r_c_a_d

I thought the whole point of RSS was as an index to new content. It never occurred to me to put the whole article in the feed... surely a good summary and a link gives the consumer the choice to load the article or not, rather than having to load all the articles all the time?

Hey, if this is your experience, then I suggest you take a step back and look at the world outside of academia a bit more carefully. I was a naive post-doc and wanted an academic job, but soon realised that it wasn't going to happen without years of hanging round in crappy roles. So I got out and didn't look back. I can assure you, there are plenty of "normal" jobs out there where people _will_ care about your PhD and the skills you learned while getting it.

Because a PhD is useful for a lot more than getting a permanent academic position. My first "proper job" was at a research division of a big corporation. They had ~20 PhDs when I started and expanded to ~100 over 3 years. I don't think any of those people would say their PhD was wasted because they didn't get an academic job at the end of it.

One teacher in the UK actually delivered meals to kids personally during the lockdown.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/coronavirus-...

Nobody likes to eat gluten-free stuff; unfortunately, some people like me have to eat it.

Convolution is an integration. It isn't itself a property of a domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution

The terminology comes from signal processing, where a convolution in the frequency domain is equivalent to a multiplication in the time domain. I don't think anyone is thinking about the frequency domain in deep-learning, but they still call the operators convolution kernels.

Spot on. I always used to get a certain company local to me flagged up by recruiters when I was job hunting. Every time they rejected my resume without interview because it did not have "Spring" on it.

Years later I worked at this place as a 3rd party contractor. What little bit of Spring I needed to know I picked up in the first few days. Their codebase and methodology was very poor and they were drowning because they only had one or two experienced people... but all the people they had had "Spring" on their resumes.

That is exactly what happened to my son's Computer Science class. They all got shifted down.

Thankfully the UK government have now decided to revert to the teacher assessed grades.

Even if you know it is likely that 2 out 5 students who you assess as grade B will have a bad day and get a C in the exam, you don't know which 2 of the 5, so you have to assess them all as a B.

Ranking students might be roughly correct, but many of the rankings in the middle where students are very similar are basically random.

Nice! I had something similar. It took over a week and the fix was to _remove_ one line of code.

It's not as simple a choice as you paint. Economic consequences can be fixed by civilised people; death cannot be fixed by anyone.

My experience is that after you have met someone once (for more than a few minutes) then video calls work a lot better than with people you have never met.

I guess you develop some degree of trust (and a stronger mental model) during a meeting that persists afterwards.

I replied to the wrong post, sorry.

Determinism is not something that just happens to other people. If a criminal acts deteministically in committing a crime, then you also act deterministically in judging them.

It will take a long time, generations, to fix this. I remember the 1981 race riots in London.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Brixton_riot

There was a public inquiry afterwards that led to the creation of a Police Complaints Commission. But that was largely ineffective for at least 20 years afterwards.

Ultimately I think integration and education are the only solution. My parents didn't meet a non-white person until they were in their late 20s. At my school there were a few black families. At my kids school there was a lot of diversity; and differences in race, sexuality and religion seem to be "old people's problems" to them now.

I don't like Gove, so it feels strange for me to "defend" him, but this is an interesting quote that keeps coming up.

In a later interview [1] he said this:

"When I was being interviewed on Sky by Faisal Islam, he put it to me that there were a number of economists and organizations of economic prestige that questioned the arguments for leaving the European Union and said that it would be a mistake if we did. I countered it by saying people have had enough of experts from organizations with acronyms that have got things so wrong in the past. And Faisal Islam, as a skilled interrogator, cut me off half way, so while I completed my sentence he took the first half and said ‘people have had enough experts?’ and used that as a fencing posture in the interview itself."

[1] https://www.chathamhouse.org/expert/comment/michael-gove-tro...

I too worked in an R&D lab after my PhD. Which projects to fund was always a problem. No-one knows which projects are going to succeed. Do you stick with a group that has been making steady progress for 5 years or switch to something else that sounds more revolutionary?

Under different leaders my lab flip-flopped from "blue sky, do what interests you" phases to "we need to focus on value" phases.

Neither produced anything revolutionary. But the blue skies phases did produce some useful work.

Research is a risk. Funding it is like gambling. Don't bet more than you are prepared to lose.

Is that true? Or is it just the case that people trying to make a profit have learned how to promote themselves to an extent that drowns out the hobbyists?

I had some hobby pages in the 1990s that got a lot of views and came high up in search results. None of them were ever deliberately publicised. I doubt that any of my material would show in the top 1000 of any web search today.

I think the daily briefings are good. It's not just a politician talking; it's a politician flanked by two scientists or public health experts. The politician explains what is going on and the experts explain why, with data. This is the first time in my life I can remember politicians so publicly deferring to experts with evidence.

I wrote an article on this last year, which scratches the surface. My conclusion was that a good name is whatever the team thinks is a good name: you cannot write a set of rules that defines good names.

https://richard-taylor.github.io/threads/coding/naming.html

Are you thinking of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies

A similar thing happened to me too; it was a 3 hour onsite. No news at all... until about 2 weeks later I got an automated request from the agent asking me to fill in a feedback form on how they did. I had fun filling in that form!

Yes, this seems obvious to me. If it were not, then publishers would release the hardback and paperback at the same time and let readers choose the format they preferred, wouldn't they?

I think the lesson here is, if you are a scientist or engineer (i.e typically not a people person), then never say anything publicly about anything non-technical... ever.

Which is sad.

Try contacting the original publisher. I did this with the small number of my discs that "rotted" and they were replaced with brand new ones without question. Probably because the industry made such a big deal about them "lasting forever" at the time of release. One disc was not replaceable (it was a weird compilation album that was no longer available) but the publisher let me pick another disc from their catalogue instead.

When my kids started school I was surprised to learn that at age 4 it is not obvious that the number of items on a whiteboard remains constant if all the items are moved to a different part of the board. So what seems obvious, probably is something we just don't remember learning.

Indeed. I worked on a team which was "given" a couple of contractors to help us "catch up" to where management thought we should be. They were both useless. Between finding something they could do without damaging stuff, fixing what thay had damaged anyway, trying to maintain the morale of the rest of the team and explaining to management why we would be better off without them... I was easily more than 10x more productive than they were. But the team was in a hellish mess.

I really don't think the people in charge are that clever. What is happening here is a reaction to recent cases like this:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/liam-allan-met-p...

where a rape trial collapsed after text messages between the alleged victim and alleged attacker were "discovered" late in the process.

So this is an instance of "we have to do something" where the suggestion swings too far the other way. I assume after some debate we will settle on a sensible compromise position.

No, that is not how science works. We can say with 100% certainty that the theory has not been falsified by any test to date.