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A History of Innovation and Dysfunction At Los Alamos National Laboratory (santafenewmexican.com)
In the past, Los Alamos National Laboratory has done some of the United States' most crucial research and development. Lately, the lab has been dealing with accidents and management problems. Reader DougDot directs us to a report from the Santa Fe New Mexican about the questions surrounding LANL's future. Quoting:
Federal officials told Congress in December that they will put the LANL contract up for competitive bid for only the second time since the lab opened in 1943. The current LANS contract ends Sept 30, 2017. Identifying what went wrong, and why the lab has proven so difficult to manage, will play an important role for the Department of Energy as it seeks out new managers to run the lab. Investigators say the problems stem from repeated management weaknesses, the kind that were supposed to get fixed when the Department of Energy turned to private industry in 2006 to oversee the lab.
It was the first time the federal government had put the lab’s management up for bid, with the idea that a for-profit model, operating under an incentives-based contract, would fix the problems that haunted the nonprofit University of California, which had run the lab since World War II. ... experts, watchdog groups and former lab employees point to an array of problems, from a clash of cultures between the regimented and profit-driven Bechtel and the languorous, research-oriented university; to incentives that may have induced contractors to put a premium on meeting deadlines despite safety risks; to a mix of shoddy accountability and micromanagement on the part of the federal government.
It was the first time the federal government had put the lab’s management up for bid, with the idea that a for-profit model, operating under an incentives-based contract, would fix the problems that haunted the nonprofit University of California, which had run the lab since World War II. ... experts, watchdog groups and former lab employees point to an array of problems, from a clash of cultures between the regimented and profit-driven Bechtel and the languorous, research-oriented university; to incentives that may have induced contractors to put a premium on meeting deadlines despite safety risks; to a mix of shoddy accountability and micromanagement on the part of the federal government.
when the players are the problem. works every time.
Two people died while I was there (industrial accident) back in the 80's when it was solely a Berkeley contract. IIRC, White Sands was the private operator and LA was the University operated arms.
I worked there for a time. I didn't see the issues, but I am not aware of everything that went on. I am really proud of the Lab and what it was accomplished for the US and the West in general.
Private industry is good at what it's good at, but if doing something dangerous it needs to be watched carefully because it WILL cheat and cut corners. That will continue until we stop rewarding sociopathic behaviors.
Private industry is NOT good at other things, and basic research is one of them. Unpredictable timelines, highly educated people who actively dislike being 'managed'--these things are not compatible with a profit motive. Where government and nonprofits tend to foul up is in an extreme focus on process, usually begun for good reasons but sometimes they need redirecting.
It's almost like no model is good for everything in the world--that you have to pick what's best for a given situation.
That is something some Tea Partiers and on the other end some extreme liberals have a problem with.
Being hardcore anti government or hardcore anti capitalist is kind of stupid. Both have stuff to offer, and both are destructive in the extremes.
Two people died while I was there (industrial accident) back in the 80's when it was solely a Berkeley contract. IIRC, White Sands was the private operator and LA was the University operated arms.
Um, no. White Sands (?) is a National Monument just south of Alamagordo, NM. The University of California managed the LANL contract from the mid-40's through 2006, when i tlost the contract to the current LLC, LANS.
Really ?
Cosmic Background Radiation, Bell Labs
Band Theory of Semiconductors, Bell Labs
Information Theory, Bell Labs
Atomic Force Microscope, IBM
Josephson Junction Circuitry, IBM
LASER, Bell Labs
High Temperature Superconductors, IBM
That's off the top of my head. I see the Zampolits in the universities have worked their magic on you very well.
Really ?
Cosmic Background Radiation, Bell Labs
Band Theory of Semiconductors, Bell Labs
Information Theory, Bell Labs
Atomic Force Microscope, IBM
Josephson Junction Circuitry, IBM
LASER, Bell Labs
High Temperature Superconductors, IBM
That's off the top of my head. I see the Zampolits in the universities have worked their magic on you very well.
Yes, well: The big dog in the current LANL contractor LLC is Bechtel. A construction company. Running a National Lab. No wonder everything is screwed up at LANL. A huge paradigm mismatch occurred when Bechtel took over the LANL contract in 2006.
Perhaps they meant Sandia National Lab.
