#Computer engineering importance in education

[krstseo]

The Best Career Options After Computer Science Engineering

https://krct.ac.in/blog/2024/06/04/the-best-career-options-after-computer-science-engineering/

As a graduate with a degree in Computer Science Engineering, you are stepping into a world brimming with opportunities. The rapid evolution of technology and the expanding digital landscape means that your skills are in high demand across various industries. Whether you are passionate about software development, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, there is a career suitable to your interests and strengths. In this blog, let us explore some of the best career options after Computer Science Engineering degree.

Best Career Options After Computer Science Engineering

Software Developer/Engineer

Software developers are the architects of the digital world, creating applications that run on computers, smartphones, and other devices. As a software developer, you will be involved in writing code, testing applications, and debugging programs.

KRCT’s robust curriculum ensures you have a strong foundation in programming languages like Java, C++, and Python, making you a prime candidate for this role. You will be tasked with developing and maintaining software applications, collaborating with other developers and engineers; and ensuring that codebases are clean and efficient.

The role requires proficiency in multiple programming languages, a keen problem-solving ability, and meticulous attention to detail.

Data Scientist

Data science is one of the fastest-growing fields, combining statistical analysis, machine learning, and domain knowledge to extract insights from data. KRCT provides the analytical prowess and technical skills needed to thrive in this field.

As a data scientist, you will work with large datasets to reveal trends, build predictive models, and aid decision-making processes. Also, your responsibilities will include collecting and analysing data, constructing machine learning models, and effectively communicating your findings to stakeholders. This career path requires strong statistical and analytical skills, proficiency in tools such as R, Python, and SQL, and the ability to clearly convey complex concepts.

Cybersecurity Analyst

With the increasing number of cyber threats, the demand for cybersecurity analysts is higher than ever. As a cybersecurity analyst, you will monitor networks for suspicious activity, investigate security breaches, and implement necessary security measures to prevent future incidents. Further, this role demands a thorough understanding of security protocols and tools, sharp analytical thinking, and a high level of attention to detail.

Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Engineer

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are the currently trending and revolutionizing industries, where we can witness significant milestone from healthcare to finance. KRCT’s focus on cutting-edge technologies ensures you have the skills to build and deploy AI/ML models. As an AI/ML engineer, you will work on creating intelligent systems that can learn and adapt over time.

So, your responsibilities will include developing machine learning models, implementing AI solutions, and collaborating with data scientists and software engineers to innovate and enhance technological capabilities. A strong grasp of algorithms and data structures, coupled with programming skills, is essential for this role.

Full-Stack Developer

Full-stack developers are versatile professionals who work on both the front-end and back-end of web applications. Moreover, KRCT equips you with the knowledge of various web technologies, databases, and server management, enabling you to build comprehensive web solutions.

As a full-stack developer, you will design user-friendly interfaces, develop server-side logic, and ensure the smooth operation of web applications. Additionally, this role requires proficiency in multiple programming languages, an understanding of web development frameworks, and the ability to manage databases.

Cloud Solutions Architect

Cloud computing is transforming how businesses operate, and cloud solutions architects are at the forefront of this transformation. KRCT’s curriculum includes cloud computing technologies, preparing you to design and implement scalable, secure, and efficient cloud solutions.

Also, as a cloud solutions architect, you will develop cloud strategies, manage cloud infrastructure, and ensure data security. Furthermore, this role requires in-depth knowledge of cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, along with skills in network management and data security.

DevOps Engineer

DevOps engineers bridge the gap between software development and IT operations, ensuring continuous delivery and integration. KRCT provides a strong foundation in software development, system administration, and automation tools, making you well-suited for this role.

As a DevOps engineer, you will automate processes, manage CI/CD pipelines, and monitor system performance. This role demands proficiency in scripting languages, an understanding of automation tools, and strong problem-solving skills.

Why KRCT?

KRCT stands out as a premier institution for all of its Engineering courses due to its rigorous academic programs, state-of-the-art facilities, and strong industry connections. Our college emphasizes practical learning, ensuring that students are well-versed in current technologies and methodologies. Also, we have the best and experienced faculties in their respective fields.

KRCT’s placement cell has a remarkable track record of securing positions for graduates in top-tier companies. Regular workshops, seminars, and internships are integrated into the curriculum, providing students with valuable industry exposure. Additionally, the college’s focus on research and development encourages students to engage in cutting-edge projects, preparing them for advanced career paths or higher education.

KRCT’s commitment to excellence is reflected in its alumni, who are making significant contributions in various sectors worldwide. The supportive community and extensive network of alumni also provide ongoing mentorship and career guidance to current students.

To Conclude

Graduating from KRCT opens up numerous career options after computer science engineering degree in the technology sector. Whether you choose to become a software developer, data scientist, cybersecurity analyst, AI/ML engineer, full-stack developer, cloud solutions architect, or DevOps engineer, the knowledge and skills you develop during your engineering degree will pave the way for a bright future. Thus, embrace the opportunities, continue learning, and let your passion for technology guide you towards your ideal career path.

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[cs-med-world-insights]

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[ahmad-gaza]

🇵🇸 Very important ‼️

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Please listen me💔

Hello, I am Ahmed, 20 years old, studying computer engineering. I had big dreams and ambitions, but because of the war, I lost everything 💔😭

I was exposed to many dangers 💔

Last January, the occupation ordered us to evacuate our house, and I am the sole breadwinner for my family. We were displaced on foot for a long distance under the showers of bullets and rain. From that day until today, I have been homeless, without shelter, and without work. Our house was demolished, I lost my car, and my university was bombed by the occupation, so I want to complete my studies and education and build my dreams again 🥹😭

Please donate and help me

https://gofund.me/8d28e7d4

[othernaut]

Without getting into the nuances of human taste with even more detail than has already been wonderfully provided, man - sometimes you want the generic.

One of the major themes of basically every sci-fi situation is alienation: being alone in the great indifferent darkness, being this awkward hairless monkey optimized for running long distances in sub-equatorial grasslands now thrust all willing into a landscape where abstraction is the only means of interaction. This is why all those silly little Star Trek vignettes of people having jazz concerts, poetry recitals, or fancy dinners are also incredibly important - like, sure, you can summon a holo-clone of the greatest jazz musicians in history to put together your dream band, sure, you can eat Christmas Eve mussels and calamari every night, but there it's just alone in your room. It's not an event. The alienation seeps in through the dark corners of your quarters; the solitude has weight.

If you grow up on Earth, or any place where people gather in the same societies they always have, with the same events and random shrimp festivals and kick-ball sports and trivia nights we've always done, then you claw back against that alienation with everything you've got. You know how. You manufacture a sound scientific reason to maintain an arboretum so you can take dates for a walk around the trees. You turn the time the computer glorked out the date as Easter Christmas Pride into a yearly shipwide holiday. You find a way to make the milestones mean something, or you make your own, because otherwise it's just you and the shadow, all of you, uncounted private solitudes eating gourmet chicken with the void.

