baddspellar

It's discussed in this Nature podcast

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03646-1

One of the investigators on this project is a guest on this segment. He does a nice job of describing it in an understandable way

I would argue that goodreads is not a particularly good way to determine whether a non-fiction book is worth reading. goodreads reviewers are just regular people who evaluate books based on how much they enjoyed them, not how accurate of useful the books are.

If I'm looking for a book I want to learn from, I scout recommendations from journals, magazines, blogs, respected radio programs/podcasts. End of year "best of" lists are also a good source of ideas. Then I read some in-depth reviews of books that strike my fancy by reviewers who have reason to know what they're talking about. Many of these have 4+ star ratings in goodreads, some don't.

Also, a blanket rejection of books by journalists or other non-experts is going to lead you to miss some really good books. That rule immediately called to mind Tracy Kidder. So, "The Soul of a New Machine" is off limits. Really? No thanks. I can think of many others.

As long as "Percent faculty with terminal degree in their field" is an evaluation criterion for ranking school quality (I took those exact words from the US News and World Report rankings criteria), there is little chance that non-PhD holders will be able to become tenured faculty at research universities going forward. Let's not fool ourselves. Schools work towards higher rankings, as they are rewarded for doing so.

I looked at the form. It doesn't say "student-athlete". it says "scholarship athlete". Athletic scholarships overwhelmingly go to Football players who are heavily recruited because football is revenue generating. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_I_(NCAA)#Scholarship_l...

http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Homeless-Teen-Intel-Sci...

This is not the first time she has been homeless. Her family has been living on the edge of poverty for years, like many american families have been.

She's doing her research at SUNY Stony Brook, a local University, which does have the lab resources.

Here's are two important takeaways: 1. her parents love and support her. That's the most important thing we can give our children. 2. she doesn't feel sorry for herself, but presses on, taking advantage of opportunities as they arise.

It reminds me of Liz Murray, another young woman from New York who was homeless in High School (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDQjH816L6E) Her parents weren't as capable (they were drug addicts), but she credits their love with helping her get through.

A PhD is a credential, as is a BS, an MS, or a CCIE.

As long as employers demand a credential for hiring, that credential will be necessary. In the US, few companies are willing to take on the burden of training scientific researchers. Further, much of the pure research in this country is done at Universities, and virtually all US universities require a PhD for tenure track faculty. So a PhD is a necessary credential to do scientific research in the US.

The linked article states that Asian companies are willing to invest in training smart university graduates to do research. That means the PhD credential is not required. The required credential is instead a "University Degree".

Now, if the question is whether the PhD system is the best way to create scientists, that's entirely different. There's no reason to believe the University PhD system necessarily produces better scientists than a corporate lab would. University professors are not necessarily good teachers, and University labs are not necessarily well equipped.

It's very similar to the "BS or higher in Computer Science or Engineering" credential on help wanted ads in the US. Does that BS or higher really make you a better programmer than someone who learned on his/her own? Of course not. But it's a credential, so you get it.

Disclaimer: I do have a PhD

Now that's what we're talking about! Good job.

Radical, one-time, short-term actions like this aren't lifestyle changes. They're not sustainable, so they don't work in the long term.

If the author said he made sustainable lifestyle changes I'd have some reason to believe he's won his weight battle. If he said he's been getting up an hour early each morning for the past 3 months to walk, or has been learning how to prepare tasty low-calorie meals and has kept that up for the past 3 months, or has taken up cycling and has commuted to the office by bike every day it would be a different story. I know plenty of people who've done these things and successfully kept their weight down indefinitely.

On the other hand, I know plenty of people who've lost weight with short term, unsustainable diets, and who gained every pound of that back.

I've run software projects on the technical side for going on 20 years now.

In all those years, I've been lucky enough to have exactly 2 good product managers. The rest have ranged from useless to downright harmful

Here's what made the 2 good ones good: They knew their limitations. They didn't imagine themselves to be programmers, architects, or user experience experts, regardless of how many books they read. They never, ever, specified requirements in terms of architecture or implementation. They might give a sketch to clarify what they're talking about, but they'd never defend it as the required (or even a good) approach. They trusted the rest of the team in their areas of expertise. In turn, we trusted them in their area of expertise.

