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Corruption Allegations Rock Australia's CSIRO
An anonymous reader writes "Australia's premiere government research organization, the CSIRO, has been rocked by allegations of corruption including: dishonesty with 60 top-class scientists bullied or fired, fraud against drug giant Novartis, and illegally using intellectual property, faking documents and unreliable testimony to judicial officers. CSIRO boss Megan Clark has refused to discipline the staff responsible and the federal police don't want to get involved. Victims are unimpressed and former CSIRO scientists are calling for an inquiry."
DIdn't they claim to have invented a particular (and difficult) aspect of recovering a clean signal from a noisy environment? (the noise being largely additional reflections of the initial signal). I believe the general consensus was that this was patent-worthy and worthy of recompense.
You don't have to do a lot of research to find get the real story rather than just relaying some of the overzealous misinformation that has gone on about this. They never said that they invented 802.11 WiFi, merely that it used some of their patented technology.
And unlike patent trolls who use submarine patents, the CSIRO and the IEEE actually discussed the use of the patent prior to its inclusion in the standard, at which time the CSIRO said they would make non-exclusive licenses available to implementers of the standard on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.
CSIRO talks out of two sides of its mouth. It wants to take credit for Wi-Fi.
Is it that they want to take credit, or do other people keep giving them credit. By the same token you could say that they want to be called a patent troll just because some people call them that!
And no, CSIRO did not discuss with IEEE the use of the patent prior to its inclusion in the standard. The standard was published in 1997 and CSIRO didn't pipe up until later. They were not even on the 802.11 committee. This is standard submarine trolling.
The CSIRO patent was first used with 802.11a, which was published in 1999. The '97 standard could only do a rather slow 2Mbit/s, a flaw that the patent helped fix. And they did discuss it with CSIRO prior to its release. From the Wikipedia entry that I cited:
In 1998 it became apparent that the CSIRO patent would be pertinent to the standard. In response to a request from Victor Hayes of Lucent Technologies, who was Chair of the 802.11 Working Group, CSIRO confirmed its commitment to make non-exclusive licenses available to implementers of the standard on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.
Cooper, Dennis (4 December 1998). "Letter to Mr V Hayes, Chair, IEEE P802.11" (PDF). Retrieved 13 May 2012.
That letter is located on the IEEE website, and it confirms the date that appears on the scanned letter. And further to that, they had also built their own chip that implemented their technology (and went around trying to sell it to various companies), so that makes them even less like a patent troll, who usually don't have any way of implementing their own patents.
And their FRAND terms? They wanted $4 per device.
Which, as they said, was an opening offer and not one that they ever expected. Every time companies negotiate a figure they start high; that is pretty much a standard tactic.
Posting as AC because I currently work at CSIRO. I've made my views known many times during employee surveys and reviews, this isn't new to CSIRO but I hope it is informative to the public.
The government has been cutting our funding progressively for a long time. They announce brand new funding agreements that are "amazing" increases, whilst not-announcing on-going small cuts to our funding between agreements. This is basically death by a thousand cuts, with a band-aid applied every 50 or so.
Our organisation makes up the slack by raising and re-raising the amount of "external contributions" required for each division. This basically means, if we don't have an industry partner the project doesn't go ahead. On top of this, the amount of overhead is ridiculous meaning 50% of external funding required may actually mean 6 times the salary of the scientists actually doing the work is required for any project to go ahead. How on earth is science meant to occur with that kind of investment disincentive.
The organisation also has never-ending red tape and administration. This means the top scientists, on the top wages, are spending sometimes over 75% of their time on paperwork. SIP planning, milestone reports, presentations, etc. To hire a new staff member can take over 3 months and require days of work by a manager just to form the proposal to request permission to produce a position description to be advertised. Most of this administration has come out of great "ideas" to minimise administration. A new system to do something is a daily occurrence and that system failing or requiring more than double the original effort is common place.
The last two points combine into a research destroying monster. Administration takes up the time of the best scientists, which must be made up through multipliers in externally funded research. The best scientists then can't work on the research because they are busy doing administration tasks to try and set up the next big project. The end result is frustrated scientists, under-performing research programs and a bloated organisation.
The only cure is to drastically cut red-tape, and reduce the number of people in management roles. The organisation needs to de-couple funding and employment and let a group of people find the money, while another group of people do the research. But this wont happen, and every attempt to achieve the objectives usually results in another grand system which just adds to the monolith of red-tape.
With all that said, CSIRO is full of amazing people who work incredibly hard. Most work, and aren't compensated, for long hours above and beyond their employment to achieve the science they aspire to achieve with the organisational burdens they carry. Even management is working hard to improve all these problems and work with what they have. Incredible research is getting done and most of my co-workers are proud to claim they work for CSIRO and dream of the day when all this bloat is finally removed.
Unfortunately, I do not see how this will occur with the current thinking. The government is not interested in increasing the money or paying for the overhaul required to improve efficiency. There are vested interests who want CSIRO to be cut up and sold off, and they are achieving more progress in their goals than the scientists are. This is evident in the one-sided, over-stated, under-substantiated news coverage that CSIRO gets. Certain newspapers are very blatant about their hatred for CSIRO and find allies from the right who enjoy offsetting budget deficits by selling assets.
The organisation is amazing but is sick. It has gangrenous limbs that need to be amputated, and is regularly being attacked by viruses who want to see it dead. What it needs is public support for the scientists and the organisation as a whole so that we can unplug life-support, get out of our hospital bed, and back out into the world, kicking ass and taking names (in the name of science)!