The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

chubertdev · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

foo:
Let's see who rants without reading:

In your quotes, you conveniently omit the article itself which is about a scientist which is apparently not as awesome (and which started the whole thing). Granted, it doesn't say whether it's in America, but being English speaking (as can be seen from the jokes), it's likely.

Most scientists do not start from the assumption that there is no God. In fact, most scientists, especially in America, are Christians, but no fundamentalists. I.e. they believe in God, but recognize that not everything written a few millenia ago should be taken as objective truth, but may be influenced by subjective beliefs of their authors, cultural influence, may have been distorted by oral and written tradition and may have been meant metaphorically rather than literally.

He never said "America is stupid". He criticized fundamentalist propaganda. If you equate the two, that's your problem.

I don't know whether or not he's a liberal. If you assume anyone who disagrees with fundamentalists is liberal, that's again your problem. Or if you just use "liberal" as a swearword for anyone you disagree with, that's even more your problem.

Yeah, the whole "Man created the Bible, God created science" thing.

Btw, is the bug about God still on hold and listed as "CNR"?

cellocgw · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Obviously TRWTF is Matlab. See http://abandonmatlab.wordpress.com/, for example.

But I call shenanigans anyway --I don't know any scientists or engineers who would waste coding effort read/writing data to files unless maybe their available RAM had just gone away. Which of course is why they should be using R in the first place. My bet is that some MatLabSuperConsultant built the first of these dlmwrite/dlmread thingies and generations of grad students copied them.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Andreas:
An expert is somebody who knows more and more about less and less until he finally knows absolutely everything about absolutely nothing :-)

Like Henry's Cat?

da Doctah · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Sean:
Anon:
Nothing WTF out there. One have to frequently save intermediate data, so that hours of calculations are not lost - the only problem was incorrect settings that made it save them too often...

We don't even know it is intermediate data. We also don't know whether there were other processes that were reading from this data dump and doing other calculations. Also, in a scientific project, critical data has to be saved for all runs so that future analysis and verification can take place.

TRWTF is eliminating an output without asking anyone whether that output was needed.

Nice work, Matt. You broke the audit trail.

FragFrog · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

cellocgw:
Obviously TRWTF is Matlab. See http://abandonmatlab.wordpress.com/, for example.
But I call shenanigans anyway --I don't know any scientists or engineers who would waste coding effort read/writing data to files unless maybe their available RAM had just gone away.

Possibly this script was old, and used to run on a machine with much less ram? It's not unusual. I once took a course in search engines and information retrieval, where the teachers had written this really nifty object-to-file interface to handle huge datasets (well, huge as in the entire Wikipedia text database) which we were supposed to use to create a text-search index.

It worked, quite well too, but the entire thing never used more than ~ 2 GB, so on my workstation which had 8GB RAM, the whole thing seemed a bit redundant.

As an alternative, the scripts may have simply been used with a smaller-than-usual dataset. I ran into similar problems just a few weeks ago, where matlab had no problems handling a 5 second recording of a neuron, but the 40 second run I needed for my final dataset proofed too large. Chunking fixed that easily enough.

Of course, I wholeheartedly concur that the real WTF is matlab.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
Yeah, the whole "Man created the Bible, God created science" thing.

More like God created the universe(s?), the universe (evolution) created Man (and perhaps some alien species), Man created the Bible, science and a couple other things. Never understood what's the big deal about it.

Mason Wheeler · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

FragFrog:
anon:
From what I have been able to gather over the years is that if they insist on being called "doctor", run...
:) most professors I know insist on being called by their first name. I have never met any that stand on their title. But then again, I only ever interacted with them as a student; possibly the interaction becomes a lot less pleasant when you are hired to do work for them.

I actually had the opposite experience. The professors who maintained a certain degree of formality and professionalism tended to be the ones who knew what they were doing and how to explain it in an understandable way.

