johnminter

I suspect that here in the US it will require a vote by the Congress.

I am a thankful user of Gnuplot. As some before me mentioned, the naming history was complex. What is more important is that the developers provided - and still support - an excellent program that we may freely use under a very reasonable license.

That is why many prefer viridis.

Yes, RStudio uses it and I find it lives up to the title "The Swiss Army Knife of document conversion."

One nice feature on many social media platforms is that one can unfollow or block people who seem to generate more heat than light in their posts. I am willing to read and interact with someone with whom I disagree as long as the discussion remains civil and productive.

Trolls have been around from the early days of the internet. I remember one student from Dartmouth that posted on many of the science newsgroups under the name Archimedes Plutonium. He continually posted that the Plutonium atom was God. This started many unproductive discussions and spammed many newsgroups. I'm sure you can imagine the flame wars... I am thankful that current social media lets me block/ignore trolls.

We live in western New York. My wife teaches in a private school and my daughter teaches in a charter school. The New York State Department of Education provides standards and direct support for high functioning special needs students and transportation to/from special classes for those with greater needs. The students in these two schools take the same standardized tests as those in the public schools. My wife teaches college level classes in Physics and Calculus to high school students with oversight from a local community college.

This is a great deal for the students because they enter the college of their choice with a better background than a typical student.

In the 1970s when my wife and I were in High School there were some gender biases. My wife (from Syracuse NY) had been cooking, cleaning, sewing, etc. because both her parents worked. She wanted to take shop instead because she was studying for the physical sciences and math. The high school administrators refused and forced her to take Home Economics. She was not pleased...

That would not surprise me. One might be able to recover the cost of the education at a state university. I suspect the return on investment would significantly lower at a private school with higher tuition. My daughter teaches at a high school with many students from lower income households. One of the exercizes the class did was to have each student pick a career that interested them. They had to find the cost of the degree and the median salary. Next they were to make a budget that for their living expenses based on that median salary, including repayment of the student loans. It was an eye-opening experience for these students.

Higher education can be a ticket to a great career. It can be a cost it takes a lifetime to repay, especially if penalties and interest accrues.

The academic route has always been a crapshoot. Most of my professors from the Chemistry Department at Florida State were still there and active when my daughter went there for a Meteorology masters decades later. The cartoonist, Jorge Cham, parodies this in the Ph.D. Comics books and movies.

One must plan a technical career carefully. I was able to get an internship at Kodak's Tennessee plant after my junior and senior years. I originally wanted to study inorganic chemistry. I worked for scientists who both were Ph.D. polymer chemists. They showed me the American Chemical Society's study on chemist occupations. 80% of chemists worked on polymers at some time during their career. I applied for both types of programs, and the UMASS Amherst Polymer Science program provided a research assistance-ship that paid my way. it was a great experience and I had a fantastic Ph.D. Advisor - who is now an emeritus professor at Rice University. I stopped interviewing after I had 5 job offers. Employment fluctuates with the economy. Some fields are more robust than others... Do your homework before rushing into a pricey program...

Manufacturers need to distinguish between critical updates that fix a significant error in the results or fix a security hole that could make the users system vulnerable. By contrast, feature updates should be labeled as such. This makes it easier for the user to make an informed choice to install the update.

Kodak Alaris still sells professional film

In my opinion one should be paid a rate commensurate with what you produce for your employer. If you choose to live in a remote location where your salary goes further, you should be able to enjoy that outcome. It should be no surprise any adult that employers will pay the least they can. When they do that, employees vote with their feet. Good employers count the cost of turnover and generally pay what is required to keep their productive employees. Large systemic changes upset the "normal case". My friends (and their managers) left at the company from which I retired took pay or hour reductions to get through the covid-19 issue. Nobody liked it, but there were few options at the time.

Not to my knowlege.

In the company where I worked that was expected of professional level staff. We could not afford to lose clients. We typically checked email daily and were available by phone in an emergency. People did not abuse this.

I think the key to a good exerience obtaining a Ph.D. is the choice of a good advisor. My advisor explained that the process of getting the degree was to teach us to find important problems and learn what we needed to solve them. Typically, that involved collaboration. He also stressed that it was a doctorate in Philosophy even though our department was in the Physical Sciences and Engineering School. That advice served me well as a scientist in a corporate materials analysis group.

Now that I am retired, I still find challenging projects to work on, mainly helping to improve open source electron microanalysis software.

One needs to find a note-taking tool that fits one's workflow. I do a lot of analysis using R and compose many documents in Rmarkdown using R-Studio. I keep a git repository with "tips" - one Rmarkdown document per subject area and master document that links all the others. I can access my notes from any computer and it is easy to keep them in sync. Like Zettelkasten's creator, writing (and editing) these help refine my thinking.

Use what works for you and we will use what works for us.

Markdown is a great tool for documentation, especially using tools like RStudio and Rmarkdown. These tools typically use pandoc under the hood to let an author generate whatever they need - HTML, PDF, Word documents, Power Point slides...

Because Markdown (and the tools mentioned above) produces a text document, this plays well with version control using git and github. Indeed github renders markdown files in the browser. These tools have been embraced by scientists who want to generate reproducible documents.

Here in the US the vendors are not doing this.

My take from the article is that one needs sufficient confidence and persistence to set a goal, a plan to achieve it, and the self-discipline to do the work to achieve it. Self directed learners have a better possibility to do this, especially if they have mentors to help them to get over the hard spots. Of course, one wants to "pay forward" this type of help.

