What's the best way to manage all the 401K accounts I've accumulated from my past jobs?

Question: I should be managing my retirement money better and one problem is the number of accounts I have (4). Would it be better for me to consolidate and what's involved in doing so?
Answer: Open an investment account on your own and have them roll the old 401K accounts into either a ROTH or traditional IRA. Do not leave them in old 401k accounts and definitely don't roll them into your new employer's 401K.
Why? Well, as great as 401K accounts are, there is one thing that employers rarely mention and the 401K companies actively try to hide:
Most 401K plans are loaded with HUGE fees.
You won't see them on your statements, they are often hidden very cleverly with accounting tricks. For example, in several plans I have participated in, the mutual fund symbols may LOOK like the ones you see on the stock tickers, but if you read the fine print they only "approximate" the underlying mutual fund they are named for. That is, if you multiply the number of shares by the market price you will arrive at a number higher than the one printed on your statement.
The "spread" between those numbers is the fee charged by the 401K management company, and since employees don't pick that company and can't easily fire them, they aren't very competitive unless your company is really large and has a tough negotiator in HR. If you work for a small company, you are probably getting slammed by these fees. Also, they often charge fees for the "automatic rebalancing" service they offer to do annually to your account to keep your allocation in line with your current contribution allocations.
I have no idea why it is legal for them not to disclose these fees on the statements, but they don't. I had to do some serious digging to find this out on my own and when I did it was downright scary. In one case they were siphoning off over 3% annually from the account using this standard practice.
HOWEVER, that is not to say that you shouldn't participate in these plans, especially if there is an employer match. There are fees with any investment account and the "free money" your employer is kicking in almost always offsets these fees. My point here is just that you shouldn't keep the money in the 401K after you leave the company when you have an option to move it to an account with much cheaper fees.
Comment: One benefit to getting to the airport many hours too early is the ability to read through the old questions like this. John, there's finally a move toward full disclosure, by July, 2012, the 401(k) custodians must fully disclose their fees.
Answer: I rolled mine over from the company I was at into my own brokerage house.  You can't roll them into a Roth IRA, so I needed to setup a traditional IRA.
There is paperwork your old jobs can provide you.  I had to put in some mailing addresses, some account numbers and turn them in.  My broker received it, I chose what I wanted to invest it in and that was that.  No tax penalty or early withdrawal penalty.  The key to avoiding penalties is to have your past employers send the money directly to another retirement fund, not send a check to you.
Comment: MrChrister said you can't roll into a Roth IRA, so you have to set up a Traditional IRA.  That's not necessarily true.  You can roll into a Rollover account and then convert it to a Roth IRA.  There are many benefits to a Roth, as opposed to a Traditional, so make sure you consider both account options before deciding.
Comment: Is a rollover a special type I need to request when I open the account or is it just a traditional first then Roth next??
Comment: The rules might be different now.  Call your broker who will host the eventual final product and ask them what is best for you.
Comment: @JCarterRN - you certainly could be right.  At the time I did it I was told no Roth for me.
Comment: @MrChrister - It seems things are changing all the time! :) In 12/08 I transferred an old 401k into a Rollover and then converted it to a Roth, because I had been told that you can't go directly to a Roth, but as I went through the process, it seemed that perhaps I could have skipped the Rollover step after all. Not sure if that's really the case, but it would make sense if they took out that middle step by now
Answer: I'd roll them all into one account, just for your own convenience.  It's a pain to keep track of lots of different accounts, esp. since you need logins/passwords, etc for all of them, and we all have plenty of those.  :)
Pick a place like Vanguard or Fidelity (for example), where you can find investment options with lower fees, and do the standard rollover.  Once all the accounts are rolled into one, you can think about how to invest the stuff.  (Some good investments require larger minimums, so if you have several old 401ks, putting them together will give you more options.)
Rolling them over is not hard, if you have paperwork from each of the 401ks.  You might be able to DIY online, but I found it helpful to call and talk to a person when I did this.  You just need account numbers, etc.
If you are moving brokerage accounts, you may need to provide paper documents/applications, which might require getting them notarized (I found a notary at my bank, even though the accounts I was moving from and to weren't at my bank), which means you'll need to provide IDs, etc. and get a special crimped seal after the notary witnesses your signature.


What type of cable should I run from the service pole to my house for cable internet?

Question: I found out that if I want Cable internet at my house, I need to spend $2400 in construction fees run a line under ground to my house. I'm a pretty handy guy, and generally like doing these kinds of things on my own, so I was wondering what type of cable internet providers use run underground to go from the line to the house. I'd like to figure out how much this'll cost, and this is the only unknown for me.
Comment: Direct burial is always a dubious choice. If you are going to dig a trench, put conduit in it. Trenches are expensive, conduit is cheap (comparatively) and conduit means never having to dig the trench again - pull out the cable, pull in fiber, pull out the fiber, pull in whatever comes next... Not a duplicate, but: http://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/66141/how-to-future-proof-a-long-cable-run/66149#66149
Comment: Randall, what is the length of cable needed?  What region of the world will this be in?
Comment: This can't really be answered.  It sounds like the distance is long since they would not charge for a normal residential service line.  The size of the cable for a long drop might be RG11 but depending on distance they may need to extend distribution cable rather than use drop cable.
Comment: What distance do you need to reach? I've run RG11 for cable tv a few 100 feet form the pole to my house and it's not rocket science. I'd suggest you price some *direct burial* RG11 and see. As long as the cable is in place (and you didn't do anything silly like hit it with a spade or kink it) the cable tv/internet installer should be able to fit connectors on each end and you're done.
Comment: @brhans the max RG11 run is about 300 feet, but the caveat is that it may be less than that depending on the location of the last amplifier in the system prior to the connection point (i.e if he's already at the end of a lateral). The limiting factor isn't usually the strength of the incoming cable signal but the strength of the outgoing signal required for 2-way communication.  Before this can be answered it needs better specification from the cable company.
Comment: it's a little over 600 ft run.
Answer: The price you've been quoted sounds as though they are going to pull feeder cable from their tap location. Feeder cable is typically 0.500 inch nominal outside diameter, frequently larger when including insulation and in the case of underground rated cable, a goopy substance used ostensibly to seal nicks in the jacket.
The stuff is seriously stiff, but can be pulled through conduit if the conduit is large enough diameter and uses sweeps at each end. Go beyond two sweeps and you may run into trouble.
Considering that you want to provide the labor, conduit is the correct way to go. Should you find yourself digging in the area in the future, a clunk of the shovel against PVC is preferred to a gash in the cable.
The cable company will likely provide you with the cable, called five-hundred, if you explain that you'd like to put in the conduit and cable in one sequence. They would suggest that you leave a few feet at each end for creating the terminations.
I've dug up too many feeder lines for repair purposes to say I enjoyed myself, but I had a good reputation on the device used to locate the break that the digging was more localized. With conduit, even if you drive a back-hoe blade through it, the need to repair becomes immediately obvious.
At the price you've been quoted, I'd guess that you have more than a couple hundred feet to travel.
Comment: Yes, it's about 600 feet.


Why is obtaining OPT authorization much longer than for CPT?

Question: Obtaining OPT authorization takes around 90 days, whereas  CPT is much shorter (~2 weeks). Why is obtaining OPT authorization much longer than for CPT?
Answer: OPT requires getting an EAD card, so that you can work for any employer. The application for an EAD, I-765, has long processing times, sometimes taking 5-6 months these days.
CPT, on the other hand, does not involve getting an EAD. When working on CPT, your I-20 authorizes you to work for a specific employer. Your school can issue the I-20 fairly quickly.
Comment: Thanks, interesting, I wonder why there is no option to start an OPT without having received the EAD card yet, as the 90-delay has quite some negative impact on students trying to work the US.


Would having two time skips close together be weird?

Question: There's a story idea I've been playing with for years now but I feel like I need to do two time skips one after the other which may be weird for readers. I have a prologue where she talks to her father who's in prison (death row) for the murder of her mother, which he denies commiting. I feel this scene is important as it explains a lot of her situation and I'm a sucker for dramatic scenes. The next chapter takes place a year and a half later. Trying to simplify things; she meets these people who reveal a whole new world to her and ask her to join their group. I want to jump forward two years after that instead of spending the time on her learning and training as I think that might be kind of boring. Would it be better to have her meeting the guys in a flashback? I've been holding off on this story for years since I just can't think of how it would be best to handle these two time skips.
Answer:
Would it be better to have her meeting the guys in a flashback?