"Hey look, Jim, there's a 'Property of D.O.E.' sticker on each rim of this Lambo!
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
I grew up in Los Alamos and I worked there during my high school years through some of graduate school. The article completely failed to mention one of the main culprits for a lot of these problems: The Department of Energy. While I do not have knowledge beyond what is in the press for most of the incidents mentioned, the ones where I do mostly include a major role in the problem played by DOE ranging from their screwed up policies to direct involvement. Given this, a new contractor can only do so much.
You see? It's like I've always said. You can get more with a kind word and a 2x4 than you can with just a kind word.
Thats what the UK did for its first nuclear component and design work. The UK government quickly worked out the US had taken all its nuclear secrets and was not going to share any of the results with the UK post ww2.
So a project was set up to pass all the skills to the private sector and then bring the results back into the UK as a production line within budget and on time.
The UK got its own nuclear systems ready and working via its own staff and skill sets.
Nations can use their private sectors with great efficiency, get amazing results with shareholders happy and enjoy exports for years.
The problem with the US is the structure of profit taking, contractors, entitled shareholders, foreign brands wanting their share using paper work US front companies.
The US is stuck with huge structures to remove cash from gov/mil projects and spread it around for a lot of profit taking. Whats left is for new work, maintenance or upgrades.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
BUT, they likely retained almost all of the people and middle management from the previous run...so, you basically had the same exact people causing problems before, still there causing the same problems.
They'd likely need to pretty much "clean house" and start over, however, you'd lose a lot of brain talent that way too...and it often hard to pick out who truly you need and whom you can let go on a contract that large...but clean house is likely the only way to have hope of true reform.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Nowadays, private industry also tends towards an extreme focus on process. There are inherent problems attempting to manage large organizations and private industry isn't any better at it than government is. I know this form a lot of experience (and friends' experience) in large, dysfunctional corporations (private industry) such as VW, Ford, GM, utilities (DTE & Consumers Energy), healthcare (Blue Cross, HAP, hospitals), etc...
I have heard personally from a former colleague who is intimately involved with LANL, a high-level University researcher with ties to LANL but not a direct employee.
The current lab management contractors have various metrics for which they manage the lab employees & programs. One metric which is now completely absent? Progress, results, and success in innovative scientific research.
The UC management might have been lax in other ways---it was very hands-off and let the lab do anything it wanted as long as there was some opportunity for UC professors to also work with LANL.
But now, the fundamental purpose of much of the lab is not even recognized----and the management fee far, far higher. And previously when the UC was the prime contractor, all the money it got for management it put back in to joint research.
The national labs can do things that universities cannot---sustained research and in particular development that takes too long and would not be rewarded in a cutthroat academic environment, but the bean-counting compliance-oriented, instead of success-oriented, management philosophy is not appropriate for what is literally, as the name says, a National Laboratory.
LANL has always been the best, and I believe that some of its excellence has been because it was managed by the University of California primarily, and others were managed by private contractors.
Cosmic Background Radiation, Bell Labs Band Theory of Semiconductors, Bell Labs Information Theory, Bell Labs
Bell Labs, a privately run lab to soak up profits from a government mandated monopoly. Not sure that makes a case for private for profit management. More like publicly funded research utopia.
Atomic Force Microscope, IBM Josephson Junction Circuitry, IBM LASER, Bell Labs High Temperature Superconductors, IBM
IBM's accomplishments were all in the pursuit of making more better cheaper things. Any "basic research" that fell out of these efforts were serendipitous happenstance.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Yeah, sorry about that. I was never at Sandia, just knew people who worked there. And it was a long time ago.
Sandia, not white sands. It was also the name of a bartender that I knew at Mom and Pops. I wonder if that place is still there.
Investigators say the problems stem from repeated management weaknesses, the kind that were supposed to get fixed when the Department of Energy turned to private industry in 2006 to oversee the lab.
If you believe that was ever the goal of turning it over to a private company, I've got a bridge to sell you. It was strictly about giving a valuable contract to a big company, done by an administration that Believed(TM) in the divinity of private industry.
I don't have inside information about Los Alamos, but I did know someone at a different national lab that got privatized at the same time. I heard a lot of horror stories from him. Their policies had nothing to do with running an effective research organization, and everything to do with squeezing as much money out of it as they could get.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Who would you recommend over them?