And then there was "call me Ashley." You know the type. Young, pretty, and aware enough of it that she could use it to coast. Her class was an absolute nightmare and I hated every minute of it. Sure, she understood the material, but she did not understand her students or how to teach. She tried to act all friendly and nice, but that was a rather thin mask over a temper with a very short fuse. Finally getting done with that class was probably the happiest moment of my college career.

Mason Wheeler · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Valued Service:
Sean:
Anonymous Coward:
FragFrog:
As for Matt: I have a really hard time relating to this story. I have studied at multiple universities in two European countries, and never met a professor whom I disliked. Most are amicable, intelligent, and above all hard working people, pleasant to work with, always happy to help you out with a problem, and very, very rarely stuck up. Yet this is not the first such story I hear; may be a cultural difference, or simply a different field.
It's not just you. I'm a US citizen who studied at a US university, and I only met one professor who was even remotely close to this "pointy-headed know it all" stereotype.

This is what you get when there is constant fundamentalist propaganda that does not believe in evolution or a scientifically explainable/experimentally survivable theory of origin of universe, believes that the usual scientific process of criticism, discussion and arguments show that scientists are lying and wants to discredit science and its teachers so that there can be more illiterate mob that it can feed on.

And now I paraphrase.

Quote 1: I have a hard time relating. In Europe, professors are awesome.

Quote 2: I have a hard time relating. In America, professors are awesome.

Quote 3: You see, stupid Americans. You get this horrible (professors are awesome) scenario, when fundamentalists don't cow-tow to evolution because it's the only theory that can explain the universe if you immediately assume there's no God, because there can't be a God, because that offends me. And thus, America is stupid.

As far as I can see, a liberal jumped on a rant without reading, because being a hater is what comes naturally.

+1. This should be a featured comment.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

AC:
"Scientists can write code just as well as CS majors," I have a problem with that sentence: CS stands for "Computer Science", so aren't all CS majors, by definition, Scientists?
I have a degree in CS and I consider myself a Scientist.

I'm not familiar with how it works in the US, is it not the same?

Ah...That would explain why most CS students I've ever met (or interviewed) can't write code for shit.

Seriously, I have an MS computer "scientist" working with me who asked me if "Java" and "Javascript" were the same thing.

What the fuck do they teach these people?

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Matt, you didn't see this coming?

He had been hired by the lab to improve the interoperability of their software. Matt had demonstrated impressive proficiency with the language in his interview.

So, after being hired to write Matlab code, he decided to quit after encountering poorly-written Matlab code? Imagine!

rad131304 · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Mat:
rad131304:
It smells of premature optimization, but it's definitely not a WTF - matlab has no intrinsic reference type (e.g. object). Push a non-sparse +1M element double array a couple dozen functions deep and you'll max your memory on your machine pretty quickly since everything gets passed by value.

Not quite. Yes, Matlab passes by value, but it doesn't create a copy of your matrix until it is modified.

Agreed (and I'd forgotten about this, so thank you for reminding me), although that doesn't mean pass by reference can't cause issues (I submit, however, it's almost certainly an indicator of a bad design).

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

TGV:
Jimm:
But professors -- excuse me, Doctors (they usually hate the teaching part of their job, which is why they turn everything but the credit over to a senior student) -- are a strange breed. When you get your PhD, at that moment you know more than anyone else in the world about one tiny probably meaningless subject that is narrower than a straight pin.

Full disclaimer: I've got one...

That's why you're complaining. Which subject?

chubertdev · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

foo:
chubertdev:
Yeah, the whole "Man created the Bible, God created science" thing.
More like God created the universe(s?), the universe (evolution) created Man (and perhaps some alien species), Man created the Bible, science and a couple other things. Never understood what's the big deal about it.

Either/or, however you want to phrase it.

