Slashdot Mirror
Academe: Technology For Sale
America has always loved technology and money in generally equal amounts, since they are so intertwined. And techno-capitalism has been very good to us, bringing both freedom and prosperity.
But until recently, we clung loosely to the notion that some institutions -- politics, journalism, academe, art and culture -- stood outside the marketplace at least somewhat beyond bottom-line calculations. That was important, especially in a free and prosperous society. That principle established their credibility and helped keep social forces like big business and big technology in some sort of check and balance.
Nodody kidded themselves about the fact that money was the engine that drove both business and technology in the U.S but there were at least some critical, detached and independent voices to raise questions, sound alarms, and pursue research avenues for reasons other than profit. That, increasingly, is no longer true.
Once upon a time, journalists felt free to take the occasional investigative or editorial poke at big business (rather than celebrate people like Bill Gates), and universities provided safe havens where politics and P&L statements couldn't intrude too brazenly on critical thinking and expression. Artists, too, from musicians and painters to filmmakers, playwrights and authors, believed they wielded a particular kind of integrity; they could be outspoken, take sharp, honest looks at society and culture. Those kinds of penetrating looks are rapidly vanishing from both mainsteam media and the arts. Even the theater has been corporatized, dominated by big-bucks, mass-marketed musicals and other super-productions.
The new global corporatism has proven more powerful than any of these institutions or the ethical standards they once brandished. Nobody seems able to stand up under the onslaught of corporate money, or cling to values beyond maximum revenue input. This is what makes capitalism and corporatism so different. Corporatism's contemporary clout dates to the 80's, when a combination of government de-regulation of business, begun by President Jimmy Carter and greatly accelerated by Ronald Reagan -- and the advent of technology, marketing and global business created a new kind of ideology. It has become the most powerful social and cultural force in the world, especially when linked with technology.
One by one, American institutions -- politics, business, agriculture, journalism, the arts, such professions as law and medicine, even middle-class restaurants, real estate firms and funeral homes -- have succumbed to the Corporate Republic. Academe had been one of the last holdouts. Scientific and other kinds of research was always thought to be governed by values other than simple profit, beholden to nothing but the principles of science. No more.
Columbia University in New York, for example, is spearheading an academic revolution, profiting from its scientific research and development of intellectual property. Columbia annually collects more in patents and royalties -- $100 million -- than any other university, its annual report announces, and is aggressively cashing in on its technological research.
"There's been a paradigm shift," in academic thinking about selling research to corporations, says Cornelius W. Sullivan, vice provost for research at the University of Southern California. "There was a time that this kind of work -- and the idea of making money from your research -- was not acceptable at universities, including ours." Sullivan is dead-on. It's no longer possible for the public, members of the student body, or anyone else to really grasp the motives and goals of scientific researchers working on new technologies. They could be working for the good of humanity. Or they could be trying to cash in on lucrative patents, generating uneeded or flawed technology for cash, or to get a sweet corporate contract for themselves or their school. Making money off of technological research is certainly acceptable now. This year, The New York Times reports, Columbia will collect more than $144 million from patents. One covers a new technique that uses animal cells to manufacture proteins for use as drugs; another discovery paved the way for eye drops to treat glaucoma. Across the country, university officials admit the Net is a gold mine, providing a much faster and larger paybacks for researchers than traditional scientific research in areas like biology. Dot.coms are aggressively seeking investment academic opportunities (at Harvard, Professor Arthur R. Miller is setting up an online law school).
As usual, this "paradigm shift" is accompanied by little or no public debate over the propriety of university research (often funded in part by taxpayers) becoming increasingly tailored to corporate clout. Congess isn't paying attention either; it's much too busy trying to pass laws requiring lobal libraries to keep Johnny off the Playboy Web site.
Yet the issue matters, especially when it relates to technology. Academic researchers are deeply involved in some of the revolutionary technological devevlopments of this century -- genetic mapping, artificial intelligence, super-computing. Theoretically, their work is supposed to proceed ethically, with the public's best interests and the highest standards of science research in mind. How does that happen when professors and administrators are drooling over dot.com stock options and other corporatist contracts? Soon, the public will be as cynical about academic research as they are about government decision-making. And the evolution of technology will get even less scrutiny and oversight. Some of the best elements of the Net and the Web came about because academics and researchers were working outside of the marketplace, not because they were dominated by it.
Corporatism has already proved a more powerful force than any of the institutions that were supposed to keep an eye on its power and hunger. Technology and corporatism are a particularly lethal combination, even more so when applied to competitive and money-hungry institutions like academe. That was a world where technology and research were supprted for their own sake and for the larger public good.
But just last month, Columbia announced the creation of Fathom.com, an online commercial partnership with such other prestigious institutions as the New York Public Library, the British Library and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. A couple of months earlier, the university had announced that it was hooking up with Cognitive Arts, a software designer firm planning to offer continuing education on the Web.
Here in the Corporate Republic, there are no public institutions operating outside the marketplace any longer, free of its influence, maintaining the credibility and independence to comment honestly on critical social and cultural issues and to monitor technological growth.
Maybe it's time to stop worrying about how to induce understandably apathetic Americans to vote and to simply start selling stock in the Corporate Republic itself. Looks like a sure winner.
I work at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management as a Solaris and Linux (and occasionally NeXT(!)) administrator. The strange thing about this building is that about a third of the rooms in this building are `sponsored' by somebody. Some of these sponsored rooms are just offices! Each one has a plaque above it saying that somebody helped pay for it.
Some day, I've got to go around and count how many plaques there are... There are a lot of them..
Also, UMN has a contract with Coca-Cola for their beverages. Even the water used at many sporting events comes from Coke (Dasani is a Coca-Cola product).
--
Ski-U-Mah!
How can schools hope to stay afloat while government funding for education is falling faster than hot grits down a troll's trousers?
If schools hope to survive (and I'm talking about primary and secondary schools as well, not just Higher Education) they will have to find sources of funding. Our beloved US of freaking A would rather subsidize military waste and corporate bail-out programs than spend an extra tupence on our childrens' (and our) education.
Schools either have to find new sources of funding, or raise tuition. In the case of public (primary and secondary) schools, they don't have the option of raising tuition.
In a few years, GM & Microsoft & McDonald's will have to sponser our public schools just so new employees can read and understand the binder. It's no surprise they are already sponsering higher education.
Look for the same thing in your local high school soon.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
You will probably find that the companies that benefit from the research also funded it. In the academic community, I would suspect the majority of grant money comes from industry looking for research to help their given field. Without industry funding the research, it probably wouldn't occurr.
If industry is funding the research, why shouldn't they profit from it. If the university allows its people to do research for corporations, why shouldn't they get a piece of the pie as well!
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Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
Mike Mangino
mmangino@acm.org
"What are you saying here? What do you mean, 'allowed'? If he owns his land, he should be able to sow salt on it or plant genetically modified SuperCrops, if he can sell them, whatever he pleases. "
That's fine. But unfortunately it'll be not be contained within his land. Rivers, lakes, aquifers, etc, the world over are dying and poluted by the leachates from farms.
Genetically modified fish that have escaped farms are destroying the wild populations, whilst at the same time are unable to survive in the wild themselves (e.g. Norwegian salmon.) Genetically modified "SuperCrops" can be just as destructive to the environment.
You seem to support quite a selfish attitude.
"Next time, think before you post. Remember, think about what you want your solution *not* to do, as well as to do.
Next time that you decide to be arrogant and condescending, perhaps *you* should think about your own words first!
Too many people under-estimate the value of research for researches sake. Sure, from a business perspective there might seem no point, or it might seem very risky. But who knows where it will go? Who knows what might spin off from it? Sometimes a the results of piece of research end up being applied to something completely and utterly different, perhaps many years later.
I think that the danger of research for profit is that universities will start acting like business and trying much harder to protect their Intellectual Property. I believe that this is bad. Part of what has made the university system work is openness and sharing (just like what started the internet and made it successful, in some ways.)
I lived in Champaign during that period, and worked half a block from Spyglass (the company that licensed Mosaic from UIUC). IMO, UIUC lost Mosaic out of pure stupidity, not because of corporate avarice.
As has been proven in the market, their static intellectual property in Mosaic was worthless without the talent to drive it; the people were the critical factor, not the existing code base. NCSA should have created something like the W3C back then and given the Mosaic team the incentive to stick around, perhaps by being a bit more friendly to "Mosaic Communications" (Netscape's original name) and less anal about defending what they saw as their property. Had they done this, the W3C would likely be based at UIUC, and the university would have lots of corporate grants for Internet research, the cream of the crop among both students and faculty, higher academic rankings, etc..., all of which translate into more dollars for them.
Instead, they pissed off Andressen & Co., who ended up mostly reimplementing Mosaic from scratch (which was relatively easy for them - after all, they had practice) and moving on. Meanwhile, Mosaic - the precious property they defended - withered when no one proved worthy of the task of keeping it up to date (including Spyglass, who tried to play the licensing game instead of coming out with a superior browser immediately to kill Netscape in infancy). So, once Navigator came out, Mosaic was doomed - as was NCSA's (and UIUC's) leadership role on the Internet, and Spyglass's future (the shop I used to work next to was closed years ago in financial crisis).
It figures that UIUC would mislearn the lessons from this and try to hold even more tightly on to its IP. Isn't it funny that NCSA's leadership role on the Web has been taken over by MIT with the W3C, considering MIT's much more relaxed attitude towards IP?
It is amazing and frightening at how narrow-minded the readership of slashdot seems to be. Most of the responses to Jon's article seem to be attacking him on minor semantic points. He's not saying "it's bad for universities to make a profit." He's saying that we should be discussing whether or not this is good.
Capitalism is not corporatism. And the way the western economic system is now run has very little to do with Adam Smith's capitalism. Sure, there's not global illuminati. But it costs money to get elected. Corporations provide money to politicians to help them get elected. The politicians pass laws that the corporations like. (If they don't, they don't get money the next time an election comes around, and they're out of a job.)
There might be - I think there probably are - similar forces at work behind the corporate sponsorship of research. It costs money to go research. Corporations have money. The give money to researchers - for specific projects! Might there not be valuable research which doesn't interest some corporation out there? People are always making fun of studies that look at tiny worms responses' to electrical or physical stimulus - but these studies are providing us with completely unprofitable and extremely useful information about simple nervous systems.
Capitalism is a free-market system in which people who are good at doing/making things are rewarded financially for succeeding. Corporatism is a socio-political system where corporations run roughshod over the needs of people. Corporations are _not_ a replacement for the nation state. Corporations have no interest in the rights of their workers. Before bashing communism and Marxism - which were worse than a lot of things - go find out why they were invented. Nobody sets out to create a brand new totalitarian-style government with a new and cool name. They were a response to the rise of corporate power in the late 19th century.
Does JonKatz generalize and gloss over details? Sure. But most of the responses to his essays don't add anything to the discussion. Let's discuss!
---sheath
Actually no, that's not how it happens either. Professor X is doing research on technology Y. Company Z sells products related to technology Y. Professor X calls Company Z and says "I want to work on making improvements in technology Y. This may not be directly applicable to what you do, but it will be usable in some way" and he writes a long proposal about what he wants to do. Company Z gets 100 proposals and says "okay, we can fund 20 of these" so they pick the 20 they like best. Professor X, if he's lucky, gets some money so he can pay for grad students and get equipment needed to do *his* research.
Hope that clears things up.
-nosilA
For one, it means that instead of researching an area that will do little but stimulate the mind of the professor and his little grad students, they are more likely to put out a product that will have impact far outside of academia.
Except that it is not always possible to determine the impact of research when it is first performed. This is why large corporations like IBM, Lucent, and AT&T have their own laboratories performing primary research on topics whose profit potential is uncertain at best. Having the profit imperative drive research is to limit scientific discovery only to the obvious. It is worth noting that as late as fifty years ago, computers were considered -- by top IBM management, no less -- to be special-purpose devices that would never be sold in significant numbers.
In order to find the gems, you have to sift through a lot of gravel. Short-sighted greed is almost always self-defeating.
--
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Of course, if the students used skills that were honed in university classes, focused by university faculty, or done in conjuncture w/ university projects, then I think the university has a legitimate claim to some of the spoils.
...
Hogwash.
Why don't you send your paycheck to your Alma Matar if you truly believe this nonsense? Chances are pretty good you got your first post-college job as a result of your degree, which in turn led to your subsequent jobs. You'd be nothing without the university, therefor by your reasoning they should be entitled to a portion of what you make. But wait, if you hadn't gone to high school, you wouldn't have been able to attend college. Better hold back some of the check for your old teenage stomping ground. But of course, to get into high school you first had to learn literacy and arithmetic in grade school
The university is entitled to Tuition and Fees. Nothing more. The students (or their parents) have paid a premium for their education and use of the university's facilities. This does not give the university any right whatsoever to any creative product their student's have created, not matter how good the equipment and study environment are, or how brilliant the education given.
Professors, being employees, are in a different category. If they are a fraction as smart as they would have us believe, then they have negotiated reasonable terms for ownership of their own creative work. Whatever form their negotiations and contract have taken, it gives them no right whatsoever to the creative products of their students.
However, students, being customers, clearly have a right to retain their own intellectual property, regardless of the money grabbing the university may be attempting. If students are being used as free labor in a professor's or universities project (or worse, paying for the privelege) then they should retain some rights to such work. Otherwise, the university should be compensating them for their work, in which case, as employees, the situation resolves itself favorably to the university in question. TANSTAAFL: the universities are not entitled to pilfer students minds for their own profit, and most certainly not against the students' will and without compensating them for the work done (and yes, that includes creative things like thinking).
The idea that "any work conducted on university equipment belongs to the university" is rediculous, particularly given that the students in question have paid exhorbitant prices for the privelege of using said equipment. I would suggest any student running afoul of such a policy sue, and sue hard.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Of course the creative work of students using university machines belongs to the students, not the university. I would never argue such a ridiculous position.
I'm glad to hear it -- when I read your first post it sounded quite different (to me at least). Unfortunately, there are numerous universities who would argue just that, just as there are employers who get people to sign contracts giving them all rights to all of their creative work, whether done on the job or on their own time, related to work or not, done on their own equipment or not.
So, while I am relieved that you are quite reasonable in your stance, I remain quite aghast at the extortionate money grabs both employers and some universities are engaged in (and have been appalled for years, I might add).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Wait, if anyone still in the gene pool thinks that journalists and politicians are outside the marketplace, please remove yourself from the swimming area now.
Furthermore, these kinds of rules do often apply to students, both in the US and abroad. If you ignore them, at least know what you are doing.
Of course, there are plenty of other reasons not to subject specific areas of economic activity to free market mechanisms, because we may have other considerations and goals that are not linked to the efficient use of resources.
Well, that simply can't work in the long run. From the point of view of paying for the practical products, you, your research, and your education are pure overhead. Any entity competing with Columbia that doesn't have to pay that kind overhead will simply produce the same product (practical inventions) at a lower cost.
