Why Some PhDs Are Quitting Academia for Unconventional Jobs
July 24th, 2018“Why did they accept so many of us into this program when there are no jobs?”
The answer is simple:
Universities profit handsomely from graduate student slave labor. It’s a similar model that of prison industries, where convicts are paid pennies per hour to manufacture a wide variety of products. Instead of goat cheese, or clothing, undergrads are the main product output from universities. And there’s a lot of work involved in churning millions of undergrads through the mill every year. Grad students help turn the gears of the machine, at very little cost.
This is not a recent development.
There was an underground newspaper at the university I attended that was distributed in various bathrooms around the campus. In one of the more memorable issues, high tuition fees, grad student conditions, the scam in the University bookstore, etc. were juxtaposed against the cost of the University President’s bathroom remodel and other insane and profligate wastes of money. For the cover of the issue, the ARBEIT MACHT FREI sign from Auschwitz had been photoshopped on to an image of one of the prominent entrances to the campus.
You get the point.
Anyway, this was almost 25 years ago.
Additionally, with regard to why “unconventional jobs” are popular with this demographic, a friend of mine, with a PhD in Cognitive Science, told me that mentioning a PhD on a CV for jobs outside academia indicates to employers that you have been, “Dipped in shit.”
In essence, it indicates that you’re older and have less practical experience than other people applying for the job. While it’s great that three out of the four people in the article below started their own businesses, if you’re trying to get a normal job and you have a PhD, you might want to leave that off your resume.
Via: CBC:
Canadian statistics from 2013 suggest that completion rates among PhD students range from only 50 per cent in the humanities to about 80 per cent in the health sciences. Students leave for many different reasons — the gruelling work, the isolation, the terrible job market.
According to 2011 figures from Statistics Canada, the most recent data available, fewer than one in five people with an earned doctorate have full-time teaching jobs.
Another 20 per cent teach part-time at universities, instruct full- or part-time at colleges, or hold contract-based jobs, according to the Conference Board of Canada.
Face Scanning at NYC Toll Plazas
July 23rd, 2018Via: New York Post:
Big Governor is watching you.
Facial-recognition cameras at bridge and tunnel toll plazas across the city are already scanning drivers’ visages and feeding them into databases to catch suspected criminals, Gov. Andrew Cuomo revealed Friday.
“When it reads that license plate, it reads it for scofflaws .?.?. [but] the toll is almost the least significant contribution that this electronic equipment can actually perform,” Cuomo said at a press conference outside the Queens Midtown Tunnel.
“We are now moving to facial-recognition technology, which takes it to a whole new level, where it can see the face of the person in the car and run that technology against databases.
“Because many times a person will turn their head when they see a security camera, so they are now experimenting with technology that just identifies a person by their ear, believe it or not,” he continued.
Doctors Give Patients 11 Seconds to Explain Reason for Visit Before Interrupting
July 20th, 2018Via: StudyFinds:
Ever feel like your doctor is in a rush to get you out the door when you come in for a visit? You’re not just imagining things. A new study finds physicians give a patient an average of just 11 seconds to describe their issue before cutting them off.
Researchers from the University of Florida determined that for all the waiting we do after we arrive at a medical practitioner’s office, its the doctors who seem to have the least amount of patience. The study showed that just a third of physicians give patients adequate time to explain why they’re there.
Now Is The Time to Be a Cockroach
July 20th, 2018I definitely wouldn’t count on banks and cash, as she suggests, but this is an OK article to share with your “normal” family and friends who might perceive the current economic situation as A-OK.
Once people understand that things are not A-OK, that would be a good time to explain what a bail-in is.
Via: Erica Douglas:
We are, right now, in a state of economic expansion that has lasted for 10 years. Having lived through two major downturns (2001 and 2008) as an adult, I’ve trained myself to recognize the top of the market. And though I may be wrong, I feel confident in saying we are at the top right now.
That does not mean the economy will not continue to expand. “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent,” John Maynard Keynes wisely said. Timing the market is extraordinarily difficult.
I closely watched the financial news during the last two economic expansions and contractions, and for the last 3 months I’ve seen the same indicators I saw at the top of those two expansions.
So, if we’re not at the top, the markets will certainly only get more irrational and frothy from here.
