Innovation is about finding a better way of doing something. Like many of the new development buzzwords (which many of them are over-used on many business documents), the concept of innovation originates from the world of business. It refers to the generation of new products through the process of creative entrepreneurship, putting it into production, and diffusing it more widely through increased sales. Innovation can be viewed as t he application of better solutions that meet new requirements, in-articulated needs, or existing market needs. This is accomplished through more effective products, processes, services, technologies, or ideas that are readily available to markets, governments and society. The term innovation can be defined as something original and, as a consequence, new, that “breaks into” the market or society.
Innoveracy: Misunderstanding Innovation article points out that there is a form of ignorance which seems to be universal: the inability to understand the concept and role of innovation. The way this is exhibited is in the misuse of the term and the inability to discern the difference between novelty, creation, invention and innovation. The result is a failure to understand the causes of success and failure in business and hence the conditions that lead to economic growth. The definition of innovation is easy to find but it seems to be hard to understand. Here is a simple taxonomy of related activities that put innovation in context:
- Novelty: Something new
- Creation: Something new and valuable
- Invention: Something new, having potential value through utility
- Innovation: Something new and uniquely useful
The taxonomy is illustrated with the following diagram.
The differences are also evident in the mechanisms that exist to protect the works: Novelties are usually not protectable, Creations are protected by copyright or trademark, Inventions can be protected for a limited time through patents (or kept secret) and Innovations can be protected through market competition but are not defensible through legal means.
Innovation is a lot of talked about nowdays as essential to businesses to do. Is innovation essential for development work? article tells that innovation has become central to the way development organisations go about their work. In November 2011, Bill Gates told the G20 that innovation was the key to development. Donors increasingly stress innovation as a key condition for funding, and many civil society organisations emphasise that innovation is central to the work they do.
Some innovation ideas are pretty simple, and some are much more complicated and even sound crazy when heard first. The is place for crazy sounding ideas: venture capitalists are gravely concerned that the tech startups they’re investing in just aren’t crazy enough:
Not all development problems require new solutions, sometimes you just need to use old things in a slightly new way. Development innovations may involve devising technology (such as a nanotech water treatment kit), creating a new approach (such as microfinance), finding a better way of delivering public services (such as one-stop egovernment service centres), identifying ways of working with communities (such as participation), or generating a management technique (such as organisation learning).
Theorists of innovation identify innovation itself as a brief moment of creativity, to be followed by the main routine work of producing and selling the innovation. When it comes to development, things are more complicated. Innovation needs to be viewed as tool, not master. Innovation is a process, not a one time event. Genuine innovation is valuable but rare.
There are many views on the innovation and innvation process. I try to collect together there some views I have found on-line. Hopefully they help you more than confuze. Managing complexity and reducing risk article has this drawing which I think pretty well describes innovation as done in product development:
8 essential practices of successful innovation from The Innovator’s Way shows essential practices in innovation process. Those practices are all integrated into a non-sequential, coherent whole and style in the person of the innovator.
In the IT work there is lots of work where a little thinking can be a source of innovation. Automating IT processes can be a huge time saver or it can fail depending on situation. XKCD comic strip Automation as illustrates this:
System integration is a critical element in project design article has an interesting project cost influence graphic. The recommendation is to involve a system integrator early in project design to help ensure high-quality projects that satisfy project requirements. Of course this article tries to market system integration services, but has also valid points to consider.
Core Contributor Loop (CTTDC) from Art Journal blog posting Blog Is The New Black tries to link inventing an idea to theory of entrepreneurship. It is essential to tune the engine by making improvements in product, marketing, code, design and operations.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
It Doesn’t Matter That Americans Are Scared of New Technology
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/it-doesnt-matter-that-americans-are-scared-of-new-technology?trk_source=recommended
It seems crazy now, but when railroads were first introduced, people were scared to ride on them. They were outright hostile towards the technology. Thinking about that seems especially relevant now, given the results of a PEW poll about future technology released yesterday: 59 percent of Americans think that technological changes will “lead to a future where people’s lives are mostly better.” But drilling down further into the numbers, Americans are distrustful of commercial drones, lab-grown meat, genetic engineering, body hacking, and driverless cars.
So, what, exactly, is everyone so excited for?
Surely iterative changes such as better battery life, higher resolution cell phone screens, and faster processors aren’t going to fundamentally change our lives the way an invention like the computer, train, internet, and cell phone have. Yet, here we are, saying we like the idea of new technology yet rejecting the types of truly game-changing breakthroughs that are on the horizon.
“I’m not impressed that this tells us very much how people will respond in a real case,” Moreno said. “If you go back and look at historical change, people were terrified of horse and carriages, they were shocked you could go 10 miles per hour on a train. But then, once you get them on it, we got very comfortable going from 10-40 miles an hour.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Spec Dilemma
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1324803&
Specifying a product may seem straightforward, but is it really?
All measured data comes from testing under certain conditions. If you vary the conditions, the specs can either be much better or much worse.
Why can that be a problem? It’s not practical for manufacturers to provide performance data for every conceivable set of test conditions. Thus manufacturers often provide typical performance characteristics along with maximum or worst-case performance characteristics. The typical conditions are usually chosen to be those that the user is most likely to experience when using the device.
Engineers are always surprised to see that a 24-bit ADC in a system will have effectively 14 or 15 bits of accuracy. And getting 15 bits of ENOB is excellent. Factors such as sampling speed, full scale range, temperature, etc., can change these results.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Corporate America Is Using the Sharing Economy to Turn Us Into Temps
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120378/wonolo-temp-worker-app-shows-scary-future-sharing-economy
The last few years have brought an explosion of startups, like Uber and TaskRabbit, that effectively act as middlemen. These companies don’t actually employ the workers who ferry passengers around town or assemble strangers’ Ikea furniture. Their online platforms merely connect people who want to provide these services with people who want to pay for them. As a result, the Ubers and TaskRabbits of the world don’t have to provide most of the benefits we normally associate with fulltime employment, like health insurance and a living wage, or even stable work.
retty much the only consolation is that the Uber model only really affects small-time operators who can be easily paired with individual customers—the cab driver or the handyman. There’s no Uber for people who toil away in larger companies, which is, after all, where most of us work.
