Post-doc biologists at Harvard have to publish 70 papers in 7 years (if memory serves) to even qualify for a junior faculty position. There's no way that a scientist can publish ten papers per year that are worth jack squat, and the result is that most of the papers coming out of Harvard are garbage that get published because of where they come from.
Where did you hear that statistic? I've been working in academic biology labs for the last decade and I've seen what the hiring criteria are, and I will bet nearly any amount of money that most faculty members (who have people working for them) at Harvard don't publish 70 papers in 7 years, let alone post-docs (who usually work independently). The few exceptions tend to be computational researchers. It is true that the competition to get a junior faculty position is intense, and it is very difficult to stand out - but the people getting the jobs are often hired on the basis of one or two high-profile publications. Having lots of other papers helps, but only if these are obviously high-quality work (if less prestigious).
some asshole sleeps around without a condom, and you are the one responsible for his health bill.
Ah yes. Or some asshole sleeps around without a condom, infects his unsuspecting wife, and then dies in a car crash, leaving his widow to choose between treating her illness or paying for her child's education. . . but hey, the slut had it coming, right?
Being from outside the US I've always found it interesting that the position of the president is held in such regard. In a sense you argued against yourself by in this last statement. Why should the penalties for conspiring to murder the president be any different than conspiring to murder your neighbour. I agree the president's job is likely more important than your neighbours, unless your neighbour is about to find a cure for cancer, but is the president's life any more important?
I'm not sure what the penalties are - my point was that simply saying "I'd like to kill the president" can get you in very serious trouble with the Secret Service, whereas "I'd like to kill all liberals/all infidels/my husband" is fine, as long as it doesn't rise to the level of conspiracy. There are a variety of explanations for why the president's life is more important, starting with the fact that he's commander-in-chief of the largest military in the world by a considerable margin. A better argument is that since four US presidents were assassinated while in office, and several others had attempts on their lives - and we've only had 44 presidents in all - the Secret Service has plenty of reason to be paranoid.
It's still nothing like China, because I'm free to say virtually anything I want about the president or any other part of the government, as long as I don't threaten his person. Personally, I don't think we should hold the president in any higher regard than we'd hold any other public employee, but I nonetheless agree that law enforcement should err on the side of caution when assessing potential threats. I also believe that violence against the president is violence against our system, and while I think Bush should have been dragged out of office in handcuffs by, say, 2006 or 2007 at the latest, I would never have condoned violence against him. (Well, except the Iraqi shoe-thrower - that was kinda funny.)
Funny - you should try talking to some members of the Revolutionary Communist Party about how hard they have had to work to be able to pass out newspapers and how many of their membership have been shut up in the process. You'd be surprised how many of them are still living underground hiding from the government here.
sigh. . .
I'm familiar with Chairman Bob's histrionics, and I don't believe a single fucking word of it. We see this all the time coming from armchair revolutionaries, okay? Lyndon LaRouche is a particularly notorious case; I'm not sure if there's any part of the US (or British!) government that he hasn't claimed is out to destroy him. No one is stopping the RCP from - for instance - setting up a large display in the middle of UC Berkeley campus explaining how the Cultural Revolution was actually really awesome, and how the counter-revolutionaries had it coming anyway. Dude, I could seriously walk over there and buy one of their newspapers tomorrow. The police, who have much more serious villainy to deal with, leave them alone as long as they don't try to incite riots that result in property destruction.
It's sort of the price you pay for living in the Bay Area - we get beautiful scenery, temperate climate, liberal social atmosphere, and we also get California government and some of the most obnoxious, self-righteous far-left remnants in the country. They're clinging to a glorious past that never really existed, and dreaming of unleashing yet another massive bloodletting, and they're desperately, futilely trying to convince everyone else that they still matter - and they don't. I grit my teeth and bear it, because, after all, at least they haven't started any wars recently, and it seems churlish to get upset about these fools when Dick Cheney is still enjoying his retirement.
But in the European Union you can do that, and you are protected with medical care to boot. Your way is not the only way, even with the many good things you can do.
What's your point? I would never claim that the US government is anything close to a perfect system; the debate is about free speech and laws restricting to it. And while I think the EU is mostly very good on civil liberties and better than us on some other unrelated issues, it's worth mentioning that they are far more willing to restrict speech - and I'm not just talking about Germany's prohibitions on Holocaust denial. Google "Ireland blasphemy" if you're curious. On the moral scale, this can't compare to the thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it's one instance where the US clearly is superior.
In every Administration there are stories that newspapers sit on for years at a time because the Feds ask them not to publish, and some that never get made public. Then there are the "official" misdeeds we'll never know about thanks to a veil of National Security keeping out the public and the media.
