Strongly agree on the "get objective test results". However I will note, as someone who did first year Maths at Cambridge and then switched to Computer Science, that even if you have all the objective marks in your favor top level undergraduate mathematics is tough. There's nothing wrong with re-evaluating after a year and picking something slightly less intellectually challenging. Had I not got into Cambridge and gone to one of my second choices perhaps I would have finished my maths degree instead of switching, but given that I always wanted to work with computers a fall back to Comp Sci was not exactly a big deal.
Mind you I'm not sure that Harvard actually has a premier Math program, I'd need to check the syllabus. My impression is that Harvard has dumbed down a lot of its courses and that may include mathematics. My advice to the young lady would be to find a school where wokeness is minimized and/or where there are clear objective grades offered that don't involve non-mathematical bits because she is, utterly unfairly, going to be tarred with the brush of DEI (Didn't Earn It) even though she did..
Sorry about the job crapola and congratulations on achieving disconnected nirvana. I'm writing this from a hotel in the middle of rural Japan where the cell coverage is iffy and the wifi didn't work for several hours. Once I got over the 'OMG I'm out of reach" initial though, it was surprisingly relaxing. The world did not actually fall apart in my absence and rural Japan in the springtime is ridiculously beautiful
Sending love, online friend. That is just a horrible situation with work. Congratulations on getting through it. I'll send you an email later. Your blog is always amazing.
Good heavens, it sounds like you have people at your company running IT security who don't really know much about IT security. It doesn't matter if you change your password daily if there aren't a number of other guardrails in place. An MFA HW token plus a complex password is about as secure as you're going to get without layered defenses around your network. Even if your passwords are encrypted with Kerberos (as opposed to NTLM; and Kerberos is a huge improvement on NTLM), with the way Windows works and caches password in memory, a sophisticated malicious actor who is already resident in your network can take advantage of that. Apple and *nix are only marginally better than MS is in these regards.
A password doesn't necessarily have to be entirely random, it just has to be non-guessable, which means a hash of it isn't going to show up in a rainbow table; and long enough that given modern HW it would take longer than the universe has existed to be able to try and guess it. There are about 110 usable characters in upper ASCII, plus the same in the the lower ASCII set. A 16-character password is 110^16. If you regularly use just a single extended ASCII character, you go to around 220^16 different password combos. There is very little point in going beyond 18 or 20 characters. Think about this - suppose you loved to play golf. How many iterations, using a few special chars, could you come up with for the passphrase "I love to swing my ping," or make your passphrase Yoda style: "Swing my Ping, do this I love."
I honestly can't believe your employer is having you use OneDrive as your source repo. I found a new development team in my company a while back, they were using OneDrive. I almost shit sideways. That tells me your employer either doesn't have anyone who really understands role separation and RBAC, or doesn't give a shit about either of those things.
IT application support maintains our source repo and access to it, developers use it in their varying roles from architect on down to interns, and we (IT Security) audit all of it.
I know you're looking for a new job, and I would suggest you shift into overdrive and put the pedal on the floor to find one. No business can afford to be so oblivious to IT security issues anymore.
My observations tell me there are more males on the right end of the math bell curve, but there are females in there also. Between her SAT scores and her math teachers input, she should be able to get a pretty good idea of her capabilities. While you still question yourself, I've experienced the males who go the other route and while good (not great) at math, will think they are math geniuses. Those who believe in DEI are telling certain groups they need a leg up and are just as bad as the ones who affirmatively act to tell every (white) male he's smarter than the rest of the populations. Astronaut John Glenn wanted the best mathematician to calculate his orbit and ignored both sides and requested the best, Katherine Johnson. One's life on the line brings all the bs into focus. The details about the lost work on the computer remind me that nightly, hard backups to tape are a good thing. I was a network administrator for a few years and was very strict about checking the tapes for errors every night. I think I kept the last 2 weeks and continually rotated. In the mid-2000's, a network admin for the state of Alaska payroll was not so diligent and the tape backups were not getting checked and were distorted. The server went down and the entire database had to be rebuilt from scratch.
I am SO happy for you, that you are taking better care of yourself.
