Community Improvement Services Limited: Fill & Download for Free

I was a grad student at UC Berkeley for roughly six years, I've worked at Microsoft Research for roughly five months, and I interned at DoCoMo Labs in San Jose for a summer prior to that. These are key differences:0) Funding models.For a professor, 9 months of salary is covered by teaching duties. A graduate student may be a teaching assistant. If the professor wants to be paid for the other 3 months of the year, or if the graduate student wants to focus full time on research, or if they want to buy any equipment, this must be covered by a grant.Academics apply to grant-making organizations such as the U.S. National Science Foundation, DARPA, or occasionally private companies. Professors or other "principal investigators" apply for grants that cover equipment plus salaries for graduate students and research staff. These grants run for fixed terms and may incorporate reviews, formal deliverables, etc. The requirements vary, for example DARPA is fond of big demos.Grant applications state the scope of the research, potential results, and why it is important. Different grant making agencies have different policies, but most include some component of peer review, where proposals for funding are read by working scientists in the field and graded. The top graded proposals are then discussed and a program manager makes decisions about which ones are funded.The specifics and size of proposals likely to be funded vary widely; part of a professor's job is to know this area cold. Think raising VC but smaller amounts of money and with the payoff being a 10x contribution to the world's knowledge rather than a 10x return on investment.With industrial research, the researcher is a regular employee of the company. The researcher is paid a 12 month salary directly by the company. Industrial researchers usually do not need to apply for external funding from grant agencies to cover salary, travel, or equipment, although at some institutions they are allowed to do so.Beyond that funding models vary from company to company. There may or may not be "internal accounting" that states a researcher is "funded" by a specific project or a specific piece of the company, there may be explicit rules about what percentage of time the person should spend on different projects, so on and so forth. In any case, to obtain "extra" resources, the researcher typically needs to find money from within the company.At Microsoft Research, my time is funded from a separate "Research" budget. The research budget also pays for a certain number of summer interns, for a desktop + laptop for me, and for some amount of miscellaneous spending. if I need additional resources, I pitch the higher ups in Research or more likely people in product groups.1) Research group structure.Professors typically have between 1 to 10 grad students, even newly minted assistant professors. One of the first goals of an assistant prof is to recruit grad student advisees. The professor acts as a research group manager supervising the students. These students rarely do all the same project but usually have similar research interests to the professor. Professors may band together in teams of 2 - 4 to focus on specific projects (e.g. sensor networks) that need large teams. Professors have no one who can tell them "no," i.e. no manager per se, especially after tenure. (On the other hand, they need to get tenure, and they need to constantly compete for grants.)A new industrial researcher (like me) typically joins an existing group within the research organization and acts as an individual contributor. Some industrial researchers spend their entire careers without ever supervising anyone. Others rise to oversee several levels of research managers under them, each of whom does different areas of research. Industrial researchers have a manager, participate in yearly performance reviews, and they don't get tenure.2) InfrastructureAcademics typically create most or all of their research infrastructure from scratch, leveraging open source. There are some limited exceptions but the academic setting does not reward infrastructure building, and it certainly does not reward maintenance. Grad student code ships with the "it worked once" option. (There are welcome exceptions.) This is not all bad -- if you are an academic and you want to use github, you typically have few to no established processes locking you into subversion.Industrial research can (but does not need to) leverage the infrastructure of the company. Data is the most obvious gap here between academics and industrial researchers. Because it's hard to release data outside a company, researchers at a company with juicy data have an "unfair advantage" over others in the field. People join industrial research organizations just so they can do studies on their dream data sets.3) Road to impactBoth publish papers for peer review. Both tell the world about awesome new ideas. Both participate in peer review within a community.Academics teach classes, advise PhD students, and found startups. More usually, grad students found the startup and the professor advises. Some academics become involved in public interest work, such as work on electronic voting machine security or serving as CTO of the FCC. None of these are impossible for industrial researchers, but they aren't normal.Industrial researchers improve existing businesses or help create new businesses for their companies. Traditionally this takes the form of products -- IBM Research is famous for disk drive improvements stemming from fundamental physics, Microsoft Research contributed to Natal, Yahoo and Google have tons of people working on auction research, etc. These days I see people working on creating new business models or improving services, as well. There is a process of "tech transfer" where the researcher will partner with other groups in the company to move an idea from research to practice.There is also "internal consulting," where a researcher will answer questions from people in the company. This is not unlike what happens on Quora with technical topics. Researchers may also inform company policies that touch on technical matters or advise people on what is the state of the art in a particular technology.4) Intellectual property issuesOn paper they actually are not that different -- the university for an academic often technically owns or co-owns academic ideas. For industrial research, the company owns what you do.In practice I rarely see academics worry about IP issues except when a) starting a company (and the university needs a cut) or b) when working with industry. This is different from the worries about being scooped in research. I rarely see academics file patents or worry too much about using open source code. I rarely see academics worry about who owns IP from a collaboration with others.Because industrial research organizations tend to be part of larger companies, they take this more seriously. For example, Microsoft Research (and Microsoft generally) encourages filing patents on inventions. We are also not supposed to read any GPLv3 code for any reason, due to the patent grant language. Collaborating with friends at other industrial research organizations has a few extra hurdles because of this but they can be overcome.

