I've been harassed for opting out of the scanners several times, just for an anecdote in the other direction.
They generally make a big deal out of it, making me wait for minutes while they go find someone to do the pat down, big sighs while he puts on the rubber gloves, rough handling of my carry-ons (since I can't touch them), arguments about the safety of the scanners ("That sign over there sez they're safe, cain't you read?!"), and for extra punishment and delay, wipe-testing the carry-ons for explosives. Like if I were carrying explosives, I'd want to attract extra attention by asking to opt-out.
As far as we know, modern inkjet prints can be extremely long-lasting, based on accelerated testing. If you pop for a high-end printer, e.g. Epson 3880, you can make really good prints that will (probably) last decades. High-dollar printers, in my experience, don't have the problems that cheap inkjets do. They're much more durable even if you don't use them that often, but you probably should use them regularly.
But then you're off in the rabbit hole of display/printer calibration (non-trivial), ICC profiles, $500 to refill the inks, etc. Each print will probably cost several dollars. It's probably not worth it for most people. But if you're going to buy your own, save yourself a lot of frustration and get a really good printer (and IPS monitor).
I've had good luck with MPix for making high quality prints. Others are probably good also.
I have no idea how long photo books last, but there are a lot of them out there. I've had good luck with MyPublisher and Blurb for prints that look like what I sent them.
So, aside from keeping multiple digital backups, verifying them regularly, off-site storage of backups, and updating formats over years, which presumably you would do anyway, do this:
Print the photos you like best on archival inkjet paper and put them into an archival box. Take notes of who, what, where, when. Reference the original digital file. That has as good a chance as anything of lasting a few decades.
There was a silver lining to the cancellation of the SSC. There has been an explosion of quantum, solid state, and low temperature physics in the last 2 decades that might not have happened if all those great minds had been dedicated to just a single project.
And a great number of them went off to become quants on Wall Street, developing models for CDOs and derivatives ("the whole Harvard physics class of 94" one fellow who would know recently told me - I'm sure he exaggerated a bit, but that was my experience too).
You think lack of civility in discourse is the problem. I think lack of civility in society is the problem - exemplified by the willingness of one particular segment of society to turn people away from medical care.
You go ahead with your agenda of trying to make us all be civil to each other, which hasn't worked in, oh, all of recorded human history. I'll settle for working to not let people who think it's ok to turn the sick away from the hospital doors get into positions of power.
The biggest thing making American politics so toxic is this sort of callousness.
It apparently matters to you whether people are accused of cheering when they turn someone away from the emergency room. What matters to me it's the fact that they think that turning someone away is acceptable.
Almost nobody does any of these things, even the Evil Right
From the transcripts of the ACA case before the Supreme Court:
Solicitor General Donald Verrilli
getting health care service [is] a result of the social norms to which we've obligated ourselves so that people get health care.
Scalia:
Well, don't obligate yourself to that.
It's hard not to read that as, if not cheering on the death of the uninsured, being more than a bit callous. Pardon me if I fail to make a distinction.
Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on it over the last 25 years in research and testing
It's easily overwhelmed or spoofed
It's cheaper to build working nuclear weapons than it is to build a working missile defense system. If it wasn't, then no one would build nuclear weapons, they'd just build a missile defense. Who could argue with that? Contravenes no treaties, the UN doesn't sanction you, Israel doesn't bomb your secret sites, the US doesn't invade you. Twice.
It increases incentive to just build more nukes/missiles to overwhelm your system
And finally, opportunity costs. Money and effort spent building a system which, even if it worked, would never be used, could be spent elsewhere more wisely.
Sure, I'd like a working missile defense system. No one knows how to build one, even given an essentially unlimited budget and decades of time. So I'd rather have the cash. And a pony. And this rock that keeps tigers and nuclear weapons away.
The 84 Honda CRX, which was the lowest MSRP car you could buy at the time, didn't have a choke. The 79 Ford before that didn't have a choke. The 76 Chevy didn't have a choke. The 72 Chevy station wagon didn't have a choke.
I'm not saying that you didn't have a car in the 90s that didn't have a choke, but in my experience, that was the rare exception rather than the rule.
I think I'd have to go back to the mid-60s Ford and Chevy 3/4 ton trucks to remember fooling around with a choke. Or the farm tractors and semi rigs. I can't remember fooling around with a choke on a passenger car after the mid-70s.