Just hearing your description of your difficulties greatly stresses me. So I can’t really imagine what it’s doing to you. I’m just really glad that you’re such a tough cookie. And that you’re doing what you need to, to make things better for yourself. 😀 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏 🙏
If it helps, Google got rid of us having to change passwords annually many years ago , maybe tell your security folks that! :)
I sympathize with your concerns about your mentee. I have seen this mismatch theory play out a couple of time for my African American friends who got accepted to elite schools they were not prepared for.
Re math prodigy ... does the family have a little bit of extra money? You guys could grab a copy of the GRE (yes, GRE!!) study manual, which has a couple of practice tests at the back. Tell her to go over the math concepts, in particular the probability stuff, but don't study excessively ... then take a test. See if she can get close to a perfect score. The GRE is a bit harder than the SAT, but still just uses concepts taught in high school math.
I suggest this because I was extremely good at math. I'm in Canada so I didn't take the SAT, but I got 100% on the math sections of my school district's "gifted" test (with no prep) and 100% on the quantitative section of the GRE (with about four hours of prep). I went to small good-but-not-top school (by choice, I absolutely loved it), DIDN'T study math but did Honours Psych ... and I kind of struggled a little in those upper level statistics courses! I know you know this but math is HARD.
Another consideration, again, keep in mind I don't know this girl or how good she is at math, I'm just considering sex differences generally ... at the very top tier of mathematically ability, males have an advantage. (It might be related to X chromosome variability, as the X chromosome has many genes linked to IQ; males only have one, women have two, so men tend more to extremes and women more to averages ... bit of a simplification but that's the gist). HOWEVER ... I think the various average brain differences between male and females also suggest that if a girl is scoring up in the 99.9th+ percentile of math ability, her talent will be a little more well rounded, more holistic, and very much capable of great things. Exactly the kind of person who should be in a top-tier math program.
This suggestion might sound silly, but bear with me ... see if she can destroy a game of Tetris. I wish I had suggestions that involved less $$ but there's a couple of VR games, Tetris Effect and SuperHyperCube (3D Tetris, insanely hard), and if she can snag spots on those leaderboard after played for a few weeks she's probably gonna be fine in a top math program (obviously with hard work, I don't think anyone just breezes through those programs!!!). I played those games while listening to audiobooks so she could combine it with studying for other subjects (e.g. history, English) assuming time is a factor and she's doesn't want to waste much on video games!
I think the most damning thing here is that her learning English at Harvard should be considered a failure. What a sad indictment of American universities and how far they have moved from their core purpose.
While I have missed your writing, I think you’re taking time away from writing, etc. would be a good thing for your wellbeing. I’ve found disconnecting for a few days to be great at helping maintain my sanity.
Like Daniel Owen Lynch said, it sounds like your IT guys kind of suck
I just got in the field of IT, but even a junior help desk guy knows a bad setup when he hears it (death to OneDrive and all M365 apps).
As to the math prodigy:
Why the rush to go to college? I didn’t start college until I was 22 and I got my degree in math not too long ago. I reckon I did aight.
IMO, math is a way of understanding the world, so what does she want to do with that understanding? That’s the more important question to ask.
She could get certifications and work in a STEM related field (like IT or actuarial science) or build up a repo of mathematics related topics (coding in Python/Matlab/etc) if she’s into the computer science stuff, or be a teacher’s aid if she’s into education.
Or, hell, just wait tables or something. Get some real-life experience. I was all online for school and that’s 100% the way to go.
Math is a huge field; what does she want to do in it?
My advice is that your friend's daughter should start entering contests in every STEM field she is interested in: Math, CISC, Physics, Chemistry, and anything else available, from the State level up to National and International including everything offered by University of Waterloo in Ontario.
This will achieve several desirable goals:
1) A reason to work hard. (This is, admittedly, needed more by some (ie yours truly) than others.
2) Deeper introduction to the various fields than generally available at a high school level.
3) Practice preparing for, and writing, long difficult tests. By the time it came for me to write the SAT, it was the easiest extra-curricular test I wrote that year. Time management and pacing was becoming second nature.