Universities produce public goods--education and basic scientific research--and those must be paid for either by the government or by donations. If, on the other hand, universities start relying primarily on student tuition and corporate funding, they'll turn into a different kind of institution: trade schools, corporate training schools, and development labs. If Columbia wants to turn into those, fine, but why bother? There are already enough of them around.
That's a common idea but pretty naive. The concept of "own time" generally doesn't exist in professional corporate employment (at least in the US). Anything you do, at any time, that is even vaguely related to your job function, automatically belongs to your employer. The same is likely true for a student, if not for any other reason, because the notion of "on your own time" is rather hard to define for students.
I'm all for Universities and corporations taking patents on the novel inventions they create. Go ahead, collect the royalties and get rich... and don't forget to give me my share!
As a taxpayer, I demand to be compensated for my contribution to this research! Whether it be university, corporate, or military technology, the fruits of the research must belong to those who paid for it -- which is very often the federal government, i.e., you and me. There is a reason why works created by government employees are not copyrightable. I don't see that works for hire undertaken by private parties at public expense should be any different.
I think it's great that defense contractors and pharmaceutical companies and universities and dot-coms are making $billions selling inventions that I paid for but due to patents am not allowed to use! Yes, Gullible Sucker is my middle name, why do you ask?
This semembers me of the book "The O-Zone": There are tax-payers ("owners"), which have privileeges and are paying to the state, and there are normal people, who don't and who only works, and there are "foreigners" who live in the suburbs... Everyone (not foreigners, but they may be hunted) is recorded. Everything is recorded. Oh, and if you don't pay your tax (As an owner), you becom an ordinary person...
This scares me, especialy since the country of the book is the US...
Anyway, you really should read this book.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
Why not buy it?
As much as I feel that Katz' article (and indeed, many of his articles), do call attention to important issues, they also miss a vital factor:
DO SOMETHNG ABOUT IT
If the Corporate Republic is on the march, infiltrate and acquire. As soon as you divide the world into 'us' versus 'them' then you give 'them' a fight and you give 'them' a chance at victory because you gave 'them' a defined target.
The world is not being taken over. There's no Master Illumnati, Bill Gates is a geek with a lot of money and questionable ethics, and most world governments couldn't find their collective backsides with their collective hands. However if we decide we've got an enemy, then an enemy we'll have.
So, instead, let's listen, and let's do something. Let's stop with the conspiracy theories and start seeing what we can do to change what doesn't work and keep what does.
We've got social changes going on - so work with it when you can, change if you must, but don't just sit there and decry it. We've got enough would-be Cassandras. Let's pay attention, analyze, then apply our knowledge.
It may be very cool and hip to talk about the decline of modern civilization - it must be since you can find doomsayers in every culture and every period. It's a good racket to get attention.
It doesn't fix anything though.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Basically the policy says that "traditional academic copyrightable works" belong to the author (unless commissioned by the university). But they make a special exception for work that may also be patentable, and explicitly say that software may be patentable and so is an exception. The result is that the university owns all the software you write in the lab. This was an issue with the local chapter of SigOps when different members wrote operating systems. We had to be careful and only use the ACM machines, not university machines.
Certainly slavery was tolerated, and by some even considered "right". However, I would offer that it never was and never will be "right" to force individuals into slavery
;-)
There are two different things: your own personal moral code, and generally accepted societal norms. Personal morality varies and has always varied greatly and we are not really talking about it. Speaking of generally accepted norms, slavery was generally accepted in a lot of societies for long periods of time.
Capitalism and communism are general catagories of ideologies. Many form sof both have never been tried. The failure of one or more forms of communism does not prove capitalism correct.
First, we are really talking about communism and capitalism not as ideologies, but as socio-economic-political systems. Surely, many forms have never been tried -- and generally there is a good reason for that
As to proving capitalism "correct", it is not and cannot be "correct". I would argue that it is a reasonable and successful way to structure a society. It is not necessarily the best that ever could be, and most certainly not "correct" (correct implies matching some standard: what standard?)
Communism has been quite sucessfull in some places.
Communism as a socio-political system failed everywhere it has been tried. Small common-property communes are not communism. For example, Israeli kibbutzes are not communism.
Once a company is so large and has such a product base that the average person can't help but buy their product, is it really a free market?
No, and that's why there are anti-trust laws.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Communism as a socio-political system failed everywhere it has been tried." Under what criteria has it been considered a failure?
Any reasonable one.
Communism in the former Soviet Union has achieved, in one generation, an enormous amount, but one has to compare apples to apples.
And which generation is it? The one that was killed in Stalin's camps?
So to compare it to the US system is ridiculous
Nobody is comparing Russia to the US. Think about this: every country that used to be "communist" with the exception of Cuba and North Korea (for obvious reasons) has forcefully rejected this way either by essentially popular uprising (Russia and Eastern Europe) or oligarchy-directed evolution (China). There must be a reason for this, no?
It is true that the Communist system was replaced with one more in line with "ours" but has this changed things for the better? Take a look at unemployment rates, mortality rates, wages, and other social indicators to judge for yourself.
First, economic indicators are not the only ones meaningful to a society. Going to jail for anti-Soviet propaganda was very real.
As to such thing as unemployment rates, I'd like to point out that NOT having a job was a criminal offense in the USSR. Besides, how do you know what the crime rates, etc. were for the Soviet regime? I certainly don't believe the official statistics from that time -- do you?
Communism clearly failed -- this is one of the major lessons of the XX century. Two major countries chose communism (Russia and China -- the rest were basically occupied), both under extreme conditions -- war, civil war, etc. Both killed off significant part of their population -- the best part! -- and both made a huge economic mess. Both rejected communism in the end. And you don't call this failure?
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
keeping a check on the freedom and prosperity brought us by forces like technology and capitalism.
Ahem. And why would I need checks on freedom and prosperity? Last time I looked, they both were Good Things. As far as I am concerned, the more I get of both of them, the better.
we clung loosely to the notion that some institutions -- politics, journalism, academe, art and culture -- stood outside the marketplace at least somewhat beyond bottom-line calculations.
Ahem again. Katz doesn't understand the basic concept of power, as in 'political power'. Yes, politics are connected to money, but they are different as well. Money is just one of the major motivators for humans (power and sex are the other ones). Journalism is an outgrowth of politics, and art has been connected to money (and power) since the beginning.
universities provided safe havens where politics and P&L statements couldn't intrude too brazenly on critical thinking and expression.
Universities always have been more or less political. And the current plague in academia -- political correctness -- has nothing to do with money or corporations: it's a self-inflicted wound.
Making money off of technological research is certainly acceptable now.
As opposed to when? I think that Katz glosses over (or doesn't understand, which is more likely) the difference between basic and applied science. Applied science (aka technology) has always been about making practical things and practical things do involve money.
their [academic researchers] work is supposed to proceed ethically, with the public's best interests and the highest standards of science research in mind.
That's news to me. I had no clue that scientific research has to proceed with the public's best interest in mind. Who can tell what's in the public best interest? And which public? American? or all humanity?
Academic research is an honest search for a deeper understanding of reality (and some unrealities as well). It has nothing to do with public interest.
And the evolution of technology will get even less scrutiny and oversight.
You mean right now there is some oversight over evolution of technology? How interesting. And who does this, pray tell?
Maybe it's time to stop worrying about how to induce understandably apathetic Americans to vote and to simply start selling stock in the Corporate Republic itself. Looks like a sure winner.
Well, Katz, you sell stock when you expect it to go DOWN, not up. I thought you were saying that the corporations won -- in that case you want to BUY stock.
In any case, Katz doesn't understand (among other things) economics. The basic function of the marketplace is to select successful stuff and kill off losers. It does this much better than, say, governments. I see no reason why the same process wouldn't work as well for technology (keeping in mind that it is *applied* science, not basic science). I certainly see no horrors in it. Of course, basic science need external-to-markets funding because it's fruits are too uncertain and too far in the future.
Sorry, Katz -- FUBARed as usual.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
On top of that, students who live on campus are going to start receiving Comcast cable, and will be billed for it whether they use it or not.
Not only that, the way I understand it, the billing is being added to the tuition bill rather than the housing bill, which is absurd. I go to UMD as well, but I live off-campus, so obviously I shouldn't be paying for cable on campus. I wouldn't see a problem with it if it was added to the housing bill, though - after all, you're paying for the ethernet access in the dorms whether or not you use it.
Barnes and Noble is the ONLY store to carry your textbooks
Ummm... that's what the Maryland Book Exchange is for (across Rt. 1 from campus). That's where I buy my books (it's cheaper).
If nothing else, Universities SHOULD be encouraged to make money off of their research rather than resorting to milking the students like cash cows.
Of course, but UMD is hardly an example for this - it's cheap as hell. I'm an out of state student from Massachusetts, and the out of state tuition at Maryland is less than in-state tuition at many schools, and it's one of the top schools in the country for Computer Science (when I was applying a few years ago it was something like #7, I think). And campus isn't *too* commercialized.
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Katz takes some journalistic license, but hits an interesting point about the corporatization of America. And it's not that it's a sudden thing. The shift has been occuring for some time in academia, politics, etc... The more sudden shift is in the mindset of people in these institutions. It's no longer just admitted grudgingly that research at Universities needs to make money. It's become acceptable to openly admit it.
Katz's assertion that our institutions are falling one by one to the Corporate Republic is true, but his list of institutions is certainly laughable. Business, small-town restaurants, real estate, agriculture. These are ALL businesses that have been profit driven by nature from the start. These aren't institutions falling to the Corporate Republic... they are in fact the very foundation of it.
As this shift to naked, unapologetic, capitalism becomes the accepted norm (as one would expect in a booming economy... the inherent unfairnesses of capitalism are certainly less obvious during boom times) it's interesting to look at movies where the post-apocalyptic vision of the future was a world ruled by corporations. Seems just a bit closer now than it did... say... 5 years ago.
- StaticLimit
One of the most interesting paradoxes in the free market is that many firms, which are larger than entire economies, are NOT run in a free market manner. I mean, they might as well be old-style communism internally, in the sense that production is organized centrally. So why are they the inevitable form taken in free-market capitalism? Several reasons- the advantages to scale in the sorts of markets we find in modern world, the effect of corporate legal status, and the phenomenon of moral diversification (it's complex, but basically, corporations are beholden to stock holders- but there are so many stock holders, and so many of these holders hold shares in so many companies that they don't care about anything but profit. This is not to say the stock holders dont care about any social goods- but rather that their interest in every individual company they own is so small that profit is the only motive that effectively survives in toto)
If you're researching to make money, you should be doing it in a think tank or corporate research division. Taxpayer money goes to research for the greater good of society, university research should be public domain, period.
They have found that its more profitable to take away peoples choices, than to produce good products.
IHMO, where capitalism fails (in the good society/market sense) is when you start getting to intellectual property. With a product that can be reproduced indefintitely, it becomes more important fiscally to restrict access than make a good product. Removing any type of competition is also important, since that might drive down the percieved value of your product. Then you just have to squeeze, baby!
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+&x
still feelin' good, eh Phil?
Frankly, it's dull. It's boring. It's the same crap every week.
yea, I get sick of the Katz bashing too. (unless I'm doing it, of course)
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+&x
sorry if that sounded a bit radical, but my point is that the concept of IP can be easily tainted by an unchecked profit motive, especially in a society where everyone can stand up to their leaders and ask for legislation. When the beneficiaries (sp) of the IP protection system lobby to extend their rights to fatten the bottom line, they do so by removing the natural rights of citizens. If the system isn't "tweaked" to check those abuses, it can easily become a negative force for both the market and society. The growing software patent issue is a great example of this. The music industry is another.
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+&x
but this leads down the road of...
profitable research = good.
non-profitable research = bad.
i.e. social research = bad.
technical research = good.
But then again, I guess studying why so many people are unhappy because they didn't get that big research grant would be counter-productive, no?
It would seem to me that the boost Free Software has gotten from the academic sector would also dry up, or would never have existed given this model of academic research.
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+&x
What are you saying here? What do you mean, 'allowed'? If he owns his land, he should be able to sow salt on it or plant genetically modified SuperCrops, if he can sell them, whatever he pleases.
Mind if I move in next to you and turn my property into a junkyard/crack house/toxic waste dump? What I do on my property can affect those outside my property, so it shouldn't be so big a stretch to think that some entity could be endowed with the power and the right to regulate what I do with my property. We can quibble over the extent of this power and over what is appropriate and what isn't, but I do not have free reign to do "whatever I please."
Given that there's nothing to be gained from doing it -- anyone since 1970 or so could have grabbed a physics grad student or two, walked by the *bad* security at Los Alamos or wherever and picked up some plutonium, and made a suitcase bomb to blow up New York.
You are quite articulate for someone who is talking out of his arse. You must have had alot of practice.
You sound so certain of this--can you produce some (any) documentation of weapons-grade plutonium being so vulnerable, so easily accessible, that anyone who wants it can get it? I didn't think so. While developing the technology to make a nuclear device is hardly a bottleneck to a nation with the means, the will, and the materials to construct nuclear weapons (every nation that has tried has succeeded on the first try), your claim that one can just waltz into TA-55 at Los Alamos and grab a bunch of weapons-grade plutonium is laughable. Despite its being pilloried in the press for security incidents, anyone with any experience at LANL knows that the security there is nowhere near as "bad"--excuse me, "*bad*"--as you described it, especially where nuclear materials are concerned. If it were, then you can bet that terrorist devices would have been made and would have been used by now.
Any 'agency', or 'law', or 'bureau' will be misused and abused to the greatest extent possible.
Ah, yes, the old "To solve your problem you need centralized control; every large, centralized institution is corrupt; corrupt institutions are bad; therefore making any attempt to solve your problem is bad" argument for inaction. I would contend that while many institutions are indeed corrupt and are abused, these same institutions are still capable of accomplishing things of merit: The mail is still delivered. The IRS collects revenue for the government. The weatherman is still right every once in awhile.
Next time, think before you post.
Good advice for us all.
Linus wasn't in the US. He wasn't in professional corporate employment. The same is not true for a student.
At least you spelled jetson properly.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Did you form a government? Or was it formed for you? Did you have a choice about the form of the government? No, you didn't. Pure libertarianism is just giving you the choice of the form of government you want. If you want to live in a socialist sub-state of a libertarian state, get a bunch of your buddies together, buy some land, and go for it. Libertarians have *no* problem with this.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Sure the CEO was elected. We voted with our dollars. If you have any doubt about that, organize a conspiracy to stop buying Pepsi, and see how long its CEO lasts.
My children *certainly* take in more advertising than public education. They get zero of the latter.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Of course. He did it on his own time on his own computer.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Trees are renewable, but you can grow three hemp crops in one season in a good climate (i.e., cotton country).