But going back to the original premise, one of the pleasant improvements in my lifetime is that cars don't break down anymore (knock wood). I haven't been stranded by a car since 1983. Even when the Honda died in 1999 with a quarter-million miles, it limped home.
And those 60s trucks and 70s American cars? 40k miles and done. Maybe 50k if you were lucky. I've had four since 1984 that have gone more than 150k miles.
To put it simply, it's due to lack of knowledge and/or imagination.
I object, sir. The people planning these missions are the ones who read those books and devoted their very life's work to the scientific proof of these hypotheses.
I've sat in the room while these topics are debated, at a high aggregate hourly rate, and we have discussed looking at other sources, non-earth-like planets, non-carbon based lifeforms, telescopes on the moon, telescopes in Jupiter orbit, arrays of telescopes, life on planets around binary stars, etc.
There was no lack of imagination. But no lack of calculation either.
Thing is, when the public entrusts you with millions, perhaps billions, of their dollars, and the public can only afford one of these missions per decade (if that - shall I give you a litany of cancelled planet-finding missions from the last decade?), you have to look under the streetlight, because that's where the light is. And if you're looking for a set of keys that you don't not even know what they look like, or if they're there, with a magnifying glass that defines your field of view, and the lamp is very dim, looking under the lamp is more cost-effective than any other strategy.
We know that life arises under "earth-like" conditions, for lack of a better word, so if you only get to look once in your lifetime, that's what you look for.
The whole business of "look for non-carbon forms of life" gets put on the spreadsheet, with all the other crazy ideas, and is assigned a Reward of 5, Difficulty of 5, and Risk of 5, and by any logical method of decision making, gets discarded early.
As it should be. Resources are not infinite. But these concepts, and wackier ones, are entertained. Discussed. Debated. Proposed.
You may fault us for not wasting millions/billions of your dollars proposing missions that will not get funded, and likely not be successful, but it's not for lack of imagining it, or putting it on the board for discussion. It's just unlikely that 1) it would make it through the review process, 2) Congress would fund it (imagine the headlines at election time!), and 3) a scientist would spend half a career pursuing such a likely unprofitable path.
(I hate to give up my mod points to comment on this thread, but I resent the implication that those who do this for a living are somehow without imagination or knowledge or didn't read the canon. We did. We took it seriously).
2 sigma isn't worth a pre-print. In a big collaboration, a preprint takes a lot of time and effort and approvals. Which they'll save for the 5 sigma data, whether the signal is there or not. No one wants to go through the effort to write a pre-print for something that might go away with the next fb^{-1}. Nonetheless, the news was out there, so why not address it? An end-of-run press conference seems like the right venue to announce status, if not results.
I'd imagine it's done because it's difficult to keep these (preliminary) results quiet nowadays. This news has been buzzing about the internets for weeks. Why not have an announcement saying what's going on? It's not as though it is a big secret anymore, and it forestalls a lot of the speculation.
I never said a postdoc cost 250k. I said "one person, decent salary, benefits, overhead" ~ 250k. I've said mid-career scientist several times. Where did I say a postdoc cost that much? In many scientific fields, maybe not yours, at many universities, and national labs, tenured faculty and staff scientists cost, not make, $250k. It is not ridiculous and it is not uncommon. Other posters have confirmed that estimate is reasonable. Shall I post up links to lists of salaries of faculty at public uni's? At national labs? What do you think a staff scientist at GSFC or LANL or Ball Aerospace makes, and costs in overhead? A typical tenured prof?
I've posted links with data that strongly suggest postdoc salaries across the country are higher than they are in your field. Those links show a range from a bit lower to a lot higher (did you look at the data?). You keep pointing to one number (which is a lot higher than you originally claimed) and now say it's no, really it's lower, without pointing out any evidence of that. Just ridicule. Post up some real data. Find better data than I did in a one-minute google search. That might be self-reported and low statistics, but it's better than anything you've put up.
$250k cost is an excellent estimate for one mid-career professional scientist FTE-year. I am not wrong about that. My original post compared that cost with the number in the original submission. It's a fair comparison. I never said postdoc. That was you. Everytime I've said anything about postdocs, I've posted reasonable postdoc numbers based on data, unlike you.
