johnminter

Udacity (and Coursera, edX, MIT OpenCourseware) can and do teach very helpful skills to large groups of self-directed learners. I have benefited from Coursera. I suspect that most who come here fit into that group. One problem is that a large proportion of the population do not have the personality/skills/drive to do this. I would note the Udacity pilot with San Jose State University. They started with a remedial math course, a college algebra course and an introductory statistics course. The pass rate of the stats class was about 50%, the two other courses much lower - 27 and 25% if I remember correctly.

One approach that has worked better is a partnership with a Community College (e.g. Bunker Hill in Massachusetts). Here they use a flipped classroom approach. The students watch online lectures and come to a lab session where they have an instructor to help when they get stuck and are encouraged work in groups. This seems to help many get past the hard parts and complete the work. This approach is obviously more expensive. Very few people work "for free." Self-motivated, disciplined individuals will always do well with systems that focus heavily on independent study. Others will have to pay more to access more personalized support.

Ah, the Smoke Alarm Supplication Dance. Great term. My wife and daughter had the same issue. They like to cook and can tomato sauce. Our smoke alarm would go off very easily - lots of false positives. One day my wife is vacuuming the hall and the motor in the vacuum cleaner overheats and starts putting out thick, black smoke right under the smoke alarm. Nothing from the smoke alarm... Needless to say we quickly replaced both the vacuum cleaner and the smoke alarm and made certain to get one with dual sensors...

I am certainly no fan of "chartjunk" and value clear graphics, I do not see the value of removing the lines on the axes. I find them to be valuable visual cues. I would also note that Tufte used them in his books, for example: (http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...).

I'll add to philtar's comment:

Because senior management forces workers to use it.

I'm a scientist who analyzes large data sets. I also need to communicate to my co-workers. I need a secure operating system without a lot of eye-candy that makes it look like a tablet and lets me give priority to my data analysis tasks. Windows is not it, but I have to use it.

There is a lot more to housing cost than monthly payment (for P&I), taxes and insurance. Landlords also must pay for repairs, hedge against costs to evict those who do not pay and or trash the place, pay for water, sewer, garbage disposal, lawn care, snow removal - unless the lease puts those responsibilities on the tenant. People often underestimate these other costs when buying a home and become what we used to call "house poor."

There are other good reasons to be cautious about homeownership. Typically, one must stay in a home for 5 years to break even on closing costs. Jobs typically are not that stable these days. It is often less expensive to sublet/get out of a lease than it is to find a willing, qualified buyer.

One example is Germany. I was talking with a German friend of mine at lunch and he noted that they are "tracked" after grade 8. Some go to trade school. Then (IIRC) there are two university tracks - one more prestigious (and more stressful) than the other. The egalitarians in the US would never stand for this.

That said, we cannot continue to fund the system we have which according to R. Arum's Academically Adrift, leaves many students with a mountain of debt and few marketable skills. As the authors of "Paying for the Party" note, these students had a great time but learned little. Both books (and Arum's follow up book tracking graduates) are sobering reads...

I think one useful purpose was described by Prof. Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel of Duke at the recent UseR conference. She teaches an introductory statistics class for non-majors. Docker lets her spin up individual virtual machines for each student with all the packages they need for the class without all the sys-admin headaches of getting all the software on everybody's systems. You can see her slides and evaluation of the alternatives here:

https://github.com/mine-cetinkaya-rundel/useR-2015/blob/mast...

Keith Baggerly and Kevin Coombes of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center tried to replicate the work and were instrumental in getting the investigation going. They have a very helpful synopsis here: http://bioinformatics.mdanderson.org/Supplements/ReproRsch-A...

I tend to agree. I would frame the key traits as persistence and a view for the long term payoff. I did a stint as an Industrial Fellow in an NSF-funded center at U. of Minn. in the early '90s. My sponsor was chair of the Chem. E. dept. They had enough B. S. graduates to have a dept. graduation. They had the department valedictorian speak. She mentioned that along the way she questioned whether it would be worth it - especially on evenings walking home after yet another study session working on a problem set from hell. She would see her friends enjoying themselves in one of the local diners or pubs. But at the end, she realized that she had opportunities they would never have. Here both the persistence and the long term view paid off.