Agreed, but this is a separate issue - there is still no legal action that the government can take to prevent publication, and not much they can do after the fact. The New York Times sat on the NSA warrantless surveilance story for a year because the Bush administration asked them too, not because the secret police held a gun to Bill Keller's head. When they finally published it, the administration and its supporters were livid - I remember seeing many of the more enthusiastic right-wing bloggers demanding treason trials for the reporters and editors involved. Yet no legal action was taken; Bill Keller is still in charge, and James Risen published his book. This is because we have several decades of legal precedent (starting with the Pentagon Papers, if not earlier) that not only is prior restraint unconstitutional, reporters can't be penalized for publishing classified information because they weren't legally bound to protect it in the first place.
The only situations I've seen where the government was allowed to censor third-party publications have been books or articles by former spies, where the appropriate agency (usually the CIA) has redacted some information. I think this is usually ass-covering for the author (and perhaps publisher), since they may be liable for revealing classified secrets that they learned as part of their job.
I certainly agree that our government errs strongly on the side of too much secrecy, but my original point stands - these issues only concern what information the government (and media) is obliged to reveal, not what it can suppress through criminal prosecution.
is censoring their search engine according to US laws different from censoring according to Chinese laws?
It depends: what does China not censor that the US does?
I'd say that the key difference is that in the US, criticism of the government, exposure of official misdeeds, and calls for regime change are not suppressed, which is why I still see members of the Revolutionary Communist Party passing out pamphlets calling for violent revolution, and why Rick Perry can talk about Texas seceding from the US. The government may outlaw child porn and make copyright law increasingly onerous, but it doesn't try to use censorship to protect its own position. In China, on the other hand. . . well, I'll just quote a section of their criminal code:
Whoever incites others by spreading rumors or slanders or any other means to subvert the State power or overthrow the socialist system shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not more than five years, criminal detention, public surveillance or deprivation of political rights; and the ringleaders and the others who commit major crimes shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not less than five years.
I'm sure you can find some equally brain-dead sections of US legal code, but the only thing even close to this in intent would be direct threats against the life of the president.
Nice strawman. Slashdot is full of left-libertarian US citizens, and we've been wailing about our less enlightened national policies for years. I for one would love to see Dick Cheney sharing a jail cell with Hu Jintao and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but every time one of the latter two gentleman is a topic of discussion, I always see dozens of comments saying "what about Guantanamo Bay/Abu Grahib/warrantless wiretapping blah blah blah?" - as if that excuses any amount of misbehavior by other governments. Well, I think we should withdraw all our troops from foreign countries, try or release everyone at Guantanamo, and send the entire Bush administration to the ICC. Do I have your permission to criticize the Chinese government now, or are you going to start whining about something else?
Besides all that, the simple fact is that the US legal system continues to be more permissive of unbridled free speech than almost any other country in the world. We send people to jail for all sorts of stupid reasons that I certainly don't support, but you can march through Washington DC with a sign comparing Obama to Hitler, and mutter about a 2nd American Revolution, and you won't be hauled off to jail. Most of us wouldn't have it any other way.
. . . in a bioinformatics lab, and I'll wager that he knows far more about biology (and, specifically, genomics) than most Slashdot readers. Search for his name on PubMed and you'll find a decent number of peer-reviewed articles (although more letters and opinion pieces - I got the impression that he was more interested in policy issues than research). I'm pretty sure he ended up receiving a PhD in biochemistry from Yale, although I left long before he would have finished.
That said, he's also Canadian, which may explain his relaxed attitude towards the privacy implications of an omniscient, paternalistic government. (He's not the only Canadian I've met with this attitude.) Those of us living in the US, where the partisans of the last administration continue to defend - no, demand - the torture and/or indefinite detention of terrorism suspects, may be more suspicious. I certainly don't think much of this idea. Hopefully this is one of the rare cases where libertarian-leaning individuals on both the left and right can cooperate enough to overcome the reflexive authoritarianism of most of the rest of the country, especially the law-and-order conservatives. (In fairness to conservatives, the last time I read about a similar proposal, it was being pushed by Tony Blair.)
Yeah, but shouldn't they pass on their research work to another, more appropriate Department?
Senior academic scientists don't "pass on their research" unless they're exceptionally well-paid for it, or retiring. To do otherwise would be career suicide.
To answer the original question: there are a variety of reasons why the DoE maintains other research programs that don't appear at first glance to be related to energy. One is that it's useful to have a sustainable and adaptable academic culture - for instance, the DoE is now putting a great deal of effort (and money) into biofuels, which is both directly related to the core mission of the Department, and dependent on biologists of every kind. If the DoE were strictly limited to physicists, synthetic chemists, and engineers, no one in the organization would have a clue about how to go about starting up a biological research program. You can always hire outsiders, but it is nice to have in-house expertise.
