In this day and age, rudimentary programming ability is as vital a skill as basic arithmetic. Even if you want to work a spreadsheet program, you need to do something pretty close to "programming". Just like not every 6 year old is a future Fields Medalist--or even a professional mathematician, engineer, or scientist--but still needs to be taught arithmetic in order to function, so too he should be taught programming, even though 99% of 6 year olds will not become professional programmers.

Throw in some pixie dust, good intentions, and some first order approximations where the math might work nicely, and magic should be a piece of cake.

Spoken like every scientist, and like no engineer, I've ever worked with.

...hehe...suckers!

Everyone agree to write in $DEAD_POLITICIAN_I_REVERE_AS_A_GOD against every unopposed incumbent next election day.

There are two kinds of people who have read Ayn Rand. Those who understand that individual liberty are not dirty words, and those who like to put dirty words in other people's mouths.

One benefit is making you think "bitter" is tasty. The second, and more important one, is the prevention of lack-of-coffee headaches.

The Reverend Dr. Thomas Bayes tells us that we can't do worse than chance if we have data, and sometimes we can do better.

You, sir/madam/AC, have made a subtle but important distinction. This is the output of one guy who's been developing and testing it in a video game simulator and with a golf-cart in an empty field. Despite the hardware, this is very much abstract and does not appear to be backed up by the level of engineering effort that aircraft autopilots were when they were introduced. So nice idea, but still quite pie-in-the-sky.

You pay vendors only so far as you think their people are smarter than your people. Once you get past the generic PC with off-the-shelf software that does 95% of what you need, there is no such thing as plug-and-play. If you believe you need that last 5%, then you can't be lazy about it and throw cash at a vendor. They can, and do, promise you the moon, and more often than not come back with a hunk of green cheese. You only outsource things you do not have time for yourself, but never things you don't know, because if you don't know what the end result should look like, and how it should be done, the vendor can sell you anything. Yes, digging around for a week to make a band-aid fix may not be the best use of your time when it takes four days to return it and buy something else, but if it takes four months and you have no more confidence that the replacement won't have the same problem, maybe you should take the week.

That's the number one issue with so-called over-qualified candidates. They're trained as scientists (vs as engineers) who have picked up just enough "software skills" to get by. Ask them to actually build (for example) and experimental setup, and they can't because in grad school they had some undergrad ME do it for them. Ask them to make a custom SCADA system to run on your embedded device, and they can't because in grad school they did it with LabView, and they couldn't even spell real time software if it interrupted them on the ass. These people are trained to think shit up rather than to execute, and quite frankly not being able to find a job is nature's way of telling them they wasted their educations.

Nope. Too many people were told "educate yourself" and heard "go to college and get a degree in underwater basketweaving." That's problem 1. Problem 2 is a persistent cultural cancer in academia that declares and academic job as the only kind of job there is. Maybe the problem is worse in the squishier sciences, but in engineering, you can't simultaneously have "not enough highly qualified candidates" for jobs that typically start at 70k+ and a glut of PhD's unless those PhD's restrict their jobs search to academia where tenure track positions are nearly nonexistent and post-doc the pay tops out at 50k. The solution isn't to change the funding model, it's to make students aware of the fact that the world doesn't begin and end at the borders of campus.

Apply tape directly to the camera.

My phone also makes phone calls, and occasionally it will also take a phone call.

The moon won't move, but the earth will spin merrily along at 15 arcsec/sec and change the orientation of the ring relative to the moon.

I did pay attention in high school, and college, and grad school, and I know exactly how peer reviewed science works. I've seen and read enough Peer Reviewed Publications to be able to say with certainty that 95% percent of them read as follows:

1. Define a Grand Problem, or, alternatively define a Problem and spend the first section convincing your reader that it is Grand
2. Spend about another section trying to convince the reader that your Noble Struggle Against The Unknown, as it relates to your topic, is part of the great scheme of the universe, on par with the toils of Newton, or Feynman, or Wiles
2a. Flatter your friends and colleagues who will be reviewing your paper
2b. Bash young-earth creationists, anti-vaxxers, and maybe Wall Street bankers. Not because it's relevant, but because you need be percieved as a little left-of-center in order to avoid inviting silly nit-picks from your reviewers.
3. Recycle some figures from old lecture notes or homeworks (depends on who's the lead author) and some equations that kinda relate to them that you finally got around to typesetting after they've spent a good year on the back of an old envelope or a post-it note
4. If so inclined, spend a section making wild-ass claims and extrapolations about how something you typed up in the wee hours of the morning before the submission deadline is ground-breaking and earth-shattering, and the ignorant masses should be grateful that you deigned to solve their problems for them
5. Pointedly thank your sponsor in a way that implies you want more money, and the world depends on you getting more money
6. Cite a whole bunch of past publications, possibly your own, which relate to your topic in any way more than none.


The good papers on the other hand, tend not to make wild-ass claims and extrapolations, and at worst only suggest possibly unfruitful avenues of further investigation, and above all, do not give you a plot of 150 years' worth of noise and with a straight face tell you that there is absolutely no uncertainty in future predictions.