I was (mostly) joking as well. (In fact, I almost minored in Sociology. Unfortunately, my Engineering Math/Computing Science combo major didn't leave me with enough hours in the day to work it in.)
EDIT: Darn Ninja posts. Also — fun fact — with the advent of GIS, the overlap between sociology, geography, land surveying and engineering is more prominent than ever.
edited 13th Feb '12 1:49:20 PM by OscarWildecat
Please spay/neuter your pets. Also, defang your copperheads.![]()
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In a nutshell, it boils down to transportation corridor planning. First, Engineers hate "bridges to nowhere" as much as taxpayers do. Second, the days where a transportation agency can plop down a road from "point a" to "point b" are long gone due to increasing environmental awareness and decreasing willingness to cooperate with the government on such projects (i.e. NIMBY!). Thus, new routes have to be planned far more carefully than ever before.
In fact, there are supercomputer applications
designed for the sole purpose of route planning. (The linked one is GIS based, and can account for socioeconomic and environmental costs in addition to construction costs.
edited 13th Feb '12 2:11:15 PM by OscarWildecat
Please spay/neuter your pets. Also, defang your copperheads.I am planning to study international politics next September. Afterwards I may continue study.
I’m a lumberjack and I’m ok. I sleep all night and work all day.Just to add to the above, Land Surveying and Civil Engineering firms (like the one I work for) are branching into GIS heavily. On the input side of things, we provide base mapping services for anybody who needs a GIS database. On the output side of things, I personally use a number of GIS data sets in my day-to-day work of hydraulic analysis. (For example, I have a GIS application that determines watershed boundaries given a latitude and longitude, provided you have the basic contour data.)
Yep Supercomputer. The application, named "Quantm", was developed in Australia for alignment planning. It has since taken off there and the rest of the world to the point that the original firm was bought out by one of the worlds biggest manufacturers of surveying equipment. However, I think the supercomputer is still based in Australia. (When I dealt with it, the way it worked was that you prepared your input on a desktop and submitted it to the supercomputer via the internet.)
edited 13th Feb '12 2:10:53 PM by OscarWildecat
Please spay/neuter your pets. Also, defang your copperheads.Both of you need mathematicians to calculate the material amounts and the max impact.
I approve of social science. QED
Now using Trivialis handle.![]()
Math is math, whether we calculate or not.
Anyone else want to share present/future areas of study?
Now using Trivialis handle.Future?
Well, lately I've been thinking that it would be cool to get into artificial life
, from a theoretical perspective — not coding, just using formal techniques to investigate the notion of life in artificial environments from a theoretical perspective.
I've seen a few cool papers about this sort of stuff around, and it think that it would mesh rather well with the sort of thing I've been doing so far.
But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Get back to me when you can build that bridge without economists and sociologists to figure out how to properly organize society for you.
Can't have civic works without some kind of social organization, after all.
*
"Shit, our candidate is a psychopath. Better replace him with Newt Gingrich."