You'll probably find similar issues at any large organization. Richard Feynman was noted for saying the triumph of Apollo was not technical but rather managerial.
LANL is officially dead. Last one out, turn off the lights. (It'll keep glowing on its own for quite some time.)
Romania did pay them $1.5 Billion for building 52 km of highway. I think that's a world record $28.8 Million per km. That's got to be a pure gold highway or something.
Human Rights, Article 12: Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence
>Bell Labs, a privately run lab to soak up profits from a government mandated monopoly. Not sure that makes a case for private for profit management. More like publicly funded research utopia.
Not to mention the core diference is that Bell Labs, being created as a profit sponge, was not a profit seeking enterprise. They may have been owned by one, but because they were specifically *expected* to not make profit they didn't operate like one - and instead was allowed to operate like academia and deliver knowledge instead (some of which, at least, would later be profitable to Bell of course).
The GP correctly pointed out that basic research is a very bad fit for a profit-motive, the only thing Bell Labs prove is that "academia" and charity are not the only ways one could conceivably fund a non-profit research lab. Nobody argued that, that was the case.
That said - government-funded academia is definitely simpler to accomplish - which is why there are millions of government funded research labs around the world (including major multinational ones like CERN) while examples like Bell Labs are few and far between.
Where private enterprise have tried to dabble in the "free reign for researchers lab" model in the past, hoping to cash in on ideas, there are far more dismal failures than successes. Xerox PARC was such an attempt - and while they produced world-class research and innocations - Xerox utterly failed to see it's value or capitalize on it (and basically gave the results to Steve Jobs for free). Ultimately that led to the end of PARC.
Bell Labs didn't survive much past the end of the AT&T monopoly either. It genuinely seems that research labs run by profit-seeking enterprises generally do not work well, and can only succeed when very specific conditions are in place (that are not organically arrived at by market forces).
I would add to the GP's reasons for this that science requires peer review, which works best when the results are shared as widely as possible. Secret-sauce science is not really science at all - and that too is fundamentally incompatible with the profit motive. Profit demands exclusivity but science demands reproducability - which are flat-out contradictory aims. This means that even when, practically, the process can be made to work - the results are tainted as science. Just look at the many resent scandals due to unreproducible drug tests. Evidence based medicine becomes a lot less trustworthy when we water down the scientific standards for what "evidence based" means (though still a lot better than pseudo-science like homeopathy and anti-vaxxers).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Yes, well: The big dog in the current LANL contractor LLC is Bechtel. A construction company. Running a National Lab. No wonder everything is screwed up at LANL. A huge paradigm mismatch occurred when Bechtel took over the LANL contract in 2006.
A huge paradigm mismatch occurred when the government decided the best way to choose a contractor was by lowest price...the phrase is actually "lowest price, technically acceptable". You get what you pay for, and companies play the game of lowballing, or filling positions with people marginally qualified for the positions, so they can be paid less giving the firm more profit. And, in times of shrinking budgets, there's always pressure to reduce staffing.
FWIW, a lot of my work is on contracts, figuring out staffing models (manpower availability, calculating required staff using monte carlo), requirements analysis, etc. While we always attempt to provide the best service/product we can, you can't build a Mercedes on a Hyundai budget.
Just another day in Paradise
just doesn't work. The teapublicans are just too stupid to understand that.
Earth to Hate-Filled Bigot Luddite: George Bush is gone, it is the Democrats that have presided over the worst Crony-Capitalism in American history, for years now. Wow. (Funny how people can't help but project their own inadequacies... the stupid part being one.)
Just because you are ignorant of the English language doesn't mean everyone else is. And if you are unable to apply the definitions you look up then that brings into question your grasp of English overall. (And giving a fake definition for a word does not contribute to demonstrating your having a grasp on the language.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
At least link to the sound for the noobs :)
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
To be fair, the highway does terminate in Transylvania, they probably had a hell of a turnover with Dracula eating all their workers.
