Slashdot Mirror
British Government Slashes Scientific Research
asobala writes "The British Government has slashed the funding of scientific Research Councils by £68 million. The Research Councils most affected by this include the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, which has been hit by a £29 million reduction in funding, and the Medical Research Council, which is seeing a £10.7 million reduction in funding. The response of the BBSRC biological research council announces that the council will have to cut 20 new grants and reduce expenditure on new equipment."
Funding for the physical sciences (among others) in the United States has been facing a lot of difficulties lately as well. Failure of the congress to pass the new budget has caused a crisis in science funding from agencies such as the NSF and NIH that supply much of the money for taxpayer funded research in the states. This threatens to close major facilities*, delay new projects and leave thousands of government scientists out of work.
Concerned citizens are encouraged to write to their congressmen to not forget the cause of advancement in the US. Instead of bemoaning the loss of the US edge in the sciences , speak up!
It seems hardly a coincidence that the US and UK are allies in the misguided Iraqi Invasion, as well as the fight against adequate science and research funding. With all the money diverted into these misguided efforts, no wonder science funding is suffering all over (There's only so much of it to go around!)
* Example from the nytimes.com article:
"Among the projects at risk is the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, on Long Island. The $600 million machine -- 2.4 miles in circumference -- slams together subatomic particles to recreate conditions at the beginning of time, some 14 billion years ago, so scientists can study the Big Bang theory. It was already operating partly on charitable contributions, officials say, and now could shut down entirely, throwing its 1,069 specialists into limbo."
68 million pounds buys a lot of surveillance cameras.
68 million British pounds = 133.17800 million U.S. dollars
google is your friend!
Intelligent design would win!
Where/how can I see what money is being spent on what? Isn't every public grant of research money supposed to be viewable online by now?
..so if you know yours tell me.
Yeah I am asking about every country
Pure science can't really fund itself. Applied science does fine, because applied scientists can turn their science into products and services.
I don't respond to AC's.
And please pay close attention to the 3.4bn value halfway down. This is not a "slash" in the budget, its simply the government calling back some of the buffer money thats left at the end of the year. It will have an effect, and some people may be out of funding as a result, but lets not blow it totally out of proportion. With luck some of that money that was previously "wasted" in Rover might make it into future science budgets...
I.....if that's sarcasm then fair enough, don't really see it as that funny but we all have different senses of humour. If not...I think you need to improve your general knowledge.
I guess the upside of them not doing an equivalent tax cut is that it is yet another example showing the system is not sustainable over the long term. When people can see quite plainly they are paying more and getting less in return they will (hopefully) notice what a leech government is.
I always cringe when I read something that sounds like it has been taken from a red top tabloid - "slashed". I almost expected the byline to read "phew what a scorcher!".
As for the story - it is due to the DTI having to pay extra costs as a result of the UK car manufacturer Rover going bust. It is not some vast cutback, and the
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6384499.stm
BBC story give a far more sensible view that the summary does. It is a 1 year cut due to an overspend, and will be restored (with an increase on top of it) next year. I am no fan of the current Labour government and their lying ways - but they are sensible enough to realise that increasing funding in science and turning the UK into a "knowledge based" economy is not only one way for the future - it is the *only* way.
Apparently we've got to buy some more nuclear missiles from the USA to replace our old ones (or is that hire from some US company, I can never remember).
The money's got to come from somewhere!
Ignorance is Strength! (TM)
So is the U.K. filling up with radical militant Christian future terrorists (Evangelicals) pushing intelligent design bull too?
In any case, looks more like budget tweaking compared to the overall budget then a mass cutback.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Drat, that inconvenient "context" thing comes in and totally screws the whole story. I suppose I could blame the editors, but we all know how useful that would be. I know, I'll blame our pathetic educational system, yeah :)
You can't get past the first sentence of the summary without having these big questions pop into your head. At least if you have any critical thinking ability whatsoever.
Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. (Isaac Asimov)
I'm a fan of getting the State out of science entirely[...]
That would be because you're an ideological fucktard who values a 'political belief system' more than the vast social and economic gains humanity has seen through government sponsored pure research. Government funded research paid to develop the very tool you're using to post endless (usually offtopic) screeds about 'anacrocapitcalism.' Not that you'll see the irony.
With all of the paranoia being caused by jobs being shipped to other countries, I don't see how this is going to help things any. One of the job areas that has been staying in the US/UK is the research and development market. Many companies are keeping their research here and moving their production facilities to other countries. With the surge in scientists and engineers that China and Asia are producing it would be a small wonder if companies didn't start moving their R/D facilities out as well. If there aren't any incentives for people to become engineers/scientists here (through cutting in research funding or cutting in education grants) then we could start losing more jobs to other countries, some of our higher-paying, technical jobs.
Does anyone know, is that 29 million cut for the EPSRC higher because they get more money in the first place, or are they specifically cutting back more on Engineering?
Since when did stupidity become fasionable on Slashdot?
You have no idea what this research will lead to directly, or indirectly via supporting technologies. If funding bodies were as short sighted as you, you wouldn't be here now since the web wouldn't exist. It was developed as a supporting technology at a particle accelerator (CERN).