But what if you grow up in that alienation? What if it's home to you? The weight of that loneliness is as bearable as air pressure. You notice it when it's gone, not when it's there. Maybe you grew up in one of those space stations, drifting like marine snow around the clean whalebone of a parent's duty. Maybe your mom does water testing, maybe you spent your youth bumming around all those graveyard towns that emptied out as soon as the stellar diaspora kicked in. Maybe your parents went through the hard times, the last rabid fight of scarcity, enough to still be thoroughly enchanted with all those utopian conveniences that make effort and want and connection inefficient and unnecessary. Maybe, maybe - the world has infinite ways to pull people apart from each other, infinite upon infinite when expanded to the size of a universe.

Maybe you spent years 7 to 14 on a space station that hosted twelve other juveniles out of a population of seven hundred, and four of those were little kids while the rest were species that don't do adolescence like you did. You kick around vasty promenades alone, staring out at black void and burning gases. You listen to downtuned lo-fi Catholic choral hymns at low volumes while sitting outside of engineering, the sound mixed and merged real-time; your education program subtly switches you onto the Music, Experimental track. You see your moms at night when they burst into your quarters, boiling with complaints about people you've never met and never will. They ask you how your day went, and you say it was fine. They kick on the replicator and ask you what you want for dinner. You have all the options there ever were. You don't know. You don't know.

Twelve years later, your affinity for rhythmic static appreciation resolves into a signal-noise mediator job on an actual planet with plants and everything. Your walk home takes you along a cobbled riverwalk bustling with bars and restaurants. You feel it, the pressure of it, every single time. Sometimes your co-workers take you out for drinks, and you appreciate it, but it's worse inside. Closer. Like a too-tight sweater; like atmospheric pressure. Your birthday - oh dead stars, they took you to a concert, there were hundreds of people there, they watched you and sang at you while you struggled to pop champagne. You walk past. The laughter and conversation follows, pleasant enough. You like that these people are enjoying themselves, the confirmation of it, as you walk up to your dim set of rooms.

You kick on the replicator and wonder what you want for dinner. You've been struggling not to just eat desserts for every meal; the replicator compensates for nutritional content, and that doesn't make it any easier to not just eat soft cookies in perpetuity. You consider noodles. It's not really what you want. It never really is.

If you were honest with yourself, you'd say you want Wafered Gelatin, Citrus Flavor - you know, the square-block ingot of generic sugar substitute that all your co-workers teased you about when you boggled over their homemade cupcakes. You tried ordering it a couple of times. The replicator gave you a bowl of orange Jell-O twice, a yuzu fried mochi trifle once.

What you want is the generic brown soda that came out of the dispensers that you'd drink by the liter while kicking around the upper promenade. What you want is the spicy steak cube skewers that came out identical every time, so much so that you could tell which one you were eating by the pattern of the marbling in your mouth. What you want is Wafered Gelatin, Citrus Flavor, printed out in the dozens and left in little crinkled paper cups on conference tables, the ones you'd sneak into hours after the meetings were over, the tongue-tingling pops of sugar-acid and the impossible texture and the quality of the loneliness in those empty rooms being somehow diffferent than the loneliness everywhere else -

Somewhere down the street, someone pops a champagne cork. The crash of glass shattering, a rousing wave of laughter: it's all right, it's all all right. Nothing's broken. Nothing's wasted. Nothing's lost. Nothing.

What do you want for dinner?

As a side note… I am really annoyed by one thing about Star Trek.

“Replicated food is not as good as real food.”

That’s ridiculous.  In Star Trek, replicator technology is part of the same tech tree as transporters.  Replicated food would be identical to the food it was based on, down to the subatomic level. 

[annantgyan-blog]

Registration link:- (Limited Seats)

[cosmicpuzzle]

Which Education🎓📚 is right for you?

Mercury rules your interest and consequently which type of course you would select.

Now you have to see how Mercury is placed. For example if Mercury is conjunct Moon it would have same effect as Mercury in Cancer or Moon opposite Mercury.

Mercury -Sun: It is called Budh Aditya yoga. These people can shine in political science, geology, sociology, medicine and they can be good leaders too. They may prepare for competitive exams.

Mercury-Moon: Some changes or confusion in choice of course. Can study more than one subject but both vastly different from each other. Chemical, hotel management, nutrition, chef, psychology, tarot and intuitive studies.

Mercury-Mars: Some obstacles in education, breaks and interruptions (dropping classes), engineering (especially related to machines, drawings, plans, civil, electronics), medicine (especially related to surgery), fire and safety engineering,

Mercury-Venus: Sales, marketing, HR, interior designing, makeup courses, all type of fine arts, vocational courses, acting courses.

Mercury-Saturn: Engineering (like construction , petroleum, mining core subjects), structural engineering, drafting, administrative studies.

Mercury-Jupiter: Finance, CPA, CMA, accounting, teaching, law field, journalism, VJ, pilots, aeronautical.

Mercury- Rahu: Chemical, nuclear subjects, cinematography, software courses, digital marketing, share markets, computer hardware, import export, AI, Machine Learning courses.

Mercury-Ketu: Computer coding, electrical engineering, bio technology, astrology, virology, research oriented fields.

For Readings DM

[darkficsyouneveraskedfor]

Pent Up 6

No tag lists. Do not send asks or DMs about updates. Review my pinned post for guidelines, masterlist, etc.

Warnings: this fic will include dark content such as noncon/dubcon, virginity loss, age gap, and possible untagged elements. My warnings are not exhaustive, enter at your own risk.

This is a dark!fic and explicit. 18+ only. Your media consumption is your own responsibility. Warnings have been given. DO NOT PROCEED if these matters upset you.

Summary: you seek validation through online correspondence with incarcerated men, only for one to lock you down in turn.

Characters: convict/excon!Thor (silverfox)

As per usual, I humbly request your thoughts! Reblogs are always appreciated and welcomed, not only do I see them easier but it lets other people see my work. I will do my best to answer all I can. I’m trying to get better at keeping up so thanks everyone for staying with me.

Your feedback will help in this and future works (and WiPs, I haven’t forgotten those!) Please do not just put ‘more’. I will block you.

I love you all immensely. Take care. 💖

You peer around awkwardly, unsure of the fine silvery cutlery and which of the forks to use. You can’t help but feel out of place as you’re the youngest at the table; by decades. It’s surreal, like when your mom left you with your great grandparents as a child. She said it would be a few days but it turned out to be a month. They never had you back. 

