Modern Academia – or how to become an over-educated secretary

Disclaimer 1: The title of this article is purposefully exaggerated. This article has no intention to even imply that the work of a secretary is somehow inferior to the work of a scientist. It is not! I have done such work and I know that almost no secretary is as appreciated as she/he should be. Being a secretary involves a lot of strenuous work requiring a high degree of concentration and adaptability to keep up with constantly changing demands. I just think that a scientist and a secretary should be two equally valuable but also distinctly different jobs.

Disclaimer 2: The following arguments do not apply to every research group but I think they roughly correspond to the general trends observed in modern Academia. (more…)

The changing job market

I just read that in the US, college graduates have trouble landing jobs related to their education if at all [1]. This vividly reminds me of a TED talk given by Andrew McAfee about what future jobs will look like. The following is a video really worth watching!

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Solving criminal cases through crowd-sourcing

I started writing this post a few days ago after reading this article. It looked extremely interesting. The main idea is that in the Boston marathon there were thousands of mobile phones taking pictures and videos. The total duration and number of all videos and pictures shot could be stunning. This could be equivalent to thousands of witnesses testifying with absolute accuracy what they saw. The author was wondering whether crowd-sourcing could become a tool to crime solving. She probably meant to write modern crowd-sourcing as some forms of crowd-sourcing have been in use since long time ago as we will see further below. (more…)