That said, we are producing far more Ph. D.s than we can employee. I have had a 30+ year career in industry. I have watched margins tighten and good friends get laid off as more and more is offshored. I doubt that this will end well for the next generation. Not everyone will be a "winner." But those who invest in developing their skills will, on average, do much better than those who do not.

Do you want them to listen to you or be frantically writing? It is A LOT easier to annotate a PDF while pondering the concepts. Too many lectures are like a firehose...

My employer emerged from Ch. 11 bankruptcy a few months ago. Never underestimate legal fees and consultant fees. Japanese laws may be different, but I would be surprised if these fees did not consume a significant fraction of the assets.

Yup - often peddled by people with conflicts of interest - deriving their income from that education.

Informed analyses are the goal, and extensive study in an area is a benefit. That said, "experts" can and do have bias and conflicts of interest (funding, prestige, acquiring tenure...) so their analyses require scrutiny as well. I would note that inappropriate appeal to authority is recognized as a logical fallacy. I would also note that we live at a time when there is unprecedented access to informations, so credentials alone are not the best measure of an argument.

I think we benefit most from scholarly debate of different models/analysis where the different sides adjust their position based on the criticism. I would also note that both credentialed and non credentialed people can be stubborn...

You need to take your employment contract to a lawyer and get legal advice before doing anything. Depending on the contract, you may or may not have rights to what you developed in your side project, especially if you are a salaried employee. In my case, my employer owns all IP I develop while in their employment. Happily, my employer has no commercial interest in the code I develop to automate my data analysis and management permits me to distribute it under an Open Source license. They understand the value both they and I receive from a collaborative community of analysts. By the way, each year I must sign a statement that I have no conflicts of interest and if I suspect I might have one, I must disclose it to management.

I have wondered about Zareason laptops (http://zareason.com/shop/Laptops/). Anybody tried them?

My employer (Eastman Kodak) had one of the few industrial research reactors built for neutron activation analysis (NAA) from 1974 to 2007. NAA provided great trace analysis of impurities that caused problems with photographic film and solid state devices. The reactor was located in the basement of the research labs, next to my electron microscopy lab. I spent close to 20 years next door to this.

There were two main issues that caused the company to decommission the reactor. 1) replacement of the californium source would have been prohibitively expensive. 2) Because the neutron source also contained isotopes that could have been weaponized (with great difficulty,) we had to maintain 24x7 security - at great expense. The press reported on the removal (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/14/kodak-nuclear-react...)

During my tenure as "next door neighbor" to this, I was more concerned about falling on ice in the parking lot during the winter than any concerns from the reactor. The staff in the NAA lab were well-trained scientists who were quite careful and they monitored constantly for activity.

A couple of items to consider. Does Linux support ALL the applications the programmers need to interact with other people in the company? The answer is "no" in my workplace.

Our company has a lot of legacy VBA code that would need to be replaced. Don't get me wrong, I think it would be smart to replace this. I hated the way VBA changed on every release and broke my code base. The last straw was when I needed to access spreadsheets that used 3rd party VBA modules that were locked. I ported my whole back-end data analysis/report generation code base to Open Source R/Sweave/LaTeX. But I'm just one user and did it myself as a spare time activity.

I still think Visual Studio is a pretty nice development environment for C++. I'm trying to get up to speed with Eclipse. I do prefer Open Source. Now that our corporate budget is REALLY tight, that is a big help. Guess the IT folks think it would cost more to switch than pay the annual tribute to Redmond

I think it is about a boss showing respect for his/her employees, active listening to and consideration for their ideas, and valuing their work. Saying "thank you" goes a long way and costs nothing. Occasionally stopping in the workplace and showing interest in the work helps. They used to call this "management by walking around." Showing value of the group's success at the expense of their own short term gain is a major plus.

