1,140 karma · joined March 14, 2008
When PhD students or postdocs burn out, it's because of underpaid boredom, lack of communication about their research or job uncertainties, and a generally ungrateful and passionless environment.
I've never seen scientists burn out over failed experiments. They know upfront that (basic) research is hard and that 90% of their stuff is not working.
http://i.imgur.com/s2MmJ8B.jpg
[1] http://footage.framepool.com/shotimg/qf/252862096-reichstag-...
Urbanization: its drivers (jobs or other opportunities) and consequences (growth faster than the infrastructure or social structure can catch up), the demographic composition (a youth bulge with terrible consequences), the potential conflicts between ethnic and ideological groups etc., all that is known from what we observed so far and can be projected 15 years into the future.
Increasing complexity is a concern. But scale is the real killer. Who has the corresponding means to manage such numbers? They mentioned 100,000 of (potentially) revolting inhabitants in a city of 10 million (1%) as an example. How do you control them? Complexity means things become more opaque and surprising, uprisings have more hidden resources and connections, the criminal and other networks are harder to detect and contain.
Anyone interested in this challenge?
After that file hosters (e.g. Rapidshare) became popular, where only one person is uploading and the downloaders are hard to identify and even harder to sue.
http://www.howtogermany.com/ http://www.exberliner.com/ http://www.meetup.com/berlin-expats/
Guess one could get help and exchange info there. But I'm speaking without experience here.
Could you (and others here) give some experiences with the issues you mentioned? Doctor, shopping for something more complex etc. I can imagine it's difficult with governmental stuff, but for the others I assume there should be solutions. E.g. going to doctors in expat-heavy boroughs, going shopping in tourist-oriented areas etc. But I could be completely wrong. So please tell me about your (negative) experiences and the barriers /showstoppers.
It's not the pragmatic business POV, but it has some highly interesting considerations.
Deutschlandfunk (public broadcasting): http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/rueckkehr-in-den-irak-fluechtl...
Tagesschau (public broadcasting, left-leaning): https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/rueckkehr-irak-101.html
Zeit (most widely read German weekly newspaper, centrist-left): http://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2016-03/fluechtlingsk...
Explicitly no right-wing media, far from it in fact.
In a corporate hierarchy are the losers (bottom), clueless (middle), and sociopaths (top).
Losers: Economic losers in that they prefer a fixed monthly paycheck over their fair share for their contribution. Risk-averse. They know they made a bad deal and don't do more than expected. They play social validation games with each other to feel better in order to stand their fate.
Clueless: They believe in the corporate story and work more than they're payed for. They're promoted into middle management where they serve as a buffer between the top management (sociopaths) and the workers (losers). They execute all ideas from top management, from the stupid over the risky to the good. If something succeeds, the sociopaths take the credit. If something fails, the clueless take the blame.
Sociopaths: Nihilists who emotionally broke under the realization that no true values exist in this universe, so they're free to make values and goals up as they like. Those stories are given to the clueless to believe in. In every corporate life cycle exist different sociopaths. In the beginning they're the risk-takers with a vision and the willpower to push something new through. In established companies they kill off new and threatening ideas to protect the successful products. During decline they milk the company for the remaining values, then leave the sinking ship and hand responsibility over to the clueless to let them take the blame.
One important part are the different languages of the three classes. Losers have "game language", the social games they play to validate each other, but the talk and the content are unrelated to reality and don't advance them in the hierarchy. The clueless try to speak like the sociopaths but don't realize that one has to have stakes in the game (i.e. something to lose or something valuable to offer) in order to be taken seriously, so their language is full of empty phrases and threats. The sociopaths' "power talk" is full of hints (without commitments) that are only understood by equals and when they talk about something they have to lose or gain something -- it's about the real things, not the empty phrases the clueless use.
That said, Red looks like a godsend. I was looking for something I can use without much setup and learning costs, that is small, elegant, efficient, fast, gets the job done, and is long-term maintainable. Red seems to fit the bill. I'm still evaluating it and it still looks good.
I like what I'm reading here.
The plan: Rover into the landing module (LM), LM into the rocket, rocket brings us to the right orbit where it releases the LM, from there to the Moon, soft landing.
There's an older post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9916217
Will you work with 3rd parties to rise awareness and support, recruit talent and external collaborators (e.g. research groups)?
While I appreciate work on Modula 2, I'd like to point out that Ada (and its subset Spark with a focus on verification) already fulfills the project's goals (correctness, safety, reliability and readability).
Plus it's battle-proven (literally) and ready to use. There exists an open source version with the GNAT compiler and it's part of the GCC (and AdaCore is really into FOSS). The literature is sparse but high quality. Programs are usually of good quality and require fewer developers (compared to C++). Real-time, embedded, systems, high-integrity, concurrent, distributed programming -- it's all there. It's suitable for large, long-lived projects.
I don't experience that people call me somehow stupid for what I do. Perhaps because I tell them I know about the dangers, how I manage them, that my approach is not necessarily the best approach for other people (invalidating their choices).