91–97 of 97 posts
IMO, the best solution is probationary hiring (e.g. 3mo contract-to-hire), but that means you have to leave your current job first and then spend the next year bouncing through a number of "temp" jobs until you find a good fit.
Here are some that come to mind: * Professional Software Developer Certification. Software developers do not have an industry recognized certification or accreditation program. Every other professional industry has this. Truck drives have this. Here are some specialized subcategories. - Web Development - Security Remediation - Operating Systems and Systems Automation - Applied Mathematics Applications - Data Manageme…
Truck driving doesn't change a great deal. Software development still changes on an annual basis. As such, it feels to me that certification would go out of date extremely quickly.
Contrarily the bed rock of most web technology standards were solidified 1998-2001 and yet most web developers have no idea how these things work without a mountain of abstraction to do it for them. This indicates speed of change isn't a considerable barrier in that example.
Software development: how to make realistic estimates, and deliver a solution on time.
Only possible if you don't do anything novel. If you are building a website that's got all the same patterns as the previous 5 websites you've built, then you can provide a solid estimate and deliver on time. If you're building something that nobody has ever made before, you've got unknown unknowns, and your best bet is intuition, which is inevitably going to miss the mark a bit.
Mathematics: A generalized solution to n-order partial differential equations. Laplace, Chebyshev, Hamilton, Wave equations, sure, ok, yes. But I mean any n-order partial differential, not the 'lucky' cases. You get that, and you've solved a great deal of the outstanding problems in other fields (hydrodynamics, optics, economics, turbulence). I'm not sure up to date on this, and it may have been proved that a general solution is actually impossible, but I'm not sure.
Physics: Braver grad students. Quantum Gravity is a long was off, we need much bigger machines or a constellation of satellites that use the sky as the particle accelerator. As such, having these brilliant minds labor on obscure portions on some niche interpretation of physics, well, it's useless really. The data will make it all clear as day, whenever the data gets here. Until then, the grad students need to be braver and strike out on their own, leaving the golden age behind. We need them to work on other things. I know that's tough as nails, but I think it's what is needed. Great work has been done in neuroscience by physicists (despite their best efforts :P), and the quants on Wall Street are a meme now. More of that, but in, I dunno, weaving or something.
User Research - What's the best way to deal with loads of qualitative data? There are different approaches but all of them have problems.
I’ve recently started working on documenting (still very, very early) on “measuring” user feedback at https://datadriventeam.org after having 50+ conversations about it with various startup founders/leaders. It is backed by an open source GitHub repo and I hope people would contribute once I’ve gotten the initial version ironed out.
It's definitely an appropriate strategy in a lot of cases. But sometimes it just doesn't capture what matters (e.g. the pure counts of how often an issue comes up =/= the severity of the issues).
To have a better sense of how people feel, you could do thematic analysis. But then you sort of lose the counts. Or you can pick and choose the most important situations and start writing scenarios. I guess my point is that content analysis is just one of many strategies, in the same way that boiling potatoes is just one way to prepare them.
Anyways I'm not trying to put down your work, I think the website could help people feel more at ease with qualitative data. I'd be eager to contribute once you're ready for other contributors. Feel free to send me a message and I'll happily write some stuff up.
Energy simulation: whether a convolution using kernel A on top of a thresholded convolution using kernel B can be represented using just one convolution using kernel C. i.e. with H as Heaviside operator, T the threshold, and * the convolution operator, prove that the following can hold for some kernels A,B,C and signal D: A * H[B * D-T] = C*D
Not C * (D-T)? If the idea is to combine the thresholding and the kernel wouldn't it be easier to start with combining B and T first? E.g. B * D-T = B' * D? Once you have two kernels (no thresholding), combining them is fairly straightforward, I think (assuming no singularities). However, I primarily work with straight convolutions for signal processing, not thresholded convolutions, so maybe I am missing something.…
Combining two kernels is straightforward indeed. You just convolve them together. This is possible because convolution is commutative.
The problem is when the thresholding operation is introduced. This makes the whole thing nonlinear. So far, the best way to calculate it (now I'm talking about 2D convolution) get a derivative form out of the kernel in order to apply Kelvin-Stokes theorem by tracing along the contour of the thresholded convolution.
[1] https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1054165/convolution...