Let me illustrate with an example from the best Division director I ever had. He came to us from NIST and valued analytical work, which made him a perfect fit for our materials characterization division. On numerous occasions when we would raise concerns over decisions our client divisions made that we felt hurt the company. He would go (or go with us) to have uncomfortable discussions with clients. On three occasions he made decisions that that adversely affected me and each time I went to him, he listened to my case and changed his decision. He was not afraid to say "no" if one couldn't build a case. The all time winner came when we needed to buy an expensive piece of equipment. At the time, capital would frequently become available near the end of the year because other divisions overestimated their needs. We then had the opportunity to purchase the instrument. This was the first year when management bonuses were tied to budget performance. Signing the order meant forfeiting his bonus. He signed it. That showed me that he valued long term organizational well being over his own short term profit. He made his share of questionable decisions - as all human beings do, but always retained my respect and loyalty.

Excel's major problem is the ease in which point/click/copy/paste generates errors. There have been several recent cases where off-by-one cell errors have caused authors issues. This was one part of the Duke scandal (the fraud was much worse, but the Excel was sloppy) and put egg on some Harvard Econ prof's faces - to the delight of the UMASS grad student that found it...

That's where version control helps. Save and commit frequently. It is much easier to go back to just before the problem and insert smaller chunks. Found many an error this way. Selective cutting of sections and stashing them in a text editor works as well.

Over the last couple of years I have migrated my workflow away from MS Office products (Word/Excel/VBA/PowerPoint) to LaTeX, R, Sweave/knitr.

These tools play well with git and make it easy to automate an analysis. I am a strong believer in literate programming - embedding the code in the documentation where feasible. There are case where it is not (long Monte Carlo simulations) but I can at least pull in the results and have the source code that generated them in version control and the report automatically uses the latest version.

Microsoft kept changing VBA and each release would break things. We had third party tools that had locked VBA modules and ours just wouldn't permit processing data in these workbooks.

I can extract all the data with R and am much happier. The Open Source community seems to better support their products than Microsoft. Go figure...

I like the way Cosma Shalizi described it to aspiring statisticians:

INDEPENDENCE: otherwise, you rely on someone else always having made exactly the right tool for you, and giving it to you.

HONESTY: otherwise, you end up distorting the problem to match the tools you happen to have.

CLARITY: turning your method into something a machine can do forces you to discipline your thinking and make it communicable; and science is public.

Then there are those of us at the opposite end of the age spectrum... I hated the look of iOS 7. Very hard on aging eyes. Replaced the wallpaper with a custom photo with my favorite background color for my text editor. Still can't find a way to get the high contrast, dark keypad back. Grrr. (expletive deleted), Apple - not everything needs to look like an hipster toy...

Try http://colorbrewer2.org/ - it has a setting for colorblind safe...

You forget that nasty reality called property and school taxes. In reality, one never owns one's home. You own it as long as you can pay any remaining mortgage and all the taxes. Let's also not forget maintenance costs. Ever paid the bill to replace a leaking roof or kitchen appliances or...

Sounds like Vienna would interest you... Not sure you could import your feeds directly, but it is not hard to set them up...

any site that you can't examine before signing up sends a red flag.

Show the importance of gmvault...

Yes. We have lab PCs here still running Windows NT because the upgrades for the hardware are either unavailable or would be prohibitively expensive (> $20K) and still not implement all the functionality. We tend to hide these from our well-protected corporate network behing a boat-anchor PC running XP with all the service packs and antivirus. We will run these systems until they can no longer be repaired because management does not want to spend the money to replace them.

Sounds like an honest assessment. You are neither a slave nor without choices. You are free to examine your job skills and transform yourself into someone who can get a more stable position in another field. As someone working through that process now to get out of my own no-win situation, I can tell you it is neither easy nor fun, but at the end of each day I sleep well knowing that I tried to make the most prudent choice presented to me.