Um, well, until now. Over the last year or so, a handful of startups have begun helping companies find workers to complete their odd jobs, too.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Workers On Autism Spectrum Finding Careers In Software TestingWorkers On Autism Spectrum Finding Careers In Software Testing
http://it.slashdot.org/story/14/12/01/1958230/workers-on-autism-spectrum-finding-careers-in-software-testing
According to Autism Speaks, about 85% of people who have autism in the United States are currently unemployed or underemployed, but a social enterprise organization called Meticulon is training autistic individuals for highly skilled jobs in software testing. According to Meticulon, autistic people often possess sharp memory and pattern matching skills as well as attention to detail, making them ideal candidates for software testing jobs.
Finding a fit for autism in testing
http://sdtimes.com/autistic-advantage-software-testing/
Intense focus, sharp memory and pattern recognition are some of the traits that a great software tester has to have. It so happens that those traits are prominent in individuals on the autism spectrum.
Autism is a term used to describe complex disorders of brain development, and a person with autism often experiences difficulties with social interaction, communications and imagination. But they also often shine in areas of visual skills, music, math and art, according to the advocacy organization Autism Speaks.
There are many talents a person with autism can bring to the workforce, but they often have difficulty landing jobs. According to Autism Speaks, about 85% of people who have autism in the United States are currently unemployed or underemployed.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ask Slashdot: Non-Coders, Why Aren’t You Contributing To Open Source?
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/14/12/02/007206/ask-slashdot-non-coders-why-arent-you-contributing-to-open-source
Most everyone is using an open source tool somewhere in their workflow, but relatively few are contributing back their time to sustaining the projects they use. But these days, there are plenty of ways to contribute to an open source project without submitting code.
8 ways to contribute to open source without writing code
https://opensource.com/business/14/12/8-ways-contribute-open-source-without-writing-code
Talking to developers and reading about open source I often get the feeling that the general notion is that open source is just about code and commits. Put another way, “If you don’t make commits for a project you are not contributing to it.” Or so they say. That notion is far from the truth in my eyes. Let me tell you why.
Sure, code is what ultimately ships and has a direct impact on the users of an open source project, so yes commits and code are important. But it’s by no means the only way you may contribute to a project. Projects mostly are a whole ecosystem, which is about more than just code.
Here are a couple of other ways you may contribute to a project.
Report issues
Write documentation
Improve the website
Offer to help with art/design
Trying out preview versions
Weigh in on discussions
Answer questions
Give a presentation about a project
If you already have done any of the above: thank you! You contributed to open source. Keep doing that if you like, if not give it a shot.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How to get started with contributing to open source
http://pragtob.wordpress.com/2014/01/13/how-to-get-started-with-contributing-to-open-source/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Now we need to lead in it that you do not understand anything
In recent years, I have begun to look at a slightly different angle. In summary, we could say that we live in a time where no longer be able to understand different points of view.
If you already have a home high-speed Internet, high-definition television (or even UHD), cellular phone, Netflix, Spotify, etc., You still would like to see more?
For many people it is very difficult to conceive that, after this will be much, much more.
This guess has always been throughout history. The writer Arthur C. Clarke said that “enough advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
The pace of change is accelerating all the time. We are reaching the point where the pace of change is no longer attached to the engineers to produce technological innovation but only to the imagination of the people to use technology.
Each project can therefore be a pioneer.
How does a project manager will ensure that you no longer an obstacle, if someone proposes something that you will not even be able to understand?
How someone came up with Uber – billion-dollar business, which is based on only one application, which you can download on your phone? In Europe it is clearly not invented, because here the resistance to change service point is hard.
The project manager is an obstacle to change, if he does not understand the potential of the digital revolution. The same otherwise applies to everyone, whether you are the CEO or a member of the project.
The pace is accelerating, cycles faster. Imagination and business models are key. R & D department engineers no longer have a monopoly on innovation-making.
If, therefore, invented a good story, and it has business value, its implementation is nothing more than an obstacle to the digital era version of the change in resistance. Technology is no longer an obstacle. The only obstacle is the lack of understanding of what the technology can do.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/viisaat/accenture/nyt+pitaa+johtaa+sellaista+mista+ei+ymmarra+mitaan/a1032932
Tomi Engdahl says:
It is having a measurable chilling effect on freedom of expression, and no society that exists under pervasive surveillance can claim to enjoy basic liberty, because it deadens innovation and culture.
Source: https://medium.com/backchannel/when-journalists-must-not-be-objective-fad5aadd8cb3
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Well Can You Work With Others?
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1324832&
Many of today’s EDA tools allow multiple people to work on a design simultaneously. Have you ever used a collaborative approach to design anything? How successful was it?
I recently reviewed a new electronic CAD package named Upverter for a Canadian magazine. This product is a paradigm shift away from classical CAD packages in that it is entirely web-based. There are no upfront costs or annual maintenance charges — just a simple monthly fee. Several other aspects also differentiated it from the pack. The thing that struck me most about this product was that it allowed for multiple people to work on the same design simultaneously.
My first impression was overwhelmingly negative. “A solution looking for a problem,” I thought.
And surely I would hate to have someone looking over my shoulder, especially if he or she could “mouse out” at any time and change what I had done.
I was discussing joint editing in general with my son and a couple of his friends, all in their early 30s. They roundly criticized my negative viewpoint. Not only did they think joint editing was a good idea, but they also described two other products that allowed the same thing and which they were using in just that way. One was a rival to PowerPoint called Prezi; the other was Google Docs.
Two designers could be working on different aspects of the same design simultaneously.
I’m just “brain-stem-storming” here, but would you consider this approach for a senior designer and several junior ones as a means of helping the juniors learn their craft? Would it speed up the process, or would it simply tie the senior engineer up, preventing him or her from performing more productive things?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Give nerds their own PRIVATE TRAIN CARRIAGES, say boffins
The Thinkfluencers’ Express will depart from platform 94 5/4…
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/03/all_aboard_the_nerd_carriage/
Anyone who has ever commuted on a train in the south east of England will have at some point considered ways to improve the service – such as, say, introducing actual cattle trucks onto the network for more luxurious travel.