You fidget and play with the frill along your left shoulder. The asymmetrical cut isn’t your favourite. You’re not sure what high school you was thinking, even if it was only a few years ago. 

“That colour is gorgeous on you,” Frigga preens, forcing you out of your anxious trance. 

You smile sheepishly. “Thanks. I... love your hair pin.” 

She touches the pearl barrette in her hair. “Oh, thank you, dear.” 

He uses the smaller fork, you think, to poke at her salad. You’re not into kale, you find it dense, but you know better to complain or decline. Just like with her son. You gulp and grab your fork. It’s like when your great grandmother made you that olive and cottage cheese delicacy you vomited into her garden. The salad is more palatable. 

You taste it, hoping the task of chewing can save you from talking. They all are exceedingly skilled at that and you don’t have much to offer. If you try, that screaming inside your head might escape to the outside. 

You wince as Thor rests his large hand on the back of your chair. 

“She’s a very clever woman. She works with electronics. Oh, and is she attending classes.” 

You swallow and nearly choke. He’s bragging about the lamest things in your life. Your job is boring and you don’t really do anything with the computers yourself. And classes... you’re just trying to pad your resume. 

“It’s very important to get an education,” Odin intones. “What’s more important is what you do with it. I spent a fortune on two engineering degrees for this one...” he shakes his head. “And look where he ended up.” 

You’re even more confounded by that revelation. Thor? An engineer? What on earth got him put in prison? You try not to delve too far into that riddle. It’s probably best to ignore that. How many red flags did you already ignore? What’s another. 

“It’s nothing special. Just... business admin. Basic stuff,” you shrug.  

Frigga’s eyes narrow and Odin tilts his head. They aren’t impressed and they shouldn’t be. That might be something. If they don’t approve of you... 

“And... I’m stuck with my parents still so... you know...” You add. 

“She is saving money. For us,” Thor assures. “You know things are difficult these days and father always said there is value in hard work.” 

“Mm, so I said,” Odin drawls. “Certainly, I hear your brother took that to heart. I hear he’s hired help.” 

“Oh?” Thor sniffs. “And still he could not come see me?” 

“He has not come to see all of us. Your mother only chanced upon him herself. Hasn’t even the time to pick up the phone for her--” 

“He is busy,” Frigga assures Odin as she pets his hand. “He will be here for your father’s birthday. That is what matters. And his assistant, she was darling. Though he was in a state. You know how he can be. Perhaps you might ask his advice, Thor. He could help you find some work.” 

“Hm, I suppose I could try asking,” Thor shifts, retracting his hand from the back of your chair. “I am not helpless. I have plans...” 

“Yes, son, you have told us the same many times. I believe the day before your sentencing,” Odin scoffs. “A bit old now to be falling back into bad habits.” 

“Father. I’ve turned myself around and she,” he reaches over to take your hand, your fork scraping your plate, “will keep me straight.” 

“Right,” Odin crosses his arms and leans back. “Don’t tell me so, show me.” 

“Father, I--” Thor clears his throat.  

Silence rises with a rippling tension. You look between his parents. You piece together the few clues you have. You can’t really begrudge them their doubt. You have your own. 

“Well, I have one in particular,” Thor pushes his chair back and keeps hold of your hand.  

He slides your fork free and puts it on the table. You peek up at him, confused. He kicks his chair back and he turns, lowering himself to one knee with a grunt. He digs in his pocket with his other hand and pulls out a band with a large diamond sparkling in the light. 

Frigga gasps and you gurgle. Odin sighs. 

“My queen, how I’ve waited so long for us to be together and now I can’t hardly wait for it to be. Please, will you make me your king?” He holds up the ring. You could fold over and evaporate into the floor. Sweat glazes over your face and your scalp itches. What do you say? 

“Um,” you sniff and blink. Your options are many. You really don’t have any. You’re too afraid of even saying no to him. Even with witnesses. “Yes?” 

He squeezes your hand and you let out a fluttery noise. Your heart is thumping, deafening you as the world pinpoints to his grip on you. He opens his hand and slides the ring onto your finger. You stare at the large rectangle diamond framed in smaller diamonds on a gold band. It must be expensive. 

A chair scrapes and you wince. You look over as Odin clucks and turns on his heel. He swipes up his can from against the table and marches out. Not a word, not a look. You look at Frigga as she gives a gentle smile. 

“He’s in shock, I think,” she says. 

You glance at Thor as he stares after his father. His face falls. He lets go of you and gets up, another groan as he does. He sits in his chair and frowns. 

“I thought he’d be happy,” Thor mutters. 

“Oh, of course he’s happy for you, son,” she affirms and reaches across to her son. He takes her hand. “I am. Don’t you worry.” 

“He didn’t say anything,” Thor sneers. 

“Thor, it’s been a lot. You’ve been away from us for so long and now this... it’s all very sudden. We’ve just met this lovely woman.” She looks at you kindly. “What are your plans? For the wedding?” 

“I have my trust,” Thor recoils and crosses his arms, almost petulant. At his size, the bratty demeanour is almost laughable. “I was not entirely unproductive in prison. I only ever did what needs to be done. Mother, you know I am not a cruel person. I’ve made mistakes, I admitted them. And you all hold it against me.” 

“No, we don’t, darling--” 

“You do! But only my diamond forgive me. She is so kind and--” he huffs. “He couldn’t even stay and face me. Congratulate me. Worse, he’s disrespected my future wife.” 

Wife? You could faint. You brace the sides of the chair to keep from doing just that. 

“Dear,” Frigga’s eyes meet yours. “Are you unwell?” 

You shake your head. You lean forward and catch yourself against the table. You reach for the tall glass by your plate. 

“I only need water,” you assure her. 

“Mm, yes, we shouldn’t let all this go to waste,” she tuts. “You know, your father just needs time. He is like you and your brother. You only need simmer in your thoughts then you come to sense. Eventually.” 

🩷

Leaving brings both relief and dread. You are glad to be free of the repressive exuberance of Thor’s family estate but uneasy at the prospect of being alone with him. Again. 

You sit in the passenger seat and stare at your hand. The large stone is as heavy as a boulder. You are not Sisyphus. You’re not sure how much further you can get it up the hill. 

“I am so happy. Are you?” He asks. 

You sit up and suck in a thick breath. You are many things. Afraid, lost, almost mourning. You regret being so stupid. Those idiotic emails were only meant to be... well, an ego boost. You are so pathetic, you wanted desperate men to tell you lies. And you told your own. 

“Thor,” you utter cautiously. “It’s a very nice ring and a very nice gesture but... I’m still very young and I don’t have much. I think maybe--” You pause and weigh your words; does the boulder roll back to the bottom of the hill? “Maybe that’s why your dad wasn’t happy. Because I’m not—not the right person for you right now--” 

He slams on the brakes. You squeal as the seat belt keeps you from hitting the dash. A car honks and serves around him. He ignores them. 

