Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • April 21, 2023 5:45 AM

@ Kent Brockman, Robin, ALL,

Re : Is it STEM or “Sitting next to Nelly” replacement?

“[T]he focus of higher ed(and those paying for it) is increasingly on the STEM fields”

Actually it’s mostly not, just appears that way to those outside of the field of endevor.

The reason is “Employers wants”. Back in the 1960’s when manufacturing industry started to take off for making home electrical and electronics goods most people left school to “go into service”, “trade” or “home making” at the age of 14. The girs became shop workers or nurses prior to being “Wedded, bedded and home making” a small number went on to be Teachers where sex equality employment was more in their favour. The boys got “trade training” but mainly had the corners knocked of untill old enough to be pushed into “National Service”.

A few of the boys “selected by the ‘Eleven Plus’ streaming” got grammer schools and academic education to get University or Managment and “Officer Cadet training”

For those doing shop or trade work even basic numeracy was not really a requirment, and their post school “training” was by the “seeing and doing” poor man’s apprenticeship of “sitting next to Nelly”.

Then for the brighter ones on entering National Service they would again be streamed into vocational trades rather than being a drunken fist swinging grunt, of the “If it moves salut it, if it doesen’t paint it” level of thinking obaying.

Back then the Armed services increasingly needed vocationaly traned personnel as equipment was getting increasingly sophisticated. A radio or radar technician on “geting out” could command wages better than nearly any other tradesperson, and many actually set themselves up in buisiness as TV/Radio repairmen and quickly earned sufficient money to pay cash for middle class and upper middle class homes along side “Professionals” such as Lawyers, Doctors, Accountants, and Teachers/acadenics.

My parents were both Professionals, my father in Accountancy and Law abd later graduate level education. My mother got hit by the inequality in academia but became a senior school teacher, then head of Department and was destined for “headship” but dropped out for a while to have a family, which unfortunately blocked her future progression up the managment path or ability to switch into higher level academia and a research post.

But the problems of lack of vocational trained technicians also hit manufacturing industry. With the result “Night Schools” started offering “Higher Education” via “City and Guild’s” training to degree entry level or with extra maths second year entry.

But industry needed manufacturing staff. Back in the 1930’s through 50’s both electrical and electronic equipment was “hand made” on early production lines. Whilst you could learn by sitting next to Nelly from an employers perspective you were not earning your wages… Thus “poaching of staff” became rampant and wages started to rise. Changes in technology and social perception in the electronics industry ment women could do a lot of manufacturing work and many who had had their families but had had war time training were draged in as a way to lower the wage bill.

During the 60’s all was well emoloyment was high and the economy was apparently hunming along. However it was not and the start of the 1970’s was not a good time, with strikes, three day weeks and power cuts.

The real reason started with “Beer and fags for the boys” policy for a Government to be ellected as WWII soldiers were discharged, rather than investing in infrastructure that had had the guts kicked out of it, and war debt. So there was no investment in industry, manufacturing or infrastructure.

Whilst things did start to pick up again towards the end of the 1970’s employers were still not investing in their work force. The advent of the microprocessor changed much of the way industry functioned and control systems became much more complicated than “lader logic” using relays and motor driven mechanical switches as “sequencers”. I got lucky I’d not just taken an interest in micro processors I spent the equivalent of half a years income on the parts to build my own computers and later purchased an Apple ][ for learning both Pascal and Fortran. The only other way to learn them was at the second year stage in university. As at that time most computer related organisation that did offer training taught only IBM “assembler” or Cobol. Then the “home computer market” kicked of big style and I rode the wave of my self education into succesively better and more technical jobs.

My main advantage was thanks to spending time from pre-teen with University and College librarians and a memmory that appeared capable of remembering vast amounts of information, but importantly in which data sheet, journal, book or standard it was in, not just to the chapter but to the page and paragraph. This made me a “Team resource” and “lead design” by default and I quickly gained wide experience so had not just incredible depth but very wide breadth across several disciplines, so “job hopping” was easy and I had the equivalent of several career disciplines to my belt, and a personal technical library from continuing self education/curiosity larger than quite a few Universities and is several thousand books in size and forms my “dead tree cave”.

Such self education does not come cheap. Around 10% of my gross income on books and related trade magazines and the equivalent of 1700 hours/year. Has it returned the investment obviously not in financial terms even with being at a consultant level.

