Wow, parent got modded troll pretty fast. Apparently the Republican mod-bombers are out in force.
It is a fact that Jindal, governor of a state (Louisiana) which has suffered mightily from natural disasters (hurricanes) in the recent past and will inevitably do so in the future, criticized Federal spending on a program designed to predict and prepare for natural disasters (volcanoes) which could easily be as devastating if not more so. It is also a fact that Jindal made this a partisan issue. Pointing this out does not constitute a troll.
Yep. And next time Louisiana gets slammed by a big storm (and it will) Jindal or his successor will go running to the Federal government for help, all the while whining that not enough was done to predict or prepare for the event. But volcanoes? Pffft. Everyone who has to worry about that is a damnyankee anyway.
(Of course, if it weren't for those damnyankees, Jindal himself would never have had a prayer of getting elected county dogcatcher in any ex-Confederate state, much less governor... but we're not supposed to mention that either.)
Louisiana politics have always been deeply corrupt, but they used to be relatively sane. I'm not sure what happened.
"The airship is great because it doesn't have that Big Brother feel, or create feelings of invasiveness," says Lee Silvestre, vice president of mission innovation in Raytheon's Integrated Defense division.
Oh, okay. As long as we don't feel like we're being watched, everything's all right then.
Excuse me? Isn't the whole idea of a good spy not to make the targets feel like they're being watched? Is it okay for foreign agents to get copies of classified documents as long as we don't feel like they're doing it?
Well, yeah, the annotation often sucks, and I do wish GEO would enforce better annotation standards. Part of the problem in this specific domain, I think, is that MIAME is, to put it politely, a rather open-ended standard. If we had more structured annotation standards, both human- and machine-readable, and the databases strictly enforced these standards for submissions, we'd all be a lot better off. A number of people I work with are working on exactly this problem, and listening to them complain I get a pretty good idea of how far off we are.:/.
That being said, I've obtained a lot of useful data sets from GEO. Sorting the wheat from the chaff can be an exercise in pain, but it's still often faster -- and a whole hell of a lot cheaper -- than doing the wet-lab work yourself.
The same applies to software implementations of new algorithms. In the paper you cite, it looks to me like there's enough detail that implementing the algorithm yourself wouldn't be all that hard, but why should you have to? Clearly the authors wrote an implementation, and it would be nice if they would release it (BMC is happy to host it, I think.) A clue in this particular case comes from the authors' institutional afffiliation; Affy is very good about describing its algorithms, not so much about releasing its software without expecting significant amounts of money in return.
Computer Science and Computer Engineering classes have yet to implement significant group collaboration.
Or they go too far in the other direction. I distinctly remember one database class in my MS curriculum which had thirty people working together on a one-semester project, and it was a nightmare. At the time I was working as a DBA lead with a team of five people including myself, which was a pretty good number for our project, so I had a pretty decent idea of how things should work. Trying to get thirty CS students, only a couple of whom had any real industry experience, to work together on a single project in that length of time was just Not Going To Happen. I tried very hard to get the professor to break the class into a few groups and have each group work independently on the problem, but he wouldn't budge; he had a Grand Vision of what all these people working together would accomplish. The mythical man-month in action.
The result was pretty much what you'd expect. Three-quarters of the class slacked off, a quarter did all they could, and instead of a working project at the end of the semester we had a half-finished mess. A few of us strongly suspected hat what he really wanted was a polished product he could distribute under his own name, so this chaos may in fact have been a silver lining... But the experience was of no real value to anyone in the end.
It depends on the field, really. In bioinformatics, we're lucky enough to have (a) a growing number of open access journals, as another poster mentioned, and (b) a number of enormous public access databases with raw data available to anyone who wants to use it. In biology and medicine in general, the NIH public access policy is designed to ensure that the finished product (i.e. journal articles) doesn't stay locked up forever. But I understand that bioinformatics is kind of at the leading edge of this trend -- if your area of interest is, say, inorganic chemistry, it may be a lot harder to get past the barriers.
WRT both science and OSS, the cathedral and the bazaar are converging. In science, the number and the size of the "ivory towers" is growing all the time, and they're getting better about sharing information both between institutions and the world as a whole. In OSS, while it's true that anyone can jump in at any time, the most successful OSS projects generally center around a core development team which carefully vets contributions. As for your use of quotation marks around the word "qualified"... while amateurs may sometimes make significant contributions in both science and software, the truth of the matter is that a formal education in the subject at hand makes it a lot more likely that your work will be good enough to be useful to the field.