Should that not have been explicit in the purchase agreement?

This article is irresponsible. The federal government has been forthcoming about the problem with one component in the test kit they released. They provided a work-around quickly and have updated the test protocol and are releasing updated test kits. At least where I sit in New York State cooperation between our Democratic Governor and the Federal Agencies has been a good example. New York can now produce test kits and are quickly ramping up to 1000 tests per day.

I would note that this was made possible by scientists with federal (and state) funding to obtain the structure of the virus quickly and that these results helped guide the development of test kits.

I remember Usenet and the science newsgroups. The author of the parent article mentioned the problem with trolls. There was one who was especially infuriating and unforgettable. He was from Dartmouth and used the screen name "Archimedes Plutonium". People would be discussing some topic on the science newsgroups and he would post off topic rants proclaiming the plutonium atom was god. Of course people took the bait. Dartmouth decided that was part of free speech. I think this was the origin of the advice "Don't feed the trolls".

That is a great solution. I love markdown. Have you considered putting the directory under version control (git)? That way you can track changes and easily recover sections you remove and regret later. I have an entire github repository for "tips".

I think it was Karl Browman from the rstats community that noted: Your closest collaborator is you, six months from now. And you don't respond to email...

IMHO the optimum financial plan depends upon your age and life situation. All require your family to work together and each member to grow in self-discipline. Here are tactics that worked well for my my family.

1. Learn to live below your means. This lets you build savings. The best tool here is a budget. Our family typically cooked at home, brought lunches to school or work, and bought staples on sale. Our kids had to choose activities that fit the budget. If it wasn't in the budget, we thought long and hard about buying it. If you need help, Dave Ramsey's books are good place to start.

2. Your next priority should be pay off high interest debt as fast as you can. If you have long term student loans, pay them down as best you can and start to accumulate (by saving) a six month emergency fund in an FDIC insured bank. The large percentage of families in the US where a $500 unexpected bill is a major problem is way too high. The emergency fund gives you breathing room.

3. Once you have an emergency fund, you should make sure to start saving for retirement and college for skill upgrades or for children. Someone once wrote that compound interest was the 8th "Wonder of the World". It is wonderful if we are talking about savings but is quite a taskmaster if we are talking about debt.

4. Become a self-directed learner. Invest time and focus in keeping your skills updated. Training budgets and travel to conferences were early casualties when my employer had major budget woes - that landed the company in bankruptcy. I paid my own way for critical training I could not get on-line. Some coworkers criticized me for this. I did what needed to be done. Those who didn't stagnated...

I wish you well. This will not be fun at the beginning and there will be times in your life you have to put up with things you don't like but can't afford to fix now. We had 2 kids in college, and our kitchen cabinets starting to fall apart. My wife hated them. That was the first thing we fixed after the kids graduated (same day, 1000 miles apart - we each attended one...)

I had a cubicle before they were popular - at Florida State U as an undergraduate from 1973-1977. They were great for studying and I could monitor my experiments in the lab just outside my cubicle.

I had a small office in grad school and in my first job I shared an office with another scientist for a couple of years before I got my own. Having a space of my own made it easier to concentrate. Because I worked in a analytical sciences lab, interruptions were frequent (clients dropping of samples ), so I learned to get in 1-2 hrs before most others so I could focus on critical projects.

The commotion in open bull-pens really interrupts one's train of thought and greatly reduces productivity.

Try SublimeText3 [1] instead. It is a cross platform editor. You can try it out and use it for free. The expectation is that if you like it and continue to use it, you will purchase a license. I really like it for programming any task I want to use plain text.

There is also a build system and one can download packages that enhance coding in many different languages. I have no economic interest in this, I'm just a satisfied user.

1 - https://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-text-3-poi...

I had a 37 year career at a company that used to be a well recognized brand. I was in the Research Laboratories in an Analytical Sciences division. During that time we had many layoffs as the company's financial position eroded. The key to success in that environment was to be a lifelong learner, a team player, and developing skills that permitted you to generate results that proved your worth.

During downsizings, as groups got smaller, managers were let go along with workers. Survivors needed learn to mourn the loss of your colleagues who were downsized, and then pick up the important work they left behind. To survive, one needed a positive attitude. Keeping one takes work under difficult circumstances. I always viewed the task as taking lemons and making lemonade.

None of us liked this. This strategy worked for me until they finally cut 70% of the Research Labs staff, including most of my clients and many of my fellow analysts. The best an employee can do is to work with your family to design a budget that lets you live below your means, build an emergency fund with at least six month's living expenses, and to save as much as you can each month in a retirement plan. None of these tasks are easy. Few people actually do this because it requires you to say "no" to many of your desires. Those who do find it easier to cope when the shoe finally drops on you...

You might took into Yihui Xie's TinyTex. It is a stripped-down install of critical packages from TexLive. One can install whatever you really need. See https://yihui.org/tinytex/

Have you started or worked in a small business? Margin makes the difference between making payrolll and continued operation or failure/closing. Large corporations also prosper or fail based on margin.

This article sounds much like the view of W. Edwards Deming, who called for the elimination of the annual performance appraisal. His rationale was, "The fact is that the system that people work in and the interaction with people may account for 90 or 95 percent of performance."[1]

[1] https://blog.deming.org/2012/10/dr-deming-called-for-the-eli...