Really? The EPA budget jumped to 10B in 2010 (stimulus), and dropped back down to 8.6B in 2011. In 1988, it was $5B. In inflation-adjusted dollars, it's at best flat since 1988, and there were many more dip years than 2010 years.
Your reference is old. The newer one (at the top of the link you listed) says $38.5k for a newly minted postdoc. Close enough to the numbers I listed as to make no difference. So I'd guess that those averages, small sample though they are, are probably about right, and the NIH pays low, which squares with what I've heard from my life sciences buds, compared to physics and engineering.
You said A typical FTE for a grad student/postdoc is around 40k/yr. My numbers are closer to right than yours, and you're sending me documentation to prove it. Feel free to send me any documentation of overhead rates you find. I just know what they are here, and at the four other institutions, academic and otherwise, that I've worked. They're not 30%. Postdoc FTEs, even at the low end, are not 40k.
/.'er reason above also verified that $250k was a reasonable estimate for a scientist FTE, which you had originally put at "Hahahaaaahhahahahahaaaa."
I'm not writing off anything less than $1M as chump change, and I'm not writing off $40k as chump change. But I'm not kidding myself about how much it costs just to get people in the lab, and I think you are underestimating it significantly.
I only know what the overhead is at places I've been, but 85-100% is what I hear from others. 100% is good enough for making an estimate. FWIW, 100% is what any freelancer charges for overhead. Maybe it's a bit less at some universities/labs, but the point is: those costs are significant.
$250k/FTE-year is a reasonable guess of what a mid-career Ph.D at a national research center costs when charging to a grant. Maybe it's 10% less, or maybe 20%. But it's not factors of two off. It's a reasonable number to work with.
And yeah, I understand how research gets done in an academic environment. Thanks.
My point, to make it explicit and at boring length, is that $40k ain't much. When it comes to crowdsourcing funding for science, if you're honest with yourself about real costs, $250k is not that much money. It's not nothing. But when someone says they're going to raise $250k for crowdsourcing of funding, the number that pops into my head, from having filled out innumerable budgeting spreadsheets, is "that's roughly one scientist full-time-equivalent-year." Adjust accordingly for who you plan to have do the work, equipment, purchases, etc. But it's a reasonable equivalent. If yours is that you can get four postdoc FTEs for that price, fine. I'm skeptical, especially since the salaries you're paying your postdocs don't square with what I can find on the web and with what I hear from the postdocs I work with, and I'm skeptical of 30% overhead numbers, but fine. You have your $250k equivalent, and I have mine.
Who charges 30% overhead these days? I don't know of any place with overhead that low, and I'm not sure I'd want to work there. I don't want to spend time fixing the printers.
$115k is an average mid-career salary in many fields for a Ph.D scientist/engineer with experience. Especially when you can switch careers and go into finance and make lots more.
I don't understand why there's so much/. sneering at scientists making decent but not great money. You'd think the same people who want more science and more engineering, and also complain about H1B visas and Ph.Ds jumping over to Wall Street, would not be slagging on a scientist making a decent salary doing actual science or engineering. Enough to actually live comfortably and buy a house in a major metropolitan area, which, let's face it, is where most of the science and engineering is done. But here, the response is let a postdoc do it for $25k. That seems like a self-limiting cycle. Who's going to sign up to be a grad student/postdoc if there's no possibilty to make enough money to actually live around where you went to school?
$115k is not that much in NYC, SF, Silicon Valley, Boston, LA, etc.
Postdocs around here make $40k, so FTE is going to be $80k-ish. And grad students cost more - ask any professor what's more expensive, a grad student, or a postdoc. Something about how universities bill tuition plus health care plus stipend.
And is that who you want doing your reseach? Postdocs and grad students? Whose lab are they going to work in, and who pays for the equipment and space and computers? I guess the PI is just supposed to do that stuff for free.
Nothing against postdocs and grad students, I was one for significant portions of my life. But they generally require supervision and equipment.
LabVIEW FPGA compiler and LV Real-time. That's it. Everything else runs on a Mac, and everything else we do is on a Mac.
Win 7 looks nicer than XP, but underneath, it's still the same NT software, and still handles ethernet badly (at least I assume that's why LV needs a multiprocessor I7 to handle 1 MB/s data streams without barfing all over its shoes).