Another reason is that the very nature both of science and of the DoE labs inherently introduces some mission creep. Because they have always done defense-related work as part of the nuclear weapons program, ever since the Manhattan Project, they have branched into other defense-related areas. The DoE is also probably the world's largest operator of particle accelerators, which have a variety of uses. At some point in the last century, someone figured out that a particular type of electron accelerator called a synchrotron (which the DoE has several of) was most useful as an X-ray generator. As a result, protein crystallographers - biochemists - are some of the most active users of DoE facilities. (This was my background, and I now work for the DoE.) More recently, they've started to work on X-ray lasers, starting with the old Stanford LINAC, and the hope is that these will make possible many new experiments in multiple fields.
(Keep in mind, the time span over which new methodologies develop is typically multiple decades. The first protein crystallography experiment was in 1937; the first cyclotron was invented in 1929. No one actually solved a protein structure with X-rays until the early 1960s, by which time synchrotrons had been invented. It took another 20-30 years to realize the application of synchrotron X-rays to biology, and another 20 years for their use to become standard. It isn't simply a case of government bureaucrats searching for new fields to move into - although that happens occasionally too. Basic research is often inherently undirected and directionless, and you don't necessarily know where you're going to end up when you start.)
Finally, don't assume that the funding comes entirely from the DoE. The research group that I work for is mostly based at a national lab, but our funding comes almost entirely from the NIH and sponsoring companies.
a large number of these "meta" studies are actually done by sociologist and other "soft" scientist
By the way, I think you'll find that most academics in the hard sciences - including the left-wing ones - don't care for sociologists any more than you do.
With in the technical fields (fields controlled ulitmately by perfomance instead of popularity) like engineering, the science and business, there almost an even balance between left and right. However, academics in all fields are statistically a good bit to the left of their counterparts in non-academic world.
This has not been my experience at all; perhaps the life sciences skew differently, or maybe the biochemistry departments in, say, Texas are more conservative. Probably the most left-wing friend of mine from grad school now works for a major biotech/pharma company. The most conservative scientist I've ever worked with is now a university professor. Everyone else (a mix of liberals and what I'll call left-libertarians for lack of a better term) ended up in a mix of jobs, which so far don't correlate very well with their political views. I'm far more conservative/libertarian than most of my colleagues, yet I still work in academia (hopefully not for too much longer).
Well, its a common trope that anyone who disagrees with a leftist is a rightwing ideolouges.
I'm not a leftist either, so I agree with you to that extent. I am, however, an academic scientist. If you insist on making sweeping claims that I and my colleagues are "inherently hostile to the economically productive", you're either a right-wing ideologue, or simply ignorant.
Tens of millions of people today are absolutely convinced they are being poisened, irraidated, genetically modified etc by evil corporations and that there only hope to survive lays in investing leftist with greater and greater amounts of state power.
Yes, and tens of thousands of relatively liberal scientists roll their eyes every time delusional left-wingers start ranting about GMOs and thimerosal and EMFs, just as we roll our eyes when delusional conservatives start ranting about Darwinism and stem cells and AGW.
You might want to start making more of a distinction between "the left" and "liberals" - there is a difference, although few people in the US care to understand it. I live and work in the Bay Area, home to some of the most strident, ideologically rigid left-wingers in the country. Nearly everyone I know supported Obama, and we all think local politics is just crazy - I even heard a former Democratic Party activist and Clinton campaign staffer describe SF politics as a "left-wing nuthouse." Just because we support progressive income taxes and environmental regulations does not mean that we hate capitalism and want everyone to live in a dreary socialist hellhole.
Exactly, thank you. I think we could extend your last point one step further: it is a common trope among right-wing ideologues that anyone who supports even the mildest left-wing social programs (such as subsidized health care, unemployment insurance, etc.) is "inherently hostile to the economically productive." This, of course, is bullshit: modern liberals figured out many years ago that a welfare state depends on the wealth generated by a capitalist economy. Unfortunately, the loudest voices on the left tend to be genuinely anti-capitalist, which makes it easy to blur the distinctions.
My favorite counter-example would be The Economist, which is an exuberant cheerleader for global capitalism, prone to making sweeping statements like "capitalism has lifted hundreds of millions of lives out of poverty", but supported the economic stimulus and healthcare reform (albeit they're not fans of the current bills in Congress).
Academic today tilt strongly to the left side of the political spectrum and many believe in the post modernist concept that every one has a moral obligation to use whatever power they have, such as that held by respected scientist, to advance their political beliefs. They are inherently hostile to the economically productive.
Maybe this is true of professors in the Sociology or Gender Studies departments, but in my experience (10 years in academic biology labs) this is rarely applicable to scientists - especially the last sentence. It is fair to say that the vast majority hold center-left political views, but this usually doesn't mean outright hostility to capitalism, and it rarely translates to attempts to skew the science one way or the other. Furthermore, very few scientists are reluctant to refuse funding from industry sources, as long as it does not come with strings attached. UC Berkeley has accepted money from both Novartis and BP for various types of life-science research (the latter for biofuels, obviously), and I can guarantee you that at least 90% of the faculty in the life sciences (well, the faculty who are American citizens, anyway) voted for Obama. I have yet to see any left-wing pressure groups making similar donations.
