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End of a Scientific Legend?
pacopico writes to mention the sorry state of the well-known Los Alamos National Laboratory. Sixty years ago, it was at the forefront of the race for the Atomic bomb. Nowadays, "smugness can breed complacency, and complacency carelessness. In recent years the laboratory has been in the news not for its successes but its failures.The result is a change of management, which the story goes on to discuss in great detail. It begs the question - can Los Alamos hang on as a prestigious place or is it too late for the supercomputing powerhouse and weapons lab?"
Remember, several of the labs (and I think Los Alamos falls into this group) are managed by Universities. And I just don't think those university administrators are really equiped to deal with managing a bunch of scientists whose IQ's are often very far above theirs, and who are sometimes willing to break rules and do end runs around them.
The college I went to many of the professors were famous in their fields and the admins were all just typical people. The things the profs would do to them (and while some were funny, some were pretty darn cruel) were often amazing. Yeah you might be a brilliant admin with an IQ of 110 or 120. But that 180 IQ professor is going dazzle you like you've never seen in your life and high end research is not a pursuit for the faint of heart! They're not just smart, they're often tough too!
I've heard some rather shocking stories from friends who work at two of the National labs that seems to bear this theory out.
I am probably one of the few people left who agrees with you, and this raises the question: isn't the meaning of a phrase determined in large part by its usage. If the majority of people use "beg the question" to mean "raise the question" then who are we to say it doesn't mean that. We don't need the phrase "it begs the question" anyways; you can always say "the argument is circular".
Philosophy.
How does Wen Ho Lee say anything about Bush? He was an issue in 1996, under Clinton.
Improper usage as a result of ignorance shouldn't determine the meaning of a word or phrase. However, struggling to teach proper usage to the masses is probably hopeless. They can't even figure out simple distinctions such as your/you're or there/their/they're.
It is important to remember that the government doesn't fund science because they like science (they don't). They fund it because it is submersible pork. If a politician gets on a podium and says: "we need to invest more money to make sure that our nation is the scientific leader of the world," who is going to oppose him or her? Additionally, other politicians look like jackasses when they oppose scientific spending: "so you don't care about America's future, eh?"
It is the same with military spending. But it should also be noted that submersible pork is also difficult to control. How does a scientifically illiterate Congress provide oversight for a complex, and perhaps obscure scientific or military program? They don't. They just assume that the scientists or generals are being honest with them.
This has lead to the current system in science where grants are given because of what scientists 'hope' to acheive. A scientist who is completely honest (and who rightly says "I don't know") will always lose grants because a scientifically illiterate Congress (and federal agencies with the same mindset) don't care for 'boring' research. Again, the same has occurred for military programs as well (which is why we have so many neat, but useless toys).
All of this has had the net effect of undermining the integrity of both the scientific and military research establishments. Hence, Los Alamos. And you are right, it wasn't started by President Bush. It was probably started around the time of FDR (when the pork industry really actually became an industry).
The other laboratories in the DOE complex have for years fought against the "Ugly Step Sisters" (as they are called complex wide) to get funding for real work within the scope of research assigned to them in their DOE mandates. Whenever research was to be done in a particular area that is the focus of a particular lab, (ie INL-Civilian Nuclear power and safety, NREL-electric/hybrid vehicles, etc etc), the step sisters would approach the customer of the smaller labs using their holier than thou smooze and steal the funding at a DOE headquarters level, and not deliver a comparable product in the end. LANL, LLNL, and Sandia are capable of this because of congressional backing; California has a huge and powerful amount of congressional representation. And, when the prior Clinton Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson became Governor of New Mexico, it only empowered these labs to hog funding and mission further having both the Californian interests from the University of California, and Campuses in California, as well as New Mexico in some cases, as well as the previous secretary of energy.
The slapdown of the "scientific legends" is a breath of fresh air for real science funding at smaller labs doing real science with real accountability because the smaller labs are too small to screw up without loosing funding catastrophically.
I am not sorry for the "ugly step sisters". If one of them is getting a whooping, and it is traceable to significant screwups (lets see, LANL had faked elements 116, 117, and 118 on the periodic table, mustangs purchased on company credit cards, significant breaches of computer and cyber security that went unfixed for years. etc . etc. ). Then let them learn and clean up their act so they can be a contributing and honest member of our DOE's scientific complex.
The Department of Energy's Scientific Budget should be for accountable science, not a government welfare program that funds bad scientists and the managers who employ them.
Anyone else remember anything along these lines?
This space intentionally left blank.
"The US has decided to abandon the Hubble telescope and allow it to burn up in the atmosphere, virtually abandon manned space travel, and divert most of the space research budget to militarizing space. Meanwhile the ESA is doing most of the space research and even China is launching manned missions."
You must not be aware of JWST or CEV, both of which are going at a surprisingly rapid clip. Your comments about the shuttle program and Hubble are amazingly misleading - there's lots of internal support at NASA for dropping the shuttles, and moving to CEV, and a similar sentiment for Hubble and JWST. In fact, the administration has been reasonably friendly to NASA in this time of budget cuts - compared to most other agencies, they took far less of a cut in the last budget. How do I know? I was working there until I left for my own personal reasons, none of which had jack to do with the administration.
Or, let me summarize: you have no idea what you're talking about in terms of NASA, and that makes me suspect your other comments are equally misinformed. Way behind? Right.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
And that is an elitest view. I'll make you a bet. I'll bet you that 200 years from now "begging the question" will have the meaning that was determined by common usage, not today's definition of correct usage. In fact, using the term "begs the question" by today's correct usage will be considered *incorrect*.