Slashdot Mirror
I've been harassed for opting out of the scanners several times, just for an anecdote in the other direction.
They generally make a big deal out of it, making me wait for minutes while they go find someone to do the pat down, big sighs while he puts on the rubber gloves, rough handling of my carry-ons (since I can't touch them), arguments about the safety of the scanners ("That sign over there sez they're safe, cain't you read?!"), and for extra punishment and delay, wipe-testing the carry-ons for explosives. Like if I were carrying explosives, I'd want to attract extra attention by asking to opt-out.
I'm not what wine does to the cure time of Quikrete. Water's probably better. And Lowes sells wine? Two buck Chuck?
Handy hot weather Quikrete pro-tip: use a bit more water than they recommend.
As far as we know, modern inkjet prints can be extremely long-lasting, based on accelerated testing. If you pop for a high-end printer, e.g. Epson 3880, you can make really good prints that will (probably) last decades. High-dollar printers, in my experience, don't have the problems that cheap inkjets do. They're much more durable even if you don't use them that often, but you probably should use them regularly.
But then you're off in the rabbit hole of display/printer calibration (non-trivial), ICC profiles, $500 to refill the inks, etc. Each print will probably cost several dollars. It's probably not worth it for most people. But if you're going to buy your own, save yourself a lot of frustration and get a really good printer (and IPS monitor).
I've had good luck with MPix for making high quality prints. Others are probably good also.
I have no idea how long photo books last, but there are a lot of them out there. I've had good luck with MyPublisher and Blurb for prints that look like what I sent them.
So, aside from keeping multiple digital backups, verifying them regularly, off-site storage of backups, and updating formats over years, which presumably you would do anyway, do this:
Print the photos you like best on archival inkjet paper and put them into an archival box. Take notes of who, what, where, when. Reference the original digital file. That has as good a chance as anything of lasting a few decades.
A good discussion is here at TOP, and read the comments too.
And a great number of them went off to become quants on Wall Street, developing models for CDOs and derivatives ("the whole Harvard physics class of 94" one fellow who would know recently told me - I'm sure he exaggerated a bit, but that was my experience too).
How's that for a silver lining?
You do. Look up "fighting words".
You think lack of civility in discourse is the problem. I think lack of civility in society is the problem - exemplified by the willingness of one particular segment of society to turn people away from medical care.
You go ahead with your agenda of trying to make us all be civil to each other, which hasn't worked in, oh, all of recorded human history. I'll settle for working to not let people who think it's ok to turn the sick away from the hospital doors get into positions of power.
The biggest thing making American politics so toxic is this sort of callousness.
It apparently matters to you whether people are accused of cheering when they turn someone away from the emergency room. What matters to me it's the fact that they think that turning someone away is acceptable.
From the transcripts of the ACA case before the Supreme Court:
Solicitor General Donald Verrilli
Scalia:
It's hard not to read that as, if not cheering on the death of the uninsured, being more than a bit callous. Pardon me if I fail to make a distinction.
I can legitimately think otherwise because:
Sure, I'd like a working missile defense system. No one knows how to build one, even given an essentially unlimited budget and decades of time. So I'd rather have the cash. And a pony. And this rock that keeps tigers and nuclear weapons away.
No, they didn't.
They thought they were following Christian teachings; just not the ones that you follow.
The 84 Honda CRX, which was the lowest MSRP car you could buy at the time, didn't have a choke. The 79 Ford before that didn't have a choke. The 76 Chevy didn't have a choke. The 72 Chevy station wagon didn't have a choke.
I'm not saying that you didn't have a car in the 90s that didn't have a choke, but in my experience, that was the rare exception rather than the rule.
I think I'd have to go back to the mid-60s Ford and Chevy 3/4 ton trucks to remember fooling around with a choke. Or the farm tractors and semi rigs. I can't remember fooling around with a choke on a passenger car after the mid-70s.
But going back to the original premise, one of the pleasant improvements in my lifetime is that cars don't break down anymore (knock wood). I haven't been stranded by a car since 1983. Even when the Honda died in 1999 with a quarter-million miles, it limped home.
And those 60s trucks and 70s American cars? 40k miles and done. Maybe 50k if you were lucky. I've had four since 1984 that have gone more than 150k miles.
Baby seal tastes like...
baby seal. Really. Tastes like nothing else. And adult seal is too stringy to eat.
