In alot of scientific disciplines Master's degree's are consolation prizes for people who get part way through the PhD and realize they're in the wrong field. (eg a master's in biology basically qualifies you for a pay raise as a lab tech but not much else) You want to pick a discipline where master's degree in itself is a useful credential. Most fields of engineering, Master of Public Health, Medical informatics are examples. If you're willing to get a PhD there are a million fields where your skills will be rare and valuable (most chemist's neuroscientist;s etc are not coders but would build themselves better tools if they were, fish biology, oceonography you name it just about. )

Look really hard at biostatistics. Pretty much all clinical medical research needs a biostatistician to be published but the Ph.D's don't get promoted checking the work of the clinical researchers and consulting for them. As a master's level statistician you could likely find work in a statistics "core" and get to help lots of different groups analyze their data at a given institution. It stay's pretty interesting because you don't get bogged down working for one group on the same project forever.

Good luck!

It's not posted in Idle it's posted under science. That's the context. Don't post under "science" and label it as written by a neuroscientist studying toxo! (leaving out that he's apparently a graduate student there) There's plenty of room to raise the quality of discussion of ideas outside of large journals like Nature and Science.

How is this science? A slate article siting the economist?

This is a classic example of potentially the ecologic fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy) In brief you have aggregate exposure data and aggregate data about the population and correlate them. From this data you don't have any idea if the exposed people are affected by the condition understudy.
(Anyone here have toxo serologies on the world cup teams?) Clearly there are no other differences between these countries besides their rate of toxo infection.:) See confounding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding).

All this stuff about toxo changing the development of society is entertaining speculation but no data is presented here to make it more than that. There are lot's more plausible pathogens for this (eg tuberculosis, malaria, HIV )

Population level correlations are best used for hypothesis generation, they are not reliable tests of same in most circumstances.

The old three button mouse twm solution for copy paste directory worked ok for me. I'm just not much of a keyboarder. I know I'm the minority here but I'm much faster with a gui. Heck why would I even run X on a PIII otherwise :).
 

ubuntu server and all command line stuff would definitely perform faster. (or some tiny linux would be even better)
My version was purely for ease of setup and use.
Unlike the usual slashdotter CLI is a pain to me, I don't know how you all type long paths without typos. It's okay for light work but the GUI works better for me.

I took an old PIII 933 mhz tablet that stank up the place runing xp tablet edition.. Xubuntu runs surprisingly well if you don't mind. I use bittorrent (transmission) client for download. VNC to admin without going to basement. (VINO to serve) Runs samba fine. I used to use enclosures and make my own but WD etc external drives have better drive spin down etc.
Currently about 2 TB of USB 2.0 external storage. Plug in more drives as needed. Use separate drives. Just mount and use Samba to make a share.

To playback video over network the cheap 5400 rpm vanillia externals deliver plenty of speed I have no trouble with playback on my lan. mostly MPEG 2 and H.264 stuff I've downloaded with VLC on the client machines. (Might be different if more than one person is accessing.)

I'm reasonably savy but no linux command line god (hence VNC ). And I wanted something I could set up and just work without tweaking for months like the last time I tried Mythtv. I got samba running and a share available on my network with about 2 hours worth of work. There's always room to tweak. Powermanagemnt on old laptop is not perfect, I can't get it to turn off the backlight on the screen. But for the cost of the drives I got a working file server and a separate machine to download torrents in a total of about 4 hours worth of work without haveing to mess with the command line too much. The main issue is that vnc is not xubuntu's strength. and I had to install samba via apt-get.

MAC is a pretty ubiquitous organism and clearly and emerging infection not only in the immunocompromised.
For people who live in older large buildings, legionnaire's is more likely to be a serious infection.
So much so that in many areas hospitals have to check their water regularly for it's presence to prevent outbreaks.

Legionnaire's it's not just from air conditioners anymore...

In no particular order.

E E "Doc" Smith - Lensman series ( have been reissued no so long ago so you should be able to find them). They're fun and it's a lengthy series.

C.M. Kornbluth and Fredrick Pohl The Space Merchants,& The Merchants war. Wrote a nice series about if advertising agencies ruled the world. In many ways more timely now than when they were written. Kornbluth has fun short stories along this line about inbreeding and consumerist societies...

A lot of Harry Harrison Novels would likely fit the bill too (I'm mostly thinking of the Stainless Steele rat. )
The Earthsea Trilogy (and the fourth book written much later) recomendation by others here is right on.

A lot of folks mention Enders Game which doesn't sound like what the OP is looking for despite being quite good.....Card's Alvin Maker series probably is and is great fun. The Call of Earth books would be appropriate too, but they are not very good.

While foundation trilogy may not be what the OP is looking for at that age I thought Caves of Steel, Robots of Dawn, and I Robot were awesome!

I'll second the Frank Herbert recommendations but you can go farther afield than Dune to stuff like the Dosadi experiment too.

Tom Swift series - basically Sci Fi Hardy boys. Neither dark nor political but honestly kinda dull.

At the risk of going off topic non Sci-fi thats great at this age is The Hornblower Series.