A professor is someone with a PhD who is tenured at the university in question.
No. A professor is someone who is given the title by the institution, period. Most universities won't do this without a PhD or equivalent degree, true, but someone who has been given the title is properly referred to by the title. And if your job title is now "Assistant Professor," you are in fact now a "prof." I'm no bigger a Cory Doctorow fan than you are, but if he has been given a job title which includes the word "professor" by an accredited institution of higher learning (I have no idea of this is so) then he is too.
People who present conflicting opinions to all those you listed get modded up as well, as long as they do so in a reasonable way. It seems to me that most of the whining on/. along the lines of "waaah, my post got modded down because it disagrees with the groupthink!" comes from people who write semiliterate rants and obscenity-laden trolls. They're not getting modded down because they're Bold Rebels Speaking Truth To Power; they're getting modded down because they can't express their arguments in a way that makes sense.
That's not free speech. You certainly have a right to say the same thing I said in your own words you can even quote me on specific points THAT IS FREE SPEECH. After my ability to make money from it runs out it can become public domain but not until it has run the course of being MY FUCKING WORK ASSHOLE!
Take a look at your own little rant. Is it offensive? Yes. Is it obscene? By most community standards, absolutely. And there are many, many people who would therefore choose to class it as "not free speech." But fortunately for you, they don't get to do that.
And you do not get to decide what is "speech" and what isn't, either.
No, we don't. We are talking about, whether creators -- of movies, music, literature, software, fashion designs -- have the inherent rights to control their creations, or whether whoever happens to be able to copy their work has the same rights to it as the creator.
[sigh] If you say something -- anything, whether or not it's something someone else has said before -- you are exercising your right to free speech. If the law tells you that you can't say what you want to say, that is a restriction on your freedom of speech. Period.
Saying "I support free speech, but X doesn't count" is a classic tool of the censor, and it's always wrong, whether X is a political position with which you disagree, a word you don't want your children to hear, or just something that someone else said once before. All speech is inherently free, and anything which limits it is, yes, damn it, a restriction on free speech. There's no way around it.
We long ago accepted that, no matter what the First Amendment says, certain restrictions on freedom of speech are acceptable. Slander carries with it legal penalties, as do threats of violence, as does revealing classified information. We also, as a matter of principle, try to keep these restrictions as limited as possible. So the only pertinent question is, how much of a restriction on free speech are we willing to accept in the name of copyright?
Debating how Copyright should work is like debating who should be king. If you accept to be ruled does it really matter how?
Yes. Yes, it does. There are good kings and bad kings. Now, generally in the modern world we've accepted that "no king" (or having a king who is no more than a figurehead) is the best option of all, but for most of human history that hasn't been a choice.
Will we ever get rid of copyright? Hell, I don't know. Should we? I don't know the answer to that one either. What I do know is that we could have much, much better copyright laws than the ones we have now. (Say, seventeen years upon registration plus an optional, one-time seventeen-year extension... I think I've heard that one before...) Condemning all copyright laws as equally bad is not going to make them go away; they'll be with us for a long, long time. There is a lot to be said for harm reduction, just as there is for, to use your analogy, supporting a good king over a bad one.
Worse, a lot of drug research is publicly funded, but then the results wind up privatized.
Fortunately the NIH public access policy is doing a lot to reverse this trend, but unsuprisingly, it's meeting with a lot of resistance. Mostly from the publishers, not the drug companies, but that's a matter of whose ox is being gored. If the FDA ever gets serious about its threats to open up clinical trial data, you'll see a real brawl.
How is getting some public governmental research entity started going to be remotely cost effective and efficient
Of course you're right. Government research is always so wasteful and inefficient. Remember that DARPAnet thing? What a dumb idea! Fortunately, it sank like every inefficient government research program inevtably will, and we can now discuss the glories of the Invisible Hand here on free-market forums such as Compuserve, Prodigy, and GEnie.
a pay-per-use government with only one tax mandatory (for defense)
So why is defense the special case in this pay-as-you-go libertopia? Why can't we all just defend our own homes and communities, as the Framers intended? ("A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State...") Once you admit that one particular function is too big a problem for individuals to handle on their own, you pretty much open the door to all the others.