That said, plenty of scientists are also raging assholes, and I'm amazed at how easily experienced researchers can delude themselves into believing crappy data. They're just as fallible as anyone else. However, peer review tends to weed out the bullshit in the long term, and part of the basic training of most graduate students is learning how to rip apart journal articles and search for flaws.
Neocons are better defined as what the europeans call liberal - strong markets, weak democracy, and the belief that the strong-markets/weak-democracy model broadly betters the world, is desired by the world, and should be aggressively brought to the world.
Whoa, that's almost exactly backwards, especially the first part. European "liberals" tend to favor free markets and limited government; I'm not sure they have an opinion on democracy, but "weak" probably isn't the word I would have used. ("republican" would be more appropriate.) The origins of classical liberalism lie in opposition to mercantilist economies, authoritarian and aristocratic regimes, and repressive social mores. It is easily confused with libertarianism, but classical liberals tend to be much less dogmatic, and generally argue for their policies based on the greater good, not on abstract principles of freedom.
Neocons were originally far leftists who became conservative without abandoning their support for massive government intervention in society. The underlying goal may have changed, but the means stayed the same. The messianic beliefs espoused by Wolfowitz and others in the Bush administration may claim to support the basic tenets of classical liberalism (democracy + capitalism = happy people), but the idea that we can bring about a near-utopian transformation of society by force is fundamentally Marxist.
This is different from how the administration is throwing money at NIH. They will be funding projects (or, more likely given their history, consuming huge amounts of money while having not a whole lot to show for it). But it's a big first step toward the end goal of crushing private pharmaceutical companies so the government can take over drug development and manufacturing.
You don't really know anything about the NIH, do you? Labs that don't get results don't get their grants extended - the phrase "publish or perish" is very apt, especially as the competition for funding has grown more intense. (I think the rejection rate is somewhere around 85% and climbing.) The NIH has also never been in the business of drug discovery, at least not in the sense that pharma companies are; running three-phase clinical trials is very expensive and has very little scientific payoff (many drugs fail for reasons that have nothing to do with scientific merit). In fact, because of the Bayh-Dole act, the NIH essentially has no control over the commercialization of technologies developed with NIH funding. So the universities and research institutions sell the commercial rights to private companies. There is some debate about how much the pharma industry has profited from these licensed discoveries, but the idea that these federally-funded studies somehow compete with Big Pharma is nonsense.
Vijay Pande is a Stanford professor and funded primarily by the same agencies that fund most of the biomedical research in this country - most importantly, the NIH. (Disclaimer: they fund my work too.) He has full-time scientists (i.e. people who spent most of their 20s in school) and computer engineers writing code and assistance from hardware vendors (ATI/AMD and NVIDIA, at least). FAH is a great example of how to leverage distributed computing resources and volunteer effort, and it's an excellent technical solution to what is potentially a very expensive problem, but the intellectual effort is *not* distributed. I don't mean any of this as a criticism (I wish I had five petaflops at my disposal too), but this is not an example of "hobbyists" performing research free of bureaucracy. (In fact, the umbrella project for much of Pande's work now has a relatively large bureaucracy at Stanford, which surely wasn't suffering from a lack of bureaucracy to begin with.)
It has nothing to do with their education and everything to do with taxpayers money being used (in the form of grants) to pay for that education.
I'm a bit hazy on the specifics, but I believe that training grants may not be used for foreign nationals. For the first two years of graduate school, my stipend was paid from these grants, and most of my classmates were funded the same way. Foreign students, on the other hand, had to be funded separately, or so one of the professors told me.
Once students joined a lab and passed their qualifying exam, they were generally paid from the professor's grant money (usually NIH). However, at that point they're basically a full-time (at least!) researcher, and you're getting highly-trained labor (at least a BS plus advanced technical skills, and usually some real-life work experience, perhaps a publication record too) for around $40,000 per year once tuition/fees are included (the actual stipend is around $25,000). Postdocs get paid a little better (the base pay is slightly under $40,000), but that's for someone who spent most of their 20s in school and has a PhD or MD. I suppose we could just tell foreign students and postdocs to fuck off and try to run our national basic research infrastructure on American labor only, but I doubt you'll find qualified Americans rushing to fill the void for such low salaries.
Qian apparently sailed through the Cultural Revolution because he was obviously too valuable to mess with. Too bad the FBI wasn't able to realize that during *our* Cultural Revolution.