Why do I mention all of these economic indicators? Because now is the time for you to start being a cockroach.
You should irrationally focus on profitability and putting as much money into the bank (liquid cash) as possible right now. And from a personal level, you should be focused on paying down debt, not taking on new debt, and stacking as much cash as you possibly can. Get money now while the economy is at the top.
As much as you can given your time and health, take on paying gigs now. Then put that cash in the bank and keep it there. You will need it when the economy tanks, whether that’s later this year, next year, or 2-3 years from now.
New Way to Recycle Lithium-Ion Batteries
July 20th, 2018Cobalt has been a very well known choke-point in lithium based energy storage systems for many years. Tesla, for example, has been reducing its dependence on cobalt and will go cobalt free for its next generation of cells. Although, what that means, in terms of an ETA, isn’t clear. The point is that the largest manufacturer of lithium ion batteries in the world is phasing out the use of cobalt entirely.
My guess is that other companies are looking at alternatives as well.
Via: Los Angeles Times:
The promise of a global electric-vehicle transformation has a looming problem.
The cathodes in the lithium-ion batteries typically used in electric vehicles are made of metal oxides that contain cobalt, a metal found in finite supplies and concentrated in one of the globe’s more precarious countries.
But an assistant professor at UC San Diego says he has developed a way to recycle used cathodes from spent lithium-ion batteries and restore to perform as well as they did when new.
“Yes, it can work effectively,” said Zheng Chen, a 31-year-old who works as a nanoengineer at the Sustainable Power and Energy Center at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering.
The method also works on lithium cobalt oxide, which is widely used in electronic devices such as smartphones and laptops.
…
The process takes degraded particles from the cathodes found in a used lithium-ion battery. The particles are then pressurized in a hot alkaline solution that contains lithium salt. Later, the particles go through a short heat-treating process called annealing, in which temperatures reach more than 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit.
After cooling, Chen’s team takes the regenerated particles and makes new cathodes. They then test the cathodes in batteries made in the lab.
The results, Chen said, have been impressive.
The new cathodes have been able to maintain the same charging time, storage capacity and battery lifetime as the originals did.
“Originally I thought we couldn’t get all this performance back, that we would lose 10% or 20%,” Chen said. “But it turns out we’re getting exactly the same performance.”
Details of the recycling method were recently published in the research journal Green Chemistry, submitted by Chen and two colleagues.
Waymo’s Autonomous Vehicles Are Driving 25,000 Miles Every Day
July 20th, 2018Via: TechCrunch:
Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet, has driven 8 million miles on public roads using its autonomous vehicles.
Waymo CEO John Krafcik shared the company’s milestone Friday while onstage with Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval at the National Governors Association conference in Santa Fe, N.M. The figure is notable when compared to where Waymo was less than a year ago. In November, the company announced it had reached 4 million miles, meaning the company has been able to double the number of autonomous miles driven on public roads in just eight months.
Waymo’s fleet of self-driving vehicles are now logging 25,000 miles every day on public roads, Krafcik said. He later tweeted out the stats along with a graphic. Waymo has 600 self-driving Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans on the road in 25 cities.
Find the Best Second Passport for You
July 20th, 2018Via: multinational.io:
Best second passport for you based on your current nationality – sorted by increase in ease of travel/quality of life etc.
U.S. Special Forces: 133 Countries Down, 17 to Go?
July 19th, 2018Via: Tom Dispatch:
None of this should be surprising, since in Africa and across the rest of the planet America’s Special Operations forces (SOF) are regularly engaged in a wide-ranging set of missions including special reconnaissance and small-scale offensive actions, unconventional warfare, counterterrorism, hostage rescue, and security force assistance (that is, organizing, training, equipping, and advising foreign troops). And every day, almost everywhere, U.S. commandos are involved in various kinds of training.
Unless they end in disaster, most missions remain in the shadows, unknown to all but a few Americans. And yet last year alone, U.S. commandos deployed to 149 countries — about 75% of the nations on the planet. At the halfway mark of this year, according to figures provided to TomDispatch by U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM or SOCOM), America’s most elite troops have already carried out missions in 133 countries. That’s nearly as many deployments as occurred during the last year of the Obama administration and more than double those of the final days of George W. Bush’s White House.