The difference here is that there's a proposed causal mechanism. Obviously a lot of research would be needed to establish whether such a mechanism exists, but "internet gambling leads to less gambling-related violence" is a perfectly reasonable proposition, while "my sister turning 21" has to do with propositions of another kind entirely.
Apple isn't much better. The official security fixes in Safari 4.0, released yesterday, are for a total of _47_ vulnerabilities. Microsoft has a long way to go.
It looks like almost half the vulnerabilities listed are only for the Windows version of Safari, which means it's probably a matter of Apple having to clean up after Microsoft's bad security practices. Trying to write secure software is a PITA when the OS is fighting you at every turn.
While I agree that the Windows monocultire is a bad thing, I think it's important to remember that you could kill every single Windows machine in the world and most of the infrastructure than runs the internet would keep humming along quite happily. What's at risk is primarily desktops and corporate (intranet) servers. Losing these machines would be bad, but "brings the entire Internet to its knees" is an exaggeration. Admins would just cut off the infected machines and keep going.
It's measured in "stupid space units" because it's used in astronomy, of course. "Kilometers per second per megaparsec" has a much more intuitive interpretation, when considering the speed at which distant galaxies are moving away from us, than does "cycles per second."
I now feel it's morally wrong to offer these tests to consumers who have no idea how to interpret them and what they mean;
It is never morally wrong to give people information about their own bodies. Not ever. In nine years of patient care and twelve years of research, I have never encountered a situation in which deliberately withholding information from a patient was the right thing to do, and at this point I really don't expect I ever will. (I have, unfortunately, encountered many situations in which withholding information was the wrong thing to do, and have had to do it anyway as a matter of policy.) To be sure, it's better if the information is presented by the appropriately trained professional (who may be an MD, or may not, depending on the circumstances) who can best help the patient understand it, but in any case, patient information belongs to patients. It's theirs. They own it.
at least genetic counseling should be offered with the test.
Indeed, and it would be perfectly reasonable for a genetic testing firm to offer its tests on that basis: "We only do the test as part of a package that includes genetic counseling." But once the test is done, no one has the right to force the patients (or perhaps "clients" would be a better word in this case) to get the counseling in order to see the data.
What concerns exactly? That it's illegal to download copyrighted stuff?
How about the fact that the penalties for "download[ing] copyrighted stuff" (which is not illegal except under specific circumstances; if it were always illegal, then everyone on Slashdot, and in fact almost everyone who uses the internet for anything, would be a criminal) are increasingly absurd and draconian, and in many cases the mere accusation of misconduct is sufficient to cause those penalties to be invoked? If that doesn't concern you, then you're not paying attention.
A big problem for scientific computing - and maybe it's a problem elsewhere, too - is that too many programs are collections of legacy code squashed just-so to make it compilable on a new machine.
It's not solely a problem with scientific computing by any means, but as a bioinformatics grad student who used to be a business programmer, I think I can say it's worse in scientific computing than in most other places. As a rule, when you design a business app, you design it for longevity. The company wants something that will not just work for the moment, but work for years, and preferably be maintainable after the person who wrote it leaves the company. Most scientific programs, in contrast, are written to solve a specific problem for a specific project in a specific lab; and the people writing them are most often grad students or postdocs who are pretty much guaranteed to leave at some point, but this isn't taken into account when the programs are being written. (At three in the morning, to meet the deadline for a paper submission or conference presentation the next day...) If they live on after that, it's pretty much by accident.
There's a reason for this. Most scientists are not computer scientists, and they don't want to be. They've had neither a rigorous education in best practices, nor the production-coding experience to see those practices put into effect. They were concentrating on learning other things -- the core knowledge of their field -- and that knowledge is vital to their research. No one, unfortunately, has the time to learn it all.
I'm not sure what the answer is. I'm a better programmer than most of the people I work with (he says, trying not to break his arm patting himself on the back) but I'm also forty years old and still a year or two away from finishing my PhD. I'm glad to have the experience that's useful in my work, but I kind of doubt that my fellow students (or faculty!) would trade away their youth for that experience. Ultimately I think the answer comes down to having a mix of people in the lab: at least a few who have business programming and/or formal CS education in their backgrounds, working alongside those who have focused their entire careers on the science itself. That way everyone can learn from each other.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, I see I got hit by the right-wing mod-bombers too. Reality's well-known liberal bias is hard for you guys to deal with.
Wow, parent got modded troll pretty fast. Apparently the Republican mod-bombers are out in force.
