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Russian Government Takes Over Country's 289-year Old Scientific Academy
ananyo writes "Russia's lower house of parliament, the State Duma, approved controversial reforms to the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) on 18 September. More than 330 members of the Duma voted in favor of the law, with only 107 against, in a move critics say will deprive the 289-year-old body of its independence and halt attempts to revitalize Russia's struggling science system. If, as is widely expected, the parliament's upper house and Russian President Vladimir Putin approve the law, the 436 institutes and 45,000 research staff of Russia's primary basic-research organization will be managed by a newly established federal agency that reports directly to Putin. The agency will manage the academy's 60-billion-rouble (US$1.9-billion) budget and extensive property portfolio, which includes lucrative sites in Moscow and St Petersburg, and will also have a say in the appointment of institute directors. 'This is not a reform — this is a liquidation of science in Russia,' says Alexander Kuleshov, director of the academy's Institute for Information Transmission Problems in Moscow."
My big take-home from this article is they have an "Institute for Information Transmission Problems" - a whole Institute just devoted to resolving poor communication.
They really got their message out!
in his quest to turn Russia into a theocracy.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Our thoughts are with those folks, this just really sucks...cause it begs the question, how do you turn this around and there's no nice answer to that. Deeper into the dark Putin takes the country.
"NYET! We will no longer allow science to tell us what the laws that govern the universe are! Starting today, it is the law that will govern science!!"
Life, ultimately, boils down to the Four Fs: Fighting, Fleeing, Feeding, and Mating.
They probably noticed that scientists can do things like prove that Russian elections are rigged.
Harper has been muzzling Canadian scientists for a long time, cutting their budgets, axing research, and so on.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Wall Street Journal
The article states that he's 61 years old, so this is more or less "president for life". If he lasts another 10 years he'll just do it again, or not even bother to hold an election.
Russia's slide will continue if this happens. Of course the US has a similar problem with entrenched elites wrecking the economy for their own personal gain.
Why is Snark Required?
The TFA seems to imply the RAS has been wholly independent for 289 years, which is obviously not the case... It was founded by the tsar who I'd imagine had some sway.
That and oh... it lived through the soviet union, which certainly had control.
Sent from my PDP-11
This is truly a shame. Back during the Cold War the question was often posed, is Russia the most backward advanced country in the world, or the most advanced backward country in the world. However, despite being cursed with horrid systems of government and an inability to make washing machines, anybody who knew anything admired their accomplishments in science and math. Now Putty Poot wants to kill that? He's a traitor.
In Soviet Russia... this academy had more freedom than it does now.
Wow.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Really biased summary and somewhat biased article. RAS is simply afraid of losing their luxurous "recreational complexes" - private villas of said academicians and "research institutes", which are mostly just "cheap offices for rent" right now. Our science is going down the drain for the last... 30-40 years, or even more, and all these old soviet-era "academicians" are much more old-school bureaucrats than scientists. Truly clever and talented people all left Russia in 90-s, leaving mostly conservative old-timers and not-so-bright yesterday students. One of the vice-presidents of RAS is known to support some absolutely fraudulent projects, like "Petrik's water filters" - and these people are saying something about liquidation of science?
I am not a supporter of Putin and his little auto-/pluto-cratic system of government, but this reform is something long-needed, almost essential for our science. With the 40-50 years old mindset you cannot innovate, you cannot truly create something new, perform some cutting-edge experiments and achieve true breakthroughs. Only with adaptation of new policies, with adequate pay and real prospects of work for the young scientists we can hope to see our science pull itself out of its current horrible state. And this time, as preposterous as it sounds, Putin is on the side of progress. Of course there is no clearly defined "good guy" in this whole situation, but RAS in its modern form is much worse than almost anything that can replace it.
Absence of proof != proof of absence.
I believe his point was that there those who argue that governments should have bigger stakes in certain endeavors like NASA in the US, but everyone here seems to be lamenting that this is the end of science because the state is taking full control of this program - which being russia I'm assuming was fully government funded before anyway, just more autonomous from direction by the duma.
The Russian Academy of Sciences has had moderate autonomy in terms of spending. They've never been funded to a level commensurate with perceived need (sound familiar?) but they had quite a bit of leeway in terms of funding individual projects. That has never been completely true, of course - the military has often worked through the Academy on projects they're interested in (and funded). The Politburo has had significant input into how various fields are funded. What appears to be the issue is that the Institute Directors will be potentially political appointees, responsible to His Glorious Putiness. We may be seeing many more studies on wrestling and tigers.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Is this whole damn planet just gonna get stupid now? This is not at all what they showed us in Star Trek. Damn, 40 years ago we are putting people on the moon, now it's just global navel gazing from here on out. Yeee haaawww.
Fuck, we are screwed.
Historically, the Russian letter "y" - which is equivalent to Latin "u" - was actually spelled as a digraph "oy", up until Peter the Great's alphabet reform of 1708. And the reason why it was spelled that is because Cyrillic alphabet was designed based on Greek, and in Greek the same sound is rendered as "ou" (omicron-upsilon) - so that was mapped as a digraph in Cyrillic, even though East Slavic languages didn't have a sound corresponding to standalone u/y, so it was never a letter in its own right. At some point, they started to write the digraph vertically, with "y" on top in line with other letters on the line, and "o" below it overlapping the tail; and then eventually "o" got dropped, leaving just "y", which is the shape that was codified by Peter in the Civil Script, and remains to this day.
So the Russian (and before that existed as a distinct language, Old East Slavic) word was indeed properly written as "roubl" up until 1708. And if it found its way into European languages at that time - which is very likely, since the word itself dates back to at least 13th century, and there was healthy trade between East Slavs and the rest of Europe - then this is the spelling from which the Latin transliteration was done.
I'm not saying that everything you wrote is false, but even if every single word of it was true, it still doesn't make the reform good. There's certainly corruption in the Academy, but there's also still plenty of real science being done. With control transferred fully to government bureaucrats, corruption is only bound to increase, and everything immaterial to the goal of enrichment through fraud will be promptly get rid of. What's even worse is that the Church is also raising its head and demanding a say in education and other spheres of life run by the state, and, so far, they have been mostly getting what they want... and now that the state controls scientific institutes directly, I would not put it past them to start stalling or even outright suppressing the lines of research that are contrary to Orthodox doctrine or the prevailing beliefs - evolutionary biology, say, or human cloning.
So, yes, this will spell the death knell of science in long term, unless a great many other things change.