Slashdot Mirror
MIT Media Lab Tightens Its Belt
Forbes Magazine has this story about the MIT Media Laboratory's current "burn rate" problem. It seems that the Media Lab is feeling the same big draft at its posterior that dot-com companies felt last year after years of go-go growth and seemingly unlimited funding. The Media Lab is particularly sensitive to this downturn due to its heavy reliance on corporate sponsorship, as well as its fondness for unconventional, even eccentric, research. Items that will no longer receive funding according to a January 5th internal E-mail from the Lab's Executive Director Walter Bender: cellular telephones, first-class air travel, food at internal Lab meetings, and furniture. Other more serious cutbacks for the Lab include layoffs for 29 staff members and reduced funding for students, including salaries for "Undergraduate Research Opportunities" (UROP) positions. The Media Lab had previously paid such positions $8.75 and up in order to remain competitive with industry offers that even not-yet-graduated students were receiving.
Assuming that is per hour - it is still a paltry sum.
I believe even Taco Bell pays it slaves $9/hr.
I'm a 2000 man.
$8.75 per hour huh? To some of the brightest minds in the world? I say cut the stupid first class travel, cut the nice office equipment, but save that salary. These "kids" are cutting edge innovators.
Imagine if something like this had happened to the folks at Bell Labs? Even with all the layoffs Lucent had, business there went on pretty much as usual. Throughout history, the true innovators were rewarded for their knowledge, not penalized for something they didn't really have anything to do with. Poor spending is poor spending, but save the salaries...
I expect to hear from people on my innovators of history part, but bear in mind I said most....
thanks
Sent from your iPad.
Having used many of the papers and ideas that came out of media lab as jumping off points for my own research, any cut back in their research will impact many others outside their doors. However, the loss of perks is just aligning them with the rest of the world.
The scariest part is the layoff of the staff. I hope that these weren't specifically research assistants (instead of admin staff). RA's (often unrecognized for their efforts) usually complete the necessary but inglorious tasks that really help get research done.
-- The Hollow Man
Non illegitimati carborundum
Many people think that it's a typo...it's not. The MIT Minimum Wage is basically ~$8/hr...Meida Lab UROPs got paid a little more base starting salary. Hardly the small fortune the article makes it out to be, considering how much most could've gotten paid locally at some dotcom (esp., during the height of the boom).
Also, as a former Media Lab UROP, I can strongly state that the UROPs in the Media Lab were the BACKBONE of work in the Media Lab. Another misconception from the article is that they UROPs had "projects" that they circulate looking for funding that the Media Lab would fund. Couldn't be more wrong. The UROPs are/were more like contract programming labor hired to support/flesh out the theories of the grad. students/professors. Cutting such is going to be the hardest cut to make...
Opportunities Program appointment at MIT. It's always seemed
rather low to me. If you have a professor paying for your UROP appointment,
then he can give you more money, and I think a lot of profs will do that.
Keep in mind that this is undergrad student pay, and can be done during
the term. Plus you get to work with researchers, etc etc.
Slashdotters are starting to show the insular world they live in.
1. While the minimum wage in Massachusetts is higher than the national average, it is not anywhere near $8.75/hour. If you search the Commenwealth's web site, you will find it is $6.75/hour.
2. Baggers at grocery stores make nowhere near $15/hour! Do the math; that is $31,200/year. In the real world, you don't get paid that much for a job that can be done by teenagers after school.
UROPs are part-time jobs that allow students to get research experience and some pocket money. They aren't supposed to be something you are going to live off of.
A few weeks ago a friend of mine in the Media Lab mentioned to me that the shit was really hitting the proverbial fan because of the missing millions, and that layoffs and cutbacks were a result of this. So, as I understood it, the belt tightening was a direct result of this serious accounting mistake (oops) and not some nebulous result of the dot com slowdown.
M. Herper, the Forbes author, neglects to mention that he is, himself an MIT graduate (2 years ago) and apparently somewhat jaded. The article was full of inappropriately perjorative commentary. I graduated from the Media Lab within the past year. The Media Lab isn't perfect, but some corrections to Herper's hatchet job are in order:
Students have never flown first or business class as standard policy for trips. That mention referred to faculty. It is an MIT-wide policy that faculty taking flights longer than some limit (like 8 hours) may fly in first or business class, I forget which. I believe the lab's new policy is more conservative than MIT's, and previously was simply in line with the Institute-wide policy. They do travel a lot, and flying internationally in any class generally sucks. I can't begrudge them a little comfort. They aren't getting rich on their salaries.
