Your parents efforts, like many of the the good efforts to move humanity forward over many decades, have been thrown into the trash. The next generations of Americans will have social/educational gaps that CPB/PBS filled for educational, cultural, historical, and sociological reasons; not because they liked influencing little kids ideologically. And the future will suffer for it, as they say, if you don't learn it at home, society foots the bill to correct it.
May I add; the Democrats In Name Only(DINOs) of Manchin, Synema, and others? destroying the slight majorities Democrats seem to put together when ostensibly "in power"... They need to exert more control over the membership, as the Rs do. But I get the impression that the Ds take as many as they can't get, but only to get screwed over later.
The game we have now is you win by the most voters, might as well be the most voters to sit on a scale and weigh more, wins. It is Mob rule. A significant portion of the electorate has no real idea of what is being asked, nor if its true, just that it sounds good. And we will never get good governance out of that.
True, but it does depend on your field. I was fortunate/unfortunate to have my feet in both over the years, and could not afford either early on, when I truly needed access.
In the past I wouldn't go to IEEE for IT and CS, except maybe, possibly for the physical level; that's the ACMs bailiwick. I had the distinct fortunate/unfortunate to be an absolute crossover, but could afford neither exsxcept when in pharma where they staffed their own libraries (from necessity), and paid for access.
I'm truly interested in your thoughts... where would you discover truly hard problems? What do you feel would make you qualified to work on them, over, say someone else? enough to prove it to someone that could authorize such a salary and expenditure of time? Unless you were self-funded, of course. I've always wondered where and how would you discover what the edge of the knowledge and science actually is, and stay ahead of it? That is, to prevent reinventing the wheel and not to waste time? Just wondering as I've understood it by a lot of people over my career lifetime. Thank You.
In academia this is typically accomplished through staying up-to-date with top tier journals and conferences. I would say this is one of the benefits of IEEE--they have quite a few high-quality venues. However, there are also plenty of top-tier venues that are not associated with IEEE.
Unfortunately, they also have plenty of low-quality venues that dilute the discoverability of the high-quality ones. Some orgs (Usenix for instance) hold to at least a decent standard across nearly all their research conferences, so I can better gauge the quality of a paper in a field I'm less familiar with based on whether it was accepted to a conference in that org. When it comes to IEEE, it seems like they'll let any low-quality journal or conference spring up with their brand as long as it brings in the cash.
Exactly; if you wish I replied below. That is exactly the point of staying in such organizations, especially if you wish to be on the edge, and especially if you wish to publish, yourself.
Of course you do; and thats where a lot of the papers are locked up, behind IEEE/ACM/Science/Nature, other journals. I guess that's a huge reason to stay involved, if nothing more to access the different subgroups, both for journals and papers. There is often no other place, in my experience, to access that level of information and knowledge. And especially if you wish to publish, on the edge, yourself.
agreed with your points... as a user of the current ath9k wireless problems, code changes to address security issues completely broke the wireless - for over two kernel releases until people alarmingly realized that noone was coming to help, code changers not even aware it was broken nor checked; that the interfaces were abstract, misunderstood, that even Linus broke in and said that such breakage, regression violated the system, and decided the patches be reverted. Point is, little to no documentation, and in my opinion too much fiat, with shallow testing and confirmation, and only when people howled was noticed. And this is the second time for me where I once spent days bisecting the kernel* over a year or two of changes, finally getting the chip manufacturers involved - ooops, sorry, was the response. *I realize that is my cost as a free OS user, but still, I'm not a developer and they shouldn't be pulling the rug out under us.
6th Grade US, early 70s. We made fake checkbooks, we were given an income, had a small school store to spend it, had to balance checking and savings accounts. Learned about S&P 500 and looking up stocks, only avail. in book form at the time. I cannot fathom why parents don't require more from their schools - oh wait, yes I can - I moved from a city to rural where the hate for intellect(uals), schooling, academics is still palpable and stated, preferring instead comic books, baseball, football, truck cult, farming, hunting days off is prevalent, as stated to me directly.