The reason,

“I dislike managment and won’t play politics”

Which is why my standing advice to especially femail enginers is,

“Get an MBA and learn to speak business so ‘the man above’ can understand you, then stick the knife in his back and use it as a rung on your ladder upwards”.

Thus the reason STEM even at graduate level is not realy of use is as I’ve said since the 1990’s most enployers want “pre trained in the tools they use”… So those in education get taught tools rather than fundemental foundation level knowledge.

And nobody asks the question,

“What happens when the tool/methodology goes out of fashion?”

As it usually does every decade or less…

If you’ve learnt the fundementals well than climbing down and up on tools is one heck of a lot easier than jumping from the peak of one tool to the next tool.

It’s why you see employers still poach and those that don’t jump from job to job, won’t get promoted, just the “new guy” becomes the team lead or higher…

But… As I’ve indicated my rapid rise was due to the type of memmory I had back then and my ability to read and assimilate information very rapidly. Having my head kicked into a street sign pole one morning not just broke my jaw at the point –supposadly the strongest part of the body– but scrambled my brains and I lost my ability to read and remember so had to start again on that…

But a question that people should ask,

“With LLM’s very likely to become a very powerfull research tool, what should we actually be learning other than the real fundementals?”

In short the way we teach STEM is going to have to change dramatically in the next year or two, otherwise it will fail all those who enter higher education.

But hey I’ve been warning about higher education since before this blog existed having seen both sides of it. That is having been taught in both colleges and Universities, and being employed in both as well at one point or another. When I needed to be paided to fundementally upscale my research and education in a new field of endevor.

However I’ve had a lot of people tell me I’m wrong, yet they rarely to never come back and appologise that they were wrong…

Clive Robinson • April 24, 2023 9:18 PM

@ Winter, JonKnowsNothing,

“However, there is a simple production capacity issue. Producing safe drugs is horribly difficult and expensive.”

Whilst that is to a certain extebt true, it’s not helped by over a 1/4 of the numbers you are talking about get put down the drain as it were,

“The proposals lay out in detail the EU’s plans on making countermeasures available largely focused on prevailing policy options deployed during COVID-19 that many argue did not effectively address scarcity of medical products and worsened inequities. More than a billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been destroyed globally, even as millions continue to remain unvaccinated around the world.”

Note the “more than a billion” destroyed…

The question is not just “Why?” but “Who benifited?”…

Clive Robinson • April 25, 2023 6:31 AM

@ JonKnowsNothing, ALL,

Re : End of patent is not ebd of profit.

“Once that patent expires the cost of the drug falls to tens of dollars.”

If only…

There are various tricks that are legaly granted in the US that extend the profit well beyond the end of patent.

But worse is “traditional drugs” such as Colchicine from the Autumn Crocus. Used for over three and a half millennium and as it’s the only effective drug for gout and for use in certain other ailments such as pericarditis. It costs only one or two cents per tablet in most of the world, and usually only 12 tablets are prescribed for gout (due to narrow range and potential risk). So there was no profit in individual prescriptions, even though the US has around a million each year.

As it is a drug that “pre-dates” current US FDA testing like a couple of hundred other drugs in common use it was in a vulnerable state under US legislation.

As you can not get a patent on such medications, the FDA has come up with a highly profitable wheeze the “Unapproved Drugs Initiative” under the provisions of the Hatch-Waxman Act that benifits not just “Big Pama” but the FDA themselves.

I won’t give links again, because they’ve caused previous problems but just searching on the drug name and FDA should bring up the likes of “URL Pharma” and the over 2000 markup, with “Takeda Pharmaceutical Co.” taking over URL Pharma and raising the mark up significantly again with what is estimated as a highly profitable 1,200,000,000USD off of those million or so 12 tablet prescriptions… Then there are the lawsuits which always appear around such gross profiteering. Even Wikipedia has links of interest in the history section of it’s page on the drug.

Apparently according to some sources the US FDA got 45,000,000USD out of this one licence alone… However the cost to the US Government medical schemes was over 50,000,000 and rising… So over all a very bad idea for the US Tax payer, as well as patients and those that pay the medical bills in the various US Health Care “hold their feet to the fire” schemes…