ChristianMarks

Metamucil

If the allegations are true, I'd like to see a Kickstarter project to fund her litigation.

I suppose this means that mathematics and the humanities will advance more than disciplines that require significant funding.

+1 for that observation.

Philosophy departments are also having their troubles with sexism, sexual harassment and allegations therof, as one can find by perusing http://leiterreports.typepad.com, http://philosophysmoker.blogspot.com/ and http://beingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com/ The serious problems in professional philosophy with sexism and harassment are exacerbated by an other-worldly proclivity among some philosophers to theorize the possibility of harassment out of existence.

There is a gap between stupid bosses and very very smart bosses. My own preference is weighted to the latter, but I recognize this can be career limiting (I have mixed feelings about working for myself, for example).

I feel your pain. I left a job after a reorg during which a VP promoted the people he hired over the rest of us. Bureaucratic protocol required loss of titles for a number of those not promoted. (No one could have the same title as the person one reported to.) I asked the VP if this was a demotion. There was no notation in my personnel file. "I don't want you to think of it that way," he said. I was reassigned to a smug platitudinous know-nothing who enjoyed remarking that he had an "environment" (this was never explained) whereas I had a "bunch of servers." He also enjoyed driveling on about "culture." I left within weeks of the reorg. But the next job was exploitative. That was harder to leave because the actual duties differed significantly from the job description in a direction detrimental to my career, and I took a significant salary cut, which created problems down the line. I tried to make the best of it and did some of my best programming on a hilariously underbid nightmare of a project that inordinately consumed the time of all involved, at significant opportunity cost. I left that for a job that, I found out, was notorious for high turnover, thanks to a rude, humorless manager who compusively emailed unreasonable demands involving continual upward modification of duties at all hours of the day and night as if they were emergencies, seven days a week. Rather than attempt to keep rolling with the punches and see things from the perspective of my torturer, I took inspiration from a Harvard business school professor whose advice is to quit early and often. I resigned within weeks. Now I'm back with friends. It is a weakness of mine that I don't like bosses, unless they are very, very intelligent.

My solution is legal but unpopular: no MPAA movies, no RIAA recordings.

You're probably right about the manipulative psychology of probing for and exploiting weaknesses. Absolutely disgusting, unprofessional, completely extraneous and non-work related. Very offensive and obnoxious to deal with.

When I hear from a manager that I must be absolutely certain that some complex system utterly beyond my control must work without the possibility of error, I leave. (I have done this.) Life is too short to spend it working with manipulative turds, let alone smug imbeciles with no comprehension of computational complexity, recusive unsolvability, probability, the problem of knowledge, the philosophy of science, and on and on. I hate to sound so negative, but surrounding yourself with individuals capable of this kind of psychological torture when the subject of software guarantees is a research industry with an extensive literature going back at least to the Mythical Man Month is bad for your health. I find it deeply offensive that one has to respond respectfully and professionally to outrageous demands as if they were reasonable.

Destabilizing.

I left an abusive working environment. High turnover places exist. The American business press likes to tell oppressed employees to take their torturer's perspective, to become one with their abuser, to act with the supreme, Zen-like indifference of the Buddha and meditate their personal Hell out of existence.

The year I left, 16 people out of around 30 left, 8 after I did. I didn't have a job waiting for me, but it was a tremendous relief not to be constantly hectored in email at all hours, seven days a week. Continually having work boundaries tested is not for me. The chronic mistreatment was bad for my hemorrhoids, I informed them. (I don't necessarily believe in taking the masochistic high road in all cases.)

You have a point: it may be that there is no news network that values journalistic integrity.

Pardon my cynicism, but resignations are good for ratings.

Fair enough. I tried in my youth to solve every problem I came across. There were many I couldn't solve. It took a while before I developed the wisdom and discipline not to solve every problem no matter how long it took. By a while I mean decades. I sacrificed the possibility of family life, have stopped talking to my uncomprehending stepfather, and have kept my social interactions to an absolute minimum to pursue my consuming interest. (I mention this as a point of pride.) I find myself continually astonished by the ingenuity of solutions I probably could never have imagined after years of work. Perhaps, after a lifetime of effort that must be continually maintained, I have attained the level an entering freshman at Harvard. At this stage, I may be reduced at best to connoisseurship of some aspects of mathematics.

Now for some reflections on attitudes. Mathematicians sometimes act as if they believe that expertise in mathematics transfers to expertise in mathematics education. Suppose you are a sensitive student, lacking in confidence. You open Korner's beautiful book on Fourier Analysis, and the first thing you are greeted with is "This book is meant neither as a drill book for the successful student nor as a lifebelt for the unsuccessful student." Korner does not mention other references suitable for the successful and the unsuccessful student. You take this comment to mean that Korner would let the unsuccessful student drown. There is no implication, but this is the psychological import, the implicature. Why mention the unsuccessful student at all? Why not say who the book is for, without planting this gratuitous image in the reader's mind? It would take some time to return to this book, to get past the wonder at a mind capable of such an incidental, dismissive, off-handed acknowledgement of "the unsuccessful student."

You could say this is "overthinking." Such remarks, microagressions as they are termed today, "perpetrated against those due to gender, sexual orientation, and ability status", are sometimes revealed in the asides of mathematical authors [1].

