I suppose it depends how much time you are willing to commit, whether you'll do it part or full time, and how much experience (if any) you have in a research environment. Full time, a PhD will take anywhere from 4-7 years, typically (in the US - I understand that's a bit lower in the UK). An MS will take another 2-3, full-time, I'd expect. So you're right in that the bar to getting into an MS program will be lower, and that, once completed, you'll have some letters of recommendation to get into the PhD program. But that will definitely take a loooooong time.

If you can find a PhD program where getting the MS will save you time, do it. Or see if you can build any research experience in your current job to try to get directly into a phD program. You could always apply to both and see what happens.

Good luck.

Sorry, but that example doesn't work because it's a postdoc position, not a permanent job. You can't use postdoc salaries as indicative of anything, if that's your point. Postdocs are to PhDs what internists are to MDs. They typically pay around $50-60k, and the person taking the position is doing it to prepare for a career as a professor. It's like an advanced version of PhD that is shorter (typically 2ish years) and where they pay you a little better.

I'd imagine that a person who takes that job for 2 years and kicks ass at it will start near $100k or so, if they choose to go to industry, or a lot less in academia.

Some stats you might find more palatable: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Degree=Doctorate_(PhD),_Computer_Science_(CS)/Salary

I don't know about that - the division I'm in (of a large company) hires almost solely PhDs, and we're not exactly "hard core", whatever that means. Also, if he's sure he wants the PhD, it's not like getting the MS will shorten his PhD appreciably, if at all. If I were mid career, I would definitely not waste time on an MS if the PhD is what is desired.

I would decide what the goal is. If it's to attempt to get a higher paying job, don't get the PhD. If it's prestige, don't get the PhD. If it's to focus on interesting problems that might require some fairly deep insights, both during the PhD program and later as a career, then get the PhD.

To answer the submitter's question more directly:

A PhD isn't a guarantee of a job in a skunk-works type of environment. It isn't a guarantee of anything, really. It is an opportunity to focus on a narrowly defined problem for a number of years, and learn the skills and mindset necessary to move what the world knows about a subject. This requires being able to synthesize knowledge and insights from collections of facts, data, theory, etc. These skills are the sorts of things you need to do to work in a skunkworks type of environment, certainly as a major contributor and not just in a support role.

I would say this - if you like to apply skills that you've learned toward your job, get the MS. If you like to figure out things that people don't know yet, get the PhD.

uh.. you didn't really understand what I wrote did you? You don't need to keep interest rates low, in fact you only have some influence over interest rates. As long as your GDP is growing faster than debt (when you have decent employment and so on) then you're fine, and it's not an issue, and you have quite a lot of knobs to turn to keep nominal GDP growing faster than interest on your debt, especially when most of your debt is at a fixed rate for years.

The problem is it never happens that way. You actually have to consider historical context and pretend this isn't the first time we've been through an economic hiccup. Every problem in the last 30 years has been "solved" with spending - the problem is, when the economic ship rights itself, no one wants to do the hard thing and reduce spending or increase taxes. That's why we have a debt that is now 100% of GDP, an increase from about 20% in the pre-Greenspan era. That is a level that has been associated with economic destabilization, and no one seems to care. Our debt ratio is higher than any time except the time immediately surrounding WWII. This is a real problem. Not for the next couple of years, this could be a problem for decades, and probably will if it's not solved.

If you think you have magical knobs to turn to keep GDP growing faster than interest on your debt, you're deludedl. The problem with all your solutions are things like "As long as....". When you build up such an unstable situation, you rely on those things continuing to be true, and when they fail, they fail hard.

other way around. Anyone who thinks now is the time to be worrying about debt is why you've been stuck in a liquidity trap for 4 years when you could have been out of it 3 years ago. Right now *is* the time to borrow more money to get employment going and get jobs created to spur demand to get the economy going. When demand picks back up then you cut those jobs and raise taxes and so on so that you can ride things along while the debt shrinks away.

Sounds lovely. The problem is when it doesn't work, and you end up having jacked up the debt, and your payments on the debt, only to face interest rates that you can't control any more and an unemployment problem that wasn't solved by your spending. In other words, exactly what happened during the "stimulus". Now what do you do?