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I have a question, and I mean this in all seriousness -- it's not an attempt to troll you, or flame, so please read it as such.
It's a question I don't quite know how I'd answer, and I'm interested in your take on it: if you're doing something in the "pure" science realm, which has NO practical / applied value to anybody, except scratching a scientists' itch to "know" something... does that really justify government funding? The government is funding science by taking money from its citizens (through taxes) and giving that money to scientists. If the scientists are doing stuff with that money that has no potential for "applied" benefit to the people that are paying for it, isn't that a bit wasteful?
On the one hand, I understand that knowledge of how the universe works has some intrinsic value, but if it's a purely academic question, does it warrant government funding? And I don't mean stuff that is too costly or with an ROI period that's too long for private enterprise to be willing to tackle it... I'm thinking here about the realm of "pure" science that you're alluding to.
Anyway, as your ignorance is so clearly entrenched, i shan't bother to debunk the idea that not-for-profit scientific research has no relationship to the success of a country, nor shall i challenge your assertion that "spending was negative for most, if not all". It is, after all, a complete fluke that the countries with highest research budgets also happen to be the wealthiest...
I'm impressed at how much effort you put into that sarky reply. Hats off to you, sir :)
As a socially-responsible country, the UK government has to fund NHS to greater and greater levels. The UK is taking in lots of new immigrants and this requires more and more health care spending.
There are plenty of other socially-responsible programs that need funding as well.
You can only cut the pie so thin, and then somebody doesn't get a slice at all. NHS or science? People or theories? This is precisely the discussion going on in the US and so far the "theories" side is still winning by enough of a margin that there still is a NASA. It will be clear how things went when NASA is de-funded to support health care.
So science will always give diminishing returns. This is simply due to the fact that we'll figure out the easy stuff first, so research becomes harder and harder to do. So yes, it costs a lot, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be funded by taxes.
There is a lot of very useful science that can't be funded by private organizations because they aren't profitable YET. Carbon nanotubes, quantum computers, fusion powerplants. Would you like their research to stop?
There is a lot of useless research out there too, you're right. I'm sitting next to the ornathompter lab. They built a full scale plane that flew by flapping its wings. I don't think that research should be cut, useless as it may be. It's nice to live in a society with room for these 'excessive' things.
and with the strings attached its not always wanted either.
Most US advances are not made with government money. It just doesn't work that way. Look towards the corporations leading the edges of technology to see what is really getting done that applicable to everyday life.
The problem with government grants is that you end up with both good and bad, new ways to heal people and usually multiple ways to kill them. At least pharms are a one way street in the corporate world... still...
don't bemoan a problem that isn't as drastic, let alone far reaching as many claim it is. What harms science is regulation an inteference by government, not lack of funds from it
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Well, in Britain's defense, that money is much better used at its new recipient, the Ministry of Silly Walks. They've been in need of additional funding for quite some time now to compete with foreign, Silly Walking threats.
Because while pure science may not have many direct benefits, its indirect benefits may include opening new areas of research for applied science--which does give benefits.
OMG!!1!!LOLZ!!1 teh fundies are taking over the UK the government's totally in their pocket cause fundamentalists don't want the TRUTH to come out about science see this is proof it MAKES SENSE FREE WILLY!
Hrm. How come that sort of reaction is not elicited by science budget cuts in the UK but it rears its ugly head for the same here in the US?
The problem with that is you have no idea what pure research is useful and which isn't. Here's a quote I found that is a good sum up:
Pure science has been held up as a beacon of hope, as a way to allow scientists to pursue their own intuitions, and thus to find totally new solutions to old problems. This is seen in contrast to applied science, where short-term goals do not allow sufficient room for finding really new approaches. Indeed, the irony here is that the best applications of sciences are ultimately based on pure, rather than applied research.
People please. What's with this is money for science talk. What if the terrorist blows up a train? There need to be more cameras capable of interpreting what it sees through its lenses. Come on. Get your priorities straight.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
FYI. 'Pound' is short for 'pound sterling' (the official name for the currency), which in turn is short for 'pound of sterling silver', which originally determined the currency's value. The 'squiggly' is based on the letter L, which naturally is derived from the word 'librum'.
ornathopter lab???
If you're next to that, does that mean that you're the same building as the Fremen naib, holding our Atriedes naib prisoner?
I think more research needs to go into figuring out better uses for the spice.
I'm glad to hear it. Those are just the type of people that research needs.
watch Idiocracy http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/, scientists were working on a way to make erections last longer for monkeys instead of working on a problem to fix a disturbing dumbing down of humanity.
what is needed is a new Manhattan project, several nano, genetics, energy.
I'm feeling really pessimistic about life today...
:)
Take away the toys, funding, research, the education. No more good jobs, no more anything interesting. More investment in off-shoring, and for the homeland more police and surveillance... Don't know what to do, don't care what you do, don't care if you're fed, or have a roof over your head. Just gonna beat you over the head and fill you with dread, until you are dead.