But tech enthusiasts from Cambridge have another idea entirely. What about a designated nerd carriage to act as a mobile “hub” for techies and entrepreneurs?
The report, How to make the most of UK Innovation, a “freewheeling contribution” from a number of Cambridge-based entrepreneurs and tech investors makes this very suggestion.
“Hubs don’t need to be in fixed places: let’s have special carriages on trains designated as informal meeting places,” it enthuses.
The authors want to connect Oxford and Cambridge via Kings Cross to create a “mega hub”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Social media data is RIDDLED with human behaviour errors, boffins warn
Trick-cyclists peddling BS about our online lives. Who knew?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/30/social_media_data_is_riddled_with_human_behaviour_errors_boffins_warn/
Researchers who heavily rely on social media data when studying human behaviour have been warned that such information can be very easily skewed.
Computer scientists at McGill University in Montreal and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh said in a paper published yesterday in the Science magazine that trick-cyclists were failing to spot the flaws in the data.
And yet, in recent years, there has been an explosion of studies on human behaviour using social media as a barometer for all kinds of predictions about the world we live in now.
“Many of these papers are used to inform and justify decisions and investments among the public and in industry and government,”
Despite the blindingly obvious weaknesses found in such data, Ruths remained optimistic about researchers using social media in their studies, if they tackle the problems outlined by the prof and his colleagues.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dropbox Steps Up to Rescue Us From Corporate Software
http://www.wired.com/2014/12/dropbox-steps-rescue-us-corporate-software/
Dropbox is going corporate.
On Wednesday, the file-syncing startup launched an application programming interface, or API, that lets outside developers build software on top of its Dropbox for Business service. That may sound like a jumble of tech speak, but it could be very useful to businesses, and ultimately, it represents a kind of finale to a decades-long contest: consumer technology has now emerged triumphant over corporate IT as the way to get work done.
Whether it’s Gmail at work or Apple partnering with IBM to bring iPhones into the office, workers are more and more the ones bringing new software and hardware into the workplace, not sales teams. This hasn’t come without difficulty, as companies struggle to balance the best tool for the job with the tools they can control. But the momentum appears to be irresistible, and the path of Dropbox from consumer convenience to corporate necessity is typical.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The pace of change has never been greater in enterprise communications and collaboration. A new set of capabilities, empowered by the combination of Mobility, the Cloud, Video, software architectures and Unified Communications, is changing expectations for what IT can deliver. The phrase “Communications Transforming Business” is becoming the new normal.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Stop Wasting Everyone’s Time
Meetings and Emails Kill Hours, but You Can Identify the Worst Offenders
http://online.wsj.com/articles/how-to-stop-wasting-colleagues-time-1417562658?mod=trending_now_5
At the end of the day, many people wonder where all their time went.
New data-mining tools are helping employers answer that question. The causes of overload have long been suspected—email and meetings—but new techniques that analyze employees’ email headers and online calendars are helping employers pinpoint exactly which work groups impose the most on employees’ time.
Seagate has since reduced meetings and cut back on its dealings with the time-draining consulting firm. “You improve what you measure,” Ms. Motsinger says.
VoloMetrix’s software draws data from employees’ email headers and calendars to show whether, how, and how often groups are interacting
“A small handful of people are really off the charts,”
Common time-wasting habits include copying too many people into emails and overuse of “reply all.” Inviting too many people to meetings is another common mistake
On email, many employees spend a lot of time writing responses
Trying to collaborate via email poses challenges, too.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Standardized tests versus creativity
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/rowe-s-and-columns/4437799/Standardized-tests-versus-creativity?elq=605f1356b5d54ab7a5473aa936a23355&elqCampaignId=20480
We’ve heard it time and time again: the world needs more young people to study engineering. Some people claim that it’s the “geek” reputation attached to engineers that drives them away. Others say it’s the “look to your left, look to your right” attitude at some engineering schools. Others blame the high schools for not doing enough to encourage students to study engineering or science. We also hear that engineering students should exercise problem solving rather than studying facts. Why do students study facts? Could part of the problem come from standardized tests?
A recent Boston Globe article cites one of the problems with standardized tests. School systems try to fill their students with the facts they need to pass.
As a general rule—at least here in Mass.—teachers in underperforming school districts are more likely to “teach to the test” in an effort to show how well they’re doing. But, some high-performing schools may also teach to the MCAS tests just to make the principal look good. Where do you draw the line between the need for testing as a measure of success and testing too much? Does emphasis on testing diminish our ability to think once we’re out of school?
Mass. wonders whether students being overtested
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/11/08/mass-wonders-whether-students-being-overtested/jZpConK32gDAdroaS30lyI/story.html
Teachers statewide complain that, like the headmaster’s demands for facts and little else, preparation for the dizzying array of standardized tests can easily consume about a month of schooling and leave little time for creative projects. Some schools administer assessments every six weeks to ensure classes are on track to pass the MCAS, a burden that stresses students to tears and even nausea.
But the proliferation of tests has sparked concern that the exams may have grown excessive.
“It’s assessment gone wild,” said Matthew Malone, the state’s education secretary. “Everywhere we go to talk to teachers, administrators, and parents the consensus is we test too much. I think we need to find a better balance.”
“America has always been a place where people think deeply about issues and [are urged] not to give a pat answer,” said Dolores Wood, the English teacher who invoked Dickens to illustrate her critique. “Now we are being boxed in by these tests and not [allowed] to think outside of these boxes. This is what we are training kids to do.”
Teachers, parents, and school administrators have been raising concerns about testing since the 1990s
The growing role of testing has redefined the atmosphere and conversation in many schools. Some principals have created “data walls” to plot the progress of each student and classroom, conjuring up images of MCAS war rooms. Holyoke teachers and parents protested data walls earlier this year.
Similarly, teachers in suburban schools complain that in-depth projects, field trips, and other memorable learning opportunities get pushed aside.
