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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?"
smugness can also breed the urge to smell your own farts!
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
It's nice to see that their secrecy is still in effect.
Just last Monday, NPR's Fresh Air program featured investigative reporter Sharon Weinberger, who has just written a book titled Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underworld. In the interview, Weinberger breaks down how the US Military has gone from bad to worse in terms of science, rejecting even its own internal peer-review system (including the JASONs) in favor of administration-pleasing junk science and "imaginary weapons".
Of course, the problem isn't new -- she points out in the interview that the Clinton administration was just as quick as anyone else to slam the door on global warming results that didn't match their polices. And in fact, the first two-thirds of the interview are studiously neutral in tone. But by the end, after host Terri Gross and Weinberger have laid the factual foundation, the Bush administration comes out looking pretty pathetic. With the current administration's secrecy, paranoia (the Wen Ho Lee fiasco at Los Alamos gets particular attention), and general disregard for the scientific method, it's pretty clear that if Los Alamos falls, it didn't jump -- it was pushed.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
It does not beg the question. It raises the question. Begging the question is something else entirely and if you aren't 100% sure that you know exactly what it means you should probably never use the term.
Lasers Controlled Games!
smugness can breed complacency, complacency leads to carelessness. Carelessness leads to ... suffering
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Currently they are building a whole new generation of supercomputing. based on plan 9.
And its not meant to be funny.. Its the truth. When some in the community questioned v9fx support in the linux kernel as not justified due to few users the folks at Los Alamos told them as much.
Next generation folks. LANL. ORNL, it doesn't matter..
Stuff gets done. :)
Both Argonne and Fermilab may soon be going under a similar change in management.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
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.
It's of interest that when Google filter's search results in China, they were 'evil'. But a lab that developed weapons that vaporized 25,000 people in a few seconds is considered 'prestigious' and 'a legend'.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
For example, you could say "Only idiots would go to Wal-Mart," and "prove" it by saying "Everyone in Wal-Mart is an idiot".
Both statements are true. I don't know where you're going with this...
Having been for an interview at another nuke design place I can save the whole thing runs against everything I grew up to believe. I can't imagine they get the best scientists these days. Pictures of "community" next to pictures of Hiroshima don't exactly inspire in-line with any morals. The day the place falls into ruin is the day we have some intelligence
How about "no one goes to that resturant because it's always so crowded."
I'll show myself out.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
>Sixty years ago, it was at the forefront of the race for the Atomic bomb. Nowadays,
Anyone can build that kind of stuff in their garage.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Before anyone jumps on the "Descriptive Grammar" wagon; yes, I am very familiar with the descriptive grammar concept in linguistics.
But it is one thing to violate the "don't end sentences with a prepostion" rule, and another thing entirely to take a word or phrase which has a very specific and nuanced meaning and try to make it apply to another situation through simple ignorance.
The best example I can come up with in the computer field is how most knowledgeable people will cringe when someone calls the computer itself the "hard drive" instead of a tower, box, or just "computer". "Hard drive" means something very specific, and calling something else by that name makes it very difficult for people to communicate. Language is an agreement by two people to use the same or at least similar conventions to aid in mutual understanding. People violating those conventions by laziness or ignorance gum up the works for everyone else.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
The US has already fallen way behind in scientific research.
America scrapped its supercollider while the Europeans built their LHC at CERN, so Europe will lead nuclear research for at least the next 20 years. Europe and Japan are doing advanced medical research while the US cuts funding and asks if its ethical to use stem cells.
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.
Los Alamos losing its shine is such a minor thing compared to the rest of the US scientific community, it's barely worth noticing. The sad thing is by the time enough people notice the US is falling behind, it will be too late.
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.
I am staff scientist at another DOE lab and spent time at Los Alamos as a graduate fellow a few years ago. From the coverage in the media and from the comments of many politicians (many of whom stood to gain much if UC were to lose out in favor of universities/companies from their home state in the LANL bidding wars), one would think that Los Alamos was full of nothing but incompetence, dishonesty, and arrogance. That simply was not the case -- Los Alamos has had a very similar track record when compared to both other government labs and industry. This was pointed out in a very informative and insightful opinion piece that appeared in Physics Today:
http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-57/iss-12/p60.html
While Los Alamos has certainly had its share of fiascos, I think a lot of bad press they received was because 1) They are the most visible government lab, and 2) Many politicians hoped that if they could humiliate the lab management enough, someone from their state could end up with the (now extremely lucrative) management contract.
(Posted anonymously out of fear of DOE muckety-mucks)
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...
I grew up in Los Alamos. My dad worked there over twenty years until he retired. He retired because the culture there had gotten sufficiently unbearable and it wasn't worth putting up with because he could no longer do the kind of science he loved. He wasn't alone among experienced senior researchers there who were fed up and leaving. When the braniest town in the world has a brain drain, there's trouble.
Management by the University of California is possibly the best thing that ever happened to LANL. Whatever the mission given to LANL by DOE, it would be carried out in an academic culture. People were rewarded professionally and looked up to informally for doing good science and good research. Ok, it wasn't all utopia, there was also the petty politicking that goes along with academia and grant groveling. I still think it was good and a lot of good work was done there.
When I moved to California I discovered that some people here objected to the UC management of LANL. They didn't want to be associated with a nuclear weapons lab. I think that's wrong and that they were foolish if they thought that the UC disowning LANL would make it go away. LANL needs the UC because the alternative is too horrible. That has come to pass and now LANL is under joint management of UC and defense contractors. I've heard rumors that the mission changed from far out theoretical, pure and semi-pure research and shifted towards more immediate engineering of new weapons. The new regime is pushing security and secrecy to the point of paranoia and counterproductivity. For many scientists, it isn't fun anymore.
I don't expect LANL to evaporate within the next 5 years. There is still plenty there that doesn't suck. I do expect they'll have trouble replacing talent in some areas. I think it's not yet too late to restore the soul of the place and bring it back and do some world class science.
Start Running Better Polls
Well, now I'll go read the article!
or look at the pictures.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Los Alamos once had the tradition that the lab director had to have a Nobel Prize. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan appointed a lawyer. It's been downhill since then.
I'd hardly call VTK (Visualisation Toolkit) a failure. It's made my job a lot easier. It is a wonderful piece of software as well as all the bells and whistles of being an open source project. There is also something about the way they archive published papers that is apparently leading world. For a university/organisation to remain competitive, especially today, there is a lot of housekeeping involved before progress can be made. I congratulate Los Alamos. They seem to be doing a bang up job to me.
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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.
I for a moment thougth, that the title was refering to the /. story of Bill Gates stepdown from Microsoft.
In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.