Slashdot Mirror
When Scientists Give Up
New submitter ferespo sends a report from All Things Considered about the struggle for scientific funding in today's political and economic environment. "Federal funding for biomedical research has declined by more than 20 percent in the past decade. There are far more scientists competing for grants than there is money to support them." It's a tough situation for new scientists trying to set up labs. In addition to all of the scientific work they do, it's essentially a full-time job in addition to that to maintain funding. The reviewers who decide which projects receive funding are risk-averse to the point where innovative research is all but off the table. The consequences of this are two-fold: not only are we giving up on the types of research that led to so many of today's marvels, but many promising young scientists are giving up on the field altogether.
Try the "not immediately useful" sciences, like astronomy, which are shedding researchers like crazy as the NSF / what-have-you cuts their budgets and increase "proposal pressure". Just talking to a PhD will reveal two hard truths about being a scientist: you will never be rich and you will never have job security. It takes a special kind of crazy to be a scientist these days.
I'm sure Chinese Firms would love to have scientists educated at the top US Universities conducting research for them. America is fast becoming a Design and Services Economy, best to leave the real innovation to China and others.
Sadly that is true, that and a few other sexy items just grease the path.
I think the realization of us being $17 tril in debt, the decline in our national intelligence, the decline in our politically correct institutions of learning, our political commitment to mediocrity, and more such, have set us on the path for not doing basic research anymore as it does not get votes.
I think we are at the end, and some other nation, maybe China, will have to take over world "leadership."
Spot on. No funding = no tenure = bye-bye faculty position and no more lab. Very proud of the papers we put out and the 3 PhD students and 1 MS student that graduated before the end though. We had just uncovered a possible mechanism for how an actin-binding protein could be involved in invadopodia formation and cancer metastasis (cancer cells escaping their initial tumor).
Stop the presses, we need to run this new story!
We're at a point where there's nothing going for scientists. They have to fight, all simultaneously:
-for funding in a very crowded market
-Politicians trying to control the results of what they do, to the point where the scientific integrity is at risk
-Govt's muzzling you because they don't want pesky things like facts to get in the way of their ideology
-Idiot reporters who completely, constantly, and continually misrepresent your research (should it make the presses)
-umpteen bajillion quacks who don't know their ass from their mouth, yet somehow manage to convince people that they are right and that actual experts are wrong (ie: Jenny McCarthy, or whoever FoodBabe is)
Doing scientific research is hard enough as it is, without having to deal with the current environment of anti-intellectualism.
I'm honestly surprised that scientists arn't yet being marched into concentration camps at gunpoint.
for every stupid project they come up with
Do you have any examples for this?
Oh yeah you don't, because there is no such thing...
...but it also puts more and more pressure on principal investigators to color their conclusions in the direction of whatever is currently trendy in the eyes of the grant reviewers in that field in order to get future grants. It's not good.
In debates about Christianity, there are two groups: those looking for answers, and those looking to just ask questions.
Yes, suggest you are disproving it and Exxon will fund you up the wazoo.
Table-ized A.I.
Not just research... EVERYTHING is totally risk averse. This is why every new song sounds and looks the same. Why we keep getting remakes, reboots, and blatent copies of the same old story over and over in the movies. There is a "patch" for this with the indie film community and the indie music scene. An indie research community would be cool, but they keep arresting people trying to do basic chemistry at home. http://io9.com/5119166/teen-wi...
The lack of Leadership, and I mean true forward looking people who take risks to move the Nation forward are no where to be found. The mantra of becoming rich is gospel and quick monetization, quarterly Wall Street figures reign supreme.
The Leaders of the past few generations, those who would see a public interest and use the immense power and resources of the Government to enable it, are long gone.
So the question isn't really one of giving up... the question is one of choice and priority. If you have no vision and no real sense of purpose beyond enriching yourself when you occupy a position of influence, then the rot will spread and not just Scientists but many others will wither away as well.
We can spend on un-ending and meaningless Wars, enriching the military-industrial-political complex through war mongering, developing our sense of uber individuality where our selfish needs are supreme above any common good or we can choose to go after bettering the lives of our fellow humans by challenging ourselves to bigger better goals and being a good/reasonable neighbor.
You have a multi-billion-dollar-sales patented drug? Chip in 0.5% of the revenue to fund NIH grants. Or make your own equivalent grants to truly independant researchers.
Enter into a licensing deal on a drug patent? Chip in 0.5% of the revenue to fund grants.
He's not entirely wrong, especially when some projects like these get government funding...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
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Prvate funding is more risk averse, and more short term than public... In today's business climate, long term thinking is the quarter after next.
That's kind of the point of the article. We are stopping use of tax dollars, and guess what? Private companies don't want to fund research, so it just doesn't happen. Great for your (short term) taxes, great for the companies (short term) profits, bad in the long term for absolutely everyone.
I assume that's exactly what I assume low-tax narcissists like you want.
No, actually the government was very dynamic at one time and got a lot of really impressive research done. Then people like you who think "government bad" started to complain about taxes and regulation, and over the course of the past 40 years or so, you've managed to suck a lot of life out of the government. It's the whole Gordon Gecko philosophy: greed is good. No, actually, it isn't. What's good is working together.
The Golden Fleece awards were mostly a load of anti-intellectual bullshit that had no comprehension of how mug applied science relies on basic science.
Clearly, we need to encourage more young people to go into STEM fields. Until then, more H1-Bs for the best and brightest biomed workers.
You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!
True that it's political nonsense, but can you honestly agree that a study to find out how to buy worcestershire sauce is worthy of government funding?
I'm all for government funding of basic research, but has anyone considered that maybe the lack of funding is due to closer scrutiny of funding bunk?
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
"lack of government regulation"? The fucking government made them the monopoly they were.
Jesus, all the anti-government nut jobs came out for this article.
The obvious solution is to return to traditional methods: establish an independent income, then take up scientific research as a hobby.
Historically, our most notable scientists were working at day jobs or otherwise independently wealthy, and did amazing research on their own as a hobby. Some devoted entire wings of their house towards scientific research, amassing a collection of equipment (or specimens) over decades.
Henry Cavendish, of the Cavendish experiment, is one such example. The experiment was so delicate that air currents would affect the measurements, so Cavendish set up the experiment in a shed on his property and measured the results from a distance, using a telescope.
There used to be a term "Gentleman Scientist" for this, but it might more accurately be called "self-funded research".
Consider Paul Stamets as a modern example. With only an honorary doctorate, he is co-author on many papers and has proposed several medications, including treatments for cancer.
I could also nominate Robert Murray Smith to the position. His YouTube Videos are as good as many published Chemistry papers.
The benefits are obvious: You get to work on whatever you think is interesting (or fruitful), you can set your own pace, and you can draw your own line between supporting your dreams and your lifestyle: If you have a family emergency, you can pause your research and spend more money on personal welfare. It also forces you to come up with more efficient (read: less expensive) ways to work.
There's a wealth of useful equipment on eBay and other places, big expensive equipment is not out of the reach of the dedicated researcher. Ben Krasnow has three (I think) electron microscopes. I personally own a UV/VIS spectrophotometer. a microgram scale, and a Weston cell.
