I don't think that's the definition usually used for "independent" when talking about voter affiliation. US politics has a long history of people telling pollsters (and filling out voter affiliation info in actual elections) that they aren't affiliated with a specific party because political parties have generally historically been seen pretty negatively in the US. In reality, many of these self-identified "independent" voters have voting records that are heavily skewed (if not straight-ticket) to one party or another. I don't have actual numbers on what % of independents this is (I too am interested in the parent's question on this matter), but it's definitely not a "definitionally, none" answer.
Singapore math focuses on teaching every concept by first manipulating physical objects, then manipulating pictures, then manipulating abstract symbols. Encouraging children to draw connections between these.
It also spreads each concept over time so that you keep revisiting the same ideas to ensure it gets fully integrated. And mixes them. So grade 1 kids may be doing "multiplication" by arranging blocks in a grid before they've fully mastered the + sign.
The USA gives a much more cursory pass through operational actions and goes straight to the abstract representation. We also do a lot more of one concept at a time, only to move on to the next while kids forget the first. The result is that kids learn to blindly follow poorly learned procedures, hoping to do it well enough to pass the test before forgetting the concept. And then the following year do it all over again, having forgot the material from last year.
Yeah, yeah, we have an official curriculum, sequencing, and there is lots of verbiage in official documents about how and when kids are supposed to get reminded, etc. But I described what ACTUALLY tends to happen. And you only have to glance at test scores to realize that the official narrative about what is learned is more myth than reality.
That sounds similar to how I learned math in Montessori in Grades 1-6.
Every math concept had physical "materials" that we had to manipulate to get to the answer (e.g. for square root, you place N beads on a grid in a square form and count how many are on the side). Often, tricks to get quickly at the answer were discouraged early on to promote a proper "grasp" on what the operations entail.
23 MY owner here - I have been very unimpressed with the automatic wipers in my car, especially in intermittent rain/water thrown up from the car in front, or snowy conditions/lots of salt on the road - they seem to either want to wipe like crazy and smear the windshield, or they never trigger when most of the windshield is covered. This wouldn't be quite as annoying except that the wiper interface isn't physical, and having to reach over to the touch screen to change wiper speed when you're already in a reduced visibility situation is not a great UI! I basically end up just pressing the one physical button to trigger a one-off windshield wipe a lot.
This was a pretty big disappointment for me coming from a 2005 (!) Audi A4 which has auto wipers that work _almost_ flawlessly (and has a physical adjustment on the stalk when I need to override).
I'm very much not a Tesla hater - overall I _love_ the car. I just wish a few details were different (speedometer & nav more directly in line of site, physical controls for windshield wipers, CarPlay integration). I've just been kinda shocked how bad the auto wipers are for a brand new car.
Adaptive Cruise works well for me though, although I enjoy the act of driving so I don't use it all that often other than long straight highways.
Do you have a feel for if they might start hiring SDE's again before the end of the month? I was looking into them because it's right up my alley: I'm an aerospace engineer (aeronautics, flight test) turned software engineer who's worked a lot in rotorcraft.
I don't, unfortunately, that's above my paygrade ;-). It's likely going to be a function of the larger hiring situation at Amazon (we're currently in a corporate hiring freeze), rather than something Prime Air specific.
Sounds like you've got a perfect background for Prime Air though! Hopefully we'll be hiring again sometime this year - feel free to reach out (email in profile) if you want to chat more about it.
Yes, I totally agree. The whisper quiet vans driving safely and unhurriedly up and down the street where my kids play are a much better solution. I hope that your plans to legislate the status quo into permanence are successful.
I may have a stale understanding of the laws regarding drones in the U.S. But my understanding is they can basically hover around / over your property without your consent.
That's very different from vans driving on public roads and (when I've ordered something) parking in my driveway.
Working from home since the start of the pandemic I hear delivery trucks honking on reverse and backing into my driveway (granted I'm at the end of a cul-de-sac but I'm in a pretty remote area) 3-4 times a day. I also see trucks backing into empty driveways to stage unloading, as well as trucks convening in the cul-de-sac to do package transfers.
I don't mind these things, but they do utilize my property and impact my little neighborhood. I'm not convinced some buzzing above is worse. How much do we own the air above us? Is that somehow not public?
I mean planes and satellites also flyover your house without your consent. Do you think you own all the airspace from your house to the edge of the atmosphere?
I don’t work at Amazon, just curious about your reasoning.
Somehow, I'm guessing the altitude makes a bit of a difference. A drone over your house might be visible and even hearable, while a satellite barely is.
