I expect that you will find a PhD program at an Ivy league school to be incompatible with your current job unless the head of your lab was hired by the department with your intended degree. Unless a lot has changed, those programs are more about apprenticeship than education. They are full time jobs in themselves, and you pay tuition on top of that. Grants, scholarships, and loans may make it possible if you are good enough and were not born into the 1%.
That said, Mathematical Biology or Biostatistics departments might be your best choice. They are likely to have people that can teach you something without looking down on you too much for your history. In the dark ages, I worked for Dr. Carol Newton, in Chicago, trying to teach programming to biologists. Talk about teaching pigs to sing, the thought modes were completely incompatible. Musicians make much better programmers.
Recently, the big money in statistics was going to physicists as Wall Street tried to use statistical models. Those PhDs unfortunately don't include a lot of the practical knowledge a statistician needs when the assumptions are uncertain. The results may have made for some good openings for biostatistics folks.
The op is right, such things are easy to design, but the per copy cost for software controls is near zero while a controller box will cost you a minimum of $100 or so including labor with no upper bound depending on complexity and materials.
However, you will have no piracy issues or weird DRM code to irritate your customers. Also a lot of folks are more willing to pay big bucks for tangible objects. Even when not in use it might be a nice status symbol to have on a desk or in a doctor's office. I see more medical equipment than I want to, and most of it consists of a small computer in a big fancy box with maybe a custom sensor or two.
Bu leaving out the Verizon iPhone 4, the chart makes Apple look much better than it is. Verizon never really upgraded its iPhone until IOS 5 came out. It provided security patches only.
That particularly bugged me since there were a couple of features I had really wanted.
Apparently, they didn't bother with the feature upgrades until the code that forked for CDMA got merged in 5.
It's easy for a company to get locked into an architecture when using home grown or proprietary software. I would bet that there are a bunch out there that really need an upgrade, and this will allow them to postpone an expensive and business threatening change for a few more years.
Oracle is extending the life of it's investment in Sun, but I don't see evidence that it is really developing it.
Actually there was an issue of Communications of the ACM on the 25th anniversary of ENIAC (about 1971) that predicted mid 90's microprocessors quite accurately. An IBM 7094 in a wristwatch is the phrase I recall, the brand might be wrong.
Nobody knew what would happen with components, but the outlines of Moore's law were visible even then.
Because of the impact of Q.C. on crypto systems, I think it unlikely that the announcement will rapidly follow a real practical breakthrough development. Unless there is a very strong willed stinker on the development team, who can resist the bribes and threats, the policy is going to be to keep it under wraps as long as possible. The news will throw the financial community into a panic as no electronic encryption or signature systems will be considered reliable. There is too much money at risk for a product announcement to come out within years of the development.
Not to mention that the spies of the world would all love to be the only ones with the technology. Let the bad guys on the other side think that their kilo-bit keys are secure so they keep using them. Enigma was the biggest secret of WW2, and mad a real difference to winning the war. Had the Germans known their codes were insecure we might be karate chopping birds for salutes today.
With the threats and bribes available, it is a secret that can be kept a long time.
BTW, if there is a reason it isn't feasible, that would be almost as big a secret. Just slightly different motives.
This looks like a great component for lots of hobby projects if it is cheap enough for the purpose. If I could get a single touch that I could make an Arduino interface for at less than $30 I can think of a dozen one-of projects right now. Great science / maker faire signs, wall art, board games, etc.. At $300 they won't sell many. Anyone know the price?
That wasn't available a year ago. I just got that feature on my phone, and am evaluating. Ping time is noticeably higher but it is hard to measure the net effect. It might be serious for some gaming and protocols, tho not for most iPad usage. The MiFi is also cheaper for heavy use, but the minimum monthly is higher. Different strokes...
I have had an iPad for more than a year, and needed a MiFi 3G hotspot anyway for travel. The need to carry a credit card sized extra, and the lack of gps for the few apps that can use it are trivial weaknesses for me.