My keyword is blabbing... How appropriate
You can say you're not a troll as often as you like, but you still smell like a troll. Waddle back under the bridge. Take a few books with you and learn up a bit, will ya?
"it has gotten to the point that I don't even bother talking with them as all I'll hear is how the didn't get a certain grant or how they have to figure out a way to keep one for the next year or three."
Have you considered that this may reflect increased competition caused by ever-shrinking budgets?
"let the market produce what the market has a demand for, not for pie-in-the-sky results"
Government funds science that has no obvious application precisely because the free market would not. The government understands that expanding human knowledge is in the public interest, whereas you do not. Well, it used to, anyway... thanks to people like you, pure research is increasingly seen as less worthy of funding than, say, attacking sovereign nations without cause. Thanks.
Unless you're psychic it is awfully hard to tell which branches of "pure" science will turn out to be really useful "applied" science later.
For example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knot_theory was purely theoretical and by your definition useless for many years. However we now find that it has rather useful applications in biochemistry.
Part of the role of government should be to expand human knowledge in directions that the free market will not. We are generally willing to accept this cost as some of this research will prove valuable in the future.
I'm not saying that this justifies spending a fortune on any and every "pure" science project we can come up with but funding some of them provides a tremendous net benefit for society.
Hummm ... no new money, eh for that CRUCIAL heavy iceball ... er, ion collider. Hellsbells how do they expect to find the Higgs with an accelerator bearly big enough to accelerate lead ... and Higgs must be the size of a baseball !!! Obviously we need more cork-infested baseball bats and LOTS of steroids ...
Are getting too close a cancer cure or hyper fuel efficiency and the Big Oil or Big Pharm are shutting them down via political arm twisting.
Pure science is discovering that ions exist, and that you can use ions to push things around.
Applied science is a guy realizing that if he does it just so then the ions can push a spaceship.
Without the discovery of ways to generate high velocity ions, the second guy wouldn't have invented an ion engine.
I suspect that in the long run, pure science will get done, most likely after a lull of 20-30 years when companies have "run out" of things to invent from the current crop of discoveries. Someone will end up trying something totally new and just swallow the risk of an expensive failure, but I doubt it will be anything along the lines of building multi-billion dollar particle accelerators just to find out if there are any other dimensions (who knows, maybe there are, and maybe they could even be made useful, but the expense of finding them and the risk of finding out that they aren't there or that they're not useful... it'd be almost impossible to justify the cost).
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I notice that while you have a problem with the government funding research, you haven't mentioned that you have a problem with the government intervening in a failed capitalist company (Rover car company), which is the cause of the funding reduction.
You clearly have no idea what the Research Councils do. One of the big things the Medical Research Council does is explore new ways to use out-of-patent drugs. The way the patent incentive system works, there's no way the market would explore, for example, using long out of patent anti-leprosy drugs to combat cancer. Without the MRC's research, this kind of development just won't happen.
Hate to be replying to my own post... however, the link to the NYtimes article regarding science funding in the US can be read without registration/TimesSelect only via the following link
Well, this is really a fine illustration of the limits of free market economics.
No rational marketeer would invest in pure research, ever, for any reason. Because by definition, you can't even forsee whether it's useful or not, whether it will EVER turn into a practical application or not. Sure, sometimes it's wildly successful, but it is a very expensive, time consuming, risky proposition if you require a profit payoff to pursue it. There is no way to even tell if the product that may ever come of it will generate the kind of return that would economically justify the investment your company put into it. THAT discovery may be three or four steps down the discovery chain, in a completely unrelated field, that your company is not tooled up to research.
But eventually, knowing how things work is beneficial to everyone, including corporations and the economy. But the only way to do that is to explore things that MAY NOT have an economic payoff.
But if you need a more direct benefit comparison, what company would ever do the research and developement required to go into space, learn about it, and, say, build an asteroid protection device? Who would end up paying for that? It may not be immediately necessary... but ultimately, we'll need one. Who will build it and why, and how exactly will it not be taxpayers/citizens paying for it?
best post ever. mod parent up.
£29 million reduction
R
This is a sensationalist garbage headline, without a percentage it is irrelevant. If it is 29 million out of 30 million, that is a bigger deal than 29 million out of 29 billion. Apparently education has already been slashed MILLIONS. Now the headline should have read that it was slashed by 1/3 (assuming the money isn't just being redistributed via a different route. Not knowing UK funding I wouldn't know, but in the US 'cuts' are sometimes actually increases with the money flowing differently).
I live in the UK and my local government is looking to spend an obscene amount of money to ensure that the special religious needs of children are met in schools. How much of that money could have been spent on science equipment?
As religion gets bigger, science gets smaller. I guess the reverse is also true, but that's just not the trend these days is it? With science you justify your existence by getting results. Sooner or later it's no results, no money.
With religion, results are not required - and your funding continues.
I personally know many college-educated Ph.Ds doing basic research who could make MUCH more money in the "real world" working for corporations. But instead, they work at colleges where they can teach a new generation of scientists, They do research and pursue new discoveries in basic science, rather than produce yet another variation on already made chemical compounds to treat impotence so that a corporation can make more money.