Here's the thing: the idiots on the fringe on either side are both wrong. Yes, we need to spend money - wisely - in targeted ways to get unemployment down and the tax base up. We also need to do it in a way that isn't going to build a house of cards that will completely destroy the economy with runaway inflation within a decade of the recession ending. Which is why your mindset is dangerous, and that mindset is pervasive in the global economic leadership right now: namely, the notion that we have a lot more control over the global economy than we really do, that we can fix all problems, and that the cure is never worse than the disease. If they were that good at controlling things, we'd never end up with these problems in the first place.

So when you say things that insinuate that our mounting debt poses no long term risk, I have a problem with that. We can't ignore it. No one ever said it's the only problem that should be addressed - a lovely false dichotomy, to be sure - but we certainly can't go back to the Obama stimulus plan (and touted by such luminaries as Krugman) that we just need to spend a lot of money, and it doesn't matter how.

One thing I've found is that, in the long run, economics is simple. And I've also found that people who think they can outwit the basic principles always end up crashing in the end. What I want is to not be in the same boat when it happens.

So I realize that this is chapter ad verse from the Book of Bernanke, effectively, but it's insane. Yes, you are correct in the short-term that the amount of the debt doesn't matter, but how much it costs to service it. But that's only true if you can manipulate the interest rates to ever-lower levels to account for the deficit spending that we've all been experiencing. After all, even given your math, if the principal keeps increasing, the interest rate has to keep going down, right? So my question to you is, how long do you think the US can keep pushing interest rates lower? Certainly not forever. Probably not much longer at all. These historically low interest rates will have to increase at some point.

I make analogies to household finance because it's easier for people to see certain ideas as completely insane when framed in a conventional frame of reference. Essentially what the US - and much of the rest of the world - has done is take out national debt on what amount to variable interest rate loans, and we've taken them out at historically low rates. Indeed, we've set our national budget based on what we can barely afford even given those historically low rates, and even then our total debt continues to grow.

Sound familiar? Pretty much exactly what happened around 2004 when every homeowner maxed out on interest-only loans they could barely afford, then paid bills on credit cards. And we saw how smart that was. As soon as rates went up a bit, we saw a feedback loop that resulted in a cascade of debt failure. Now every country in the world is doing the same thing with their national finance that those homeowners did with household finance. Great plan.

The problem with your strategy is the same problem that happened then: everything gets screwed up when the interest rate merry-go-round stops and the cost to service the debt balloons. Even more fun is that, if we don't solve the problem, lowered debt ratings will also result in higher interest rates on that debt as it goes out of control.

So what do we do? Claiming that the debt is an artificial political construct is fantasyland. If your neighbor told you his debt - that amounted to as much as he makes in a year and is growing rapidly - is just something his wife says to piss him off, you'd say he was delusional. It's no different here. Ballooning debt is a huge long-term issue. The only question is how much we trade off short-term vs. long term to solve our immediate problems. Put another way, how much do we live off our credit cards to pay the bills?

First, you've highlighted one thing very accurately - continuing to pay unemployment benefits to some people who have been on them for up to four years straight is completely insane. Providing incentives to employers to hire full-time employees with health benefits would be a much better idea. But that is too obvious for US leadership.

The next thing is how you get off this merry-go-round. Your solution, as you state, is to simply manage interest rates at a low level. If only it were that easy - sorry, but you can't keep them this low forever. Or even likely very long. So the question is, how do you let them rise without leading to crippling inflation or an equities crash? Your plan requires a solution to that problem. It also requires a plan to return our debt-to-GDP level to where it needs to be, which will probably require keeping debt constant (ie, balance the budget) while increasing GDP and letting interest rates rise to normal levels. And it's going to be very hard to do all those at the same time.

Otherwise, we "solve" this stagnation/unemployment problem only to cause new, potentially worse problems. And this is the problem I have with Greenspan's legacy - we've spent the last 30 years solving the short-term problem while ignoring the long term. That's how we got where we are. We need to actually start looking at the long-term consequences of our policies for once. And that's why our debt problem isn't an artificial political issue. Anybody who thinks that hasn't thought this issue through past the next year or so.