Their focus was on talking to real customers about the problems they faced, finding out why current products (ours and competitors) didn't solve those problems, and getting that information to the people who had skills in building products. When we had something to show, they'd give us feedback based on how well it met the customers' needs, and they'd use their relationships with customers to get some customers to give us feedback on intermediate results. They did research. If they didn't know something, they'd say so, and find out.

They trusted us to give them fair estimates. If something was going to take so long it would miss a market opportunity, they'd work with us to figure out alternatives.

They'd prioritize, and stick to these priorities unless significant new information came along, in which case they'd sit with us to make tradeoffs.

What did the rest of them do?

They'd specify requirements in terms of implementation. They'd tell us how they wanted something architected. They'd attempt to design a UI and tell us the requirement was to implement that UI. They'd trust their gut without doing actual research. They'd promise features in a specific timeframe before getting estimates from engineering.

Does anyone know if they have an active program to cut the bottom performers? If not, I suspect they have quite a collection of overpaid mediocre programmers.

I worked for many years at a company that paid significantly higher than average salaries. Even with a program to cut the bottom 10% per year, we had quite a few people who were mediocre at best.

It's easier for a busy manager to hold onto the people they have than to hire and train new ones. Paying high salaries is an easy way to do that if you have the cash.

"Knowing the code base is a pretty hefty requirement... even seasoned developers don't know everything about their product... so it would be nigh impossible for a Product Manager to do so. It's more important that their minions think they know the whole code base, to try to keep the lazy virtuous developers honest."

I let the "CEO of a product line" slide, but the above comment had me seeing red. A product manager thinking programmers are his minions? I guess it might be true if the programmers are so incompetent that they can't see through a blowhard who pretends he knows the code base.

I don't know the root cause, but something this esoteric would most likely be discoverable only in a code review, or possibly a unit test. It's hard to imagine someone thinking of testing the case of 2 files that differ in every 128 bytes without reading the code.

I'm the volunteer cookie sale manager for my daughter's service unit, which consists of ~35 troops and ~400 girls. We're part of the Girl Scouts of Eastern Massachusetts Council, one of two councils in Massachusetts.

The cookie sale is primarily a fundraiser for a council. The council sets the price (in our case, $4.00 per box). Out of the $4.00 per box, here's where the money goes:

Council Programs and Properties (50%): $2.00 Baker (22.5%): $0.90 Troop Proceeds (15.5%): $0.62 Administration (9%): $0.36 Girl Incentives (3%): $0.12

GSUSA gets their cut out of the Baker's share as a licensing fee.

If you look at the Program Guide for our council, (http://www.girlscoutseasternmass.org/programs/) you'll see that it offers a large number of programs and camps for girls in eastern MA, at very reasonable cost. Half the money from the sale goes towards property maintenance and operations, keeping the cost down for all girls, and for scholarships for girls who cannot otherwise afford them.

I have an 11 year old daughter who I help with math homework every week. Some of the new methods work for her, and some are terribly confusing to her. I think it's good to expose kids to a variety of methods in math. I am concerned, however, and the near-complete lack of emphasis on memorizing the basic math tables and doing calculations in your head. Doing that at a young age really helped me to understand numbers. Many of the techniques they teach in school are techniques I figured out on my own by exposing myself to large numbers of calculations.

Not quite.

Here's the actual story. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2004/techsquare-0317.html

"The most intriguing tenant, still invoked by almost everyone who spent time in the building, was the Central Intelligence Agency, which had an office on the third floor under the name R.K. Starling Associates. The office spawned numerous pranks and jokes; one of the best known was a hallway sign that read "Intelligence," with arrows labeled "Central" and "Artificial" pointing to either side"

I understand why teens might not tweet, but I thought this sentence was strange: "Teens' lives are entirely built around their actual friends. Quite simply, why would teenagers bother using Twitter when Facebook exists, and offers so much more?"