I object, sir. The people planning these missions are the ones who read those books and devoted their very life's work to the scientific proof of these hypotheses.
I've sat in the room while these topics are debated, at a high aggregate hourly rate, and we have discussed looking at other sources, non-earth-like planets, non-carbon based lifeforms, telescopes on the moon, telescopes in Jupiter orbit, arrays of telescopes, life on planets around binary stars, etc.
There was no lack of imagination. But no lack of calculation either.
Thing is, when the public entrusts you with millions, perhaps billions, of their dollars, and the public can only afford one of these missions per decade (if that - shall I give you a litany of cancelled planet-finding missions from the last decade?), you have to look under the streetlight, because that's where the light is. And if you're looking for a set of keys that you don't not even know what they look like, or if they're there, with a magnifying glass that defines your field of view, and the lamp is very dim, looking under the lamp is more cost-effective than any other strategy.
We know that life arises under "earth-like" conditions, for lack of a better word, so if you only get to look once in your lifetime, that's what you look for.
The whole business of "look for non-carbon forms of life" gets put on the spreadsheet, with all the other crazy ideas, and is assigned a Reward of 5, Difficulty of 5, and Risk of 5, and by any logical method of decision making, gets discarded early.
As it should be. Resources are not infinite. But these concepts, and wackier ones, are entertained. Discussed. Debated. Proposed.
You may fault us for not wasting millions/billions of your dollars proposing missions that will not get funded, and likely not be successful, but it's not for lack of imagining it, or putting it on the board for discussion. It's just unlikely that 1) it would make it through the review process, 2) Congress would fund it (imagine the headlines at election time!), and 3) a scientist would spend half a career pursuing such a likely unprofitable path.
(I hate to give up my mod points to comment on this thread, but I resent the implication that those who do this for a living are somehow without imagination or knowledge or didn't read the canon. We did. We took it seriously).
2 sigma isn't worth a pre-print. In a big collaboration, a preprint takes a lot of time and effort and approvals. Which they'll save for the 5 sigma data, whether the signal is there or not. No one wants to go through the effort to write a pre-print for something that might go away with the next fb^{-1}. Nonetheless, the news was out there, so why not address it? An end-of-run press conference seems like the right venue to announce status, if not results.
I see what you're doing there. You're going for the anti-marketing dollar.[1]
[1] RIP Bill Hicks
I'd imagine it's done because it's difficult to keep these (preliminary) results quiet nowadays. This news has been buzzing about the internets for weeks. Why not have an announcement saying what's going on? It's not as though it is a big secret anymore, and it forestalls a lot of the speculation.
More fb^{-1} needed...
in 25 easy steps:
at The Online Photographer
I never said a postdoc cost 250k. I said "one person, decent salary, benefits, overhead" ~ 250k. I've said mid-career scientist several times. Where did I say a postdoc cost that much? In many scientific fields, maybe not yours, at many universities, and national labs, tenured faculty and staff scientists cost, not make, $250k. It is not ridiculous and it is not uncommon. Other posters have confirmed that estimate is reasonable. Shall I post up links to lists of salaries of faculty at public uni's? At national labs? What do you think a staff scientist at GSFC or LANL or Ball Aerospace makes, and costs in overhead? A typical tenured prof?
I've posted links with data that strongly suggest postdoc salaries across the country are higher than they are in your field. Those links show a range from a bit lower to a lot higher (did you look at the data?). You keep pointing to one number (which is a lot higher than you originally claimed) and now say it's no, really it's lower, without pointing out any evidence of that. Just ridicule. Post up some real data. Find better data than I did in a one-minute google search. That might be self-reported and low statistics, but it's better than anything you've put up.
$250k cost is an excellent estimate for one mid-career professional scientist FTE-year. I am not wrong about that. My original post compared that cost with the number in the original submission. It's a fair comparison. I never said postdoc. That was you. Everytime I've said anything about postdocs, I've posted reasonable postdoc numbers based on data, unlike you.
Really? The EPA budget jumped to 10B in 2010 (stimulus), and dropped back down to 8.6B in 2011. In 1988, it was $5B. In inflation-adjusted dollars, it's at best flat since 1988, and there were many more dip years than 2010 years.
