On 17-2-2009 17:11, Invisible wrote:
> scott wrote:
> 
> I'm still impressed about the guy who got a grant to find out whether or 
> not a duck's quack really does echo. WTF?

I am not sure that is true. Anyway I saw it both on Brainiac and on 
Mythbusters tried and falsified.

>>> Well, I guess it depends on what precisely you wanted to tackle. 
>>> Either way, I suck at research, so...
>>
>> You seem to have demonstrated otherwise here, frequently you seem to 
>> have taken ideas and material and then expanded upon it yourself.  It 
>> doesn't matter if you were unaware that someone else had already done 
>> the same, if you were doing a real PhD you would search a bit more 
>> thoroughly before starting work.
> 
> Surfing Wikipedia for a few hours is one thing. Somehow finding and 
> actually reading academic papers is much harder. (I failed epically at 
> this last time around...)

I still think you should try. But there is the problem of that BSc.
BTW I am also not very good at reading papers. I have this problem that 
I get distracted by possibly unrelated ideas popping into my head so 
often that I can hardly finish a sentence. The only place I can read 
seems to be in bath. That cuts the reading time to about an hour per 
week. I should read at least 4 or 5 hours so...

>>> Yes, but does anybody actually employ PhDs? Most of the ones I know 
>>> of still hang around universities...

There should be a couple in your company. At least in the US, but given 
what you do, also at least one in the UK. (if there isn't one, that may 
explain some things).

>> Over half the people working at my employer in Oxford have PhDs, it's 
>> mainly a research lab (my department is the exception, we deal with 
>> developing technology for specific customers).  Surely a lot of people 
>> at your place have PhDs too?  I think a lot of people who hand around 
>> Universities do so because they want to (they just enjoy academia) 
>> rather than because they can't find a job outside.
> 
> I don't think I've ever met anybody who has a PhD. 
At least you met a couple on line.
> (Of course, it's not 
> like they have labels on them, so I can't be sure...) Most of the people 
> who work here have degrees.

What degrees would that be?

> Most worryingly, I don't think anybody I met at uni had a PhD either... o_O

Could be. In other disciplines than computer science it is quite rare 
not to have mainly PhD's in the staff.

>> People with the PhDs are the ones inventing new things at the concept 
>> stage, then the Engineers like me get to work out how to actually make 
>> it into a product :-)
> 
> Heh, yeah.

Here the interpretation of a PhD is that you are able to define and do 
your own research.

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