*NOTE: posted as an AC because it is a class C felony in the State of Washington to gamble or even provide gambling 'information' over the Internet.*
I worked at Sandia Natl Labs the last 3 summers, and heard lots of weird stories about people from Los Alamos. There was the guy who wore a cape everywhere, of course. There was also an individual who transferred from Los Alamos to Sandia (rarely do people transfer the other way), who could not get along with anyone, and did not last long. One of the researchers even initially worked at Sandia, transferred to Los Alamos, and then transferred back, saying the whole environment is just... off. Los Alamos is basically surviving on their history now. Their museum hasn't had much to add this last half a century; they mainly focus on the history of designing and testing the atomic bomb.
There's much more drama at these national labs than the general public might think...
Just because a handful of idiots don't know how to use a phrase properly doesn't mean it has "evolved" into a new meaning.
I always find it funny when people try to insist that they're right, and everyone else is wrong.
Like it or not, languages DO evolve. Not always in a rational way, and not always to your liking. In fact, more often than not languages evolve trough misuse rather than through a logical progression. You could argue that this sort of change is not "evolution" but rather a degradation of the language, and you'd be absolutely correct, but it wouldn't change the fact that when 90% of the population accepts a certain change, the language WILL change regaurdless of how you personaly feel about it.
It is impossible to tell just how bad the labs under the control of the University of California are or aren't. Its murky since its hard for anyone to peer inside high security facilities because thats what security clearance are for. Also much of the information coming out of them in recent years may be the Bush administration intentionally trying to make them look bad because they want to transfer their control to Republican friendly contractors or the University of Texas to pump billions of dollars in to his home state.
"administration-pleasing junk science and "imaginary weapons""
Unfortunately this is what you get out of governments whose top priority is delivering pork to contractors who happen to be big political supporters of the people in power (like Bechtel and Lockheed Martin). This is a disease that predates the Bush administration by a long ways, but the current administration has just taken it to new and breathtaking levels. Not sure the Bush administration really cares if it gets anything for the money, they are just delivering large quantities of our tax dollars or borrowed dollars(our deficit) in to the pockets of their friends. It has an important added political benefit of creating artificial stimulus in the economy and jobs by pumping large amounts of money and profit in to the private sector, and it makes the U.S. economy look a lot better than it is. The U.S. economy is becoming massively dependent on government spending since its one of the few parts of the U.S. economy that isn't being crated up and shipped to China and India. This massive government intervention in the economy used to be referred to as either Socialism (under FDR) or more like Fascism today. Its sad to see how the Republican's have tarnished the name Conservative. There is nothing conservative about them any more unless you qualify it with Social Conservative. Political and fiscal conservatives are for limiting government power, size and spending and that is the antithesis of today's Republican party so they are aghast at today's Republican party. Someone should make them, Limbaugh and Colter stop claiming the title, Fascist is a lot more accurate term its just a taboo term since World War II. Conservative != Fascist so stop claiming to be conservatives, you aren't.
The national labs, DOD weapons programs and satellite manufacturing are GREAT places to pump money in to the pockets of your friends because you can use the high security clearance, and "state secret privilege" to crush any oversight that might catch some of the fraud, waste, abuse and incompetence. A subset of Congress is the only body that can provide oversight but.....
There is an intereting article on the Christian Science Monitor today about Congress's feeble efforts to restore legal and financial oversight on the Bush administration and the DOD. I didn't realize it till this article but when the Republican's gained power in 1995 one of the first things they did in the House Armed Services Committee was disband the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. This subcommittee's role was to reign in the fraud, waste and abuse in the Pentagon. It was like they fired the last cop in town, and created open season for thieves. It is now quite clear why there is such rampant corruption in the DOD now. There is NO real Congressional oversight to stop it.
Harry Truman rose to prominence with the "Truman Committee" which basically performed this role during World War II and saved the country billions in fraud, waste and abuse.
Its a basic problem in the current government that the Bush administration and DOD is running amuck using 9/11 as an excuse and since they have control of all branches of the government there is NO oversight of anything going on. Congress has abdicated so much power to the Executive branch we really are teetering on the edge of a term limited dictatorship.
As a result we get Duke Cunningham, satellite programs billions
@de_machina
The underlying dynamic here is that the President and some of his friends would like to put the LANL and LLNL contracts (currently held by the University of California) in play, so they can be awarded to...the University of Texas.
This means that UC's administration of the labs must be made to appear incompetent.
I was just chatting tonight with a manager in one of the larger divisions at LANL who said that, all in all, not much has changed with the recent change in management. And speaking from personal experience (three years, on and off), the people at LANL today are doing science that is just as amazing - if not more so - as they at the Lab in it's "hey-day."
It turns out that, for government labs, any PR really isn't always good PR.
OK so New Mexico politicians will keep the lab alive (last paragraphs) and maybe biology research is the wrong field for a classified-capable facility's limited time. I'm glad to see they closed down and restructured based on at the least those two news story with the missing sensitive data and suspected spy. Hopefully the facility will acquire better utilization and purpose but in nuclear technology it's OK to be a backup as long as you're competent. IMO, the lab should continue to exist, not only to do the computational research, but most importantly to compete with the other two labs in the west and elsewhere because competition is important and should be especially encouraged with something as risky and complex as nuclear technology.