Yes. Or if it's possible, mention the meeting in at most two or three sentences.
All stories revolve around events in a character's life. And while a character may have experienced many life-shaping firsts - the first meeting with a vampire, the first kiss, the first Tae-Kwon-Do lesson - not all are interesting to us as a reader. No matter how exciting the first adventure of a rookie vampire hunter is, if the story as a whole revolves around the same hunter (but older and more experienced) infiltrating a vampire clan to take down their big bad, we can assume the first adventure happened and move on.
Does this sound wrong? Well, as human beings, we subconsciously cut out a lot of our 'firsts' all the time. A person pushing fifty interviewing for a job is unlikely to mention that one summer in '86 when he went door-to-door selling vacuum cleaners. An Olympic swimmer appearing on a talk show isn't going to talk about the first silver tri-state championship medal she won. Unless, of course, these events are immediately important to the present. For example, if the company the middle-aged man interviews at makes the same vacuum cleaners he used to sell back in the day, or if the swimmer's coach who helped her win the Olympic medal is the father of the girl she lost the gold medal to in the tri-state championship.
The same should go for your characters.
Answer: Normally I don't like giving this advice with regards books (and, indeed, would tend to give quite the opposite), but in this case I feel it's warranted:
Think of it like a TV show for a moment.
This can be done in 2 ways:  Either think of it as a single episode, where your prologue is the brief "stinger" before the title sequence starts (which represents your timeskip), or think of it as an entire series, where the early episodes are setting the scene and worldbuilding.  If you have a timeskip like this, it would usually be at the end of the first episode (or, perhaps, a two-parter), and then get to the main story.  In this style, having multiple timeskips won't work, and will leave the story feeling disjointed.
However, that brings us to the other way in which a TV series can build the world and expectations: a series of self-contained episodes which prime us on the world in which the story is based, before throwing us into the first lengthy 'arc'.  This is, perhaps, something to play with:  Instead of having 2 timeskips, have several, and make the skip shorter (both in the scene itself, and the amount of time skipped) each time - show snippets of the training, glimpses which also serve to teach the reader what the character is learning, introduce us to the characters, giving us chances to see "the rookie" failing through inexperience (at first), and gradually overcoming those mistakes.  Rather than a montage of lots of very brief snapshots, you give fewer, longer scenes.
Don't overdo it though - this should probably all add up to the first couple of chapters, ending on an indication along the lines of "and that brings us up to today", letting your reader know that things are about to settle in for the long-haul.

Start with the Prison scene (T-18 months, start of story)
Push onward to her introduction to the hidden world (T±0, ends the first chapter)
Add an event about 9 months into her training - perhaps a test or dummy mission? (T+9 months, starts the second chapter)
Another 6 months, another event.  Make it mirror the first in some way, to show the character's development.  Perhaps she's now the one mentoring a fresh-face? (T+15 months)
3 more months, time for a 'graduation' of some sort.  She's still a rookie, but now at least she's competent in the basics, and ready to properly participate in the hidden world (T+18 months)
For the next 6 months, consider a few (very few) callbacks to the earlier events, and allusions to other events that have happened in the time we skipped, which might be referenced in flashbacks later on - a paragraph - or less - for each, to give a flavour of her new life.
Chapter 3 starts the main story (T+24 months)

An important thing to note here - you need to make the scenes short, and (ideally) you need to make subsequent scenes even shorter.  This then means that Chapter 3, drawing the story out at length, will more obviously be the start of the "proper" story.  It's a bit like a circling a drain:  every loop brings you slightly closer to falling down the plughole, and every loop takes less time to complete.


What is outliers and how to determine outliers in the following phylogenetic tree?

Question:
I an confused with the term 'outlier' and 'outgroup' in phylogeny. Could someone please explain with the example phylogenetic tree above which is the correct term? Thank you very much !!!
Comment: Welcome to the group.  Can you explain your question more.  What do you need explained about the tree?
Comment: An "outlier" is a term used in general statistics to infer that a minority of the data set deviates substantially from the majority. An example would be the number of radical substitutions present in a house-keeping gene. An outgroup is described below and singularly refers to phylogeny.
Answer: Distance- and ML-based algorithms using reversible models can't find the root of trees. A classical method to root a tree is to use an outgroup (not outlier), which is a species/sequence known to directly descend from the root of the tree. In your case, it is relatively easy: add a chicken or fish ortholog to your dataset and put the root on the chicken/fish branch.
Outgroup works well for single-copy genes used in species tree construction (e.g. ADH). However, it doesn't always work. The culprit is the "known" part. Say a gene has two copies A and B in vertebrates. Copy A was lost in rodent and copy B lost in primate. If you choose a chicken A gene as the outgroup, the correct tree should be ((primary-A,chicken-A),rodent-B). Without knowing the true history, you may forcefully put the root at the chicken-A branch and build a wrong tree ((primate-A,rodent-B),chicken-A).
There are a few other tree rooting methods. An easy approach is to put the root at the longest branch in the tree, assuming the presence of molecular clock. When the species tree is known, you can root a gene tree by minimizing the number gene duplication/loss events in the history. I generally prefer the latter approach when the relevant information is available.
Comment: @ZhengKeongNg In phylogenetics, "outlier" is not clearly defined. Avoid that word.
Comment: How to differentiate between outgroup and outlier? Thank you very much :)
@user172818
Answer: you may use the OD-seq algorithm to filter outliers in a multiple alignment.
https://bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12859-015-0702-1


Can every antenna be used both for transmit and receive?

Question: Assuming I have an antenna for receiving GPS signals, can I use it also for transmit — to create a repeater in a tunnel (or some place with no reception)?
Comment: Not an answer to your main question, but [GPS passive repeaters](http://lmgtfy.com/?q=gps+passive+repeater) exist.  They basically work by having an active antenna on a roof or above ground, and a passive antenna inside the RF dead zone.  In the 90s, we used them to provide signals inside of fire stations for AVL to work instantly and have a faster TTFF.  As stated in the answer and comments below, the position is at the passive repeater receiving antenna and not the vehicle - but it keeps the almanac updated, effectively in a hot/standby condition.
Comment: @PeteNU9W AVL = automatic vehicle location (in other words, vehicle tracking). TTFF = time to first fix (a common figure of merit for GNSS).
Comment: Hey, @Paul, what do "AVL" and "TTFF" mean?
Comment: Hey, @hobbs-KC2G, what does "GNSS" mean?  Remember, you're talking to a general audience here, people who probably aren't in on your jargon.
Answer: No. Many types of antennas may be unsuitable for transmitting.

A so-called active antenna contains an integrated low-noise amplifier (LNA) for amplifying weak signals. (This is very common for GPS antennas.) This amplifier cannot pass a signal in reverse, and could be damaged by transmit power levels appearing on its output. It is possible to have an automatic switch to bypass the LNA when transmitting, but this feature would not be designed into an antenna meant for receiving.
Some designs of antenna, such as the Beverage antenna, contain resistors or other dissipative elements. If they are used for transmitting, the resistor must be capable of dissipating a certain fraction of the power input to the antenna. This is inefficient since that fraction of power is not transmitted, and requires a resistor which will not be destroyed by the heat.
A receiving antenna may contain a ferrite element, which allows it to be much more efficient when receiving than its size would otherwise permit, but which will saturate at any significant power, becoming nonlinear and creating harmonic distortion (as well as heat).
A transmitter requires impedance matching between the final power amplifier and the antenna. An antenna's impedance varies with frequency, so it has some frequency range over which there is an acceptable match. The same antenna can be used for receiving over a much wider range; antennas used solely for receiving may be deliberately mismatched vs. the intended band to gain other advantages such as being physically small.
An antenna with the wrong impedance at the desired frequency can be matched using a matching network or antenna tuner (adjustable matching network), but this is still less efficient because there will be additional losses.
This is the least significant problem of all those I have listed: with a good antenna tuner, just about any chunk of metal insulated from other objects can be used as an antenna. The problem comes when non-metallic elements are in circuit as in the other cases.

Since you mention GPS in particular:
You cannot repeat a GPS signal usefully. Or rather, if you did, it would cause your GPS receiver to think it is at the position of the original receiving antenna, not its actual location. (This is because GPS operates by analyzing the combination of signals from multiple satellites, and this combination happens in the receiving antenna.)
It would also be likely illegal to operate such a transmitter, because you are transmitting on frequencies you do not have permission to and interfering with normal GPS operation.
Comment: > it would cause your GPS receiver to think it is at the position of the original receiving antenna — I was going to say "that's not true!" because I was thinking in terms of repeating a *single* GPS satellite. But by repeating them all, yes! Which unfortunately makes some GPS spoofing attacks much easier (vs. knowing the P(Y) keys) even against e.g. [military receivers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incident).
Comment: @PhilFrost Worth a mention. I was loosely thinking of that under "antenna with dissipative elements", but reading a bit on saturation suggests that's not accurate — is it more accurate to expect that the impedance will change drastically and therefore problematically in such a case?
Comment: +1. Also loopstick antennas, because the ferrite core saturates.
Comment: I suppose the impedance would change, but I don't think that's the biggest problem. The problem is that the core becomes non-linear. At small powers when the core doesn't saturate, the magnetic domains in the ferrite align with the magnetic field portion of the transmitted signal. The aligned magnetic domains then contribute to the magnetic flux through the coil, increasing the current in the coil by some multiple proportional to the core's permeability. But..
Comment: ...on transmit they also align, and they would multiply the magnetic field generated by the transmitter, except that with even very low transmit powers, *all* the magnetic domains are fully aligned, and they can't become "any more aligned". So the effective permeability drops towards zero. And yeah, the core will get hot, and also this nonlinear behavior will create tons of harmonic distortion.
Comment: @PhilFrost Thanks. I've added a separate item for those.
Comment: @KevinReidAG6YO `If Beverages are used for transmitting, the termination resistor dissipates power. This is inefficient since that fraction of power is not transmitted.` True! However, although the F/B ratio will be significantly improved with a terminating resistor, *it is not absolutely necessary to terminate a Beverage antenna*. It will still have about a 10 dB F/B ratio. And if that can be tolerated, a Beverage --in my tests-- is actually a fair performer for DX. See http://www.w0btu.com/Beverage_antennas.html#transmitting_on_a_Beverage
Answer: No issue. You can use it on both ends and the loss is almost negligible.
Comment: This answer immediately following the previous one is unintended SE poetry.