In reality though, look at the path the highway takes, it goes across the whole country, which as far as I understand is quite mountainous. The particular section that they worked on is not indicated as to the difficulty though, and the Carpathian mountain section is said to be the most difficult, which apparently they didn't work on.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
You named two organizations, one defunct which was not a profit-making operation anyway. A very few companies will do serious basic research, but that doesn't mean it's a viable model. Most basic research is government-funded.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
>(parenthetically, it is unclear why any company would purposely destroy its own profit)
For exactly the reason Bell Labs existed - so a monopoly could hide how *much* of a monopoly it was and avoid antitrust laws.
> Bell saw that only the labs could develop the technology their system needed.
Most of what Bell Labs developed were useless to AT&T and they did some of the most important research in a field Bell was specifically prohibited from entering - they could only do that because there was no intention to profit from that research.
>Bell Labs was not "publicly funded"
I didn't say it was - I said that the lack of a profit motive on the research allowed the researchers to operate the same way publicly funded researchers do. Any researchers that have to consider a profit motive are no longer scientists by definition.
>The transistor is a good example
No, It is not. It's the exact opposite of basic research. It was intended to build something with a practical purpose - that's decidedly NOT research, that's engineering by definition. Research seeks knowledge, it presumes any knowledge is useful - and there is no such thing as "failure". A failed experiment is just as valuable as a successful one because either way you gained knowledge. You proved or disproved an idea. Engineering only cares about successes. Nobody is interested in a design that cannot work - but an experiment that cannot work has value.
It's not monetary or practical value however, the value is the knowledge itself - not something you can profit from, you already have all the value RESEARCH can ever have the moment it is done.
> Harvard was forced to put a Chinese Wall between its research and teaching
Interesting suggestion - I would counter that I see no such problem but then I never saw teaching as a function of universities at all. To me a university is a research organisation, it exists purely for the production of knowledge for it's own sake. Teaching is a side activity it engages in purely for the purpose of letting the current generation of researchers pass their knowledge on to the next generation and ensuring there will be a next generation. Frankly any field that isn't purely research focussed should never have existed at university level at all. Arts and science should have been the only faculties a university ever had. The rest belong in trade schools.
>That's what patents make possible.
No. That's the opposite of what patents do. At least in the short term. However, it is irrelevant since anything you can patent is, by definition, not research but engineering. Research is about discovery, engineering is about building. Discoveries cannot be patented.
Make no mistake, I am not dissing engineering. Engineering is a noble profession and I'm proud to be second generation engineer. But it's not science, it's not research and it is incredibly intellectually lazy to conflate the two as if they have something in common. Computer science (where Bell Lab's greatest breakthroughs happened) is a bit blurry - some of it is research most of it is engineering, the best things to come out of Bell (like Unix) were the ones more on the research side.
>I think this just becomes some kind of statist class warfare
Not at all - private research is tainted by the very concept that *anything* except the knowledge mattered at all - it forever leaves any private research less trustworthy than public research. But that doesn't imply either class or state based loyalties. There are many ways to fund things that involve neither profit motives NOR governments. They haven't been explored much when it comes to research but some examples do exist and I'm sure there could be others that will likely be far better than either of those alternatives (if only because governments also have ulterior motives and sometimes impose those on scientists which again taints the results).
Science is about knowledge and the most trustworthy science is the science that considered nothing *bu
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
First you aren't challenging the point, just the limits of effort I was willing to put into making the post.
Second your second point is wrong.
But engineers dont try to build designs that almost certainly wont work. Scientists do experiments they expect to fail routinely - to confirm that they fail and if they dont start figuring out why.
Engineering applies (usually very simplified) scientiffic theories while assuming those theories are correct. Science assumes tge opposite.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Do you have figures on basic research that is or is not government-funded? There are occasional companies that back researchers in pretty much what they want to do, like IBM or Microsoft, but most companies want to do more short-term and directed research and development and stuff they can incorporate into their products (and MIcrosoft seems particularly bad at that, however much I appreciate their contributions). It's going to be hard to separate out basic research. Coming up with the laser was arguably basic research (the theory had been more or less there before, but confirming basic research is basic research), but using it in audio and video players, or using it as a range-finder for tanks, wasn't. I don't think there's a reliable way to divide research and development to basic research (like the laser) and the definitely not basic research (like the Blu-Ray player). Lots of people in the private sector do non-basic research.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
But engineers dont try to build designs that almost certainly wont work. Scientists do experiments they expect to fail routinely - to confirm that they fail and if they dont start figuring out why. Engineering applies (usually very simplified) scientiffic theories while assuming those theories are correct. Science assumes tge opposite.