“Not right for me? You are the only one for me,” he insists. “My queen, you said yes to me.” 

“I did. I—I didn’t want to have this conversation there. It’s not that... It’s... I’m... I have to finish school and right now isn’t good for me--” 

“You don’t need school. I will take care of you--” 

“Thor, I can take care of myself--” 

“It is my job to take of you,” he snarls. 

You lean away from him, startled by his deeper tone. In the cabin of the truck, he is even bigger. You wipe your sweaty hand on your skirt. 

“It’s very sweet of you but--” 

“You said yes,” he growls. 

You blink, eyes tinging with moisture. You wet your lips. Your throat is scratchy. 

“Yes,” you nod. “Thor... My parents... you know, I think maybe before we decide anything I need to talk to them.” 

“Oh, I will be speaking with this man, this stepfather of yours. I will not be asking anything of him either. I will be telling him,” he says. 

You gulp. While the idea of him intimidating Andy is on the surface amusing, it’s deeply troubling too. You don’t want your family to know anything about Thor. 

“Well, let me talk to them first.”  

Another car honks and you look out the back window. Thor is unbothered by the roadblock he’s caused. You are about to melt into a puddle. 

“Can I be honest?” You ask. 

He stares and nods. The lines in his face trace his displeasure. Your eyes wander to his rounded muscular silhouette and his thick hands. The intrusive thought of them around your neck make you squirm. What if he killed someone? 

“I didn’t tell them yet,” you blurt out. It’s true but still a lie because it isn’t the truth you kept from him. “My family. I never mentioned you. I... never told them about anyone so I think they might be surprised and, so, er, can’t you let me... tell them first?” 

He looks at you. His forehead wrinkles. He exhales through his nose. Another car lays on their horn. He shakes his head and sits straight. 

“I suppose...” he mutters as he hangs his head. The horn continues to blare. 

He grips the wheel and he face twists in agitation. He peels his fingers off and balls his hands to fists. He hits the steering wheel and snarls. 

Before you can react, he taps the button on his seat belt and it retracts. He swings open the door, mindless to oncoming traffic, and gets out of the car. He lands heavy on his feet and marches along the side of the truck. 

You panic and scramble to untangle yourself from your seat belt. You fall out of the truck as you hear him hollering. 

“You honking at me?” Thor barks as he approaches the other car. “You’re messing with the wrong man.” You sprint around the truck bed as he gets to the driver’s window. He bends to snarl through, “why don’t you open up and face me, eh? Coward!” 

“Thor, please, get back in the car,” you scurry over. “Please, we’re in the way--” 

“No, he has no patience!” He hits the top of the car and leaves a dent. You gasp. It looks as if it took him no effort at all. 

The man in the car is frightened. He curls over his wheel and revs in a futile effort to scare away the raging giant. You grab Thor’s hand and pet his forearm. 

“Thor...” you peek once more at the scared driver. It’s your fault. All of this is your fault. “My king.” You coo at him shakily. “Please get back in the truck and take me home.” 

“He is disturbing us! He could go around--” 

“Thor!” You nearly shriek. “How can I marry you if you are so angry? If you do not listen to me?” 

His eyes round and he twitches as if he’s been struck. He looks at you and his face turns grim. “Marry me?” 

“I didn’t-- I wasn’t saying no. I was just saying—asking for some time,” you look him in the eye, caressing him, calming him like a riled dog. “But I can’t marry someone who does these things.” 

He lowers his head. He actually looks guilty. He nods and turns. He bends and taps gently on the window. He waves his hand. 

“Sorry about that. Bad day,” he gives a sheepish grin. “Here.” He lets you go and takes out his wallet. He takes out a couple of bills; each at least a hundred dollars. “For the roof.” 

He tucks the money under the wiper and stands straight. He latches onto you again and drags you away. He sighs out the tension. 

“You are right, my queen.” He says. “This is why I need you. To keep me in my right mind.” 

[achingly-shy]

now that you're here, please consider reading the rest of this post and supporting my friend asmaa and her family in palestine!!!! those things that we may need more of every so often are critically important to asmaa's family, so please consider helping them.

asmaa is a 19-year-old student of computer engineering from gaza who dreamed of making a difference through work as a computer engineer after the conclusion of her schooling. however, her dreams have been disrupted by the war and bombardment, and her and her family desperately need our help!!!

asmaa's home was destroyed and her father lost his means of livelihood. she is trying to raise $50,000 ($5,000 for each of her family members) so that they can escape gaza and rebuild their lives, including the continuation of asmaa's education.

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[hachama]

Step kid worries that her confidence/ ability in math means that her career options are limited. I figure she's probably not unique in that view.

As your official internet nonbinary parent friend and Actual Professional Engineer, please believe me when I say this: you don't have to be good at remembering formulas. You don't have to be good at working polynomial factorial square roots or love writing proofs.

If I need to use advanced math, I use a computer.

My math education gets used for two things: Google search terms so I can find the formula that I vaguely remember existing, and having just enough of a clue what the answer should be that I can tell if I maybe possibly set up the equation wrong. (Volume isn't negative. If you ever try to find the volume of a real, solid object and come up with a negative number? You did something wrong.)

My father was an engineer, before everyone carried a calculator with access to the sum total of human knowledge around in their pocket. He actually really liked math and was very good at it.

He called calculating Square roots in his head a "party trick." He never used that level of math professionally.

From this, you could deduce a couple things:

1) my father was a real party animal.

2) for most of us mere mortals, that level of math capabilities is unnecessary

Now, before any angry mathematicians and/or math educators turns up, there's an important addendum.

Doing math is about more than just learning to do math, it's like bicep curls for your brain.

Regardless, please don't let the math scare you away from something you like doing

[techav]

On Documenting History

I've mentioned a couple times before that the first computer I really got to use was the Sanyo MBC-1000, a Z80-based CP/M machine. In the greater picture it was a largely forgettable machine with little to differentiate it from its competitors. Which is pretty much what has happened. There are a few units sitting in museums and the odd Reddit post of someone acquiring one, but not much real information.

So last year I started taking a closer look at the machine I grew up with to try to learn what I could about how it works. And in the interest of preservation and education, I've pushed my notes to a GitHub repository.

There is much more work to be done, but so far I've made an entry-level attempt at reverse-engineering & annotating a disassembly of the boot ROM, documented all of the components on the main logic board, documented the expansion card specifications including modeling the slot and mounting brackets in freecad as well as the board outline in kicad. I've also made an effort to reverse engineer a schematic for the serial expansion card — which as far as I am currently aware is the only official expansion card that was ever produced.

