confuse the terms "training" and "education". Universities are primarily not for training but for education. The employers want training and they're not willing to pay a cent for it but they're happy to bitch and whine when the world doesn't go their way.
"You want an employee? Cheap, good skills, good education. Pick any two."
"So you believe in unintelligent falling? It certinly has something to recommend it, since I've observed that people having even a modest level of brainpower can often manage to walk upright and remain that way for moderate periods of time."
Unintelligent falling sounds so 1980s so I've decided that it's an invalid theory. Stuff scientific consensus - if the ID crowd can do it, then my wacky notions are just as valid.
I hereby propose instead the theory of drunken falling: that objects are naturally drunk and fall over to the ground. Therefore, the way to fly is to drink massive amounts of coffee. But we still need to understand this theory more by subjecting people to differing levels of tasty alcoholic drinks to see the effect on falling.
This must be tested immediately. I volunteer to be a subject.
I prefer to find out whether people actually *have* broken the law first. Does this not make sense? Surely someone has to have actually broken the law before they can be punished? That's exactly what this case is trying to establish.
At my interview, I was told that my age (I got my PhD as a mature student) might be a problem. I was in my mid 30s at the time. Curiously, the interviews seemed to go okay until my details went before a committee and then I was slapped down real quick. It was just as well because I was told that in this field, the job was fairly routine and uninspiring donkey work. Instead, I got a position at a university that wasn't as well paid, but has sure been fun because I've been able to lead my own research.
"That, erm, the, erm, missiles, Mr President, well, erm, they kind of aren't there any more. We're not sure where they could have got to, but we're sure that they'll turn up real soon!"
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe he works for a major bank or investment house? Those companies really do consider the ability to mess with the source code as a major advantage. I think Google like the access to the source too.
Good point. As a former scientist myself, I left the academic world for a number of reasons:
1) Being poorly paid, commensurate to the qualifications, experience, and quality/scale of work. If I did what I did for a company, I would have been a senior executive on a large bonus. As it was, we got no performance pay to increase motivation, no bonuses whatsoever, few holidays, and we were packed into a cramped office fighting over crumbling PCs). Did I mention that HR considered it a good days work to start us off on the bottom of the pay scale regardless of experience, talent or qualifications.
2) Spending half of my research time applying for grants and maybe 10-15% of what was left to complete mystifying administration work (hint: perhaps the admin staff could help us out by doing something useful rather than just giving leaflets out or showing presentations).
3) Ethics committees being too PC and panicking any time we approached the public. I had to submit a 52 page questionnaire before I could issue a paper-based survey to people even if I just asked them anonymously what their favourite colour was.
4) Low status - "rock star" professors are all well and good, but plain researchers get relegated to the bottom of the heap beneath administration in terms of resources if you can believe it. I once requisitioned a pair of headphones for an experiment. 18 months later, I had finished my thesis and still had no headphones. You guessed it - I had bought my own because it was easier).
5) Little chance of advancement regardless of talent or accomplishments.
6) Bad security - researchers live on temporary contracts and a permanent one is extremely rare. The problem is that with a family, I need a place to live etc and at least some idea that I might be able to stay in the same place for a few years rather than just 6 months.
7) Having senior staff with inferior knowledge of methods tell you to change your design to one that is compromised. Admittedly this is rare, but annoying nonetheless.
The points about lack of advancement, lack of pay, poor conditions etc, all seem to stem from management cocking it up. Because we didn't produce anything with a price tag on it, we couldn't demonstrate our worth in terms that they can understand. Instead, I left academia with my ideas and training and I am going to make them work for me. I tried the university's business start-up service, but they wanted a large percentage, control over how everything was run (if it's anything like the university then be prepared for another SCO), but they weren't interested because I was just a research fellow and therefore unimportant. Once they realised what my position was, they didn't even ask me what the idea was.
The business isn't properly started yet, but we're getting there; and it's a very big market. We're just hoping to scrape by until the product begins to get momentum.
In case you're interested, this was a UK university.
I think the Jedi as religion was a bit of a joke (similar to a protest vote) done for censuses. I'm not sure if people really and truly consider it as a religion.
When I was 8, Star Wars came out. I went crazy for it just like most of my friends. We really wanted to see it and queued up for hours in the rain when it finally came to our cinemas. We bought the toys, played at Star Wars in the playground, and lived and breathed it.
But finally, after a few years, we just grew up a bit more and got into other things like other movies, girls, books, drinking, working, etc. My younger brother was mad keen on the return of the jedi a few years later; for him, it was his formative film, but since then, he also has grown up and sold off his toys.
We both have soft spots for our formative films and have happy memories of watching them and playing them, but to revere them as one of the biggest global cultural events is a little bit silly. It really is just entertainment with a bit of pseudo-religious babble mixed in there. People might recognise the Darth Vader sound, but it doesn't run their lives. They don't do things like quake in terror and get shocked like I a saw a elderly French woman do when she suddenly saw a dummy dressed in an SS uniform during an exhibition once.
In all of my travels, Star Wars has changed the world only for a small handful for people. For most, it really is just a movie and nothing else.
I thought it was familiar. And there was me thinking dupes belonged only in the headlines... ;-)
You can't be a serious psychologist without having statistics training. It's the central and most important tool available to psychs. This applies even in clinical psychology which probably has the lowest amount of stats of any of the sub-fields. Personally, I think she needs more training. Is she practicing / researching?