How can I benchmark an application of ant colony optimization?

Question: In my research on video games path finding I'm using ant colony optimization, not only to find the shortest path, but also to add some unpredictability and adaptiveness to bots path finding. It works the way as players move in the map, they add some pheromone to the map, so it adds up a probability that bots choose path like players. I have sent the paper, but judges said you need a benchmark and distinguish to previous works. Can you tell me how can I benchmark this work?
Answer: I would assume that in this case, they are asking you to compare the performance of your particular algorithm to other similar algorithms used in pathfinding. For example, A*
Comment: really? what you mean about performance? performance is time complexity or finding shorter path? the problem is goal of my research is non of them. the goal is to make bots choose path like players.
Answer: The biggest issue here may be similarity to prior work. As for the benchmarks, benchmarks are a common means for comparing algorithms. What it means here would be to compare the end-result (your chosen goal) for each of the algorithms compared in a similar scenario, or a generated test-scenario. This will mean that you will have to utilize all chosen algorithms in your test-game-map software. To make it more original, shake it up a little with some creative/disruptive element which should lower the performance of the algorithm. Find some way to quantify how close the algorithms actually come to meeting the stated goal (or not meeting goal, like how far off they were) with and without the disruptive element.


Embedded device: How to do raw reads and write to flash (emmc/movinand) bypassing file system cache

Question: I have an embedded device with a flash memory running linux.
I want to do raw read writes on the flash part but I also want to avoid any file system cache. How can I do this? Any pointers?
Answer: If the flash has a filesystem on it and you just want to open a file but bypass the cache for IO to that file, then open it with the O_DIRECT flag.  If it  has no filesystem on it, then you just open the block device directly.
Answer: I think you want the O_DIRECT flag to open().  Be aware that it may not work as expected on the filesystem on your flash device.   Also, I am assuming you are using a filesystem, and not reading a device file.


How are the PC-1 & PC-2 calculated for the DES block cipher?

Question: How  are the permuted choice tables - PC-1 and PC-2 - calculated for the DES block cipher algorithm?
Comment: See https://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/1684/ (one of the group's very first questions!)
Comment: I think they were *established* rather than calculated. Note that the DES / Lucifer cipher wasn't part of an open competition where cryptographers discussed their algorithm freely. So not all design rationale may be known - hopefully somebody can answer this one.
Comment: This seems a duplicate of [DES Key Schedule Algorithm](https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/11011/des-key-schedule-algorithm/11927).
Answer: These are not calculated, but as with the particulars of S-boxes, suggested and reviewed as part of the design.
These fixed values/configurations are intended to add certain qualities to the particular step of each round, essentially obscuring the final output as much as possible, in a non predictable way. As you can read on Wikipedia, there is some controversy involved in the development of the S-boxes.

There was some criticism from various parties, including from
  public-key cryptography pioneers Martin Hellman and Whitfield
  Diffie,[1] citing a shortened key length and the mysterious "S-boxes"
  as evidence of improper interference from the NSA.


How does pregnancy affect airline pilots operating under FAA regulations?

Question: Female airline pilots have an area of medical concern that male pilots don't deal with: reproductive issues. If a female airline pilot operating at an air carrier in the United States of America under the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) were to become pregnant, how would this affect her standing with a first class medical and in general with operations at most airlines?
Comment: In what country? Some countries have laws against discriminating against women because of pregnancy. I suppose this is more airline policy than federal laws. As long as the woman can pass the requirements for a first-class medical then I don't see it having any effect. The only effect is that doctors don't recommend pregnant women fly in the last part of the third trimester, and blood pressure is probably the biggest medical issue.
Comment: @RyanBurnette That narrows it down to one regulatory body, so it should be fine.
Comment: @RonBeyer Many countries that do have such anti-discrimination laws also have exceptions for when safety could be affected.
Comment: @RonBeyer Good call. I narrowed the question down to a discussion of the matter in the USA under the FAA. Do you think it's still too broad?
Comment: There was an article in the NY about this yesterday:  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/17/business/when-the-captain-is-mom-accommodating-new-motherhood-at-30000-feet.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
Answer: As long as the pilot is having a first class medical, her pregnancy should have no effect on the operations, at least legally, though the regulations differ from country to country.

I'm not aware of any FAA regulations that prohibit pilot ing during pregnancy. The closest it comes is in 14 CFR § 61.53 - Prohibition on operations during medical deficiency, which says (noting that pregnancy is not a medical deficiency in any way and the regulation is taken here in the widest sense) that:

(a) Operations that require a medical certificate. Except as provided for in paragraph (b) of this section, no person who holds a medical certificate issued under part 67 of this chapter may act as pilot in command, or in any other capacity as a required pilot flight crewmember, while that person:
(1) Knows or has reason to know of any medical condition that would make the person unable to meet the requirements for the medical certificate necessary for the pilot operation

As long as the pilot feels that she is medically fit and has a valid medical certificate, they can't be legally prevented from flying the aircraft.

In case of other regulattions (like EASA), pregnant women are not allowed to pilot after 26 weeks of pregnance. For example, UK Aviation Authority says:

(c) Pregnancy
(1) In the case of pregnancy, if the AeMC or AME considers that the licence holder is fit to exercise her privileges, he/she shall limit the validity period of the medical certificate to the end of the 26th week of gestation.  After this point, the certificate shall be suspended.  The suspension shall be lifted after full recovery following the end of the pregnancy.
(2) Holders of class 1 medical certificates shall only exercise the privileges of their licences until the 26th week of gestation with an OML.

There are a number of medical issues that the pilot should be aware of while pregnant, so that appropriate measures could be taken, like,

Ability to move the controls to their full extent.

Ability to wear seat belts.

Effect of high altitude operation on the foetus
among others. The airline policy will vary and they have to consider a number of other conditions- for example, the ability of flight crew to egress during a crash etc.
Comment: I know at least one GA pilot who considered her pregnancy a "medical deficiency" such that she could no longer act as PIC until after she gave birth (she got "big enough" that she couldn't get full up-elevator without the yoke hitting her abdomen) - that's obviously a case-by-case situation though, and depending on the airplane might not be an issue (e.g. an Airbus or a Cirrus with a side-stick)
Answer: Here is a decent article from AOPA on the matter (covers the topic from an FAA/USA standpoint). Looks like legally they don't have to say anything and they can't legally be pulled

The law is on their side, too. In the early 1990s, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that unless a woman voluntarily disclosed her pregnancy to her employer, she couldn't be switched out of her job to one that carries less risk to her fetus. Essentially this means that a woman has the right to decide when to declare she is pregnant to her employer, and to stay in her position even if it may cause harm to the developing fetus.

It also seems like the regulations vary from airline to airline,

Few airlines today ban first trimester flying (from the time of conception through the first 12 weeks of pregnancy). Most, along with the military, permit flying through the second trimester (24 to 28 weeks) during an uncomplicated pregnancy. A few companies have no written policy and handle their pilots' pregnancies and leave issues on a case-by-case basis.

The article goes on to cover  most of the topics related to this pretty comprehensively and is worth a read.
Of course there are some general medical concerns that any mother should take into account.
Answer: I am a pregnant pilot with an ATPL in Australia where we are allowed to legally fly until the end of our 30th week. I'm currently at my 27th week and definitely still feel fit to fly, I just had my Class 1 medical Renewal and my Doctor said he would be more than happy to sign me off to fly for longer but the CASA regulation is firm. I myself still feel fit to fly and am lucky that I have crew that load bags and do the heavy lifting so to speak.
Comment: Welcome to aviation.SE and congratulations! Unfortunately yours is a personal anecdote that does not really apply (the question is about FAA regulations, you mention Australia's CASA), while we are looking for factual answers, like extracts and links to relevant regulations.
Answer: This is not specific to aviation, and I don't know the rules for countries other than Germany.
I was just starting to argue about radiation doses, but this turns out not to be an issue in most cases:
An average pilot / FA receives a dose of about 2 mSv / year (worker in nuclear power plant: 1mSv/y). An embryo / fetus is not allowed to collect more than 1mSv during the entire pregancy. This would not happen if the much larger mother collects 2mSv in one year, but there are still special precaution requirements. For example, the received dose has to be measured weekly instead of monthly.
But our law gives even more. For example, after the 3rd month, a pregnant woman is not allowed to work on any means of transport, which an aircraft definitely is. And in general, pregnant woman are not allowed to do a job where they have to lift / push / move weights over 5kg permanently or 10kg occasionally.
Due to this laws, pregnant women have to be grounded immediately, no matter what the airline says.
Comment: Since a typical pregnancy is 9 months, during which the last 6 weeks they would definitely not fly, this means at most the pregnant woman would get 1.25mS according to your numbers, so I'm not sure I would consider radiation exposure as a larger factor. I'm not sure about Germany, but I know in the US most women don't get radiation tested weekly during pregnancy...
Comment: Actually the 1mSv for the entire pregnancy will gather up quite quickly if you fly long distance. For example flying weekly from Europe to Asia and back will give a pregnant woman about 10 working trips (back and forth, so 20 flights) before the whole 1mSv is full. So if you are able to fly from the time the prengancy has started and fly 3 to 6 trips per month it only gives you 2-3 months to fly.
Comment: @Ikosatu: I think, what I wrote was a little misleading. The unborn child should not collect more than 1mSv within the 9 months. Flying staff collects an average of 2mSv, the maximum is typically at about 5mSv per year. This dose is a total body dose, not per kilogram. The simple math is: If a 70kg woman collects 5mSv per year, 3.5kg of her body collect 0.25mSv per year or 0.1875mSv in 9 months. In reality, it's more complex since there are some weights on different tissue types, but the fetus also doesn't weight 3.5kg all the time...
Comment: @RonBeyer: No, the dose is indeed not that high I thought it were, but it isn't. But that doesn't change the laws about monitoring. I'd also like to know if flying staff is tested in general  in other countries. But as I wrote, it turns out they are not allowed here to push a trolley through the aisle...