The idea that "research can only be done at the behest of government" or "is only associated with university" is a modern fiction. Government would *like* you to believe that everything depends on their whim and largesse, but it's not the only, nor even the best way.
Build a lab and start tinkering, or join a hackerspace. Lots of people do it. Lots of good science is done this way.
Name any scientist who has been funded "up the Wazoo" by Exxon or any other fossil fuel company to disprove global warming/climate change.
With actual evidence of receipts and bursaries.
You can't?
I can name quite a few environmental groups and universities who have taken millions of dollars including Stanford University which got $500 million from Exxon Mobil.
That's the problem with fairy tales and urban myths - they're near impossible to disprove to the gullible and easily misled.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
A lot of basic research does not produce profits in anything like a marketable timeline, and yet, without basic research, marketable discoveries won't happen at all. You can't feed yourself on developments that might take years to produce results.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I would rather prefer the market not to solve this problem at all than to let the thing proceed as it happens currently. What is so great about the current situation in which people are forced involuntary to give up some of their money aka being stolen from (otherwise called taxation) and based on judgment of some politically biased clerk to finance someone's PhD, while at the same time try to get by on the money left.
Cool. We'll just make sure that there are monopolies like Bell to support all that research.
Perhaps Comcast Labs?
Unfortunately Microsoft Labs seems to be a very poor producer given their finances (near unlimited) and their restraints (near unlimited).
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
The reviewers who decide which projects receive funding are risk-averse to the point where innovative research is all but off the table.
One of my all-time favorite quotes:
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough." -- Alan Kay
Ezekiel 23:20
I doubt one could even begin to count the ways that government helped Bell along.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So.. let's mod the idiot +4 insightful, because we're apparently dumbfucks who believe stupid-conspiracy theories about science funding.
So here's the Actual breakdown of NSF research funding(which is about 80% of their total funding, with the rest allocated to science education and overhead).
Now, back to that first link. About 1.75% of research funding goes to environmental research of any sort, which is the umbrella category for climate change research among a fuck-ton of others. half goes to defense research.
So if you want an "easy target" for money, there's your answer. Not paranoia about evil climate change researchers. Next is health, with a good 25%ish, which is the thing that this article whines about. So, yeah, change from an area that gets 25% of national research spending, to one that gets 2. Good job.
Or tell the Pentagon that it can be used to kill Muslims.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Bell Labs simply sat on many of their discoveries for decades because while they were clearly useful, they had this paranoid idea that anything that could let people use phones differently was a threat to their profits.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It is also the mechanism whereby it is distributed that is the problem. We get grants for a few years at a time for discrete projects. When one of these grants is not renewed, a lab can basically collapse and then shut down completely. This prevents long term thinking and taking the risk on something that won't fit in that 2-5 year window and on that specific project. The NIGMS at NIH is trying out a new way to provide more stable funding in exchange for less overall funding for some labs. Think of it as funding people rather than projects (http://watersheding.wordpress.com/72314-mira-mira-on-the-wall-whos-the-fairest-grant-funding-system-of-all/). I think it is a good start.
I am assuming you never licensed a patent from a university. I can assure you that they have become quite adept at extracting money from the licensing of some pretty pathetic patents.
I recently inherited the handling of our licensed technology portfolio, and I can assure you that we pay a pretty penny for some almost trivial, but essential patents.
The downside is that universities are beginning to use this calculus in their decisions to bring on key researchers, and to focus their efforts on "profitable" ventures, leaving a lot of really important, and interesting basic research to lie fallow, because there's no obvious pay out from it. Things that used to be the bread and butter of academia research.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
I want to reassure you, we have the best governement money can buy!
Seriously?
http://www.theguardian.com/env...
The Koch' brothers also funded the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatur project, which started out with key people being sceptical about global warming. But the data convinced them otherwise:
http://www.theguardian.com/sci...
Do you have any link to the actual Worcestershire sauce project that is referenced on Wikipedia via a news paper clipping? That doesn't sound like a research project, that sounds more like a military spec writing. Just like there are military specifications for mechanical and electrical parts, there are a lot of military specs for food items so that their contracts for food block loopholes. While some of the stuff goes over the top on the specs, some of it is just copy paste from other food specs and something needs to be specified so a contractor doesn't give them watered down food products to cut corners.
These days people expect Uncle Sugar will give them funding for every stupid project they come up with
It's a reasonable assumption when you consider things like this http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
In fact, the conspiracy theory that the government is funding climate scientists who say that global warming is real and caused by human activity with the purpose to strengthen the government's authoritarian grip on society is a myth. But also the more plausible idea that scientists exaggerate their findings to get more funding does not seem to be true:
http://arstechnica.com/science...
True that it's political nonsense, but can you honestly agree that a study to find out how to buy worcestershire sauce is worthy of government funding?
I have no idea. Can you provide a copy of the actual report? Or only third-hand accounts of this report from an obviously biased source (Wikipedia links to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article that describes the organization the gives out the Golden Fleece Awards, with a three line summary of the report in question---what assurances do we have that this summary is accurate?)?
If the report's only purpose in life was to explain how to buy a bottle of Worcestershire sauce, then there is a problem. But is that really why the report was commissioned? Is that really all it says? Is is possible that the report is about purchasing food in general, with the sauce as an example? Is it possible that the report was commissioned in order to demonstrate how Byzantine the process of buying supplies is in an effort to cut down on paperwork in the long run? How do we know that the report actually cost $6,000?
Rhapsody in Numbers
"Assuming that oil companies fund studies that disprove man-made global warming and governments fund studies that prove it, "
There are no studies that disprove it. Their are papers that cherry pick one thing and then go on about it being a reason to doubt AGW.
Fact of the matter, AGW is EASY science, and easy to test. AGWs exact impact on climate is harder science.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Seriously?
http://www.theguardian.com/env...
The Koch' brothers also funded the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatur project, which started out with key people being sceptical about global warming. But the data convinced them otherwise:
http://www.theguardian.com/sci...
right... and that's even to be expected. I don't fault the oil industry for funding research that furthers their goals. It makes sense.
The problem is with the public. You have less than 100 credible scientists worldwide that have a problem with the idea of Climate change being a problem created by human activity. And of those only a few actually flat out deny it entirely. The entirety of the rest of the scientific community world wide, scientists that number in the millions, fully support the idea. This isn't just a majority, it's a broad and overwhelming consensus. There are more scientists that deny Relativity, Evolution or Continental drift, than deny climate change. If you doubt the scientific consensus on climate change at this point you're just an ideolog that will argue your political point until the house burns down around you.
You bring up valid points. I'd actually love to see the report if I could find it (I'm sure it's out there somewhere). The most reliable source I can find is from the NY Times, which itself doesn't list any references either.
http://www.nytimes.com/1981/07...
I guess I chose a bad example to run with. The point I'm trying to make is that some science is worth government funding......like Fermilab for example....where as some isn't. If I were to write a grant application on deconstructing the contents of this Slashdot post, I would hope the government would turn me down.
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i knew one of the idiots would say this.
and thats what it is: idiocy. unsupported by reality.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Not so sure, I agree with that conclusion.
Giving up on doing research in the US - sure.
Giving up on the field when other countries are glad to fund you - seems like more people are considering doing research in other countries.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I listened to this on the radio, and they left some bits out.