“I really think we are throwing a lot at them at a young age,” said Wendy Hasson, a fifth-grade teacher in Taunton. “We need to get back to why we educate and what we hope for our children.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Programmer Father Asks: What Gets Little Girls Interested In Science?
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/14/12/04/0149236/programmer-father-asks-what-gets-little-girls-interested-in-science
Programmer David Auerbach is dismayed that, at a critical developmental age, his 4-year-old daughter wants to be a princess, not a scientist or engineer, he writes in Slate. The larger society keeps forcing sexist stereotypes on her, in every book and toy store.
The Princess Trap
Our daughter is getting into dolls and dress-up. What are programmer parents to do?
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/12/women_in_tech_and_the_sciences_how_to_make_sure_your_daughter_knows_she.single.html
Getting more women into science and technology fields: Where’s the silver bullet? While I might get more hits by revealing the One Simple Trick to increase female participation in the sciences, the truth is there isn’t some key inflection point where young women’s involvement drops off. Instead, there is a series of small- to medium-sized discouraging factors that set in from a young age, ranging from unhelpful social conditioning to a lack of role models to unconscious bias to very conscious bias. Any and all of these can figure into why, for example, women tend to underrate their technical abilities relative to men. I know plenty of successful women in the sciences, but let’s not fool ourselves and say the playing field in the academic sciences or the tech world is even. My wife attributes her pursuit of programming to being a loner and pretty much ignoring wider society while growing up: “Being left alone with a computer (with NO INTERNET TO TELL ME WHAT I COULDN’T DO) was the deciding factor,” she tells me.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Future of Popular Coding Tool In Doubt After Public Split
http://www.wired.com/2014/12/io-js/
Node.js, a popular and influential tool for building and running modern internet services, has split in two.
Late yesterday, some of its primary developers “forked” this open source project, creating a new version of the tool they call Io.js. The group was unhappy with the stewardship of Node’s official sponsor, cloud computing company Joyent, so they’ve chosen to fashion a new version on their own.
“We don’t want to have just one person who’s appointed by a company making decisions,” says Mikeal Rogers, a Node community organizer involved in the fork. “We want contributors to have more control, to seek consensus.”
The split highlights the tensions that often exist between the corporate sponsor of an open source project and the many other coders and businesses who use it and help build it. Docker, the company behind a new approach to cloud computing that has exploded in popularity in the past year and half, is in a similar boat
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lev Grossman / TIME:
Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to wire the world and put every single human being online
http://time.com/facebook-world-plan/
The story of Facebook’s first decade was one of relentless, rapacious growth, from a dorm-room side project to a global service with 8,000 employees and 1.35 billion users, on whose unprotesting backs Zuckerberg has built an advertising engine that generated $7.87 billion last year, a billion and a half of it profit. Lately, Zuckerberg has been thinking about what the story of Facebook’s second decade should be and what most becomes the leader of a social entity that, if it were a country, would be the second most populous in the world, only slightly smaller than China.
At 30, Zuckerberg still comes off as young for his age. He says “like” and “awesome” a lot.
But he’s not the angry, lonely introvert of The Social Network. That character may have been useful for dramatic purposes, but he never actually existed.
Zuckerberg can be extremely awkward in conversation, but that’s not because he’s nervous or insecure; nervous, insecure people rarely become the 14th richest person in the world. Zuckerberg is in fact supremely confident, almost to the point of being aggressive.
Zuckerberg has been thinking about Facebook’s long-term future at least since the site exceeded a billion users in 2012.
Fulfilling the actual mission, connecting the entire world, wouldn’t actually, literally be possible unless everybody in the world were on the Internet. So Zuckerberg has decided to make sure everybody is. This sounds like the kind of thing you say you’re going to do but never actually do, but Zuckerberg is doing it. He is in Chandauli today on a campaign to make sure that actually, literally every single human being on earth has an Internet connection. As Sandberg puts it (she’s better at sound bites than Zuckerberg): “If the first decade was starting the process of connecting the world, the next decade is helping connect the people who are not yet connected and watching what happens.”
Part of Zuckerberg’s problem-solving methodology appears to be to start from the position that all problems are solvable, and moreover solvable by him.
The population of the earth is currently about 7.2 billion. There are about 2.9 billion people on the Internet, give or take a hundred million. That leaves roughly 4.3 billion people who are offline and need to be put online. “What we figured out was that in order to get everyone in the world to have basic access to the Internet, that’s a problem that’s probably billions of dollars,” he says. “Or maybe low tens of billions. With the right innovation, that’s actually within the range of affordability.”
Zuckerberg made some calls, and the result was the formation last year of a coalition of technology companies that includes Ericsson, Qualcomm, Nokia and Samsung. The name of this group is Internet.org, and it describes itself as “a global partnership between technology leaders, nonprofits, local communities and experts who are working together to bring the Internet to the two-thirds of the world’s population that doesn’t have it.”
You’d think Zuckerberg the arch-hacker wouldn’t sully his hands with this kind of soft-science stuff, but in fact he doesn’t blink at it. He attacks social/economic/cultural problems the same way he attacks technical ones; in fact it’s not clear that he makes much of a distinction between them.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kid Designs His Own Prosthetic Arm at a Summer Camp
http://hackaday.com/2014/12/07/kid-designs-his-own-prosthetic-arm-at-a-summer-camp/
Ever heard of the summer camp called Superhero Cyborgs? It’s where [Coby Unger] met nine-year-old [Aidan Robinson] and helped him design his very own custom prosthetic arm.
The camp is put on by KIDmob for kids who have various limb disabilities, and helps give them the tools and guidance to be able to make their very own prosthetics. Some of the designs the children come up with are cool, useful, pretty and sometimes not overly functional — but [Aidan’s] designs really intrigued [Coby] who is a designer and part of the staff at Pier 9, a world-class fabrication facility (and makerspace) run by Autodesk.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Playful-Prosthetic-Arm/
Tomi Engdahl says:
10 STEM holiday gifts for kids
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/engineering-the-next-generation/4437859/10-STEM-holiday-gifts-for-kids?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_funfriday_20141205&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_funfriday_20141205&elq=6c59a3c0bff0489281252e0e96e6f8f2&elqCampaignId=20540
If you’re looking for gifts to inspire the children in your life toward pursuits in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math), check out the goodies on this list for some options beyond the standard Legos and Tinker Toys.