It is true the Heart (along with Du Pont) killed the hemp industry over its effectiveness: when they began their campain, machines for the cheap creation of hemp paper had just been invented. It's not a coincidence. You should read Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do. Here's the link to the relevant chapter: How and Why Drugs Became Illegal
The private universities charged a whole lot more, but they also provided much, much more.
The private schools encouraged individuality, focused on exploration, hell, they wanted you to try everything in a safe environment. And they didnt try to push you into a mold. Plus... Once you paid your bill, just about everything on campus was included.
Penn State was horrendous. THey tried to take advantage of their students at every chance they could. IT was extremely repressive, and individual thought was discouraged. HEll, thinking was discouraged.
And the corporate presence was enormous. Lets put it this way - the only beverages allowed to be sold on campus HAD TO BE PEPSI PRODUCTS. Wanted a coke? Sorry.
Anyway... It seems to me that the better undergraduate education comes from the smaller schools, who arent big enough tot attract the money of corporate america.
<STEPS_OFF_SOAPBOX>
tagline
... hi bingo
Take a look at russia and what communism has done to its enviroment. There are places that are so radioactive you have to fly over by helicopter.
Yes, Communism caused Chernobyl's problems.
I can't decide whether you're deliberately being stupid or are outright ignorant.
------
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
The American public views JFK as a hero.
He was a philandering egomaniac who pushed the world closer to a nuclear conflagration than any sane person would be willing to do.
That the Soviets backed down shows that they had more sense than Kennedy.
The American public loves Kennedy because he stood up for America regardless of his faults. Stalin did the same for Russia. Russia was the *other* superpower. Would so many Americans be rabidly patriotic if they were citizens of Luxembourg?
Of course, a leader on a plane of his own is Winston Churchill.
------
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
In essence, yes.
If the public purchases something with one of the above things built into it, they are obviously accepting it. You don't want to pay a tax on recordable media? Don't use them. If something is offensive enough, people will boycott the product quite successfully. DivX, say. Sales of Windows 2000 are low because a significant number of people don't agree with the exorbitant pricing. However, nobody expects your personal tastes to be perfectly in line with everybody else's. What you find a major turnoff may be a non-issue in most people's minds.
People most obviously do want Ms. Spears, else why has she sold some seventeen million albums in the USA alone? Sure, she was marketed. And she found a nearly untapped market with incredible buying power. You and I don't want her, and therefore we don't buy her albums, don't go to her concerts, and don't listen to radio stations that play her music incessantly. That's our prerogative under this capatilistic system. Much better than going to the government operated CD Shoppe, where each of us redeems our coupon for our "choice" of either Spears or Aguilera. Despite what you say, teenaged pop stars are not being stuffed down our throats.
Corporations do make what the people want. Nobody said that you have to follow the crowds in their rampant consumerism.
Note that several of your complaints have absolutely nothing to do with corporations.
------
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
If everybody who claimed to be a Christian or budhist actually lived as one the world economy would collapse.
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
And this is as it should be, the only way *I* can conceive of, the way it's been since one man established dominion over another. Politics, war -- it's all been done over money!
... if only you'd put your money where your too, too big mouth is.
The Crusades were largely fought by second sons who wanted a piece of the familial pie.
The Civil War was fought over tariffs and other economic policies (no matter *what* they tell you in some watered-down 'history' class, it *wasn't* slavery).
The Cold War was fought for military-industrial dollars.
The Gulf War was fought for oil dollars (and something like twenty million personally as a little 'thank you' to George Senior from the Kuwait government, no paragon of freedom and non-repressiveness itself.)
Hell, World War II came on the heels of a *major* depression in Germany that left the nation starving and scrambling for a solution -- and a scapegoat.
Long before 'corporatism' became a lefty buzzword, people were killing each other over money. We still do it today, though we pretend we have other reasons. And it comes as a surprise that *universities*, which already receive scads of government funding, might not be so detached from the pernicious grasp of money?
Be still, my blathering Katz... I notice you still get paid for your work. And by a corporation, no less. I *might* give some credence to what you say
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
And who is able to stand outside of the monetary influences and say that the farmer should be allowed to modify his environment so that he can get more money?
What are you saying here? What do you mean, 'allowed'? If he owns his land, he should be able to sow salt on it or plant genetically modified SuperCrops, if he can sell them, whatever he pleases.
And how much will it cost you to have your baldness and impotence cured, and what will you do to get the money to pay for it?
Work. You know, that dirty word that you socialists can't stand?
What happens when the continent of Africa gets a few nuclear warheads and starts ransoming the planet for money (hey they are only applying some old tech).
Given that there's nothing to be gained from doing it -- anyone since 1970 or so could have grabbed a physics grad student or two, walked by the *bad* security at Los Alamos or wherever and picked up some plutonium, and made a suitcase bomb to blow up New York.
And the only reason the world hates us so much is because of all that stupid, misguided, metagovernmental meddling we do, propping up dictators that we like and pulling down elected democrats we don't.
We have shat all over our ecosystem and enslaved 3/4 of the planets population in poverty. Of course everything is going to be alright.
What's your solution? Think before you answer! Any 'agency', or 'law', or 'bureau' will be misused and abused to the greatest extent possible. The cure is nearly *always* worse than the disease. Oh, and don't forget that all of your precious protectors of the environment will be themselves exempt from these rules. And that your hated corporate Darth Vaders will make some select campaign contributions, and, in a shining example of free-market economics, buy themselves a Congressman.
'Enslaved'? All of those Nike employees are free to go starve in the streets if they like. Americans are free to have slightly less stylin' shoes. Forced by economic circumstance and forced by a gun to the head are quite different.
Next time, think before you post. Remember, think about what you want your solution *not* to do, as well as to do.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
There was a time when academicians disseminated their knowledge freely by publishing it in scholarly journals. This work was not encumbered with patents, and consequently anyone could walk into a library, read an article in a journal, and use the ideas contained therein in any way they saw fit, including in a commercial project. In that sense, academic research belonged to everyone.
Times have changed, however. These days universities have become more businesslike in their research, in that they want to cash in on potential commercial applications. Consequently, academic researchers at many institutions are now encouraged to patent any discovery they make that might be salable. They still publish in scholarly journals, of course, but only after securing the patent. Where before academic research was available to everyone, now it is increasingly available only to those who can pay for it.
The benefits of this new mode of academic research include licensing intellectual property as an additional source of funding for universities. In an era where public funding for academic research has been a little anemic by comparison to past decades, it's not hard to see why this is attractive to university administrators. However, I wonder if it's worth the price. Who will take over as the storehouse of our civilization's knowledge if universities abdicate that role to pursue the almighty buck? Will there even be any public knowledge left for universities to watch over, or will every scrap of information be somebody's property, usable only by those who are willing and able to pay for the privilege?
Since these trends are largely driven by public research funding drying up, we can always hope that they will reverse themselves when public research comes back into favor, provided that universities don't become too addicted to the patent gravy train in the meantime.
And if the trends don't reverse? Well, then, maybe we academicians can at least expect some directed shares when our universities have their IPOs. . . but I'm not holding my breath on that one.
-rpl
Perhaps "captilism" hasn't taken into account natural resources, but capitalism does. Further, capitalism does not require "continuous growth"; this is simply a strawman argument constructed by critics of capitalism to somehow "prove" that capitalism is somehow evil.
Capitalism, by the way, is simply the free economic exchange between large groups of individuals who are (largely) free to act as their own agents without (undue) influence by the State.
This is as opposed to Socialism, where the State controls means of production (meaning it would be illegal for you in a pure socialist state to buy a pottery wheel and kiln and start making your own pottery to sell). And this is as opposed to "Communism" where the State also attempts to control consumption as well.
Idiologists and philosophers who support these systems presume that socialism and communism are "natural states" that people would eventually gravitate to for the "greater good"--but in practice, to set up either means passing laws which restrict your ability to interact economically with other people. (Read: passing laws which would make it illegal for me to buy something you made with your own two hands.)
Capitalism, however, does take into account natural resources--though it does so imperfectly. It is possible by passing various laws to take into account the destruction of the ecosystem caused by pollution--in fact, it has been done here in Southern California. The reason why I say "imperfectly" is because (a) it's sometimes hard to agree upon a value for the air we breath and the senery we enjoy, and (b) even if we place a value on these things, shortages may temporarly make the value of digging for oil (for example) greater than the value of a natural park. Because of this, sometimes it's necessary to simply bypass economics alltogether and take land out of play, as has been done with natural parks. (Socialism and communism doesn't save the ecology as anyone who has visited Eastern Europe can attest to.)
Capitalism does not require continuous growth, by the way: while some people are greedy and thus desire more and more things and are not satisified, this does not mean they necessarly need to succeed otherwise the entire system collapses. The only reason why we have had continuous growth is because we've had continuous population growth (and they've got to live somewhere), and because until recently we've priced the "new" over the "old." But here in Southern California, for example, right now "McMansions" are now passee: it's "in" to live in a small bungalo than building a 6,000 sqft box to live in. People's desire to live in "older" neighborhoods has done more to curb growth than just about any other factor, including lack of water resources and lack of land close to existing transportation corridors.
But even without constant population growth and a constant drive for something "new" doesn't mean you cannot (or should not) set up a pottery wheel and make pottery for others. Dispite living with a fixed population for centuries, and dispite living with few material posessions, my ancestors (the Salinan tribe of Indians in Northern California) had money and economics and used a capitalist system for interacting within people of our own tribe, and with outsiders that we would trade with. Granted, trade was more in small things like arrow heads and mortar bowls, but it was capitalism.
Dispite being a band of capitalists, and dispite having things like property (and land property!), I think you'd be damned hard pressed to find a bleeding-heart liberal who would say that the Salinan Indians were bio-sphere unfriendly...
One farmer at the beginning of this century could feed about forty. One farmer now can feed ten times that many. What allowed this miraculous development? Technology! Fertilizers, improved equipment, better processing and distribution systems (though not to those ucky third-world folks, I concede) and the like.
Footnote: it is for this reason that the small family farms are being destroyed: because farming and distribution operations have become so successful that small farmers are simply redundant.
I will note also that we aren't feeding third world countries not because of a lack of desire to try. The United States has attempted repeatedly to set up distribution centers to sell food overseas to third world countries--after all, if we can export food across the Pacific to Japan, we certainly can export food across the Atlantic to Africa. (The latter is a shorter trip.) However, so far, all attempts to set up such distribution systems has failed in large part because of the local politics of those third-world countries.
The United States would love to feed the entire world. And between the United States and other food exporting countries, we could feed the entire world easily. Other countries just don't want the food, or are insufficiently stable (politically) to allow us to set up a distribution center that wouldn't result in 95% of the food rotting on the unloading docks. (And it's not for a lack of trying by any means: I've seen and heard of agribusiness leaders regularly flying to both China and Africa in order to crack the nut of successfully exporting food to those countries.)
People in third world countries are starving to death largely because the local political environment would rather they starve than provide any sort of stability to the local region.
You dummy! The corporations produce X and shove into your head that you want it!
*wow!* I just had an insight about how all that food I've been eating from agribusiness is not what I really want: I've been programmed by agribusiness to eat from the day I was born!
Look at drug commercials (TV/magazines), or any commercials for that matter: they don't inform you about the product - they persuade you that "X is the best thing since sliced bread"... and the next day or week you are sheepishly buying it.
Lousy example of what you're trying to prove, as it requires a prescription from your doctor to buy most drugs now being advertised. Mostly why the drug companies are advertising is because they want patients with pre-existing problems (who are already taking drugs) to ask their doctor if there are better alternatives. But having people shift what medically necessary drugs they are already on to a different drug which may work better is hardly having product shoved down their throat--as often the alternative is to suffer.
And what judicial system? Such a good judicial system that I can sue you for the color of your roof until you have to sell it to pay your lawyers?
Well...the alternative is to have the government confiscate your roof in the name of the "greater good"...
Look at the medical system in the USA. Doctors are so well-paid that medicine attracts not the people who want to cure people, but those who want to get rich quick. So? You get doctors who want to process as many patients as they can, suboptimally, and recommend more treatment than is reasonable just to make a buck. To get an idea of who is treating you, look at how many honest med students there are. They're out there, for sure, but they're hard to find!
And this process has so gutted the quality of the medical system in the United States that people routinely fly abroad to have medically necessary procedures rather than risk their lives with the medi....
Oh, wait: they come to the United States to have medically necessary operations, rathern than leave. Hmmmm... Guess your theory has a few holes in it, doesn't it?
While it is true a lot of people go into medicine because it seems "lucrative" (until you get hit with astronomically high student loan bills), medicine is a meritocracy: you only get rich if you're good at a specialization that pays well. And sometimes not even then: a friend of mine who just became partner in an existing medical practice is still living in a tiny little two bedroom apartment she shares with her husband because her student loan bills are absolutely astronomical. (My father's payments on his Ferrari is smaller than her student loan bills.)
If you are going to knock capitalism, go for it--there's a lot of precidence. However, I would strongly recommend not insulting whole groups of people, such as med students, in order to support a half-baked thesis.
Academe had been one of the last holdouts. Scientific and other kinds of research was always thought to be governed by values other than simple profit, beholden to nothing but the principles of science. No more.
Ok, I have some issues with this. I do love how Katz makes wide, encompassing statements without a smidgin of research, numbers, or anything more complicated than a quote or to from Dr. Big Ass Degree who wants to whore himself for more research money.
What's open source? The VAST majority of the software available on Freshmeat has been done by people who love the art, love technology, or just like doing cool shit. I like when someone uses a libary I've written. I'm not driven by any more profit than that given by feeding my ego! :) Open Source software, open source artistic tools like The Gimp, and lots more through some sand in the eyes of that "creeping corporatism", no?
As far as non-profit driven research, we've come to a point where just about any technological advancement has profit potential. You think a cure for cancer wouldn't bring profit? How about real nanotech? How about the ability to control gravity like electromagnetism (the real prize of a GUT in physics nobody talks about). How about the abilty to make customized drugs based on your DNA profile?
Get with the program, good stuff comes out of Katz sometimes, but this is just alarmist drivel. Go spend a summer on a real farm with no computers Katz, then write about the evils of technology.
..don't panic
Real farms have computers dammit.
I'm not talking about "modern" food crop farming. Try working at a tree farm where you have to hand-weed, or try working at a Chistmas Tree farm wielding a machete. You'll understand why we value high technology so in a real hurry.
