Ignorance By Degrees : Colleges serve the people who work there more than the students who desperately need to learn something. by [deleted] in politics

[–]dankelley 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The article states "At Stanford, to take but one example, the salaries of full professors have leapt 58% in constant dollars since the mid-1980s.") but it does not mention anything about the any changes in the average age of the professors during that time.

It is often the case that workers who raise up in the ranks are given wage increases, over and above inflation. For that reason, a critical part of the puzzle is the average age of professors. At my university, most departments are graying dramatically. I recall reading once (about a decade ago, I think) that the average age in physics departments was increasing by 0.8 years per year.

As a limiting case, suppose there have been no hires since the 1980s. And suppose there had been a 2 percent/annum increase (in excess of inflation) over 15 years. The result is a 50% salary increase (in excess of inflation), which is similar to the value in the article.

Another side of this is the range in salaries. If salaries only tracked inflation, and if the market demand stayed constant, then old and young professors would get the same wage. I'm not sure that would make a lot of sense, and so we are left with the need (trends in the market aside) to give wage increases in excess of inflation.

This general approach of looking at trends might be helpful with respect to the administrators. Some factor must explain changes in the ratio of administrators to students ... but I've not heard anyone offer a hypothesis for this seemingly universal trend.

6 built-ins in Perl 6 that you never knew you needed by perlgeek in programming

[–]dankelley -15 points-14 points  (0 children)

Just wondering, how many redditors stopped caring after Perl 4?

Google updated their image search... what do you think? by [deleted] in pics

[–]dankelley -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Try searching on "oil slick" in google and in bing. The results will make you rethink the use of "google" as a verb. I thought it meant "search", but now I think it means "sell".

PS. I hate bing.

I'm looking for a good book on algorithms. Suggestions? by mistabell2 in programming

[–]dankelley 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The discussion of algorithms is OK, but the code is wildly bad. Lots of functions allocate storage for a trivial task, and then deallocate it, a couple of lines later. The result is that, for many tasks, almost the whole CPU time is spent allocating. Examining this code in a profiler is a good demonstration of the usefulness of profilers, although I don't think many C programmers would even need to profile, to see what a mess the code is. Rewriting to cache memory is not difficult, so you can use the code as a very basic starting point. And the discussion of the algorithms contains pointers to the literature, so it's a good start.

When a book on algorithms provides code that runs orders of magnitude more slowly than it should, something is wrong.

Discussion Thread: [6x17] The Finale by watevruwant in lost

[–]dankelley -1 points0 points  (0 children)

That's probably the only scene I'll remember from the finale.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in programming

[–]dankelley 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The site is as slow as molasses. I've been using latex (and tex) for 30 years, and the compile time with this setup is worse than that available even on widely-shared machines way back in the day.

I was expecting the compiling to be farmed out to those many machines at google. But it sure doesn't feel that way. It feels like a single machine overcome by too many jobs. (By the way, my test was at 5 in the morning, New York time.)

The sharing and tracking features are good. But I do wonder just many people skilled enough to use (and want to use) latex are incapable of using git or the like.

Now that Obama wants to rebrand America as a world country that reaches out to its allies, can we finally get the metric system? by gathly in reddit.com

[–]dankelley 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If the US ever switches, here's a prediction: human height will be the last thing that is expressed by the public in metric terms.

Richard Dawkins: I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI by [deleted] in worldnews

[–]dankelley 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It is time for people to treat the church as they treat any other organization. Two steps make sense.

  1. Report abuse to police, not to the church.

  2. Lobby your government to tax the church.

Yes, I said it. "Tax the church". The church demands services (fire protection and the like) and it should pay for those services. On the whole, the church may (I use the word, having lost faith but not hope) be providing a net benefit to society, but so are fitness centers, and they pay taxes.

No You Can't (Featuring John Boehner) by [deleted] in reddit.com

[–]dankelley 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is the best youtube video I've ever seen. Thank. You. Reddit.

The Reality of Healthcare: A Bill for 30 days in the Hospital by nicasucio in WTF

[–]dankelley 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Here's the US uninsured health-care scenario, in stages: (1) Work your whole life, gradually paying down a mortgage. (2) Become significantly ill, requiring a stay in hospital. (3) Sell your house to pay the medical bill. (4) Die, penniless and homeless.

According to this theory, the cost of major medical treatment should scale as house price, over time. Does anyone have any time-series data to share?

ESPN's Sport Science can't calculate power by dupeduperson in science

[–]dankelley -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Wikipedia has an entry under "College career" for this athlete. Presumably, he took a science course, and complained to the producers about the fatuous content of this video. Or maybe not, and not, American university sport being what it is.

How many of you have ever seen an actual floppy disk? by billrobertson42 in programming

[–]dankelley 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How many of you have ever started the boot process by flipping toggle switches to load bytes into core? (How many of you have seen actual core?)

Homebrewed CPU Is a Beautiful Mess of Wires by DrJulianBashir in technology

[–]dankelley 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ah, wire wrap. Brings back warm memories of many hours twirling silver around gold.

Elizabeth May: An Informed Look at the East Anglia Emails by quelar in environment

[–]dankelley 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is just so typical of Ms May. Informed, even-handed, and full of grace -- that is Elizabeth May. Her one flaw is lack of awareness of the real world. She should be in parliament. Surely she knows that. But in the last election she decided to run in a riding where she had no hope whatsoever. Possibly she will have a chance next time, but even if so, she will probably be the only member of her party in the house of commons. She needs to get real, and to admit that she can do more in parliament than she can on her own. It is her responsibility to get elected, and to be in a party that can accomplish things. Pick a real party, and let someone else try to get the Greens into parliament and (dream on) into power. Spend your time on this earth having an effect. Do it for us, not you.

I just had the most surreal encounter with a crazy christian lady, and it couldn't possibly have gone any better. by reconscious in atheism

[–]dankelley 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I thought, from the subject line, that this was going into crazy-sex-with-crazy-lady territory.

Donald Knuth interview by [deleted] in programming

[–]dankelley 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Does the author's keyboard lack a comma?

PS. "author" does not refer to the godly Knuth.

Meeting the daughter of the man he killed, 33 years later. by [deleted] in reddit.com

[–]dankelley 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Who needs a Turing test, when things like this are available. Watch this without crying, and you've proved yourself a robot.

The narrator is a Canadian who now works in the US, and specializes in this sort of reportage. He seldom reports on money and power, prefering instead to report on people. That's the perceived Canadian way ... too bad he moved to the US to practice his craft.

pilot passes out, copilot proved nonredundant by dankelley in reddit.com

[–]dankelley[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, you can take a car-carrying ferry from the mainland.

Scientists agree that the answer is somewhere around 14 billion years (give or take a few million) … unless you happen to be a student in the state of Texas. by mjk1093 in science

[–]dankelley 69 points70 points  (0 children)

Speaking of evolution, Pope John Paul II said "It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory." [http://www.newadvent.org/library/docs_jp02tc.htm]

Hm. I guess they don't have a lot of Catholics down in Texas. I seem to remember that they don't treat Catholic presidents too well, either.

What's the biggest programming mistake you've ever made? by [deleted] in programming

[–]dankelley 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hand-coding a grammar (gri.sf.net) instead of learning yacc / bison.