Trust us. In the long run, your kiddos will thank you
Tomi Engdahl says:
What do you do with an idea?
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/engineering-the-next-generation/4437859/11/10-STEM-holiday-gifts-for-kids
“And then I realized what you do with an idea. You change the world.”
While not a hands-on activity, this book is a story for anyone who has ever had an idea that seemed a little too big, too odd, too difficult to complete.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Brain baloney has no place in the classroom
A study published this week brilliantly debunks myths about the brain that pervade the education system
http://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2014/oct/17/brain-baloney-neuro-myths-teaching-education-classroom
Tomi Engdahl says:
What Do Investors Want? Imperious Group Investing In 30 Startups in 2 Years.
http://www.arcticstartup.com/2014/10/20/what-do-investors-want-imperious-group-investing-in-30-startups-in-2-years
The investment market is becoming increasingly competitive, and the Nordic/Baltic region is starting to attract special attention from VC’s. Many major firms now have full-time principals and partners looking at startups everywhere between Denmark and Estonia and others often send representatives to local events.
With this increased attention, comes the competition for finding and funding top startups.
Many do not realize just how interesting the investment market is. The investors are fighting for the best startups, working together on investing into them while pitching to LP’s to get more funding, just the way you pitch your startups to them.
“We invest into teams, but all the founders of our startups are market innovators. They either create completely new markets, find problems in existing ones or look at a market from a new perspective.” says Pavel Aleshin, head of Analytics at Imperious Group.
Do not start a company if you want to make money, start it if your really want to change something. Preferably solving your own personal need.
Many say that the biggest reason for startup failure is building something nobody really needs.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Harvard University says it can’t afford journal publishers’ prices
University wants scientists to make their research open access and resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-university-journal-publishers-prices
Exasperated by rising subscription costs charged by academic publishers, Harvard University has encouraged its faculty members to make their research freely available through open access journals and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Choosing Remote-Collaboration Software
Hardware development requires more than general-purpose tools
http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/choosing-remotecollaboration-software
Hardware development, like many engineering projects, is typically a group effort, with contributors increasingly working from home or across multiple buildings, organizations, states, countries, and continents rather than face-to-face. And as a new wave of hardware start-ups are finding out, coordinating those contributors often requires more sophisticated tools than just e-mail and phone calls.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A nation of CODERS? Yes, says UK.gov, and have some cash to do it
School leavers offered bursary to study maths (as long as they teach!)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/08/a_nation_of_coders_yes_says_ukgov_and_heres_some_money_to_do_it/
A National College for Digital Skills is to open in London in 2015, as part of a raft of government measures announced on Monday intended to improve Blighty’s economic output.
The college aims to teach digital and coding skills to 5,000 learners within five years, and will focus on “higher level technical provision, through a range of qualifications and apprenticeships”.
Individuals working in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, contribute twice as much to national productivity, according to a report by Deloitte cited by the government.
David Cameron said today: “There’s no secret to success in the modern world. If countries are going to win in the global race and children compete and get the best jobs, you need mathematicians and scientists – pure and simple. So today, we commit to deliver more maths and science teachers.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Design 2.0: A New Moore’s Law
EEs embrace hackathons, accelerators
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1324901&
Something I am calling Design 2.0 is bubbling up in the engineering community, injecting new energy into the profession. In many ways, it’s the new Moore’s Law.
Hackathons make sense for folks such as Facebook and Google. They run vast server farms where you can plant a new software program and — with some luck and considerable tweaking — quickly wind up with a bumper crop of profitable web services.
Facebook applied this design philosophy to its data center hardware with its Open Compute Project, disrupting the staid markets for servers and switches. The GoogleX lab did the same for hardware projects from smartglasses to driverless cars.
It’s early days for Design 2.0.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Casey Johnston / Ars Technica:
To make computer science more relevant and inclusive, we should add it to general curriculum in schools
To address tech’s diversity woes, start with the vanishing Comp Sci classroom
The number of schools offering AP Computer Science has dropped 35% in recent years.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/12/to-address-techs-diversity-woes-start-with-the-vanishing-comp-sci-classroom/
School staff doesn’t know quite what to make of the situation. Computer science is “the language of so much of what we do,” said John Ball, the school’s assistant head for academic affairs and a teacher of economics and AP Physics. Ball described the lack of computer science as a demand problem, not a supply problem.
“Right now it’s not attractive—I don’t know why,” he said. “We have to do a better job.”
Beyond Emma Willard, the AP Computer Science tests aren’t doing incredibly well overall.
The average computer science class
Currently, the way computer science is taught as a standalone subject at a high school or college goes something like this: first, students learn a few lines of code to establish how we talk to computers. (Typing “print ‘hello world!’” gets the computer to respond “hello world!”) Thus, communication is established. Next, students start breaking down simple problems, like adding numbers or storing values to variables (x = 2, y = 3, z = x + y).
Eventually they work their way up to building simple tools, like a coin-flipping simulator. After a while, they may teach that simulator to store its results and learn some important lessons about randomness. There will likely be a digression on how microprocessors work and how to convert numbers to binary. There are some obvious links to math and science here, but usually math is used as a way to understand computer science, not the other way around.
Computer science remains a standalone AP test and a standalone college major despite the fact that computer-assisted data processing, programming, modeling, and many other applications are used in fields from physics to art. So critics of the current approach wonder: are we marketing computer science classes all wrong?
While computer science is related to math in that it involves using known rules to solve a problem, math is typically using a known system to derive an answer: plot the quadratic equation, solve for 0, divide 40 by 8, and so on. Computer science, on the other hand, is the process of creating a system that solves problems. It brings students to the level of the mathematician who, for the first time, figures out how to process the relationship between the lengths of the sides of a right triangle, or how to find the area under a curve. They are making a thing that, given a certain scenario, can take any combination of inputs and turn out an answer.