Apparently Bill Clinton and GW Bush substantially increased funding ironically. The lab community were foolish, took all that money and used it to build new labs... they assumed the funding would continue indefinitely and they were wrong. Now all those new labs are floundering looking for funds. It's not that funding has dropped from historic levels... it's that there was a massive increase in the late 90s early 2000's that didn't continue.
The amount of money that Exxon spends -- actually the amount of money that the entire oil industry spends on climate research -- is dwarfed by government funding. By an order of magnitude. These are easily obtained figures, just look them up.
How much of that government funding is spent on big ticket items like building, launching and collecting data from satellites, or maintaining and collecting data from a large network of weather stations, or deploying and collecting data from 3,600 ARGO floats? Those are things that someone like Exxon are unlikely to fund for any reason yet the information they collect is quite valuable.
No. No it is not.
You are lying.
You are spreading myths.
Assuming that oil companies fund studies that disprove man-made global warming and governments fund studies that prove it, you would expect to see a 10-to-1 ratio in the number of studies published for AGW versus against. And that's pretty much what you see out there.
No it is not what you see out there.
Your statement belies a belief that who pays determines the outcome. Believe it or not, most scientists have a tremendous amount of integrity and follow the rigor required by the scientific method. That's why you dont see many of them working for oil companies. Some scientists have worked for oil companies (or any company) and gotten the "wrong results" and ceased to work for those companies. The gentleman who did research on herbicides re: frogs is one such. Other scientists found themselves massaging data and keeping their jobs. They are in the minority however. And among government funded scientists you can find both flavors of scientist, those for and against. The key difference is, no one has had funding cut off due to results.
In short: you are full of it.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Well it's not like government funded research has ever brought us anything useful -- think DARPA.
I wouldn't be surprised to see countries such as BRIC members, EU members, or other countries start trying to woo the best and brightest for economic gains.
It may not be profitable to do R&D in the next quarter, but governments will greatly profit in a longer interval. For example, Paraguay's stake in their hydroelectric dam might not have meant much in the next quarter when they went in with Brazil on building it... but it has guaranteed the country completely energy independence for now and the near future.
Government funding will still be around. It just won't be the US who hands over currency.
The problem is that we don't have enough people graduating with STEM degrees. All the smart people people at Fox news know this.
I hate to contradict your narrative, but NIH (at about 8 times the size of NSF, a good proxy for biosciences funding) is still about 10% above 2000 funding levels. NIH also averaged increases of 13.5% (9.5% in constant dollars) from 1984-2004. It makes sense after that kind of run up that funding would be flat or be reduced during fiscally precarious times. See NIH's own info: http://officeofbudget.od.nih.gov/approp_hist.html for budget details. One issue is that a lot of the doctoral programs were designed around the assumption that the budget growth would continue and so merely slowing it to inflation (2004-2010) caused problems that were exacerbated by actual cuts from 2011-2013. 2014 is pretty much flat from 2013 after accounting for inflation.
for every stupid project they come up with
Do you have any examples for this?
A few gems, sorted by year.
That actually disproves the point more than it proves it. If you look at the author affiliations on that page, there is exactly one American researcher on there, and he is named with a large number of international researchers for the same work. On top of that, he is not solely an American, suggesting his funding contribution (which we cannot ascertain from this, other than to say it was almost certainly less than 100%) was likely not all from US funding.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Your comments got me thinking -- if people want to treat 'intellectual property' as 'property', then shouldn't it be subject to property taxes?
Of course, the problem with both of our ideas is that the companies would do exactly what they've been doing with their logos -- spin off a company in another country, give the IP to that company, and then rent the use of the IP back to the original company. (thereby reducing the profits of the main company, reducing their tax burden ... and the spin-off is in a low tax country, so it's almost pure profit over there).
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I would say that the defense spending one is a bit misleading, since a lot of basic science winds up under the Defense Department part of it. Friends of mine were researchers working on a particular parasite that primarily lived in snails. Because some of the neurological pathways involved in what the parasite did to the snails were congruent to those in humans they managed to get funding under the Defense Department banner. I am not sure that any weapon would ever be able come out if this (unless there was a snail invasion), but it was in that category anyways.
NIH is in addition to NSF funding. 25% of NSF funding goes to medical research. Just like DARPA doubles up on defense research. And NASA on aerospace.
And I did intentionally gloss over the fact that there are a few other major funding organizations out there for science grants, but I didn't want to get into the complex budgetary analysis that would involve, and the inevitable pedantic claims of comparing apples and oranges and whether certain allocations "count".
Focusing on the NSF seemed like a good way to make the primary point clearly, without making my post into a TLDR monstrosity.
Yep. Welcome to democracy, where the government screws 49% to get the approval of 51%.
You forgot poor Republicans, who proudly screw themselves over because the rich ones tell them Democrats are going to take their guns and religion away.
Didn't we see an article recently (like this AM for me) discussing lack of reproducability in studies?
And not as in "noone bothered to reproduce our study", but "we couldn't even reproduce our own study when someone paid us to"....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
They are crying about funding in real dollars. Please cry to the Fed about that. In addition, plugging numbers from their own publications into online CPI calculators shows they are overstating the case (Shocking!)
Sure, but can we assume that the other researchers didn't receive grant money from *their* governments?
One of the points of Ig Noble is to "make people laugh, and then make them think". After thinking about some of these nominees, you can sort of think about what their research could impact. However, some seem absolutely silly, and it would seem wrong to give them federal funding at some other projects expense. Deciding which projects are grant worthy is tricky, especially when you have so many PhD's wanting to get their hand in the cookie jar.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
I would strongly suggest to watch less Faux News.
Gee, if only someone like Barry Goldwater had warned his fellow Republicans about the consequences of climbing into bed with the Jesus freaks.
This is an opinion of yours, regardless of your stating it as fact. There are numerous examples of scientists faking data, fudging data, faking entire studies and seeking confirmation for their bias. They are human with each and every human foible others have. You are also incorrect in that there are a large number of scientists working for oil and other venues you personally don't care for. Your disregard for them only shows your bias - again, opinion, not fact.
Yet again, utter bull. There are numerous examples of funding drying up if the agenda is not met.
There's going to be a LOT of posts about politics here. Mine will be no different. oh look, the first post is about global warming. "Just link your thesis to Global Warming, and you won't have a problem."
Except that's the complete opposite of what the article is saying...
We need good science. I'm very annoyed that we are subsidizing profitable industries while NOT funding important science work. You all should be too. What happened to us? What happened to America? When did we become so.... Stupid? When did we change from people that valued knowledge and learning to a people that put quotes around "scientists" all the time?
I'm guessing it happened right around the time that the messages that educated people were telling us became harmful to the messages that industry wanted us to hear. Why can people not see that?
Private research dollars are expected to produce profitable innovations. Bell Labs wasn't run for the good of all humanity, it was run to innovate in the communications space, and it did. They made tremendous amounts of money on the research their lab produced. And the rest of us have continued to benefit from the existence of the transistor. But even though they were wildly successful, where are they now?
Government funded research isn't expected to produce profit, but instead to the betterment of all. Look at any the Big Science projects, such as anything NASA does, or the Human Genome Sequencing project. These projects aren't intended to produce money, they are intended to further our collective understanding.