The "top of the pay scale" that is mentioned with regard to UROPs tracks the MIT pay scale for UROPS - institute-wide. As far as I know the Lab paid no more than any other labs at MIT could pay their undergrads. And in Boston/Cambridge, $8.75/hr ain't much money no matter how you look at it. My undergrads were great, a bargain at most any price... you can't do complicated projects without a team.
Historically, Media Lab students have excellent track records of publication acceptance by journals and conferences. If you can't go to the conference to present a paper, then you can't submit the paper in the first place. It is very bad form not to attend. Students at other institutions, who don't get assistance and don't have personal wealth, don't go to conferences. And graduate students in many other programs outside MIT don't even deal with this problem because they never publish anything - at those programs, "publishing" is a privilege reserved for the faculty and senior Ph.D. students. I believe the lab's policy of helping people get to conferences was/is perfectly responsible. The faculty's emphasis on writing and publishing, even for new graduate students, is commendable. It's too bad that many students go through graduate programs without writing even one conference- or even workshop-quality paper. I hope that Media Lab students will be able to continue to submit papers and participate in the greater academic communities brought together at conferences. This is perhaps an area where analysis and planning could cut expenses, without harming academics. A personal track record of publications matters. Any organization that can help its researchers publish more, creates an advantage both for itself and for its people. Better questions to ask of all academic communities in general are "why are conferences so expensive for everyone?" and "are conferences the best venue for academic sharing?" (Answer: I'm told the ACM forbids its conferences from happening in any but the most expensive hotels - Hiltons and Marriotts)
"Limo" is a very loaded word. Generally if students travel by other than taxi or subway (sometimes hauling several road cases of gear plus clothes and laptop(s))... they don't take stretch Lincolns with televisions and bars, though that would be hilarious. This is talking about a car service with a driver... a high-end private taxi. This is not something that people used often. I did it a couple of times, both paid for separately by sponsors who asked me to come see them. It's actually cheaper and faster than a taxi if you do it right,. Personally, I usually took the subway to the airport ($0.85 and now $1.00) if I had time and wasn't hauling too much stuff. But if you're hauling gear, the three changes (red line, green line, blue line) and then the bus to the terminal are really too much to deal with. If the Lab's had a problem with travel, it's due to a failure to optimize and preplan, not largesse, at least as far as student travel is (generally) concerned. I can't address specific cases or faculty/research staff. I just know that I didn't see people going on junkets.
Food: I used to own companies. One thing I learned was that I could get people to work right through lunch AND dinner if necessary, if I fed them. The guy I worked for before that took care of my lunch from time to time, and I worked right through. From that perspective, I find it hard to argue that the lunches were a bad deal. When I last had a staff (pre-Lab), it was common for a half-hour or hour-long lunch to consume 50% more than the "official" time, given the pre-planning time ("where should we eat?") and the post-lunch restart delay of people washing up, and getting into gear to work again. All I'm suggesting is that if the funds are available, feeding your staff may actually be more economical than not feeding them. I'd argue the same for any dot-com that fed its people or paid for sodas during rush times, and all times are rush times at the lab. I was buying free soda for my staff back in 1991... it was much cheaper than selling it to them, and it made them happy. The cost was next to nothing - cans of soda in quantity are dirt cheap.
It's easy to pounce and have a strong reaction, but in the end what I saw at the lab was a lot of really smart people working very hard. Don't believe everything you read in Forbes, and don't believe everything published about the lab. The projects that are highlighted and played up by the press are sometimes the ones that make the prettiest pictures. Serious research, hard math, physics, thinking, sociological studies, all the serious and fun bits of science, technology and humanity don't necessarily photograph well, so you don't hear as much about them, even though the place is full of people doing great things.
Oh, and not every project is great. Some of them suck. Some of mine really sucked. But the good ones... are so damned good. The place was built for people to take chances, not to play it safe and hit one guaranteed home run after another... so a little slack there wouldn't hurt.
cheers
-"John Smith"
Yes, the Media Lab was a unique place, but even during my time at MIT (4 years ago already), it was considered an embarrassment by the majority of the MIT community. This is the place that could suck down $40 million a year and have only Lego Mindstorms to show off after a decade of work by the entire laboratory. This is the place that would hire fashion models to wear their wearable computer crap for the dog and pony shows they'd run to try to suck more money out of the industry suits. This is the place that would do non-novel, non-useful research as long as it looked cool and they could show it off to their corporate sponsors.
The majority of the research that was done at the Media Lab belonged in industry, and was of no academic significance (electronic ink being on of the few counter examples). The only real reason it was tolerated at MIT was 'cause the Media Lab brought in its own money (and a lot of it).
And no, HDTV was not created by the Media Lab, the EE department (Prof. Lim) worked on that.