As Mother Jones writes, simple literacy, the ability to create or process words, used to be a class distinction. Now, we think of it as a basic educational offering. The same thinking can be applied to the problem-solving skills that go with learning to build a computer program.
Continued research may help schools decide how to prioritize computer science.
“A well-designed, modern AP Computer Science A course can help address traditional issues of equity, access, and broadening participation in computing while providing a strong and engaging introduction to fundamental areas of the discipline,”
But the course itself focuses strongly on hard skills—algorithms, data structures, object-oriented solutions, and implementation in Java—rather than broad principles of thought that might appeal more widely.
“Understanding how to encourage female and underrepresented students into the field of Computer Science requires sustained efforts and commitment over time,
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Can We Get Business to Care about Freedom, Openness and Interoperability?
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/how-can-we-get-business-care-about-freedom-openness-and-interoperability
They use our stuff. Why not our values too?
At this point in history, arguments for using Linux, FOSS (free and open-source software) and the Internet make themselves. Yet the virtues behind those things—freedom, openness, compatibility, interoperability, substitutability—still tend to be ignored by commercial builders of new stuff.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Obama Becomes First President to Write a Computer Program
http://www.wired.com/2014/12/obama-becomes-first-president-write-computer-program/
President Barack Obama told the world that everyone should learn how to code. And now he’s putting his money where his mouth is.
Earlier today, to help kick-off the annual Computer Science Education Week, Obama became the first president ever to write a computer program. It was a very simple program—all it does is draw a square on a screen—but that’s the point, says Hadi Partovi, co-founder Code.org, an organization that promotes computer science education. “All programming starts simple,” he says. “No one starts by creating a complicated game.”
Last year, Obama delivered a YouTube speech last year to promote Computer Science Education Week, but didn’t write any code himself. “Learning these skills isn’t just important for your future. It’s important for our country’s future,” the president said in the video. “If we want America to stay on the cutting edge, we need young Americans like you to master the tools and technology that will change the way we do just about everything.”
Obama was echoing the sentiment of the growing code literacy movement, which seeks to expand computer science and programming education throughout the world. Code literacy advocates argue that with information technology embedding itself ever deeper into our lives, everyone should learn a bit more about how computers operate. A whole industry has sprung-up around the idea, with companies offering everything from children’s games that teach the fundamentals of programming to intensive three month full-time “bootcamps” dedicated to teaching people how to code well enough to land a job.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Seeking Coders, Tech Titans Turn To K-12 Schools
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/14/12/09/2316248/seeking-coders-tech-titans-turn-to-k-12-schools
“The $30 million campaign to promote computer science education has been financed by the tech industry, led by Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, with corporate contributions from Microsoft, Google, Amazon and other giants. It’s been a smash success: So many students opened up a free coding tutorial on Monday that the host website crashed”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The two biggest drivers of change in business computing today are multi-device computing and cloud. Multidevice and cloud are driving a rapid evolution in application architecture toward more powerful front ends and more flexible back-ends.
in the last five years there has been an explosion of innovation in web and native technologies, with rapid releases of libraries, framworks and tools to help developers create applications for this new world.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A commissioned study, conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Adobe, shows that companies that embrace creativity experience greater revenue growth and market share over their peers. Despite the benefits of creativity, many companies are still not being as creative as they’d like to be.
Media Alert: Does Creativity Matter? Adobe Research Shows Dramatic Impact on Business Results
http://www.adobe.com/news-room/pressreleases/201409/092414MediaAlertDoesCreativityMatterAdobeResearchShows.html
The Creative Dividend survey shows that what makes a company succeed — the ability to foster innovation; develop exceptional talent and leadership; and a high degree of brand recognition — is influenced by its creative perspective, practices and culture. But does creativity also impact the bottom line, and do companies experience more business success because they foster creativity? Through this research, Adobe concludes that creativity is essential to current and future business success. Key findings include:
Companies that foster creativity achieve exceptional revenue growth than peers. Fifty-eight percent of survey respondents said firms that foster creativity had 2013 revenues exceeding their 2012 revenues by 10 percent or more. In contrast, only 20 percent of less creative companies performed similarly.
More creative companies enjoy greater market share and competitive leadership. Creative companies are more likely to report a commanding market leadership position with a higher market share than competitors. Of those reporting market share leadership, creative companies outnumber their less creative counterparts by a factor of 1.5 percent.
Despite the perceived benefits of creativity, 61 percent of companies do not see their companies as creative. Only eleven percent said their practices were perfectly aligned with firms readily recognized as creative. The majority (51 percent) said they were neutral or not aligned with creative firms, and 10 percent felt their practices were, in fact, the opposite of what creative companies do.
Creative companies win recognition as a best place to work. A positive employee work environment is a fertile breeding ground for creativity. Sixty-nine percent of creative firms also reported winning awards and national recognition for being a “best place to work.” Just 27 percent of less creative companies achieved similar accolades
It’s official:
Creativity drives business results.
http://landing.adobe.com/en/na/products/creative-cloud/55563-creative-dividends.html
Download the study
A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Adobe finds
Tomi Engdahl says:
The New York Times open-sources its Hive crowdsourcing platform
https://gigaom.com/2014/12/09/the-new-york-times-open-sources-its-hive-crowdsourcing-platform/
A couple of months ago, the New York Times rolled out an interesting project called Madison, in which the newspaper asked readers to help the paper identify old print ads by going to a website and answering questions — and even in some cases transcribing the actual text in the ads. Now, the company is open-sourcing the platform it built for that project, known as Hive, so that others can use it for their own experiments in crowdsourcing.
Hive: Open-Source Crowdsourcing Framework
http://blog.nytlabs.com/2014/12/09/hive-open-source-crowdsourcing-framework/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Silicon Startups Get Incubator
Keysight, Synopsys, TSMC are first partners
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1324919&
Three semiconductor veterans announced plans for an incubator dedicated to helping chip startups design their first prototypes. Silicon Catalyst aims to provide support for a sector many traditional venture capitalists have fled.
