Same deal in Canada, except my school gives all foreign students a bursary that reduces their tuition to the same level as Canadian students. North American schools go to great lengths to attract any students at all, since students do research and write papers that get funding.
I do wonder if this is why the American attitude (In a gross... disgustingly gross exaggeration) seems relatively insular compared to many other countries. Too much naval gazing because you're already the centre of the universe.
If I move to the US I can sit around staring at boats? I thought the pirates were Canadian?
The Canadian government released a report a few years ago concluding that we train more PhDs than we "get" in a year. More of the foreign students that we train go home than students finishing degrees elsewhere come in to replace. They also noted that if foreign students apply to become a landed immigrant they're likely to stick around. In response to the outcry from industry (which is funny since they don't seem to hire all that many the grad students...) there's a funding initiative based on the number of Canadian and landed immigrant students at a university. Apparently if we pay the Canadian students more the foreign students won't leave...
Debt is a reason not to go to grad school if you ever plan to have a life. Tuition + stipend will let you live through the experience and you can typically defer your undergrad loans (and grad loans if spend more than ~10/yr after tuition). Then, for a master's degree, you're 2 years older, haven't touched your debt, and are starting at pretty much the same salary you would have otherwise. Adjust that to 7 years for a PhD. Oh, and your tuition + stipend may or may not be guaranteed for anywhere near the current average completion time for your degree. I've yet to see a university admit the actual average completion time for their grad degrees openly, e.g., on average students in my department require extensions beyond the "program limits".
A master's degree may give you more earning potential later on but my job hunting with an engineering master's degree (plus undergrad business minor) is turning up pretty much the same opportunities as my classmates had from undergrad. In a tech intensive city I've found one job at one company where it really makes any difference (project management). A friend in another field with similar credentials is finding it similar; there's one job with major relocation where it would make a difference and it's debatable whether he'd be as desirable with just a bachelor's.
Grad school is a good experience in really working on a largely independent project and learning about a field that interests you. Marketing it as something that will pay off for North American students in the current economy is questionable but it's not an experience I'd give up.
Are there seriously no women in their LUG? Why not?
It's quite simple really: every LUG has at least one guy who doesn't shower regularly (or douses himself in cologne making it impossible to tell whether he showers). Unlike a CS class there's no obvious gain to going to the LUG meeting and you can't really sit on the opposite side of the room. Sure, you can claim that men can smell the stink are in the LUG anyway but that's the part that I find inexplicable.
Is management starting to wonder (again) whether a computer can really do a better job making the important decisions? But can it yet? There is so much data that needs to be acquired in order to return a meaningful answer.
If they're foolish, sure they hope computers can make better decisions. If they aren't complete fools they realize that computers can provide analytical support for decisions. For example, algorithms can evaluate more potential alternatives, generate potentially good alternatives that they haven't thought of, or make predictions. In most cases, algorithms are just formalizing analysis processes. The supposition is that being able to consider more data leads to better decisions. There are cases where it works really well already, e.g., managing lines at theme parks, basic scheduling, etc (see http://www.scienceofbetter.org/). Algorithms are used extensively in portfolio selection.
Data acquisition isn't a bit deal but getting the data into the right format for the algorithm still is though there's progress being made there. The really hard parts are understanding the problem enough to formalize the process and being able to properly interpret the results. Some problems are much easier to formalize than others (portfolio expected value and risk, production rates and material requirements), some can only be done with surrogate measures at this point (water scarcity, consensus and voting, anything with 'value'), and some we may never be able to fully formalize in an acceptable way (human behaviour). Letting the algorithms take care of the easy stuff is often efficient and work is being done to increase the set of 'easy stuff'.
I do use Firefox and I find that it avoids the most annoying ads by default (i.e., pop-up junk) so I don't bother with any additional blocking.
I solve the problem more concisely on my not-employer-owned machine by running 64-bit Ubuntu. That way I don't get any annoying flash ads even if I want them!
