makes it clear that this story is part of a carefully managed PR campaign. Not that that makes it false. But it means we should treat it with extra skepticism.
Well, Gillespie has been working on this for 30+ years. He clearly has an agenda, but "PR campaign" seems harsh. I mean, what's he selling? Movie rights?
I've worked at home for decades. In the beginning when I had small apartments, I used to put a table with my computer on it inside a closet. I'd open up the closet door, pull up a chair, and voila, office.
In those days, monitors were thick, and the web didn't exist. Now that monitors are thinner and computers have become many people's de facto TVs, there would be less advantage in doing this.
I don't think so. Having a degree from CC marks you as from the lower class. Upper level and prestigious positions tend to be filled with people just like those already there. There was a good study on this http://www.asanet.org/journals/ASR/Dec12ASRFeature.pdf
I don’t agree with this speaking from experience in the tech industry, which is the focus of article. I went to CC. I work right along side folks with all kinds of prestigious backgrounds, and we’ve earned eachother’s respect based on performance on the job. My education label hasn’t hurt my ability to get the jobs (or salaries) I’ve wanted, either.
The trend I’ve noticed is that the more senior of a role we interview for the less and less we even look at their education. Much more comes from their work history.
While the study is possibly applicable to the jobs they studied (lawyer / business roles), I’m not sure it holds up in all sectors.
If the last 50 years have taught us anything it's that the middle class will be pushed lower, the lower class will be pushed lower still and the upper class will take all the winnings.
The economy has been a zero sum game for the majority for a very long time, so zero sum game strategies is what they employ.
That was my first thought - companies are just looking for people who consider themselves (or can be embarrassed into thinking of themselves) as “lesser” and are willing to accept lower paychecks in return.
"Elite Professional Service Firms" is not he tech industry. In the tech industry, people can get ahead by doing good engineering work, mostly regardless of background. In "Elite Professional Services", no productive work is being done, just PR and marketing and CYA-management for clients.
I'm having a similar though tangential reaction: is this trend saying something about the four year degree against changing demands for talent? I don't know but if I've long argued that if the Associates degree in the US was valued as something more than just "doorway to a BA/BS", the talent "shortage" (sarcastic quotes intentional) would probably disappear overnight.
"Legacy applicants, or students with a parent who attended Harvard, were accepted to the school at the rate of about 34%, according to data from six admissions cycles analyzed by an economist hired by the group suing the school. That’s compared to an admissions rate of about 6% of non-legacy students, according to an analysis of Harvard data."
And I'm sure some of that is because the children of Harvard graduates tend to be more qualified (in terms of other application criteria) than the general population or applicant pool.
If an additional 1000 2.0 students applied to Harvard next year this number would look even worse. But would the change be meaningful?
That's not to say they don't take legacy into account. But, as presented, those numbers can be misleading.
Some of it also likely occurs because the children of Harvard graduates will have a better idea of what the process is looking for, not least of which because they have an N=1 daa point of a successful application.
Similarly, if you're trying to have a successful interview with a company, it helps to talk to people who have interviewed there before, preferably people who have interviewed there successfully.
(The process may well have other issues that make "legacy" applications more likely, but a higher acceptance rate of such applications doesn't inherently suggest a problem.)
If children of graduates are more qualified _naturally_ then why does Harvard _need_ it to be _policy_ that they take legacy status into account? MIT and Caltech seem to do fine with legacy-blind admissions.
I'm not from the US so don't really know what I'm talking about - but my impressions from this side of the pond are that MIT and Caltech seem to have rather different reputations from Harvard?
Legacy applicants are X% more qualified naturally (well educated parents, etc), and get Y% from the admissions. Given the numbers for Harvard, MIT, etc, there are plenty of qualified applicants for each spot.
I would imagine that both MIT and Caltech have a higher acceptance rate for legacy for this reason. However a side effect of them not keeping track is that we will never have the breakout of those rates.
Than the general population possibly, but not than the applicant pool, which is the comparison that matters.