Since when have all of a teens' (or anyone's) Facebook "Friends" corresponded to real "Friends". Oh, I know some are, but really, most are not.

When I was young I had an astonishingly good memory, and I could keep a remarkable amount of information in my head, so I never really had to write anything down. One wise manager warned me to be careful about relying too much on my strengths, so I did put effort into being more organized and to keep better records. I also worked on being more systematic, creating mini-project plans for everything I do. Now that I'm 47, I'm really glad I put in that effort.

Ummm, what was I saying? Sorry, I forgot. ;-)

Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory - by Peter Hessler

A fascinating book about everyday life in today's China. It's actually 3 books in one: - Book 1 is an account of his driving trip along the route of the great wall from near Beijing to the Western deserts and steppes, the people he meets, and the towns he visits. - Book 2 is an account of his experiences in the village of Sancha where he bought a house and came to know a family with dreams of setting up an inn and restaurant. Eventually the village becomes a suburb of Beijing and the family gets wealthier and wealthier, at a price. - Book 3 is an account of his experiences in the town of Lishui, a small city on the way to becoming a major manufacturing center. The focus is on a couple of entrepreneurs who set up a factory that makes bra rings.

Besides the excellent writing style, what I liked about this book is that it focused on ordinary people and their hopes and dreams. It was impossible to avoid mentioning corruption of small time party leaders, but it didn't dwell on them. It was the first book about China I've read that didn't make the country seem like a dark menace or an unstoppable economic dynamo.

I did my PhD in Computer and Systems Engineering (in the EE department of my school), an my thesis involved use of Computer Vision and AI in the analysis of microscope images of human cells, so I did a lot of work with MD's and Biologists. I thought it would be interesting to see which theses overlapped cell biology and Electrical Engineering.

The browser showed two overlaps: "Low-Power dynamic amplifiers for pipelined A/D conversion" and "Precision clock synthesis using direct modulation of front end multiplexers/demultiplexers in high speed serial link transceivers"

The first of these mentioned "cell phones" in the abstract. There was no evidence of any cell biology link in the second.

The visualization may be interesting, but I'm not so confident in the quality of the data.

I'm surprised nobody mentioned "Hoosiers"

The author goes too far.

Sometimes emails need to be longer than 5 sentences because they need to convey more than 5 sentences of information. I can't tell you how many 1-2 sentence e-mails I receive every week where I have to ask the sender what they're talking about. This is a waste of my time.

If an e-mail is very long, however, it should include a brief introductory paragraph summarizing its main point and action items so the recipient can figure out whether or not he/she actually needs to read the whole thing. Sometimes the main point and action item summary is enough.

tl;dr: "I was convinced to go to law school by empty promises of a fulfilling and remunerative career"

I've got no sympathy for this guy. I challenge him to come up an actual promise by the Law School that he'd have a "fulfilling and remunerative career". Oh, sure, they might have published starting salary statistics from recent years, but how is this different from any other case where you assume good times last forever? Did you found a dot com in late 1999? Did you buy a house in 2006? Did you invest in silver in early 1980? In fact, in this case, he's even better off that the people who made these other investments, because it's entirely up to him what he does with this education. John Cleese and John Chambers both have law degrees, but were never hired by a big name law firms.

I'm glad rubashov posted this. It reinforces the point that you really need to understand the people who work for you.

One of the developers currently working for me needs multiple one-on-ones per week. She needs frequent feedback on her performance. I've had other developers working for me who bristled at the thought of scheduled and structured one-on-ones. With them I'll casually stop by to chat for a couple of minutes from time to time, but I won't schedule anything except when performance reviews are due.

I do find that most developers respond well to weekly or bi-weekly short one-on-ones, however.

"We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty." - Mother Teresa

Effectively they're rewarding employees for interviewing with other companies. What about the equally-valuable employees who are very happy with their jobs and don't choose to interview? Won't they become a little less happy, once they know they're making less than the guy who was a little unhappy and chose to interview?

