Dr. Alfred Lee was the professor at Duke physics. He mentioned that
"Over the last decade, I have been astonished by how much of what I learned as a graduate student, post-doc, and professor has been directly relevant to the jobs I have had since leaving physics.
Some of the areas I would like to touch on in the talk are:
* All interesting new applications are data driven, yet few are trained in measurement
* Computer scientists don't understand noise; economists have never been wrong
* Nobody builds phenomenological models better than physicists
* General Relativity is everywhere
* e.g., Google is a not query engine, it measures distance in a curvedspace
* The limitations are no longer data availability or computing time
* In the 90's, only Wall Street could afford the compute power to fund physicist's investigations - 1 GigaFlop cost ~$1,000,000 in 1990, now comes in your iPhone
* The Internet is a data creation machine
I will use examples from my time at Microsoft and PayScale.com, and relate it to my years in physics as a Duke professor and before.
And here is his bio: http://blogs.payscale.com/about.html. He was part of the Duke High Energy Physics experimental group, working on OPAL at CERN and CDF at Fermilab.