Except that the Cultural Revolution really did do an amazing amount of damage to China's scientific progress - it took them decades to recover, since some of their brightest minds were shipped off to the countryside to work in collective farms. In the Soviet Union, while physics and engineering prospered, their biology was essentially worthless because of the dominance of Lysenko and his ideas. The other totalitarian states of the 20th century had similarly awful records - some German physicists rejected the work of Einstein because it was "Jewish Physics," and Enrico Fermi left Italy because his wife was Jewish and the Fascists had started passing anti-Semitic laws.
I agree that the example you give is a near-suicidal mistake for any country to make, and certainly not the only example either (Oppenheimer was also treated poorly), but the USA has usually done a much better job of avoiding such mistakes than authoritarian regimes.
It takes drastic environmental change to knock everyone out of that local maximum and maybe look for a new one.
I've never been clear on the distinction between P.U. and catastrophism (not in the Velikovsky sense, though). When I first learned about the fossil record, a major point was the mass extinctions that have occurred throughout history. The "Cambrian explosion" is thought to have followed the extinction of >80% of all species, where entire phyla were wiped out. Perhaps not coincidentally, all modern phyla were present in the Cambrian era. (If memory serves there were several even worse extinctions that followed.) The naive but obvious conclusion I drew from this is that massive changes in ecosystem and depopulation of niches increased the potential for adaptive radiation as organisms moved into new niches. This would also mean that more mutations might yield an increase in fitness, since what determines fitness would be so drastically different. In a stable ecosystem, in contrast, niches don't get emptied or added and hence populations stay more static.
Is this part of the modern evolutionary theory? (I am a biophysicist, but I don't know much about evolutionary theory.)
You'd have to cross reference this with the funding of those universities... In lots of places universities are state funded, so they aren't as wealthy as the ones in the US.
The majority of US academic scientists, however, receive significant amounts of money (in many cases, all of their funding) from the government, regardless of whether they work at a private or public university. It's worth pointing out that the US has traditionally (over the last half-century) poured tons of money into basic research, to a greater extent than many European countries that have almost entirely public educational systems.
So, let's stop talking about China and start talking about something we might be able to change: America.
Who says you can't do both? Boycott the ISPs who turn over data at the slightest provocation, don't listen to censorious broadcasters, and find alternatives to companies that enable authoritarian regimes to remain standing. Oh, and figure out ways to evade surveillance that both Americans and Chinese can use to fool the assholes who want to run our lives.
I'm more worried that China is up-front about government tyrrany and people here think that's just fine and we shouldn't judge. China is currently trying to export its model of government and economy to the rest of the world, same as we do, and some nations are paying attention. This isn't good for their citizens or, in the long term, for us.
Students in China did not "die for freedom" in Tian'an men Square. This is a Western myth. They were mere puppets, and their strings were being pulled by crime organizations and Western governments.
I see we have a Maoist in the audience. Is any movement against authoritarian government simply a tool of Western imperialists? Is wanting other people to enjoy the same rights under a liberal democracy that we in the USA have cultural chauvinism? Do you not believe in the concept of universal human rights? While we're on this subject, what's your opinion on the case discussed in the article?
I'm frankly sick and tired of hearing this moral relativism applied to human rights. Islamic law as currently practiced in, say, Iran, allows the government to execute you for consensual adult sex. China just threw someone in jail for exposing government propaganda and routinely tortures religious minorities. I don't think it's bigoted or imperialist of me to say that these actions are awful and immoral. I don't think we should invade them, but I will do everything I can to promote alternatives, and that includes boycotting any company that supports such totalitarianism.
Look at what has happened to Russia. Obviously it's better for Americans that the USSR is not there anymore, but Russia has been in a shithole for the last 15 years, and is only beginning to climb out of it.
Seventy years of communism followed by fifteen years of rampant corruption will do that to a nation. If the US hadn't won the Cold War the way it did Russia would have collapsed on its own anyway thanks to their ridiculous economic system and intellectually bankrupt leadership. (Of course, Bush may do the same for us.)
Put another way, those students were traitors. And do your research; we gave them plenty of opportunities to stand down, and they refused.
Since we have freedom of assembly and speech in our country, the idea that a mass demonstration against the government constitutes treason is a little hard to swallow. In fact, our constitution states that the government is responsible to the people, not the other way around. I know there are plenty of people here who'd like to see antiwar demonstrators rounded up and shot, but we have laws against that, unlike China. What's your excuse for the persecution of the Falun Gong and Christians in China? Are they traitors too?
The fact that the founding documents of the USA make strong statements about liberty seemingly has no bearing on whether or not authorities will erode said liberties.
Agreed, but I would never defend our past failures either. We may have ignored our principles many times in the past, but that's different from having no principles at all. What I find inexplicable is that someone thinks that individual liberty and freedom of thought/speech are a bad idea. And I really hope (often futilely) that people who think that way aren't in a position to influence our national policy.