..don't panic
Look, we're a *nation* (talking about US here). It is ludicrous that everybody should just make up their own local governments. Sounds great on paper, but tell me, how do we handle international trade, and law? How do we decide foreign policy, let along domestic? How do we even ensure the constitution is being respected, which is at least the essential function of the federal government anyway? Sorry, I don't want to live in some balkanized confederation. The US hasn't been a confederation in a long time, and amen. I want the same rights in California that I do in New York. I also want goods and services to be about the same, and I want public services to be available. There is simply a mandate for federal government of *some* type. Now, sure, we can trim down government to get it out of our business, but there has to be some (theoretically neutral) party to ensure the constitution is being abided by. If we don't have a federal government we might as well not even be a nation and just dissolve into seperate nation-states or something.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I'm less paranoid than I should be. The media does control the "collective unconscious" as you put it...or at least those who watch that mind and soul sucking marketing tool called television. What do you eat? What do you wear? What do you like? What do you feel about other people? Hell, what is your perception of politics and candidates? If you are not careful the media is there is insert all these perceptions for you. Of course I'm not saying it's a conspiracy, but the media cater to the lowest common denominator, and those in control of the media *can* control what people think and feel (that at least should be obvious). But enough from me, I have to take my three medications to relieve my allergies, headaches, and panic attacks so I can search for information on that great new car I need, purchase one of Oprah's books of the week, and get that great body that I've always dreamt about.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Well at least it was under the guise of "national security" and protecting the world. Now it is just about who can patent what gene or chemical or process the fastest and market it. I think a lot of that could be considered typical "public domain" work that universities used to do.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Well I think a lot of people on the net have a libertarian streak, as I do. But I part with pure libertarianism when it approaches plain irresponsibility. I think taken to the extreme (anarchy), pure libertarianism is just replicating the "natural state" we form governments to avoid in the first place. The next best thing, libertarianism in the form of citizen, consumer, and labor rights, and removal of big business influence over government and policy, but not forgetting a few fundamental responsibilities we do have to each other as a nation (respecting commonly owned property, like the air, water, etc., basic guidelines for products and services, fraud, etc.), is Nader and the Green party.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
The only thing that is surprising about this "corporatization" is that people are surprised. Big corporations feed the media, and the media in the hands of a precious few own a monopoly on perception. Here is just one example: the presidential debates, the single most important deciding factor of the next leader of the last superpower of the western world is funded by tax-deductable donations from corporations like Anheuser-Busch, and AT&T (and previously Philip Morris), and controlled by a commission run by Republicans and Democrats funded by big corporations, which virtually sprung up overnight to impose an arbitrary and artificially high 15% barrier to entry (3 times the threshhold for federal matching funds). History showed us what effect this can have: Ross Perot, whom one out of five Americans (~19%) voted for in '92, was reduced to 8% after being refused admission for the presidential debates in '96. And Perot also had billions of his own money he could spend to fight the system in the first place.
"Grilled tenderloin for fundraiser: $1,000 a plate. Campaign ads filled with half-truths: Over $10 billion. Finding out the truth: Priceless."
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
In fact, the years of the Hearst dominated media are a good example of business having a great, overt power over politics.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
No one can say human beings don't deserve what they get. :-(
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
Actually, your post appears to exhibit a poor understanding of the nature of scientific research. When you say science is "based on facts", you are making some unwarranted assumption about the nature of facts.
The facts you find in your research are very often determined by what questions you ask. Profit motivation, driven by corporate funding, will alter the nature of the questions asked in academic research, thus changing the nature of the facts discovered.
And that doesn't even take into consideration corruption of the human beings involved.
Corporate research is an excellent thing. So is research done for the sake of research. Academic research should be public domain, just to preserve the diversity of research that is done. Imagine if this "paradigm" really takes root, and the vast majority of universities conduct research for profit. There is some very important research done that will be abandoned because there's no product to sell at the end.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
You, sir, are an idiot.
Research for research's sake is the only way to produce revolutionary results.
Look at it this way:
- Why do smart people get into research? To make money? Maybe, but most get into it because they enjoy solving difficult problems that others haven't solved before.
- How are these research problems formulated? Two methods prevail. Business needs and the researcher's interests.
- Business needs are all well and good, but the real breakthroughs tend to come from those projects that the researcher thought he would like to work on. The problem might not necessarily have an immediate business application, but because it's neat, he tends to put more effort into it and get more excited about it. Never underestimate the benefits of self-motivation.
- If you eliminate research for research's sake, you eliminate this source of innovation.
The elimination of this type of research is one of the main concerns of industry research labs (regardless of academia), and there are big fights going on concerning it.
Trust me, I work in one of them.
"I'm an old-fashioned type of guy. I worship the Sun and Moon as gods. And fear them."
The boundary of understanding of physics from at least the perspective of string theory is a relatively well-funded endeavor in the world today.
(begin rant)
Research on string theory itself may be a well funded but some of the aspects that are required to show proof that it is a viable theory are not. Going back to high energy physics, quite a few of the string theories out there (there is more than one), including the one that is considered most likely, require that aspects of particle physics like supersymmetry be true. Unfortunately, the funding of high energy physics fell through the floor after the Superconducting Super Collider project was kill ~$5 billion, out of $20 billion, into the project. Right now the high energy physicists are trying to scrape up ~$9 billion from the US, EU, and Japan in order to build either the NLC (US design) or Tesla (German design). The physicists hope that one of these will be built, but aren't sure if they will get the funding. The two designs allow for colliding leptons at the TeV range, the TeVatron at Fermilabs collides Barions which give different results. If something of this scale is not built then theories like supersymmetry cannot be proven. If supersymmetry cannot be proven then we lose the ability to test the robustness of some of these string theories.
Nuclear physics is a dieing field in the US. Unless you want to work on weapon research you are poorly funded. Other than the new laser over at Lawrence Livermoore Labs, what news have you heard about the advancement of non-weapon nuclear technology?
(end rant)
It seems to me that Katz's main complaint is that many scientists become pawns of corporations. But why is this bad
Scientists in corporations are not necessarily bad. IBM owns the Watts (sp?) lab, which has done wonders to push the technology that we have forward. Corporate sponsorship of science becomes bad for society when that is the only science that occurs. If governments, and the general populous, decide that all science can be handled by corporations, then we will lose a lot of the science conducted for the sake of science.
Although Katz's article seems to take the 'The sky is falling' approach it does bring up some interesting points. Should we allow corporations to fund scientific research conducted in public institutions? Should we allow corporations to dictate what research should be done in public institutions? Can we control/stop it? I believe that this phenominon needs to be looked into to see how it is effecting not just scientific research, but who is going into those fields where corporations are funding the research, and why.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
>Would the AMA push for approval of such a
>technology,
snip
>disturbing fact that there is a hideous amount
>of financial incentive not to cure many diseases.
If I'm CEO of the company that makes the drugs that treat said disease, sure, it makes sence. But only until the 17 year patent on said drug runs out, at that point I damn well better make the cure available and profit off it before *its* 17 year patent runs out. I'd be lynched by my shareholders otherwise. And if *I* have the cure, and my COMPETITOR makes the treatment? Damn skippy, I'd release it.
>What would happen if, say, a generalized cure
>for all our physical ailments were developed
>(e.g. nano-facilitated medical immortality)?
You seem to forget the fact that many, if not most geeks don't give a DAMN about the status quo; and, in fact, would be happy to shatter it into a zillion pieces if given the chance.
If I'm at the helm of the Sunnyvale nanotech startup that figures out how to make microscopic robots give humanity clinical immortality, damn straight I'm going to push it out. Those robots would make me rich beyond the dreams of Midas, make me a hero worldwide (hell, I might even get my own holiday), and... oh yeah... provide an immeasurable benefit to humanity. *SCREW* the AMA.
(Working out the resulting overpopulation problems resulting from immortality is left as an exercise for the reader. Tho, if I perfect nanotech to the point where I can make humans immortal, I suppose nanotech will be prefected to make resources (except for real estate) essentially unlimited too. (Time to get my 'bots working on those carbon nanotubes for that space elevator!!!))
As for the doctors? Well, they HAD their salad days. We'll still have a need for plastic surgeons, dentists and ER docs I suppose.
But just because you've been making money in the PAST, you do NOT have the guaranteed right to that money in the FUTURE. Robert Heinlein said as much in one of his novels (much more elequently than my humble self). Someone's been posting the quote in most every iteration of the Napster debate, referring to the RIAA rathar than the medical industry)
**
(in the Heinlein story in question, someone invents a machine which will tell you the EXACT day you're going to die, and is promptly sued by the entire insurance industry. The insurancemongers are duely and properly smacked down in the supreme court.
I read it a LONG time ago, but can't dredge up the title or exact quote at the moment)
**
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
>modified crops, I think it is the ultimate in
>human arrogance to belive that we even have the
>remotest idea what effect our tamperings will
>have on our environment,
Now this is something that baffles me about the anti-genetic-engineering crowd.
I, personally, have nothing, in principle, against geneticlly enginnered "supercrops"... so long as they do, in fact, live up to their advretisements. What baffles me, is that while the antigenetics crowd are protesting the use of these crops AT ALL, they are equally outraged at Monsanto's invention of the "terminator" gene, which would make it possible to CONTROL these same GM crops if they get out of hand.
Personally, I think *ALL* geneticlly modified food crops *should* include Monsanto's "terminator" gene. That way GM foods that are all good and true to their purpose can continue to be super-productive and feed more people more efficently. But if any of these "supercrops" turns out to have horribly bad side effects (or if they simply escape the confined of a controlled environment and start to overrun the baseline strain), they can be "terminated" in one generation, without escaping into the general population and overrunning the "normal" strains of foodstuffs.
And I have little doubt that there will always be a demand for organic foods, grown from the original strain with no artificial ferterlisers or pesticides. So there *IS* a baseline to fall back upon.
What I DO, however, take issue with, is the use of tetracycaline to activate the "terminator" gene. That seems just plain stupid to me. We have too many resistant bacteria strains as it is, WITHOUT spraying more antibiotics all over seed fields.
But as to why people who oppose GM foods also oppose the mechanism that would keep them from getting out of control??? That just baffles me.
Any greenies want to share their thoughts/reasoning on that one? I'd love to know.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
Is this a bad thing? I don't know. The Mellon Institute was involved in the development of many consumer products, including cornflakes and innerspring mattresses, as well as the GR-S synthetic rubber formula that helped win World War II.
Ultamitely, people will buy what people want; and the corporations will make what the people want.
People wanted the AARD detection virus in Windows 3.1?
People wanted the CSS content scrambling system to prevent them from watching their own movies?
People want to pay a 50 cent piracy tax on blank cds?
People don't want to buy digital music online?
People wanted the Macrovision scrambling system so that they couldn't use their VCR to change inputs?
People wanted to be gassed, beaten, and starved in Seattle?
People wanted to have their ears ripped off at the Republican National Convention?
People didn't want the right to reverse-engineer for interoperability?
People WANT brittney spears?
I'm not sure corporations will make what the people want. I think they will use their wealth to obtain control, and use their control to limit our choices - and we will blindly take the best choice they offer us.
but i could be wrong.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
It seems to me that exploiting patented technology developed on campus to generate revenue is going to free these institutions not enslave them. Which situation do you think is more healthy; an organization which is living hand to mouth and constantly needs to beg corporations, the government and alumni for research grants and funding which heavily influences the research areas explored or a financially independent entity which can choose it's own path and might even tend to pursue more valuable intellectual endeavor?
I know what I think is better.
The trouble with the argument as presented by Katz is that it simply bemoans the change and rather foolishly assumes that things in the past were much better. That just isn't true, academia was never a utopian ideal Katz assumes it was.
Since the earliest universities in America were created to train preachers, these schools have always been the intellectual captives of their sponsors.
When I was in school in the sixties, it was the Defense Department. (Remember Darpanet? Remember the Vietnam war?) Frankly, I prefer the corporations.
I would say the corporate influence has two purposes. One is to fill the void left by the withdrawal of governmment. The other is to inject some value into the outdated curriculla.
These days a corporate certification is of much more value than a university degree. I would argue this is not the result of a corporate plot, but of the failure of the universities.
Geez, where to begin...
.edu ("Damn, Columbia.com is already taken!"). Survive without Government subsidy -- THAT is the Free Market, not this Corporate Welfare bullshit.
If a researcher wants to make big bucks, here's a novel idea: WORK FOR A FSCKING COMPANY! Ever hear of Bell Labs? Xerox PARC ring a bell? Ever look for "IBM" or "Apple Computer" in the patent database?
Universities, both public and private, receive substantial amounts of taxpayer-derived money both directly (e.g., grants) and from their status as educational institutions. The public should not have to subsidize research which primarily benefits corporations. If they want to become profit-centered institutions, they should be stripped of their educational status and forced to incorporate -- no more grant money, no more tax-free donations, no more
The other beef I have is other posters saying that profit-driven research will lead to more products the consumer wants. NOBODY knows what products they want 20, 30, or 50 years from now, because they don't know what will be possible then. High-end research -- the kind done by Universities, defines what is possible down the road.
For-profit research also raises the question: Profitable when? Most companies only look at this or next quarter's bottom line. Experiment for the reader: Go to Company X and tell them the product of your research will be hugely profitable, but only after fifteen years of constant investment. Until then it will just be a cash sinkhole. Wait for reaction.
The Soviet Union fell behind the US in the technology race because they lacked a critical component in the flow-down from high-end research to everyday products. They had world-class physicists and mathematicians at the high-end. They had engineers who were very innnovative working with the materials at hand (witness the Mig-25). What they lacked was that middle component that moved technology between the two ends -- and that was profit-driven companies.
We had all three components, but I'm afraid we'll end up sacrificing the high-end component to feed the profit appetite of the middle -- to whip out the cliche, we'll kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. In the end we'll wind up with the ultimate bitchin' version of today's technology, not tomorrow's.
Like it or not, we do *not* live in a true Capitalist state. Not-for-profit organizations -- the Government and its labs, and the Universities -- make substantial contributions to our technology base which companies later run with, and I'd like to keep it that way.
The question is why any of this is necessary. The football team at UVa is a HUGE money-MAKER. Why do they need corporate sponsorship?
The school charges a lot - i went there too. Out of state students pay for all their education, plus some of the education of the instate students. Just from tuition. Then of course the school makes money selling memorabilia, garbage, etc. Why do they need to make more money from selling magazines? They don't. The Lawn, by the way, is the original part of the school designed and built by Thomas Jefferson. It is one of the most beautiful parts of any campus in the country and is a recognized architectural masterpiece and part of our cultural heritage. Why is it for rent for selling women's magazines?
When I look around at the world i see that we put up with a LOT of crap our grandparents would have never tolerated. Some things simply should not be for sale.
Scientifically speaking and with the notable exception of biology, we have not made much progress for 20 years. Or at least not as much as we could have done, I think.
Across the country, university officials admit the Net is a gold mine, providing a much faster and larger paybacks for researchers than traditional scientific research in areas like biology.
This is a joke! What about the thousands of academic researchers that are now working in biotech start-ups? Really, it must be a joke.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
I take it then that Katz doesn't make any money from his writing? If he does it's very strange that he is able to make the sort of comments he does since it directly contradicts his central thesis about money's influence.