The fundamentalists that say that the Earth is thousands of years old and that dinosaurs and man lived together are the true funny ones.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

FragFrog:
As for Matt: I have a really hard time relating to this story. I have studied at multiple universities in two European countries, and never met a professor whom I disliked. Most are amicable, intelligent, and above all hard working people, pleasant to work with, always happy to help you out with a problem, and very, very rarely stuck up. Yet this is not the first such story I hear; may be a cultural difference, or simply a different field.

In America, I think I had about 10 professors like that in 5 years.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
foo:
chubertdev:
Yeah, the whole "Man created the Bible, God created science" thing.
More like God created the universe(s?), the universe (evolution) created Man (and perhaps some alien species), Man created the Bible, science and a couple other things. Never understood what's the big deal about it.

Either/or, however you want to phrase it.

The fundamentalists that say that the Earth is thousands of years old and that dinosaurs and man lived together are the true funny ones.

There are a lot of dating methods showing a young earth as well as a young solar system. The fact that we even still have helium AT ALL is inexplicable in the model of evolution. It should all be gone already, and soon will be, and hard science has shown no method that creates more. The Oort Cloud only exists (as a complete fantasy with no evidence) because otherwise an old solar system would be falsified.

Also, dragons are documented (side by side with man) by every ancient culture. And scientists sitting in a room voting on whether the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid 65 million years ago isn't as hard of a science as you might think.

Be careful how much stock you put into fairy tales, even if they are told by scientists.

chubertdev · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

PRMan:
The fact that we even still have helium AT ALL is inexplicable in the model of evolution.

Ummm, I think that you listed the wrong model.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

dkf:
It's knowing that no matter how bad you are you'll still have a job that leads to the WTF flowering. (Well, assuming you avoid doing things that embarrass the Dean personally.)

... or the President's daughter.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Kimm:
    dlmwrite(strcat('\interim data\', num2str(index), '.txt'),data); 
    data = dlmread(strcat('\interim data\', num2str(index), '.txt'));
But wouldn't the compiler just optimize that away?
I have a right to give the computer vague indications of what I want, and it should "just work". That's what I was promised.

I can't tell if you are serious or not.

In either case this code isn't even much of a WTF. When you are writing code in something like MATLAB (or doing data processing in general) its fairly common to want to save and investigate copies of the intermediate steps in order to provide a checkpoint at which the process can be restarted if subsequent steps are done incorrectly, or if two people work on the steps at different times. In either case this is a clear instance where someone got too busy and forgot or omitted the obvious simplification when they went into production.

If the hero doesn't want to do such a job that is his decision but its not at all a WTF to expect that such work needs to be done by someone, and in this case he is the low man on the totem pole so he gets to do it.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

SunTzuWarmaster:
... work like hell ... 60 hrs/week ... 8 years ... 6 years ... paid virtually nothing ... Professors are frequently disconnected from the 'business' world (where you have to sell products to make money), but frequently are a bargain for the taxpayer.

Boo hoo hoo.

I've got a guy willing to work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 40 years nonstop, at just over subsistence wages. Is he a bargain for the taxpayer?

It all depends on what he is producing.

If he is digging holes and filling them back in, it doesn't matter at all how much his back aches, he is still not a bargain for the taxpayer.

If he is producing something somebody values, why not ask said somebody to pay for it? Then the whole discussion of value becomes moot because the taxpayers aren't being forced to fund it.

Yes a professor may be the smartest person walking the planet but if all he does is publish papers twice a week on all possible configurations of angels on a pinhead, his brilliance might not be deployed where it is doing society the most possible good.

And who determines if your taxpayer funded research is valuable? Other taxpayer funded researchers. Can you say "conflict of interest"? Often peer-review is actually pal-review.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

AC:
"Scientists can write code just as well as CS majors," I have a problem with that sentence: CS stands for "Computer Science", so aren't all CS majors, by definition, Scientists?
I have a degree in CS and I consider myself a Scientist.

I'm not familiar with how it works in the US, is it not the same?