If private labs are profitable, they are built and run. Google Labs, Microsoft Research, etc., they do a lot of useful stuff and donate much of it. Even the research universities are not contributing as much to the common good as they once did, and are now becoming profit centers for their schools. A tiny example is to look at how much money the University of Minnesota's ag laboratories have made patenting apple hybrids. This is something that once upon a time would have been shared with everyone.
Private money isn't the only answer.
John
Yes, I do, and here is why:
United States Department of the Army for a 1981 study on how to buy Worcestershire sauce
The ESDoA is a fairly large organization. Studying the logistics, methods, and process of buying something is well worth the money.
They but this stuff but the ton. So looking at it is well worth while.
Should they have just assumed they had the best process? That the logistic are fine? That no new way could possible come out? that no unforeseen errors in the process had cropped up?
How do you think people find waste?
Personally, I think it was a good use of 6000 dollars.
Of course, all this assume it's actually true because I couldn't find the study. I hope it is, I want an organization for needs to provide the tens of thousands of people to look at their process and methods.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Thank the Republicans who hate science and don't want to fund pure research but would rather corporations subsidies....nice how that works.
Wow, epic fail zippy.
And in hind sight, they where correct!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Sure, but can we assume that the other researchers didn't receive grant money from *their* governments?
What difference does that make? Why should we care what kind of research the government of Japan wants to fund?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Some great science can be done on very low budgets, even by high school students. However, Space X was not and never could be the product of a high school science fair. Nor could the Human Genome project.
Remove public funding, and science will indeed to back to hobbyist, 18th Century style....where the only people who can afford to do expensive science are the idle rich. I don't know about you, but I'd rather not trade thousands of universities and colleges doing science involving millions of students and faculty for a few hundred Bill Gates dabbling in their backyard.
We need more privately funded research, like we had in the days of Bell Labs or Xerox PARC.
It was a different country that had Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. Same reason why it is so difficult if not impossible to send people to the moon and back because this is not the same country as it was before.
However, I wonder what kind of research Google is doing? We see the self driving cars but is there some other stuff they are doing but not talking about? After all, they can easily hire a bunch of really young superbright PhD types, give them a facility and a few billion dollars, turn them loose on whatever.
mfwright@batnet.com
I've heard that Breast Cancer works well.
Accusations that climate science is money-driven reveal ignorance of how science is done
http://arstechnica.com/science...
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Hardly. Pure research has traditionally been funded by government because the private sector is risk adverse. But funding has been cut back and back until almost incredibly bland and tame ideas are tested. Cutting edge research is not being done in the United States which leads to a brain drain. People are giving up or leaving for other countries that will fund the research. This puts the United States at a competitive disadvantage.
Really? 2000 is the high point of NIH funding? Look at defense spending then come back and talk.
I have always laughed when I see someone doing fundamental research and saying that it could help defeat bombs, or something else that DHS would love. The mental twists and turns that somehow connect something fundamental to something very practical although worthless.
So I have a simple idea, half the DHS budget and hand it to fundamental research. Also play a random game where projects are ordered by what seems to be some sort of worthiness. Then use that as a weighted order to select random projects. This would generally avoid the scummiest of fraudulent projects but then occasionally find the gem in the rough that goes against conventional thinking.
And your someone who did not read the article. These are researchers that want to engage in pure research, ask the tough questions that may not have an immediate application. But that's the point about research, discoveries lead to new ideas.
FYI published papers *DO* result in products. Someone takes the ideas in the paper and turns it into something. That's the step that you missing in your list. We call those people engineers.
The military is finally allowing gay people to serve.
IN side the demographics, a group is unusually obese.
Since the military dress, feeds, trains, gives healthcare to them, then studying why a group is out of bound on anything is the SMART thing to do.
Why has gone wrong? Why don't you people think?
The federal government has very little actual waste. But people can make political points by pointing out some headline instead of figuring out why the study was done. That is the key. It's not WHAT was studied, but WHY it was studied.
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That's funny you mention PARC.
PARC got it's people from SRI ARC. Those people got there knowledge, ideas and experience form government funding.
And the idea the Ma Bell didn't get anything form the government is laughable, at best.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
As an academic from the EU, I don't think we pose much of a threat. We face the same problems of declining funding, increasing competitiveness, the spreading plague of "excellentism", and risk-averse research. Combined with that our research professor salaries are not even half of those at the top universitities in the US.
You're mostly right about this coming from Republicans.
However, in the spirit of the original post, Democrats deserve some shame too.
For example, this stuff about Title IX and sexual assault is basically a witch hunt, where academic campuses are being turned into "legal protection-free zones" essentially, that allow the government to (1) deny privacy rights of victims that would be granted to them elsewhere, and (2) circumvent due process that would occur elsewhere. If you're a male on a college campus, or will be, you should be angry and/or scared as hell right now. I'm all for victim's rights, but that includes a right to their autonomy as human beings to decide when they want to pursue charges, and a right to innocence on the part of the accused until proven guilty.
Democrats have their own brand of thought control when it comes to academic review processes and IRB constraints as well.
The bottom line is that university campuses, traditionally among the most protected areas in terms of free speech, are becoming horribly politicized in general. Political extremists, left or right, are having a difficult time with universities being places that they can't control, and are trying to end that in multiple ways. (I'm pretty independent, and see the two-party system as being the real threat at the moment.)
Yes, there are two problems.
First, there's the human cost of having people spend roughly two decades of their lives to trying to become a scientist only to give up because there's far more scientists than jobs. It's a tough thing to be giving everything you've got to your career and still laying awake at 3am wondering how you'll feed your family when the current grant runs out. Of course, the solution is obvious: use career scientists rather than PhD students to do scientific research. And it's not clear that PhD students are actually any cheaper than career scientists. Instead, there's a culture of assuming that the purpose of university research labs is to educate students - leading to far more people being trained as scientists than there are available jobs. A long term solution would be to change this culture and move scientific research out of universities into dedicated research institutes. At the very least, there should be more of an effort to discourage young people from pursing a career in science.
Second, there's a problem that the intense competition for funding stifles the most innovative research. Of course, one solution is gentleman scientists - only the rich get to do innovative research (as a hobby). But there's another solution. There's plenty of science work that requires high levels of training, skill and hard work but that is fairly routine - giving science lectures, preparing science instructional media (videos, textbooks, etc.), curating public scientific databases, doing routine genome sequencing of novel organisms, interpreting genome sequences for individuals with rare genetic diseases, etc. It would be possible to have a system where a scientist could earn a decent salary (say, $75K/year) working for half the year on routine science and then be allowed to pursue whatever out-of-the-box research they wanted for the other half year. What would be required would be a culture shift - rather than trying to squeeze every last ounce of measurable productivity out of scientists instead recognize the value of free exploration and innovation in science.
Scientists could still be required to account for their time during their out-of-the-box research time (e.g. wrote simulation program in morning, read scientific literature in afternoon) but a grant system wouldn't be used to limit their research. Of course, the grant system would still be necessary for the large routine scientific projects (e.g. the sequencing of the first human genome) but individual scientists would be free to push the boundaries of innovation and creativity.
I was going to post "quite a lot of admin in there" but you really put it better.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Actually, science works DESPITE many scientists not having integrity.