Think again. I worked in alumni affairs at Case Western Reserve Uni. and most of the money spent on the school was provided by Alumni. I'm talking MILLIONS. Now for state schools there is more Government money, but most private schools are funded by their rich alumni.
What about what people NEED?
You'll be changing your tune when you get some obscure form of cancer where research was ABANDONED because the number of people to sell healing drugs to, was too small to justify, due to too small profits.
Research needs to be conducted AGGRESSIVELY in ALL area because of one simple word: Serendipity.
Discoveries are always made when we're not looking, that's a basic component of research. If it doesn't have a use right now, who cares, it will someday. And with this wonderful networked world, sooner than later.
But ultimately this is all good. It will just hasten the revolution.
Rich...
Ignore Alien Orders
The real problem is that when a university develops something patentable, they get the patent. If this was a corporate system and the university was treated like the contractor that it is, there is no way they'd be allowed to keep that patent. It would go back to whomever paid them to develop it, i.e. the government or private groups.
This is why NASA is effectively losing tons of money on research. They give someone a multimillion dollar grant to figure out how to make a single part. That person does so, but all the stuff they build in order to do the research and actually make the part they get to keep. Essentially all NASA gets is a recipe how to make it. They have the cookbook, but they have to pay even more to use the kitchen to bake the cake.
This is a problem because it means a lot of non-profit research foundations are being shafted. They get their new medical technology, etc. However the universities are the ones actually making a killing when the technology is implemented. All this means is the non-profit research groups are quickly running low on money.
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
But until recently, we clung loosely to the notion that some institutions -- politics, journalism, academe, art and culture - stood outside the marketplace at least somewhat beyond bottom-line calculations. That was important, especially in afree and prosperous society. That principle established their credibility and helped keep social forces like big business and big technology in some sort of check and balance.
I'm sorry but this just isn't a true statement. Artists want to make money... they always have, even in the days of the Renissanse. They are apart of the market just like we are today. Politians have been greedy thieves throughout history, people who want power and money... while there are some who genuinely care about the people I think the majority fit right into the Marketplace. American culture is sadly all about making money and it has been pretty much from the early 1800s when the Industrial Revolution came along.
Allow me to shift gears and comment as well on your issue with university patents: I attend a university and frankly I'd love to see my school develop new technology and sell it. Why? Because it benefits me by keeping my tuition down, providing me with smaller class sizes by adding buildings and gives me a school that I can be proud of. While I doubt my school does this now, I think its a great idea. It doesn't disservice the students at -- most of whom probably will not make some kind of break-through invention that will award them millions. This way everyone gets a little slice of the pie. Personally I don't see why JonKatz would have a problem with this because thats the so called "Corporate Republic" giving money to the higher cause of Education.
Corporations are obviously not the best thing in the world but we wouldn't have technology without them. The media itself is a corporation so maybe we shouldn't trust Jon Katz either :)
I have written my own article about corporations and technology. If anyone is interested you can read it here: The Technology of Sharing and the Leadership of Corporations
Never knock on Death's door:
The Anti-Blog
I agree with your practical comments on Africa, but refering to another comment of mine "do you belive in the eternal ownership of property?" in particular the "american" continent is owned by? If the poorer contries of the world gained the power to truly threaten the rich ones, would the money grabbing commercialists happily kill them all off because "they don't buy or products anyway"?
I am a white man, and I also have not enslaved anyone directly, but my simple presence in a nation such as Ireland, buying clothes made in sweatshops etc. etc. (I try to put my money where my conscience is, but as we all know it can be very hard to really tell who is who when you are handing over money). I live in a rich country in a poor world, and my richness is perpetuated by the continued suffering (in relative terms) of the majority of the planet. If I gave away every penny I earned I would still be rich to most of the planet, the only way I could resolve this problem would be to give away everything I own and live in one of the coutries with a more average wealth, and this is not what I am advocating.
Two questions, if you have so much food and money, why are so many people hungry? What makes you believe that your countries economic engine can run the world?
I have never suggested a "crazy back-to-Nature love fest" all I would ask is that we try to remeber that this planet belongs to all of us and as you say we must show far more respect for it. I don't want to revert to hunter gatherers, I am not luddite, I just entirely agree with you that: We just don't seem to agree on the simple fact that capitalist ideals must be compromised to prevent this.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
And who is able to stand outside of the monetary influences and say that the farmer should be allowed to modify his environment so that he can get more money? And how much will it cost you to have your baldness and impotence cured, and what will you do to get the money to pay for it? What happens when the continent of Africa gets a few nuclear warheads and starts ransoming the planet for money (hey they are only applying some old tech). We have shat all over our ecosystem and enslaved 3/4 of the planets population in poverty. Of course everything is going to be alright.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
I must admit I am overplaying the devil's advocate role to a degree (though not much), but thank you also for recognising that I am not trying to flame or troll, but simply to reveal how I see these things. /. (and I regard /. as it's posters) for some reason seems to always defend the capitalist ideals while slating the coporationist. Corporationism is the logical conclusion of capitalism and it is not acceptable.
You say that "I don't believe that poverty+nuclear power=ability to hold the world hostage. The entire world would unite against any country that tried to do that. " but can it not be argued that the entire rich world has been holding the poor world to hostage? I was trying to simply evoke the realisation on people that we (the people lucky enough to be born in the richer section of the planet) should be in a vulnerable position, we are the minority. Instead we are holding all the "money" and living our luxurious lives at the expense of others (ask all the kids in your country who wear Nike's if they profit from capitalism, and do not try to argue with me that we are providing good jobs to the workers just because it is better than nothing, would you work for the equivalent of those wages their or in your own country?).
From your remaining points, the capitalist ideals (sorry but my upbringing refuses to let me believe they are truly American ideals) you claim are "responsible for the greatest increase in wealth and prosperity, for the greatest number of people, harming the least amount of people, in history" may be, however as you so simply put it "Can it be replaced by something better? I certainly hope so!". I personally feel disgust with the corporatist tack that I feel the American (and in this case I have no problem singling America for particular though not solitary attention) policy makers have taken, and my readings of slashdot certainly agree with this (Napster, 2600, etc.). I just always feel that
I have to say that the one aspect of this I feel you (Moofie) are missing is that we are all on an evolutionary chain, and just because the system we rich slashdot readers have has the best history, does not mean that it even came close to being good. I do not have the answers, but I feel strongly that the attitude we (rich people) have collectively taken is sickening, and I for one would be willing to sacrifice my posessions (I would still have the extreme privilege of an education to degree level) to bring a level of equality. To the people who asked me to give these up, I refuse to do this in isolation as it would be a token gesture of meaningless consequence, but I am happy to sacrifice another 10-30% of my income to help force the world bank to drop the debts they have promised to, to give even more to all the people in my society (Ireland) worse off than I am, and to grow the pool of money that my already quite generous country offers internationally to the needy (I have no problem making my country subsantially poorer to make hundreds of poor countries minorly richer). I get sick every time I hear someone slam a "welfare" system or taxation for wealth redistribution, quite simply, the current systems work well for us on the best side and do not destory the less well off, however we can and should do better, for the equlaity of humanity.
And to finish (because I feel that this deserves an on-topic story to itself) what genuinely makes me sick to the pits of my stomach is the ideals frequently esposed which state "fuck anyone poorer than me, I deserve it", to each of you (and this is NOT directed at Moofie) be very very afraid, someday those souls you feel happy to leave ground down (and you repluse at the idea of aiding in any way, even any form of "socialist" welfare system) will rise, and you will fall as a consequence (even if only to approach their level from above) and who do you think they (the majority) will want to shaft? Maybe it won't be you, but if not it will be your ancestors. Let us all build for a happier future now.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Academics are descended from the courtier intellectuals of the 14-17th centuries. They've always, for the most part, been suckups to power. In the 20th century that was government power. Now it's corporate power. Given how the 20th century went, this is probably an improvement.
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
I see a similar issue here in academia. They shouldn't focus on commercial appplications because the market is good at that!! Instead, they should be focusing on studying what the VC's and commercial enterprises don't want to do but that would benefit the public good.
I don't the outcome of the commercialization trend is inevitable. Money is a means, not an end, and we can choose to value academia, education, democratic space, . But if we don't speak out, like Katz has done, and actively challenge this trend, it is certainly threatening much of the non-profit sector.
Michael Weiksner, founder of Quorum.org a politics forum w/open editorial control
Hey democracy lovers, add Quorum as a c
It was because companies were making the university's research into closed-source, proprietary software of which redistribution was forbidden.
Which was quite contrary to the goals of a university, and open research. Which is happening (again, on a larger scale) now.
What do we do?
Do what Stallman did. Work to feed ourselves, yes, but only participate in open research in the universities. Walk away from a bad situation. Don't end up like the guy in Florida (*) who was imprisoned and put on an chain-gang (!) for "stealing" his own work. (which some company claimed rights to). Most of us here are NOT poor, we have choices.
Freedom and a Pentium II, or slavery and a quad Pentium III, it is quite distressing how many of us will take the second option.
(*) He is Petr Taborsky, more info can be found here: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/INST/jun97/student.ht ml. According to that article, he is now a convicted felon. I.E. he has lost some legal rights under law for the rest of his life. Keep that in mind for those of you that think the intellectual property law isn't dangerous.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
It seems to me that Katz's main complaint is that many scientists become pawns of corporations. But why is this bad, beyond the obvious reason that it empowers corporations and if you think that all corporations are bad, then... In the same sense that politics is corrupted when the money/power reasons for involvement outweigh public service reasons, science is corrupted when money rather than search for mystery/understanding is why people get into science. We could criticize "career" scientists in the same way we criticise "career" politicians.
Not just bought, but owned outright from day one. Many of the Universities founded in the mid to late 19th century were founded by capitalists, or taken over my capitalists and given their current name.
For example, consider Drew University. The college was created by Daniel Drew, a back-stabbing cold-hearted money-grubbing capitalist robber baron. Nowadays, he'd been funding the University for a tax break. Back then, it was just to get into heaven. Many private institutions have a long history of being owned, either overtly or covertly, by various corporate influences.
The university where I work at, many of the computer science professors have worked at Lucent Technologies (or the same company under its earlier names). Some of my coworkers graduated from here, and where do you think they got jobs before returning? Who do you think provides 'grants' to various computer projects, in return for us pushing our best and brightest at them as cheap interns? Damn right, Lucent. I don't think of this as some evil 'selling out'. It is not like we're forcing these students into something or pimping them out. We are providing them with a tight relationship with one of the more innovative companies in the area. We get more grant money, they become rich, and leave us money in their will. Everyone benefits, the students, the university, and the 'giant evil faceless corporations'.
Though I do find it amusing that the brightest programmer we've got as a student right now has been turning down various corporate offers and GPL'ing his work. *grin*
>Katz say money bad.
Well, it is the potential strings attached to that money that is probably more troubling than the money in itself. It's all well and good if Glaxco or someone puts money into university research and society as a whole benefits from progress made in medical research and Glaxco gets a reasonable return on it's investment. I don't personally have a problem with this straightforward scenario.
But, if the independance of the researchers is somehow undermined by the threat of withholding money, then you could have a problem. "Here, this $100 million ought to tide you over for a bit on that cure-for-baldness research you are doing. BTW, why are all your best grad students still working on that dead-end cure for juvenile diabetes research project? Heck, the profit potential for a baldness drug is 100 times that of almost anything else. We sure would like to see a few more of your top people working on 'our' project (wink, wink, nudge, nudge)."
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Reading this, I'm just wondering what Female Impotence entails, but I think I'll avoid making any jokes about it.
In any case, Pfizer necessarily had to do a whole bunch of research on impotence to get their drug properly targeted in the first place. Can you think of any reason that we shouldn't benefit from that research in ways other than the commercial prescription drug?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm going to go slightly offtopic here and talk about something that bothers me a great deal, which is this nasty habit of people to equate something which doesn't hurt anyone to something that does.
Never mind the morality here; The question of whether taking off your clothes and being photographed and having those photographs disseminated widely is amoral is not the issue here. The fact of the matter is that if it hurts anyone, it's only the person photographed. Even the Nixon administration had to admit that there was no link between pornography and sex-related crime, or any other kind of crime. I'm not guilty of anything worse than the occasional traffic offense, and I'm totally into porn.
But a University (or other public institution) sacrificing its impartiality for any reason, including to get money from corporations, is definitely something that can (and will, and has) hurt people. The university does research, uncovers something that will cause people harm, but does not announce it because they will lose funding. Someone dies. Now the University is, essentially, guilty of murder because they could have stopped deaths of ostensibly innocent people, and has done nothing. Every person with the secret is guilty.
Perhaps you didn't mean to draw such a close comparison between the two events. I'm willing to accept that possibility in the interests of fair-mindedness. But that is, in fact, what has happened. Likening a probably harmless entertainment, or arguably an entertainment which only negatively affects the person who has taken their clothes off, to an event which will cause death, dismemberment, or at the very least malady, is irresponsible.
I do, however, agree with this point wholeheartedly. Even something as simple as eschewing one soft drink for another is irresponsible. Taking money from a corporation whose developments you should be investigating is clearly a conflict of interest.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You and RMS can go live in a commune where everyone lives via subsistence farming and no one is paid for software development, but I strongly suspect that the amount of quality code that comes from inside such a place will diminish rapidly.
I personally want to be rewarded for my work. With money comes leisure and all kinds of fun material items like computers and their variants (Ala the Playstation 2, Dreamcast, and Super-Mega-N'Cube-Sync box from Nerdtendo) and I like to have those things. I doubt I'll achieve my dream of owning a Ford GT40 without either making a contribution upon which I am then paid, or stealing someone else's. I personally believe that the former is far less a sin than the latter.
So, "Tech is fine and dandy, but where's my royalty check?" If I were independently wealthy, I'd still put together websites and such. Since I'm not, I choose to spend the majority of time I put into such things making money, which I enjoy having and spending. Money is not an end to me, but a means, and I intend to get my hands on large quantities of it, and then use it for my own evil goals, muahahahaha(tm).
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...seem to run against the grain of your argument. Many of our most prestigious and hallowed institutions have been run as businesses since their inception. The act of taking money for research makes sense...you get to do more research. Privatization makes sense. The projects that demonstrate commercial viability fund more research into some projects that are not as commercially viable.
You use the same argument that I used for some time, but in a different area: commercialism taints academic progress. I used to complain how funds and effort were channeled into the football program at Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia...until I found out that the programs' incomes paid for themselves, every other sport, and much, much more. Hey, I misunderstood how important these funds are to the school's very existance, and I think you misunderstand, as well.
What'dya mean there's no BLINK tag!?
Bullshit.
We will see the world turned into walled communities, where those inside live high on the hog, and those outside get to live in shantytowns and garbage dumps. That's where the corporate republic is leading us.
