Recruitment on a fixed schedule?

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I think I’ve figured out why I never get just one contact from a recruiter in a given day anymore. There must be a schedule that recruiting firms and/or HR departments operate under.

I received two today: one was from Bloomberg, the other from a company that appears to do VPN and network cryptography.

It would be so easy to just leave academia! Industry has received me so warmly (some of the recent offers have six figure starting salaries), while all academia has done is make demands of me… demands for ever greater effort with ever diminishing rewards. I can’t even pursue my academic interests within my field, much less the wide spectrum of interests I have overall. Ironically, several companies have promised me precisely the sort of training I can’t attain in an academic institution. If I want to truly do research, though, I need to see this through to the end. Once I graduate, I’ll be free!

I think it’s time to get back to seriously working on my dissertation. So long as I worked on it alone without someone else’s inefficiencies constraining me, I made very good progress… but waiting for a review of the first draft shattered my momentum.

Baddeley's Working Memory Model

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In the course of researching for the working memory paper I’m about to submit, I had to read quite a bit on Baddeley’s model of working memory. Overall, it appears to be an example of a decent but incomplete model that, rather than admitting its incompleteness, was extended in such a way that it no longer resembles its former self. The components it proposed as working memory subsystems were split apart into definitively disjoint sub-subsystems that may not even share spatial locality in the brain, casting doubt on the experiments with brain-damaged patients that supported the original model in the first place! The addition of an episodic buffer also appears to render some of these sub-subsystems redundant.

To Moleskine:

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I don’t really care whether Picasso, Matisse, or Hemingway used the same type of notebook that I bought, so you can stop making such false claims. I just want something that doesn’t fall apart in my pocket.

Thanks.

Procrastination and Anticipatory Fatigue

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There’s a paper I need to continue working on today, but I’ve been writing papers all week and I’m exhausted. Nevertheless, I decided at this point that it was unwise to delay any further.

As soon as I resolved to begin it, I felt like all of the energy left me.

This was somewhat surprising, as I had expected that the fatigue associated with the activity (a feeling I always associated with about 2:00 PM on a 9-5 schedule of a boring job, probably because I tended to finish my work around 1 PM) would have an onset after work began. That does not seem to be the case, and may explain the root cause of procrastination – if one feels fatigued or otherwise unwell prior to beginning a task, he may never actually get around to doing it.

Natural Selection in Viruses

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Cold viruses spread through respiratory particles and stimulate the release of these particles (through coughing and sneezing, for example). Gastrointestinal illnesses spread through feces and vomit, both of which they tend to produce as symptoms.

I very much doubt that this is accidental. It seems selected for; viruses that symptomatically increase their own chances of spreading must be more successful than those that do not. Of course, viruses do contain either DNA or RNA, both capable of propagating, and thus are able to evolve in such a manner.

The puzzling thing, then, is why some viral diseases traditionally caused swift death. It would seem that they deprive themselves of living cellular machinery to produce more virus – what would appear to be a losing proposition.

I still think they’re alive.

Cellular Universe

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I had an interesting idea while on the bus. Many people think the universe is a computer simulation. I don’t, but…

What if it’s actually a cell? What if the multi-worlds interpretation is correct and it divides each time an observation is made? Are we then acting as the divisive mechanism, like some sort of vast organelle? Is there some sort of “colony” of universes growing out there in 5-space?

Emergency vehicles and priority inversions

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A situation occasionally arises in operating system theory known as “priority inversion”. This is an interesting situation where a low-priority process holds a resource required by a high-priority process. The high priority process therefore cannot run until the low-priority process releases its resource, which it cannot do until its scheduled time slice. This results in the low priority process effectively gaining prioritization over the high-priority process. The situation gets even weirder because both processes can be preempted by other processes running in the system despite higher prioritization. This can cause problems if these processes are critical to the operation of the system. Priority inversions can usually be solved by temporarily assigning the low priority process high priority so it can finish its work and release the blocked resource.

Anyway, I noticed a similarity while waiting at a traffic light. On the other side of the road was an ambulance waiting to make a left turn. In front of the ambulance were two cars. The light was red. The cars had nowhere to go; there was no side to veer off onto or anything of the sort. No one was coming in the other direction.

Here we have a high priority process (the emergency vehicle) blocked by two low-priority processes (the cars in front), which are waiting for the release of a critical section (the traffic light turning green).

As you might expect, the solution to this scenario is to give the cars in front the same priority as the ambulance (allow them to go through the red light), ensuring that the ambulance quickly becomes unblocked.