Idiots who don't realize how much better their current life is because of discoveries made through government sponsored research disgusts me. Many drugs and treatments which may have saved the life of one of your loved ones would not have been found if not for government sponsored research. The pharmaceutical companies don't do that much basic research (which often ends up leading to applied uses later). They also concentrate on immediately solvable problems that will return big bucks on investment, rather than those which may be critically needed, but by populations with little money. As one of those scientists, I'm glad I don't have idiots like you talking to me.
Sir, first things first: I frequently disagree with your positions as posted here, but I'm glad you keep coming back to stir up a good discussion.
It's a common perception amongst people with, how to put it, a bottom-line focus or business perspective to question the value of funding for things like the pure sciences. It's not even a particularly, within that limited frame of reference, a bad position to take. However, I think that examples can easily be found that point to the value of funding even highly speculative scientific endeavors, that even though the pay-off time-frames are immense thus making ROI calculations almost a crap shoot ... every now and then one pays off so hugely that it changes the entire world (and in the process, opens up vast new fields of business opportunity, which the original investing entity might even benefit from if they're sufficiently quick on their feet). The prime example that comes to mind is James Clerk Maxwell and his funding on behalf of the British government. Without Maxwell's fundamental work on electromagnetism whole swaths of industries as we know them today would not exist (or wouldn't exist in their well-characterized form). A few pounds sterling 150 years ago, and now the British (and the rest of us) get to apply that work product of pure science (at that time, almost pure science fiction) for incalculable gains here in the commercial world. Putting it another way, I seem to recall you had a sporting goods/skating store at one point (currently?). Do you think you'd have (would have had?) that business had not some crazy Germans and Russians in the mid-1800s fooled around in their state-funded university labs with this new-fangled "organic chemistry" stuff (polyurethane and all the other wonders of petroproduct/elastomer/plastic chemistry and chemical engineering)? Would the colorful dyes in all those materials be possible and indeed easily produced had Kekulé not fallen into a drunken stupor before his fireplace one night and dreamed up a coherent explanation for resonance structures (and in particular rings; much of modern dye chemistry is influenced by these resonance structures which interact as you might expect with the UV/Visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum)? Of course in hindsight it is hard to play what-if games, but it is inarguable that pure science has contributed to commercial gain.
Naturally there has to be a linkage of some sort to allow advances in the pure sciences to be translated to the commercial world, but the field of research commercialization is an active one at most universities. I think you would find a busy R&D commercialization office at any major research institution, eager to license their discoveries to commercial suitors. Sometimes that linkage is long or indirect (how could JCM have anticipated the Internet, or e-commerce? Even more recent theoreticians like V. Bush in the 40s were wildly off the mark, more remarkable for the scant bits they got right than the majority they got wrong.), but it exists!
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
I guess they needed four additional Eurofighters. Got to have 'em all! Or is that Pokemon? I always get the two confused.
Karma: 2.71828182846 (Mostly due to small, fun pills)
If they changed from monarchy to republic. Or else create some little Elvises in the cities where the problems are.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
And weight is measured in stone (in the context of body weight) which happens to be a setting on my digital scale sold in the US.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Please tell me this: why should I allow this research to take place on my nickel, when most likely me or my community will not see much of a return for the money? Most government funded research is simply welfare for scientists. Do you really think people will all of a sudden stop being interested in discovery if they weren't forced to fund it? I find that laughable at best. If you think science is important, there would be nothing to stop you from funding it with your own goddamn time and money. Thank you.
"I'm a fan of getting the State out of science entirely -- let the market produce what the market has a demand for, not for pie-in-the-sky results that never seem to be worth the cost to taxpayers and the economy as a whole."
Key word being "seem". I have doubts.
Much applied research couldn't happen without a broader scientific foundation. You can't "apply" science if there isn't some science *to* apply. Furthermore, *some* "pie-in-the-sky" results pay off spectacularly. The problem is, we never know which items those are until after the fact.
Then there's the issue that, regardless of industrial applications of science, the world is a hazardous and changing place. It's foolish to not study ways to avoid or mitigate natural hazards (recent example: the tsunami in Indonesia). Is there a market force that will drive this? Maybe the insurance industry, I suppose, but half the time they are more interested in limiting their liability than dealing with any and all natural disasters that can and do happen.
There's the issue of natural resources, where and how to find them, limitations on their use, and the possibility that human activities can jeapordize supply (e.g., energy supply, water supply, minerals, etc.). How do we find more oil and gas? How do we find more copper? How do we pump water out of the ground and dispose of waste without contaminating the inputs?
This stuff doesn't magically appear, environmental contamination doesn't magically fix itself (especially after the company responsible goes belly up), and while market forces certainly drive scientific innovation in the necessary fields, the applied areas still draw on fundamental discoveries in a wide range of scientific fields in order to get the practical job done: physics, chemistry, biology, geology, etc. There are a great deal of newer, applied techniques that might never have been discovered without the fundamental research that gave people the ideas in the first place.
The whole nature of applied science is that you are *applying* fundamental scientific principles. Where do those principles come from in the first place? Thin air?