I plan to continue adding notes to this repository as I learn more about this machine. It may not have made any significant historical impact, but it was a solid machine that was more than capable of doing some serious work. I believe it can still teach us something and deserves to be remembered.

I do have a secondary motive for taking such a detailed look at this machine though — at some point in the last 20 years we misplaced the box containing its boot disks and other software. I have found an old Teledisk image of an MBC-1000 boot disk which does appear to have all of the important CP/M components (like the disk format utility, sysgen, and assembler), but there is no guarantee it will work. Beyond that, its floppy drives were never terribly reliable and out-of-production magnetic media does not have much life left anyway. I want to come up with some way to attach a modern storage device to the machine to breathe new life into it (a Gotek would probably be easiest since it uses standard Shugart floppy drives, but I would love to come up with a way to give it an SD card interface or something like that). All this information will be useful for developing anything new for this machine.

[arrghigiveup]

How easy is it to fudge your scientific rank? Meet Larry, the world’s most cited cat

-Christie Wilcox

Reposting whole text cos paywall:

Larry Richardson appeared to be an early-career mathematician with potential. According to Google Scholar, he’d authored a dozen papers on topics ranging from complex algebras to the structure of mathematical objects, racking up more than 130 citations in 4 years. It would all be rather remarkable—if the studies weren’t complete gibberish. And Larry wasn’t a cat.

“It was an exercise in absurdity,” says Reese Richardson, a graduate student in metascience and computational biology at Northwestern University. Earlier this month, he and fellow research misconduct sleuth Nick Wise at the University of Cambridge cooked up Larry’s profile and engineered the feline’s scientific ascent. Their goal: to make him the world’s most highly cited cat by mimicking a tactic apparently employed by a citation-boosting service advertised on Facebook. In just 2 short weeks, the duo accomplished its mission.

The stunt will hopefully draw awareness to the growing issue of the manipulation of research metrics, says Peter Lange, a higher education consultant and emeritus professor of political science at Duke University. “I think most faculty members at the institutions I know are not even aware of such citation mills.”

As a general rule, the more a scientific paper is cited by other studies, the more important it and its authors are in a field. One shorthand is the popular “h-index”: An h-index of 10 means a person has 10 papers with at least 10 citations each, for instance.

Inflating a researcher’s citation count and h-index gives them “a tremendous advantage” in hiring and tenure decisions says Jennifer Byrne, a cancer researcher at the University of Sydney. It also drives the business model of shady organizations that promise to boost your citations in exchange for cash. “If you can just buy citations,” Byrne says, “you’re buying influence.”

Enter Larry the cat. His tale began a few weeks ago, when Wise saw a Facebook ad offering “citation & h-index boosting.” It wasn’t the first promo he and Richardson had seen for such services. (The going rate seems to be about $10 per citation.) But this one linked to screenshots of Google Scholar profiles of real scientists. That meant the duo could see just which citations were driving up the numbers.

The citations, it turned out, often belonged to papers full of nonsense text authored by long-dead mathematicians such as Pythagoras. The studies had been uploaded as PDFs to the academic social platform ResearchGate and then subsequently deleted, obscuring their nature. (Wise and Richardson had to dig into Google’s cache to read the documents.) “We were like, ‘Wow, this procedure is incredibly easy,’” Richardson recalls. “All you have to do is put some fake papers on ResearchGate.”

It’s so easy, Wise noted at the time, that a quickly written script to pump out plausible-sounding papers could make anyone highly cited—even a cat. “I don’t know if he was being serious,” Richardson says. “But I certainly took that as a challenge.” And he knew just the cat to beat: F.D.C. Willard. In 1975, theoretical physicist Jack Hetherington added his Siamese to one of his single-author papers so the references to “we” would make more sense. As of this year, “Felis Domesticus Chester Willard” has 107 citations.

To break that record, Richardson turned to his grandmother’s cat Larry. In about an hour he created 12 fake papers authored by Larry and 12 others that cited each of Larry’s works. That would amount to 12 papers with 12 citations each, for a total citation count of 144 and an h-index of 12. Richardson uploaded the manuscripts to a ResearchGate profile he created for the feline. Then, he and Wise waited for Google Scholar to automatically scrape the fake data.

On 17 July, Larry’s papers and 132 citations appeared on the site. (Google Scholar failed to catch one spurious study, Wise notes.) And, thus, Larry became the world’s most highly cited cat. “I asked Larry what his reaction was over the phone,” Richardson told Science. “I can only assume he was too stunned to speak.”

Although Larry’s profile might seem obviously fake, finding manipulated ones usually isn’t easy, says Talal Rahwan, a computer scientist at New York University Abu Dhabi. Earlier this year, he and Yasir Zaki, a computer scientist at the same institution, and their colleagues scanned more than 1 million Google Scholar profiles to look for anomalous citation counts. They found at least 114 with “highly irregular citation patterns,” according to a paper posted in February on the arXiv preprint server. “The vast majority had at least some of their dubious citations from ResearchGate,” Zaki says.

ResearchGate is “of course aware of the growing research integrity issues in the global research community,” says the company’s CEO, Ijad Madisch. “[We] are continually reviewing our policies and processes to ensure the best experience for our millions of researcher users.” In this case, he says, the company was unaware that citation mills delete content after indexing, apparently to cover their tracks—intel that may help ResearchGate develop better monitoring systems. “We appreciate Science reporting this particular situation to us and we will be using this report to review and adapt our processes as required.”

Google Scholar removed Larry’s citations about 1 week after they appeared, so he has lost his unofficial title. However, his profile still exists, and the dubious citations in the profiles that were in the advertisement remain. So, “They haven’t fixed the problem,” Wise says. Google Scholar did not respond to requests for comment.

It’s not the first time somebody has manipulated Google Scholar by posting fake papers. In 2010, Cyril Labbé, a computer scientist at Grenoble Alpes University, invented a researcher named Ike Antkare (“I can’t care”), and made him the sixth most cited computer scientist on the service by posting fake publications to Labbé institutional website. “Impersonating a fake scientist in a cat is very cute,” Labbé says. “If it can be done for a cat, it can easily be done for a real person.”

For that reason, many researchers would like to see less emphasis on h-index and other metrics that have “the undue glow of quantification,” as Lange puts it. As long as the benefits of manipulating these systems outweigh the risks and costs, Wise says, people are going to continue to try to hack them. “How can you create a metric that can’t be gamed? I’m sure the answer is: You can’t.”

[rocket-enjoyer]

OO Report RC7-42-OZ-4409

WARNING. Unauthorized sharing and viewing of this file is extremely strictly prohibited. All attempts to share by OO personnel WILL be immediately punished with lobotomy or death. Unauthorized civilians viewing this file are liable to be tracked, sued or even assassinated should they read any further.