It’s always the teacher’s fault.Example #1:A student has attendance that is atrocious.The teacher calls home, emails home, notifies the school, etc.Nothing changes.Is that student’s failure the teacher’s fault?Example #2:The teacher assigns regular homework. The student never does any of the homework.The teacher calls home, emails home, notifies the school, etc. The teacher offers tutoring. The student does not attend.Is that student’s failure the teacher’s fault?Example #3:The teacher plays video games in class. The teacher shows movies all day. The teacher doesn’t return papers in a timely fashion or give students feedback. Some students fail.Is that student’s failure the teacher’s fault?The answer is “yes” in all three cases. How?Well, in case #1, the teacher should have gone to the home of the child (with the appropriate authorities, of course, like CPS and the police) and had a face-to-face with the parents and child about the severity of the situation. In case #2, the teacher should have arranged for officials from the military and criminal justice to meet with the parents and student and talk to them about the repercussions of poor grades. And, in case #3, the teacher should have done a better job trying to engage students.There’s obviously a problem here: teachers have limited time and resources. Cases #1 and #2 are nearly impossible for a teacher to solve, in part because many teachers (myself included) don’t have one student like that, but dozens.What’s the solution?Easy - we need to significantly improve the education system. This starts with additional investment in the schools. We need to hire extra people to interact with the community on behalf of the teachers so that teachers can do what they’re trained to do - teach. Those additional employees (community leaders, social workers, law enforcement, child protective services, etc.) need to have time to meet with teachers to get up to speed on the problems faced by individual students and how they can assist. They also need time to actually interact within their communities.Furthermore, both these new employees and existing teaching staffs need additional support with the paperwork this will generate. That means clerical and technology staff will need to be hired and trained.We’ll need extra money to advertise and promote this new intervention. And we’ll need a long-term commitment to the success of cradle to adulthood education and community involvement.When a child fails, it’s our fault as a society. It’s our fault as a nation. And we will pay for our crimes in the form of increased crime in our community, the cost of increased incarceration, the loss of productivity from those incarcerated, the diminished image our nation will have on the world stage, the diminished innovation that could have been brought on by those currently incarcerated, and the wholesale loss of generations of poor and oppressed people across this country.A child cannot fail - not without our help and complicity. If that child does fail, it is on all of our backs. Teachers, parents, educators, the community, and most importantly, the government that turns a blind eye to the suffering of its citizens.We have the money and know-how to fix this. We just lack the will.

Cloud computing is really the transformation of the IT industry from a product based economy to a service/utility based economy. This is a function of commoditization of ALL IT resources from hardware to software to management capability.NIST provides a comprehensive definition which a few people agree with. Here is the gist of it:a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g. networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.Cloud computing builds on the advancements in SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and web service technologies, grid computing, and virtualization technology. It promises to offer many benefits, including:cost savings from consolidation of operations and maintenance, better utilization of computing resource, and savings in energy useimproved IT services from the pooling of IT expertise to allow more efficient and effective use of technical staffimproved service reliability and availability from hardware/network redundancy and remote data backupimproved service performance and response time from the flexible, on-demand sharing of computing resourcesimproved security from the uniform enforcement of security measuresopportunities for business innovation resulting from the clever integration and use of data generated by the various activities in existing organizations and the efficient sharing of information across organizational boundaries.[edit]Five essential characteristics[edit]On-Demand Self ServiceThe on-demand and self-service aspects of cloud computing mean that a consumer can use cloud services as needed without any human interaction with the cloud provider.[edit]Ubiquitous Network AccessUbiquitous network access means that the cloud provider's capabilities are available over the network and can be accessed through standard mechanisms by both thick and thin clients.This does not necessarily mean Internet access. By definition, a private cloud is accessible only behind a firewall. Regardless of the type of network, access to the cloud is typically not limited to a particular type of client.[edit]Location Independent Resource PoolingResource pooling allows a cloud provider to serve its consumers via a multi-tenant model. Physical and virtual resources are assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand. The location of the physical resources underneath the cloud infrastructure is not known to the consumer and can change dynamically.In many cases privacy laws and other regulations require the cloud provider's resources to be in a particular location. The cloud provider and cloud consumer must work together to adhere to those regulations.