The educational track in South Korea is extremely competitive, and everything hinges on how well you do on the Suneung (a kind of SAT on steroids). If you drop out, it is usually because you have intergenerational wealth, exceptional non-scholastic talents, or a route to study/work abroad.
Or you just don’t like studying. There are plenty of Koreans who drop out of high school because they don’t feel like studying is for them. Yes, parents are more likely to try to force them to stay in school compared to other countries. But South Koreans are people too.
I spent a few months in Songdo visiting my in-laws (and often return) and I generally concur. Specifically, I found that the area had much more of a community feel than these articles let on (local interest groups for expats and Koreans alike, libraries, a wide variety of restaurants, meeting places) and I found the quality of life higher than in some American inner cities where I've lived (LA specifically). I found the contrast between the high rises and the parks refreshing and uplifting, and it was heart-warming to see people take advantage of abandoned land to have makeshift vegetable gardens on the outskirts of town. Both the large and the small testified to the ingenuity of the people living there.
Things that I didn't like so much: it definitely felt like there had been a shift away from bringing in businesses to housing, so that you end up with blocks upon blocks of apartments, and with empty business districts. I worked in a high-rise that had an identical 30-story building next to it, completely empty. The Incheon government is trying to turn the tide by attracting biotech and more universities, but it will probably take years before the balance is properly restored.
> the area had much more of a community feel... local interest groups for expats and Koreans alike, libraries, a wide variety of restaurants, meeting places... makeshift vegetable gardens on the outskirts of town
Thank you for sharing this. Far more than the article's specific concerns like CCTV coverage, planned cities seem to fail when these things aren't present. Places like the planned core of Brasilia or Section 8 highrises in the US are defined by interchangeable spaces, a lack of pleasant third places, and restrictive use of land (either by policy, like banning gardens, or logistics, like paving deadspace and closing rooftops).
Overbuilding is definitely a concern, too. It's not just a waste, it tends to feel isolating and interfere with more natural as-needed expansion. It's not as catastrophic as rendering inhabited spaces alienating, though, so hopefully things will stabilize in time.
I see the reverse engineering skillset as not essentially different from low level systems programming, and as such it's very valuable even outside of "pure" security research.
I work as a Python programmer building scientific apps (so not security-related or systems programming at all), but at work every so often we're confronted with legacy code in binary form, or particularly nasty segfaults, etc. The thing with abstractions is that every so often the lower levels bleed through. At times like these, if you know your way around gdb, the ELF format, linking conventions, and can reason in assembly, you'll find yourself highly sought-after.
It gets even more fun when things work nicely on Linux and go haywire on Windows. Often there are no docs on Windows, so you need something who is ready to crack their knuckles, fire up IDA pro, and descend into the 7 circles of hell.
A counterexample would be a dataset that forms a fractal in the ambient space. I don't know of a realistic example of this, but it seems plausible if you think of scale-invariant phenomena. Other ways of getting fractal-like structures, or at least "dust-like" structures with weird topologies, is by taking intersections of smooth structures. These things would be hard to separate...
It's worth checking out Peter Woit's homepage at http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/ and looking beyond the blog and his role as a string theory skeptic. He teaches a number of classes and has a book about quantum mechanics and representation theory that has gotten a lot of favorable reviews. Not sure I'd classify this guy as your average helpdesk guy ;)
He's not an average help-desk guy, but he's not a first rate researcher either. He produced some good lattice qft work in the late 70s/early 80s, then worked unsuccessfully on Chern-Simons theory for a while. Since then he hasn't produced any papers. For a PhD researcher, this is basically 'failure to launch'. (And to be fair, this is probably the most common outcome for STEM PhDs.)
Lemaitre was also a first-rate geometer. He wrote a paper on quaternions and elliptic geometry (geodesics on a sphere) that was published with a Latin abstract in a journal of the Pontifical Society of the Vatican. My library didn't have a copy, and so that was probably the only time in my life that I had to correspond with the Vatican to get a copy :-)
In the US/UK civil engineering is often taken to mean constructing buildings (very roughly, in a nutshell), whereas other countries (in particular continental Europe) use the meaning that you quote. So you can have a Belgian civil engineer who specializes in theoretical physics, and knows more about the Higgs boson than about "traditional" engineering topics.
Not quite -- the comment refers to the fact that R^d has the structure of a normed division algebra in dimensions 1, 2, 4, and 8. This means that you can multiply things together in a nice way when you're in one of those spaces. For R^1, this is just multiplying real numbers, for R^2 it's multiplying complex numbers, R^4 is quaternions, and R^8 is octonions. As you go up in dimensionality, you lose more and more nice properties: the quaternions are not commutative and the octonions are also not associative (which is why there's no mention of them in the blog post). The point is that in dimension 1, 2, and 4 all sorts of interesting things happen. John Baez has a paper about this: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/octonions/node1.html
