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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."
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.
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.
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.