Mostly right! Fly by wire doesn't inherently have to do with whether a pilot has the strength to move the controls or not - airliners in the pre fly-by-wire era still had hydraulic actuation of control surfaces, which allow pilots to multiply the force of their inputs. The main question/difference here is how much physical feedback the control system gives to the pilot - basically how much harder to move the stick it gets as the actual pressures on the control surface increase. Whether it's an electronic system or a hydraulic one in between the cockpit controls and the surfaces doesn't HAVE to mean that the physical feedback is all that different. It does make it easier to do non-linear ramping of the feedback though.
You also can do more complicated mappings of control inputs to control surface movements more easily with FBW (you can think of automatic traction control in a car as a somewhat analogous system - it uses differential braking per wheel, which the driver has no direct control over, to attempt to straighten out the path of the car and follow the driver's inputs from the steering wheel). As another comment mentioned, this has been happening in fighter jets for a long time, mostly due to how inherently aerodynamically unstable they are.
I feel like this irony is at the core of the modern Republican party (witness the fact that more ideologically consistent libertarian types have basically found themselves ignored in the post-Trump era).
The cynical way of looking at this (and IMO supported by the popularity of Trump's rhetoric) is that most on-the-ground Republicans aren't actually opposed to government handouts, they're just worried that government handouts are mostly going to the wrong people - groups outside of their circle of empathy. Unfortunately, this often seems to be largely defined by race...
Maybe not quite 5-year-old, but here's my attempt:
The elevator is the little wing at the back of an aircraft that tilts up and down to make the nose go up and down. When the pilot is flying, this up-down is what moving the yoke forward/back does.
The elevator also has a tab (the trim tab) part of the wing that can move independently from the main part. This trimming movement allows for adjustments to the plane's up/down movement that don't require the yoke forward/back (this is useful to "lock in" the current desired climb/descent/level flight so that pilots don't have to be constantly pushing/pulling on the yoke to get the plane to be climbing/descending/level the way they want it).
The 737-MAX has a system that automatically uses this trim tab to pitch the nose of the plane down when it senses certain conditions, without notifying the pilots. In this case (plane inexplicably pitching down), the natural response from a pilot is going to be to pull back on the yoke to counteract.
This can cause issues because the act of pulling back on the yoke increases the pressure on the elevator (because physics - the more the elevator deflects in an attempt to change the plane's attitude, the more force the airstream flowing over it exerts. This "catching the airflow" is why it can change the plane's attitude at all). Apparently on this plane if the trim tab is way out of line even if disconnect the erroneous system that was automatically adjusting the trim tab and try to reset the trim to a safe position by hand, the airflow over the "loaded" elevator (which is trying to counteract the position of the trim tab and keep the plane from crashing) is too strong to physically allow the manual control to move the tab. So the "correct" procedure is to push the yoke in (allowing the nose to go down/lose altitude) to reduce the airflow that's hitting the elevator, while frantically spinning the manual trip wheel to get it back to neutral. Then, once you've reset the trim manually, you presumably pull back on the yoke to get the nose up and pull the plane out of the dive.
The issue with that is that the ground can get in the way in between when you've let off the yoke and you've spun the wheel enough to get the trim tab back to neutral.
I wanted to update my explanation ^ a little bit - it's based on how trim works in smaller trainer aircraft (which are all I've flown). On a 737 there isn't a "trim tab" - instead the whole littler wing at the back of the airplane (tailplane) can change its position based on the trim, while the elevator is the adjustable tab at the back of that which moves based on the pilot's inputs.
I think the basic procedure for how to undo the excessive trim based on too much force to move the tailplane still is accurate though...
Incorrect, this describes a typical General Aviation aircraft with trim tabs. Most (all?) airliners use a trimmable tailplane, meaning the entire tailplane tilts up and down to trim for a specific speed.
Incorrect, this describes a typical General Aviation aircraft with trim tabs. Most (all?) airliners use a trimmable tailplane, meaning the entire tailplane tilts up and down to trim for a specific speed.
The only airliner I can think of that uses trim tabs is the DC-9 and its derivatives (MD-80/MD-90/Boeing 717). Some, like the L-1011, went in the completely opposite direction and use an "all moving tailplane" where the functions of the elevator and stabilizer were integrated into one piece.
An example fully trimmable tailplane in a general aviation airplane is the Mooney, at least the 201 and related models. Look at pictures of it and compare it to, say, a Cessna 310’s plane. You will see the “trim tabs” at the back of the 310’s elevator and none on the Mooney 201.
I seem to recall some tail draggers I flew had no trim tabs too.
Yeah this explanation is completely backwards. The "trim" moves the entire horizontal stabilizer. The elevator control moves the elevator (a moveable section of the back of the horizontal stabilizer).
In an average case (trained pilot, solid amount of experience, etc.) what is the turn around time between detecting this problem and fixing it in the air?