Maybe they're imported from somewhere else in the world that does do fundamental research? Sure, there will be plenty of fundamental research done somewhere in the world, but by the time someone tries to industrially apply it, it will already be patented in the country where people are enlightened enough to fund *both* applied and non-applied research, and where the funding agencies make sure they both work with industry. You run the risk of whole industries being made irrelevant by the next breakthrough. Taxpayers will be unhappy.
Finally, there's the observation that because of competition, many companies are extremely secretive about the techniques and concepts they use. It's a competitive advantage for them. That's great for them, but there isn't any direct public benefit to keeping these things secret. The public benefits more when it is a publically-made discovery that *any* company can use to develop something marketable. It's a public investment, and the bonus is (in a functioning system), if the public funds, they get to set the priorities for the research (and if you have a problem with that, fix the system, don't axe it).
You can always argue that even if I'm right in principle, it still isn't worth the expense when you tally up the cost:benefit, but I'm doubtful it is easy to put in monetary terms. I mean, how do you evaluate all the money spend on "pie-in-the-sky" research on astronomy, space probes, paleontology, geology, computational physics, geochemistry, etc. that led to the understanding that asteroid impacts really did and still could decimate life on Earth? We are talking about the potential for human extinction, or at least total collapse of the world economy. Would we even know about this hazard and how it might be mitigated if science was based *only* on "market forces"? Is there a company somewhere that funds this sort of research?
How about this: you remove all science and technology from your life and then I'll support your request to be exempt from paying for scientific research.
From a strictly "give back as much as you take" perspective, if you benefit from science then you should either be doing science yourself or paying taxes to someone who is.
From a practical perspective, if you really want to get science out of your life (i.e. don't benefit from it and don't pay for it), then you can move to a remote jungle somewhere and live in a cave. You won't have to be paying taxes and you won't have to worry about freeloading off other people's scientific discoveries.
I disagree, in fact, I think gov't *should* fund science, especially basic science. Corporations, as a general rule, don't do basic research. They cherry-pick from academic science those bits that they think can be made profitable. If you want gov't funding of science to end, you need to either figure out a way for private funding of basic research (remembering, of course, that it needs to be open and peer-reviewed), or say goodbye to scientific advancement.
All government organizations are inefficient, and jockey more for position and power than for results.
That's just silly. Some gov't entities are horribly inefficient, others are quite good. Some corporate divisions are horribly inefficient, some are quite good. If you seriously believe that power & position-jockeying are limited to gov't, you haven't worked in a large corporation.
If a government organization could obtain positive results, it would mean they couldn't ask for more money.
Also frequently not true, nor limited to gov't. Your issues are with bureaucracies in large entities, something not limited to gov't.
I'm a fan of getting the State out of science entirely -- let the market produce what the market has a demand for, not for pie-in-the-sky results that never seem to be worth the cost to taxpayers and the economy as a whole.
Then you don't know what the hell you are talking about. Science is a non-linear recursive endeavor where you never really know what you're going to discover, nor what value it might or might not have to the market. Basic research is not a money-making field, and never will be...yet it is required for 99% of the results that you feel do have a positive affect on the taxpayer (and are money-makers). Also, who is deciding whether the results are "worth" the cost? Surely not scientifically-ignorant Slashdot posters.
I personally know so many college-educated Ph.Ds and all who are constantly trying to get grants so they don't have to go into the "real world" that it disgusts me.
Do you stop to listen why they do that? Because in the "real world" (which in PhD-speak means Industry), you are severely limited in what kind of research you can do. You generally can't do the stuff you find interesting, rather you do the stuff your company thinks will be profitable (and you hope there is some overlap of the two). It is similar to an artist ending up at an ad agency...sure they are making "art," but not really.
-Ted
-=-=- Quantum physics - the dreams stuff are made of.
If a government organization could obtain positive results, it would mean they couldn't ask for more money.
What the hell are you talking about? Government funding organizations want to fund working research projects. They don't want to fund something that isn't going anywhere. If a project gets good, interesting results, it will continue to get funding as long as there is enough money to go around. That and researchers don't want to keep working on a non-working project because it doesn't help with publications and tenure.
I personally know so many college-educated Ph.Ds and all who are constantly trying to get grants so they don't have to go into the "real world" that it disgusts me.
What is this "real world" you speak of? Research science is very much the real world. There is probably more competition for research grant money in academia than anywhere else. It's just that research grant proposals get vetted by other scientists instead of consumers buying products. Not all science is applied science. Corporations do not fund basic research. Besides, why should they. It is far more efficient for them to pay taxes (along with everybody else) and have a portion of that tax money go to basic research that they benefit from, rather than independently fund their own basic research programs, which would cost a lot more money and lead to a lot of duplication of effort.
There is actually an industry that directly benefits from basic research and could conceivably do so completely without government intervention. And that is the university industry. They benefit from multiple sides: People are willing to pay the university to be part of the research, the research itself generates prestige which attracts people who just want to learn from the university, and the results of the research create a wider body of knowledge to sell.