At my university (Penn State), Computer Science was part of the College of Engineering. Which is where it belongs IMO. Unless you're researching new algorithms or something, you aren't a scientist. And even that would be more of a mathematician...maybe research on AI or something could be called science. But regular software development -- the stuff 99% of CS majors end up doing -- cannot, in any sense, be considered science. You aren't creating and testing hypotheses and doing research, you're just engineering.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

urza9814:
the stuff 99% of CS majors end up doing -- cannot, in any sense, be considered science. You aren't creating and testing hypotheses

QFT. Most computer scientists aren't.

If your work is like this...

Hypothesis: f(x) can solve the Traveling Salesman Problem faster than g(y) while returning the exact same solution for every possible case
Tests: blah blah
Conclusion: yadda yadda

... then you are a scientist. Otherwise, you are a writer, perhaps, or a designer.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

PRMan:
chubertdev:
foo:
chubertdev:
Yeah, the whole "Man created the Bible, God created science" thing.
More like God created the universe(s?), the universe (evolution) created Man (and perhaps some alien species), Man created the Bible, science and a couple other things. Never understood what's the big deal about it.

Either/or, however you want to phrase it.

The fundamentalists that say that the Earth is thousands of years old and that dinosaurs and man lived together are the true funny ones.

There are a lot of dating methods showing a young earth as well as a young solar system. The fact that we even still have helium AT ALL is inexplicable in the model of evolution. It should all be gone already, and soon will be, and hard science has shown no method that creates more. The Oort Cloud only exists (as a complete fantasy with no evidence) because otherwise an old solar system would be falsified.

Also, dragons are documented (side by side with man) by every ancient culture. And scientists sitting in a room voting on whether the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid 65 million years ago isn't as hard of a science as you might think.

Be careful how much stock you put into fairy tales, even if they are told by scientists.

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CE/CE001.html http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CE/CE261_1.html http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CH/CH712.html

go back to AnswersInGenesis

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Bill:
If he is producing something somebody values, why not ask said somebody to pay for it?

Do you have any realistic plan how this could possibly work for basic research? You know, the kind that may take decades to turn into commercial applications, often in areas not anticipated initially. (Like quantum physics, which intially seemed like a theoretic curiosity or even philosophic aberration, depending who you'd listen to, and which today is involved in most modern technology.) Sure, basic research is not as visible to "normal" people as typical corporate research (like development of new drugs, or in our field new programming languages and frameworks), but in the long run, it's much more important to progress.

Do you really expect that corporations (which usually (have to) plan for short-term profit) sponsor such research that maybe in 10 or 20 years will yield results that may be turned into commercial applications, maybe in a completely different field than what the corporation is doing? That's ridiculous.

So, apart from ranting how government-sponsored research is evil, how about some concrete suggestions how to provide for basic research?

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Oops, forgot one.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html#creadate

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

PRMan:
The Oort Cloud only exists (as a complete fantasy with no evidence) because otherwise an old solar system would be falsified.

As someone working in cometary research, I have no idea what you're on about.

The reason the Oort cloud is hypothesized to exist is to explain where comets that all have a very similar composition are coming from. It's got nothing to do with old or young solar system. We know the solar system is old from a billion different pieces of evidently, starting from the fact that our stellar evolution models are absolutely amazing at this point (with the exception of supernovas) and they suggest a very clear age for the sun.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Bill:
If he is producing something somebody values, why not ask said somebody to pay for it?

When Hurtz discovered electromagnetic waves, he was asked of their application and famously gave this answer:

'It's of no use whatsoever.'

If Hurtz could not see the value of an immense contribution such as that, who do you think can?