Only raw measurements (bit counts at the interface) can be collected without significant processing. On a multiplexed interface figuring who got what isn't trivial.
I hate the marketing ideas that add cost and complexity to the network to reduce revenue. Metered billing seems very likely to reduce usage so people pay less than they did before. Sure the markups look great, but mailing DVDs is a cheap alternative @~$0.15 or less per gig. Great bandwidth, high latency, negative cool factor.
Fair charges are hard to define. Retries? Port scans or ping storms? Pure noise bad packets. Lots of failure modes cause increased counts. Do we really want to incent the carriers to do bad maintenance?
Disk has gotten cheap and fast, a user who records every bit going across his own interface is in good position to beat up an ISP billing group. I think metering may cost them to do, I suspect it's a loser even on wireless where the delivery costs are higher, as it drives users to find a wifi hotpoint. The only thing it is good for is making full wiretaps cheaper by cost sharing the common equipment.
Electronic voting could be worthwhile for the cool factor, but offers little improvement over well established methods. The standard is a hierarchy that trades time against obviousness of the result.
1). Voice vote, good if result is very disproportionate. Instant 2) Raised hands (usually combined with voice) instant, or at least quick, to 60-40 or so. 3) a "division of the house" for those very close votes, or if someone really wants a record of who voted how.
The division, if needed, can be accomplished by people physically moving. It turns out to rarely be needed.
The system is at least 300 years old, but it still works. See Roberts Rules of Order.
Given the authors first sentence disclaimer, I can't fault his expression of well grounded opinion, but I can disagree.
I don't think investment bankers, or quants, are any less moral than vultures or other scavengers. They serve a valued role in eliminating mindless investors with too much money and redistributing fertilizer so more valuable species can take root.
Admittedly, we are all suffering right now from the after effects of some dead elephants. But they were dead before the vultures exposed their rot.
Even more likely he has only signed a contract with the developers, and hasn't a clue whether it will get approved.
The development group's salesman was, no doubt, very enthusiastic and certain of the approval, but they get paid approved or not:-). Gratz, sales guy! Sounds like fun to work on.
The recent discovery of oxygen and CO2 on Rhea, makes it very likely that NASA will announce that there is evidence of life there. The evidence is announced; the interpretation is something they want to be careful with.
What math you can use in life depends on what you know more than on your job. Sure, there are common calculations/algorithms that require trig or calculus, but you can usually palm them off on someone that knows how. My son called me up once for an arithmetic answer his calculator couldn't handle. But he needed it to complete a train of thought on a politics question. He could set up the problem but couldn't solve it, an interesting cusp where he knew just enough for the situation.
I had studied differential equations, but had never encountered differential forms until later in life. It really opened a new way of seeing a lot of the world, since it allowed me to visualize approximate solutions to so much of what happens around me. (Most of the world from economics to weather is in dynamic equilibrium, that takes difEq to understand)
In college I took "music appreciation" and learned stuff about music I was far from being able to perform. I wonder if a course like that could be developed that taught differential forms without teaching the skills for general integration, the mean value theorem without the proof or much probability calculation, etc. so kids could understand why some conclusions have much more solid support than others that dissolve into speculation on further study.
Marketing droids seem to look at screens in diagonal measurements. Wide screens measure more diagonal per square inch and seem more cost effective as a result.
I first noticed this when I went to buy my first LCD tv and had to buy a much larger diagonal to get the same 4:3 picture size.
Had someone that knew how to multiply insisted back in 1950 that a 8 by 6 screen be marketed as a 48 sq in, rather than a 10 inch screen, I don't think we would have the problem.
BTW the screen proportion is a great feature of the iPad. When I read the specs on other tablets, the low Hight irritates me.
The EFF article said "The exemptions were granted as part of a statutorily proscribed rulemaking process". They obviously meant "prescribed", but I had this amusing flash of a rulemaking comittee meeting in a secret room to make banned rules.