Putin Claimed Associates of Financier William F. Browder Funneled $400 Million to Clinton Campaign [???]
July 19th, 2018Update: Putin Now Says the Amount Was $400,000
Via: The Intercept:
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, dashed the hopes of conspiracy theorists across America on Tuesday by withdrawing the startling claim he made the day before in Helsinki, that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had received $400 million in donations from investors accused of tax evasion in Russia.
What he had intended to say, according to a Russian government spokesperson, was that business associates of the U.S.-born investor William Browder had donated $400,000 to Clinton’s campaign. (According to public campaign finance records, that figure also appears to be inflated.)
Alexander Kurennoi, a spokesperson for Russia’s prosecutor general, told reporters that Putin stood by his demand that the United States should make Browder, and a number of former American diplomats and intelligence officers described as his accomplices in a criminal plot, available for questioning.
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Via: NPR:
For instance, we can bring up Mr. Browder in this particular case. Business associates of Mr. Browder have earned over one and a half billion dollars in Russia. They never paid any taxes, neither in Russia nor in the United States and yet the money escaped the country, they were transferred to the United States.
They sent a huge amount of money – 400 million – as a contribution to the campaign of Hillary Clinton.
Well, that’s their personal case, it might have been legal, the contribution itself, but the way the money was earned was illegal.
So we have a solid reason to believe that some intelligence officers accompanied and guided these transactions. So we have an interest of questioning them. That could be a first step and we can also extend it. Options abound.
Pentagon Sees Quantum Computing as Key Weapon for War in Space
July 19th, 2018Disclosure: I am long Quantum Resistant Ledger (QRL).
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I had not heard of quantum technologies being applied to inertial navigation systems before.
Check out this 2014 piece from New Scientist:
IN 2016 a British submarine will slip its moorings and set sail under the guidance of the quantum world. The navigation system it will be testing should record the vessel’s position with 1000 times more accuracy than anything before.
If successful, the system, known as quantum positioning, could be miniaturised for use in aircraft, trains, cars and even cellphones. This would provide a backup navigation tool in cities’ concrete canyons, or in autonomous vehicles, where a loss of GPS signal can be dangerous.
GPS doesn’t work underwater, so submarines navigate using accelerometers to register every twist and turn of a vessel after it submerges and loses its last positioning fix. But this isn’t very accurate.
“Today, if a submarine goes a day without a GPS fix we’ll have a navigation drift of the order of a kilometre when it surfaces,” says Neil Stansfield at the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at Porton Down. “A quantum accelerometer will reduce that to just 1 metre.”
To create the supersensitive quantum accelerometers, Stansfield’s team was inspired by the Nobel-prizewinning discovery that lasers can trap and cool a cloud of atoms placed in a vacuum to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Once chilled, the atoms achieve a quantum state that is easily perturbed by an outside force – and another laser beam can then be used to track them. This looks out for any changes caused by a perturbation, which are then used to calculate the size of the outside force.
The DSTL team wants this set-up to be usable in the real-world setting of a submarine, where the size of the force would correspond to the movements as the sub swings around in the sea.
And more recently: ‘Quantum radio’ may aid communications and mapping indoors, underground and underwater.
Via: SpaceNews:
Top Pentagon official Michael Griffin sat down a few weeks ago with Air Force scientists at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio to discuss the future of quantum computing in the U.S. military. Griffin, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, has listed quantum computers and related applications among the Pentagon’s must-do R&D investments.
Quantum computing is one area where the Pentagon worries that it is playing catchup while China continues to leap ahead. The technology is being developed for many civilian applications and the military sees it as potentially game-changing for information and space warfare.
…
Artificial intelligence algorithms, highly secure encryption for communications satellites and accurate navigation that does not require GPS signals are some of the most coveted capabilities that would be aided by quantum computing.
…
Quantum clocks are viewed as a viable alternative to GPS in scenarios that require perfect synchronization across multiple weapons systems and aircraft, for example, said Hayduk. “We’re looking at GPS-like precision in denied environments,” he said. “It often takes several updates to GPS throughout the day to synchronize platforms. We want to be able to move past that so if we are in a denied environment we can still stay synchronized.”