23/8/2189, 02:38

Insertion to transfer orbit was successful. OZYMANDIAS is on a trajectory to its target orbit and will reach it within 30 years.

All systems confirmed operational. Automatic BNC checkup systems onboard OZYMANDIAS inform databases DC9-42-OZ-1, -2 and -3 of location, velocity and system health every standard day, 0:00 GMT. Communication with BNC systems available from terminals TC9-42-OZ-1, -2 and -3.

Conversations with OZYMANDIAS Neural Computer recommended daily, mental checkups weekly. Mental instability is considered unlikely even over long periods of no communication, but redundancy, trust and system health is of unparalleled importance. Communication with ONC is available from terminal TC10-42-OZ-4. Vocal communication is preferred, but text communication is possible for redundancy. Recommended education of ONC conversation partner is university level and recommended fields of expertise are philosophy, literature and neural computer engineering.

ONC mental checkup performer must be mentally stable, highly experienced with psychology and highly educated on theoretical NC science. They MUST NOT be underqualified or underexperienced. Level 3 background check is necessary. Head NC engineer of OZYMANDIAS is an acceptable backup option but we must not rely on them.

[mariacallous]

With U.S. President Donald Trump, many high-tech titans have decided that now—after their coffers overflowing—Americans don’t need much government. Leading the charge to dismantle it is Elon Musk. His role is especially jarring because Silicon Valley was built on the government’s largesse. A booming high-tech sector—one of the signature achievements of the modern economy—wouldn’t have happened without the administrative state that Trump is seeking to root out.

The history of Silicon Valley exposes the grave dangers posed by the war on government. The hazard is that as a result of this push, Trump succeeds in breaking apart the marriage between Washington and the technology industry that has helped make America great.

The road to high tech really started to be built during World War II. In 1945, Vannevar Bush, who had directed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development during the war, captured the zeitgeist of the era when he published “Science: The Endless Frontier,” which offered a declaration of principle for the government supporting scientific education. The report, submitted to President Harry Truman, explained why government support for research was so important to national security and the economic well-being of the nation. “The pioneer spirit is still vigorous within this nation,” Bush wrote in the letter that accompanied the report. “Science offers a largely unexplored hinterland for the pioneer who has the tools for his task. The rewards of such exploration both for the Nation and the individual are great. Scientific progress is one essential key to our security as a nation, to our better health, to more jobs, to a higher standard of living, and to our cultural progress.”

Much of the development of large mainframe computing systems was born of defense needs. While mainframe systems were being built in the early 1930s, during the war, the U.S. Army and several other defense units developed the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) under the direction of Maj. Gen. Gladeon Barnes. Congress devoted massive resources (today’s equivalent of millions in current) dollars to the construction of what would become the first general-use computer. The most important initial function of ENIAC, which was completed in 1946 by University of Pennsylvania scholars John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, was its ability to provide cutting-edge calculations about the trajectories of weapons. Before the project ended, the government discovered ways to use ENIAC for a wide range of jobs, including advanced weather prediction and wind tunnel design. With funding from the Census Bureau, Mauchly and Eckert next worked on the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC), resulting in a digital computer allowing for data processing and storage methods that were new and extremely beneficial to industry. With CBS anchor Walter Cronkite standing by, UNIVAC, which weighed a whopping 16,000 pounds, famously predicted early on election evening in 1952 that Dwight Eisenhower would defeat Adlai Stevenson by a landslide. A computer star was born. The machine would even appear on the cover of a Superman comic book.

Throughout the early Cold War in the 1940s and 1950s, the federal government poured resources into the production of knowledge. The GI Bill of Rights (1944) vastly expanded the student body by covering the cost of enrollment and more for veterans, many of whom were first-generation students. In 1950, Truman signed legislation creating the National Science Foundation, an institution that complemented the National Institutes of Health by aiding nonmedical science and engineering. Their shared mission was to “promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity and welfare; and to secure the national defense.” Eisenhower, a Republican, worked with congressional Democrats such as Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson to respond to the Soviet Union’s successful launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 by building on this precedent. The National Defense Education Act (1958) financed student loans, graduate fellowships, and research funds. By the early 1960s, with substantial help from the government, U.S. universities were booming and considered to be among the finest institutions of learning anywhere in the world. As the Cold War kept heating up, one area where Americans were clearly ahead was on the campus.

Without the government-industry connection that emerged from this era, there would be no internet. While there may still be people debating whether former Vice President Al Gore invented the internet, there is no dispute that the federal government did. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), established in 1958, undertook high-risk, large-scale research, cooperating with private firms, that had the potential to produce enormous payoffs. DARPA was central to the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) in the late 1960s, which constituted the first advanced computer network. Much of the drive for the military had been the desire for a functional network that could survive a nuclear attack. ARPANET was the basis for the modern internet. The National Science Foundation announced a distinct section, called NSFNET, in 1986. The foundation connected five supercomputer centers and granted academic network’s access. The project was considered to have been the “backbone” for the creation of the commercial internet. Other notable computer innovations also grew out of this operation. DARPA dollars facilitated the Stanford Research Institute’s making of the mouse, a technology that made it easier for an individual without great technical expertise to interface with computers. In 1991, Congress passed the High-Performance Computing Act—legislation that Gore helped move—which funded a team of programmers at the University of Illinois’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications that helped vastly expand the internet. Marc Andreessen, one of the engineers who co-created Mosaic and Netscape, acknowledged in 2000, “If it had been left to private industry, it wouldn’t have happened, at least, not until years later.”

Indeed, Silicon Valley would not have become what it is today without the government. The DARPA-Stanford research partnership, as the historian Margaret O’Mara has brilliantly recounted in Cities of Knowledge and The Code, is a big reason why the university emerged as such a powerhouse in high-tech education and research. Government money fueled the transformation of a formerly sleepy region, which O’Mara reminds us would have once been improbable to imagine as a hub of big inventions and money. A series of Stanford leaders, including provost Frederick Terman, opened their arms to the federal coffers and shepherded the Stanford Research Park into its current incarnation.

Not only was Stanford built up with government monies, but many of the companies that have littered the landscape in northern California had Washington to thank. Fairchild Semiconductor, established in San Jose in 1957, took form with Air Force and NASA contracts. NASA’s ongoing investment in the integrated circuits that it and other companies produced allowed costs to become accessible and for the semiconductor industry to emerge. Federal dollars during the 1980s and 1990s that were tied to programs such as President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative—a massive laser missile shield that would protect the United States from nuclear attack, which critics derided as “Star Wars”—resulted in all sorts of computer innovations not envisioned by the administration’s plan. Though stories about Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak working out of a garage capture our entrepreneurial imaginations, the role of the administrative state continues to loom large over the entire region. “From the marble halls of Washington and the concrete canyons of Wall Street,” O’Mara writes in The Code, Silicon Valley was made by many hands. Other “cities of knowledge,” including Cambridge, Massachusetts; Philadelphia; and Atlanta, were similar beneficiaries of government.