4) Many schools use contest results for scholarship assessments. U Waterloo for example makes all final scholarship decisions based on contest results.
5) A key limitation of the SAT is that it is, deliberately, not really attempting fine distinctions above a score of 1400 or 1450. Above that, contests are much better at discriminating.
Next - look very closely at how elite universities are set-up, and what **their** goals are. For example
1) Harvard is a business school designed to build elite-level networks amongst the best and brightest - of the wealthy. Getting in is tough, but how good are the STEM programs really, with M.I.T. just down the road?
2) What role are fraternities and sororities playing in this woke age? Queen's University Kingston is an elite Canadian STEM school, where fraternities and sororities have been banned since 1933. The result is that faculty and department become one's social network, especially in the STEM field with small departments - without the pledging.
3) University of Waterloo sits at one end of Canada's "Big Insurance Alley" between London and Kitchener. It was founded as counterpoint to Western, Canada's closest equivalent to Harvard, but with an emphasis on math (ie actuarial studies) rather than business per se. It's Business School is just one wing of its Faculty of Mathematics.
4) There is much to be said for not traveling too far for undergrad studies. When the network built in high school is just an hour down the road instead of several, or even a cross country flight away, that can provide much needed support with the big transition into university.
Honourable Mention Canadian Senior Math Contest 1973
Prize Winner 1974 Canadian High School Physics Contest
Prize Winner 1974 Canadian Chemistry Research Assistantship Exam
1600 on 1974 SAT
Top 10% of Putnam competitors 1974, 1976, 1977
I am a decent proxy for what your friend's daughter might possibly be; and also perhaps an object lesson in how NOT to send a bright child off to university, anchorless and guideless.
In re your maths prodigy.
Strongly agree on the "get objective test results". However I will note, as someone who did first year Maths at Cambridge and then switched to Computer Science, that even if you have all the objective marks in your favor top level undergraduate mathematics is tough. There's nothing wrong with re-evaluating after a year and picking something slightly less intellectually challenging. Had I not got into Cambridge and gone to one of my second choices perhaps I would have finished my maths degree instead of switching, but given that I always wanted to work with computers a fall back to Comp Sci was not exactly a big deal.
Mind you I'm not sure that Harvard actually has a premier Math program, I'd need to check the syllabus. My impression is that Harvard has dumbed down a lot of its courses and that may include mathematics. My advice to the young lady would be to find a school where wokeness is minimized and/or where there are clear objective grades offered that don't involve non-mathematical bits because she is, utterly unfairly, going to be tarred with the brush of DEI (Didn't Earn It) even though she did..
Sorry about the job crapola and congratulations on achieving disconnected nirvana. I'm writing this from a hotel in the middle of rural Japan where the cell coverage is iffy and the wifi didn't work for several hours. Once I got over the 'OMG I'm out of reach" initial though, it was surprisingly relaxing. The world did not actually fall apart in my absence and rural Japan in the springtime is ridiculously beautiful
Sending love, online friend. That is just a horrible situation with work. Congratulations on getting through it. I'll send you an email later. Your blog is always amazing.
I’ve missed your writings. Sorry about the super challenges you had to face and solve.
Good heavens, it sounds like you have people at your company running IT security who don't really know much about IT security. It doesn't matter if you change your password daily if there aren't a number of other guardrails in place. An MFA HW token plus a complex password is about as secure as you're going to get without layered defenses around your network. Even if your passwords are encrypted with Kerberos (as opposed to NTLM; and Kerberos is a huge improvement on NTLM), with the way Windows works and caches password in memory, a sophisticated malicious actor who is already resident in your network can take advantage of that. Apple and *nix are only marginally better than MS is in these regards.
A password doesn't necessarily have to be entirely random, it just has to be non-guessable, which means a hash of it isn't going to show up in a rainbow table; and long enough that given modern HW it would take longer than the universe has existed to be able to try and guess it. There are about 110 usable characters in upper ASCII, plus the same in the the lower ASCII set. A 16-character password is 110^16. If you regularly use just a single extended ASCII character, you go to around 220^16 different password combos. There is very little point in going beyond 18 or 20 characters. Think about this - suppose you loved to play golf. How many iterations, using a few special chars, could you come up with for the passphrase "I love to swing my ping," or make your passphrase Yoda style: "Swing my Ping, do this I love."
