jk4930

C'mon, I somehow have to put a higher meaning into those barriers. I've to rationalize the pain, it's a coping mechanism. :)

>single moms who don't get anything for their children.

Which is good, because then there's no incentive to produce many children just to cash in their basic income. Being a single mom in Western nations is mostly a business model anyway (either the father or state has to pay and considering that more than 70% of break-offs are initiated by the woman), and it usually results in children who are more prone to become criminals and dropouts.

Of course. Imagine, during the assembly process, someone eats his sandwich while hanging over the mirror of some space telescope. Do you think the all those dots you're seeing on the NASA images are stars? And once they discover the peanut butter nebula, they have to update parts of the astronomy books.

Actually it's a filter, keeping those away from doing business who aren't able to handle little annoyances. I often hear people complain about (German) bureaucrazy and funding difficulties and they say "I just want to do X". But the bitter truth is: If one isn't able to overcome those barriers, they'll probably won't handle their business at all if they can't manage the many little annoyances that don't have to do with X but will occur while doing business.

At first my answer was meant to be a joke, but the longer I think about it... :)

The good news are: Since you seem to be able to manage those barriers, you're fine and can care about doing X.

And this (Ham Internet) is what comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet

Years ago I found some software (on SourceForge?) for operating Linux over Ham. Can't find it.

Hey Arnold, there are several ways and I don't know--given the current situation that you're not the only one--which works best. So let me give you a series of suggestions to follow up:

First, see the German Foreign Office's FAQ and visa regulations:

http://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/EN/Infoservice/FAQ/Uebersicht...

http://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/EN/EinreiseUndAufenthalt/Visa...

Since many are coming as refugees from Syria, it could be an idea to apply for a regular visa, either for working or studying in Germany. Note that the German mission in Damascus is closed and you have to contact any embassy or mission outside Syria. They suggest using the embassy in Beirut. Problem is that you need to translate all paper stuff to German and I can't estimate the time it takes. Usually it's 2-10 days for visits under 90 days, it can take longer (even months) for visits over 90 days or working permits.

If you come for work, you need an invitation from an employer. But I don't know how long the handling takes with the mission (they have to okay it first), especially since the Damascus mission is down.

Perhaps you qualify for the EU Blue Card (skilled immigrants):

http://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/EN/Infoservice/FAQ/ArbeitenLe...

http://www.make-it-in-germany.com/en/

If that's an option, look into the conditions for studying in Germany.

Wish you all the best. Tough times.

Usually one bad apple won't kill the area rating, they filter for that.

Image search for "schuldneratlas" (a detailed map of private households in distress) to get some impressions.

Or see there: http://www.boniversum.de/schuldneratlas/

"In terms of software, the languages Ada and C have very different attitudes to freedom. Ada introduces restrictions and checks, with the goal of providing freedom from errors. On the other hand C gives the programmer more freedom, making it easier to make errors.

One of the historical guidelines in C was "trust the programmer". This would be fine were it not for the fact that programmers, like all humans, are frail and fallible beings. Experience shows that whatever techniques are used it is hard to write "correct" software. It is good advice therefore to use tools that can help by finding bugs and preventing bugs. Ada was specifically designed to help in this respect."

https://www.adacore.com/adaanswers/gems/gem-30/

(And if even Ada is not restrictive enough, one uses Ada's subset Spark, e.g., http://www.spark-2014.org/ )

Not to say that one should use Ada (though it would often help I guess), but this different approach to software design and maintenance ("Ada culture"[1]) is worth knowing.

[1] http://archive.adaic.com/intro/ada-vs-c/ada-vs-c.html

My personal rule of thumb:

C and Scheme for explorative hacking, Ada and Haskell for reliable implementation, Perl for teh recreational lulz.

I assume you'll enjoy the five chapters on human systems, inspired by "Systemantics": http://www.draftymanor.com/bart/systems1.htm

You might be interested in the Artificial General Intelligence Conference series: http://www.agi-conf.org/

See also the "artificial toddler": http://wiki.opencog.org/w/OpenCogPrime:Roadmap#Phase_2:_Arti...

I also recommend Pianomania (2009): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1331115/

There are clips on youtube.

He just learned the lesson that you have to follow the path of "Continuous Visible Productivity" to get up in the hierarchy:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/21/how_to_get_paid_more...

You better learn something from that without turning into a douche.

Here's why Perl is great: http://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol1_1/tpj0101-0002.html

According to Firefox's page info, this is from Fri 17 Oct 1997.