The federal government has helped high tech in many other ways besides policies directly related to computers and the internet. Immigration reforms, for instance, that opened the doors to high-skilled foreign-born immigrants resulted in the arrival of people who helped build the computing products that the entire world depends on today. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society helped a young Sergey Brin and his family obtain a visa to emigrate from the Soviet Union in 1979. With that, Google was born. Musk was able to finish his education at the University of Pennsylvania with a student visa and stay in the United States because of an H1-B visa. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang immigrated with his family from Taiwan in 1978. The Small Business Investment Incentive Act (1980) provided valuable dollars to Silicon Valley firms as they struggled to make a name for themselves.

Indeed, Musk’s company Tesla benefited from government assistance. In 2009, a critical moment for the company, Tesla received $465 million in low-interest loans from the U.S. Energy Department that it used to construct the Model S. Electric vehicle tax credits have grown consumer demand for his and other vehicles. Federal research grants played a role in the different components that make up these cars.

The federal government and the high-tech industry have stood side by side for decades. And the high-tech story has happened many times over, often in some of what have become the country’s most conservative areas. In From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt, historian Bruce J. Schulman traces how the revitalization of the South and Southwest, ground zero for the modern conservative movement of the post-1960s era, was built on defense contracts and military bases. Reagan’s presidency, which pushed politics rightward, derived electoral profits from massive congressional investments made over the decades after the war.

While many agree on the importance of markets, the hand of government—sometimes hidden from view—has been equally essential to economic success. The history of high tech has revolved around a genuine partnership between markets and government, not one or the other. To destroy the partnership threatens to destroy what has made the U.S. economy great. Every American will be forced to pay the cost.

[redfacedpalindrome]

i think it's so cool that you're a biology researcher! if i may ask, how did you find yourself in that path and how did you know you wanted to go to med school? i'm not in college yet but i've been considering the possibility of clinical practice in the future but i am not too sure 🥹

hi!! omg that's so exciting i remember trying to figure it out as well. this is LONG because i have a lot of advice so i am vv sorry in advance!

so i spent most of my time in high school thinking i was going to be an engineer. i'm talking 4 courses of physics, multivariable calculus and self-taught diffEq, statistics, more calculus, two years of computer science, and I did a physics program at Fermi Lab. I was always interested in biology and medicine though, so in my head the best overlap was going to be biomedical engineering.

but when i started actually applying to biomedical engineering programs, i started to realize that if i went into bme, i'd end up just inches away from the job i actually wanted. like, i'd be developing the tools but i wanted to be at the physician-patient interface. and that kind of made up my mind for me, that i at least wanted to try to be in medicine.

so i hail mary'd and i applied to a direct-med program-

(sidebar, i don't actually know if this has come up so much as it has been sign-posted by my linguistic preferences but i'm american and studying medicine in america is one triple mega xl shitshow. in a direct-med program, rather than applying to undergrad, finishing, maybe taking gap years to build a cv?, and applying out to medical schools, then residency + fellowship which is a grand total of like 1 trillion years, you apply to med school and undergrad at the end of high school and then you kinda have a conditional admission to med school as long as you complete the pre-med requirements and it shortens the process to a conservative 0.8 trillion years.)

i've done an unfortunate job here of making this process seem horrible, but i will say two things: this process is long and difficult. you know what the interesting thing is though? life is usually both long and difficult. there are easier ways to make money, there will always be easier ways to make money – but if you love medicine and you love biology, the fulfillment you will have practically every day as you make your way through this process outweighs everything. i have spent twelve hour days in lab, come in on weekends, left at ungodly late hours all for minimum wage and felt blinding satisfaction that is rare to find in a lot of roles. and i've heard similar things from a lot of my friends. i will never pretend it's easy, but something being hard doesn't make it not FUN.

-and i got in! even then, i wasn't sure if locking myself into a med program was the best idea since literally months before that i was so committed to engineering. but i knew that if i put myself into that program, i would come out the other end a physician and i wouldn't regret it. and honestly, i'm extremely grateful for this because it surrounded me with a cohort of peers who all delusionally committed to medicine at the age of 17. they're the best :) and they were the biggest influences on my love for my intended career.

if you're from literally any other country (most do medical education differently), it will be a little bit of a different experience but i think broadly surrounding yourself with peers who can encourage you and inspire you to find ways to be fulfilled within the healthcare field and help you not second guess your decision is super important. i also think if you're interested in maybe being in clinical practice, taking a look at studying medical humanities (bioethics, medical sociology, health policy, the history of medicine) could also be an interesting exploration because it will get you in touch with both the art and science of medicine. the humanistic components are understudied by a lot of aspiring physicians but if you root your passions there i swear you never lose it.

when it comes to medical/biological science (and my now position as a vascular biology researcher), i started with bench science research in undergrad! i cold emailed a bunch of principal investigators to find if they had room for an undergraduate research assistant, and i found a lab that studies blood vessel growth and became insanely attached to the subject matter. i get to do a cool combination of hands-on science and data analysis, and they give me a lot of room to take charge of the project and present its findings.

i always thought i'd wanna do research 'curing' something, like research that specifically impacts a disease. my research, however, is basic science research – so i'm basically trying to figure out how a set of genes work and what they do because we don't know it yet! i never thought i'd fall in love with this project but i did! so my advice on research is to reach out to whoever you can, try to find good mentors, and keep on open mind. you never ever know what you'll end up with a passion for.

let me know if there are any other questions i can answer! but you're early in the process yet – you have a lot of time to explore :) i'm not sure all of this was actually useful advice cos the path i took was kind of a niche path, but i swear i can give better more applicable advice.

[queer-scots-geordie-dyke]

"A couple of months after I shot the pilot for “Babylon 5,” I got an invitation to something called “a science fiction convention.” What could that be? “I’m not quite sure,” said Diane. “What do I have to do there?” I asked. “Sign autographs and do a Q&A.” “What is a Q&A?” I asked, puzzled. “I guess the fans will ask questions and you will answer.” “The fans? Who are they?” “Yes, the fans. The fans of the show,” said Diane, probably thinking her new client was mildly challenged in the intellectual arena. “Ok, I don’t quite get it but yes, of course, I’ll do it. It seems like an easy job,” I said. “Do they pay or is it just publicity for the show?” I asked, clearly an alien who fell onto this planet without getting the necessary information about human ways. No wonder I got my green card as an “alien with extraordinary abilities.” (Or should it be “inabilities,” I sometimes wonder.) “They do pay. $5,000 for two days.” What? Really? I don’t have to learn any lines? I don’t have to descend into dark tunnels of emotion? I don’t have to “perform?” I just have to be me? And they’ll pay me for that? Oh yeah, count me in! Keep bringing it on! Maybe life doesn’t have to be such an incredible struggle all the time. Maybe one doesn’t have to bleed to death for every penny earned. Maybe even I deserve some lightness, some easiness. Or do I?