I honestly can't believe your employer is having you use OneDrive as your source repo. I found a new development team in my company a while back, they were using OneDrive. I almost shit sideways. That tells me your employer either doesn't have anyone who really understands role separation and RBAC, or doesn't give a shit about either of those things.
IT application support maintains our source repo and access to it, developers use it in their varying roles from architect on down to interns, and we (IT Security) audit all of it.
I know you're looking for a new job, and I would suggest you shift into overdrive and put the pedal on the floor to find one. No business can afford to be so oblivious to IT security issues anymore.
My observations tell me there are more males on the right end of the math bell curve, but there are females in there also. Between her SAT scores and her math teachers input, she should be able to get a pretty good idea of her capabilities. While you still question yourself, I've experienced the males who go the other route and while good (not great) at math, will think they are math geniuses. Those who believe in DEI are telling certain groups they need a leg up and are just as bad as the ones who affirmatively act to tell every (white) male he's smarter than the rest of the populations. Astronaut John Glenn wanted the best mathematician to calculate his orbit and ignored both sides and requested the best, Katherine Johnson. One's life on the line brings all the bs into focus. The details about the lost work on the computer remind me that nightly, hard backups to tape are a good thing. I was a network administrator for a few years and was very strict about checking the tapes for errors every night. I think I kept the last 2 weeks and continually rotated. In the mid-2000's, a network admin for the state of Alaska payroll was not so diligent and the tape backups were not getting checked and were distorted. The server went down and the entire database had to be rebuilt from scratch.
I am SO happy for you, that you are taking better care of yourself.
Just hearing your description of your difficulties greatly stresses me. So I can’t really imagine what it’s doing to you. I’m just really glad that you’re such a tough cookie. And that you’re doing what you need to, to make things better for yourself. 😀 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏 🙏
Impressive!
If it helps, Google got rid of us having to change passwords annually many years ago , maybe tell your security folks that! :)
I sympathize with your concerns about your mentee. I have seen this mismatch theory play out a couple of time for my African American friends who got accepted to elite schools they were not prepared for.
Re math prodigy ... does the family have a little bit of extra money? You guys could grab a copy of the GRE (yes, GRE!!) study manual, which has a couple of practice tests at the back. Tell her to go over the math concepts, in particular the probability stuff, but don't study excessively ... then take a test. See if she can get close to a perfect score. The GRE is a bit harder than the SAT, but still just uses concepts taught in high school math.
I suggest this because I was extremely good at math. I'm in Canada so I didn't take the SAT, but I got 100% on the math sections of my school district's "gifted" test (with no prep) and 100% on the quantitative section of the GRE (with about four hours of prep). I went to small good-but-not-top school (by choice, I absolutely loved it), DIDN'T study math but did Honours Psych ... and I kind of struggled a little in those upper level statistics courses! I know you know this but math is HARD.
Another consideration, again, keep in mind I don't know this girl or how good she is at math, I'm just considering sex differences generally ... at the very top tier of mathematically ability, males have an advantage. (It might be related to X chromosome variability, as the X chromosome has many genes linked to IQ; males only have one, women have two, so men tend more to extremes and women more to averages ... bit of a simplification but that's the gist). HOWEVER ... I think the various average brain differences between male and females also suggest that if a girl is scoring up in the 99.9th+ percentile of math ability, her talent will be a little more well rounded, more holistic, and very much capable of great things. Exactly the kind of person who should be in a top-tier math program.
This suggestion might sound silly, but bear with me ... see if she can destroy a game of Tetris. I wish I had suggestions that involved less $$ but there's a couple of VR games, Tetris Effect and SuperHyperCube (3D Tetris, insanely hard), and if she can snag spots on those leaderboard after played for a few weeks she's probably gonna be fine in a top math program (obviously with hard work, I don't think anyone just breezes through those programs!!!). I played those games while listening to audiobooks so she could combine it with studying for other subjects (e.g. history, English) assuming time is a factor and she's doesn't want to waste much on video games!