That's one of the reasons that I actually FAVOR creation science despite the fact that I think it is not a correct theory.
Because there are a ton of scientists out there who do fudge their data, or take their data and deliberately misinterpet it, beyond those who take their data and accidentally misinterpret it.
Then others go around and BELIEVE the studies, far in excess of the claims of the study. So then you have general academia all saying "well, science proves that lack of funding will destroy education." Or whatnot. Because they heard it, and want to believe it.
And there, to break through all the dogma, is the creation scientist who says, "uhhh.... a lot of your data looks okay, but you draw absolutely nonsense conclusions from it. Here, look at the limits of accuracy of your pb-pb dating, and consider...."
Now: Don't take my word for it... I'm making up numbers to give the gist of what I'm about to say, but 90 percent of the scientists will refuse to listen to what he said. 9% will attack him virulently. And 1% will say, "That's very interesting. I still think the theory is basically valid, but what would that imply, then?" And sometimes he discovers a fraud. Sometimes he discovers a new law.
So it is the creation scientists who battle the dogma, and help ensure that science moves forward.
So don't worry that science wouldn't move forward if scientists didn't have integrity. For it is very possible (and indeed, from what I have seen it is moderately often true) that don't, and it does.
You just have to figure out what to ignore.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
The US of A has too much debt (and contingent liabilities). Perhaps another country is willing to pick up the tab?
227-3517
The voice of navel-gazing stupidity has spoken!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Part of what drives scientists away is that all of these grant proposals are a huge time sink. It takes a very large percentage of time just to write enough proposals to keep funding coming in that actually doing the science becomes secondary.
Stop and think about what sort of scientists you get if the top priority is writing grant proposals and churning out incremental paper after incremental paper. On of my engineering profs fell into this category, it was year after year of publishing correlation "papers" between weather data and recorded satellite signal strength. He lacked in almost all forms of creativity, and was not an inspiration for students, but climbed up to department head on the back of all that publishing (and on the backs of a few perpetual grad students who actually did the work).
The energy industry has stopped funding climate research when they're last few attempts to fund climate change denying scientists backfired. They've backed way off funding this type of research and are using the savings to fund lobbying efforts and and pro-fracking PR efforts.
However, you will find that they're figuring climate change into their corporate strategies. So, on the one hand try to convince people there's no climate change, and on the other place bets on climate change happening.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Better yet, find a job in a company's R&D department instead of suckling at the government teat.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I'm not sure why everyone seems to boil things down the false dichotomy of goverment or business. The 'public' can fund non-profit research organizations in ways that don't involve a government middleman. As a society we need long-term non-profit oriented research, but I would think that the goverment should be the last resort. It's a highly political environment full of corruption and self-interest not unlike many businesses, but unlike business it's essentially self-regulated. I'm not saying goverment is evil or incapable of doing wonderful things in the realm of research (internet, and nice fluffy memory foam among others), but I would like to see the 'public' funding the research more directly via contributions and support of non-profit research organizations that they select - that's true democracy - not 51% being able to spend 100% of the dollars. As a society we may not responsible enough for that approach, but I think it would be more effective - and it doesn't a consensus or majority - just enough like minded people to contribute toward making the world a better place.
Exactly. I watched a documentary recently on the LHC, and one of the scenes showed a physicist explaining to a lay audience what the multi-billion dollar effort was all about. One of the questions from the audience (who self-identified as an economist) was what was the economic benefits from knowing about all those particles or discovering the Higgs boson.
The response from the scientist was - "nothing". There is no economic benefit from spending all that money and doing that research. On the other hand, when they were discovered, radio waves weren't called radio waves - they were just a new form of radiation.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
Way to cherry pick the data. Bush was responsible for the biggest increase in federal R&D funding for science in 30 years (the biggest increase prior to that was under the elder Bush). The vast majority of that increase was for biomedical research. So it's not at all surprising their funding has dropped a bit in the last decade. Their funding was more than doubled (in nominal dollars) between 2000-2004. The federal government has been concentrating on shoring up other scientific fields in the decade since then.
You know, it's the ones who get caught "faking data, fudging data, faking entire studies and seeking confirmation for their bias" who are the ones you hear about mostly. There are (probably) 100's of scientists for each scientist caught who don't make the news because they didn't do any of those things. If you let the few exceptions like that color your views of the whole field you come away with an erroneous opinion that does no good.
The energy industry has stopped funding climate research when they're last few attempts to fund climate change denying scientists backfired.
Please don't use fuzzy phrases like "the energy industry". Instead, you should name and shame the specific companies involved:
1. Exxon Mobil
2. Koch Industries
... and that is pretty much it. Other energy companies have not been significantly involved in AGW denilism.
If you care about the planet, or even about the principle of scientific integrity, you should avoid these companies if possible. Koch is hard to avoid, because they do business deep in the supply chain, but Exxon is easier. Next time you need to gas up, please drive past the Exxon station, and fill up at a more responsible company.
It's an opinion of many, due to an array of factual examples of scientists getting caught acting without integrity and forced out of their profession. You want some of the dark side of "human nature"? Well for one thing a scientist can increase their reputation a great deal by disproving another, and gets a vast increase to their reputation if they manage to prove that another scientist is a liar.
Of course this should all be obvious so the mystery here is whether you are ignorant of the subject you are discussing or pretending to be ignorant to advance your argument by dishonest means. Not a good look either way. It's also a bit depressing to see luddites on a tech site but I suppose cargo-cult fanboys that like shiny technology but have been convinced by political propaganda that science is bad want to spread their views just like everyone else.
Wow. That's a fantastic parody post. Keep up the good work since those luddites really hate it we we laugh at how utterly ridiculous they are.
Isn't that just for string theory, which is still a bunch of pablum dressed up as science?
(ducks)
But, seriously, a number of my relatives who are physicists work on military or industrial applications.
Will check with them to see if it's as bad there.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Yes they learned from things like that to get their propaganda spread by economists and others with no connection at all to the item being studied. Real scientists are in danger of doing real science if they come in contact with systems that they understand.
If I were to write a grant application on deconstructing the contents of this Slashdot post, I would hope the government would turn me down.
Don't worry, they would. Unless you (or some of your University's board members - more likely, since you're a scientist and not someone who actually did something useful like make money and donate it to politicians) were a personal friend of a senator. Then, you'd get your funding.
That is all.
Thank the Republicans who hate science and don't want to fund pure research but would rather corporations subsidies
I can't believe I'm defending the Party of Torture, but I think this is unnecessarily harsh towards the GOP. When they took over Congress in 1994 and Gingrich rose to the speakership, my father (who, like me, worked in academic research) was terrified that they'd slash his program and he'd be out of a job. Ironically, he told me years later that what ended up happening was exactly the opposite: Gingrich loved basic research and that's when the funding really boomed (it didn't hurt that the economy was doing reasonably well). Arlen Spector was also a big proponent of NIH funding.
Now, that doesn't mean that Republican candidates like Sarah Palin and Rick Perry won't use this issue for their demagoguery, but it's less of a systematic problem than you might think. It especially doesn't hurt that private corporations like public funding for basic research too, because it takes some of the burden off them, and because most of their employees get their training working in labs funded by public grants. Every time the NIH or DOE needs to reassure Congress that they're still relevant, they get Big Pharma heavyweights to testify. (Which I realize means there's a corporate welfare aspect to this, but Big Pharma doesn't really have any interest in building a $1 billion X-ray generator when they can rent time on the DOE's equipment, which works out well for everyone.)