Slashdot Mirror
Post-doc biologists at Harvard have to publish 70 papers in 7 years (if memory serves) to even qualify for a junior faculty position. There's no way that a scientist can publish ten papers per year that are worth jack squat, and the result is that most of the papers coming out of Harvard are garbage that get published because of where they come from.
Where did you hear that statistic? I've been working in academic biology labs for the last decade and I've seen what the hiring criteria are, and I will bet nearly any amount of money that most faculty members (who have people working for them) at Harvard don't publish 70 papers in 7 years, let alone post-docs (who usually work independently). The few exceptions tend to be computational researchers. It is true that the competition to get a junior faculty position is intense, and it is very difficult to stand out - but the people getting the jobs are often hired on the basis of one or two high-profile publications. Having lots of other papers helps, but only if these are obviously high-quality work (if less prestigious).
some asshole sleeps around without a condom, and you are the one responsible for his health bill.
Ah yes. Or some asshole sleeps around without a condom, infects his unsuspecting wife, and then dies in a car crash, leaving his widow to choose between treating her illness or paying for her child's education. . . but hey, the slut had it coming, right?
Being from outside the US I've always found it interesting that the position of the president is held in such regard. In a sense you argued against yourself by in this last statement. Why should the penalties for conspiring to murder the president be any different than conspiring to murder your neighbour. I agree the president's job is likely more important than your neighbours, unless your neighbour is about to find a cure for cancer, but is the president's life any more important?
I'm not sure what the penalties are - my point was that simply saying "I'd like to kill the president" can get you in very serious trouble with the Secret Service, whereas "I'd like to kill all liberals/all infidels/my husband" is fine, as long as it doesn't rise to the level of conspiracy. There are a variety of explanations for why the president's life is more important, starting with the fact that he's commander-in-chief of the largest military in the world by a considerable margin. A better argument is that since four US presidents were assassinated while in office, and several others had attempts on their lives - and we've only had 44 presidents in all - the Secret Service has plenty of reason to be paranoid.
It's still nothing like China, because I'm free to say virtually anything I want about the president or any other part of the government, as long as I don't threaten his person. Personally, I don't think we should hold the president in any higher regard than we'd hold any other public employee, but I nonetheless agree that law enforcement should err on the side of caution when assessing potential threats. I also believe that violence against the president is violence against our system, and while I think Bush should have been dragged out of office in handcuffs by, say, 2006 or 2007 at the latest, I would never have condoned violence against him. (Well, except the Iraqi shoe-thrower - that was kinda funny.)
Funny - you should try talking to some members of the Revolutionary Communist Party about how hard they have had to work to be able to pass out newspapers and how many of their membership have been shut up in the process. You'd be surprised how many of them are still living underground hiding from the government here.
sigh. . .
I'm familiar with Chairman Bob's histrionics, and I don't believe a single fucking word of it. We see this all the time coming from armchair revolutionaries, okay? Lyndon LaRouche is a particularly notorious case; I'm not sure if there's any part of the US (or British!) government that he hasn't claimed is out to destroy him. No one is stopping the RCP from - for instance - setting up a large display in the middle of UC Berkeley campus explaining how the Cultural Revolution was actually really awesome, and how the counter-revolutionaries had it coming anyway. Dude, I could seriously walk over there and buy one of their newspapers tomorrow. The police, who have much more serious villainy to deal with, leave them alone as long as they don't try to incite riots that result in property destruction.
It's sort of the price you pay for living in the Bay Area - we get beautiful scenery, temperate climate, liberal social atmosphere, and we also get California government and some of the most obnoxious, self-righteous far-left remnants in the country. They're clinging to a glorious past that never really existed, and dreaming of unleashing yet another massive bloodletting, and they're desperately, futilely trying to convince everyone else that they still matter - and they don't. I grit my teeth and bear it, because, after all, at least they haven't started any wars recently, and it seems churlish to get upset about these fools when Dick Cheney is still enjoying his retirement.
But in the European Union you can do that, and you are protected with medical care to boot. Your way is not the only way, even with the many good things you can do.
What's your point? I would never claim that the US government is anything close to a perfect system; the debate is about free speech and laws restricting to it. And while I think the EU is mostly very good on civil liberties and better than us on some other unrelated issues, it's worth mentioning that they are far more willing to restrict speech - and I'm not just talking about Germany's prohibitions on Holocaust denial. Google "Ireland blasphemy" if you're curious. On the moral scale, this can't compare to the thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it's one instance where the US clearly is superior.
In every Administration there are stories that newspapers sit on for years at a time because the Feds ask them not to publish, and some that never get made public. Then there are the "official" misdeeds we'll never know about thanks to a veil of National Security keeping out the public and the media.