It's got nothing to do with old or young solar system

I want to correct this statement slightly to say that it does actually have to do with age, but far less so today than when the hypothesis was created. Today we know of the Kuiper belt, which is extremely stable (long enough to survive 4.5 billion years) and a source for comets. There is nothing to say that there could not be another such belt further out. Additionally, we know that some comets have hyperbolic orbits, meaning they are not just orbiting the solar system, which is another source for comets. Today, the idea that there is no way to regenerate comets without an Oort cloud does not hold, and that is not the primary reason its thought to exist.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Universitypolitik:
TGV:
Jimm:
But professors -- excuse me, Doctors (they usually hate the teaching part of their job, which is why they turn everything but the credit over to a senior student) -- are a strange breed. When you get your PhD, at that moment you know more than anyone else in the world about one tiny probably meaningless subject that is narrower than a straight pin.
I don't know why such rancor gets promoted to featured comment. Perhaps you haven't been paying attention of the nephews of bosses with an Excel diploma running the IT department, or the self-taught VBA programmers cum business owners. A Ph.D. is not required for odd behavior.
Full disclaimer: I've got one...

Got what? An Excel diploma? Odd behavior? At least you are forthcoming upfront...

Maybe that's why I can't get one - I have been forthcoming out back.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Jack:
In business, nobody is guaranteed success. Either the nephew figures out what to do (which may include surrounding himself with competence) or he takes the company down.

Well said. And one need look no further than the financial and automotive industries during the Great Recession for axiomatic examples of how that works.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

While not really defendable these types of things are understandable in academia/matlab coders. Matlab has a horrible ability to partition code properly. It almost by design forces you to make self contained functions. So someone probably wanted to do the first part of the program and needed the data in a file. Then someone comes around and says: hey that is interesting lets right a function to analyze those files. So another function. Someone decides to "automate" the task and simply cuts and pastes the two functions together.

No one ever thought of making an in memory variable for things because they started out as two separate processes and often by two different partially educated grad students that only cared about getting their particular sub problem solved in time for their defense not to provide a useful tool for the guy coming after them.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

stew:
Jack:
In business, nobody is guaranteed success. Either the nephew figures out what to do (which may include surrounding himself with competence) or he takes the company down.

Well said. And one need look no further than the financial and automotive industries during the Great Recession for axiomatic examples of how that works.

... of how that works when government bailouts meddle with the market's self-correcting mechanisms to reward failure at the expense the taxpayers.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Mike:
While not really defendable these types of things are understandable in academia/matlab coders.

You fool, no one cares about Matlab any more. This comment thread is all about blatant trolling and churlish libertarianism.

... so a normal TDWTF comment thread, then.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

PRMan:
There are a lot of dating methods showing a young earth as well as a young solar system.

Name one.

pjt33 · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

AC:
"Scientists can write code just as well as CS majors," I have a problem with that sentence: CS stands for "Computer Science", so aren't all CS majors, by definition, Scientists?

Only if someone with a Ph.D. in civil engineering is by definition a philosopher.

PS I studied computer science at university and came away with an M.A. What does that make me?

chubertdev · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

pjt33:
PS I studied computer science at university and came away with an M.A. What does that make me?

Under-qualified.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Paul:
stew:
Jack:
In business, nobody is guaranteed success. Either the nephew figures out what to do (which may include surrounding himself with competence) or he takes the company down.
Well said. And one need look no further than the financial and automotive industries during the Great Recession for axiomatic examples of how that works.
... of how that works when government bailouts meddle with the market's self-correcting mechanisms to reward failure at the expense the taxpayers.

Oh good. So we're in agreement that significant (if not all) segments of private enterprise subsist or thrive at taxpayer expense. Was there a particular semantic point you wanted to debate beyond that?

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Jack:
TGV:
Perhaps you haven't been paying attention of the nephews of bosses with an Excel diploma running the IT department, or the self-taught VBA programmers cum business owners.
In business, nobody is guaranteed success. Either the nephew figures out what to do (which may include surrounding himself with competence) or he takes the company down. In academia, you can make a career of nothing but hubris, because the taxpayers are an unlimited trough that can be drained forever.

The taxpayers AND the parents who are paying tuition.