It is a fact that Jindal, governor of a state (Louisiana) which has suffered mightily from natural disasters (hurricanes) in the recent past and will inevitably do so in the future, criticized Federal spending on a program designed to predict and prepare for natural disasters (volcanoes) which could easily be as devastating if not more so. It is also a fact that Jindal made this a partisan issue. Pointing this out does not constitute a troll.
Yep. And next time Louisiana gets slammed by a big storm (and it will) Jindal or his successor will go running to the Federal government for help, all the while whining that not enough was done to predict or prepare for the event. But volcanoes? Pffft. Everyone who has to worry about that is a damnyankee anyway.
(Of course, if it weren't for those damnyankees, Jindal himself would never have had a prayer of getting elected county dogcatcher in any ex-Confederate state, much less governor ... but we're not supposed to mention that either.)
Louisiana politics have always been deeply corrupt, but they used to be relatively sane. I'm not sure what happened.
"The airship is great because it doesn't have that Big Brother feel, or create feelings of invasiveness," says Lee Silvestre, vice president of mission innovation in Raytheon's Integrated Defense division.
Oh, okay. As long as we don't feel like we're being watched, everything's all right then.
Excuse me? Isn't the whole idea of a good spy not to make the targets feel like they're being watched? Is it okay for foreign agents to get copies of classified documents as long as we don't feel like they're doing it?
Well, yeah, the annotation often sucks, and I do wish GEO would enforce better annotation standards. Part of the problem in this specific domain, I think, is that MIAME is, to put it politely, a rather open-ended standard. If we had more structured annotation standards, both human- and machine-readable, and the databases strictly enforced these standards for submissions, we'd all be a lot better off. A number of people I work with are working on exactly this problem, and listening to them complain I get a pretty good idea of how far off we are. :/.
That being said, I've obtained a lot of useful data sets from GEO. Sorting the wheat from the chaff can be an exercise in pain, but it's still often faster -- and a whole hell of a lot cheaper -- than doing the wet-lab work yourself.
The same applies to software implementations of new algorithms. In the paper you cite, it looks to me like there's enough detail that implementing the algorithm yourself wouldn't be all that hard, but why should you have to? Clearly the authors wrote an implementation, and it would be nice if they would release it (BMC is happy to host it, I think.) A clue in this particular case comes from the authors' institutional afffiliation; Affy is very good about describing its algorithms, not so much about releasing its software without expecting significant amounts of money in return.
Computer Science and Computer Engineering classes have yet to implement significant group collaboration.
Or they go too far in the other direction. I distinctly remember one database class in my MS curriculum which had thirty people working together on a one-semester project, and it was a nightmare. At the time I was working as a DBA lead with a team of five people including myself, which was a pretty good number for our project, so I had a pretty decent idea of how things should work. Trying to get thirty CS students, only a couple of whom had any real industry experience, to work together on a single project in that length of time was just Not Going To Happen. I tried very hard to get the professor to break the class into a few groups and have each group work independently on the problem, but he wouldn't budge; he had a Grand Vision of what all these people working together would accomplish. The mythical man-month in action.
The result was pretty much what you'd expect. Three-quarters of the class slacked off, a quarter did all they could, and instead of a working project at the end of the semester we had a half-finished mess. A few of us strongly suspected hat what he really wanted was a polished product he could distribute under his own name, so this chaos may in fact have been a silver lining ... But the experience was of no real value to anyone in the end.
It depends on the field, really. In bioinformatics, we're lucky enough to have (a) a growing number of open access journals, as another poster mentioned, and (b) a number of enormous public access databases with raw data available to anyone who wants to use it. In biology and medicine in general, the NIH public access policy is designed to ensure that the finished product (i.e. journal articles) doesn't stay locked up forever. But I understand that bioinformatics is kind of at the leading edge of this trend -- if your area of interest is, say, inorganic chemistry, it may be a lot harder to get past the barriers.
WRT both science and OSS, the cathedral and the bazaar are converging. In science, the number and the size of the "ivory towers" is growing all the time, and they're getting better about sharing information both between institutions and the world as a whole. In OSS, while it's true that anyone can jump in at any time, the most successful OSS projects generally center around a core development team which carefully vets contributions. As for your use of quotation marks around the word "qualified" ... while amateurs may sometimes make significant contributions in both science and software, the truth of the matter is that a formal education in the subject at hand makes it a lot more likely that your work will be good enough to be useful to the field.