Is anyone else getting ads for the newest blackberries on this page?
Mike Lazaridis' view on the 'essence' of the blackberry is that a core team designed and engineered every aspect of the product. The integrated full-picture approach led to the difficult to duplicate product. This seems very close to Apple's design philosophy. In the blackberries it's led to lots of proposed features tested by employees using prototypes. Which ideas were (or weren't) successful is often surprising. So we can list lots of things we think we'd like but hopefully Apple takes their time properly considering and evaluating new features before launching a new product.
Having women around, the office actually smells nicer.
Not because of any female perfume, but because the men are actually taking showers now.
Now I have the perfect opening line for my cover letters: "Not only can I address all of the requirements for this position but I can make your workplace smell better just be being there."
You don't need to be male to break into the old boys club. I've managed at 3-4 different workplaces and I was only there for 4 month terms as well as conferences where I've only met people for a few days. One of my CEOs was a huge masochist but I'm one of the only students he ever got to know. Going into his office and telling him he was wrong about something may have done it. It might also have been not treating him any differently after I'd done so. Honestly, within my limited experience, I've found it harder to get 'in' with the women who were higher up.
Life's a game to play and no one will tell you the rules. Everything seems stupid when you don't understand it and some things really are wrong. You can try to change them but whining won't do it.
Actually the study did just that, except they submitted papers with male, ambiguous, and female names. Acceptance rates were male > ambiguous > female.
I see we're on the same page. At least it's good that the governments and schools are starting to see the need for further investment. Taking the local cost of living into consideration would be a big step forward. $17k is the same guarantee for funding at my university (although only for PhDs) and it's enough to manage to scrape by. I can see how it wouldn't be sufficient in Alberta these days.
But Canadian Graduate Scholarships get awarded to maybe 3% of PhD students and the second-level NSERC scholarships are considerable less (21k vs 35k). Many universities in Canada are currently offering a top up to external scholarships (here it's 10k on top of national or provincial awards). While the "extra" money sounds good, remember that most of these scholarship values were nearly the same 30 years ago. They've only very recently become tax free and tuition values have rising significantly since the values were set.
Sorry, did you say $10,000/yr for a grad student? I thought my funding was bad... Here they give you that much extra if you can bring in a gov't scholarship. A basic research assistant in eng/sci/math gets $17,000/yr + ~$5000 for teaching assistants. Although that's taxable and your scholarship's not so it might be the same thing in Canada...
Plus, depending on the car and the state, a few hours in the shop getting daytime running lights and a 5mph bumper (instead of 3mph) installed. Still worth it though, especially for older cars sports cars from the southern states and imports.
Using the clock or computer that you set earlier based on the cellphone? I've got too many time-keeping devices for there to be any significant probability of them all needing to reset at the same time. Even when moving at least my cell and computers will keep decent time.
Part of the reason for charging you the same and calling it a discount is that the alternative is "PR suicide". First Chicago Bank implemented a teller fee for interacting with a real person instead of using an ATM. They had to get rid of the fee due to public outcry. Within a few years airlines were effectively charging people for talking to someone for booking a ticket but they framed it as a discount for buying online. People never got ticked off at the airlines for doing it. Decision framing matters.
From Stallman's responses at the Q&A after this talk he doesn't think it's "wrong" to make money off of coding but that the code should be open source. His example was if some company needs an internal system for, e.g., managing their inventory, then there's nothing wrong with contracting to write that system for money. What he felt was wrong was not releasing that system into the public domain afterwards. Individual companies will continue to need enterprise software for their own particular requirements.
Reason is the basis of intelligent decisions. If you decide to avoid something because the consequences of a bad outcome * the probability of the bad outcome is greater than the consequences of a good outcome * the probability of a good outcome (aka the benefits outweigh the risks), then you are thinking intelligently.