Corporations do not care about anything except the bottom line. They could care less about any ideals such as freedom or love for your fellow man. They don't give a shit about the environment. They don't give a shit that they rape 3rd world countries and leave the citizens there with nothing. As long as their stock value looks good, that's all that matters.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Sure, some people are a little more willing to break a few rules if they see a dollar sign at the end of the tunnel, but generally, these people would have been weeded out by the rigorous training in medical/journalist/research ethics. Or, they became lawyers. Science has always been a field where underpaid professors spend all the time in the lab and then only gain street cred for their work. Why not cut them in on the profits their research might garner?
I think I see what is really worrying people, and that is the similarities between programmers and scientists. Programmers spend a lot of time manipulating data into coherent, usable structures. Scientists do the same.
I understand the argument that large-body corporations are beginning to appear as dangerous Non-state Actors in the international political world, but I can't see a way in which society could exist without them. Sure, they didn't exist in this form 100 years ago, but who'd have thought near-instant global communication was possible then, either? Corporations will become the next nation-states in the political regime. Proctor and Gamble has their own solvency, since they stretch beyond the grasp of various nations. So does Microsoft, Apple, Sun, Oracle, IBM, and millions of other groups. Welcome to the 21st Century, era of corporate politics. The TwenCen notion of political legitimacy requiring control of contiguous areas of land is now defunct.
But where do we go from here? Excellent question. We will see stability evolve from these new Non-State Actors as stability arose following the Franco-Prussian war in Europe. The Great Peace. Let us only hope that we don't tie the hands of researchers by forcing them into accepting only what Universities offer and not garner royalties from their hard work and effort.
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
The CEO of a major corporation is not elected; his appointment is decided by a small group of peers. Business, therefore, is essentially an aristocracy. How many complaints have we seen in this thread about Katz's "old world" ideas? Well, an aristocracy is a very, very old idea. Most of them have eventually been torn down by popular revolutions or major wars.
Business, however, has been given free run of the world's social and economic fabric. The tax laws and antitrust legislation that are complained about so vigorously by so many are not serving to stunt this growth in any significant way. This is where the problem lies -- not in any fundamental inflection point, where everything changed, but in a steady and almost unnoticed trek down the road to corporate control of society.
No, I am not completely in support of the Communist model of government, or Anarchy; both are extreme over-simplifications of an incredibly dynamic and mutable set of issues. However, I think that the evidence speaks for itself: governments are more or less powerless against the largest corporations in the world, children take in more advertising that public education, and no one is considered a successful contributor to society unless they "make it".
The illusion of capitalism's suitability as a general framework for social policies then creates a danger the equal of any Communist regime: the complete obfuscation of the workings a government. We are no longer a Democratic society, we are a capitalst one; since capitalism has no meaning outside the context of economic transactions, then anything falling outside those boundries is suddenly exempt from any overriding philosophy.
It's also truly sad to me to see a "geek" say, "Tech is fine and dandy, but where's my royalty check?" Aren't we supposed to be the ones who can see past the money, and into the value of things like open source? Or even, dare I say it, something being a Good Thing, simply because it is a clever hack or truly new idea?
But I guess I'm just not being a good, productive citizen, 'cause I have hopes and goals in life other than turning a profit.
Corporatists are willing to separate us have access to that its lawyers and secrets, perhaps even better, volunteer to the context and participatory than ever.
And the widening rift between gets much as "the puritans" or other consideration. Magic, the primary means safe, flawlessly-planned enclave from illegal sexual imagery or are flames, or Chickclickers don't want to re-define itself. There was reported in which are harassed, humiliated, sometimes possible to censorship and communications from Amazon.com.
This is one of the theater frequently. Tell them you be impossible working conditions, job markets are then sold any indication, it seems to this new national TV variety of AllAdvantage, a gradual erosion of them in how technology and popular culture and the technological life for new wisdom says Kate, a new, hybrid, and geneticists, for help of their female movement - corporatism -- gave him someone to hide myself in ways to our information.
The Libertarians appear to mass-market, monopolize and software is probably the megacorps hae been another in cyberspace. There is divulged, it much. The Digital Age.
Yes, but how many other slashdot opinion collumnists are there... oh, that's right, none other. If Katz is so dull, perhaps Slashdot ought to give us another voice to listen to?
Free BeOS, runs from a Linux partition
Where's the insult generator?
Free BeOS, runs from a Linux partition
Blah blah blah. All together.. USELESS!
Is this all Katz talks about is this imaginary society? I can see him sitting about a musty, parlor with a dozen or so eggheads in tweed jackets, pipes, and syncophants tut-tutting about the death of intellectual America and the unsavory rise of technocrats and libertarians who are usurping power through uppity start-up ventures and online publishing.
I can hear him complaining about the Death of the Cafe Society.
I hear him complaining about the gall of universities that require their professors actually show up for class and teach rather than sending in barely literate GA's.
I hear him complaining about the lack of intellectuals as advisers in politics since the 1960's.
I see him ignoring the stifled yawns and empty desks as he ponders what could/should have happened with an effective Communist Party in the US in the 1972 elections.
I listen to him complain about the demise of publishing outlets for intellectuals, Harry Potter on the NYT booklist, how hard it is to find a nice tweed jacket with those patches on the elbows, and the shortage of fawning, demur, busty, college coeds.
I laugh my ass off as his kind fades away with each year until they are relegated to the history books with corsets, 8-track tapes and Edsels.
In addition, I would note that while $100M that Columbia receives in patent royalties may seem like a lot, in an institution with annual gross revenues of a few billion dollars (mostly tuition), this is not a dog-wagging tail. This is especially true as most universities actually lose money on research, since providing the infrastructure costs more than grants bring in in indirect cost reimbursement (see below), and those that do make any significant money tend to make almost all of their money on one or two patents---so profit from research becomes a big crap-shoot. The real marketplace value of research to universities is as P.R.
University technology transfer offices are less important for making money for the university than for impressing superstar faculty whom the univeristy wants to hire and who want to know that if they come, the university will support them in their quest to make millions off their research. The millions do not, in general, materialize, but supporting these fantasies is an increasingly significant part of the hiring process.
Even more significant for a university, though, is attracting good students, and here research acts as a loss-leader, as the economists Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook describe in The Winner-Take-All-Society . The argument here is that good students, all other things being equal, would prefer to go to a university that produces a lot of Nobel Prizes, even if their tuition is helping subsidize the research (Frank and Cook argue unpersuasively that the increasing importance of research has driven hyperinflating college tuitions, but fail to account for the fact that four-year liberal arts colleges, where much less research is done, have suffered similar inflation). Again, there is nothing new in the .com world that we haven't seen before with the defense industry or biotechnology.
One of the best serious historical looks at the interaction of university research and the commercial sector is the first half of David C. Mowery and Nathan Rosenberg's Technology and the Pursuit of Economic Growth . A more contemporary account of the cutting edge can be found in Lewis M. Branscomb's Industrializing Knowledge: University-Industry Linkages in Japan and the United States . Both books provide strong evidence that Katz's alarmism reflects neither anything fundamentally new nor anything so seriously alarming or threatening as he would have us believe.
Look at how many articles he's written along these lines. In spite of the constant and persistant ridicule he has generated on /.
I still think he writes these in batches, and just submits them to Slashdot in sections. There is no evidence that he is listening to anybody else here at all in anything he writes.
Nearly every argument he has put forward has been torn down as being misguided, inaccurate, overstated, ignorant of history, myopic, arrogant, short-sighted, wrong-headed, or just plain incorrect... yet he keeps trudging on with more of them, as though he has not even read the feedback from even the posts that got modded up to 4 or 5. Steering a train off its tracks would require less effort than getting Katz to deviate from his present course.
He's got a book to write, and has probably already accepted an advance from his publisher; if his basic premise is flawed, it is far too late to turn back now.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The barbarian hordes are selling women's magazines on the hallowed greens of our University lawns!
Our noble warriors of the gridiron have been stained with the horrid logo of a shoe manufacturer!
Great painters are rotting in the guilded cages of wealthy benefactors who wish to be seen supporting the arts (even as they lure the unsuspecting young artists out of the poverty from which all true art must come)!
The savages are even daring to use human cadavers for safety research!
Will the horrors never end? My fragile constitution cannot possibly stand the strain of it all! Ooooh, the pain, the pain...
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
It can't. Fortunately, capitalism does not require continuous growth.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Last I checked, our replacement rate in the USA is about 0.85 per person. If the rest of the world was more like the industrialized West, we would be having debates about the best way to increase human procreation, rather than whether we need to slow population growth down.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Not where I live. Maybe you need to elect better state legislators.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The problem is, as usual, Jon is jumping on a bandwagon that left 50 years ago. The academic community has been under the thumb of the "military industrial complex" since the fifties, everybody vying for the coveted research grant.
As usual, this "paradigm shift" is accompanied by little or no public debate over the propriety of university research (often funded in part by taxpayers) becoming increasingly tailored to corporate clout. Congress isn't paying attention either; it's much too busy trying to pass laws requiring local libraries to keep Johnny off the Playboy Web site.
The reason that there is little public debate, is because this "paradigm shift" is mostly illusionary. Universities in the United States, have always been for profit organizations. Adding patents to the tuitions, alumni contributions and government research grants just isn't that big an issue. And don't confuse the University making money with the researchers making money. Yes they will continue to lie and cheat to get the lion share of research funds, but this is nothing new. Neither is the corporate encroachment anything new, 25 years ago, when I was a student at CSUN, the big issue was the "Foundation", the corporation that owned all the facilities (ie:book store, cafeteria) had interests and connections with the South African Apartheid.
I'm less worried about the possibility of corrupting good scientists into giving bad results than I am about the possibility of distracting them from helping me understand my world, which includes plenty besides profit motives. Or are we going to outsource that job to the legions of tired, mass-market theologians that are in it for the money too?
Pah. I serve a higher cause than mere manners: pedantry is its own reward.
Besides, if I wasn't an ill-mannered, pettifogging, sanctimonious, loudmouthed, over-educated pedant, how would people know I was a lawyer? Seeing the suit, they might think I was an accountant or something low-class like that there./p.
-- AndrewD
A Maze of Twisty Little Laws, All Different.
This is a Yin and Yang world: any good solution has an element of bad that goes along with it, any bad solution has an element of good that goes with it. There are no perfect solutions. You don't seem to recognize that.
Criticism is easy; talk is cheap. If you have a better way, show everyone. Don't talk, DO. Kick everybody's asses with your better way. Create a better life for more people. Like the Japanese after WWII everyone will recognize your way is better and change to it. Until then you are just spouting 'eco slogans' in the hope of being able to seize political power you don't deserve.
It is not power which corrupts, it is UNDESERVED power which ATTRACTS the corrupt. Those who seek power they don't deserve are corrupt to begin with.
The reason I concluded you were ridiculing his post was the sarcastic tone of the language in your post.
Here would be a way to phrase such points without sarcasm:
"There is a downside to the solution you have given. We may be exhausting the natural resources of the planet at such a high rate that future generations may be left with no way to even live. Have you fully considered that downside to your solution?"
If you are critical of someone's solution to a problem when you have no alternative to offer you ARE pulling a power game; you are trying to make yourself look good by making someone else look bad.
You hope to leave the reader with the implied idea that "Of course, being far superior I could easily come up with a better answer", and THAT is a power game. That is the point of my 'Put up or shut up' paragraph.
Asking questions without having the answers is appropriate if you are trying to learn something. Asking questions without having the answers in the hope of making someone else look bad, because you know they don't have the answers either, is a cheap and sleazy trick. Do you now understand the If you don't have the answers, don't ask the question mentality?
I can't imagine that any other articles on /. are under half the scrutiny as Katz's are. Ooh, he missed the P on the keyboard by a centimeter! Let's burn him at the stake!
I seem to have discovered an example of conflict of interest between corporation and university:
A doctor recommended Terbinafine to kill toenail fungus. I did some research about this drug on the Internet, and discovered that the university research was funded by the drug company which makes Terbinafine.
Research showed that even small quantities of this drug kill fungus. The drug is fungicidal, not just fungistatic. The drug has a half-lifetime in the body of 200 to 400 hours.
However, the conclusions of the research were that the drug should be taken in doses of 2 capsules a day for months. The drug company sells Terbinafine for about $7 US per capsule.
It is unsettling to realize that the research was paid for by a company which has a strong financial interest in the results of the research.
(Futurepower is a trademark.)
Don't forget who is doing a lot of the research work, STUDENTS. How much are they getting paid? Next to nothing compared to their industrial counterparts (at my university there is a pay cap at $14 an hour for students, and I keep ramming my head against it). We have all heard stories about professors taking advantage of research assistants (delaying graduation, etc). Imagine how immoral it is to use students in this way for commercial gain.
You have to realize that in many professions a student NEEDS to do research to be advance in the market place. I had a roommate studying microbiology. He had to TRY OUT so that he could VOULENTEER for the research lab. Why? Having the lab on his resume would significantly increase his chances of getting into medical school (same goes for TA's in his major, they are unpaid volunteers).
Luckily the computer science major isn't that bad (nobody would dream of working for free), but we are always hit over the head by $14 hour pay cap.
I am in an interesting position. I am both a professional and a student. I did work in a research lab for a year and a half, but if I knew my work was going to be sold by the university for a profit (and not given to the public for the good of mankind) I would not have tolerated the low pay.
Selling the work of those who NEED the time in the lab (microbiology majors) is nothing more than profiting from slave labor.
This essay cuts directly to the heart of an important issue that is often well below the awareness level of the average citizen. Daily I am confronted with reports of thus-and-such findings in some poll or some study in my newspaper, on the television, on the radio. As an academic, I am prone to dismiss these things out of hand as probably belonging more to the class of "paid advertising" than "robust research". Even though I am well aware of the increasing inroads of Corporate America in universities, I find myself assuming that if the study has been conducted by members of the academic community it is ensured to be objective. In this light, I think that the author provides a service in reminding us all that we must be careful in assessing the reliabilities of reported results from any sources, not just the popular media.
The best point of this article is buried deep within the text:
"Technology and corporatism are a particularly lethal combination,even more so when applied to competitive and money-hungry institutions like academe. That was a world where technology and research were supprted for their own sake and for the larger public good."
It is critical to note that over the period discussed in this piece (late 70s - late 80s), the money provided in terms of government and public support for universities declined sharply, especially with respect to major state research institutions. Reduced cash flows from these previously stable sources had to be replaced somehow, if the organizations were to survive. Universities had a large supply of competent and enthusiastic researchers and a demand for funds. Corporations brought the cash to the table, and wanted the benefits of high-powered researchers without the expense of maintaining them in-house. In economic terms, this is the proverbial Match Made In Heaven.
Is it appropriate to criticize universities for buying into this deal, or to criticize corporations for providing it? It may be better, instead, to direct one's attention to the governmental policies that catalyzed the cash-crunch in the first place. The People elect lawmakers according to policy preferences; the People, ultimately, are responsible for this situation.