Keysight, Synopsys, and TSMC have signed exclusive deals to provide tools and services to the incubator. Silicon Catalyst aims to select its first batch of about 10 chip startups before April.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rector tried programming: “Civics where many other”
Microsoft and the Young Entrepreneur Association organized #OpeCode was part of the international # HourOfCode campaign, which encourages all to try their wings in programming.
Keilaniemi Microsoft went to the house on Wednesday hard bustle, when a group of Finnish teachers came to baptize their toes in the waters of the encoding # OpeCode event.
The programming, is becoming a part of 2016, published in the new basic education core curriculum.
Microsoft and the Young Entrepreneur Association organized #OpeCode was part of the international # HourOfCode campaign, which encourages all to try their wings in programming. The week-long campaign goal is to get 100 million people for the first time the code lathe edge.
Spot #OpeCodessa were 13 teachers from different educational levels and different subjects. Each teacher had previously been paired with technology student, with whom the teachers discussed even before the possible application ideas.
During the day, 13 of the application
Couples had one working day time to prepare your application. End of the day took place in the sales talks with other teachers had to convince its own application need.
Young Entrepreneur Association Virpi Utriaisen of this year #opecode was only the beginning. “We are now looking model #OpeCodelle. We desire that as many teachers have the opportunity to try programming, “Utriainen says.
He points out that the vast majority of start-up companies are valued programming skills. And school children are the future of the workers and entrepreneurs.
Source: http://summa.talentum.fi/article/tv/uutiset/117863
Tomi Engdahl says:
Women in Tech: Change the Conversation
Female CEO/entrepreneur pivots to positives
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1324941&
Joanna Weidenmiller has a problem with the conversation around women in technology today. The San Francisco native has started multiple companies and worked in a variety of tech sectors across the world, but she is concerned that the next generation of female techies and entrepreneurs will be deterred by too much negative conversation.
“No kid is going to want to be doing this is if all we talk about is the negatives of [being a woman in the technology industry]. Technology is so new, and women in business is relatively new,” Weidenmiller told EE Times. “Men are trying to catch up as fast as they can and get out of their gorilla style, but they’re not as quick as we are.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
AnDevCon Highlights Embedded, Open-Source
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1324852&
Intel, which has its own developer conference, was there encouraging developers to be cross-platform — not just Android-specific. In his keynote, Jeff McVeigh, the general manager of performance client and visual computing within Intel’s Developer Products Division, stressed multi-platform awareness is key to reaching full breadth of your audience.
“The hardware without the software is just sand, It doesn’t do anything. It just dissipates heat,” said Intel’s Jeff McVeigh in an interview, explaining why hardware company Intel is interested in a developers. “Software exposes what the platform can do.”
Open-source collaboration and projects go hand-in-hand with an increase in freelancers, since individuals can gain new skills, or improve on already existing skills through collaborative projects, such as open-source design for embedded systems, independently from being full-time at any individual company.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Have You Ever Been Blindsided by Your Own Design?
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1324975&
While reading a book that referenced an encrypted communications system used by the Argentinians during the Falklands War, Aubrey Kagan realized he’d had a part in designing this system.
“Just a minute,” I said aloud to myself, “that was one of mine.” Actually, this is a bit of an exaggeration. In fact, I had designed the first prototype — the proof of concept — for the microprocessor that controlled the digital tuning of a radio to operate as a frequency-hopping device. It was a very early application of a microprocessor. It synchronized the transmission and then controlled the calculation of the next frequency to which the transmission would hop.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Suggests Separating Students With ‘Some CS Knowledge’ From Novices
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/14/12/14/1441219/google-suggests-separating-students-with-some-cs-knowledge-from-novices
To address the challenge of rapidly increasing CS enrollments and increasing diversity, reports the Computing Education Blog, Google in November put out an RFP to universities for its invite-only 3X in 3 Years: CS Capacity Award program, which aims “to support faculty in finding innovative ways to address the capacity problem in their CS courses.” In the linked-to RFP document, Google suggests that “students that have some CS background” should not be allowed to attend in-person intro CS courses where they “may be more likely to create a non-welcoming environment,” and recommends that they instead be relegated to online courses.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The IT department is increasingly being seen as a profit rather than a cost centre with IT budgets commonly split between keeping the lights on and spend on innovation and revenue-generating projects.
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/28/techies_talking_business/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Indiegogo launches Life, a fee-free crowdfunding site for personal causes
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/12/15/indiegogo-launches-life-fee-free-crowdfunding-site-personal-causes/
Crowdfunding giant Indiegogo has just launched a new service, Indiegogo Life, dedicated to campaigns raising money for emergencies, medical expenses, celebrations and other life events.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Interviews: Ask Jonty Hurwitz About Art and Engineering
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/12/15/1357213/interviews-ask-jonty-hurwitz-about-art-and-engineering
“Jonty Hurwitz is an artist with a degree in engineering who says each one of his pieces is “a study on the physics of how we perceive space and is the stroke of over 1 billion calculations and algorithms.” Recently, his nano sculpture project drew a lot of attention.
3D Printed Art Smaller Than an Ant’s Forehead
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/11/16/079256/3d-printed-art-smaller-than-an-ants-forehead
Tomi Engdahl says:
Want to influence the world? Map reveals the best languages to speak
http://news.sciencemag.org/social-sciences/2014/12/want-influence-world-map-reveals-best-languages-speak
Speak or write in English, and the world will hear you. Speak or write in Tamil or Portuguese, and you may have a harder time getting your message out. Now, a new method for mapping how information flows around the globe identifies the best languages to spread your ideas far and wide. One hint: If you’re considering a second language, try Spanish instead of Chinese.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Internet of Things: Engineering for Everyone
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1324995&
The emergence of open-source development platforms, developed and maintained by dedicated volunteers, has effectively raised the level of abstraction to a point where nonexperts can now use these platforms.
Not too long ago, the idea of open source was synonymous with “free,” because, of course, there is no upfront cost involved. That perception was successfully realigned, through education, towards “liberty,” the freedom to use the resource without cost.