An action to export a Photoshop document with file name intact

Question: Is there a way to export a document in Photoshop using an action that would preserve the file name? Example: I have a document called Home.psd. I'd like to run an action, and it would create a Home.png in some specified location, like the Desktop. I can do all of this pretty easily by recording the action, except to set the save destination and file type, I must enter a name.
Comment: Since it is what you were looking for, posting it as an answer would be a good thing.
Comment: You might want to take a look at this ( newest foles can be found in github ): http://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/16915/file-backups-for-photoshop/16968#16968 The only big difference is that it saves .psd. it wouldn't be difficult to change it to save a png instead... or additionally
Comment: ...and I love you too, man.
Comment: Thanks! I ended up editing his script to make my own:
https://github.com/edwardloveall/Photoshop-Export-PSD-script

What's proper etiquette for posting it somewhere? Should I comment on plainclothes' answer to link to this or make my own answer?
Answer: I ended up making my own script based on advice from plainclothes and a link from Joonas
You can find the script here: https://github.com/edwardloveall/Photoshop-Export-PSD-script
By default, it saves to the Desktop, but just edit the line
var desktop               = '~/Desktop';

to change the destination.
Answer: If you want to be completely hands-off I believe you need a script.
If you had a lot of files to process, you could batch the action and automate the name and destination there. But that still requires your intervention at the start.
Answer: You can create an action to save the images as you want and then simply use this action in the "batch" command found in the menu "file" then "automate"
There you can choose what folder to use for the images you want to process, and also WHERE you want them to be saved.
You can also simply select the "extension" as shown in the screenshot below; it will save your image with the same name, but will add the right extension.


How to deal with kids playing outside my house?

Question: I live in India. My neighbor's kids play cricket outside my house and keeps scratching and denting my car with the ball. I have talked with the parents and asked them to use a soft or sponge ball rather than a plastic one. But they do not seem cooperative and their tone is not friendly. How do I effectively deal with kids, preferably without involving legal authorities?
Comment: Without being rude, but you live in India while not having an Indian name, and (from their perspective) you want to deprive Indian children from playing the national Indian ballgame, is it possible we are dealing with a culture clash here?
Comment: @dominique While the OP may answer it best, it is possible that Sam is a shortened form of a longer name. As India is a multi-religious country it is also possible that it is his actual name. India's national game is actually Hockey though Cricket is hugely popular & religion for some. As an Indian, I sympathize with Sam and feel the neighbour & their kids are being insensitive.
Answer: An increasingly common trick in Britain to deter youngsters from an area is to play them classical music.
This sort of music is seen as highly uncool and they find somewhere else to hang out.
This was discussed at length on the BBC News Website when it first became popular.
The downside in a residential area is that you may annoy the neighbours - or violate noise abatement laws.  It would be worth doing this in concert (sorry!) with your neighbours rather than unilaterally.
Answer: As complaining about kids is not "cool", especially when they are small, although it is morally and legally fair. Its good to find an alternative, I'm glad you have started to think about this.
Now, what is a cool way to handle those cute faced tiny lovable monsters?
Step 1: Make friends with them.
You might think this is not worth it on the moment of first thought but trust me playing with kids helps you in many ways
Step 2: Explain your problem to them and they will understand now.
The thing is kids don't like to follow orders, especially if it messes with their favorite things (playing cricket with a hard ball in your case).
But, if friends ask the same, they "listen".
Simple, problem solved and now you have more friends too.
Answer: I have an in ground irrigation system tied to my Alexa. For a while when a neighbors dog would use my yard I'd turn on that section of the irrigation system. They stopped.
Answer: Proof that the damage to your car is from the kids, bring the parents an official looking document in which you claim payment for the damages.
You can soften that a bit by telling them that you will not take action yet but will do so when there is further damage to the car or any other of your posessions.
When the parents take you serious they will keep the kids from damaging your things.
This is not a friendly way, so it might be better to just talk rather than to bring it to the point.
Answer: A simple shelter covering your car is probably the best answer.  A (rigid) car cover, plastic shed or quonset (half-cylinder lying on its side) can be very inexpensive and will keep cricket balls (as well as sun, tree sap, and bird droppings) off your car.  Even a tent would work, as long as it has walls at least on the long sides.
Answer: We all have been kids and world was great at those years.Even evil things let us feel cool.Maybe that is why they find your car as a target. But I can suggest a responsible behavior instead of finding a solution to get rid of them.
In your situation if I were you I would take tour with them with your car so your car will became valuable for them too.Be their friends they will even fight for your car :D
Another solution while you have a voice much more than kids speak with municipal authority to make them a place where they can play safely which was rounded by fence.
It would be amazing if you can do it , wouldn't it ?


How can I fill in/color a transparent vector path in AI CS6

Question: Thank you for taking the time.
I'm actually new to AI and I'm having a trouble filling in a vector path that's transparent on the inside. I have attached a pictuare of the shape that I want to fill in, I tried changing the color from the fill box, but the border color changed instead of the inside.
Answer:
Select the O
Choose Object > Compound path > Release from the menu

Both shapes are then standard shapes.. fill them however you'd like.
Comment: While the other methods work, this is the only truly right solution. Tge reason is that this builds the right kind of structure (that is imprevious to conflation artifacts) that is the lightest possible one. If you dont understand why this is you should cogitate on this for a while.
Answer: There's a few ways to achieve that, depending on your usage. Here's one way:

hit A and Alt-Click the inner line of the 'O'
Ctrl+C
Ctrl+F this takes the inside of the 'O' and creates a new object of the same shape and in the same position.
With this new object selected you can now choose a new fill color.
Answer: Select your shape and fill its interior with the Shape Builder tool. It creates a new object that can have a fill and a stroke. You can select them afterwards or just before clicking the interior of the O.


Where can I create and publish a font?

Question: I appreciate good and professional typefaces, but always think that I can improve or customize them for my needs. But where can I design and possibly publish my fonts online?
Answer: This is a bit broad and difficult to give a specific answer, but to produce fonts you need software and then to publish fonts start by looking at the largest publishers first and read their documentation.
Independent font publishing is possible via Behance for instance where many freelancers are posting 'home-made' fonts, some of which are quite popular.
Comment: Thanks for the recommendations and insights, I will take a look at these.
Answer: Fonts aren't generally designed using online services. I suspect what you are really looking for is font creation software such as fontforge (free), or fontographer (not free).
It's unlikely you will be legally allowed to improve/alter commercial fonts, since these are generally copyright, and as such, making derivatives would breach copyright.
You can publish fonts using services such as dafont.
Comment: Thanks for the recommendations and insights, I will visit them, I guess the subject is much braoder than I anticipated after all.
Comment: @SydneyKT Just so you don't go into this completely blind, you should be aware that creating high-quality fonts like those used to set books, magazines, newspapers, etc., takes a long time. It includes many years of experience and knowledge of typography, kerning, and aesthetics, a very steep learning curve for the software and knowledge about how font tables interact and such things—not to mention actually designing each glyph. For professional type designers creating a single typeface is often a project which takes several years of work.

Where can I create and publish a font?


How to calculate the statistically significant level for a guassian line profile?