It seems more likely that in the applicant pool the non-legacy kids would be smarter. Imagine how confident of your ability you'd have to be to apply to Harvard as a random kid from a public high school in Iowa. Whereas if you'd grown up expecting to go there because your parents did, the threshold for applying would be pretty low.
Imagine two RC cars driving in opposite directions on a crumpled up, (virtually) infinitely large blanket with an uncountable number of ripples. The cars' top speeds are 10 MPH. On top of each car is an ant watching the other car.
Both cars start driving off at 10 MPH in opposite directions. From an ant's perspective on top of one car, the other car looks to be going 20 MPH away from it. Then someone starts pulling the blanket underneath the cars from opposite ends at 5 MPH. Now it looks like the other car is going 30 MPH. Now imagine for each ripple on that blanket, another hand appears and starts to pull, and the outer edges are pulled at 5MPH from the reference point of the nearest ripple.
From the perspective of an ant on one end, it can eventually get to the point that the other car is warping off at 100MPH or more. And as this blanket spreads out more and more, things speed up more and more as well. The cars never technically exceed their speed limits of 10 MPH, but the space that they occupy is being pulled apart in a way that they seem to be exceeding 10 MPH from each other's perspectives.
Anything which moves through space-time is restricted to moving at the speed of light. Space-time itself can warp causing objects to "move" away from each other faster than the speed of light.
Think of ants crawling on the surface and a balloon which is being blown up.
Because while matter cannot move faster than the speed of light the universe itself is allowed to expand faster than the speed of light. Think of the spacetime fabric stretching so fast light cannot cover the increased distance. The universe is essentially creating more distance between objects.
Another way to think of it is velocity of an object is derivative of position in space over time. If space itself is moving your position relative to it isn't changing.
I still can't intuitively understand this. If two objects ar stationary relative to each other, the expansion implies that at some point, the distance between those two objects will increase (without either of those objects having moved).
So space is being somehow created?! What if i have a large object, will the length of that object increase? Or will it break up?
The object is bound together by electromagnetic forces, and the local group is bound together by gravity. These forces are much stronger than the expansion of the universe (cosmological constant), but the expansion of the universe manifests as a tiny tiny outward pressure term (too small for us to detect). It makes every atom/orbit a little bigger by changing the equilibrium point, but they don't to grow in size because the force isn't increasing.
If the cosmological constant were much larger than it is, atoms would have never formed at all.
I think you are using a concept of space-time that is quite limited. You are at most using concepts from Einstein's Special Relativity. Everything changed with General Relativity.
Space is not "created", space-time is warped. Gravity is the deformation of space-time by mass/energy. The distance from point A to point B is measured by the time it takes for a light ray to get from A to B using the shortest path. But if you move objects with mass (or with energy) near A and B, the shortest path will change. Also, it's easy to measure distance in seconds when you know the speed of light.
If I understand this correctly, you're talking about something similar to Star Trek's Warp Drive (or the Alcubierre drive, for something less fictional). Instead of stars and galaxies moving at the speed of light, the space around them expands and the expansion accelerates at a rate that will eventually make the speed of expansion larger than the speed of light. Or in other words, stars and galaxies will continue to move at their sub-luminar speed, but the space in which they exist will expand so fast that the expansion will cause the distance between them to increase at such a rate that light will not be able to keep up.
[Edit: and, er, all that has something to do with dark energy?]
OK, but in that case, and if we still exist as a technological civilisation at that time (very doubtful) we might be able to use the effect for our own benefit. By building warp drives and er, not-quite-travelling faster than light, by expanding space around a ship, etc.
Right now the only serious effort to consider how to do so is the Alcubierre metric and its variations. Nobody knows how to build one, or what matrials could build one, or how to turn it on or off. Unless you have a cunning way to cheat, such as making the inside bigger than the outside, it requires in excess of minus the rest mass of the observable universe for a plausible sized object. There are further objections, but above my level.
"We're feeding it to the public in bite-sized chunks."
from a non-paywalled article
https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/dozens-heard-amel...
makes it clear that this story is part of a carefully managed PR campaign. Not that that makes it false. But it means we should treat it with extra skepticism.