Agreed, but this is a separate issue - there is still no legal action that the government can take to prevent publication, and not much they can do after the fact. The New York Times sat on the NSA warrantless surveilance story for a year because the Bush administration asked them too, not because the secret police held a gun to Bill Keller's head. When they finally published it, the administration and its supporters were livid - I remember seeing many of the more enthusiastic right-wing bloggers demanding treason trials for the reporters and editors involved. Yet no legal action was taken; Bill Keller is still in charge, and James Risen published his book. This is because we have several decades of legal precedent (starting with the Pentagon Papers, if not earlier) that not only is prior restraint unconstitutional, reporters can't be penalized for publishing classified information because they weren't legally bound to protect it in the first place.
The only situations I've seen where the government was allowed to censor third-party publications have been books or articles by former spies, where the appropriate agency (usually the CIA) has redacted some information. I think this is usually ass-covering for the author (and perhaps publisher), since they may be liable for revealing classified secrets that they learned as part of their job.
I certainly agree that our government errs strongly on the side of too much secrecy, but my original point stands - these issues only concern what information the government (and media) is obliged to reveal, not what it can suppress through criminal prosecution.
is censoring their search engine according to US laws different from censoring according to Chinese laws?
It depends: what does China not censor that the US does?
I'd say that the key difference is that in the US, criticism of the government, exposure of official misdeeds, and calls for regime change are not suppressed, which is why I still see members of the Revolutionary Communist Party passing out pamphlets calling for violent revolution, and why Rick Perry can talk about Texas seceding from the US. The government may outlaw child porn and make copyright law increasingly onerous, but it doesn't try to use censorship to protect its own position. In China, on the other hand. . . well, I'll just quote a section of their criminal code:
Whoever incites others by spreading rumors or slanders or any other means to subvert the State power or overthrow the socialist system shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not more than five years, criminal detention, public surveillance or deprivation of political rights; and the ringleaders and the others who commit major crimes shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not less than five years.
I'm sure you can find some equally brain-dead sections of US legal code, but the only thing even close to this in intent would be direct threats against the life of the president.
Nice strawman. Slashdot is full of left-libertarian US citizens, and we've been wailing about our less enlightened national policies for years. I for one would love to see Dick Cheney sharing a jail cell with Hu Jintao and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but every time one of the latter two gentleman is a topic of discussion, I always see dozens of comments saying "what about Guantanamo Bay/Abu Grahib/warrantless wiretapping blah blah blah?" - as if that excuses any amount of misbehavior by other governments. Well, I think we should withdraw all our troops from foreign countries, try or release everyone at Guantanamo, and send the entire Bush administration to the ICC. Do I have your permission to criticize the Chinese government now, or are you going to start whining about something else?
Besides all that, the simple fact is that the US legal system continues to be more permissive of unbridled free speech than almost any other country in the world. We send people to jail for all sorts of stupid reasons that I certainly don't support, but you can march through Washington DC with a sign comparing Obama to Hitler, and mutter about a 2nd American Revolution, and you won't be hauled off to jail. Most of us wouldn't have it any other way.
. . . in a bioinformatics lab, and I'll wager that he knows far more about biology (and, specifically, genomics) than most Slashdot readers. Search for his name on PubMed and you'll find a decent number of peer-reviewed articles (although more letters and opinion pieces - I got the impression that he was more interested in policy issues than research). I'm pretty sure he ended up receiving a PhD in biochemistry from Yale, although I left long before he would have finished.
That said, he's also Canadian, which may explain his relaxed attitude towards the privacy implications of an omniscient, paternalistic government. (He's not the only Canadian I've met with this attitude.) Those of us living in the US, where the partisans of the last administration continue to defend - no, demand - the torture and/or indefinite detention of terrorism suspects, may be more suspicious. I certainly don't think much of this idea. Hopefully this is one of the rare cases where libertarian-leaning individuals on both the left and right can cooperate enough to overcome the reflexive authoritarianism of most of the rest of the country, especially the law-and-order conservatives. (In fairness to conservatives, the last time I read about a similar proposal, it was being pushed by Tony Blair.)
Yeah, but shouldn't they pass on their research work to another, more appropriate Department?
Senior academic scientists don't "pass on their research" unless they're exceptionally well-paid for it, or retiring. To do otherwise would be career suicide.
To answer the original question: there are a variety of reasons why the DoE maintains other research programs that don't appear at first glance to be related to energy. One is that it's useful to have a sustainable and adaptable academic culture - for instance, the DoE is now putting a great deal of effort (and money) into biofuels, which is both directly related to the core mission of the Department, and dependent on biologists of every kind. If the DoE were strictly limited to physicists, synthetic chemists, and engineers, no one in the organization would have a clue about how to go about starting up a biological research program. You can always hire outsiders, but it is nice to have in-house expertise.