Getting rid of Government grants would require an overhaul of the current university system, but it could result in tuition inflation coming down to regular inflation and more student interaction with research scientists.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
When there's money left over, the budget is reduced the following fiscal year by the excess amount the prior fiscal year. That's the way the UK Government funds things, which is why there is a desperate scramble at the end of the year to buy useless, expensive items to flush the rest of the budget. Take a look at the spending pattern of any of the UK county councils.
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)
Despite the context of immigration increasing health care costs etc, as well as the inflammatory edge to the comment, the parent actually makes a really good point.
I fail to see how this is at all a troll OR a flamebait. Obviously, scientific investment is necessary for ANY nation that doesnt want to be left behind in the increasingly "near" futures, but how DO you propose balancing the need for theoretical advancement versus direct advancement of your populace by investing more in health care programs and the like?
I am not against scientific research investment, quite the opposite, but that does NOT change the fact that there is only a finite amount of resources to go around.
I'm sure if the parent had posted his point in a thread concerning declining health care budgets, he'd be modded insightful, however inflammatory. Mod points are NOT meant to be used to disagree with someone (yes yes, this IS slashdot..)
Ice Cream has no bones.
I don't think it's quite that clear-cut. From a business perspective, the end products that come out of basic science are both extremely rare and extremely valuable. Imagine for example how much money could be made on licensing if you owned key patents on fiber optics, atomic power, etc. Note that I'm not talking about patent trolling, but actual constructive licensing where I invent something valuable and you pay to use it.
Obviously most companies couldn't actually invest in more than one those fields, but if a research company could come up with one such patentable idea every 20 years, they could probably make a profit on even billions of investment.
Using financial tools coming from the insurance industry, the (massive) risk could be distributed among many investors and repackaged to the point where it might not exceed the risk of picking individual stocks.
I realize that it's entirely possible that the cost/risk/return ratios wouldn't work out - but I don't think that we can shoot down market-based research as easily as you suggest. I suspect that government subsidies would be necessary, but it might make more sense to fund research via tax breaks, long patents lives for basic research, and so on would be a more effective than funding research directly.
It looks like sanity may have temporarily prevailed and funding's been increased for some American science. Science 23 February 2007:Vol. 315. no. 5815, pp. 1062 - 1063 (sorry no linky-unless you're at a uni you probably gotta pay) says that the NSF's budget increased by $334 million, matching it's 2007 request (NSF they say has a $4.4 billion budget). NIH also got a boost of $612 million, and the DOE $200 million. So that's about 1.1 billion, or for the median 'merican that increase is less than half a Big Mac a year--truly a fucking bargain. However according to the article science is still expecting hard times in 2008. Not that the last couple of years have been a picnic by any means...
So what are you saying - that some of the smartest and most dedicated people you know are unable to fund their research?
There are many advances that have no immediate commercial or practical value, but have nonetheless made a truly massive difference to society and the economy, and have opened up many new avenues for commercial exploitation. It seems to me that you're letting your anti-government dogma influence your rational judgment.
Remember kids, the most amazing discoveries are made by chance.
well, that's a reasonable thought, but regardless of how high minded a business is and how willing to take on risk, they are going to be guided by what they think could turn into a product in some kind of reasonable timeframe, and they are going to focus into some sort of core compentancies. Plus, you lose the "open source' nature of current science, where patents don't drive scientific progress... any discovery can be siezed upon, improved, and used by anyone else interested and motivated to do so. The damage to overall progress could be huge, if a corporation stashed its findings because it wasn't immediately clear how it could be profitable, waiting to figure it out themselves... when all the while, that guy in the university basement working on something totally unrelated could have seen that research and seen the connection to his own work....
I really think it is *by far* best to decouple pure research from the pure profit motive of business, or at least to have some area of it not dictated by profit motive. The businesses can profit from the results of research now, and they also finance research into what they consider to be related to their businesses. Letting them decide the course of research *entirely*, however, seems like it would destroy scientific inquiry and progress nearly utterly.
As others more able than I have posted, you can never know what discovery will bring the revolutionary change that spurs progress. So in whose possible best interest is it to restrict research to that which may seem, with current knowledge, to be vaguely profitable?
You sound like a complete asshole. Oh wait, you're a libertarian, no wonder. Luckily, no one listens to fringe-dwelling kooks like you.
One hardly knows where to begin. The Brits deserve a lot of credit for their "sealing wax and string" approach to science. Read Crick (and Watson), Max Perutz, Rosalind Franklin, etc. (Fred Sanger and many others for the 'real' afficianados out there.) Some of the comments on slashdot seem to imply that academic researchers are a bunch of lazy sobs who are only interested in feathering their nests... Couldn't be further from the truth. "It's the people, stupid" to paraphrase a lot of stuff out there. What is amusing to someone who's been on both sides of the table (academics and industry) is that when you push the people who complain about the training in the Universities concerning what they want, they usually do not have any constructive suggestions. "Send us smart people who are well trained" is usually what you hear. And we are actually pretty good at this on the university side. So it is sad to hear about what is happening to funding in the UK. They are very good at doing tremendous work on a shoestring, as are the people in the US. Good luck getting the same quantity and quality work done from "contract research." Mr. B.