Your reference is old. The newer one (at the top of the link you listed) says $38.5k for a newly minted postdoc. Close enough to the numbers I listed as to make no difference. So I'd guess that those averages, small sample though they are, are probably about right, and the NIH pays low, which squares with what I've heard from my life sciences buds, compared to physics and engineering.
You said A typical FTE for a grad student /postdoc is around 40k/yr. My numbers are closer to right than yours, and you're sending me documentation to prove it. Feel free to send me any documentation of overhead rates you find. I just know what they are here, and at the four other institutions, academic and otherwise, that I've worked. They're not 30%. Postdoc FTEs, even at the low end, are not 40k.
I'm not writing off anything less than $1M as chump change, and I'm not writing off $40k as chump change. But I'm not kidding myself about how much it costs just to get people in the lab, and I think you are underestimating it significantly.
$40k seems like a good estimate, and googling for a minute seems to verify the numbers I've heard recently from my colleagues:
Caltech $45k
MIT $43.4k
UT-Austin $43.5
U of AZ $41.5k
I only know what the overhead is at places I've been, but 85-100% is what I hear from others. 100% is good enough for making an estimate. FWIW, 100% is what any freelancer charges for overhead. Maybe it's a bit less at some universities/labs, but the point is: those costs are significant.
$250k/FTE-year is a reasonable guess of what a mid-career Ph.D at a national research center costs when charging to a grant. Maybe it's 10% less, or maybe 20%. But it's not factors of two off. It's a reasonable number to work with.
And yeah, I understand how research gets done in an academic environment. Thanks.
My point, to make it explicit and at boring length, is that $40k ain't much. When it comes to crowdsourcing funding for science, if you're honest with yourself about real costs, $250k is not that much money. It's not nothing. But when someone says they're going to raise $250k for crowdsourcing of funding, the number that pops into my head, from having filled out innumerable budgeting spreadsheets, is "that's roughly one scientist full-time-equivalent-year." Adjust accordingly for who you plan to have do the work, equipment, purchases, etc. But it's a reasonable equivalent. If yours is that you can get four postdoc FTEs for that price, fine. I'm skeptical, especially since the salaries you're paying your postdocs don't square with what I can find on the web and with what I hear from the postdocs I work with, and I'm skeptical of 30% overhead numbers, but fine. You have your $250k equivalent, and I have mine.
Who charges 30% overhead these days? I don't know of any place with overhead that low, and I'm not sure I'd want to work there. I don't want to spend time fixing the printers.
$115k is an average mid-career salary in many fields for a Ph.D scientist/engineer with experience. Especially when you can switch careers and go into finance and make lots more.
I don't understand why there's so much /. sneering at scientists making decent but not great money. You'd think the same people who want more science and more engineering, and also complain about H1B visas and Ph.Ds jumping over to Wall Street, would not be slagging on a scientist making a decent salary doing actual science or engineering. Enough to actually live comfortably and buy a house in a major metropolitan area, which, let's face it, is where most of the science and engineering is done. But here, the response is let a postdoc do it for $25k. That seems like a self-limiting cycle. Who's going to sign up to be a grad student/postdoc if there's no possibilty to make enough money to actually live around where you went to school?
$115k is not that much in NYC, SF, Silicon Valley, Boston, LA, etc.
Postdocs around here make $40k, so FTE is going to be $80k-ish. And grad students cost more - ask any professor what's more expensive, a grad student, or a postdoc. Something about how universities bill tuition plus health care plus stipend.
And is that who you want doing your reseach? Postdocs and grad students? Whose lab are they going to work in, and who pays for the equipment and space and computers? I guess the PI is just supposed to do that stuff for free.
Nothing against postdocs and grad students, I was one for significant portions of my life. But they generally require supervision and equipment.
If you total up all of the projects and what we're shooting for, though, it's about $250K, so, not tiny.
$250K is about one FTE-year. That is: one person, decent salary, benefits, and overhead for a year, at most any lab in the country.
Not saying it's tiny, just throwing that out for perspective on simple personnel costs.
LabVIEW FPGA compiler and LV Real-time. That's it. Everything else runs on a Mac, and everything else we do is on a Mac.
Win 7 looks nicer than XP, but underneath, it's still the same NT software, and still handles ethernet badly (at least I assume that's why LV needs a multiprocessor I7 to handle 1 MB/s data streams without barfing all over its shoes).