I note, as an ironic aside, that at my institution, the influence of the corporate pressures on research are far more prevalent in the sciences than they are in the business school
I work at Columbia University in one of these groups Katz appears to be talking about. We have had revenue generating copyrighted and patented material in my department since 1993, so this is nothing new. The only thing that's new is the amount of money being collected.
Most of the point of this article is irrelevant, though, and betray's Jon's lack of perspective on this idea of money-making. Most scientists toil in obscurity for years, and their work is never recognized by anyone outside of a small clique of their peers. It is a rare project indeed that is funded based on it's potential to make money.
On a three-year grant, most projects create no usable output for 2 years and 10 months. It is only in the last two months that anything remotely resembling a marketable idea/commodity/process is generated. And once the project is completed, who cares if the university sells it for money?! That only generates more cash flow into the institution to fund more new research! That is much better than relying on the whims of institutions like the NSF, NEA or NEH, which are subject to political influences, as we should all well know.
Until and unless there is a large portion of research undertaken solely based on it's potential profitibility (and I strongly assert this is not the case now), universities are well within their bounds of intellectual property creators to feel entitled to profit from their investments.
And since the market only pays for things which are useful (arguable point?), the university is only going to profit from things that benefit a large number of people, after all...
The greatest thinkers of the 20th century were all from the 1st half of the century - Einstein, Bohr, Turing, Godel, Wittgenstein, Ramanujan. There were many more educated people in the 2nd half who were better fed, had better health care and more opportunities and freedom to do whatever they wanted to, yet I can't think of one who has the stature of any of the six mentioned. (Feynman? Hawkings? .... no ) Why is that so? Is it because all the really big, tough problems and ideas have been figured out or is that all those people who could potentially provide mankind with the profoundest insights have been distracted by the intrusion of popular and commercial culture? Surely there must be some pretty awesome minds among the billions of people around today. Could it be that they are all busy writing software, designing microprocessors, identifying and patenting genes and looking out for stock options to be bothered about tensor geometry, number theory and epistemology? Have the cultural conditions that nurtured Einstein and Godel disappeared forever?
If these are not the people responsible for identifying the dangers and risks of the modern world, then who?
Read 'The Kept University' if you couldn't stomach Katz's take on it. This is SERIOUS, dammit. Even ignoring the concerns over wholesale destruction of the cooperative spirit in scientific research, public health matters, and the stats are freaking chilling. "More recently, an analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that studies of cancer drugs funded by pharmaceutical companies were roughly one eighth as likely to reach unfavorable conclusions as nonprofit-funded studies.". Read this stuff! This matters. It's not okay to suppress risk information...
One only has to look as "scientific research" to see that Universities have never been rich. This "independent" research has depended on outside corporations handing out large sums of money. And whoever pays the piper picks the tune.
Some examples, for you:
- Much "independent" research on tobacco has been
paid for by... tobacco companies.
- Much research on what foods are healthy has
been sponsored by... large produce growers and
large agricultural re-sellers.
- Much research on nuclear safety has been paid
for by... the nuclear industry.
The list goes on. Do you think these "benevolent" corporations all handed over wheelbarrows of that green stuff, purely out of the goodness of their own hearts? Get real! It was to allow them time on news shows to invalidate any real concerns that had formed.(BSE in America? You must be joking! The cattle ranchers have only our best interests at heart...)
Money really IS the root of all evil, and blaming corporatism for simply continuing down a road that had been made when the British Empire was still a futuristic dream, and Latin was the most widely spoken language in the Old World. Stop the Blame Game and Start trying to figure out how to stop this continuing devastation!
What good does pointing fingers do? When you get right down to it, when you point one finger at "the bad guy", you're pointing THREE fingers back at you.
No, blaming "Corporatism" for taking advantage of the obsession with green scraps of paper (which is all Capitalism really is, anyway) isn't an answer. At the very least, there needs to be something in it's place. Some kind of "utopia", where the "deserving" are rich and everyone else is on the streets is simply Corporatism from a different angle.
What, then, =IS= the answer? I doubt there is any one single, simple answer. Instant Solutions are like Instant Mashed Potato. Sure, you only need to add water, but it still tastes like regurgitated cardboard with sawdust seasoning.
The best I can come up with is to say that humanity needs to ditch it's obsession with money. As a form of simplified bartering, it served it's purpose. But some resources are dangerously out of balance, now. Human-caused extinctions of entire species of flora and fauna are now so frequent, the biosphere is likely to become unstable within one, at most two, generations.
Then, there are other resources which are so plentiful in principle (but throttled back in practice) that to deprive others of their use in an attempt to get rich is utterly pathetic and amoral.
(Decent education is one. The Internet is another. =CLEAN=, unpolluted water is a third.)
IMHO, those comodoties which are "universal" should be taken out of the bartering equation completely. The rest can be phased out over the next few centuries, as superior alternatives are found.
(We don't =have= any superior alternatives, because nobody with the money to really look for any has any interest in doing so, because to do so means to reduce their own elevated status.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Research for it's own sake is the only reason you are able to read the page you just posted.
It is the only reason that you can drive your car.
It is the only reason we have big shiny airplanes.
Research for it's own sake is what truely DRIVES INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY. Without it, we are left with nothing more than last year's crap with a pretty new face. If you have ever worked at a company without a REAL research budget, you will know what I mean.
Business men are not the smartest in the bunch, they are the most greedy. They have to be told far too often the implications of the technology they promote, and if they can't show a profit from something from day one they don't want to hear about it. Nothing gets accomplished in an evironment like this. Nothing.
The "american dream" in this country has not only been destroyed, but it was auctioned off to the highest bidder. No longer can you do anything for the love of it, no longer can you be an individual without being asked "how much can you make off that".
The copper bosses killed you, Joe. 'I never died', said he.
To all but Katz such statements border on the self-serving and reflect unpardonable amnesia.
Is there anyone who doubts that the economic interests of the United States (and of other countries) haven't consistently influenced their foreign and domestic policies? From the rationales for British imperialism in the 19th century, to the arguments *for* slavery by southern plantation owners in the 19th century US, politics has always reflected the economic interests, and supporting morals and mores, of the ascendant economic elite.
I don't mean that *everything* in politics has been derived from an economic imperative (an invisible hand?!), but most big decisions have. Academic institutions have helped, in the past, to reproduce knowledge and social institutions that supported existing hierarchies of power and privilege. Rather than being apart from economic and globalizing trends they are a critical enabler of them.
ELITISM: It's always lonely at the top. Uninvited company is rarely welcome.
The point of research is to develop technology for the good of society, right? So what's wrong with combining that with capatalism?
Let's take the American Medical Association as an example.
What would happen if, say, a generalized cure for all our physical ailments were developed (e.g. nano-facilitated medical immortality)? Suddenly there is no more disease or death (save accidental, violent, or suicide). The need for doctors is diminished to almost nil, save for the occasional accident victim.
Would the AMA push for approval of such a technology, knowing it would put most of their membership in the unemployment line? Or would they delay, possibly even bury, such a breakthrough to maintain their own profession? To suggest the former is to stretch credibility beyond any reasonable bound, while to suggest the latter, unpleasant, possibility, conjurs unpleasant memories of similar actions in other industries which have already been documented.
Many arguments (of varying veracity: some quite compelling, most not) have been put forward that the medical establishment has already buried cures for various ailments which are more profitable to treat than to cure. True or not, it does point to the disturbing fact that there is a hideous amount of financial incentive not to cure many diseases.
A flagrant real-world case of abuse is the criminalization of marijuana. A natural substance with medical and practical non-medical uses (paper, rope, textiles) has been outlawed in no small part to protect certain business interests (the cotton industry, the wood-pulp industry, and more recently the pharmaceutical industry).
In Normal, Illinois teenagers convicted of possession of marijuana were enrolled in manditory treatment centers, where many were then diagnosed with depression (what teenager wouldn't be, especially after getting "busted" and having their life turned upside down by the authorities?), and required to take anti-depressents. An exchange of a relatively innocuous substance for an addictive and very potent psychiatric drug!
Clearly, pharmaceutical profits were being protected at the direct expense of the good of the people. Is it reasonable to believe this is the only occurance of such abuse by this one industry? I don't think so. I suspect this is the tip of the iceberg -- how many penecillin-esque wonder drugs have simply been buried, because they would undermine the profitability of other, well selling product lines? Since we are privy to so little privately funded research, we may never know.
Do you honestly believe research conducted by private, for profit groups, is going to be anywere near as open and accessible to public scrutiny as research funded today by public institutions such as the National Science Foundation?
I would submit that recent history demonstrates the opposite: corporations with existing business models will, on average, find it more profitable to bury their own research than change their business models (which most breakthroughs generally entail).
While conducting public research does not eliminate this problem, reducing it (as was done in the 1980s) and eliminating it (which is the trend today) certainly makes the problem worse and the abuses both more chronic and more acute.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Katz's point is not that Columbia's administration has it in for geekhood, as your jab seems to imply. It's that there is a danger in tying the funding of an academic institution to a corporate agenda. I know that as an employee of a state university, I'm forbidden from officially endorsing any product (at least in the IT field), but I wonder if that would be the case if we became the Microsoft Information Technology Research Center.
Who told you that? The Science Fairy?
It's a running joke now, in the tech industry especially, that two competing corporations which comission studies on the same topic will come up with differing answers. Third party research which is funded by corporate entities is always suspect. Even in instances where no improper behavior takes place, such studies are often treated with skepticism just because of the possibility of bias. Witness the Mindcraft/Microsoft debacle of a few months ago.
For the most part, Katz is speaking less to direct funding of academe than academe's entrance into the corporate arena in its own right. And here, my own testimony is a bit suspect - we do what amounts to consulting services for money here (although we're salaried, and make considerably less than the average consultant). But I have to admit that part of me regrets the loss of the whole "ivory tower academia" stereotype.
The problem is that these are not necessarily compatible. The goal of capitalism is to make profit. That's all! All other goals (saving the whales, educating the children, cleaning the environment) are secondary to the goal of making a buck. Furthermore, this buck making is generally a very short sighted effort, looking to make money right now despite potentially dangerous long term impacts of the effort.
As the number of independent researchers diminishes, who is checking the work of these for-profit efforts. Certainly if they find out that there technologies are harmful they will do everything they can to cover it up. Non-disclosure agreements, bought off politicians, etc. Without some journalists and scientists out there asking the tough questions, free of a corporate leash, we may be in serious trouble.
Certainly there is nothing wrong with making money from technology, but there is something wrong when the independent voices challenging the impact of your developments diminishes. Furthermore there is something wrong when the amount of pure science research is being diminished by the drive for profit.
There are a lot of things in the Universe that are worth exploring on an intellectual level that are almost totally pointless at an economic level. Capitalism puts the immediate growth of profit margins above the long term growth of the human mind. What if all of the government and academic funded "pure science" research was scrapped in favor of money making technologies? Anything that doesn't have immediate applications or marketability (come see the wonders of the pharoas for a low low price of $25) wouldn't be touched.
---
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
One reason I've heard for this is that it prevents a student from submitting a single piece of work to multiple classes. I.e. if I write an essay about "Quantum Computing" I can't turn it in for a grade to my physics class and my comp.sci. class without permission from the instructors. It is perfectly reasonable for the university to try to prevent that type of thing, but it is not reasonable for the university to claim copyright over things I write as a student. I'm paying them, they're not paying me!
Another thing I think this is trying to stop is students selling good essays to be used by other students. I don't think that type of thing is very good, but the problem isn't the person selling the essay, it's the people fraudulently claiming they wrote the essay they bought. Why shouldn't I be able to publish my good essays that I wrote for class? They're mine.
We need to speak out against this abuse.
...if linus would have studied in a corporate run university where everything that counts is making money?
Sorry, Jon, but no institution has ever been free of the influence of the marketplace. Every institution collects money, buys things, and pays people. This has an effect on the marketplace, and inevitably the marketplace affects it.
Your nirvana never existed. You're wasting your time mourning its passing.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
At my school, Harvey Mudd College, corporatism is even integrated into the curriculum to some extent. Seniors in some of the "classic" disciplines like chemistry or biology still do research for theses, but computer science and engineering students are required to participate in at least a year of "clinic" for graduation.
Basically, these clinics involve teams of students becoming contractors of sorts for corporations. Clinic teams are given somewhere in the neighborhood of $35,000 to complete these projects, which are funded by companies such as DirecTV, Raytheon, TRW, and of course, Microsoft.
Based on the success of the clinic experience, the school is experimenting with initiating "entepreneurial clinic" where a team of students literally receives VC funding to start a company. They receive credit for this, but in addition, the school is made a partial owner of the company.
One of the visiting professors here a couple years ago spoke out against the clinic system, saying it was turning students into corporate slaves, but the trustees got rid of him. This past year's senior class made a move to have him as the commencement speaker, but the trustees went with someone else instead.
I see no sign of the clinic system here abating, and expect it to catch on at other universities in the near future as well.
John C. Polanyi. Excerpt from the keynote address to the Canadian Society for the Weizmann Institute of Science, Toronto June 2, 1996.
It is the research for the sake of science, not technology, that pushes uncharted boundries that has the potential to return with the largest benifits to society. By standing on the basic building blocks of the universe we live, in we can see and understand more of that universe. The pure research that is conducted to create solid foundations of understanding ultimately leads to building of that which is most benifitial to society. As a concrete foundation is to a building, pure scientific research for the sake of science is to practical scientific research.
Here is a good example:
Understanding in quantum mechanics allowed for the creation of instruments like electron microscopes and other high precision instruments. These intruments allowed for the discovery of DNA. The understanding of genetics allowed us to modify plasmids in bacteria to produce human insulin, which allows diabetics to live more normal lives. Technologies due to understanding in quantum mechanics also include televisions, computers, cat scans, etc... They are also leading to things like nano-technology.
There is research being conducted today that has the potential to revolutionize our society. Fields like high energy physics have great potential that hardly anyone sees. Through the understanding of the basic particles that make up all matter, and the fundemental forces that bind everything the ability to do great things for society arise. Discoveries in particle physics help out with research in fusion. With a better understanding of gravity we may be able to achieve interstellar space travel. The dicoveries made at high energies allow for a better understanding of how the universe was when it began.
Research in practical areas is good but I believe that Academia should spend more time working on that which could have the greatest impact, ie science for the sake of science.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
It's not news that academics are swayed by money. For literally hundreds of years, what research got done and what types of findings were generated has been driven by who pays (start with Christopher Columbus and other exploratory expeditions ... work through the North and South pole expeditions at the turn of the 20th century ... you get the idea).
I'm glad that Katz is talking about this, and has included the astronomical sums from Columbia as food for thought.
Anyone who kept their eyes open in college should know already about how the money flows. Big science research (where the grants go) have all sorts of equipment, new buildings, classroom space, faculty offices, etc. The places where grants usually don't go (the humanities, especially) are in the run-down buildings and the faculty are still using 386 computers. I work at a big-time research university, and see this every day.