Frack, wish I had some mod points! Mod parent up!
The community does need to ask--why is science getting "more expensive"? Is it the cost of an apparatus? The IP law/legal know-how to protect yourself, that science is currently profit oriented, science is tightly coupled with a free market society or even tightly coupled to a political bias? Or is it just a cost of living issue (professors need their BMW's too...)
I mean even kids' science fair projects have gotten way too expensive (robotics anyone?).
In a world were you need to buy fresh water, practicing science is becoming a privilege vs. a right.
And the $ is squiggly as well. Your point? Or were you trying to be funny, but instead looked like an ignoramus?
It seems ludicrous to think of $133 million as a big deal at the national level, but it reminds me of the charming British view that anything more than about an hour's drive away is an overnight trip.
Main problem is that research universities usually suck at teaching undergraduate students.
4 hours (1 is a bit of an exaggeration), and it's a fair amount of money for the UK to be loosing in just those sectors of government funding.
You have no clue, have you? So you like all the technology around you (hey, you're on /.), and you seriously think that all this stuff would have been invented out of the blue by some engineer or an 'applied scientist'? Someone said "Hey, let's make a transistor, let's invent solid state physics to figure out how"? Do you think that GPS would work without special and general relativity? Why would anyone have paid ivory tower scientists decades ago to work on relativity, a totally un-applicable science back then. Now we know better. I agree that a lot of the basic research will not make it into applications, but picking the right topics in advance clearly has proven impossible over the centuries. It's so funny that you, as a ./ reader, could possibly believe that this world around you would exist without basic physicists, chemists, biologists etc.
Oh, I dunno. In many cases 'tards are perfectly fine for research. You know, as long as measuring reaction time or ability to plan ahead isn't a part of the experiment. One needn't always have the 'smartest graduates' on hand for that sort of stuff.
*shrug*
The dumber you get, the stronger they get!
They gotta cut costs somewhere when you are expecting other operating costs to go through the roof. Like M$ says, the purchase price is just the start of TCO. Science, who needs science when we can have mid 90s style INNOVATION. Whooo.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Would you like a Japanese expedition to be the first to bring humans to mars just because they found out an extremely new "market useless physics thing" that allowed them to faster space travel ?
I would personally love to see the US become some kind of middle earth world with religious guys stopping kids to learn about science and a government that has disallowed science in the whole country in order to get to your minds more easily. Ultimately the lack of science will harm your weaponry and reduce your offensive capabilities and therefore you would save the world. So please continue with that kind of "real world" attitude.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Yes.. they do now because their research revenue is isolated from their tuition revenue. Research Profs are actually discouraged from entering the classroom by the current environment: Grant givers prefer professors who give 100% of their time to the research rather than 50% in the classroom.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Ow! My eyes hurt. *rub*
I think you're referring to some formulation like "The Crown promises to pay the bearer of this note one pound
sterling". Well they changed that. Now it says "The Crown will excise one pound of meat out of the backside of any
serf who is foolish enough and has the gall to ask for silver in exchange for scrip".
anything more than an hours drive for me turns into a swim.
http://www.doreymedia.com - Accessible Web Design in Surrey UK
I apologize for the tone of my response... I do get a little worked up sometimes about people using my taxes for anything under the sun. For the record, yes I do work in technology.
but it could result in tuition inflation coming down to regular inflation
Hey guys! I have a great idea! Lets take money away from universities, that'll make them charge students less!
Tuition inflation is due to the fact that to get even the lamest non-physical-labor job, you have to have a BS, minimum, even if the job doesn't require it and it's just on the list of requirements so the company can land themselves a wage slave fresh out of college with thousands of dollars in debt to keep him/her abusable. Everyone therefore wants to go to college: demand, and thus price, goes up. It's been bad, but there's no surprise that it's gotten really bad with the recent advent of computerized resume filtering. Just think, Bill Gates would be flipping burgers if he had dropped out today, without the computer match on his resume, he's as good as dead to HR.
Fix the job and recruiting system, and university tuition will return to normal when people who don't have a degree at least have a chance at having something resembling a future.
You misspelled anarcho-capitalism, probably on purpose to make a joke too, however you have implied in your post that it is impossible that a non-government body can do basic research needed to push forward applied technology. I find it strange, because plenty of companies do push forward some forms of research, who is to say that the Internet would not have appeared just sometime later without any government intervention?
You can't handle the truth.
It can have direct consequences to things such as quantum computing and nuclear fusion, both of which may be critical to manned spaceflight in the future.
And with earthlings as stupid as we seem to be, it might be necessary for our species to master spaceflight in the future, lest we cause our own extinctio.
Stew
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
Almost correct, it is derived from the Latin libra, which trivially means "pound" (or also "scales"). It is also the same stem for the Lira (Italian and Turkish), which explains why the complete name of the Pound Sterling in Italian is Lira Sterlina, whereas the word for pound as a measure of weight is libbra (occurs mostly in old Hollywood movies, before they started translating to SI; most people have not the slightest idea which is heavier, a pound or an ounce).