A professor is someone with a PhD who is tenured at the university in question.
No. A professor is someone who is given the title by the institution, period. Most universities won't do this without a PhD or equivalent degree, true, but someone who has been given the title is properly referred to by the title. And if your job title is now "Assistant Professor," you are in fact now a "prof." I'm no bigger a Cory Doctorow fan than you are, but if he has been given a job title which includes the word "professor" by an accredited institution of higher learning (I have no idea of this is so) then he is too.
People who present conflicting opinions to all those you listed get modded up as well, as long as they do so in a reasonable way. It seems to me that most of the whining on /. along the lines of "waaah, my post got modded down because it disagrees with the groupthink!" comes from people who write semiliterate rants and obscenity-laden trolls. They're not getting modded down because they're Bold Rebels Speaking Truth To Power; they're getting modded down because they can't express their arguments in a way that makes sense.
That's not free speech. You certainly have a right to say the same thing I said in your own words you can even quote me on specific points THAT IS FREE SPEECH. After my ability to make money from it runs out it can become public domain but not until it has run the course of being MY FUCKING WORK ASSHOLE!
Take a look at your own little rant. Is it offensive? Yes. Is it obscene? By most community standards, absolutely. And there are many, many people who would therefore choose to class it as "not free speech." But fortunately for you, they don't get to do that.
And you do not get to decide what is "speech" and what isn't, either.
We're talking about restrictions on free speech.
No, we don't. We are talking about, whether creators -- of movies, music, literature, software, fashion designs -- have the inherent rights to control their creations, or whether whoever happens to be able to copy their work has the same rights to it as the creator.
[sigh] If you say something -- anything, whether or not it's something someone else has said before -- you are exercising your right to free speech. If the law tells you that you can't say what you want to say, that is a restriction on your freedom of speech. Period.
Saying "I support free speech, but X doesn't count" is a classic tool of the censor, and it's always wrong, whether X is a political position with which you disagree, a word you don't want your children to hear, or just something that someone else said once before. All speech is inherently free, and anything which limits it is, yes, damn it, a restriction on free speech. There's no way around it.
We long ago accepted that, no matter what the First Amendment says, certain restrictions on freedom of speech are acceptable. Slander carries with it legal penalties, as do threats of violence, as does revealing classified information. We also, as a matter of principle, try to keep these restrictions as limited as possible. So the only pertinent question is, how much of a restriction on free speech are we willing to accept in the name of copyright?
Debating how Copyright should work is like debating who should be king. If you accept to be ruled does it really matter how?
Yes. Yes, it does. There are good kings and bad kings. Now, generally in the modern world we've accepted that "no king" (or having a king who is no more than a figurehead) is the best option of all, but for most of human history that hasn't been a choice.
Will we ever get rid of copyright? Hell, I don't know. Should we? I don't know the answer to that one either. What I do know is that we could have much, much better copyright laws than the ones we have now. (Say, seventeen years upon registration plus an optional, one-time seventeen-year extension ... I think I've heard that one before ...) Condemning all copyright laws as equally bad is not going to make them go away; they'll be with us for a long, long time. There is a lot to be said for harm reduction, just as there is for, to use your analogy, supporting a good king over a bad one.
Dude. This kid survived a murder attempt by God Himself. I'm pretty sure he could kick your ass up one side of the block and down the other.
Just ask the majority of reporters and news producers, who explicitly identify themselves as left-leaning and left-voting.
Just ask the majority of owners of news organizations, who explicitly identify themselves as right-leaning and right-voting.
Worse, a lot of drug research is publicly funded, but then the results wind up privatized.
Fortunately the NIH public access policy is doing a lot to reverse this trend, but unsuprisingly, it's meeting with a lot of resistance. Mostly from the publishers, not the drug companies, but that's a matter of whose ox is being gored. If the FDA ever gets serious about its threats to open up clinical trial data, you'll see a real brawl.
How is getting some public governmental research entity started going to be remotely cost effective and efficient
Of course you're right. Government research is always so wasteful and inefficient. Remember that DARPAnet thing? What a dumb idea! Fortunately, it sank like every inefficient government research program inevtably will, and we can now discuss the glories of the Invisible Hand here on free-market forums such as Compuserve, Prodigy, and GEnie.
a pay-per-use government with only one tax mandatory (for defense)
So why is defense the special case in this pay-as-you-go libertopia? Why can't we all just defend our own homes and communities, as the Framers intended? ("A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State ...") Once you admit that one particular function is too big a problem for individuals to handle on their own, you pretty much open the door to all the others.