Question: In some papers, they fit a line profile with gaussian model. For example, in
this paper, fig 1 draw three gauss line profile, O VII, O VIII, and Ne IX.
But the data seems noisy and the gaussian height (from bottom to the top of the gauss line, especially O VIII, and Ne IX) do not seems above 3*(the height of 1-sigma errorbar) of the residual data. But in the text they say (on the left bottom of page 3): "The centroid wavelengths of three lines are consistent with O VII, O VIII, and Ne IX at zero redshift,respectively. Those lines are statistically significant at the 6.5, 3.1, and 4.5 sigma levels.". So i'm puzzled with the calculation algorithom of the significance. In my memory that the sigma=sqrt(variance of the residual data) and the height of gauss Intensity=exp(a*(x-b)/c^2), the significance = a/sigma. Then any wrong with my calculation?
Comment: Can you edit your question to point to a specific example in a paper?  That would make it easier to see how they are calculating significance. My guess is that the calculation is based on all of the points that make up the line - so they may not be measuring the *height* of the line at the 3 sigma level, but rather the *presence* of the line overall - a bunch of consecutive points deviating from the overall continuum level, at the right wavelength for a known line, can be significant even if each point alone might not be.
Comment: At it's most basic level, if you have 4 individual (indepependent) bins of data that roughly define your Gaussian shape, each of which are 2 standard deviations above the continuum, then the whol eline would have a significance of 4 sigma ($2 \times \sqrt{4}$). Of course it isn't quite that simple, but that is the root of your problem/misunderstanding.
Comment: Thank you. I reedit my question and add a link to the paper. Can you see out how they calculate the significance of these gauss line profile?
Answer: It is difficult to say, there isn't a description in the paper as to how they arrive at those numbers. Given that the equivalent widths of the lines have signal to noise levels that mean they are only greater than zero at significance levels of 2-3, then it isn't clear these are meaningful numbers at all.
However, here is how it might have been done.
You fit a continuum model to the spectrum, get a minimum chi-squared $\chi^2_1$ (or maximum [log] likelihood value); you then fit a continuum plus absorption line model and get a new, lower value, of chi-squared $\chi^2_2$ (or higher value of max log likelihood)
You then get the difference in chi-squared $\Delta \chi^2 = \chi^2_1 - \chi^2_2$ (or form the likelihood ratio) of the two models, which should be distributed as chi-squared with the number of degrees of freedom being equal to the number of new parameters in the more advanced model (i.e. 3 for a line centre, width and depth). You then check a chi-squared table for the corresponding p-value and significance.
In other words, if $\Delta \chi^2 = 6.25$, that corresponds to p=0.1, or if $\Delta \chi^2 = 11.35$ for p=0.01 etc.
In your comments you say:

First i use powerlaw to fit the continue get reduced chi-square1 = 1.00277 / dof=179. Then i fit with powerlaw+gauss, the reduce chi-square2 = 0.88091 / dof=176. The Δχ2 = 24.455. Is that right?

Yes. A chisquared test for 3 d.o.f. yields p=0.00002012
To convert to a number of Gaussian sigma, it is the stuff of standard statistics that
$$ n\sigma = \sqrt{2} {\rm erf}^{-1} (1 - p)$$
which in the case above suggests a significance of $4.26\sigma$.
Comment: Thank you Rob. I fit with your method. First i use powerlaw to fit the continue get reduced chi-square1 = 1.00277 / dof=179. Then i fit with powerlaw+gauss, the reduce chi-square2 = 0.88091 / dof=176. The Δχ2 = 24.455. Is that right? Then i want to ask, if the reduced chi-square1 < 1 and reduce chi-square2 > 1, how can i calculate, get the absolute value of the different? And what is the relationship of p-value and traditional sigma significance level, i.e. 3*sigma=what p-value?
Comment: @chen The method is described in my answer. The relationship between p-values and sigma are in standard statistics tables. 3 sigma is $p<0.003$.
Comment: @Chen I just realised you were asking me what happens if the new reduced chi-squared is worse than the old one. Well I think that is just about possible, but in any case it indicates that your fit has not improved so there is no significant line.
Comment: What is erf in your formula? Since the best reduced chi-square is 1, so maybe above 1 and below 1 should have equal fitting result. So in your formula Δχ2=χ21−χ22 , then if one chi-square is above 1 and another one below 1, how to calculate them? The same formula as the both are in the same side of 1?
Comment: @Chen erf is the "error function". The best reduced chi-squared is not 1. Adding more parameters to your model will always make chi-squared smaller and will usually (but not always) make the reduced chi-squared smaller. Stop thinking about reduced chi-squared since it is irrelevant to your question (or my answer).
Comment: Now i see the relationship of p-value and 3*sigma. Thank you so much for your help.


Your team member fails to meet the deadline for the coding and testing of a component. What do you do?

Question: You are the manager of a software development project. One of the team members fails to meet the deadline for the coding and testing of a component. What do you do?
Comment: @ameer_hamza Your question appears to overlap with How to deal with a team member who keeps missing deadlines? at http://pm.stackexchange.com/questions/611/how-to-deal-with-a-team-member-who-keeps-missing-deadlines?rq=1 Please review that question and if it does not cover your query, revise your question accordingly.
Comment: TBH I'm surprised at how many replies here ignore context and go right for the prescriptive approach. Can you provide more info such as expectations for a "manager" at your company, team responsibility, or company values/culture?
Comment: give the developer a 'black mark' when they have 3 black marks fire them immediately and hire a replacement. This ensures you have only the best developers in your company
Answer: You manage your variances. Fast track or crash succeeding tasks where you can and what you can afford. And communicate early, honestly, and as much as possible. This is project management. Unless you consistently plan fat and happy, which is not an objective you should have, you will be late as much as you are on time and early. How you manage those unfavorable variances is what makes you a good PM, not that you are never late.
Answer: You get used to it, as it happens all the time. :-)
You start be readjusting the schedule. Then, if needed, you escalate the newer deadline to those who need to know, so they can adjust their plans and the customer's expectation.
In the real world you probably have a buffer in the schedule so that the missed deadline doesn't cause major harm.
If this happens often, then you have to either learn to adjust the estimates this programmer gives you, or else send him to a course for better training.
Answer: In classical project management there is only communication. Your project is late not because that one developer, your project is late because of bad planning or risk management. What your stakeholders want you to do in this situation is explaining the situation, the consequences and of course what you do now to keep the postponement as small as possible.
If there are still things to do support your developer with more developers and create an environment where they can focus on their work.
If he is basically done there is only honest communication - and don't forget to take responsibility, there is nothing weaker than blaming the developer.
If you look on the root cause of the problem, your complete project depends of planning the wrong or too less people on a specific task. This is not bad project management. In software projects it's normal. On new software components it's simply not possible to plan properly, depending on the complexity of your software. That's why you should think about switching to agile methods like Scrum or Kanban. They deliver a much better way to plan and forecast based on solid statistics.
Comment: Being late is not due to bad planning and risk management. Work is probabilistic. Always has been, always will be.
Answer: Your success as a PM depends on your ability to create a bond of trust between the team members. Everyone on the team should feel and believe that truth, cooperation, and mutual support are values shared by all on the team. Throwing your tardy team member "under the bus" will destroy that bond.
Instead I would have a one-on-one with that person to understand what obstacles they faced that prevented them from meeting your expectations. Be willing accept and admit your role in creating those expectations. Recall the original agreement assigning the work in question. Was it SMART? Ask what they thought would help them better deal with the obstacles they encountered.
At the next stand-up or retrospective meeting, you and the tardy team member state the facts and aforementioned obstacles. Let the needs of the situation speak for themselves without judgement on your part. This should be done in a routine manner at the daily stand-up meeting rather than a special event/flogging. Allow the team to self-organize the recovery plan so the entire team owns the situation, not just you or the tardy member. Set the grounds rules that we will keep the discussion positive and comments brief. Ask all to use "I statements." This will reduce the projection of judgements and emotions they are moved to share. If team members start blaming, remind them that we all share in the consequences for the situation.
Lastly I would end with the adage that "Bad news never gets better with age." If anyone is having trouble at any time, they should speak up immediately so that the team can deal with the situation. The longer problems are hidden, the fewer our options for corrective action, and the more difficult our recovery.
If you take action without team consensus, the team morale will suffer and your action will appear arbitrary. However, after repeated missed deadlines and efforts to support this person, your team will likely realize that your tardy member is not up to par, and they will "vote them off the island." With that consensus, your job as PM will be to make it so. Team members may be saddened (or not) the departure, yet they will know that they (and you) have done all that is reasonable to help their former colleague succeed.
Answer: If the developer failed to meet deadline - there is a reason behind that. Find out what happen, make sure it will not happen again, or create a contingency plan for when it will happen again.
In my practice, the best way to approach this - is to establish communication guidance with developers.
First of all, i would recommend for developers to give you their estimates for the task they will be working on, or if there is a deadline for the task, ask them to do a review/research for 15-30 mins and either confirm they going to meet the deadline or deny and provide new estimate, based on info they found out from research.
During the actual execution, Developer should update you if something went wrong (issue occurred, a risk was realized, or dev just understood that this is going to take more time) and he/she will not meet the deadline. Based on the reason, you can try to help him out in many different ways, if necessary.
Try to avoid situations when you give developer a task with a deadline, and check the task progress only when the deadline comes.
It is also your job as a PM is to support developers through their work and help them do their job at best.


Artificial Gravity

Question: Is it possible to make the artificial gravity for space station to work by using the Permanent Magnet (PM) technology to float/rotate and balance out the inner floor/living quarters to counter-rotate the outer rotating station when creating gravity? Thank you so much.
Comment: These are *different* but slightly related questions (artificial gravity and magnetic fields) that you might find interesting: [Alternatives to centripetal force and constant acceleration to simulate Earth-like gravity](https://space.stackexchange.com/q/481/12102) and [Proposed methods to use electromagnetic force to replace gravity beyond boots?](https://space.stackexchange.com/q/34010/12102)
Comment: I think the answer is "no" because the direction that we feel the artificial gravity "pulling" us is away from the rotational axis. If it's a rotating cylinder, then we would stand on the inside surface of the cylinder and feel as though we were being pulled to it. The only thing a counter-rotation would do would be to prevent us from rotating and then there would be no artificial gravity effect. I think that [this answer](https://space.stackexchange.com/a/18127/12102) effectively answers "no" to your question. [This would be too weak](https://space.stackexchange.com/a/507/12102)
Comment: Hi @Rodmant I see that someone with the exact same user asked this first in Astronomy SE and then followed advice there to ask here. (Because both users are unregistered I can't tell if both of these are the same user.) It's strongly discouraged to ask the identical question on multiple SE sites, so it's best if you delete the other copy. Thanks, and *Welcome to Space!*
Answer: For artificial gravity to work well, you need a really large station: if the station is too small, there are side effects that would make the experience very unpleasant. You need a diameter of 100-200 m.
Current thinking is to achieve this by having two habitable modules with a truss or cable between them, and spinning the entire station. The simplest way to rotate these is using rocket thrusters.
Rotating the living quarters inside an outer shell is inefficient: you've doubled the weight of the station for very little benefit. If you do go this route, magnetic bearings are feasible. But they're only a tiny part of the problems you have to solve to get to an artificial gravity system.

