johnminter

I suspect that here in the US it will require a vote by the Congress.

I am a thankful user of Gnuplot. As some before me mentioned, the naming history was complex. What is more important is that the developers provided - and still support - an excellent program that we may freely use under a very reasonable license.

That is why many prefer viridis.

Yes, RStudio uses it and I find it lives up to the title "The Swiss Army Knife of document conversion."

One nice feature on many social media platforms is that one can unfollow or block people who seem to generate more heat than light in their posts. I am willing to read and interact with someone with whom I disagree as long as the discussion remains civil and productive.

Trolls have been around from the early days of the internet. I remember one student from Dartmouth that posted on many of the science newsgroups under the name Archimedes Plutonium. He continually posted that the Plutonium atom was God. This started many unproductive discussions and spammed many newsgroups. I'm sure you can imagine the flame wars... I am thankful that current social media lets me block/ignore trolls.

We live in western New York. My wife teaches in a private school and my daughter teaches in a charter school. The New York State Department of Education provides standards and direct support for high functioning special needs students and transportation to/from special classes for those with greater needs. The students in these two schools take the same standardized tests as those in the public schools. My wife teaches college level classes in Physics and Calculus to high school students with oversight from a local community college.

This is a great deal for the students because they enter the college of their choice with a better background than a typical student.

In the 1970s when my wife and I were in High School there were some gender biases. My wife (from Syracuse NY) had been cooking, cleaning, sewing, etc. because both her parents worked. She wanted to take shop instead because she was studying for the physical sciences and math. The high school administrators refused and forced her to take Home Economics. She was not pleased...

That would not surprise me. One might be able to recover the cost of the education at a state university. I suspect the return on investment would significantly lower at a private school with higher tuition. My daughter teaches at a high school with many students from lower income households. One of the exercizes the class did was to have each student pick a career that interested them. They had to find the cost of the degree and the median salary. Next they were to make a budget that for their living expenses based on that median salary, including repayment of the student loans. It was an eye-opening experience for these students.

Higher education can be a ticket to a great career. It can be a cost it takes a lifetime to repay, especially if penalties and interest accrues.

The academic route has always been a crapshoot. Most of my professors from the Chemistry Department at Florida State were still there and active when my daughter went there for a Meteorology masters decades later. The cartoonist, Jorge Cham, parodies this in the Ph.D. Comics books and movies.

One must plan a technical career carefully. I was able to get an internship at Kodak's Tennessee plant after my junior and senior years. I originally wanted to study inorganic chemistry. I worked for scientists who both were Ph.D. polymer chemists. They showed me the American Chemical Society's study on chemist occupations. 80% of chemists worked on polymers at some time during their career. I applied for both types of programs, and the UMASS Amherst Polymer Science program provided a research assistance-ship that paid my way. it was a great experience and I had a fantastic Ph.D. Advisor - who is now an emeritus professor at Rice University. I stopped interviewing after I had 5 job offers. Employment fluctuates with the economy. Some fields are more robust than others... Do your homework before rushing into a pricey program...

Manufacturers need to distinguish between critical updates that fix a significant error in the results or fix a security hole that could make the users system vulnerable. By contrast, feature updates should be labeled as such. This makes it easier for the user to make an informed choice to install the update.

Kodak Alaris still sells professional film

In my opinion one should be paid a rate commensurate with what you produce for your employer. If you choose to live in a remote location where your salary goes further, you should be able to enjoy that outcome. It should be no surprise any adult that employers will pay the least they can. When they do that, employees vote with their feet. Good employers count the cost of turnover and generally pay what is required to keep their productive employees. Large systemic changes upset the "normal case". My friends (and their managers) left at the company from which I retired took pay or hour reductions to get through the covid-19 issue. Nobody liked it, but there were few options at the time.

Not to my knowlege.

In the company where I worked that was expected of professional level staff. We could not afford to lose clients. We typically checked email daily and were available by phone in an emergency. People did not abuse this.

I think the key to a good exerience obtaining a Ph.D. is the choice of a good advisor. My advisor explained that the process of getting the degree was to teach us to find important problems and learn what we needed to solve them. Typically, that involved collaboration. He also stressed that it was a doctorate in Philosophy even though our department was in the Physical Sciences and Engineering School. That advice served me well as a scientist in a corporate materials analysis group.

Now that I am retired, I still find challenging projects to work on, mainly helping to improve open source electron microanalysis software.