The difference here is that there's a proposed causal mechanism. Obviously a lot of research would be needed to establish whether such a mechanism exists, but "internet gambling leads to less gambling-related violence" is a perfectly reasonable proposition, while "my sister turning 21" has to do with propositions of another kind entirely.
Apple isn't much better. The official security fixes in Safari 4.0, released yesterday, are for a total of _47_ vulnerabilities. Microsoft has a long way to go.
It looks like almost half the vulnerabilities listed are only for the Windows version of Safari, which means it's probably a matter of Apple having to clean up after Microsoft's bad security practices. Trying to write secure software is a PITA when the OS is fighting you at every turn.
While I agree that the Windows monocultire is a bad thing, I think it's important to remember that you could kill every single Windows machine in the world and most of the infrastructure than runs the internet would keep humming along quite happily. What's at risk is primarily desktops and corporate (intranet) servers. Losing these machines would be bad, but "brings the entire Internet to its knees" is an exaggeration. Admins would just cut off the infected machines and keep going.
It's measured in "stupid space units" because it's used in astronomy, of course. "Kilometers per second per megaparsec" has a much more intuitive interpretation, when considering the speed at which distant galaxies are moving away from us, than does "cycles per second."
I now feel it's morally wrong to offer these tests to consumers who have no idea how to interpret them and what they mean;
It is never morally wrong to give people information about their own bodies. Not ever. In nine years of patient care and twelve years of research, I have never encountered a situation in which deliberately withholding information from a patient was the right thing to do, and at this point I really don't expect I ever will. (I have, unfortunately, encountered many situations in which withholding information was the wrong thing to do, and have had to do it anyway as a matter of policy.) To be sure, it's better if the information is presented by the appropriately trained professional (who may be an MD, or may not, depending on the circumstances) who can best help the patient understand it, but in any case, patient information belongs to patients. It's theirs. They own it.
at least genetic counseling should be offered with the test.
Indeed, and it would be perfectly reasonable for a genetic testing firm to offer its tests on that basis: "We only do the test as part of a package that includes genetic counseling." But once the test is done, no one has the right to force the patients (or perhaps "clients" would be a better word in this case) to get the counseling in order to see the data.
What concerns exactly? That it's illegal to download copyrighted stuff?
How about the fact that the penalties for "download[ing] copyrighted stuff" (which is not illegal except under specific circumstances; if it were always illegal, then everyone on Slashdot, and in fact almost everyone who uses the internet for anything, would be a criminal) are increasingly absurd and draconian, and in many cases the mere accusation of misconduct is sufficient to cause those penalties to be invoked? If that doesn't concern you, then you're not paying attention.
A big problem for scientific computing - and maybe it's a problem elsewhere, too - is that too many programs are collections of legacy code squashed just-so to make it compilable on a new machine.
It's not solely a problem with scientific computing by any means, but as a bioinformatics grad student who used to be a business programmer, I think I can say it's worse in scientific computing than in most other places. As a rule, when you design a business app, you design it for longevity. The company wants something that will not just work for the moment, but work for years, and preferably be maintainable after the person who wrote it leaves the company. Most scientific programs, in contrast, are written to solve a specific problem for a specific project in a specific lab; and the people writing them are most often grad students or postdocs who are pretty much guaranteed to leave at some point, but this isn't taken into account when the programs are being written. (At three in the morning, to meet the deadline for a paper submission or conference presentation the next day ...) If they live on after that, it's pretty much by accident.
There's a reason for this. Most scientists are not computer scientists, and they don't want to be. They've had neither a rigorous education in best practices, nor the production-coding experience to see those practices put into effect. They were concentrating on learning other things -- the core knowledge of their field -- and that knowledge is vital to their research. No one, unfortunately, has the time to learn it all.
I'm not sure what the answer is. I'm a better programmer than most of the people I work with (he says, trying not to break his arm patting himself on the back) but I'm also forty years old and still a year or two away from finishing my PhD. I'm glad to have the experience that's useful in my work, but I kind of doubt that my fellow students (or faculty!) would trade away their youth for that experience. Ultimately I think the answer comes down to having a mix of people in the lab: at least a few who have business programming and/or formal CS education in their backgrounds, working alongside those who have focused their entire careers on the science itself. That way everyone can learn from each other.