Like, how long does it take to determine the exact problem, spin the manual trim wheel to get to the point where you can recover from a nose dive in this case?
How does that number (in seconds I'm guessing?) translate to altitude levels?
By regulation, when a system fails (as designed) the pilot MUST be able to recover:
- in 3 seconds when in cruise
- in 1 second when on approach
- when in the landing phase - immediately!
Such a system would be certifiable.
Most modern airliners have ~10 "memory items" that are procedures that are to be recalled and applied immediately without consulting any checklists. Runaway stabilizer is such a memory item. But first you need to recognize the issue as such..
It bears to mention that the 737 is riding on it's "grandfathered" certification status from the 60's, getting a free pass on many newer requirements that are subjected to airliners designed today. This is why it doubly makes sense for the bean counters to not design a new aircraft.
That's really impressive turn around times. I wish I could debug most software errors in 3 seconds or less.
That is pretty frightening about the grandfathered rules.
I don't know much about cars but I do know they have a similar thing. Suddenly because you have a car 1 year before a point in time it can be obnoxiously loud but today it wouldn't be street legal. I almost can't believe the same thing happens with planes.
The situation is actually worse with airplanes. When automobile regulations change, owners can generally continue to drive older vehicles but manufacturers can't continue to sell new vehicles approved under old rules. But with aircraft, once a type certificate is issued the manufacturer can generally continue producing it forever.
I think (please correct me if I’m wrong), the plane’s “type” is fixed, and pilots have certifications for that “type”. So theoretically the plane is simialar enough to not require completely new training if a pilot is certified to the type - this new 737 Max is grandfathered into the 737 “type”. If it were different enough, then it would be a new type. If the plane is a new type, pilots, and likely all sorts of other things, mist be retrained, and reissued.
So there’s an incentive to not just make the type backwards compatible to keep the common “type”, but also not introduce too many new features that might bring into question the grandfathered training.
This 737 Max added this new “safety feature” without telling the pilots (because it’s the “same type”). And that feature seems to have an unfortunate interaction with other systems in some circumstances.
I don’t know the specifics, but I assume the process to get changes approved to an already-certified type of aircraft (the 737 family in this case) is less rigorous than what you’d have to go through to get an entirely new type certificate.
Personally, I find this "turn to anger" a little hollow/self-serving. Nothing Trump has done so far is in any way out of line with what he was saying on the campaign trail - the only people who are surprised by his actions are the people who took a "he's not being serious, it's just talk" view when evaluating his speeches. I wish SV companies and executives could have had this "turn to anger" back when it mattered and helped avert this when it was easiest to do so - before the election.
Having the temporary immigration ban affect current temporary and permanent residents to the United States was pretty out of line with campaign promises. So was extending that ban if banned nations don't cooperate with United States (really Syria, Yemen and Iran are going to cooperate?) Kinda makes it a not so temporary ban.
I think they were disgusted but generally uncomfortable fighting against the power and the electorate that voted him in. Maybe the campaign was all talk like his locker room talk, who knows? And campaigns are often quite dirty affairs.
But now its week one, the policies are eggregious and the implementation is incompetent, and a groundswell is building. I suppose now industry leaders dont feel like they are sticking their necks out, or at least they have a lot of company.
Now they jump in and intervene to play the role of hero, begging the question: why not sooner?
Rhetorically, the answer implied is that, had they made their voices and opinions known earlier, it might not have seemed as heroic as it does now. Letting circumstances become dire, when they could have been prevented altogether suggests performances are crafted and dishonest for the purpose of branding, marketing or personal fame.
Sort of like if John McAfee reared his head right about now, but with greater subtlety.
The biggest problem is that the Dems could only offer a hawk who had issues getting along with Putin. I would have held my breath if she entered office while Putin was still in power. That and her globalist outlook (even if later she tried to pretend to become anti-globalist.)
There was really no good choice and it became a choice of the least bad and the guy who won at least isn't afraid to say he's looking out for Americans whereas Hillary was more timid about looking out for the average Joe and Sue.
Ardusat | https://www.ardusat.com | Salt Lake City, UT | Full-stack Engineer, Front End Engineer
Come help change the way science and math are taught in schools! Ardusat is a growing educational technology company providing engaging experiences to science and math students by creating technology, products, and curriculum preparing them to run custom experiments on real satellites in space. With over $6B available in public and private STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) grants, this is an exciting space to work in. We are a small (9 person) team with a successful round of seed funding and a lot of really promising district pilot programs. Everyone at Ardusat is here because we believe parts of the education system are broken, and need to be fixed. We want our work to impact students’ lives all over the world by cultivating more interest in math, science, and technology.