There's still something "pure" about the intellectual climate at colleges and universities, and you're less likely (but far from unlikely) to be censored or fired for expressing unpopular thoughts. So, let's try not to get too cynical about universities that work to make a buck from their intellectual capital (aka, employees). Just keep your eyes open for the evidence that's easy to find for anyone involved with higher education.
how exactly is this worse than the cold war era, when the majority of research at our major universities was funded by the "military industrial complex"?
--
All the "examples" you mention have _nothing_ to do with research. They simply concern student lifestyles. While that may seem important to students, I can't conclude from the evidence you provide that there is any effect on research.
:)
Pepsi may pay for a building, and that may bug you (as may the fact you can't get a Coke on campus), but the real issue is: has any researcher said, "Oh no! Pepsi gave us money! Forget basic research on topic X and let me work on topic Y which is more applied!"
If your purpose was to provide examples, try again
Because you're not a researcher. They don't go to their jobs so that you can feel that "phew! there is a place on earth that corporations can't touch!" Rather, they take on their jobs because _they_ find it interesting. It's their lives and their work. Don't be so presumptutious to think you can or should have any control over it up and above what you pay to them in taxes and/or tuition.
When they choose to go into academia, they face an opportunity cost: go to industry and make $$$ or stay with basic research and work on more _interesting_ problems.
But as basic research finds applications, the equation changes: they can easily switch to private industry and still do the same things they like. Or, they can spin off a company. Or, they can seek corporate dollars. Or, the liscence their patents.
I don't think the outcome is grave or dangerous. Academia is still filled with thousans of people who have a Katzian hate of "corporatism". There will always be people who _want_ to do basic reserach because it is much more interesting than anything they would do in industry. And as long as they can get their hands on research grants, life goes on.
If, on the other hand, the government research grants are augmented by private-sector research funding, who loses?
I would argue there is a benefit.
As people who _want_ to be more applied get their funding from corporate sources, there is less competition for government (read: tax-payer supported) funding for more "pure" research.
If played right, this could be a win-win situation.
Yeah, you're right. This is why governments and corporations suppressed the polio and measles vaccines -- because it would have dramatically lowered cases and taken away something for them to treat. How could we have missed such a vast conspiracy.
(The truth is that curing a disease is a much bigger and more complicated problem to tackle than is treating symptoms).
There is nothing wrong with that. The problem is when the people (corporations) that fund research get to decide which research project will get funded. Even this works OK when the funding entity has a "good" motive (wealthy person whose spouse died of cancer funds cancer research), but the problem is that there are a lot more wealthy and greedy people than there are wealthy and altruistic people (not researched, merely observed).
Mobil isn't going to fund a university that researches methods of eliminating oil from the world's energy supply - it's not in their best interest. This type of research IS in the world's best interest, but not the oil company's.
There is no financial reason for people like Einstein or Hawking (or Dirac or Bohr or Tesla or Feynman or ...) to be able to pursue their research, at least not in the near term. These "pure research" people need funding just as much as (or more than) the people researching the best way to make a supercomputer (a lucrative proposition).
The other problem with corporate or government funding is that there is ALWAYS an "ulterior" motive for the funding: NASA gets funding because the Air Force wants to become the Space Force, The internet is developed because the DOD wants a research and military data infrastructure (ARPANET), etc. As an offshoot of this type of funding, we get trips to the moon and pure scientific data from Voyager and other space probes (and the internet :).
It is easy to see where Corporate America and Political America screw the people. In the case of news, we have the excellent example of US television covering the 1996 Olympic Beach Volleyball Quarterfinals (where the Americans were playing), and not broadcasting the Soccer Gold medal competition where top-ranked Argentina lost to the basically unknown Nigeria because the US had already been eliminated. This type of reporting happens all the time - the major news services are not interested in bringing us the news - they are interested in selling more newspapers with something like the OJ hype or the Lewinsky "issue", while there wars going on around the world. That isn't news reporting, it's selling more potato chips to Americans who couldn't care less about the rest of the world.
- The Sigless Wonder
The line the University held to, and still holds to, is that NCSA's job is to research new technologies, not to market them as business products. Once Mosaic was deemed a success, they gave licensing rights over to a separate company (Spyglass) and got back to researching other technologies.
Maybe it's time to stop worrying about how to induce understandably apathetic Americans to vote and to simply start selling stock in the Corporate Republic itself.
Well, you can't get equity, but you can buy debt if you want to invest in your country (too bad the returns are so-so. Of course, the risk is pretty much damn near zero too..).
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Let me begin by saying that I am a student at Columbia University, and that I fully support their decision to profit from patents and other intellectual property. Your opposition to this, I think, reflects a poor understanding of the nature of scientific research.
Columbia's engineers work hard to develop useful, even marketable products, and the fact that these products are useful and marketable is a testament to Columbia's success -- not evidence that they have "sold out." What's more, this money can go to other useful causes, such as student financial aid, or to fund less-profitable research in other fields, such as history, or sociology, or pure mathematics (which I am paid to do).
It's not as though Big Evil Corporation (TM) calls up the office of Columbia's president and says: "Quick, we need some research and statistics from the Chemical Engineering department to support our evil, corporatist, anti-geek agenda!" Scientific research isn't like that. It's based on facts -- you can't just magically come up with results to support your personal agenda. In that way, it's quite different from journalism, don't you think?
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Yes, Jon, these institutions have all too often served to check freedom and prosperity. Fortunately, freedom and prosperity have succeeded in overcoming these checks, at least in the US, and we are now mostly free and mostly prosperous. However they still exist, and they would still like to check freedom and prosperity. I'll do my best to stop them. Won't you? Vote Harry Browne in 2000!
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Recently there have been reports about how hard it is for schools to retain professors in the technology sector because many professors could be making tons more money if they were in the workforce developing patents for companies and actually working to create new products.
How do you propose getting around this problem?
Have you ever thought about how a school can get their tuition costs down, while at the same time attracting top-notch professors away from lucrative positions?
One of the ways that a school subsidizes their expensive labs to teach students in is to make their departments more like co-ops; where a professor and his students work to develop a theory, technology, etc. with the end product being something that is patentable and able to generate more revenue to fund the school. Many private schools rely on this so that the can continue to attract the brightest people to their "Center of Learning"
Of course they are relying more and more on this revenue generation... but isn't it better to rely on this than to make tuition more expensive than the majority of students can afford? Do you want higher education to become more and more the education of the wealthy and elite?
By having the goal become a patent in some cases, a school can generate money to subsidize the giant costs of running a private institution.
Of course people are going to argue for public colleges, but public colleges do the same thing because their costs are even more complex. They are required to give in-state tuition at a lower cost so that they can receive money from the state government, however these federal grants are often less than required. Also, as we've approached a period where a college education is becoming more and more required for higher paying jobs, there is a need to keep these costs down for a large population. Without more federal subsidies (that are deducted from YOUR payroll), how do you propose reducing these costs?
Many posters have been crying "what's wrong with formerly starved researchers making a little money?"
Well, instead of researchers, let's put in the words:
artists
politicians
judges
journalists
policemen
teachers
doctors
You could easily make the same argument for any of them getting paid more for the work they do, and perhaps doing more work because of it.
But if we value the work of these professions only in terms of money, the value of their work diminishes: it's not as honest, as challenging, as self-sacrificing, as useful, as impartial, as thorough when it is done in an atmosphere where its value is set only by who finds it valuable.
Think about it. What's worth more money? A report on how product X kills, or a report on how product X grows hair on your scalp? If the makers of product X can't pay for the report, it's a toss-up. If they can, it's a slam-dunk that they'd pay well for the good news, and pay even better to suppress the bad.
There's another element here: competition for scarce resources. The universities are conveniently NOT part of the corporations that are providing funding, so that they can claim credibility, or at least plausible deniability. Rather they are sub-contractors, looking for the customers with the deepest pockets, and eschewing the research that is just costly overhead, or even merely low-margin.
Don't underestimate this later point. Think about the harm to all of us from the fact that the best:
researchers
artists
politicians
judges
journalists
policemen
teachers
doctors
serve the communities and individuals with the most money, and the worst of these professions serve those of lesser means.
What matters is not that we keep these professionals poor. What matters is that they work for values other than money, and that we avoid systems like the one brewing at universities that punishes professionals that attend to anything other than money.
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
This isn't about the Corporate Republic - instead, it's the early Free Market pioneer's dream. We have systems that prevent abuses of the market - Microsoft, for instance. Our judicial system decides on these. In the meantime, that which can be sold, will be sold - it's simply an extended bartering. It fosters intellectual growth, and encourages new product development. Ultamitely, people will buy what people want; and the corporations will make what the people want. If jorunalism is what the people want, the corporations will make that. And note the plural - because of that, we can have several voices in the marketplace. Indeed, this is the dream of the early Free Market pioneers.
Free BeOS, runs from a Linux partition
What disturbs is that as more and more Universities cash in with corporate sponsorship, students are being looked at more and more as customers by their universities. And I DON'T mean as customers receiving the unviersities' product, their college education, I mean as consumers of the university sponsors' goods.
An example, since I enrolled in the University of Maryland at College Park in 1998, the university has gained endorsements from Pepsi, Rebok, and most recently our school bookstore was bought out by Barnes and Nobles. On top of that, students who live on campus are going to start receiving Comcast cable, and will be billed for it whether they use it or not.
While Katz was bemoaning Universities getting paid for research, I must agree with the numerous other posters who said that this was not the true problem. The true problem is that universities have started to exploit their captive audiences. When you can no longer buy both Coke and Pepsi on campus, and Barnes and Noble is the ONLY store to carry your textbooks, and you can't walk to class without being accosted by numerous people trying to solicit you with credit card offers, there IS a problem. We are starting to lose that free market that our country was supposed to be built on. Certainly, demands for low cost higher education have caused universities to look for alternative sources of income, but people don't seem to realize the impact these corporate sponsors can have. If nothing else, Universities SHOULD be encouraged to make money off of their research rather than resorting to milking the students like cash cows.
The other benefit is that it teaches the grad students and other who work on the project a lot more than just how to program a robot to recognize who it's talking to, it teaches them how to develop a product, talk with corporate sponsors, and "sell" a proposal. This is very valuable if these students or professors leave acadmia.
In my last semester, I was part of a research project that was 66% sponsored by a private company, and 33% sponsored the the "Pennsylvania Infrastructure Technology Alliance" and the 12 students in this course got to not only apply their skill as engineers, but learned how to give a proposal, conduct cost-benefit analysis, etc, etc. This was probably my most valuable course as an undergrad for that reason.
Academia is just trying to find the happy in-between. They want the public to see the benefit, and the students toget a benefit, while still being able to conduct new and innovative research. I think they're doing a good job.
-nosilA
You can't be too surprised that universities get jealous when they see their ideas make people multi-millionaires and they don't get a penny. There was a project here at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign called Mosaic a little while ago. The project leader graduated and then founded a new company designed on the project, which became Netscape. The university now keeps tighter reign of their "intellectual property". According to their policies, if a student uses university computers for a personal project, the university owns the rights to all the work done. Something to think about.
How is this much different from the old system in which researchers produced potentially flawed technology and biased research in the name of tenure and standing? Academic institutions have always been very politicly and econmically motivated places, it is just that htth were previously "donated" to by large companies and the government rather than working in active partnerships. While certainly there is a paradim shift here, I do not think it as servere as is made out in this article. We are simply seeing a formalization of relationships and conditions that have exist for a long time.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Here's a story about potential conflict's of interests for professors. It involves Prof. Leighton, an MIT prof who's research led to Akamai.
The issue of how patents are handled at universities is also an issue at MIT. Currently, as I understand it, MIT's patent department assists students in obtaining patents in return for a percentage of any income derived from those patents. A view on this was expressed by Prof. Bose (yes, that Bose =) in a guest column in the school newspaper.
A recent partnership with Microsoft (!)brought up more discussions about MIT's role and how the many partnerships with industry affect MIT's goals. (I can't seem to find the articles that popped up about it, though :(
Here's an old one by "Drexel University professor Noble, formerly an assistant professor in MIT's Program in Science, Technology and Society".
IMHO, I don't think industry ties are entirely bad. Like anything else in the world, there are pros and cons. Obviously, as these ties become closer, ethical issues arise, and there isn't a clear resolution to this problem. Unless you make the professors and students choose between academia and industry. The Media Lab is an example of how industry and universities can dovetail successfully. AFAIK, corporations provide funding to the Media Lab as a whole. Then, if they see anything they like, they can take it in house and develop it to their own desires. As a result, the Media Lab receives a huge influx of funding, and is thus able to research things that may or may not have an obvious commercial value. But cool things come out of there all the time. (i.e. Lego Mindstorm was developed there).
The campus became a regular campsite for companies trying to hawk their products. For example,
- Glamour Magazine was allowed to set up a tent on the illustrious Lawn, hawking products, trying to enlist subscribers, scouting for models, selling poor self-image.
- Football fields and buildings, and renovations (and benches and tables and lightswitches) were named in honor of donors, as usual, but the donors were moving in corporate directions. The main building of our Darden School of Business is called the Pepsi Forum (it's should be no surprise that you can't get Coke in there).
- I first spotted the Reebok logo appearing on our football players in my third or fourth year, although it had probably been there all along; perhaps they increased the size.
(I'm sure there are more examples I've forgotten.)I don't think Katz adequately addressed the issue of why corporate sponsorship is a problem. In my opinion, such contributions are like the system of patronage that strangled the painting world for many years (and continues to, I believe). You can't really bite the hand that feeds you and then expect another bite. I think it is safe to assume that research at UVA is not going to suddenly announce that caffeine and sugar combine to form toxins that eat your brain... Such systems dilute the value of the research, and also direct it away from "pure research" (as opposed to profit-research) which tends to lead the way in advances that actually help society.
(Incidentally, UVA hosts one of the two crash test research centers that use actual human cadavers in the car; the other is the University of Heidelberg... "Hey, those aren't dummies!")
Every few days, the Katz machine churns out another big chunk of crap, weaving whatever is upsetting the geeks into some great conspiracy involving the "Corporate Republic". What exactly is he trying to acheive?
Oh no! Napster got shut down! "Blame the corporate republic".
Oh no! Somebody's sponsoring a University! "It's all the fault of money! Be communist!"
Oh no! Some mad kids went and shot a load of people! "Blame closed source!"
He's like a UFO spotter or some other kind of lunatic conspiracy theorist - nothing but hot air, and an inablility to see how unreasonable he sounds, all the time.
Frankly, it's dull. It's boring. It's the same crap every week. The reason nobody plays "Guess what Katz wrote this week" is that the game is far too easy.
And, like most Americans, he concentrates entirely on what's going on within the borders of his little country. One day, he might actually realise that there's a whole world out there which doesn't care about what goes on in the United States of Overinflated Egos.