The distinction is important because, in order for open source to continue to grow, it requires those benefiting from it to contribute back to the project in some way — an action that clearly involves a level of effort and therefore contains an element of cost.
The availability of open-source software and, more recently, hardware targeting embedded applications means that access to high-quality engineering resources has never been greater.
The emergence of open-source development platforms based on popular microprocessors, developed and maintained by dedicated volunteers, has effectively raised the level of abstraction to a point where nonexperts can now use these platforms to turn their own abstract concepts into real products.
Tomi Engdahl says:
@wnderer I think one of the issues here is a cultural divide between what girls are interested in, and what they’re told they should be interested in. Colleges can have programs for women (though I imagine few people would tell you there are “enough” programs), but encouraging girls, teens, women to get invovled in the field is another story. Weidenmiller believes much of the negative talk around women in tech is further deterring those potential engineers.
Source: http://www.eetimes.com/messages.asp?piddl_msgthreadid=46811&piddl_msgid=331959#msg_331959
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Ventures Shifts Focus to Health Care
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/12/15/google-ventures-shifts-focus-to-healthcare/
Google GOOGL -3.43%’s venture-capital arm is moving strongly into health care and life-sciences startups, mirroring shifts at the Internet giant.
More than one-third of the money Google Ventures invested in 2014 went to health care and life-sciences companies, up from 9% each of the prior two years. The venture group plans to continue investing in the area, looking to capitalize on an explosion of health data and new ways to analyze it, said Bill Maris, head of Google Ventures.
“Barring some huge calamity we’ll see more interesting things in life sciences in 2015,” Maris said.
By contrast, Google has curbed investments in consumer Internet startups. They received 8% of Google’s venture investments in 2014, down from 66% in 2013, when Google placed a $258 million bet on taxi-hailing app Uber.
Google sees opportunity in health care, but Maris said it is also moving against the grain, as valuations of some consumer-Internet companies soar. “If you are at the buffet and everyone is picking the entrée, try the dessert,” he said.
“Google’s mission is to make the world’s information useful,” Conrad said in a July interview. “We shouldn’t put a slash through that and say ‘but not health care.’”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Clever Gets $30 Million From Lightspeed To Become The Login Layer For Education Apps
http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/16/clever-30m-lightspeed/
It’s not often you hear about companies actually disrupting the education market. Conventional wisdom seems to be that due to the bureaucratic nature of the industry, it’s nearly impossible to get wide-scale adoption at the institutional level.
Clever seems to be an exception. Since launching two-and-a-half years ago, the company has added tens of thousands of schools to its platform. The company has managed to get them on board mostly by providing a free service that provides immense value to teachers and students alike.
Tomi Engdahl says:
In IT, Beware of Fad Versus Functional
http://it.slashdot.org/story/14/12/16/1819236/in-it-beware-of-fad-versus-functional
Cloud, big data, and agile were three of the technology terms that were brandished the most by IT leaders in 2014. Yet, there could be a real danger in buying into the hype without understanding the implications of the technologies, writes Pearson CTO Sven Gerjets. In this essay, Gerjets warns that many IT executives drop the ball when it comes to “defining how a new technology approach will add value” to their organization.
In IT, beware of fad versus functional
https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2014/10/it-beware-fad-versus-functional
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ask Slashdot: How Should a Liberal Arts Major Get Into STEM?
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/14/12/16/1936218/ask-slashdot-how-should-a-liberal-arts-major-get-into-stem
though I very much appreciate my education for having taught me a great deal about abstraction, critical thinking, research, communication, and cheesily enough, humanity, I realize that I should have stuck with the STEM field. I’ve found that the jobs available to me are not exactly up my alley, and that I can better impact the world, and make myself happier, doing something STEM-related
Should I continue picking things up where and when I can? Would it be wiser for me to go deeper into debt and get a second undergrad degree? Or should I try to go into grad school after doing some of my own studying up? Would the military be a better choice?
Comments:
“Yeah it’s kind of actually BS that students with degrees are given a fair shake while people without degrees are shafted for programming jobs. It should be taken on merit. Why would an employer want to turn down a self-motivated candidate that spent his weekends reading documentation with a portfolio full of projects for a fresh out of college kid who spent his weekends getting drunk with a small portfolio of school projects?”
“Because you have to prove merit. A degree proves that you’ve studied the field for 4 years. A lack of degree show absolutely nothing. Thus to have equivalent background you have to show much more.”
“Secondly, when looking for high impact workers- the things you want don’t correlate to no degree. What you want is hard working, creative, a willingness to step up and take ownership, and high intelligence. Lacking a degree means he’s not likely to be hard working, he wasn’t willing to put in the work to go to college. It means he wasn’t willing to take ownership of his own career path. And it means he was either too stupid to get into college, or too stupid to see the benefits of it. The only one you might get is creative because he “went a different way”- but he did so without thought or a good reason for doing so, which again isn’t what you want.
So yeah, the non-degree holder loses again.”
“None proves it, but the question was how to break in to the field, this implies an interest in being successful in the field, not cheating your way to a diploma. There are many STEM careers that are hard or impossible to get in to without going back to school and getting the specialized degree. EE, CompE, Chemical engineering are all tough to break in to on your own. You could of course read a lot of books, but it’s probably tough and you’re unlikely able to get the kind of focus you need on the areas you will use on your specialization. A dirty secret is perhaps that if you go to school for say EE and you study RF, you may have a very hard time breaking in to computer engineering later, or even the much more closely related power systems. These areas end up being super specialized and your school+work experience ends up binning you into your niche. Later in life your “experience” is expected to be pretty fine grained and deep, so the breadth that’s frequently touted as an advantage for liberal arts is actually a drawback for STEM fields outside of academia.”
“In theory some software programming jobs are easier and don’t necessarily require a degree, but I would absolutely be prepared to demonstrate expert knowledge on the language they use (exclusively C in my line of work) and if you’re in to systems programming you better know hardware really well too. A CS degree really only helps with the social factor, even if you already know how to code well and have some documented experience on open source.”