Artificial Gravity


Question about the proto-Germanic root hampijaną

Question: This question came as I analyzed the origin of the english words "happy" and "happen" and after my research i found the reconstructed proto-germanic root "hampijaną". However i found that this root only appears in the North Germanic languages and was probably adopted into english from Old Norse. Is it common for some roots to be adopted only in one of the germanic branches?How come it completely disappeared in western germanic languages such as German,Dutch,Low Saxon etc.?
Answer: "Happy" and "happen" were both formed within English from the noun "hap" (good fortune). The OED (Oxford English Dictionary, on-line version) indicates the etymology of "hap" as follows:

Etymology: Probably < early Scandinavian (compare Old Icelandic happ
  (neuter) chance, good luck, success (Icelandic happ), and Norwegian
  happ, Swedish regional happ, both masculine), cognate with Norwegian
  heppa to happen, Old Danish hap (adjective) lucky, Swedish hampa
  (reflexive) to happen (by chance), (regional) happa, habba to happen,
  succeed, Danish happe, and further with Old English gehæp (adjective)
  suitable, convenient, gehæplic (adjective) convenient, orderly,
  probably < the same Indo-European base as Early Irish cob victory
  (rare) and Old Church Slavonic kobĭ destiny.

If the Celtic and Slavic parallels are correct, it follows that this root is not restricted to North Germanic, but has to be ascribed to proto-Indo-European. Obviously, it has not been preserved in all branches of IE, or even all branches of Germanic. But this is the way that languages work.
Comment: Compare *hope*, as in "there's hope/there's a  chance".
Comment: "Hope" is not related to "hap".
Comment: @vectory Interesting correlation.Is it just your guess?
Comment: @fdb, I guess the roots *kep-* and *kewp-~kwep-* allow internal reconstruction? cp. *to hop* PIE *kewb-, "vor Freude hüpfen". Ger. *Hampelmann*, which is amusing. It's derived from a cross of *ampeln* (?), *hüpfen* "to hop" and *humpeln* "to hunch, limp"; cp. *Ampel* "traffic light, lantern" derives from *ampulla, amphora*; Does that remind of *euphoria*! Which reminds of *good news* or *evangelion*, Ger. *Hoffnungsschimmer* "gleam of hope (on the horizon)". The gloss "to smoke, boil" for *kewp- reminds of *roast, happening*. cp. *rise, spring*, Ger. *Sprung* "jump, move, fissure", *bring*.
Answer: Words die out and become replaced by neologisms at any time. When it happens shortly after a major fork into branches we see only one branch retaining the original word.
It is not really uncommon to find attestations of a certain word only in some sub-branch of a language family, both North Germanic and West Germanic have words that are absent from the other branch.
EDIT: For the definition of a branch, shared innovations (neologisms, sound shifts, grammatical innovations) are necessary. Therefore we see new words (of whatever origin, e.g., composition, loan words, new inventions) in each of the branches as well.
Comment: You might also mention that new words can be picked up by only one branch, either as loans or neologisms. (Though that doesn't seem to be what happened here.)


Why does FX's Fargo have a 1h13m airtime?

Question: FX's new Fargo TV series airs from 10 PM to 11:13 PM, Eastern.  Why?  I'm positive they could trim enough from each episode to make it fit a normal one-hour timeslot, and I doubt it'd be too hard to extend it to 1h30m if trimming wasn't an option.  Why give the show such an irregular timeslot?
Comment: Art doesn't always fall inside the box. Why are Stephen King novels so long? Why are movies of varying lengths? Simply because, it takes as long as it takes, to tell the story. All art is not haiku, though all haiku are art.
Comment: @wbogacz: But novels and movies don't have set lengths.  TV shows, on the other hand, are expected to fall into timeslots that are multiples of 30 minutes in length, and deviation from this is *very* unusual.  Why would the FX executives let the show producers mess up the network's scheduling just for the sake of art?  Why would the producers even *consider* a 73-minute timeslot in the first place?
Comment: The pilot episode was 70 mins, the regular episodes are 50 mins.
Comment: @Oliver_C: They may be 50 minutes once the commercials are removed, but they're still broadcast in a 1h13m-long timeslot.
Comment: @jwodder - I don't know that that's a rule. It is certainly an accepted practice. Also, a network's product is not the shows, but the commercial time sold in the gaps. Longer shows contain more opportunity for money-filling gaps. TV is an ad-driven enterprise that uses story wrapped around the ads, not the other way around. It's the story that keeps the audience coming back for the money-driving commercials.
Answer: If you look at their entire schedule, they list Fargo as running back to back to back.
So, from the 10pm to 11:13 Saturday night time slot you have an episode of Fargo, then from 11:15p Saturday until 1 am Sunday, you have another episode. (It is not clear if it is an encore presentation or not).
Then again at 1 am, you have another slot for Fargo, only this one is limited to an hour.
So my supposition is that they are extending the time slots to get more advertising time/revenue, and the two shows together take up a 3 hour block.
Answer: That only comes out to blocks of 2 and a half hours, not 3. I read the network execs allow them a lttle more time to tell the story each episode, due to each season being like a mini-series, ending on the season's last episode.
Comment: Citation? Where did you read that, and what else did they say? (Your first sentence would be better suited as a comment on the answer it addresses.)


Why was Hank tagging trees in the college?

Question: In S5E8, Hank talks about the job he had when he was on college and implies how simple, but easy the life was back then to Walt. Why that job is selected as the college job of Hank by the writers? Why not delivering newspapers for example? Is there a symbolism/metaphor here?
Comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/breakingbad/comments/zak8j/hanks_talk_about_tagging_trees/
Answer: Hank said:

Oh, yeah? Back in college, I'd spend my days marking trees in the woods with this-- this orange spray can.
......
Crews would come in later and find the trees I tagged and cut them down.
First, you go in, and you mark locations for skid trails and landings.
Then you choose specific trees all within a selected grid.
(Script source: springfieldspringfield)

Now if you read it attentively you will notice he said orange spray and what other orange prominent thing was in that episode? "Prison uniform", Hank and DEA has marked those people orange too who get killed. Same fate as the tree. So this tree tagging story is just a parallel to what happen to the prisoners.
Same was concluded by ew.com too.
Comment: Wow this show is even more brilliant than I realized.
Comment: Everywhere gives the same explanation but the thing is, Hank didn't tag anything. Walt got the names from Lydia.
Comment: @Utku https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreshadowing
Comment: @Utku those people were killed because Walt was afraid of them negotiating a deal (that would lead to him) to avoid prison. Also, being in prison made their location known. Had they been free, there would have been less incentive in killing them and they could have hid or run away. Hank discovery of Gus'operation, the arrest of these men and the failure of the security measures did lead to their deaths.


will i lose data/quality converting my raw files to jpeg on my pc?