As soon as you find the time to make all of your decisions that way, let the world know. Excluding purely emotional decision making you have to deal with normative (or rational) decision making and what people actually do for most decisions. I doubt the world is a less desirable place if people don't consider the probabilities of various outcomes when they choose cereal over grapefruit for breakfast out of habit. Most decision making is based on heuristics including using emotional responses because it's just not worth the effort required for full rational decision analysis.
(BTW, your probability*outcome function isn't so robust and makes some possibly desirable outcomes unattainable if the outcome 'values' and probabilities aren't convex. How do you plan to deal with non-commensurate criteria that are often components of consequences? The economics view of representing everything in dollars isn't very widely accepted and most decisions involve multiple people.)
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Same deal in Canada, except my school gives all foreign students a bursary that reduces their tuition to the same level as Canadian students. North American schools go to great lengths to attract any students at all, since students do research and write papers that get funding.
If I move to the US I can sit around staring at boats? I thought the pirates were Canadian?
The Canadian government released a report a few years ago concluding that we train more PhDs than we "get" in a year. More of the foreign students that we train go home than students finishing degrees elsewhere come in to replace. They also noted that if foreign students apply to become a landed immigrant they're likely to stick around. In response to the outcry from industry (which is funny since they don't seem to hire all that many the grad students...) there's a funding initiative based on the number of Canadian and landed immigrant students at a university. Apparently if we pay the Canadian students more the foreign students won't leave...
A master's degree may give you more earning potential later on but my job hunting with an engineering master's degree (plus undergrad business minor) is turning up pretty much the same opportunities as my classmates had from undergrad. In a tech intensive city I've found one job at one company where it really makes any difference (project management). A friend in another field with similar credentials is finding it similar; there's one job with major relocation where it would make a difference and it's debatable whether he'd be as desirable with just a bachelor's.
Grad school is a good experience in really working on a largely independent project and learning about a field that interests you. Marketing it as something that will pay off for North American students in the current economy is questionable but it's not an experience I'd give up.
It's quite simple really: every LUG has at least one guy who doesn't shower regularly (or douses himself in cologne making it impossible to tell whether he showers). Unlike a CS class there's no obvious gain to going to the LUG meeting and you can't really sit on the opposite side of the room. Sure, you can claim that men can smell the stink are in the LUG anyway but that's the part that I find inexplicable.
If they're foolish, sure they hope computers can make better decisions. If they aren't complete fools they realize that computers can provide analytical support for decisions. For example, algorithms can evaluate more potential alternatives, generate potentially good alternatives that they haven't thought of, or make predictions. In most cases, algorithms are just formalizing analysis processes. The supposition is that being able to consider more data leads to better decisions. There are cases where it works really well already, e.g., managing lines at theme parks, basic scheduling, etc (see http://www.scienceofbetter.org/). Algorithms are used extensively in portfolio selection.
Data acquisition isn't a bit deal but getting the data into the right format for the algorithm still is though there's progress being made there. The really hard parts are understanding the problem enough to formalize the process and being able to properly interpret the results. Some problems are much easier to formalize than others (portfolio expected value and risk, production rates and material requirements), some can only be done with surrogate measures at this point (water scarcity, consensus and voting, anything with 'value'), and some we may never be able to fully formalize in an acceptable way (human behaviour). Letting the algorithms take care of the easy stuff is often efficient and work is being done to increase the set of 'easy stuff'.
I'll give you two: algebra and calculus.
And that would be one snowflake or one snowfall.
I solve the problem more concisely on my not-employer-owned machine by running 64-bit Ubuntu. That way I don't get any annoying flash ads even if I want them!
Mike Lazaridis' view on the 'essence' of the blackberry is that a core team designed and engineered every aspect of the product. The integrated full-picture approach led to the difficult to duplicate product. This seems very close to Apple's design philosophy. In the blackberries it's led to lots of proposed features tested by employees using prototypes. Which ideas were (or weren't) successful is often surprising. So we can list lots of things we think we'd like but hopefully Apple takes their time properly considering and evaluating new features before launching a new product.