Stonybrook was the place. Michael O’Hare was the other guest. I was on stage, answering questions from “the fans” who seemed unusually kind and, for the first time in my American experience, sincerely interested in “my story.” Finally, someone was actually getting it. “The fans” struck me as sophisticated, smart, and well-educated. They seemed not to be buying the black and white picture of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the picture that the media kept serving them. Their questions were intelligent. And, what struck me most, they seemed to be peace-loving people. It seemed we were on the same side: the side of the people, the side of peace. I realized: I actually liked talking to them. I was on stage, talking about my experience of being exiled from my own city, from my profession and my life. “I lost my career, my colleagues, my family.” Then I heard a voice from the audience. “But you gained another one. Welcome to your new family. Welcome to our family.” It brought tears to my eyes then. It is bringing them now, as I’m writing this.

I’ve been a part of the science fiction family for more than twenty years now. Conventions have become an important part of my life. I’ve met interesting people, including respectable scientists, engineers, astronauts and computer wizards. I’ve traveled America, from coast to coast and in between. I’ve traveled Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Some of the people I met I will never forget. Some became my friends. Whatever resistance I may have felt throughout the years towards being pushed into the category of “science fiction actors,” is gone now. This new family has been good to me. And although I will never become a social media gal, having a deeply organic, strong aversion towards the increasingly blurry line between the private and the public, I do hope that I haven’t been too dysfunctional as a member of my new family either. This new family has proven to be much more loyal and much more reliable than the one I left behind (or that left ME behind)."

- Mira Furlan, Love Me More Than Anything In the World

[justforbooks]

Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates

In contrast to the current crop of swaggering tech bros, the Microsoft founder comes across as wry and self-deprecating in this memoir of starting out

Bill Gates is the John McEnroe of the tech world: once a snotty brat whom everyone loved to hate, now grown up into a beloved elder statesman. Former rivals, most notably Apple’s Steve Jobs, have since departed this dimension, while the Gates Foundation, focusing on unsexy but important technologies such as malaria nets, was doing “effective altruism” long before that became a fashionable term among philosophically minded tech bros. Time, then, to look back. In the first of what the author threatens will be a trilogy of memoirs, Gates recounts the first two decades of his life, from his birth in 1955 to the founding of Microsoft and its agreement to supply a version of the Basic programming language to Apple Computer in 1977.

He grows up in a pleasant suburb of Seattle with a lawyer father and a schoolteacher mother. His intellectual development is keyed to an origin scene in which he is fascinated by his grandmother’s skill at card games around the family dining table. The eight-year-old Gates realises that gin rummy and sevens are systems of dynamic data that the player can learn to manipulate.

As he tells it, Gates was a rather disruptive schoolchild, always playing the smart alec and not wanting to try too hard, until he first learned to use a computer terminal under the guidance of an influential maths teacher named Bill Dougall. (I wanted to learn more about this man than Gates supplies in a still extraordinary thumbnail sketch: “He had been a World War II Navy pilot and worked as an aeronautical engineer at Boeing. Somewhere along the way he earned a degree in French Literature from the Sorbonne in Paris on top of graduate degrees in engineering and education.”) Ah, the computer terminal. It is 1968, so the school terminal communicates with a mainframe elsewhere. Soon enough, the 13-year-old Gates has taught it to play noughts and crosses. He is hooked. He befriends another pupil, Paul Allen – who will later introduce him to alcohol and LSD – and together they pore over programming manuals deep into the night. Gates plans a vast simulation war game, but he and his friends get their first taste of writing actually useful software when they are asked to automate class scheduling after their school merges with another. Success with this leads the children, now calling themselves the Lakeside Programming Group, to write a payroll program for local businesses, and later to create software for traffic engineers.

There follows a smooth transition to Harvard, where in the ferment of anti-war campus protests our hero is more interested in the arrival, one day in 1969, of a PDP-10 computer. Gates takes classes in maths but also chemistry and the Greek classics. Realising he doesn’t have it in him to become a pure mathematician, he goes all-in on computers once a new home machine, the Altair, is announced. He and Paul Allen will write its Basic, having decided to call themselves “Micro-Soft”.

The early home computer scene, Gates notes, was a countercultural, hippy thing: cheap computers “represented a triumph of the masses against the monolithic corporations and establishment forces that controlled access to computing”, and so software was widely “shared”, or copied among people for free. It was Gates himself who, notoriously, pushed back against this culture when he found out most users of his Basic weren’t paying for it. By “stealing software”, he wrote in an open letter in 1976, “you prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?” This rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way and still does, at least in the more militant parts of the “open-source” world. But he had a point. And that, readers, is why your Office 365 account just renewed for another year. Fans of Word and Excel, though, will have to wait for subsequent volumes of Gates’s recollections, as will those who want more about his later battles with Apple, though Steve Jobs does get an amusing walk-on part. (Micro-Soft’s general manager keeps a notebook of sales calls, on one page of which we read: “11.15 Steve Jobs calls. Was very rude.”). This volume, still, is more than just a geek’s inventory of early achievements. There is a genuine gratitude for influential mentors, and a wry mood of self-deprecation throughout. Gates gleefully records his first preschool report: “He seemed determined to impress us with his complete lack of concern for any phase of school life.” Later, he explains how he acquired a sudden interest in theatre classes. “Admittedly the main draw for me was the higher percentage of girls in drama. And since the main activity in the class was to read lines to each other, the odds were very good that I’d actually talk to one.” Strikingly, unlike most “self-made” billionaires, Gates emphasises the “unearned privilege” of his upbringing and the peculiar circumstances – “mostly out of my control” – that enabled his career. Adorably, he even admits to still having panic dreams about his university exams. The book’s most touching pages recount how one of his closest friends and colleagues in the programming group, Kent Evans, died in a mountaineering accident when he was 17. “Throughout my life, I have tended to deal with loss by avoiding it,” Gates writes. He says later that if he were growing up today, he would probably be identified as “on the autism spectrum”, and now regrets some of his early behaviour, though “I wouldn’t change the brain I was given for anything”. There is a sense of the writer, older and wiser, trying to redeem the past through understanding it better, a thing that no one has yet seen Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg attempt in public. That alone makes Bill Gates a more human tech titan than most of his rivals, past and present.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?