It is ridiculous of course. It is also a common attitude among PI's toward their postdocs and students, especially in high-profile, high-pressure labs.
This letter from a PI to a worker made the rounds a few years ago. The PI claimed later it was a joke. It doesn't read like a joke, and the exact same attidude is not uncommon at all:
PCMCIA CF card reader, plus fat formatted CF card, plus USB CF card reader.
Or about a thousand other ways.
Find a compromise between predicting too much of the future and just managing a project by the seat of your pants; get into a rhythm where you check how good your estimations and learn to get better at them.
Of course you can't develop every project this way; I've used Agile and it's worked for me. I've used waterfall and it's worked for me too. You have to try to be sensible; you can't completely wall of other people's need to know when you'll accomplish certain things, nor can you build a solid plan based on pure speculation. You have to have an intelligent responsible way of dealing with future uncertainty, a plan to cut it down to size.
I've even had the good fortune at one point of winning a $750,000 grant to build a system for which no firm requirements had been established. It was kind of an uphill-flowing waterfall: we knew how long it would take us and how much it would cost but we had no firm idea of what we were supposed to build. If that sounds like a recipe for disaster, it was; but my team was *successful* and built a product which was still be used and supported over a decade after the grant finished.
What's missing from many programming estimates is honesty. It's a matter of ethics; you can't take people's money and say maybe someday you'll deliver something useful to them. People don't have unlimited time and money to accomplish all the things that need to be done in the world. It's an honor being entrusted with people's aspirations, and a serious responsibility. It's hard, even nerve-wracking, but you've got to care enough about the impact of your planning on other people to make the effort to do the very best job you can.
And what I've found is that if you do make the effort you can do a surprisingly good job of estimating a project if it's in an area and with technologies you're reasonably familiar with. If you look closely your specific predictions will often be way off, but if you care enough to be brutally honest the pleasant surprises tend to balance out the unpleasant ones.
I used to ride every day. But my place of work changed, so now I walk and take the train instead. Around home we generally walk as well, so my bike sits unused for months on end.
Walking is also good exercize of course, but it does limit the range of places to go. I should fix up the bike and start using it again come spring.
Automation changes the source of production from workers to machines. And that separates the source of production from the source of consumption.
To put it simply, robots produce wealth but does not consume it. Humans consume wealth, but (in this possible future) can no longer produce it. Robots have owners of course, but even if you ignore what happens to the majority of people, a few extremely wealthy people can not possibly make up for the consumption shortfall. Ten-thousand people with 10k each vastly outconsume (by necessity) a single person worth 100M.
So, if the entities making wealth and those using wealth become separate, you need a way to transfer wealth from one to the other. If not, you will see a slow-moving economic collapse, as lack of demand and cost-cutting automation drive each other down.
A basic income, generated from a tax on production (transaction tax, energy tax, direct tax on machinery) is one way, and has the benefit of being simple, straightforward and having low administrative overhead.
The time spent selecting questions, then answer them in a simple and understandable way is not free. Especially in a climate where even keeping a blog in your spare time is sometimes seen as a suspect frivolity that takes time from your research.
That said, I spend several years of my life helping to get rid of the Morse Code test for radio hams, so that smart folks like you could just take technical tests to get the license.
I'm currently assembling a Softrock Ensemble receiver just to play with SDR. I'm starting to become interested in more than passive receiving â" but a major part of my curiousity is about Morse, not voice. I can talk to anybody over the net after all, while Morse code communication feels like a very different kind of thing.
[...] and rather than cutting the least important program, they cut the most visible program, in an attempt to get their funding restored.
Honestly, though, a qestion-answer service for school children probably does rank among the least important programs for a research lab. I very much doubt this is part of their written remit (as opposed to communicate their actual research to the public), and the people spending time at work answering the questions certainly get zero professional recognition for it.
It does sound like a very nice, fun service. And I do agree that this kind of outreach is important. But if this is not part of what their funders want them to do, then it should come as no surprise if it's among the first things to go when money becomes tight.
You want this kind of thing to continue? Make sure there's funding (and paid time) earmarked for doing it. In fact, that may be a good idea in general: add a small fraction (.1% or even less) to any research grant over a certain size for general science outreach. If it's part of your funding, that also removes the career obstacles toward doing outreach we too often have now.
If it's so easy to use that people will actually _use_ strong encryption (end2end - who cares if there are central servers passing on the encrypted data) then yes - why not?
I fully agree with Moxie - and I'm hoping to get a lot of people to move from Skype to Wire. It might only be end2end encrypted for voice calls - not the text/group chats - but it's a lot _better_ than the alternatives, with a UI that has a chance of getting wide adoption.
More of the world's communication will be secured. That's progress.
Yes, I've used Redphone. No strange setup process needed for the calls to be secure. That's what we're discussing, right?
The first time you start up RedPhone, the app prompts you to register your phone number by tapping a button. And then you're done; that's it. RedPhone doesn't ask for passwords, logins, or even for users to create an account. The app is designed with privacy in mind, so it requires as little from you as it can.
Yeah. If only there was an easy to use end2end encrypted mobile phone application for voice calls that Moxie had been involved in creating.
Sure - but the configuration of the continents was also different which means we can draw no conclusions from that time period.
Rents in Mountain View for a nice apartment run around $2500/mo. The cost of not having to commute can be high. But there are plenty of other places with relatively good BART access that will run significantly lower. They certainty don't run $7K/month unless you are renting a large house.
-Matt
Despite their name, rare earth elements (with the exception of the radioactive promethium) are relatively plentiful in Earth's crust, with cerium being the 25th most abundant element at 68 parts per million (similar to copper). However, because of their geochemical properties, rare earth elements are typically dispersed and not often found concentrated as rare earth minerals in economically exploitable ore deposits.[3] It was the very scarcity of these minerals (previously called "earths") that led to the term "rare earth".
An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you really care to know.
