Grant money is given preferably to teams that already publish a lot. Even "starting grants" in the EU require a single principal investigator (PI) with a lot of well-cited publication under their belt. This can only be achieved if the PI has done their initial research in a well-heeled lab, with a well-known head of the lab who is well-connected, and so on. This encourages a pyramidal structure with a lot of grunt students at the bottom, supervised by post-docs, supervised by assistant professors, and so on. Success encourages visibility, which encourages grants, which ensures money, which ensures good grunt students can be hired, and so on.

This is not the only possible successful structure, but one of the most common. A single researcher, however brilliant, cannot usually keep up with the outpouring of landmark papers the pyramidal structure can achieve. On the other hand, if everybody does their job, meritocracy in the pyramidal structure ensures that the best grunt students get promoted to post docs, and so on, usually in a different pyramidal structure.

The big drawback of the pyramidal structure is that the prof at the top usually doesn't know exactly what is going on at the bottom, even though they put their name on most of the papers that the structure produces.

Disclaimer: I'm a tenured prof. I do have a reasonable number of students, but I work with them directly. All my students are co-supervised with at least one other prof. Occasionally I do have a few post-docs but the structure is always collaborative. This is not the standard but this works well enough also as long as there isn't any ego-driven fights in the lab. This means choosing your collaborators well. I've made a few mistakes, but so far so good.

If you look at just about anybody's success story, the first thing that is of utmost importance is being in the right place at the right time. In other words, luck. The American dream has always been a dream. I'm not convinced that anything much has changed in the last 70 years about this, i.e. since about the end of WWII. Sure hard work is a factor but by no means the only one.

Not all libraries. OpenCV for instance.

Inefficient (two interpreters), inelegant (two syntaxes), and there is usually no point to it. Both languages are roughly as capable.

Only the really cheap stuff is particle board. They also have plenty of real wood stuff. What they really do well is the non-particle, real wood, cheap shelves like the Ivar brand. These are everywhere and there is essentially no alternative.

Only of those Europeans that have rich families. The European universities are full of European students too (and very few North Americans), usually the not-so-rich kind.

Most prestigious, most awash with money, yes. What befuddles me is why these super-rich universities don't simply select the very best students all over the world (including the US), and don't offer them affordable tuition. They would be even better. As of now, most US universities simply perpetuate a rich class divide.

The US to the rescue! the dream of all countries mired in anti-democratic squalor. If you look around the list of recently US-"liberated" countries, even as far back as the 1950s, it could perhaps bring you back to reality.Getting the US attention is more a curse than a blessing.

I'm sorry, citation needed. It does have compression and encryption, and you *can* make a RAID 0 or 1 with it, so it has some (weak) redundancy support, but I have never heard about it having deduplication. ZFS is the only filesystem I know that has deduplication.

As long as the US remains attractive for immigrants, you are correct, this is a life choice. However realize that population in any given country needs to be replaced. Having (too) many kids in Uganda do not compensate for the (dramatic) lack of kids in Japan. It's not a simple matter of shifting kids around, which is never simple to begin with.

So in short you may choose not to have children, but somebody will have to pay your pension eventually. It can help if this is someone you now well.

It is because it is a more complex issue that first thought.

Quadtree are an approximation technique widely used in imaging and computational geometry. Did you look on Google Scholar/Web of Science or just in patents?

A light search returned these links:

http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-47789-6_106 (sorry paywalled)

https://diglib.eg.org/EG/DL/Conf/EG2002/short/short90.pdf

I'm not sure if this is what you are looking for. In discrete geometry (construction of a Voronoi tessellation on pixel data), it is often more efficient to used an Euclidean distance function, which is linear. Indeed constructing the quadtree plus using it for the computation takes more time.

Is the project poorly managed now? Do you have inside information?

No, we really do have working quantum computers in the lab right now. They are fully capable of running Shor's algorithm. It's just that they can factor at most a number like 15.

In many cities around the world, taxis are heavily regulated. Among these regulations are a fixed number of license plates, and the costs of these plates (or equivalent medallions, etc). This means that in many instances there aren't enough taxis to go around because these numbers were fixed a long time ago and may not be have been updated to meet demand. This benefits most the taxi operators and to some extent the drivers themselves because a high demand drives the price of the fare up. Also a business with low competition is always more comfortable to run. Customers hate it but are used to this situation.

Now Uber and others have sought to change the game, first by ignoring regulation and getting self-employed people to drive their own car to ferry people around. This is very good to some extent because taxi business in a lot of places is over-regulated and does not meet demand. Also the Uber et al have a nice online presence and at this stage at least do provide a useful service, so why not.

However, Uber fares are not cheap, this is not "sharing", this is a business. The self-employed individuals driving the cars may be putting themselves at risk: with their rides, the regulatory authorities, in case of accident, with other regulated taxi drivers, etc. We are still in a "honeymoon" period but this is sure to end. Uber has become much to big to be ignored, and so will soon have to fight for its own existence, in a lot of places all at once. I'm not sure their (huge) valuation will be enough.