I haven't found this in my experience but then it might depend upon what kind of circles you move in. If it's the "lower end" of the scale in terms of ability, then yes I would agree but the same probably goes for any subject. Otherwise, I would disagree. I majored in psych and did a PhD in the topic. My external examiner for my viva was a Cambridge statistician and ex-math olympian (Alan Dix if you're curious) who focused his interests in human-computer interaction I think because of the challenges he got in the field that math or stats didn't provide.
I have found though that when it comes to "certain numerical rituals associated with null hypothesis significance testing", I have found far more problems in the hard sciences: biologists turning data into z-scores for comparison and then performing inferential analyses on those normalized data is one example.
Perhaps it might have been more accurate to say that "poor / less able psychology researchers are often averse to math and tolerate math errors in papers"
My former uni (Univ Cardiff) had a big thing about Blackboard but the lecturers didn't like it at all. Neither did those students who had used anything else as a VLE. In our dept, we used a completely different system for our extensive postgrad courses which was much satisfactory (despite CSS being replicated many times in each page of code)
It can read and write also, so it fails the intelligence test too.
This is slightly off-topic, but the best experience I had on a flight (apart from being bumped up to business a couple of times - the free champagne!) was on a delayed flight. Weather caused the planes to back up before it was safe to take off and we were sat on the runway. The captain them came onto the tannoy to tell us what was causing the delays, and then said, "...and we apologise for the delays. So we have a little time to spare, and there's something I've always wanted to do."
And then he sang...
"Come fly with me, let's fly, let's fly away!"
All the passengers were in fits of laughter about this. Strangely enough, it made the delay seem more bearable.
I don't want to sound negative but (and assuming this is a commercial gig) you may need to get someone who knows how to design UIs in to do the job. After all, would you hire a HCI specialist to produce C code? It's good that you want to learn about UI design (and best of luck), but it's a surprisingly large area with lots of work being done (even so called specialists aren't aware of the research that goes on).
Reading books and style-guides is a start but then so is employing programmers with a basic certificate in programming. If you had some difficult coding to do, would you employ a UI designer who had read a dummies guide to C to do the job?
If it fails, then I guess that's evolution - it wasn't fit to survive in its environment. Perhaps some nice creationist being will be kind enough to make them survive market forces.
So in your opinion, would you get out now?
Screwing the prom queen sounds like time well spent to me, not a waste.
Absolutely. Just make sure that you link into someone elses already open sourced libraries and you can say, "sorry, all of my code needs to be under the GPL too." I've found that excuse useful already but hey, the organisation didn't contribute anything to the work so why should they get the goods?
But also, a lot of PhD work does count as experience. Quite often, it is everyday work, not study.
Cache: http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:-PJEtsLZfV8J:www.inter-sections.net/2007/11/13/how-to-recognise-a-good-programmer/+hire+good+progammer+site:inter-sections.net&hl=en&lr=lang_en&client=firefox-a&gl=uk&strip=1
yo, I, like, studied both, Greek and Latin for, years at skuul and: im much beter at my inglish. i speek very best!
Man, try this for the ClassMate (TM)
http://www.intel.com/intel/worldahead/classmatepc/
Notice any similarities like the graphic at the top?
That's true. It seems that empoyers want nothing more than a drop-in replacement or perfectly working employee without having to invest in all that training. Of course, it is perfectly possible for colleges and universities to fulfill this need, but when Java falls out of favour, what jobs are the people they taught going to do? Without a broad background in computer science and with a concentration upon a single language, they are going to be unemployable and their degree could be worthless unless they move into HR or management. I can see a day when a persons employability lasts for a shorter period than their education took.
I think employers confuse the terms "training" and "education". Universities are primarily not for training but for education. The employers want training and they're not willing to pay a cent for it but they're happy to bitch and whine when the world doesn't go their way.
"You want an employee? Cheap, good skills, good education. Pick any two."
Remember to sprinkle it on the night of a full moon on a spot where a murderer was hanged.
/. - there are lots here.
You will also need a hair from the head of a virgin. Maybe that is why it's taking so long to get right? They should try
"So you believe in unintelligent falling? It certinly has something to recommend it, since I've observed that people having even a modest level of brainpower can often manage to walk upright and remain that way for moderate periods of time." Unintelligent falling sounds so 1980s so I've decided that it's an invalid theory. Stuff scientific consensus - if the ID crowd can do it, then my wacky notions are just as valid. I hereby propose instead the theory of drunken falling: that objects are naturally drunk and fall over to the ground. Therefore, the way to fly is to drink massive amounts of coffee. But we still need to understand this theory more by subjecting people to differing levels of tasty alcoholic drinks to see the effect on falling. This must be tested immediately. I volunteer to be a subject.
I prefer to find out whether people actually *have* broken the law first. Does this not make sense? Surely someone has to have actually broken the law before they can be punished? That's exactly what this case is trying to establish.
At my interview, I was told that my age (I got my PhD as a mature student) might be a problem. I was in my mid 30s at the time. Curiously, the interviews seemed to go okay until my details went before a committee and then I was slapped down real quick. It was just as well because I was told that in this field, the job was fairly routine and uninspiring donkey work. Instead, I got a position at a university that wasn't as well paid, but has sure been fun because I've been able to lead my own research.
"That, erm, the, erm, missiles, Mr President, well, erm, they kind of aren't there any more. We're not sure where they could have got to, but we're sure that they'll turn up real soon!"
TBC
Now that's not a bad idea!
Who said hunting bugs was a dead-end job?