Two kilowatts is an unlikely estimate for the output of a single cow. A horsepower is about 750 W, and was based on peak output of a large draft horse. I doubt a cow can produce more than a fraction of a horsepower continuously.
Now the farmer may believe the number because the picture shows the cow powering some kind of machine through a linkage. Since a generator rated at 2kw can't start a very large electric motor, it is easy to believe that the cow can substitute for a 2kw generator in that application.
Eve is operated with a very laissze faire policy. Fraud, taking advantage of weak code, and other forms of "cheating" only get punished if repeated after explicit announcements. Piracy and fraud attempts are one of the interesting learning aspects for most new players.
The game is treated as something to be played as it is, not as some perfect environment where you should be compensated for deviations.
This is to my taste, as is the extreme PVP orientation. Playing a carebear game instead of Eve is a more appropriate response than whining if you don't like it.
I think Jeffrey has a good idea going: allow using different interfaces for different specialized activities. It would be great to access the auction house, answer mail, or craft on a PDA or smartphone. A well designed console interface might be much more possible if it didn't have to be particularly usable for anything but predictable combat.
If you want to grind but still craft and reorganize your bags during downtime, you can always use the full interface on your PC.
I recall one guy that went to some effort to build a gadget to tail an Everquest log so he could get prompt notification if he sold anything. That would be even more useful for auction results if you could re-post something that failed to sell, or put up more of an item that was moving quickly that day. The interface for that is easily within the capabilities of a smartphone. It might even be worth using both devices at the same time if it eliminated some travel time.
But it would be stupid to join a raid while waiting in the doctor's office, or answer email and manipulate a few hundred inventory items on an (logically) small TV screen using a controller.
Slashdot Mirror
I expect that you will find a PhD program at an Ivy league school to be incompatible with your current job unless the head of your lab was hired by the department with your intended degree. Unless a lot has changed, those programs are more about apprenticeship than education. They are full time jobs in themselves, and you pay tuition on top of that. Grants, scholarships, and loans may make it possible if you are good enough and were not born into the 1%.
That said, Mathematical Biology or Biostatistics departments might be your best choice. They are likely to have people that can teach you something without looking down on you too much for your history. In the dark ages, I worked for Dr. Carol Newton, in Chicago, trying to teach programming to biologists. Talk about teaching pigs to sing, the thought modes were completely incompatible. Musicians make much better programmers.
Recently, the big money in statistics was going to physicists as Wall Street tried to use statistical models. Those PhDs unfortunately don't include a lot of the practical knowledge a statistician needs when the assumptions are uncertain. The results may have made for some good openings for biostatistics folks.
The op is right, such things are easy to design, but the per copy cost for software controls is near zero while a controller box will cost you a minimum of $100 or so including labor with no upper bound depending on complexity and materials.
However, you will have no piracy issues or weird DRM code to irritate your customers. Also a lot of folks are more willing to pay big bucks for tangible objects. Even when not in use it might be a nice status symbol to have on a desk or in a doctor's office. I see more medical equipment than I want to, and most of it consists of a small computer in a big fancy box with maybe a custom sensor or two.
Bu leaving out the Verizon iPhone 4, the chart makes Apple look much better than it is. Verizon never really upgraded its iPhone until IOS 5 came out. It provided security patches only.
That particularly bugged me since there were a couple of features I had really wanted.
Apparently, they didn't bother with the feature upgrades until the code that forked for CDMA got merged in 5.
It's easy for a company to get locked into an architecture when using home grown or proprietary software. I would bet that there are a bunch out there that really need an upgrade, and this will allow them to postpone an expensive and business threatening change for a few more years.
Oracle is extending the life of it's investment in Sun, but I don't see evidence that it is really developing it.
Actually there was an issue of Communications of the ACM on the 25th anniversary of ENIAC (about 1971) that predicted mid 90's microprocessors quite accurately. An IBM 7094 in a wristwatch is the phrase I recall, the brand might be wrong.
Nobody knew what would happen with components, but the outlines of Moore's law were visible even then.