Disclaimer: I have a daughter in college.

Here's something that puzzles me. Let's say that the average college class has about 30 students. Some 100-level classes have well over that, and some advanced classes may have half a dozen, so I think an average of 30 is plausible. Each student takes several classes but each prof teaches several classes, I thinks profs could reasonably be expected to spend as much time teaching as students spend listening to them teach, so a college should be able to manage with a student-teacher ratio of about 30:1.

Let's say a reasonable salary for a professor is $100,000. You rent space the size of a classroom for a few hundred a month. Let's say that adds another $10,000 per prof per year. Let's suppose that other expenses -- supplies, adminstration, and so on -- add another 40% to that. That seems ample. So for every 30 students, a college should cost about $150,000, or about $5,000 per student.

The state and federal governments contribute large amounts of money to colleges. Wealthy alumni routinely contribute large amounts to their alma maters.

So how come the tuition that I am paying is, shall we say, rather more than $5,000 per year, even after financial aid is applied? Where is all the money going?

For extra credit: How is it that community colleges can provide an education for the first 2 years that is not obviously grossly inferior to what 4-year colleges provide for approximately 10-20% of the cost? Are years 3 and 4 that much more expensive to provide than years 1 and 2? Are their professors paid that much less? (If it was even half the cost, I could beleive that community college profs are paid only half of what 4-year profs get. But 10%? I doubt it.)

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
foo:
chubertdev:
Yeah, the whole "Man created the Bible, God created science" thing.
More like God created the universe(s?), the universe (evolution) created Man (and perhaps some alien species), Man created the Bible, science and a couple other things. Never understood what's the big deal about it.

Either/or, however you want to phrase it.

The fundamentalists that say that the Earth is thousands of years old and that dinosaurs and man lived together are the true funny ones.

Please give me some examples of scientific evidence, i.e. experiments performed in the laboratory, or other direct observations of nature, that prove that those ideas are false.

The fact that you think that an idea is truly funny is not scientific evidence. Anybody can ridicule people who disagree with him. Providing evidence is somewhat more difficult.

TheLazyHase · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

I won't take position on whether scientist are overprotected or overexploited, because it's not the field where I work.

However, how come someone in the private sector can say with a straight face that there is no leech in private sector ? Either they are the leeches, they are extremely lucky, or they don't pay any kind of attention to the people they work with. Both very small and very big firm are hit badly by that in my experience and in the experience of every people I know in the IT.

I believe it's quite the same in public research, i.e. you can find both crook who exploit their position to be paid without working and hard worker who compensate for the leech.

As a side note, nobody know in advance what research will be useful. Nobody could ever have expected Einstein theorical physic to yield laser (and their use in medicine) or the GPS. Saying that non-applied research is useless mean you have no idea how thing are invented in the real world which mean you are a reality-disconnected theorist, the exact opposite of the pragmatist you believe to be. The same can be said of Darwin by the way : regardless of whether evolution is true or not, it have yield extremely useful application in medicine and IT.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Uhh:
PRMan:
There are a lot of dating methods showing a young earth as well as a young solar system.

Name one.

Decay of the Earth's magnetic field. If current rates are projected backwards, then by the time you get to 10,000 years ago the magnetic field would have been strong enough to have had effects that we should be able to observe today.
Influx of salts into the oceans. The water cycle evaporates water from the oceans, leaving the salts behind. A percentage of this water than falls as rain on the land, where it eventually flows back into the oceans, picking up salts along the way. Hurricanes and tsunami return salts from the oceans to the land, but at a much slower rate than the influx. If the oceans had started with zero salts, and existing processes had been operating at present rates, it would have taken about 2 million years to reach present levels. If these processes had been going on for billions of years, the level of salt in the ocean today would be orders of magnitude higher.
Escape of helium from oil deposits. Helium is a gas, and so will leak through solids and liquids and escape into the atmosphere and eventually into space. We can measure the rates at which it is escaping today. At measured rates the amount of helium we actually find in oil deposits is what you would expect after several hundred thousands years, not millions or billions of years.
"Evaporation" of comets. Every time a comet passes near the sun, some of its mass is lost as the solar wind exerts force on it. This is, of course, the cause of a comet's tail. At observed rates, all known comets would have completed disintegrated within a few million years, and yet they still exist.

