Nikita Prokopov has written a blog post detailing disenchantment with current software development. He has been writing software for 15 years and now regards the industry’s growing lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence as a problem to be solved. He addresses the following points one by one:
(Score: 4, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday October 04 2018, @10:31AM
Consider the effort that goes into the CIA World Fact Book.
Quite a lot of CIA publications are unclassified and are posted openly on their website. Several of them - including the transcript of an address to the staff by a former CIA director - are concerned with ways to avoid letting personal bias influence one's analyses.
The CIA Memorial Wall is white marble, with five-point stars carved into each for each clandestine agent that's been killed while on a mission. There aren't as many stars as one would expect. I concluded that the CIA must not have many clandestine agents of its own, rather than much of its intelligence comes from "assets" - foreign citizens who commit treason by spying for the US - as well as "contractors" - not so much like Snowden, but clandestine agents who are paid by the CIA but who aren't CIA employees.
I'm quite certain that the vast majority of CIA employees are analysts who do stuff like read every newspaper in God's Creation so as to keep up to date on America's up-and-coming new enemies.
The CIA also translates foreign academic journals, then publishes these translations in the US. A Caltech astronomer I once worked for used one such translated journal as a Russian source for a review article he wrote.
Review articles summarize the results of a number of other, more-focussed articles. For example I did the data analysis for the age measurements of some globular stellar clusters - one paper per cluster. A review article would then discuss all those papers, so as to draw some conclusion about globular clusters in general.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]