Because of the impact of Q.C. on crypto systems, I think it unlikely that the announcement will rapidly follow a real practical breakthrough development. Unless there is a very strong willed stinker on the development team, who can resist the bribes and threats, the policy is going to be to keep it under wraps as long as possible. The news will throw the financial community into a panic as no electronic encryption or signature systems will be considered reliable. There is too much money at risk for a product announcement to come out within years of the development.
Not to mention that the spies of the world would all love to be the only ones with the technology. Let the bad guys on the other side think that their kilo-bit keys are secure so they keep using them. Enigma was the biggest secret of WW2, and mad a real difference to winning the war. Had the Germans known their codes were insecure we might be karate chopping birds for salutes today.
With the threats and bribes available, it is a secret that can be kept a long time.
BTW, if there is a reason it isn't feasible, that would be almost as big a secret. Just slightly different motives.
This looks like a great component for lots of hobby projects if it is cheap enough for the purpose. If I could get a single touch that I could make an Arduino interface for at less than $30 I can think of a dozen one-of projects right now. Great science / maker faire signs, wall art, board games, etc.. At $300 they won't sell many. Anyone know the price?
. But a year ago, such amazing technology didn't exist because Apple hadn't invented it yet.
Nor had FroYo become available on offered phones. Do you buy a new phone every year, Red?
That wasn't available a year ago. I just got that feature on my phone, and am evaluating. Ping time is noticeably higher but it is hard to measure the net effect. It might be serious for some gaming and protocols, tho not for most iPad usage. The MiFi is also cheaper for heavy use, but the minimum monthly is higher. Different strokes...
I have had an iPad for more than a year, and needed a MiFi 3G hotspot anyway for travel. The need to carry a credit card sized extra, and the lack of gps for the few apps that can use it are trivial weaknesses for me.
I hope someone over at Eve Maps codes this in to make more sense of the galaxy.
I've worked onthis in the past. Metering Internet usage isn't easy to get right as VZW discovered.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/03/verizon-agrees-to-refund-customers-90-million-for-wrongful-data/
Only raw measurements (bit counts at the interface) can be collected without significant processing. On a multiplexed interface figuring who got what isn't trivial.
I hate the marketing ideas that add cost and complexity to the network to reduce revenue. Metered billing seems very likely to reduce usage so people pay less than they did before. Sure the markups look great, but mailing DVDs is a cheap alternative @~$0.15 or less per gig. Great bandwidth, high latency, negative cool factor.
Fair charges are hard to define. Retries? Port scans or ping storms? Pure noise bad packets. Lots of failure modes cause increased counts. Do we really want to incent the carriers to do bad maintenance?
Disk has gotten cheap and fast, a user who records every bit going across his own interface is in good position to beat up an ISP billing group. I think metering may cost them to do, I suspect it's a loser even on wireless where the delivery costs are higher, as it drives users to find a wifi hotpoint. The only thing it is good for is making full wiretaps cheaper by cost sharing the common equipment.
Electronic voting could be worthwhile for the cool factor, but offers little improvement over well established methods. The standard is a hierarchy that trades time against obviousness of the result.
1). Voice vote, good if result is very disproportionate. Instant
2) Raised hands (usually combined with voice) instant, or at least quick, to 60-40 or so.
3) a "division of the house" for those very close votes, or if someone really wants a record of who voted how.
The division, if needed, can be accomplished by people physically moving. It turns out to rarely be needed.
The system is at least 300 years old, but it still works. See Roberts Rules of Order.
Even older than that. He's Canadian, and CBC reported on it in 2006:
http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2006/11/21/lottery-probe.html
Given the authors first sentence disclaimer, I can't fault his expression of well grounded opinion, but I can disagree.
I don't think investment bankers, or quants, are any less moral than vultures or other scavengers. They serve a valued role in eliminating mindless investors with too much money and redistributing fertilizer so more valuable species can take root.
Admittedly, we are all suffering right now from the after effects of some dead elephants. But they were dead before the vultures exposed their rot.