Et cetera. I've seen lists of dozens of methods that have been proposed to put bounds on the age of the Earth and of the solar system. Radiometric methods typically give ages of billions of years. All the other methods give maximum ages of a few million or less.

You can, of course, come up with ad hoc explanations why all these dating methods give "wrong" ages. For example, you can theorize that the Earth's magnetic field periodically reverses and is somehow re-energized during this process. But there are no observations that such a thing happens. It is speculation needed to save a theory that does not conform to the observed evidence. Ditto the Ort Cloud, or dark matter: no one has ever observed these things. They are speculations proposed because the actual experimental observations do not fit the long ages that we "know" have really happenned.

chubertdev · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

jay:
Please give me some examples of scientific evidence, i.e. experiments performed in the laboratory, or other direct observations of nature, that prove that those ideas are false.
The fact that you think that an idea is truly funny is not scientific evidence. Anybody can ridicule people who disagree with him. Providing evidence is somewhat more difficult.

Carbon dating.[/troll kill]

chubertdev · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

jay:
The taxpayers AND the parents who are paying tuition.
Disclaimer: I have a daughter in college.

Here's something that puzzles me. Let's say that the average college class has about 30 students. Some 100-level classes have well over that, and some advanced classes may have half a dozen, so I think an average of 30 is plausible. Each student takes several classes but each prof teaches several classes, I thinks profs could reasonably be expected to spend as much time teaching as students spend listening to them teach, so a college should be able to manage with a student-teacher ratio of about 30:1.

Let's say a reasonable salary for a professor is $100,000. You rent space the size of a classroom for a few hundred a month. Let's say that adds another $10,000 per prof per year. Let's suppose that other expenses -- supplies, adminstration, and so on -- add another 40% to that. That seems ample. So for every 30 students, a college should cost about $150,000, or about $5,000 per student.

The state and federal governments contribute large amounts of money to colleges. Wealthy alumni routinely contribute large amounts to their alma maters.

So how come the tuition that I am paying is, shall we say, rather more than $5,000 per year, even after financial aid is applied? Where is all the money going?

For extra credit: How is it that community colleges can provide an education for the first 2 years that is not obviously grossly inferior to what 4-year colleges provide for approximately 10-20% of the cost? Are years 3 and 4 that much more expensive to provide than years 1 and 2? Are their professors paid that much less? (If it was even half the cost, I could beleive that community college profs are paid only half of what 4-year profs get. But 10%? I doubt it.)

Your numbers might have been accurate in 1952. Maybe.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Pretty accurate. You are missing one thing:

Academics are like [magpies|(birds|animals) that likes shiny things]

I worked with them for 3 years, and it became apparent very quickly that grant applications were written to be as vague and broad as possible.

This meant that when a big pile of (tax-payer) money came in, the academics could pretty much do whatever they liked with that money.

It won't surprise you to know that the first thing they would buy was shiny toys for themselves. They would also buy very expensive very specialized equipment, BUT they would buy it first, and THEN they would figure out whether they needed it or not.

It was not uncommon to have some brand-new shiny still in the box expensive gizmo dropped on my desk. "We bought on of these. Make it work." "What do you need it for?" "We don't know yet." "Ah."

Fun. Fun. Fun. Well, that part was. This next part was not: When a research project came to an end, or certain people left, it was not uncommon to see the same equipment get turfed out with them, because no-one else knew how to work it.

Silverhill · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

jay:
1. Decay of the Earth's magnetic field. If current rates are projected backwards

Not a good idea. The rates have been seen to vary, so purely linear approximations could well be useless.