We're looking for an experienced engineer to work on building out our student/teacher software features and help us scale as we grow. We've got a great working platform that is used by schools around the world to conduct science experiments, create and discover curriculum, and help manage, document, and assess Maker projects in the classroom. We have tons of ideas, but we need help taking this tool set to the next level. As an Ardusat software engineer, you would be responsible for architecting major new features and portions of our system - we're not just ticking off a bug list here. The ideal candidate is someone who has experience building web applications from the ground up and is excited by owning a large portion of product direction and design decisions.
Development Process:
Our development process is organized around 2-3 week sprints, and we have 2 in-person engineering tag ups a week. We are a small team and encourage autonomy, so we do asynchronous daily updates (accomplishments, blockers, collaboration needs) but try to avoid getting too bogged down in process or unnecessary meetings. We value accomplishments, not time-in-office, so we try to optimize our process around allowing flexibility and personal accountability.
Tech Stack:
Our website and API are powered by Ruby on Rails, our experiment tools and platform use Angular.js, our real-time features use Node.js, and we have a handful of microservices related to our data pipeline using Python. On the database side, we use Redis to coordinate services and Postgres for our primary data store. We’re especially interested in candidates with Ruby, Javascript, and Angular experience, but for the right candidate we’re open to other languages/platform experience with a demonstrated track record for learning new technology. Although everyone wears a lot of hats at an early startup like Ardusat, this position will be more backend focused, so experience with server management, cloud platforms (we use AWS), Docker, CI, or API design is a plus (although not required). Experience with "maker" technologies including Arduino, Raspberry Pi, 3D printing, etc. is also a plus.
Ardusat (Project-based education tech with access to space) Salt Lake City, UT
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Come help change the way science and math are taught in schools! Ardusat (https://www.ardusat.com) is a growing educational technology company providing engaging experiences to science and math students by creating technology, products, and curriculum preparing them to run custom experiments on real satellites in space. With over $6B available in public and private STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) grants, this is an exciting space to work in.
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Why Ardusat is an awesome place to work:
* Early stage startup with successful seed funding round. We've proven that investors and early adopters are excited about our vision, now we need help making that vision a reality! As part of a small team, you'll have the chance to make a real impact on the future direction of the company.
* Education is a space where what you are doing matters. Everyone at Ardusat is here because we believe parts of the education system are broken, and need to be fixed. We want our work to impact student's lives all over the world by cultivating more interest in math, science, and technology.
* We value autonomy, professional development, and life outside work. Do you do your best work when you get out skiing for the morning and work at 1 am? We understand different people work differently, and we want everyone we hire to be inspired by and love what they do. This means that we try to have people work on projects that are interesting to them, provide the resources to continue learning, and give the flexibility to fit in life outside work.
* Space is cool. So, you're not exactly a rocket scientist? Well, we don't actually work with rockets, either, but a satellite engineer is pretty close. We have a close partnership with San Francisco-based Spire and collaborate with their engineering team on a variety of projects. There's a good chance that some of the code you write at Ardusat will be running in space in a few months.
* Salt Lake City is not the Bay Area. We love visiting the Valley, but we're always pretty excited to get home. SLC is more affordable, has way less traffic, and, most importantly, is 30 minutes away from some of the best skiing, mountain biking, rock climbing, and hiking in the country. We are proud to be located somewhere where access to the mountains is close enough that you don't have to be a weekend warrior. (We respect powder days)
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Jobs Available:
* Front End Developer - We need someone to help develop our various web-based tools. The ideal candidate would be comfortable creating great UX and familiar with modern JS frameworks (we currently use Angular.js) HTML5, CSS3. Experience developing mobile apps is a big plus. We work with a top notch design firm for our creative, but having a decent eye for design is important.
* Embedded Software Developer - We need a “full stack” embedded hacker to help us develop some of our product offerings. Experience with typical “maker” technologies (3D printing, proto-board prototyping, Arduino, etc.) is preferred. This is an important, early hire for the team, however, so it involves multiple hats, and we're also looking for someone with experience working with backend technologies including sys admin and backend web development (we use Rails and Node.js).
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Technologies
We try not to be dogmatic about individual technologies. We've all used a lot of different platforms, languages, and idioms over our careers, so we're not overly focused on any particular technology/framework. However, we currently use/like the following technologies, and experience with some of them certainly helps!
Node.js
Ruby on Rails
Postgres
Angular.js
React.js
C
Arduinos
Docker
AWS
iOS/Android
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How to Apply
If you think Ardusat sounds like an exciting place to work, we want to hear from you! Please email us at jobs@ardusat.com with a brief description of your background and why you are interested in Ardusat, as well as a portfolio/CV. We would like to see a non-trivial code sample that you feel showcases your coding abilities and experiences – whether that's a github profile, side project code sample, OSS contribution or something else. We'll try to get back to everyone as quickly as possible!
