master card moment

[Pope]

that'll be the laugh

 

I'm graduating in less than a month and I still have no idea what to do next

 

any cool stuff to do with a law degree?

[Oerwinde]

that'll be the laugh

 

I'm graduating in less than a month and I still have no idea what to do next

 

any cool stuff to do with a law degree?

 

Lawyer?

 

Apparently law school is super easy, its actually trying to become a lawyer thats hard. Do you have a specialty or just a general law degree?

[Gfted1]

^Isnt the tricky part passing the BAR? Do they even have that, or an equivalent, over there? What does BAR stand for?

[walkerguy]

I don't know what your handwriting is like now, but pretty soon its going to degrade to hell

 

Wait... what kind of doc are you?

Edited May 27, 2008 by walkerguy

[taks]

doctor of philosophy, i.e. a Ph. D. already got terrible handwriting, so it can't get worse.

 

technically my degree is "doctor of philosophy in engineering with an emphasis in electrical engineering" but realistically it is "doctor of philosophy in electrical engineering with an emphasis in communications and signal processing." our school only offers PhDs in the engineering department (though a nursing one starts this fall), and the other engineering areas (mechanical, computer, aerospace and computer science) were not granting enough degrees to maintain their status. as a result, they combined them all into one to guarantee the state* would not yank the smaller department degrees (EE typically has 3 or 4 per semester, so we were never in danger).

 

taks

 

* note that there is no such thing as a national accreditation program such as ABET for graduate schools. they are all monitored by their respective states or not at all.

Edited May 27, 2008 by taks

[Meshugger]

ah, i'll give that a try when i get home, tigranes. that's about what my hood and gown looked like meshugger, but the gown had black velvet stripes, not blue. i got to keep the hood (which they pinned on during the ceremony) and mortarboard/tassle. the gown was a rental.

 

115 pages total, including all fluff such as title, lists of tables and figures, copyright page, etc. the actual meat of the writeup describing what i did was probably 30-40 pages with another 30-40 explaining all the simulations. if i had another 6 months, it would have been 200 pages or so since there were a lot of things i wanted to show that i did not have time for.

 

basically, my idea was a means for estimating multipath (aka channel estimation) coupled with a means for adaptively detecting symbols (not unlike an equalizer) in the presence of multiple access interference (multiple cell phones talking to the same base station, for example).

 

taks

 

115 pages in less than a month, quite impressive indeed

 

I am currently writing my Master's Thesis, which is mostly a case study of compiler development for multi-core processors. It pretty much consists of traversing through a network of kernels, pipelining, parallelization, and threading. I am 4 weeks into writing and i just reached a mere 54 pages. Also, writing it with LateX might be good in general, but trying to write down discrete cosine transforms and explanation took an eternity

[taks]

my MS thesis took a month, too. it was about 70 pages or so before i added the software in an appendix. i included none of my software in this document.

 

i would recommend MathType, btw. very easy to use, and much faster than LaTex.

 

there are compilers that actually work for multi-processor architectures?

 

taks

[Meshugger]

my MS thesis took a month, too. it was about 70 pages or so before i added the software in an appendix. i included none of my software in this document.

 

i would recommend MathType, btw. very easy to use, and much faster than LaTex.

 

there are compilers that actually work for multi-processor architectures?

 

taks

 

Thanks for the tip.

 

This compiler is in-the-works. Expected release-date in 2010, if ever

[taks]

ahhh, thought so. even getting compilers to properly deal with SIMD is a pain. at least, gcc (and similar) is incapable of vectorizing code on its own, hence the assembly stuff i'm writing as we speak (figuratively). threading on top of vectorizing is just asking too much for what we've got today. i guess it's a huge AI problem underneath it all.

 

taks

[Tigranes]

Interesting - it depends on margins, styles and font, etc., but for me a masters would be about 100 pages of pure writing. Currently working on a BA (Honours) thesis that will end up 50 pages by October, going to have an excruciating time writing that. The only time I ever wrote a single piece so long is back in middle school when I understood 'a report on the Crusades' to mean 'a report on EVERY crusade evar'.

 

Science-related works seem to be as much about providing a comprehensive step-by-step of how you did it as much as providing your conclusions, of course, hence your 30-40p of simulations. Heck, I remember a biology masters that was 50 pages of describing data and 15 pages of analysis. Not sure how that one passed, but that's another matter.

 

Heh. The neighbour's printer bled that day.

[taks]

engineering theses/dissertations are typically much shorter than liberal arts versions (e.g., history, english, etc.). the hardest part with the engineering versions is advancing the theory, i.e., you sort of have to invent something (i invented two somethings, and tied them together).

 

taks

[Meshugger]

ahhh, thought so. even getting compilers to properly deal with SIMD is a pain. at least, gcc (and similar) is incapable of vectorizing code on its own, hence the assembly stuff i'm writing as we speak (figuratively). threading on top of vectorizing is just asking too much for what we've got today. i guess it's a huge AI problem underneath it all.

 

taks

 

Yeah, we've been toying around with IBM's Cell extensions to the gcc, called ppu-gcc (main data handler) and spu-gcc(the actual work), and looking into on how their implementation has been done. But i just implemented test cases of that stuff, it's up for the other Ph.D's to use that info to actually produce something new

[~Di]

Wow, a monumental achievement, taks. Mega-congrats!!

[Pope]

that'll be the laugh

 

I'm graduating in less than a month and I still have no idea what to do next

 

any cool stuff to do with a law degree?

 

Lawyer?

 

Apparently law school is super easy, its actually trying to become a lawyer thats hard. Do you have a specialty or just a general law degree?

I wouldn't call it super easy. Might have that reputation in the US, but not so here in Belgium. Then again, I don't consider myself the most brilliant student and I passed without any real trouble. But I'm no idiot either, and I definitely put in the required effort. With the exception of this year (the last year is sorta relaxed compared to the others), most days during examination periods were filled with an average of 12-14 hours of study. (The main reason for that being that I never really did much during the year. I tend to only take action when it's absolutely necessary; but when I do, I do it right.)

 

I specialized in criminal law. Made that choice back when I was still interested in prosecuting people. Public attorney and all that. Doesn't really jive with me anymore today.

 

 

^Isnt the tricky part passing the BAR? Do they even have that, or an equivalent, over there? What does BAR stand for?

There's an equivalent of the bar here as well. It takes a few years of training to become a true lawyer, but the real tricky part about it is finding (and being accepted by) a firm which handles the sort of cases you're interested/specialized in. Most big firms offer big paychecks, provided one is willing to work 14 hour days. Which I'm not. I was actually hoping for those days to end once I get my degree.

 

I originally considered getting another degree, but after 5 years I've kinda had enough of all that studying.

 

Anyway, I still have a good 3 weeks to focus on my final exams before I really need to start thinking my future through.

Edited May 28, 2008 by Pope

[taks]

Yeah, we've been toying around with IBM's Cell extensions to the gcc, called ppu-gcc (main data handler) and spu-gcc(the actual work), and looking into on how their implementation has been done. But i just implemented test cases of that stuff, it's up for the other Ph.D's to use that info to actually produce something new

i was doing a presentation at the GSPx conference in 2006 (the multi-core applications section) and one of the guys that was porting gcc to work with the cell was there. his work was about as far along as the work that had been done for the BCM1480 (quad-core MIPS), i.e., not very. he tried to turn it in to a bit of a competition during my speech (which was about parallelization), but we had different target applications: i was targeting under 30 W with a high FLOP/W ratio, he was targeting over 100 W, just for the freaking chip, with a relatively low FLOP/W ratio.

 

thanks di.

 

taks