But yes, I remember when I studied there (2001), things like Echelon and Total Information Awareness were the current topics. It was clear to us few "paranoids" that we're (soon to be) completely "transparent".

Please don't forget the immigration of fertile religious traditionalists.

There's OpenAPL, but I've no experience with it (yet).

From your website I assume you're in the US. You could contact the Mars Society. They run analog research missions. Not with spacecraft, but with habitats, rovers, equipment (operated by "astronauts"). You could design and test UIs in the near term and get useful feedback. Plus it's usually a lot less bureaucratic than an official agency or company to have a first look. It's a good entry point. If you see that this works for you, you should use their space industry/agency network to get into further stuff perhaps.

We (oewf.org) have analog missions, too. With rovers, equipment, on-site (analog Mars) control stations. And we have a Mission Control Center, what about better UIs for the ground station? (But I think you should be in Europe for that, working remote is certainly difficult in such a case.)

Another possible partner: Look at the Google Lunar X Prize teams. Some (of the advanced ones) could be interested in UIs for their Mission Control.

I'd like to mention that a good part of my (professional) social network switches to retroshare. And I'm forced to go with them if I want to stay in touch. :)

Ask friendly whether the whole table is booked and sit down. If they don't respond, just move their bag a bit and sit down. Keep looking friendly and relaxed, signal that you're not a threat and everything's usually fine. It's not that difficult.

(Escalated version: If they start complaining in an unfriendly way, mix your coffee with their laptop. Accidents happen in crowded coffee shops.)

code.box.sk was my favorite resource on programming languages then. The whole *.box.sk was amazing.

> Win98 machine

That's another issue. I still have no clue what (outdated) OS/software are used in labs. I've heard so many things (that usually point to older stuff) that I can't say what dominates. Hints?

P.S.: At least they don't use COBOL. :)

Thanks for both of your answers. Sounds reasonable what you propose.

I assume the examples (image processing, data analysis) are otherwise done manually. So it's a workflow issue. And it needs a GUI to be useful to the majority of users.

A double is a float that has twice the memory size to store a number, thus it can represent a real number with greater (doubled) precision. Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-precision_floating-point...

Looking at Plexon's GUI this doesn't seem to be something done in a hackathon and requires active participation of neuroscientists as domain experts and as end users to develop. And they usually don't have time (or willingness) for that.

Regarding fMRI, I take your posting as something to talk about with the neuro people.

My main takeaway from your posting is that better GUIs and visualizations are needed. That's what I found (workflow, UI) before and your posting is another affirmative data point here. Thanks for the links.

Any hints how to talk to biologists / neuroscientists? I still need to know more about their incentives (what they have to accomplish or help them doing so) and constraints (what they can't do or is unimportant) and culture. As usual, publications and funding, but what is seen as high status and what is frowned upon?

And there are Biopython, Biohaskell etc., but from what I saw there this is more about bioinformatics (e.g., focus on gene sequencing). I don't know whether those are the problems the parent was talking about. From my experience (interviews) with labs it's more about the workflow (often pretty pre-computer) and quick&dirty software with terrible UI.

> biology/chemistry

What are the low-hanging fruits I can aim for to get used to the problem domain? What are the relevant pain points that justify some hard thinking and coding?

In the end what I have in mind is basically this: http://biomind.com/AI_Against_Aging.pdf

BTW: http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2611/4168078969_35d7b90449_z.j...

(Reads: next time without Italy) ;)

I won't dig out examples, but I'd like to sketch the general game:

You need to have a good publication record (i.e., papers in journals and conference proceedings, some monographs with a prestigious publisher can also help). When you can't publish in high-impact journals/conferences, you lower your expectations and spread your papers over several journals/conferences, some _will_ publish you.

The next thing is to split up your research results over many papers in order to have many publications; differences between the papers are small (and you can reference to yourself, i.e., to the "bigger picture" of which this paper is a part of). That's btw the same with grant applications: Promise much, do only 30% and have the rest as a follow-up (grant renewal). Splitting up results over several publications and grants plus the usual academic behaviour (internal status games, academic nitpicking) delay research by 300%.

Then you can create citation cartels where you mutually reference with your colleagues.

But it's not that researchers are evil, often it's the funding source that uses those metrics (e.g., publication count) that are then gamed.

Forget this disinfo. Read Robert Anton Wilson and understand. ;)

>People are in meetings right now working out how to move all their stuff

I'm wondering why they didn't consider this scenario in the first place. That lets me question their expertise very much. Aren't they professionally paranoid enough? Then why do they run critical infrastructure?