As an engineer I worked at an R&D "lab" that was also charged with producing actual product. To confirm our models, we absolutely created designs that we expected to fail in order to confirm the models were correct so that designs that were supposed to work had a greater degree of confidence in meeting their design goals. I guarantee you I did not work in the only such job, as I strongly suspect companies like Apple work along similar lines, albeit maybe not with quite so many intended failures, as one of our goals was to document some bleeding edge cases.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
You have a remarkable capacity to miss the point - then you pounce on explanatory statements and try to disprove those as if that would somehow impact the validity of the argument they were meant to explain.
Let me try this again: engineering does not follow the scientific method, if it did it would *be* science. That is literally the difference between science and non-science.
Philosophers demarcate systems of thought into three broad categories:
1) Science - which can be identified by the fact that it follows the scientific method
2) Pseudo-science - which pretends to be science but does not follow the scientific method and is thus not trustworthy
3) Non-science - which does not follow the scientific method but also does not claim to and instead follow other methods more appropriate to their goals.
Engineering falls under non-science. Now a lot of things fall under non-science and the lines can be debated - so for example most religious philosophers would categorize theology as a non-science while strict rationalists would categorize it as pseudo-science. Art is a much more definitive non-science. Nobody pretends Van Gogh is science, but it's clearly valuable nonetheless - while pseudo-science is worthless.
But there is no significant debate about engineering - engineering is a non-science. It's goals and methodologies are vastly different from science despite occasional minor overlaps.
These differences are important because what you categorize something as sets the expectations of the field. If you pretend that homeopathy is science - you are trying to get people to trust it's claims like it was real medicine - creating an expectation of the field which isn't supported by how the field operates.
Now these are not absolute lines of separation - some specific activities cross the lines, many fields have elements from more than one category (engineering depends on scientific advance and in turn builds the tools which is needed to produce advances in science). But they are still recognizably different activities. The same job may entail doing engineering and science at different times of the day - and the job would be categorized by what it consists mostly off, but those activities are each still within one or the other category.
My and the GP's argument was that the profit motive fundamentally conflicts with the scientific method, and I stand by the belief that "pure research" is a term which should only be applicable to science. The "pure" in "pure research" specifically refers to the LACK of any other goal but knowledge - the distinct lack of a profit motive or a desire to produce a working design or invent something or build something or sell something or even to give something away. It's "pure" research when the only identifiable goal is "to find out what happens" - that absence of any ulterior motive is what makes the research "pure".
Privately funded research almost always has an ulterior motive, at best it's philanthropy - more commonly it's profit, but in either case this prevents one from sanely categorizing the results as "pure" research. When genuine science comes out of impure research it is, more often than not, accidental discoveries made while trying to achieve something else.
The Manhattan project employed a lot of physicists, physics is undoubtedly a science - but the Manhatten project's goal was not learning knowledge for it's own sake - it's goal was to produce a weapon, a practical application of knowledge. The Manhatten Project was an engineering project - it only employed scientists because the science this engineering depended on was so cutting edge.
One could even argue that while Feynman was working on the Manhatten project he was *not* a scientist but an engineer, he was a scientist before and after the project but not during it.
The scientific method is fundamentally incompatible with a profit motive since it requires you to follow the evidence even if the evidence would lead to greater costs or even the complete destruction of
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
You have a remarkable capacity to miss the point - then you pounce on explanatory statements and try to disprove those as if that would somehow impact the validity of the argument they were meant to explain.
Not at all. I agreed with the rest of your post except for this absolute statement:
But engineers dont try to build designs that almost certainly wont work.
The only potential quibble is as an engineer with an R&D lab are you more scientist or engineer? That would be a philosophical discussion I'd be open to but would likely be long and need to morph depending on the specific task being done (i.e., I'm stating that it is indeterminate in the general case)
Perhaps I should have prefaced it with a few mollifying terms and not just stated it baldly, as I could see how that might come across as adversarial. As I spent less than 30s on the entire session, I take the blame for not proof reading it prior to hitting the submit button.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.