Mcdonald'S Application Paper: Fill & Download for Free

In my experience, yes it was.I graduated in my mid-20’s with a PhD in theoretical physics. I had always wanted to study theoretical physics to a serious level and I felt at the end of my undergraduate degree that I was only just getting to the interesting material (gauge theory, quantum field theory, general relativity). So I applied for PhD’s in the areas I wanted to study more deeply.It was an OK financial decision as in the UK PhDs are funded giving you enough money to live on (as long as you are still living a student lifestyle - obviously if I had gone straight into a job I would have earned more).As well as learning and researching in the subject I loved (quantum field theory), I gained a number of other great skills (some software development, research skills, ability to write complex reports, attending and presenting at conferences, lecturing, writing papers and posters, defending your work to a groups of experts etc). Off topic, but I also became really obsessed with photography (which probably delayed the completion of my PhD).Toward the end of my PhD my research group was advertising a lecturer position (associate professor equivalent). They had ~ 100 credible applications, four were selected for interview and flew in to be interviewed and give presentations to the research group. The applicants had really good and at that point I realised that an academic career was unlikely to be successful for me, the competition was too good. I did not apply for any postdocs and instead started focusing on what work I’d like to do.I decided I’d like to try technical/technology consultancy. The PhD and skill set did open some doors, I got to final interview for one position that would have had a starting salary of three times what that lecturer would have earned. However, that one was not to be.Four months after my PhD finished I was in a job I would not have been considered for without an advanced degree, modelling new aircraft to aircraft communication systems and then shortly after designing elements of a satellite navigation system. I started on a higher salary than those coming in with undergraduate or masters degrees, and the company could charge me out at a higher rate.So in summary, was it worth it - well I studied the subject I was obsessed with, was paid to do it, learned lots of skills, had lots of fun and moved into a job that otherwise would not have been available.

I honestly think that there is no single research paper that every NLPer should read. NLP is such a broad field that no person can specialize in everything, and research papers are, by nature, rather narrowly focused.However, in certain areas, there are classic papers that should certainly be read by everyone in the area. Here are a few that I particularly like (out of my admittedly biased and limited bag of tricks).ParsingKlein & Manning: "Accurate Unlexicalized Parsing" (shows that lexicalization is not necessary to achieve reasonably good parsing accuracy)Klein & Manning: "Corpus-Based Induction of Syntactic Structure: Models of Dependency and Constituency" (a revolution in unsupervised dependency parsing)Nivre "Deterministic Dependency Parsing of English Text" (shows that deterministic parsing actually works quite well)McDonald et al. "Non-Projective Dependency Parsing using Spanning-Tree Algorithms" (the other main method of dependency parsing, MST parsing)Machine TranslationKnight "A statistical MT tutorial workbook" (easy to understand, use instead of the original Brown paper)Och "The Alignment-Template Approach to Statistical Machine Translation" (foundations of phrase based systems)Wu "Inversion Transduction Grammars and the Bilingual Parsing of Parallel Corpora" (arguably the first realistic method for biparsing, which is used in many systems)Chiang "Hierarchical Phrase-Based Translation" (significantly improves accuracy by allowing for gappy phrases)Language ModelingGoodman "A bit of progress in language modeling" (describes just about everything related to n-gram language models)Teh "A Bayesian interpretation of Interpolated Kneser-Ney" (shows how to get state-of-the art accuracy in a Bayesian framework, opening the path for other applications)Machine Learning for NLPSutton & McCallum "An introduction to conditional random fields for relational learning" (everyone should know CRFs, and this paper is the easiest to understand)Knight "Bayesian Inference with Tears" (explains the general idea of bayesian techniques quite well)Berg-Kirkpatrick et al. "Painless Unsupervised Learning with Features" (this is from this year and thus a bit of a gamble, but this has the potential to bring the power of discriminative methods to unsupervised learning)

SMILE?I NEARLY CHOKED!On Friday 13 September 2019, a 72-year-old man was convicted of fraud and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment at Falkirk Sheriff Court.It follows a police investigation into two fraudulent applications for UK passports in 2004 and 2011. Following enquiries, officers from Police Scotland’s Organised Crime Team arrested 72 years old James McFarlane McDonald in Stirling in March 2018. He was subsequently charged.A four-year sentence may seem a tad harsh for a 72-year-old man.However, James McFarlane McDonald (JMM) was no ordinary fraudster. JMM was a recidivist, a habitual offender, a repeat fraudster of the highest order.He was also renowned for defending himself in court. A self-taught lawyer (he read a John Grisham novel in jail once).We have a Facebook group for retired officers. The above news was announced, and the comments started pouring in:-“I thought he was dead.”“He’s still at it?”“I nearly laughed my c**k off.”Then the stories started coming in:-“He used to place ads in the paper for TV repairs. The number was a phone-box. He then goes and picks up the TVs and sells them. Interesting character.”“He loaned a Microlight to a male who crashed it into a house in Stirling, The guy lost a foot. He wasn’t the pilot but was selling it to an inexperienced guy who crashed it, and with life-changing consequences.”I’ll share more stories about JMM later but this was my favourite:-“I remember PC Moodie and I reported him for a defective exhaust. The bold Jim, as usual, defended himself and duly arrived at the District Court with volumes of law books and others. I had given my evidence and PC Moodie was in the witness box.“With a flourish, JMM stood to question PC Moodie. He was armed with an official workshop manual for the particular car he had been driving. He showed PC Moodie a page of the manual and asked him to confirm if this was the type of exhaust fitted to his car.“PC Moodie thought for a second and replied, “Not quite, the one you had fitted to your car had a big hole in it.“I thought I was going to burst out laughing. Guilty verdict!"