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
That is not surprising if you think of traditional British car manufacturing values like Rover reliability, Rover quality and Rover useability. Just along Rover fat cat board bonus (67 million with the company bleeding red ink all over) vs British salary and let's just add Rover asset stripping for good measure.
The money is being redirected (according to BBC and el reg) to continue payouts on the Rover bailout which was done for the sole reason of Tony Bliar collecting himself some votes in the last election. There was no way in hell it would have survived in the first place and Antonio Bliar govt repeatedly lied to the public (nothing new here) and flaunted EU rules on state aid to try to keep it alive first by supporting the "british industrialist" group which bought it from BMW and asset stripped it (that is Alchemy partnership specialty by the way), then providing financial assistance bridge package after it went under.
As a result now science and education all over the country have to suffer (not by much, but Rover is not the only cockup, there will be more chickens flying having home to roost and having diahorea).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Oh please. The parent is just another "OMG Socialism!" troll just written better. The reduction has not been because of the NHS at all. Just like the jackass who mentioned security cameras earlier he is trying to shanghai this discussion so he can make political points. I swear I could use the "British Topic Bingo Card" image I got off Fark.com in this discussion and get pretty close to a full house. Anyone care to mention that the British have bad teeth? That would real help me out.
For the real reason for this cut in funding see this post.
We've precious little land, barely any natural resources, and no manufacturing industry to speak of left.
I thought the "Knowledge Economy" was where our future was at. Apparently not.
erroneous: look me up in a dictionary
At least they now can afford to put up some more cameras to see what these unemployed researchers are doing...
Perhaps but surely the market would have seen this possibility years and years ago and it if would have worked the market would have employed its market forces and exploited this niche 100% efficiently, as only the market can and produced many fabulous and wonderous things.
So sorry but, the market says no.
Of course you can do fundamental research as a company, but what is your incentive? Not to gain money for sure, because you don't know if ANYTHING usefull will come out of it. Therefore, there is no business case to support the research, hence no incentive for a company to invest in it.
:-), but it was Tim Berners-Lee who could turn it into the world wide web due to fundamental research money at CERN. Now, CERN had never had the goal to invent something usefull for the Internet, but as the by-product of fundamental research it did give us the www we now use with slashdot.
Take your example of the Internet, it was developed by DARPA to shoot nukes at the Russians during the cold war (pretty good business case
It's sucking all of the regular resources out to cover their high-tech hi-jinks.
You must be talking about a different Slashdot.
Oh please. Has science spending been cut to fund faith schools? No. Maybe you have a problem with religion (I might also), but this is a different discussion. The British government tried to bail out Rover. It was a valiant attempt to keep a few more workers working and off benefit. It didn't work, there's a short term pinch. It happens. Oh, and I work on an EPSRC funded project, so yes, I do care.
That tw*t Tony Blair is too busy giving away my money to immigrants & the unemployed to worry about using it to do something useful with it, that might actually do some good.
No, really !
The introduction does not state that £68 million is a drop of about one third. The drop was from £196 to £128 million.
You know what they say... The difference between a Briton and an American is that a Briton thinks one hundred miles is a long distance, an American thinks one hundred years is a long time.
That's simple. An ounce weighs many times more than a pound. HTH!
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
There may be an element of truth to this (as there is with all good jokes), but it is clearly a joke. What retarded Mod thought this was informative? There isn't even the excuse of wanting to give karma for the joke since it was written by an AC.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK
"Windoze"!! My god man, you are so clever! I mean, you see so many comedians here on Slashdot but rarely one with your depth and reach. And "M$"? Bwahahahahahah!!!! You came up with that all by yourself?? Bwahahahahahah!!!
Pure science can't really fund itself. Applied science does fine, because applied scientists can turn their science into products and services.
I wonder if somebody has thought about a system where royalties on this kind of pure science (from the applied sciences) could be paid back into a pool, funding further science. It would change the current model, but if anything it would accelerate the amount of science done and not leave it beholden to Congress every year.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Actually, finding out there are additional dimensions would be extremely useful. To find that out, some sort of interaction in that dimension would have to take place. For all we know, the law of conservation of energy is universal - so to be able to interact with some not-trivially accessible dimension would mean the possibility to transfer energy from/to there. This would make the law of conservation of energy not apply strictly within the three-dimensional subsection of the universe we live in. The ways this would help us are completely beyond anyone's imagination.
blow your mind already
There's no way that the market is going to compete with a free government provided service. You're correct to say that the market will identify opportunities, but when the government currently gives money to researchers - and then *gives* the patents to for-profit companies, it's a no-go. There's no business that can compete with free tax dollars.
I hope someone else has already pointed out that this is hardly a "slash". It is small change out of a massive amount of money. The real story is that now that the defender of the budget, Lord Sainsbury, has gone the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) feels that it can raid the science budget to pay for its own incompetent financial management. It is sad that the UK press has handled this story so badly. They even failed to say where the money has gone. I loved the bit where they take money from the Research Council that supports research in electronics to pay for thew DTI's failure to get its act together on Europe's electronic waste initiatives. More here: http://michaelkenward.blogspot.com/2007/03/i-am-su rprised-that-none-of-reports.html
MK