To be able to buy it in Canada? At least it should be easy to set the pricing now...
Now I have the perfect opening line for my cover letters: "Not only can I address all of the requirements for this position but I can make your workplace smell better just be being there."
Life's a game to play and no one will tell you the rules. Everything seems stupid when you don't understand it and some things really are wrong. You can try to change them but whining won't do it.
Actually the study did just that, except they submitted papers with male, ambiguous, and female names. Acceptance rates were male > ambiguous > female.
I see we're on the same page. At least it's good that the governments and schools are starting to see the need for further investment. Taking the local cost of living into consideration would be a big step forward. $17k is the same guarantee for funding at my university (although only for PhDs) and it's enough to manage to scrape by. I can see how it wouldn't be sufficient in Alberta these days.
But Canadian Graduate Scholarships get awarded to maybe 3% of PhD students and the second-level NSERC scholarships are considerable less (21k vs 35k). Many universities in Canada are currently offering a top up to external scholarships (here it's 10k on top of national or provincial awards). While the "extra" money sounds good, remember that most of these scholarship values were nearly the same 30 years ago. They've only very recently become tax free and tuition values have rising significantly since the values were set.
Sorry, did you say $10,000/yr for a grad student? I thought my funding was bad... Here they give you that much extra if you can bring in a gov't scholarship. A basic research assistant in eng/sci/math gets $17,000/yr + ~$5000 for teaching assistants. Although that's taxable and your scholarship's not so it might be the same thing in Canada...
And one more: When an eel lunges out Takes a bite of your snout That's a moray
Plus, depending on the car and the state, a few hours in the shop getting daytime running lights and a 5mph bumper (instead of 3mph) installed. Still worth it though, especially for older cars sports cars from the southern states and imports.
Using the clock or computer that you set earlier based on the cellphone? I've got too many time-keeping devices for there to be any significant probability of them all needing to reset at the same time. Even when moving at least my cell and computers will keep decent time.
Part of the reason for charging you the same and calling it a discount is that the alternative is "PR suicide". First Chicago Bank implemented a teller fee for interacting with a real person instead of using an ATM. They had to get rid of the fee due to public outcry. Within a few years airlines were effectively charging people for talking to someone for booking a ticket but they framed it as a discount for buying online. People never got ticked off at the airlines for doing it. Decision framing matters.
From Stallman's responses at the Q&A after this talk he doesn't think it's "wrong" to make money off of coding but that the code should be open source. His example was if some company needs an internal system for, e.g., managing their inventory, then there's nothing wrong with contracting to write that system for money. What he felt was wrong was not releasing that system into the public domain afterwards. Individual companies will continue to need enterprise software for their own particular requirements.
Reason is the basis of intelligent decisions. If you decide to avoid something because the consequences of a bad outcome * the probability of the bad outcome is greater than the consequences of a good outcome * the probability of a good outcome (aka the benefits outweigh the risks), then you are thinking intelligently.
As soon as you find the time to make all of your decisions that way, let the world know. Excluding purely emotional decision making you have to deal with normative (or rational) decision making and what people actually do for most decisions. I doubt the world is a less desirable place if people don't consider the probabilities of various outcomes when they choose cereal over grapefruit for breakfast out of habit. Most decision making is based on heuristics including using emotional responses because it's just not worth the effort required for full rational decision analysis.
(BTW, your probability*outcome function isn't so robust and makes some possibly desirable outcomes unattainable if the outcome 'values' and probabilities aren't convex. How do you plan to deal with non-commensurate criteria that are often components of consequences? The economics view of representing everything in dollars isn't very widely accepted and most decisions involve multiple people.)
Same in Canada. There's a regulation against clear beverages being caffeinated (unless it's from a "natural source" like Guarana).
But if you give your computer a cookie, it's going to ask for a glass of milk...
Sign with a fine point Sharpie, let dry, and cover with scotch tape. Replace tape as necessary. If a cashier doesn't like it then peel off the tape.