liedra

You might get a tax free stipend... :) Depends on whether you get a scholarship! (I have a PhD student of mine who has a "fees only" scholarship - she is employed doing other things at the university but that's separate from the PhD.

I hope there will be an independent ethics review committee or similar.

The modern concept and frameworks of Responsible Research and Innovation might be a helpful starting point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsible_Research_and_Innov...

Ha, my long distance relationship survived with a good old fashioned "3, 2, 1, go!" :)

This is creepy as hell. Video saved to the cloud, owned/processed by Google? Yeah nope.

I remember having to go home and tell my mum I now worked for freshmeat.net, looking at her face, then realising ... "NO! It's not a porn site!!!"

Yes, I'm an ethicist, but I also am a realist. In the current HE environment in the UK having a "permanent job" means very little these days. I'm all for bucking the system, but I have to be able to be in the system to effect change, and a lot of that isn't through token activities like this but working to change policy and governance structures (and educate the next generation!). I'd rather have a solid base from which to do that sort of thing than the ability to lose everything. It's not a whistleblower situation, I have nothing apart from a good story to really gain from meeting with him, and it's not particularly a principle thing because I think you have to pick your battles, and this isn't one of the ones I've picked.

Given I'm here on a work visa, I'd rather not have much cause for authorities to look closely at me until I've gone for citizenship :-)

I was an editor for freshmeat back in the early 2000s and it was a lot of fun. I was there when fm acquired themes.org and was one of the main people tasked with ensuring the HUGE db of themes was sanely migrated into the fm backend. We had stupidly high standards, and I don't think a lot of people really knew how much we threw out over the years, or how much we sanitised the entries (so much broken English!). We also had to (to a certain degree) sanity check the projects - make sure they looked like they did what they did. One of the best projects I ever had to say no to was a "next-gen compression tool" which came during a bit of a fad for these in the early 2000s and basically converted everything to binary and got rid of the 0s. (Not surprisingly, there wasn't an "unzip" tool!) Nice try, guy!

Another story I remember is all the flak we got when we opened the osx.freshmeat.net section - we got so much criticism about how we'd sold out etc. etc. but it actually turned out to be quite a good repository for OS X apps for a while until iTunes kinda took over.

Good times :D

Men can (and should be!) feminists too.

The more people who come out saying it's unacceptable the more likely there is to be a paradigm shift, at least, that's how I hope it will go. Another voice to add to those decrying the brogrammer culture is always welcome.

Not at all - I think a qualitative approach may be able to illustrate the problem better because you can get more complexity from deeper questioning.

And perhaps over on the "nursing news" website they are actually doing this. We're in tech. Let's sort our own back yards out before pointing fingers at others'.

"Applications of statistics in this area fail to illuminate but at all any useful causal link." - if you're relying on statistics to show things in this area you're missing the complexity of the situation which a more interpretative account may be able to find meaning in. Statistics is not the be all and end all.

You may be bored/fed up/whatever by it but many women (and men) in tech aren't - and nor should we be. It's a highly socially constructed issue that is endemic in our society and not present in others. If you think it's about suppressing ability then you obviously have absolutely no idea about the challenges of getting women into tech.

As a woman in tech, I'd like to thank the men in this thread who obviously get what the problem is here. This sort of stuff can only change with a concerted effort from both men and women to change the culture. And it's small steps like standing up to sexist jerks and calling out people who engage in activities like this that will get us closer to our destination.

Except they weren't originally developed to be used by literal eyes of evil. They were the skype of the time, pretty much.

Sounds like someone's bitter. Or trying to stave off competition. :)

I don't see what's so radical here. It sounds like any other branded clothing/etc. sales-based job, really.

This is a failing of your supervisor and university if you have this experience in a UK university. I'm currently supervising PhD students at De Montfort University and we are required by the university to have AT LEAST monthly meetings with our students (usually 2-3 supervisors per student too). We support our students with seminar and theoretical workshop series, and encourage and support our particularly promising students to produce papers and submit them to conferences and journals.

