Slashdot Mirror
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."
They need to round up this lot of criminals and send them to an island!
Researchers feel ''sliced and diced'' and ''disempowered'', the reviews say, by the need to adhere to what paying customers want.
So it seems that CSIRO got a new director, and, not having enough funds, this new guy started operating the research group like a business, focusing on outside revenue from other companies. Of course, this made it hard to do science, especially since the director wasn't a particularly good director. The scientists almost are turned in to sales people. So it seems kind of bad.
It's a matter of 'not enough money' then 'getting money from the wrong sources' causing motivations to go bad.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You guys need to get your government under control. Get with your boards of directors and insist on a proper budget for buying "compliant" government officials. I, know, it's painful sometimes, but it's the price of doing business. They payoff is that we can do just about anything we want and with a little more money thrown at the right political campaigns, and the stupid voters will stay focused on stupid shit like gay marriage and leave us alone. So get it done. We can't have the people thinking that they actually control things. Not now.
The allegations directed at the CSIRO are little different from what could be said about many Australian universities (speaking as a PhD graduate and post-doc of many years' experience in them). It's possible that the CSIRO problems are coming to light first because they have more senior academics; not just hoardes of PhD students and the occasional terrified post-doc.
In particular, it's common for low and mid-level people to be hired from overseas, come to Australia, and see their research stagnate due to lack of funding. New academics don't realise that when Australian positions have "grant writing" as part of the job description, they mean: "You must bring in ALL of your own money, dude, oh, and btw, hope you have better luck with that than ALL THE REST OF OUR DEPARTMENT!" These new people end up fiddling around with bits and pieces of their old research projects from former institutions while they're ground to dust lecturing a bazillion subjects. All of this is covered up by our glorious leaders in Administration who commission glossy brochures to explain how well we're doing in research.
I'm not really at liberty to describe the research culture at CSIRO in great detail, but it is, or at least was, as the articles say, very application-driven and short-term, external-earning motivated. This was only in one division, I cannot speak for the whole of the organization, however these stories seem to indicate that the problem is widespread.
I was at CSIRO between the mid-1990 to the mid 2000, and I have seen it progressively become a very tough place to do research. I was very very happy to leave. I'm not a top researcher by any stretch of the imagination, and I was never bullied, although I did experience unpleasant conflict. Ever since I've left (for academia) I've been more free to conduct my research the way I wanted it, I have found that it is indeed easier to find funding (so far). Looking for funding first and doing skunk research second is a sure way to kill imagination and generate stress, dissatisfaction and mistrust, not to mention poor results. Scientists are not necessarily good salespeople (too frank). Basically CSIRO was (and apparently still is in some places) in some ways a toxic place for scientists.
I hope it improves. CSIRO is nowhere near the top 10 rank it seeks to achieve, at least in the areas I'm familiar with, but there are still very good people working there.
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.
Megan Clark was installed as Director under Labor in 2009. While you might want to cast some blame howards way for funding cutbacks, the mess didn't really start till labor took over.
I don't believe they claimed to invent wifi but claimed to invent the algorithm which wifi uses to overcome the issue it had with severe packet loss, without this algorithm wifi would be next to useless.
And that would make you another Labor revisionist?
2009 - Labor was in power...
Seen all those ads on TV from Labor about how the Liberals were denying the GFC? It was Labor who said 'We are not in a recession' when the Liberals were talking about the GFC and how it hit Australia.. The only thing that saved us was Liberals hard saved cash that Labor spent.
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
All pseudo-government organisations in this country have been forced to fund themselves to some degree by economic rationalism (neoliberalism) in successive governments . In the case of the CSIRO this means directly exploiting the patentable inventions they come up with rather than those inventions being for the greater good as it was in years of old. I fully expect CSIRO now spends more time chasing things with higher potential returns rather than greater public utility. I cannot fault the CSIRO for adapting although I do lament the good ol' days. I can think of far more odious examples of exploitation of dubious intellectual 'property' triggered by the same policies.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
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.
As a project staff person, I really enjoyed my time at CSIRO. I was working on a project that had some initial success but eventually wound up. The uni I'm working for now is no better for job security - still fixed term employment tied to the duration of whatever grant is propping things up at the time - but there seems to be less confusion about budget and more strategy (or even just acknowledgement) of how to deal with my current term ending. At CSIRO, every year, we would receive termination E-mails and be chasing up other work before we discover at the last minute we could hang around a bit longer if we wanted. And I know many of my colleagues were in a similar situation every year (or even more frequently!)
So, as much as I loved working with the people there, and as much as I found the work interesting, and as much as I know that higher-ups tried hard to improve this endless cycle of needless uncertainty - it gets increasingly difficult to remain fully committed to your work at an organisation where despite best intentions the net result is a feeling that you weren't important enough for your term to be sorted out in a more orderly fashion - so you know you'll be facing all that stress and anxiety, job interviews and perhaps having to decline offers again next year... I understand the matrix compounds this by decoupling funds from silos and so on but if the funds are in one place, you're employed in one division, and delivering to another... who is really making term renewal decisions? I certainly never met them! So it's no wonder I had a number of "which boss do I listen to" moments (all resolved, but still).
And yet here is the other side of the story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_inventions
Wi-Fi being on that list.
CSIRO talks out of two sides of its mouth. It wants to take credit for Wi-Fi. They promote themselves this way, and you even see the Science Minister of Australia (Evans) stating "It's hard to imagine an Australian-invented technology that has had a greater impact on the way we live and work".
But then in technical circles where they face informed response, they play things down.
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.
And their FRAND terms? They wanted $4 per device. This would amount to more than the entire cost of a WiFi chip.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/04/how-the-aussie-government-invented-wifi-and-sued-its-way-to-430-million/
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
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)!