And now if only mathematics educators would evaluate their students on the state of their confusion!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microaggression

I've left academia and returned, then left and am returning again. Thanks to the sequester, the NIH and NSF funding situation is bleak--I know successful PIs who currently have zilch. They're pursuing consulting contracts to make ends meet--at least in engineering this is possible. At this point it is trolling--pure sadism--to suggest that confidence and hard work will overcome the destructively competitive working conditions many academics look forward to every day. (I suppose I could be confident, for an additional charge.) Why is it trolling? Because the troll will never ever acknowledge his expectation that scientists (and science along with them) should thrive in a plutocracy as if it were a meritocracy [cf. Leiter, Brian, The Truth is Terrible (February 22, 2014). Daniel Came (ed.), Nietzsche on Morality and the Affirmation of Life (Oxford University Press, Forthcoming). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2099162 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2099162]

I happen to be returning to academia after leaving a non-academic job a few months ago. I spent the intervening months working an application with a friend. Over the past decade we have been attempting to solve a certain problem for ourselves. After dead end upon dead end, we have a prototype. Now, on the verge of re-joining the academic precariat, a potential customer has asked us for how much we would license our software. We'll see how that goes.

The probability of my landing a tenure-track position anywhere is less than the probability that the software venture succeeds (perhaps this isn't surprising, judging from my posts online here). One tires of playing zero-sum games for diminishing payoffs against people who should be your collaborators. This is the kind of the cost-benefit analysis one doesn't do explicitly that seems to underlie decisions to leave. (I am rational, according to a cost-benefit analysis I haven't done.)

I've used flash cards (SuperMemo and Anki) for mathematics and do not see anything wrong with using flash cards, memorizing the solutions to 500 complex analysis qualifier exam questions and using spaced repetition algorithms. I would prefer to have a perfect memory and not to (have to) rely on such techniques, but life is short. J.F. Jardine once told me that "there is no right way to do mathematics."

But I enjoy solving problems, e.g., http://publicsphere.org/2014/02/07/exercise/ http://publicsphere.org/2014/01/04/fibrations/ http://publicsphere.org/2013/12/23/markets-and-market-games/ http://publicsphere.org/2013/12/14/elementary-equivalence/ http://publicsphere.org/2013/12/12/another-problem/ http://publicsphere.org/2013/12/08/problems/

I have many more in password-protected blogs, notes, etc.

This morning a friend informed me about Oppia https://www.oppia.org/. I took a few minutes to solve their introductory example, Euler Project Problem 1 (Question: What is the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000?). I did this in Mathematica by combining inclusion-exclusion (expressed via indicator functions if you like) with little Gauss's formula for summing the integers from 1 to n.

SumN35[n_] := 3SumN[Floor[n/3]] + 5SumN[Floor[n/5]] - 15*SumN[Floor[n/15]] where SumN[n_] := Binomial[n + 1, 2]

I got SumN35[999] = 233168.

[OT lamentation ahead] Unfortunately, in my experience, employers don't seem to value this activity--at least I tend not to impress them as a confident person who will passionately defend his answers until shown wrong. I don't have the personality, patience and energy for this kind of bravado. (I have an acquaintance who has the requisite unaesthetic attitude, who is not more intelligent that I am and who landed a job at Google.) I tend to have inspirations that come from nowhere that I have to go back and reason about. The act of convincing yourself that a correct answer is really correct can sound like a lack of confidence to some individuals. To me, projecting confidence requires extraneous cognitive load, but I can be confident for an additional charge.]

If you tell me that using flash cards is morally wrong, or if you have a theory of learning that invalidates their use, I won't argue.

I had to learn the epsilon-delta definition before I really understood limits. As far as insanely small goes, as you must know, the definition is equivalent to "for every epsilon < M, there exists a delta >0, ..." where M is some positive constant (it could be 1 or 1/10^100...). Sometimes it helps to play with the quantifiers...

It's not a great win for Russia to annex the Ukraine. If they do, they're stuck with an expensive mess.

This is for hackers who want to brush up on their Nietzsche. The author, Brian Leiter, runs http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/ and is one of my intellectual heros.

The problem with "the problem" is that there is no uniquely specified problem. The article is concerned with the use of key performance indicators by administrators to allocate resources to scientific projects in many fields. Math and computer science are also affected by this, contrary to what you say.

If you want to impress an employer as someone who will work until they die on the job, your answer to the question "where do you see yourself in 5 years?" should be "dead."

Exactly right. I once timed my departure from such a job within a period during which lines lost to attrition or retirement would not be replaced. This was soon after a reorganization. The loss of direct reports hurt the manager's street cred.

If Godzilla is angry, that is an ominous sign.

If MtGox were too big to fail, the taxpayer would cover their losses. Looks like someone wants a bailout. Nice work if you can get it--the question for me is, how do I get in on this? If the answer is that I cannot, then allow me some shadenfreude.

Yes, better to allocate the funds to a cause you actively oppose if you fail.

Calling all Gwerns...

A general principle is to never contribute to anyone else's power law distribution.

The MtGox Bitcoin deserves to go to zero.

Preach it, brother.