I've spent quite a bit of time as a manager at some larger tech companies. We'd monitor turnover and adjust our compensation policies, and other policies that affected satisfaction, across the board if there was an increasing trend in turnover. Sure, we'd make a diving catch every once in a while when we didn't keep a close enough eye on one of our top developer's satisfaction. In those cases we'd still look at our overall package.

When we made adjustments, the really good, happy engineers were even happier when they got nice raises without even asking for one. Now, by across the board, I don't mean that every engineer gets a good raise. That's because as a company gets larger, they get more and more mediocre engineers. The article doesn't say that Google gives big counter offers to every engineer. I assume Google is smart enough not to do that. It's not possible that all of their engineers are really good. Sometimes good-bye is good riddance.

Almost 20 years ago, I went back and earned my PhD in computer engineering after serving a 4 year military commitment I incurred for my ROTC scholarship.

A few things I should point out: 1) You can finish in 4 years. I did. You just have to be organized and not allow your advisor define your pace. I finished ahead of some of my undergrad peers who went straight through. They waited for their advisors to tell them when they were ready. 2) I did my PhD mainly because I wanted the challenge. Life isn't just about money. I had fun doing it, I learned a lot about myself and my field, and I'd do it again. 3) The payoff isn't just the credential. Having done it, I am no longer intimidated by things I don't know how to do. 4) This quote is silly: "Once you have a PhD -- and even during the process of getting one -- you are able to be your own boss. Rather than working on someone else's vision, you are the one to define the vision" You don't need a PhD to be your own boss, and getting a PhD is not a ticket to being your own boss. That quote leads me to think the author doesn't have much of a clue about the world outside academia.

This is nonsense.

A CS degree includes math, science, a range of CS electives (e.g. database theory, networking, algorithms) and non-CS electives (e.g. writing, philosophy).

Plus, you have graded assignments, lab exercises, supplemental papers, and interaction with teachers and fellow students.

A number of these PM tasks go deeply into the development world: defining development processes, architecture, and managing developer checklists.

I've worked with a number of product managers who've grossly overestimated their competence in these areas, and who've been mocked and ignored as much as possible by the development team as a result. I'm familiar with a large, well known software company that uses such a job description. I worked with a product manager who left that company for mine. He was awful. He never gave customer-focused requirements. Instead he'd define implementations as if he knew what he was talking about, and I'd have to play 20 questions to figure out what problems he was trying to solve.

The best product managers I've worked with have leveraged their strengths and trusted others on their team to do what they're best at. In my experience, these product managers have always had a very strong customer/user focus. My favorite product manager was at a medical imaging company. He had been a tech before he moved into product management, so he knew deeply what our users needed from our product, he had many connections in the user community, and he knew how to listen. We'd challenge and ask questions, but at the end of the day we deferred to him in his area of expertise, just as he challenged and asked questions but deferred to us in our area of expertise.

Some years ago, I saw a 60 minutes episode on issues in higher education. The reporter picked a biology journal off a shelf, read its arcane title, and exclaimed "who actually reads this stuff?" to back up her claim about how useless journals are... as if she were somehow qualified to judge the importance of a paper by its title.

I couldn't help but imagining what she would have said if she picked up a paper titled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" or "On formally undecidable propositions of. Principia Mathematica and related systems".

Do you have a link to back this claim up? I don't believe it.

If you look at PayScale.com, for example, you'll see a ranking of undergrad majors, with starting and mid-career salaries, where mid-career is defined as "full-time employees with at least 10 years of experience in their career or field who hold a bachelor's degree and no higher degrees."

ref: http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/degrees.asp

English Majors start at $37,800 and get to $67,500 after 10 years. Electrical Engineering Majors start at $60,800 and get to $104,000 after 10 years.

AACRO has an incentive to overstate the benefits of non-technical college degrees, as these are the most common types of degrees, and these are the degrees that are leading more people to question the value of a college education.