There is a LOT of hand holding that goes on in our PhD programme. But your mileage may vary. I've heard that Russell Group universities can be a particularly mixed bag in this regard, but academics at other universities without such big names have more to gain by supporting our students.

What's your point? I have several friends (and myself as well) that deleted their accounts and they were actual active users.

Yeah, I was pleasantly surprised by this too! I had the birthday, an address, and something about one of my standing orders that I had to pick from. It was nice to not have to explain yourself to a real person either. You just had to confirm whether the transactions were real ones. I just have a normal Barclays account, too, nothing special.

Really cute! It'd be nice to be able to share a mockup with friends somehow.

What alternative OS can I run on the device?

I'm in the UK. It's also useless for finding things - it has petrol stations in places they don't exist near my house, and restaurants that closed down years ago. It also sucks for anything but driving - I don't have a car so I walk everywhere and its coverage of pedestrian zones in my city is woeful (unlike google maps). Also, public transport options are nonexistent (unlike google maps). Pretty useless for me really.

Yeah, me too! I am very impressed. :D

(Hope you're getting some affiliation cash, OP, I'd be happy to throw that your way given the usefulness of this!)

Apparently you can cut and shave them down, but it seems like a bit of a scary thing to try! There's also cutters popping up on ebay which claim to do it. Who knows, though.

I also have large mail accounts with Mail and haven't had any problems either. iPhoto is the big one I have a beef with, but Mail was always good to me (except with Exchange integration, but DavMail fixed that up).

Having tried to use Open/Libre Office as a MS Office replacement I can say it's definitely not on par with MS Office (sadly). So many little things that you take for granted on MS Office either aren't implemented or are incompatible with others who are using MS Office. For collaborative documents in an academic setting, using track changes, extensive bibliographies, stupidly large wordcounts etc., it's far, far easier to just use MS Office. I'd love to move these people on to google docs or something but old habits die hard in academia - emailed word documents is still where it's at.

As for Outlook - while I've set up my home computer to not use it, for most it's just easier to use it. Convenience has a lot going for it. For non-tech-savvy people it's also a lot easier, since then calls to tech support at work will actually get you help. :)

Yeah, I think you were on multivaders too, right? Heh, small world.

I was also probably addicted to FFXI (played from the release of CoP til 2009ish), so hey fellow ex-FFXIer. I pulled myself out of it when I realised I wasn't getting any of my PhD done and then went and managed to pull that off with the remaining time I had left. Now I won't play any MMOs because I'm concerned that I might fall back into old habits. I play D3 and other games that I can dip in and out of, but no mass organised stuff like FFXI needed.

The addiction for me was more of the organisation of stuff - I co-ran one of the most successful linkshells (guild) on my server for a while, and was in charge of many raids - I loved it and was good at it. I'd probably make a great middle manager or something, heh. (No thanks.)

Anyway yeah, it's possible to "get out" and still reclaim your life. I have a tenured position at a university now and completed two successful postdocs since I quit. I don't regret having played though - I met some excellent people through FFXI, many of whom are still very close friends today. It's just a matter of having the ability to self assess where you are and the guts to pull yourself out of it if you realise that there's an issue. I know I can do that now, but I also don't want the temptation to fall back in.

You can to a certain degree, yeah. There was a project in the UK that looked at using NLP to determine what age/gender child groomers are (to see if they were adults impersonating children in order to befriend children online). It was pretty successful (the Isis project - see http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=pedophile-p... for an overview). The problem is that doing this sort of thing "live" is ethically dubious - not only for the privacy of the child but also for the privacy of the potential offender (because being labelled paedophile is probably one of the worst things you can be labelled - imagine if you are falsely accused).

So yeah, you'd need a huge amount of certainty that this was "the guy", and, frankly, storing enough data about individual writing styles for comparison means it's highly unlikely (right now) that this would be possible to do from a technical perspective, and potentially ethically dubious even if the technology were there - what constitutes "public data" on the internet from a privacy and data protection perspective?