Interesting. How is it, exactly, that you know that they overwhelmingly vote for Democrats? Given the fact that, as you surely know, US elections use a secret ballot. Come on, tell us! How the fuck could you know who these "dead people" are voting for??"

Good point. You just illustrated the problem with ballot security. There's no way to know whether dead people are voting, pr for whom. Therefore, we can all surely agree that ballot security is a good idea, right?

If you think that the grandparent is just a racist thug, then there's only one way to prove him wrong: IDs for voters. And he is right about one thing - everybody has a picture ID. For Chrissakes, a picture ID is required to get a job, and I'm pretty sure it's required to get government benefits, and you're pretty much guaranteed to be on one or the other.

I have to say, it is worth questioning why some groups are dead-set against IDs for voters, considering that it would disenfranchise virtually no one. It's reasonable to question who benefits from ID-less elections, and that it's likely the same ones who are dead-set against requiring IDs. Doesn't require a genius to make that connection.

Seriously, if I need an ID to drive a car and get a job, shouldn't Democracy be worth preserving by simply maintaining its sanctity? If we have to make gov issued IDs free to take away the excuse, then do it.

You can't simultaneously thing wikileaks and government transparency are good things and this is a bad thing

The hell I can't. Government should be transparent, not people.

Also, there's a similar analogy to the difference between a six-shot revolver and an automatic weapon. The balance between openness and privacy was struck when the data was hard to get. Now that it's so easy to get en masse, that balance needs to be re-struck.

How can you have an article on LGBT issues without trolling?

on slashdot? Simple. 1) Make it news, 2) make it matter, and 3) make it for nerds.

Here, it's not news because it's a speculative question. A question about a horse of a news story that has been beaten into a bloody pulp by the national media. Does it matter? The basic topic might, but the hypothetical doesn't. Is it for nerds? Nope. And simply dropping MS in there doesn't make it so.

This is the kind of bullshit that degrades the quality of slashdot. This site is only as good as its editors, and it's definitely seen its peaks and valleys over the last, what, 15ish years? Seems like it's reaching a low ebb again thanks to crap like this. And in case anyone cares, yes, I'm in favor of gay rights, but that's not why I read slashdot.

Not to mention that he actually has 1820 on the plot, and it was almost zero. So he has 4 data points, of which 3 fit the "trend", and one completely blows it up. Worse - and this is the part that separates science from bullshit - he seems to claim absolutely no mechanism of any kind.

The problem is that such terrible science could taint better work with the same stink of shit, when there are better studies that attempt to predict future instability. Things like male/female ratio, baby booms, and other demographic have been linked to future violence in much better studies than this.

Honestly, if I were teaching a senior level college math course and a student turned this in as a term paper, I'd give it a C. It's pathetic for a professor.

What's the big deal about that? Tier 1 helpdesk doesn't need a pulse

Fixed.

Actually, let's. Regardless of the how and why, the people running the drug trade right now are grade-A assholes. They are the kinds of assholes who are traffickers by nature, and if you legalized drugs they would move on to trafficking something you like less.

If you think they're just misunderstood freedom fighters, go hang around in a Mexican border town sometime.

...how about they review eyewitness testimony? Eyewitness accounts are known to be highly unreliable in many situations, including stress, poor lighting, poor angle relative to event, and more. Additionally, identifying a person is difficult if the person is not already known to the witness, especially if the witness is not of the same race as the person being identified. Worse, the witness interview process by the police may result in suggestion to the witness' memory - either intentionally or unintentionally.

I would personally bet - though cannot prove - that more bad convictions are due to bad witness testimony than bad forensic evidence. By all means bad evidence should be cleaned up - a recent example is identifying bullets by trace metal composition, which was recently found to be questionable

In the end, however, it's only a start in the right direction, and somehow bad witness IDs need to be reviewed as well. It would be great if there was some sort of independent auditing agency (independent of the adversarial justice system) that reviewed questionable convictions based on changes in what we know about the validity of evidence.

Here's a good site that discusses eyewitness testimony effects. Scary, really.