This feels especially true when you have access to things like BigQuery ML.
It's very easy for an average engineer (like me) to start using ML using these tools, but a lot harder to explain how it works, or exactly which type of models to use.
In my mind a DS would be really useful to just point us in the right direction and check work. Like a super specialist QA...
My Dad was too cheap for Encarta. We had a shareware version called something like Infopedia. I remember doing a homework project at a friend's house and being quite jealous of the proper version!
My last home was built about 5 years ago, and the house builder had fitted fibre ducting to the curb, but when OpenReach turned up they came with a ladder and slung up a copper cable.
Maybe on a massive development they will install brand new street cabinets, but anything smaller than a few hundred homes, copper is still the standard.
> Maybe on a massive development they will install brand new street cabinets
Street cabinets would be FTTC. The cabinet is full of electronics, for FFTC there's a full VDSL modem which is you can feel and hear a working FTTC cabinet, it gets hot, so it has cooling fans that spew warm air and makes a gentle buzzing noise.
For FTTP they can and do either just bury everything (in a city or where the cables are underground for tidiness) or hang it from a pole if there are telegraph poles in your area. Because there's very little of consequence near you, the smarts are all in an exchange building that might be a full day's walk from you rather than street cabinets typically just a few hundred metres from each property.
> anything smaller than a few hundred homes, copper is still the standard.
If you're building twenty properties the fibre is free if the builder asks. Nothing to pay, just so long as you get Openreach in at the start to ensure a viable deployment.
If you're building between two and nineteen properties it's cost sharing, the builder pays part of the extra install cost over copper for their smaller site.
This is our situation too. What makes it worse is we have Cable in the area too, but that stops on the public street, and doesn't come on to the estate.
We were looking to move recently and almost bought a house from a sub company of Persimmons (yeah, we pulled out after we found out they were involved), but the houses all had Fibre to the premises. Except the provider was a monopoly, and was owned by Persimmons. Apparently, you didn't eve get a BT line installed, and were completely stuck with this dodgy 3rd party provider for the life of the property. That and the quality of Persimmons workmanship was enough to make us walk away from what was actually a very "sweet" deal.
There are all sorts of problems with houses built in say the last 10-15 years. The leasehold scam has headlines, but even freeholds come with things like 'estate charges' and 'management companies', which mean that nearby public spaces (open areas, playgrounds etc) are owned by a private company, and that company can charge whatever they want to house owners, without even giving them a breakdown of the costs! Note these are public facilities open to everyone, not just residents.
Half the time the roads aren't even maintained by the council, but there's no rebate on council tax.
Look into point-to-point wireless links? Find a friend outside the estate that you can work out how to get a line-of-sight to and connect up to their connection, and pay all or half of their ISP fees.
Depends on terrain for how easy it is to do.
I really like Ubiquiti products (e.g. Litebeam, Nanostation) because they are cheap, reliable, and have great features. They do need configuration, but I worked it out from Internet and YouTube when I did it.
Do you mean FibreNest (the Persimmon owned one?). I can't understand how they are allowed to get away with that!
We live on a relatively recent Persimmon estate but luckily OFNL got the contract; even that's a bit dodgy, all of the ISPs have crap websites and are a little dodgy looking (although the service has been alright).
And yeh, no BT line. It was an exclusive contract. OpenReach say they wont even install lines until the roads are adopted. Ironically, there is an independent Care Home built next door to us & OpenReach have been up and down the street and in our estate cabinet busy fitting their lines....
There are probably simpler ways - for example, if an accident report states there was only one person in the car, it was probably the driver using his phone.
I've been followed home and threatened in the US for giving a driver who was tailgating the middle finger. Are you saying that in the UK this would never happen? I certainly wouldn't risk provoking random strangers, especially those who are not following traffic codex.
But you still have to give the Verify companies enough data that a breach of their systems would be very serious. Eg. If the Post Office (an organisation that recently falsely sent a load of employees to prison due to their own cocked up IT project) gets hacked, they have (or could have) dates of birth, 6 years of addresses, email addresses, etc. of a good number of gov.uk users.
You don’t give the majority of those details to the Post Office (or other providers), they ask you questions about the data they already hold on you. The passport and driving licence information is checked via APIs provided from the government to accredited companies, and the system is designed such that that data isn’t stored by the identity providers (beyond a flag to say that that form of identity has been verified).
I still can't believe people are happy using Verify.
I very reluctantly tried to use it as I don't want to give all my data to any of the companies you listed, and yet it failed to identify me using the two companies I was allowed to pick.
I really don't see how it's acceptable to force users to give so much personal data to a handful of randomly selected private companies, on the off-chance that they already have it.
I'm in a similar situation to you. Last time I tried to verify my identity, two of the companies refused to do so because I don't have a full driving license, only provisional; and the other two didn't require a driving license but refused to accept that I exist, naturally without telling me what I should do about it.
The concerning part was what happened when I tried to cancel the process. The companies told me that they would delete all the data I had submitted to them, but when I tried again a year later, I was invited to resume my application, and all my data was still in their systems!
[edit] Just tried to go through the process again to see if anything has changed. I picked Royal Mail as an identity provider but was unable to finish because I had to upload a scan of a phone contract, which I don't have since I use pay as you go! Bloody waste of time!
There was a good article on the vast money charged by these journals in the Guardian last week. Although the publishers business does seem pretty robust, there are at least winds of change from universities and governments who fund this research that are finally saying enough is enough...
Hopefully something charges this time. Last time (i.e. around 2010) the publicity campaign failed. Back then university librarians managed to create some awareness about the extortionate price of journal subscriptions, but that's all they did, prices didn't decrease.
The trouble is, there are certain core journals that are really needed and many crap journals. Subscriptions come in packages, i.e. a library can't choose to keep Cell and get rid of Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry, they can only cancel Elsevier altogether. That's why the campaign failed last time, there wasn't a critical mass ready to unsubscribe from everything to convince the publishers to get their act together. Maybe this time, with Scihub, things improve.
I predict that Elsevier & friends are going to use their influence on Congress to implement internet filtering at universities to keep Scihub out. It worked for the music/film industry.
Did someone pull the strings at Economist to publish this editorial in order to respond/damage control the Guardian piece?
(obviously it's just my speculation but coincidence is also only one of the plausible explanations)
On the other hand, if you are lucky enough to work somewhere in the UK that grants options, those options are likely void the moment you leave the company so this entire discussion wouldn't even take place.
I've been granted options twice, both times essentially designed to stop people leaving during a rough period. Given how few UK startups float it wasn't much of an incentive!
It's very easy for an average engineer (like me) to start using ML using these tools, but a lot harder to explain how it works, or exactly which type of models to use.
In my mind a DS would be really useful to just point us in the right direction and check work. Like a super specialist QA...