Question: will converting raw files to jpeg be the same as taking a jpeg photo to begin with? or will I keep my raw quality converting it to jpeg post shoot?
Comment: The way I look at it is the raw file contains straight-from-the-sensor data whereas the jpg is one possible visualization of that data. If you don't save the raw file then you're stuck with just one interpretation. Assuming you don't resize the  image the quality of a jpg is the same as the raw file in that you don't really look at a raw file, you look at a jpg interpretation of the raw data.
Answer: JPEGs have a narrower range of features than RAW files, so you can expect that your generated JPEGs will be no better than your original RAW files. Depending on what features and format were used to record your original RAW data, you may notice significantly reduced quality.
Three major areas where you can be assured a JPEG cannot equal are a RAW file are Color Depth (Sampling), Color Space (Gamut), and Image Data Compression. Here's a quick enumeration of what's different:
Color Depth
RAW:  Any sample bit depth is available, 16bit is typical nowadays.
JPEG: 8bit only (16bit is possible in the updated JPEG2000 spec).
Color depth is the one key area where JPEGs cannot match RAWs, especially any RAW file with 16bit samples. This manifests itself in the form of reduced tonality, and in the most severe case, block-like artifacts in JPEGs when the output quality level is reduced. Some images benefit from dithering to improve their relative fidelity to their original image, which can visually make a JPEG look as good as the original to an untrained eye.
Color Space
RAW:  Any color space is available, and usually this is some form of expanded gamut specific to the manufacturer and class of capture device. You can expect to see gamuts that can meet or exceed sRGB, Adobe RGB, etc.
JPEG: Only sRGB, Adobe RGB, or Unspecified (often interpreted to be some form of RGB) are widely used.
In theory any ICC profile could be embedded in a JPEG, but the most common display mediums often have undefined behavior with any color space that isn't sRGB.
You may not see much degradation here, as most current display devices are sRGB based, and not many people have displays with an expanded gamut. Printing is where you will likely see an issue, as the sRGB space has significant areas subject to interpolation when rendered with ink; and in high-end printing, both sRGB and Print CMYK-based spaces have large areas of exclusion to each other where colors from one space can never be reproduced exactly by the other.
Image Data Compression
RAW:  No compresssion or Lossless compression are the norm.
JPEG: Lossless compression is available only under very specific circumstances.
Most RAWs from cameras contain some form of sensor data or directly converted samples based on sensor data. These are lossless and can be converted with high fidelity to another compatible or similarly capable format (TIFF, DNG, etc.).
With JPEGs, many editing tools have their own interpretation of what is lossy and what isn't, leading to significant degradation on round trip open/edit/save operations on the same JPEG file, and some non-professional editing tools aren't truthful about saving JPEGs in a lossless mode at 100% quality. Because one of the design goals of JPEGs was to trade size for quality, you can expect JPEGs to almost always win on size due to use of lossy compression, but rarely keep up on quality.
It's a little bit trickier to enumerate what looks visually worse about a JPEG due to compression levels, as the high end of the range looks pretty good, and many images have compositions that don't look that much worse to untrained eyes until the compression level gets really high. Some attributes that eventually manifest as the compression ratio increases are muddiness/weak contrast, false colors, and block-like image details.
Subjectively, you have to decide whether you want to record images or samples in RAW or as JPEG. Here are some of the trade-offs when making this choice for cameras:
Negatives
RAW: Slow writes to media (SD/CF cards, etc.) and may exhaust camera shooting buffers quickly when shooting long bursts. Slower workflow after-capture, as your tools may require image conversion to TIFF or JPEG or other formats.
JPEG: Greater chance of missing and irrecoverable image details if your shot was exposed badly. Weak color and detail in many types of scenes where color, micro-contrast, and image details matter, such as landscape and portrait photography.
Positives
RAW: Best possible image quality from your device. The capabilities of many high end cameras may only discovered by starting your workflow from RAWs.
JPEG: Often the fastest possible shot acquisition for many devices; and simplest workflow after-capture, which is ideal for scenarios such as social media, surveillance, and photojournalism where time-to-distribution often counts the most.
Whatever you choose for your needs, you would be best served by keeping a copy of whatever original you obtained from your device. This way, if you find that your workflow have lost a lot by working with JPEGs, you can start over from the original image data, which is the best representation you can retain.
Answer: RAW files are data that really cannot be displayed on your computer screen; for example RAW often has a color depth of 12 or 14 bits per channel, screens can only show 8 bit (except those very new hdr displays..). Jpeg is also an 8bit format.
So every time the raw sensor data is converted to jpeg (in camera or on your pc) or software tries to display it on screen, a decision has to be made how to reduce these 12 or 14 bits to 8.
In-Camera jpeg creation and also any software displaying raw files do this automatically, which is the easy way. Doing the "reduction" (developement of the picture) manually allows you to decide for yourself about how to use the information overhead, which is a bit more time consuming but lets you choose how the image should look.
So: image quality is not really different, necessarily, but developing a jpeg from raw gives you more control over the image, which might just decide whether the resulting picture is a good one or just any shot.
Comment: It's more than just 12 or 14 bits vs. 8 bits. It's also single monochromatic luminance values per pixel vs. 3 channel color information interpolated from demosaicing the raw data to produce color.
Answer: It depends.
Some of the factors involved:

The results of the camera's jpeg engine versus the jpeg engine of whatever raw processing application you choose. Different applications will handle the same raw data differently to one degree or another.
Your skill in using the camera's controls and settings to affect the outcome of the in-camera jpeg versus your skill in using the raw processing application's much more sophisticated and flexible settings and tools. There are some things you can only do with a raw file on a computer that you can't do in-camera. But like many advanced tools, it takes knowledge and experience to use them properly. Without the needed skill, the automatic solution in camera will likely result in a more pleasing image.
Answer: The short answer is: it depends.
You can make from your raw file a full jpg, which will keep full quality. It will also be huge.
When converting from raw to jpg you lose options for further image manipulation. This is not quite the same as image quality. You can make a black & white jpg from a raw file, it will have full resolution but there is no way to make the jpg color again. You could however, reprocess the original raw file to make a different color interpretation.
It is often practical to make a limited resolution jpg of acceptable quality for distribution. And the limiting of further editing is not necessarily a bad thing - export to jpeg is a way of declaring the image "final".


Renting or Buying an House

Question: We are a young couple who are renting apartment near NYC. It has been almost 4 years that we have been renting and after every couple of years we had to move to   a newer location and every time our rent has been increased by nearly 20% and now we are looking at near about $ 2600 to 2800 rent without including utilities. At this juncture I am thinking of buying an apartment instead of renting. I would be a first time buyer and because I am still a legal immigrant in this country I am not sure of me staying more than couple of years in this country. I am trying to understand what would be better in my scenario , renting an apartment for 2600 $ or  buying a house for $ 400,000 with 20 % downpayment and selling it after two years for 400K. I have a very good credit score which is above of 780. I would like to understand, if I would make any loss if I sell the house after two years. In case of renting I will eventually loose $ 62K in two years and this is the primary reason that I am considering buying as I will be the owner of the house and can stay as long as I want.
Comment: You will lose money if you sell the house for less than the price you bought it for plus interest on your mortgage plus any other expenses. So in other words to not loose money you would have to sell it for at least the purchase price plus interest payments over 2 years plus other expenses over 2 years.
Comment: Are you aware of the timescales of trying to sell a house. What if you need to leave US immediately, how would you handle selling it ?
Comment: @DumbCoder I will rent it if I have to leave US immediately. I will not sell it atleast for two years.
Comment: @Victor The plan is to sell the house for the same price which I bought. In any case , even if I rent , I am loosing $ 62K in two years, so any loss in selling which is less than $ 62K will actually not be a loss.
Comment: @user1596433 - how do you know you will sell it for the same price that you bought it for? You can not plan for what price you might sell the property in the future, that may depend on many factors. What happens if property prices drop by 20% in that 2 years, would you still sell it? You have just answered your own question - if you lose less than $62K then you are ahead ! But if you are asking what the price will be in 2 years _ then no one can answer that !!!
Answer: When you sell a house around between 7-10% of the sales price will go to various fees. Mostly to the agents, but also to county fees, city fees, deed tax, and possibly covering closing costs for the buyers. So if you sell a $400k house for the same price you buy, just in fees, you're out $40k.
Mortgages are structured so that the frontend is very interest heavy, while at the end you're mostly paying towards principal. So for the first two years you will pay down very little of the principal. Figure around $2500 for the mortgage, and without running the numbers I bet you would pay an average for the first two years of around $1800/month in interest. $43,200. Mortgage interest is tax deductible, so you'll get some of that back.
That's also $16,800 in equity you'll have on the house, so you'll get that back out when you sell.
Rough numbers, I would be you lose around $50k buying the house and selling for the same price two years later. That doesn't take into account having to do any maintenance. And it assumes you can sell quickly when you want to.
Renting is not throwing away money. You don't lose any money. You get a place to live in exchange. You don't build equity, sure, but you don't need to worry about maintenance and other related issues. When you're looking to be somewhere short term renting is generally the best idea.
Comment: Gee, when I sold a unit just over a year ago all I paid was 1.65% to the agent.
Comment: @Victor That's a great deal. National average is between 5-6% for agent fees if you're using a realtor to sell.
Comment: In Australia it is between 1-3% for agent selling fees, apart from CGT (only if it is an investment property) there are no other taxes when you sell, and the only other costs are for conveyancing (which if you do yourself can be limited to a few hundred dollars). You guys pay to much !
Answer: Some pros and cons to renting vs buying:
Some advantages of buying:

When you rent, the money you pay is gone. When you buy, assuming you
don't have the cash to buy outright but get a mortgage, some of the
payment goes to interest, but you are building equity. Ultimately you
pay off the mortgage and you can then live rent-free.
When you buy, you can alter your home to your liking. You can paint in the colors you like, put in the carpet or flooring you like, heck, tear down walls and alter the floor plan (subject to building codes and safety consideration, of course). If you rent, you are usually sharply limited in what alterations you can make.
In the U.S., mortgage interest is tax deductible. Rent is not. Property taxes are deductible from your federal income tax. So if you have, say, $1000 mortgage vs $1000 rent, the mortgage is actually cheaper.

Advantages of renting:

You can move somewhere else whenever you like or almost whenever you
like. You may have some obligation on a lease, but worst case is
usually that you have to pay a year's rent. When you buy, if you move
you can't just stop making mortgage payments. You have to sell the
place. Sometimes this is easy, but often it can take a long time to
find a buyer, and/or you cannot sell the house for what you paid for
it.
When you rent, your rent includes maintenance. If the plumbing leaks or the furnace fails, you call the landlord and he has to fix it. When you buy, it's your problem and you have to fix it or pay someone to fix it. Many first-time buyers fail to take the cost of maintenance into account. Also, for an apartment the landlord typically takes care of mowing the loan, clearing snow from the parking area, etc. When you buy a house, this is all your problem.