The current environment is a bit of a weird situation, but let's not forget that the sequester was a bipartisan deal.
please drive past the Exxon station, and fill up at a more responsible company.
As long as it's not Shell (supported the Nigerian military junta), or Unocal (supported the Burmese military junta). I don't really expect moral purity from oil companies, but it can occasionally be difficult to find one that doesn't have blood on its hands.
Yeah, government never comes up with any interesting research results, like the internet (DARPA), GPS (DoD), touchscreens (CIA/NSF), or Siri (DARPA).
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Free market capitalism gives us Viagra. Which is a dramatic way of saying that it encourages short-term thinking, because human beings have a well-documented cognitive bias toward near-term results, and tend to heavily discount the benefit of long-term results. And so we get cattle ranchers abusing antibiotics even though in the long run many people will die as a result of the antibiotic-resistant bacteria this practice breeds. And we get pharma companies developing Viagra analogues instead of antibiotics.
I say this not for your benefit, since you are not interested in being contradicted, but because it's possible that someone else reading your diatribe might believe you if nobody points out the problem with what you've said.
The gold standard would have prevented the economy from growing as it did over the course of the past 40+ years. Inflation was indeed the result of failed monetary policy, but not that monetary policy.
As long as it's not Shell (supported the Nigerian military junta)
Nigeria has not had a military junta for 15 years.
Unocal (supported the Burmese military junta).
Burma has, since 2008, been progressing toward full democracy, and the Burmese people have been using their new found freedoms to murder each other in numbers that were impossible under the military dictatorship.
But hey, Bush was able to work out his daddy issues, doesn't that count for something?
Monstar L
To the morons who marked my response "Flamebait", take a look at yourselves.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
This hasn't been my experience. Reviewers and grant officers want to fund high risk/high reward science. But you are competing with others who have already tried a bunch of risky ideas and are only proposing the ones that happened to work. You basically have to make a significant discovery before you can be funded and then you can get funding to bring that idea to full bloom and hopefully fund a few risky projects on the side that will serve as the basis of the next grant proposal.
Most new ideas are bad ideas, so funding agencies have to have a pretty rigorous filter to sort out the promising ones. As a result, it will always be very hard to get funding to explore an idea before there is evidence that it is on the right track.
It is getting warmer. Man is responsible. We can't do anything about it. The last point is just as much of a fact as the first two. So you better start living in the real world, rather than the fantasy world you seem to inhabit.
The debt is just a number that various groups start throwing at each other when they don't get their way. It means almost nothing in the real world, as no one is ever going to pay it. We have plenty of money to fund science. We just don't want to, apparently.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
As much as republicans like to pretend they are shit-kicking retards, the reality is that science funding has tended to fare better under republicans.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Companies will not fund anything that falls outside their extremely narrow idea of what's "useful." Basically, anything that cannot be turned into a profitable product within 5 years is off the table. This means basically 99% of science. True, places like Microsoft Research exist, but they are relics of the past and most of them are in the process of winding down and shutting down.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Science is hard and requires years of experience. Virtually no PhD students produce ground-breaking discoveries, simply because they aren't at the level of expertise yet where they can do that. A PhD is a way of obtaining the expertise required to carry out research.
However, whenever you hear about a lab that discovered something amazing, it's almost certain that the grunt work of carrying out experiments and collecting data was done by grad students. You're right that most scientists are stuck doing boring, repetitive, non-creative work, because guess what, that's exactly what most of science is.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
When an experiment can't be reproduced, it's not fraud. It's a very common occurrence for experiments to be non-reproducible. Non-scientists seem to be of the opinion that science requires meticulous back-and-forth checking in order for stuff to be published. It doesn't. A published paper just means, "Hey everyone, we did this experiment and got these results, and we can't figure out if we're wrong. Would you guys mind double-checking our work?"
Fraud, on the other hand, is deliberate manipulation (or fabrication) of results. This is not a common occurrence at all. When it happens it usually makes the news and you get a bunch of people fired.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
That's not something you've ever heard me say. Exxon hires a bunch of scientists (geologists, chemists, etc.) and I have no reason to think that any of them are doing that. The statements from the corporate spokespeople are another matter. But from what I know about Exxon's position it's an admission that AGW is happening but we can adapt as we go.
It's kind of an example of what I was talking about. Even if 1 or 2 Exxon scientists are found to be faking it doesn't mean the whole bunch are.
It ain't Repubs that are trying to ban all nuclear power and prevent new reactors from being built. That award goes to the anti-science liberals. Something about carbon free power that Democrats just can't stand, or the fact that its so cheap, or the fact that it can desalinate seawater by the tons per minute (what was that about a severe drought in California)?
Basic questions simply may not be asked in a university setting where most research is done in America. There might be a finding that liberals don't like and we can't have that. No, it is liberals who don't like science or its sometimes very UN-PC conclusions.
And Obama, was he able to work out his absent-daddy issues by running up a $17,000,000,000,000 debt? If so I hope its fixed cause we are going to be blown away by it since it will be over $20,000,000,000,000 by the time he leaves office. Quick, someone give him another Nobel Prize so he can bomb a village. Anything, just keep him from blowing another $2,000,000,000,000.
Goldwater was a nitwit. His advice meant nothing, he failed at nearly everything he did in public and the religious folks are the only ones in America who kept the Soviet Union from sticking a communist bayonet up his butt.
Virtually all of the 'ground breaking' work in physics such as the discovery of the Higgs boson has led to absolutely nothing of practical real world value and won't lead to anything either. Physicists spend years, sometimes decades chasing dark matter (fairy dust), get an award for it and retire. I don't know why they can't be called upon to do something practical like find an inexpensive method to produce aero-gel. That would get rid of a tremendous amount of poverty, solve most of our energy problems and revolutionize the world. But no, its just too fun going to seminars and debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
But but . . . but Americans think the government is their mommy and daddy. And mommy and daddy buy them free candy so what you said about government can't possibly be true. Every thing the government does over here to a liberal is magic. Free education (now more expensive and unaffordable here than anywhere else), free healthcare (see free education), free food ( most obese poor people on the planet), free housing (ghetto), free pot to the poor (what could go wrong there?).
Its fun to pretend.
The universe is almost certainly a simulation and thus also fake. Therefore any gold within the universe is also fake. Again, rhodium is the only real currency.
You can't spell "oneiromancy" without "roman".
Record breaking cold with snow this summer right now in the U.S, and you think its hot. I challenge you to walk through 10 miles of summer snowfall barefoot and when you get to the end and tell me that its hotter than its ever been before I will believe it.
Global warming grants specifically state in the terms that the successful grant recipient will show global warming. So they pay for a pre-conclusion. Its all fraud and its all bogus. But there is simply so much money to be made promoting this AGW myth that no one will be allowed to disagree.
With every post of yours I have the good fortune to read, I am imbued with the sense you really don't have a clue what's going on in the world. I'm sure you think you do - you seem to have gathered some things to hold on to and assume they represent reality, but it seems you go no further than that. You are happy with your choices, and will do nothing to challenge them or to even ensure they're correct.
