The faculty hiring process (at least here in Europe) really doesn't care what subject is listed on your certificate, as long as you have the right experience. The title of your thesis is much more important. In fact, people who cross subject boundaries often earn a little extra respect - it helps you to bring new ideas from one field to another. My prof is famous for his work in biochemistry, but his degrees are all in physics. It hasn't hurt him at all. I do not know if this works outside of universities though, where there is likely to be less understanding of the details of your PhD. The hurdle, as ever, is to get past HR so you can speak to someone who actually knows something about the job you've applied for. Sadly, I suspect HR will dismiss anybody who has a PhD in anything other than stats, if that is the job title. I'm not sure CS has any advantage over biology in this case though.

Steve Smith has been doing this at the John Radcliffe in Oxford for maybe ten years or more. He's a maxillofacial surgeon, working on difficult facial reconstruction (seriously, these guys get to see some ugly messes - what they do is incredible). He has a 5-axis mill, and some software cobbled together by a former PhD student. He uses CT data to cut out skulls from foam, so he can practice fitting plates to the skull before opening the patient. They also make neat desk ornaments.

Erm, great summary. A link to some university rag, but none to the original article.

The idea of a university has survived since medieval times. The surrounding world has changed significantly, but the model still works. The idea that old==bad is largely a marketing one.

Information is not free. Those universities have large, well-stocked libraries, and professors to point you to the right section. Those books are expensive, especially when you're not even sure which ones you need yet. There is a ton of information online, some of it even accurate. But you need to know quite a lot to be able to judge whether you are reading something correct, deliberately misleading, or just plain wrong. For the details, most of us still use books.

A society where one needs a college degree to achieve financial security is clearly broken. We all place too much emphasis on degrees. Academic degrees are very good for a very small proportion of jobs. If we can get over the idea that academic qualifications somehow make a person superior, the world will be a better place. To quote an old example, when your kitchen is flooding, you don't need an expert in fluid mechanics - a plumber will be much more welcome. Why is this important? Because when we send less people to university, we as a society can cover more of the cost. This is only unfair if you think everybody needs a degree. At the same time, a decent apprentice scheme is also very beneficial to society (see Germany for a good example).

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." - Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

Well, I don't like ribbons, but I'm not afraid of change. It wasn't just the ribbons, but they certainly helped. I finally changed my work PC to Linux.

Lots of you have commented that Kindles just don't have a big enough screen for scientific papers as PDF. When I look at the papers I have next to me, they're all formatted as two columns (so your eyes don't lose track of the line you're reading). So what we really need are scientific papers formatted for e-reader. Are any of the major publishers doing this? (Yes, I know we all have a ton of PDFs, but let's look to the future for a moment...)

A lot of scientific software is run less than 10 times, often only once. It generates the result, end of story (well, go away and understand what you got). There really is no point in extensively recoding for reuse, checking all the consts are const, etc. Documentation of the form 'does X using method Y (numerical recipes page P)' is often enough - i.e. a couple of lines of comments at the top of the file. It doesn't have to look nice, it just has to be correct. And don't even get me started on optimization (spending three weeks to cut a 12 hour runtime in half is not worth the effort).

How about charging $8 for the first person who accesses the paper, and then putting up free for everyone else?

There is a better way. Various groups are seriously trying to push open-access publishing, Frontiers being one example (frontiersin.org). When you look into the problem a little more closely, you find that publishing isn't free. Hosting the PDF is cheap, but somebody has to produce it in the first place and maintain a website. And before that, someone has to arrange for the peer-review to happen, find an editorial board and reviewers, etc. Most open-access outfits use the publisher-pays model - i.e. you pay to have your article published, and then anyone can download it for free. The trouble is this shifts the payments from the largely invisible library subscriptions (taken from university staff overheads) to a very direct, comes-off-your-grant payment. But it is still a better model - we just need to see publishing become a recognised cost in grants. Your article is then, subject to peer review, freely available to anyone who wants it - an the authors retain copyright. Think about it next time you're publishing.

Now, does anyone want to explain why impact factors are a crap, self-serving metric that promotes more rather than better articles?

...nobody has yet found a PC capable of running Windows 7 today.

(I upgraded from XP last month. I upgraded the PC at the same time, to what sounded like quite a fast machine. But Win7 destroyed that advantage. How I wish I didn't need proprietary packages - then I'd switch everything to Linux and shout less at my computer)

So in some 18,000 years there will be a bunch of techs wondering why their galaxy-spanning computers are running a bit slow? Man, who expected hackers from the past?

What's the relationship between FITS, HDF and NetCDF? I've looked into the last two, but eventually decided they were far more complicated than I needed them to be - and did the evil thing that so many of us do - invented my own simple format that is 'just enough' for my own needs :-).But FITS is new to me.

I think you're missing two points:

First, as an academic group, it is important to make your software usable for other groups. It brings collaborators to you - researchers who want to do something new, that your software almost supports. It's faster for them to work with you than start from scratch - more for your expertise in the field than for your coding abilities.

Second, industrial software isn't open source, and for niche markets is often of terrible quality at a very high price. Open-source is slowly pushing industrial software out of science - biomedical imaging being a very good example. With OS, if the package doesn't do what you need, you can at least extend it yourself. Often more importantly, you can also check it for bugs. Less out-and-out coding bugs, more subtle bias in the way the data is processed. Super-secret-magic-algorithms do not make for reliable science.

My main screen is 1920x1080, so I don't think that's my problem. My problem is that I can't find anything - I spend far too long searching for options - and I've been using it since not long after it was introduced. Everything is two clicks away - apart from the stuff I use (e.g. sub/superscript in Powerpoint).

Seriously, I have not spoken to a single real-person-standing-in-front-of-me who likes the ribbon. I am genuinely surprised by reports from people who like it. As a GUI element I don't see how it's different to tabs and buttons. As a GUI design, I think it's poorly laid-out.

With menus it is easy to present a lot of options in a tree structure, several layers deep if needed. The ribbon is effectively two layers deep. Maybe it would be useful for often-used options, alongside a menu bar, but not instead of it. I'm used to complicated packages (I also use stuff like Solidworks) - I just like to be able to see what's available.