There are a lot of transaction costs involved in buying a house. You have to pay a realtor's commission, various legal fees, usually "loan origination fees" to the bank, etc. Plus the way mortgages are designed, your total payment is the same throughout the life of the loan. But for the first payment you owe interest on the total balance of the loan, while the last payment you only owe interest on a small amount. So early payments are mostly interest.
This leads to the conventional advice that you should not buy unless you plan to live in the house for some reasonably long period of time, exact amount varying with whose giving the advice, but I think 3 to 5 years is common.
One mitigating factor: Bear in mind that if you buy a house, and then after 2 years sell it, and you discover that the sale price minus purchase price minus closing costs ends up a net minus, say, $20,000, it's not entirely fair to say "zounds! I lost $20,000 by buying". If you had not bought this house, presumably you would have been renting. So the fair comparison is, mortgage payments plus losses on the resale compared to likely rental payments for the same period.
Answer: You may be in a situation where buying is preferred, especially because you can enter the market in a strong position - with a 20% down payment.  If you have the financial ability to assume the risk of owning, you may be better off.
I would consider two things.
Renting is purchasing a service. You are buying the flexibility to move with minimum hassle and the landlord is assuming the risk of owning the asset (property). They will make money on you, like any service provider.
Buying is purchasing an asset. You are buying the underlying asset and assume all the risks associated with it. This is large, unforeseen maintenance, fees, taxes, depreciation, etc... Some of these risks were passed to you as a renter, but some were not.
Just like purchasing $400k in stock, if you have to sell when the market is down, you lose big. You win if you can hold.
Unlike a stock, real estate will eat your cash in taxes and repairs unless it is rented. If you are willing to be a long-distance landlord, this may work out. Understand that property management fees will eat into your rent income and being long-distance will give more potential for a bad tenant to ruin your property value. These and other factors (e.g. vacancy rate) will increase your risk of loss and should be considered.
Some of this will be your preference, since you will spend much more time dealing with buying/selling/property management as opposed to a more clean rental situation. Is this hassle worth the savings? For many, yes; others, no.
Finally, I hope this calculator can help clarify some of the financial aspects for you.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-calculator.html?_r=0
Good Luck!
Answer: I actually didn't do the math with your numbers, but I recall Sal from Khan Academy did a nice video about your question, challenging the notion that it is always better to buy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YL10H_EcB-E

Renting or Buying an House


Best Encrypted Backup Solution for Windows and Linux servers

Question: I am looking for advice, and hopefully there are people here with experience that have suggestions.  I have a Linux SAMBA File Server that has financial data on it that I want to backup to a remote server.  Also I have a Windows server with Quickbooks documents on it.  I need a solution that will create an encrypted share and then do automated back-ups.  Any thoughts on the best way to accomplish this?
Answer: Some of the open source ones out there do this for you. Bacula and Amanda. Amanda does have a company behind for a paid version and support. These are complete backup systems.
If you wanted something using more basic tools, check out this article over at Debian Administration. The benefit of using basic tools, if you experience a large failure, it is easy to get the data out of the backup and get going again.
You can even use this to roll  your own with a little bit of scripting.
Comment: Bacula also now has an enterprise version with paid support.
Comment: Didn't realize that, been a while since I looked into it. Bacula Systems http://www.baculasystems.com/
Answer: Tarsnap and cron.
Answer: There are two kinds of encryption to consider:

Encrypting the backup during transmission to the remote site
Encrypting the actual contents of the backup.

If you are control the remote site, then perhaps 1) is all you need.  This can be accomplished by sending your data through an SSL tunnel - using stunnel or the equivalent.  The advantage of this method is that you won't need a key to decrypt the backup in a Disaster Recovery situation.
However, if the remote site is not secure, or not under your control, perhaps you want option 2.  This can be accomplished in several ways - from storing the original data on an encrypted partition, to actual encrypted backups - where the original is not encrypted, but the backup is.  (We use bacula, and I know it's capable of this).  In these cases it is imperative that you not lose the encryption key, or your backups will be as useless to you as they are to anyone else.
If you are interested in encrypting your actual filesystem, have a look at eCryptfs.  The latest Ubuntu release (9.10) uses this by default to encrypt user's home directories.
Answer: And if you don't want to host the backup server yourself, you can also use SaaS such as SpiderOak (https://spideroak.com/).
It's very easy to setup on Windows/Mac/Linux, encrypts everything and has zero maintainance on your side.
There's a spideroak-addons package for Ubuntu to add a headless init.d script.


Symmetry and stability of a molecule (Jahn-Teller Distortion)

Question: I've taught in my class that if a molecule posses high degree of symmetry it's stability will be more,in other words symmetry and stability are directly proportional. Is this statement correct? And if this is correct than why Jahn teller distortion stabilizes a molecule when it's symmetry gets low eventually because of the distortion.
Answer: The symmetry and stability are not directly related per se; is benzene more stable that naphthalene for example? Benzene is more 'symmetric' than the naphthalene but both are stable molecules; $D_{6h}$ vs $D_{2h}$ point groups.
Jahn  and Teller discovered that in a non-linear molecule in an orbitally degenerate electronic state, say $e_g$ or $t_{2g}$ in an octahedral complex, that there is an interaction between the electronic orbital motion and nuclear vibrational motion, which causes the minimum energy position  to differ from the symmetric structure. This motion lifts the orbital degeneracy and lowers the energy. Thus the lower symmetry state has lower energy.
An example might be the lengthening of a pair of axial bonds in a octahedral complex, $\ce{[CoF6]}^{3-}$ for example, however, the J_T theorem does not give any indication of how big the distortion might be, i.e. it does not predict the geometrical nature of the distortion. There is also a restriction which is that if the degenerate structure has a centre of symmetry so does the distorted structure.
note: The electronic spin of the molecule (singlet, triplet etc.) is not important it is the orbital degeneracy only that matters. The Jahn-Teller effect is a breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation which is based on separating nuclear and electronic motion.
Comment: I don't get that how come elongation of the axial bond, say in $Cu^{+2}(d^9)$ configuration, brings in the stability? How does the bond elongation affecting the interaction of ligand (present on $z$-axis) and the $d_{z^2}$ orbital?
Answer: Well generally you can say that symmetry contributed to the stability. But in most cases you will find exception. The Jahn–Teller effect is most often encountered in octahedral complexes of the transition metals. In octahedral complexes, the Jahn–Teller effect is most pronounced when an odd number of electrons occupy the eg orbitals. This situation arises in complexes with the configurations d9, low-spin d7 or high-spin d4 complexes, all of which have doubly degenerate ground states. In such compounds the eg orbitals involved in the degeneracy point directly at the ligands, so distortion can result in a large energetic stabilisation and is not related to symmetry.


Product not display in product list page

Question: I have added products and set quantity is more than zero and stock status set to in stock and products also assign to specific categories but product not display in product list page.
Answer: This is a just a quickie – got caught out with a weird issue yesterday where the Magento products in a particular category just disappeared – they still existed if you navigated directly to their URL, but they would not show in their categories (though the Manage Categories screen in the Magento admin still showed those products in their correct category).
These things always happen at inopportune times, I was right about to start a pre-go-live review of a site, and was left with one category completely devoid of products, thanks for making me look like an egg, Magento!
It prompted me to begin a sequence of steps I have found myself often taking to diagnose why products do not appear on the Magento frontend like I expect them to. I thought it might be worth documenting those steps I take and things I check to find out what is preventing a product to show up. Ironically yesterday, I got to the end of my usual list and the products still didn't show up! So I now have one other thing to suggest you try when products appear to inexplicably stop displaying.
Here we go with my top things to check for when your products don't show up:
Are the products In Stock?
I know it sounds obvious but when you're adding a quick test product, it's easy to miss this field, trust me. Make sure it's set to In Stock as shown below:

You can also set up the inventory configuration to Display out of stock products, which sort of negates this one if it is set to Yes:

Are the products Enabled?
Again another easy one to miss when adding a product manually, not so easy to stuff up if you use bulk product imports though. Interestingly the fix I eventually found below involved this attribute.

Are the products Visible?
In some merchandising situations you want your simple products to be invisible and only show the parent products. However if you do want your product to be visible make sure you set it where applicable in this field.

Are any associated products in stock?
Are the products in the expected category?
Are your Caches and Indexes out of date?

Access these options in the System -> Cache Management and System -> Index Management menus.
Have you run out of other things to try?
And lastly – the weird situation I had yesterday where the products were visible when navigating directly, but not when looking at their category page (and oddly it only affected one category). I suspect this must be to do with an index table not being correct, or a cache, but I tried re-indexing and refreshing the cache to no avail, so I can't pin it on this for sure.
Anyway, all it took to have the products re-associate with their category was to bulk disable them and then bulk re-enable them. Strange eh? I had tested a bulk attribute change earlier and that didn't fix them, so it wasn't just any attribute change, but particularly the status. I just wish I knew why that fixed them – but I didn't have time to investigate further, or even try to replicate the issue. So for now It's a 'solar flare' problem…
Got through all of these and still no luck? Let me know. Also I'd appreciate any feedback on other tips or suggestions people may have on this, always good to add another possible fix to my list.
Article Taken:
http://www.aschroder.com/2010/07/why-are-my-magento-products-not-showing-up/