2. Influx of salts into the oceans. The water cycle evaporates water from the oceans ... If these processes had been going on for billions of years, the level of salt in the ocean today would be orders of magnitude higher.

Unless subductive processes re-infuse some of the salt into continental minerals.

3. Escape of helium from oil deposits. ... At measured rates the amount of helium we actually find in oil deposits is what you would expect after several hundred thousands years, not millions or billions of years.

Helium seeps into very tiny crannies. Not all of it would be expected to remain in one gas pocket, but not all of it would escape to space.

4. "Evaporation" of comets. ... At observed rates, all known comets would have completed disintegrated within a few million years, and yet they still exist.

But there are as-yet-unknown comets, O Foolish One.

For example, you can theorize that the Earth's magnetic field periodically reverses and is somehow re-energized during this process. But there are no observations that such a thing happens.

Bullshit. Get a good encyclopedia, or textbook, that deals with paleomagnetism and the long history of (irregular, but definite) magnetic reversals as recorded in the rocks.

Go learn some real science, troll. Until then, don't bother spouting off here.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Carl:
urza9814:
the stuff 99% of CS majors end up doing -- cannot, in any sense, be considered science. You aren't creating and testing hypotheses
QFT. Most computer scientists aren't.
If your work is like this...
Hypothesis: f(x) can solve the Traveling Salesman Problem faster than g(y) while returning the exact same solution for every possible case
Tests: blah blah
Conclusion: yadda yadda
... then you are a scientist. Otherwise, you are a writer, perhaps, or a designer.

Not really. A more valuable hypothesis would be this: f(x) can approximately solve the Traveling Salesman Problem faster than g(y) while returning a solution that is usually at least as good, or by returning a solution that is almost as good but computed one million times faster, etc. The rules for "usually" or "almost" vary as needed depending on the discovery, and if they aren't good enough then the discovery should be abandoned and the researchers should try something else.

As for creating and testing hypotheses, sometimes I do that hundreds of times a day (though most days are less than a hundred). Most of the hypotheses turn out to be false. When a hypothesis turns out to be true, the next step is a bug fix. The fix might depend on a secundum sequence of hypotheses and failures before success.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

rad131304:
Matlab does have an abstract "handle" class, which is essentially the object class, but you have to construct your own box/unbox functions before you can use it and then you end up littering your code with
if ~isa(foo, 'box') foo = box(foo); end
and
foo.value
statements.

The handle class doesn't work for booleans though. The only boolean value you can handle is FALSE.

2013-02-26 Reply Admin

Oops, I forgot to mention the type of object the RAM handled.

ekolis · 2013-02-26 Reply Admin

No, Matt! You just destroyed their logging feature! What have you done?

2013-02-27 Reply Admin

Where the hell is Matt?

CAPTCHA: iusto like captchas, but not anymore.

2013-02-27 Reply Admin

Jack:
TGV:
Perhaps you haven't been paying attention of the nephews of bosses with an Excel diploma running the IT department, or the self-taught VBA programmers cum business owners.
In business, nobody is guaranteed success. Either the nephew figures out what to do (which may include surrounding himself with competence) or he takes the company down. In academia, you can make a career of nothing but hubris, because the taxpayers are an unlimited trough that can be drained forever.

Banks. Car manufacturers.

2013-02-27 Reply Admin

AC:
"Scientists can write code just as well as CS majors," I have a problem with that sentence: CS stands for "Computer Science", so aren't all CS majors, by definition, Scientists?
I have a degree in CS and I consider myself a Scientist.

I'm not familiar with how it works in the US, is it not the same?

Not quite. I have a Bachelor of Science, Computer Science degree, but I'm a Software Engineer. Those who do research in computer theory are Computer Scientists. Having the degree just means that you have learned the theories so that you have the chance of becoming a better engineer.

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