The fact you think you know for sure that ground-breaking physics research will never lead to anything with practical value highlights this point wonderfully.
That's completely wrong. The search for and discovery of the Higgs Boson, aside from the eventual applications it could have, has had a bunch of immediate ones as well. Advances in mathematics and particle accelerator tech (better magnets, refrigeration, plasma containment, etc.) to name just a few.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
He said "most scientists", and you counter that by claiming there are occasional cases of fraud. I hope you realise the two are not mutually exclusive... You've not hurt his argument what-so-ever, and have pointed out that fraudulent scientists are discovered by other scientists.
True believers are the only ones allowed to do any government 'research' into AGW. No questions about its validity are entertained. When anyone points out that we have record breaking cold they won't say "thats incorrect". They'll say "you are not a real scientist and therefore cannot read a thermometer". When a real scientist who has been there for years, even decades says it they'll say "you should be fired" not "where is your data" or something like that. No question about the emperor or his lack of clothes will be tolerated.
Whenever you can on rare occasion get a 'scientist' like Bill Nye to answer a question in public like that out of the blue they'll say something very unscientific like "climate never shows up in weather". Daily weather is the only way to detect climate but nevermind. You hurt a AGW true believers feelings when you ask for real world evidence or point out that 17 of the 19 climate computer models were wrong.
Tell the people that were convinced otherwise that we are experiencing record breaking cold and snow in the U.S. (after what they told us it was 40 + years of warming) and its not even fall yet. When you say it let them know that reality is where real world data should be measured, not a computer program. Real world data (not the SIMS they programmed themselves) should register at some level regardless of their own brainwashing. Also, tell them that computer simulations are not reality. Reality is what should matter to real science.
Indeed. And Republicans must have caused all this record breaking cold and snowfall this summer.
Yes! All that record breaking cold and snow this summer currently being reported by The Weather Channel is a myth. They just made it up. It can't be snowing its still summer.
Yes, as are all those fake reports about record cold and snow this summer. Someone just invented it.
No, it is a real 'research' project just like studying cow farts and burps. Government money is given away in many cases without strings. They gave a guy $400,000 once to gauge how people react to stupid looking art sculptures. The list is as endless as our $17,000,000,000,000 debt.
The first two points have been scientifically demonstrated to be true to a staggering degree of certainty, whereas the third point you plucked out of thin air. Classy.
I wouldn't be surprised to see countries such as BRIC members, EU members, or other countries start trying to woo the best and brightest for economic gains.
You mean like in the European Commission's research projects into things like graphene and the human brain? Europe are investing massively in research, and so are China, who are on a wild shopping spree for hi-tech companies, not least in UK. If they haven't already, they will pass the US so fast, you won't even know it.
I wouldn't be surprised to see countries such as BRIC members, EU members, or other countries start trying to woo the best and brightest for economic gains.
I think this focus on the "best and brightest" is actually a part of the problem. Sure, you'll need certain skills to run a research group, but these skills are found in many people and not just in the top of the batch. Beyond a certain point, the individual abilities of a researcher tend to be only weakly correlated with the actual research outcomes. There are many examples of people doing amazing science even though they are generally not considered to be top-notch scientists, even including Nobel laureates.
Science is an inherently risky business, with most scientists not finding out anything really exciting during their entire career and only very few ones will hit something that turns out to be really big. But you cannot possibly know in advance what this next big thing is going to be and who will find it, otherwise this wouldn't be science at all. In such an environment, the best investment strategy is to allocate your funds evenly across as many scientists as possible (I think it was Taleb who showed that). Of course, you have to make sure that each scientist gets enough money to run his or her group, but this optimal strategy is exactly the opposite of the current trend towards mega-chairs involving multiple labs and dozens of grad students and postdocs.
OS Reviews: Free and Open Source Software
Yeah, you're right.
I tried not to name Koch because they've become synonymous with a certain political persuasion and I didn't want to make it about partisan politics. This is about something a level above partisan politics.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I've been following the goings-on in Burma since I was a kid, since my Dad fought in the China-Burma theater with Merrill's Marauders during WWII and brought back all sorts of trinkets and pictures and stuff. That's a place with some sad history.
I've wanted to visit forever, and have gotten just across the border, but it's such a mess. I keep hoping.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yes! All that record breaking cold and snow this summer currently being reported by The Weather Channel is a myth. They just made it up. It can't be snowing its still summer.
That's a foolish example. This is about a change in the climate, not about local weather patterns. Global CO2 rise will affect the planet Globally by increasing temperature. In your home town it might get colder, in sothern Africa it might get hotter. The point is that the climate is changing because of our activity. Predicting how the climate will change in Charleston on January 28th as a result is nearly impossible. Predicting how it will change Globally over a period of 10yrs as a result isn't all that hard.
It's like in my job. We've got records that come in and go. We hire 20% more people... how many more records will we have next Tuesday because of those employees? I've no idea... How many more tickets will we have on average over the next year? 20% See the difference?
It is getting warmer. Man is responsible. We can't do anything about it. The last point is just as much of a fact as the first two. So you better start living in the real world, rather than the fantasy world you seem to inhabit.
We can do something about it. Many would like you to believe that it's this vast incurable problem. You can't expect everyone in America to stop driving or buy new cars overnight. I used to think that to. But the majority of the worlds pollution comes from Power plants and Shipping. There are only a few dozen huge container ships in the world that are producing more pollution than all the cars combine. We could build more nuclear power plants while we wait for Solar to mature. We could force those transport vessels to use cleaner fuels. They could do that without modification even!
There are, in fact, things we could do. So lets do them.
The debt is just a number that various groups start throwing at each other when they don't get their way. It means almost nothing in the real world, as no one is ever going to pay it. We have plenty of money to fund science. We just don't want to, apparently.
This is true, and bears repeating. There is no debt crisis. It's not even that no one is ever going to pay it. It's that the US can print its own money. It is not like state governments or a household. It has the capacity for infinite dollars. It will always be able to pay its debts.
So yes, we have plenty of money for science. We have plenty of money for everything. It is only political decisions that affect funding.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
You're reading impaired? I agree with "It is getting warmer. Man is responsible."
The part you don't seem to be able to respond to is "We can't do anything about it."
The carbon is in the air; it doesn't magically disappear; from the AGW activists themselves: http://www.skepticalscience.co... Capping or reducing carbon emissions will have very little effect on climate change; it may delay it by a few years if that. And even those steps have proven to be impossible.
Sorry to bust your belief in Santa Claus, but here's no viable plan for stopping climate change.
Bullshit. http://www.epa.gov/climatechan... Transport accounts for 13% and energy accounts for 26% of global carbon emissions. Even if you managed to eliminate all of those, it would only slow down climate change a little.
Bullshit too. http://www.statista.com/statis...
Nuclear power plants aren't the answer; they are hugely expensive, there is only limited fuel available, and we have no political solution to the waste disposal problem. And solar won't "mature" if the first thing you do is dampen down the world economy through emission restrictions.
Why won't anybody think of the children! It would be totally ineffective, it would wreck the world economy, it would hurt people far more than climate change itself, but at least we would feel like we are doing something!