I think the most damning thing here is that her learning English at Harvard should be considered a failure. What a sad indictment of American universities and how far they have moved from their core purpose.
While I have missed your writing, I think you’re taking time away from writing, etc. would be a good thing for your wellbeing. I’ve found disconnecting for a few days to be great at helping maintain my sanity.
Incredibly well said.
what is "DEI" ?
Like Daniel Owen Lynch said, it sounds like your IT guys kind of suck
I just got in the field of IT, but even a junior help desk guy knows a bad setup when he hears it (death to OneDrive and all M365 apps).
As to the math prodigy:
Why the rush to go to college? I didn’t start college until I was 22 and I got my degree in math not too long ago. I reckon I did aight.
IMO, math is a way of understanding the world, so what does she want to do with that understanding? That’s the more important question to ask.
She could get certifications and work in a STEM related field (like IT or actuarial science) or build up a repo of mathematics related topics (coding in Python/Matlab/etc) if she’s into the computer science stuff, or be a teacher’s aid if she’s into education.
Or, hell, just wait tables or something. Get some real-life experience. I was all online for school and that’s 100% the way to go.
Math is a huge field; what does she want to do in it?
My advice is that your friend's daughter should start entering contests in every STEM field she is interested in: Math, CISC, Physics, Chemistry, and anything else available, from the State level up to National and International including everything offered by University of Waterloo in Ontario.
This will achieve several desirable goals:
1) A reason to work hard. (This is, admittedly, needed more by some (ie yours truly) than others.
2) Deeper introduction to the various fields than generally available at a high school level.
3) Practice preparing for, and writing, long difficult tests. By the time it came for me to write the SAT, it was the easiest extra-curricular test I wrote that year. Time management and pacing was becoming second nature.
4) Many schools use contest results for scholarship assessments. U Waterloo for example makes all final scholarship decisions based on contest results.
5) A key limitation of the SAT is that it is, deliberately, not really attempting fine distinctions above a score of 1400 or 1450. Above that, contests are much better at discriminating.
Next - look very closely at how elite universities are set-up, and what **their** goals are. For example
1) Harvard is a business school designed to build elite-level networks amongst the best and brightest - of the wealthy. Getting in is tough, but how good are the STEM programs really, with M.I.T. just down the road?
2) What role are fraternities and sororities playing in this woke age? Queen's University Kingston is an elite Canadian STEM school, where fraternities and sororities have been banned since 1933. The result is that faculty and department become one's social network, especially in the STEM field with small departments - without the pledging.
3) University of Waterloo sits at one end of Canada's "Big Insurance Alley" between London and Kitchener. It was founded as counterpoint to Western, Canada's closest equivalent to Harvard, but with an emphasis on math (ie actuarial studies) rather than business per se. It's Business School is just one wing of its Faculty of Mathematics.
4) There is much to be said for not traveling too far for undergrad studies. When the network built in high school is just an hour down the road instead of several, or even a cross country flight away, that can provide much needed support with the big transition into university.
For books, consider:
1) "What is mathematics?" by Courant & Robbins
Link: https://archive.org/details/whatismathematic0037cour
2) "Recreations in the Theory of Numbers" by Beiler
Link: https://archive.org/details/recreationsinthe0000beil/page/n5/mode/2up
3) Main Stream of Mathematics by Kramer
Link: https://archive.org/details/mainstreamofmath0000edna_m4b5
4) Mathematical gems by Honsberger
Link: https://archive.org/details/mathematicalgems0001hons
5) Feynman lectures on Physics by Feynman, Leighton, Sands
Links: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/
Vol1: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_toc.html
Vol 2: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_toc.html
Vol 3: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/III_toc.html
To conclude, a little background on me:
Honourable Mention Canadian Senior Math Contest 1973
Prize Winner 1974 Canadian High School Physics Contest
Prize Winner 1974 Canadian Chemistry Research Assistantship Exam
1600 on 1974 SAT
Top 10% of Putnam competitors 1974, 1976, 1977
I am a decent proxy for what your friend's daughter might possibly be; and also perhaps an object lesson in how NOT to send a bright child off to university, anchorless and guideless.