Even more likely he has only signed a contract with the developers, and hasn't a clue whether it will get approved.
The development group's salesman was, no doubt, very enthusiastic and certain of the approval, but they get paid approved or not :-). Gratz, sales guy! Sounds like fun to work on.
The recent discovery of oxygen and CO2 on Rhea, makes it very likely that NASA will announce that there is evidence of life there. The evidence is announced; the interpretation is something they want to be careful with.
What math you can use in life depends on what you know more than on your job. Sure, there are common calculations/algorithms that require trig or calculus, but you can usually palm them off on someone that knows how. My son called me up once for an arithmetic answer his calculator couldn't handle. But he needed it to complete a train of thought on a politics question. He could set up the problem but couldn't solve it, an interesting cusp where he knew just enough for the situation.
I had studied differential equations, but had never encountered differential forms until later in life. It really opened a new way of seeing a lot of the world, since it allowed me to visualize approximate solutions to so much of what happens around me. (Most of the world from economics to weather is in dynamic equilibrium, that takes difEq to understand)
In college I took "music appreciation" and learned stuff about music I was far from being able to perform. I wonder if a course like that could be developed that taught differential forms without teaching the skills for general integration, the mean value theorem without the proof or much probability calculation, etc. so kids could understand why some conclusions have much more solid support than others that dissolve into speculation on further study.
Marketing droids seem to look at screens in diagonal measurements. Wide screens measure more diagonal per square inch and seem more cost effective as a result.
I first noticed this when I went to buy my first LCD tv and had to buy a much larger diagonal to get the same 4:3 picture size.
Had someone that knew how to multiply insisted back in 1950 that a 8 by 6 screen be marketed as a 48 sq in, rather than a 10 inch screen, I don't think we would have the problem.
BTW the screen proportion is a great feature of the iPad. When I read the specs on other tablets, the low Hight irritates me.
The EFF article said "The exemptions were granted as part of a statutorily proscribed rulemaking process". They obviously meant "prescribed", but I had this amusing flash of a rulemaking comittee meeting in a secret room to make banned rules.
First few seasons anyway. Instant play or dvd. Easy enough to check out if you subscribe. Now on my instant queue.
Two kilowatts is an unlikely estimate for the output of a single cow. A horsepower is about 750 W, and was based on peak output of a large draft horse. I doubt a cow can produce more than a fraction of a horsepower continuously.
Now the farmer may believe the number because the picture shows the cow powering some kind of machine through a linkage. Since a generator rated at 2kw can't start a very large electric motor, it is easy to believe that the cow can substitute for a 2kw generator in that application.
Eve is operated with a very laissze faire policy. Fraud, taking advantage of weak code, and other forms of "cheating" only get punished if repeated after explicit announcements. Piracy and fraud attempts are one of the interesting learning aspects for most new players.
The game is treated as something to be played as it is, not as some perfect environment where you should be compensated for deviations.
This is to my taste, as is the extreme PVP orientation. Playing a carebear game instead of Eve is a more appropriate response than whining if you don't like it.
UNLAMBDA is going to have a new Life! I never really liked reusability anyway.
I think Jeffrey has a good idea going: allow using different interfaces for different specialized activities. It would be great to access the auction house, answer mail, or craft on a PDA or smartphone. A well designed console interface might be much more possible if it didn't have to be particularly usable for anything but predictable combat.
If you want to grind but still craft and reorganize your bags during downtime, you can always use the full interface on your PC.
I recall one guy that went to some effort to build a gadget to tail an Everquest log so he could get prompt notification if he sold anything. That would be even more useful for auction results if you could re-post something that failed to sell, or put up more of an item that was moving quickly that day. The interface for that is easily within the capabilities of a smartphone. It might even be worth using both devices at the same time if it eliminated some travel time.
But it would be stupid to join a raid while waiting in the doctor's office, or answer email and manipulate a few hundred inventory items on an (logically) small TV screen using a controller.