The most effective way of getting emissions to go down is for government to stay out of the way. Fossil fuels are costly and people are highly motivated to use less of it already. If you make it harder for people to ship solar cells, or buy them, or make silicon, or whatever, solar cells will "mature" more slowly or stop maturing at all.
. . . although basic science can have colossal economic rewards, they are totally unpredictable. And therefore the rewards cannot be judged by immediate results. Nevertheless, the value of Faraday’s work today must be higher than the capitalization of all shares on the stock exchange. . . . The greatest economic benefits of scientific research have always resulted from advances in fundamental knowledge rather than the search for specific applications . . . transistors were not discovered by the entertainment industry . . . but by people working on wave mechanics and solid state physics. [Nuclear energy] was not discovered by oil companies with large budgets seeking alternative forms of energy, but by scientists like Einstein and Rutherford. . . .
-- Margaret Thatcher
People keep trying to have the government do stuff that they're not allowed to do, such as funding scientific research. "But it's really important! We need to force everyone to pay for it by funding it from taxes." Hasn't anyone read the 10th amendment? The states can take care of that stuff. Keep the limits on the feds!
I just wrote a blog post on this subject a day or two ago:
http://freedomgeek.quora.com/S...
--- wad
You are entirely full of shit. Look into Bell Labs sometime, which employed a ton of PHds in physics, math, and other theoretical disciplines. They did more fundamental research than almost any other institution during much of the 20th century, and you have them to thank for creating the entire fucking information age. They produced a little thing called the transistor, millions of which sit inside your computer, enabling you to bitch about physics online. Not to mention developing information theory, lasers, the first communication satellites, the cell phone network, and way back in the day the telephone lines and vacuum tubes to enable your words to be heard plain as day by somebody on the other side of the country.
If you don't believe fundamental work in physics has produced anything of value, then you must not use the internet, a modern car, watch TV or DVDs, listen to music (even much of radio is digital now, and anyway it is all amplified by transistors), or talk on a cell phone. Not to mention the constant increases in battery life, memory density, computer speed and storage capacity. Every single one of those comes down to fundamental physics, a bunch of eggheads "going to seminars and debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin".
Sadly that is true, that and a few other sexy items just grease the path.
I think the realization of us being $17 tril in debt, the decline in our national intelligence, the decline in our politically correct institutions of learning, our political commitment to mediocrity, and more such, have set us on the path for not doing basic research anymore as it does not get votes.
I think we are at the end, and some other nation, maybe China, will have to take over world "leadership."
Its too late, China, India, Russia, Japan have all advanced beyond the USA. An average worker in Russia, Japan, (and Canada -- not in the list) live better than the average American worker. Measure it by the net-net earnings. The Net-Net earnings remove costs such as taxes, shelter (homes), health, and education and child rearing. After subtraction, what is left is the net-net $.
What is the difference between the listed countries and the USA. In the USA the corporations run the country, and they appoint the government via their funding.
The land of abuse is due to Corporate America. It is no longer "government of the people, by the people, for the people." And how wonderful it is to move corporation head offices off shore, so the profits gained in the USA are not spent in the USA. SHAME.
Prove me wrong.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Global warming grants specifically state in the terms that the successful grant recipient will show global warming. So they pay for a pre-conclusion. Its all fraud and its all bogus. But there is simply so much money to be made promoting this AGW myth that no one will be allowed to disagree.
Huh, this isn't how I thought grants worked. Could you share an example with me?
i don't know karate, but i know ca-razy
Um, you are aware that the really cold areas are limited, and counterbalanced by unusually hot areas, aren't you? Or, to put it another way, that the world extends more than 100km from your home?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Fossil fuels only get expensive after all the easy-to-find stuff has been burned and contributed its CO2 to the atmosphere. Incentives to not produce CO2 are a much better idea. If they can be made to more or less match the external costs of producing it, the market will move towards an efficient solution.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Never read the Constitution, I see. Funding things is one thing the Feds are specifically allowed to do.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Except for most of that "debt" was actually accrued by GW Bush resolving his daddy issues, Obama simply stopped playing games with the debt. The deficit is now lower than it was at any time under Bush..... but silly me, debating a Republican with facts. We all know Republicans are immune to them.
Monstar L
Typically development can come to market with a product in 5 years or less. Larger companies can deal with longer development cycles than smaller companies. Big companies like the OLD AT&T had Bell Labs (I just don't know the current statuss, and it was significantly downsized when AT&T was taken over by SWBell), and IBM has its labs that both have done and do real research that may or may not ever come to market. Most of their 'research' could also be considered 'development'.
As much as I dislike government sponsored research and development, even as a conservative I think it has a place. DOD is a special case, but even there research needs to be separated from development, especially for basic research. To me, basic research has a long term 'payback' probability. Things like the Manhattan project was a special case (compressed research and development cycle, but was compensated by unlimited funds (within reason for the day)). We are still benefitting from the Los Alamos Labs continuing research. NASA is another compressed development that came from WWII development and went to a compressed/accelerated cycle or R&D in the '60s, and has tapered off since. ... All this to say, government sponsored research is best suited to long term ahd highly speculative research.
Also, Research is exploration with a low probability of usable (spelled commercially viable) outcome. Development is taking the results of research and often other developments and rolling them into a viable and typically useful outcome (commercial product).
China learned from the 'American Century' (1900's), to bad we haven't. ... Yes, research costs, and costs big money. The spinoffs overall tend to take a while to turn into 'profit'. But basic research is the investment we put into the future of our society.
On economics, we need to find a way to get much of the expatriated assets repatriated. Currently companies are not repatriating cash assets due to tax laws. How to do it depends on the the political winds, but it appears obvious that higher tax rates than other countries. Secondly, and more importantly we need to reduce the amount of national debt held outside our borders (by non-US citizens) to less than the GDP. That is a long term goal. It is basically like paying your mortgage to family members versus to a out-of-town bank that has no skin in the game seeing you succeed.
Am I right? I think so. Am I wrong? Not totally. -- Implementation is left to the interested student.
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
... There is no debt crisis. It's not even that no one is ever going to pay it. It's that the US can print its own money. It is not like state governments or a household. It has the capacity for infinite dollars. It will always be able to pay its debts.
So yes, we have plenty of money for science. We have plenty of money for everything. It is only political decisions that affect funding.
Great. Let's print $10000000000000000000 of money and save the world.
Yeah, ya can't just do that. Though that is a frequent response to the idea that we have unlimited money. The reason you can't is that you'll get massive inflation. The money supply can't increase faster than GDP or you'll get inflation. Sometimes inflation is desirable, BTW.
Funny story though: Since 2008 the Fed has tripled the money supply. Tripled! There are now three times as many dollars in existence than there were 7 years ago. The inflation hasn't materialized as much as some would think, for various reasons. I don't know entirely why myself. But the Fed's action is an example of how we have as much money as we want. It's really a matter of distribution. That's why I say these are political decisions, not financial ones. After the crash in 2008, the government could have given people money to pay off part of the loans on their underwater homes, thereby avoiding the devaluation of the CDO securities. But instead they bought a lot of the securities based on those loans, which cratered in value, at their peak prices. They bailed out the banks while leaving borrowers to be foreclosed on. Political decisions.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
One cold summer near my house = no climate change. Brilliant. Also, fuck you.