[edit]Rapid ElasticityElasticity is defined as the ability to scale resources both up and down as needed. To the consumer, the cloud appears to be infinite, and the consumer can purchase as much or as little computing power as they need.[edit]Measured ServiceIn a measured service, aspects of the cloud service are controlled and monitored by the cloud provider. This is crucial for billing, access control, resource optimization, capacity planning, and other tasks.[edit]Delivery models[edit]Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)Rather than purchasing servers, software, data-center space or network equipment, clients instead buy those resources as a fully outsourced service. Suppliers typically bill such services on a utility computing basis and amount of resources consumed (and therefore the cost) will typically reflect the level of activity. IaaS evolved from virtual private server offerings.ORThe consumer uses "fundamental computing resources" such as processing power, storage, networking components or middleware. The consumer can control the operating system, storage, deployed applications and possibly networking components such as firewalls and load balancers, but not the cloud infrastructure beneath them.[edit]Platform as a Service (PaaS)Deliver a computing platform and/or solution stack as a service, often consuming cloud infrastructure and sustaining cloud applications. It facilitates deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software layers.ORThe consumer uses a hosting environment for their applications. The consumer controls the applications that run in the environment (and possibly has some control over the hosting environment), but does not control the operating system, hardware or network infrastructure on which they are running. The platform is typically a virtual machine, but it can also be an application framework.[edit]Software as a Service (SaaS)The consumer uses an application, but does not control the operating system, hardware or network infrastructure on which it's running.[edit](some have additionally added BaaS... Bulls*#$ as a Service to describe "cloud" offerings from vendors)[edit]Deployment Models[edit]Private CloudSome vendors have used the terms to describe offerings that emulate cloud computing on private networks. These (typically virtualisation automation) products offer the ability to deliver some benefits of cloud computing whilst mitigating some of the pitfalls. These offerings capitalise on data security, corporate governance, and reliability concerns during this time of transition from a product to a functioning service based industry supported by competitive marketplaces.They have been criticized on the basis that users "still have to buy, build, and manage them" and as such do not benefit from lower up-front capital costs and less hands-on management,[62] essentially "[lacking] the economic model that makes cloud computing such an intriguing concept".ORA private cloud offers many of the benefits of a public cloud computing environment, such as being elastic and service based. The difference between a private cloud and a public cloud is that in a private cloud-based service, data and processes are managed within the organization without the restrictions of network bandwidth, security exposures and legal requirements that using public cloud services might entail. In addition, private cloud services offer the provider and the user greater control of the cloud infrastructure, improving security and resiliency because user access ad the networks used are restricted and designated.A private cloud CAN be managed by a third party and can be physically located off premies. It is not necessarily managed and hosted by the organization that uses it.[edit]Community CloudA community cloud may be established where several organizations have similar requirements and seek to share infrastructure so as to realize some of the benefits of cloud computing. With the costs spread over fewer users than a public cloud (but more than a single tenant) this option is more expensive but may offer a higher level of privacy, security and/or policy compliance. Examples of community cloud include Google's "Gov Cloud".ORA community cloud is controlled and used by a group of organizations that have shared interests, such as specific security requirements or a common mission. The members of the community share access to the dta and applications in the cloud.[edit]Public CloudPublic cloud or external cloud describes cloud computing in the traditional mainstream sense, whereby resources are dynamically provisioned on a fine-grained, self-service basis over the Internet, via web applications/web services, from an off-site third-party provider who bills on a fine-grained utility computing basis.ORIn simple terms, public cloud services are characterized as being available to clients from a third party service provider via the Internet. The term "public" does not always mean free, even though it can be free, or fairly inexpensive to use. A public cloud does not mean that a user's data is publicly visible; public cloud vendors typically provide an access control mechanism or their users. Public cloud provide an elastic, cost effective means to deploy solutions.[edit]Hybrid CloudA hybrid cloud environment consisting of multiple internal and/or external providers "will be typical for most enterprises". By integrating multiple cloud services users may be able to ease the transition to public cloud services while avoiding issues such as PCI compliance.Another perspective on deploying a web application in the cloud is using Hybrid Web Hosting, where the hosting infrastructure is a mix between Cloud Hosting for the web server, and Managed dedicated server for the database server.ORA hybrid cloud is a combination of a public and private cloud that interoperates. In this model users typically outsource non-business critical information and processing to the public cloud, while keeping business-critical services and data in their control.A hybrid cloud is a superset of the technology used in a Community Cloud.