Another reason is that the very nature both of science and of the DoE labs inherently introduces some mission creep. Because they have always done defense-related work as part of the nuclear weapons program, ever since the Manhattan Project, they have branched into other defense-related areas. The DoE is also probably the world's largest operator of particle accelerators, which have a variety of uses. At some point in the last century, someone figured out that a particular type of electron accelerator called a synchrotron (which the DoE has several of) was most useful as an X-ray generator. As a result, protein crystallographers - biochemists - are some of the most active users of DoE facilities. (This was my background, and I now work for the DoE.) More recently, they've started to work on X-ray lasers, starting with the old Stanford LINAC, and the hope is that these will make possible many new experiments in multiple fields.
(Keep in mind, the time span over which new methodologies develop is typically multiple decades. The first protein crystallography experiment was in 1937; the first cyclotron was invented in 1929. No one actually solved a protein structure with X-rays until the early 1960s, by which time synchrotrons had been invented. It took another 20-30 years to realize the application of synchrotron X-rays to biology, and another 20 years for their use to become standard. It isn't simply a case of government bureaucrats searching for new fields to move into - although that happens occasionally too. Basic research is often inherently undirected and directionless, and you don't necessarily know where you're going to end up when you start.)
Finally, don't assume that the funding comes entirely from the DoE. The research group that I work for is mostly based at a national lab, but our funding comes almost entirely from the NIH and sponsoring companies.
a large number of these "meta" studies are actually done by sociologist and other "soft" scientist
By the way, I think you'll find that most academics in the hard sciences - including the left-wing ones - don't care for sociologists any more than you do.
With in the technical fields (fields controlled ulitmately by perfomance instead of popularity) like engineering, the science and business, there almost an even balance between left and right. However, academics in all fields are statistically a good bit to the left of their counterparts in non-academic world.
This has not been my experience at all; perhaps the life sciences skew differently, or maybe the biochemistry departments in, say, Texas are more conservative. Probably the most left-wing friend of mine from grad school now works for a major biotech/pharma company. The most conservative scientist I've ever worked with is now a university professor. Everyone else (a mix of liberals and what I'll call left-libertarians for lack of a better term) ended up in a mix of jobs, which so far don't correlate very well with their political views. I'm far more conservative/libertarian than most of my colleagues, yet I still work in academia (hopefully not for too much longer).
Well, its a common trope that anyone who disagrees with a leftist is a rightwing ideolouges.
I'm not a leftist either, so I agree with you to that extent. I am, however, an academic scientist. If you insist on making sweeping claims that I and my colleagues are "inherently hostile to the economically productive", you're either a right-wing ideologue, or simply ignorant.
Tens of millions of people today are absolutely convinced they are being poisened, irraidated, genetically modified etc by evil corporations and that there only hope to survive lays in investing leftist with greater and greater amounts of state power.
Yes, and tens of thousands of relatively liberal scientists roll their eyes every time delusional left-wingers start ranting about GMOs and thimerosal and EMFs, just as we roll our eyes when delusional conservatives start ranting about Darwinism and stem cells and AGW.
You might want to start making more of a distinction between "the left" and "liberals" - there is a difference, although few people in the US care to understand it. I live and work in the Bay Area, home to some of the most strident, ideologically rigid left-wingers in the country. Nearly everyone I know supported Obama, and we all think local politics is just crazy - I even heard a former Democratic Party activist and Clinton campaign staffer describe SF politics as a "left-wing nuthouse." Just because we support progressive income taxes and environmental regulations does not mean that we hate capitalism and want everyone to live in a dreary socialist hellhole.
Exactly, thank you. I think we could extend your last point one step further: it is a common trope among right-wing ideologues that anyone who supports even the mildest left-wing social programs (such as subsidized health care, unemployment insurance, etc.) is "inherently hostile to the economically productive." This, of course, is bullshit: modern liberals figured out many years ago that a welfare state depends on the wealth generated by a capitalist economy. Unfortunately, the loudest voices on the left tend to be genuinely anti-capitalist, which makes it easy to blur the distinctions.
My favorite counter-example would be The Economist, which is an exuberant cheerleader for global capitalism, prone to making sweeping statements like "capitalism has lifted hundreds of millions of lives out of poverty", but supported the economic stimulus and healthcare reform (albeit they're not fans of the current bills in Congress).
Academic today tilt strongly to the left side of the political spectrum and many believe in the post modernist concept that every one has a moral obligation to use whatever power they have, such as that held by respected scientist, to advance their political beliefs. They are inherently hostile to the economically productive.
Maybe this is true of professors in the Sociology or Gender Studies departments, but in my experience (10 years in academic biology labs) this is rarely applicable to scientists - especially the last sentence. It is fair to say that the vast majority hold center-left political views, but this usually doesn't mean outright hostility to capitalism, and it rarely translates to attempts to skew the science one way or the other. Furthermore, very few scientists are reluctant to refuse funding from industry sources, as long as it does not come with strings attached. UC Berkeley has accepted money from both Novartis and BP for various types of life-science research (the latter for biofuels, obviously), and I can guarantee you that at least 90% of the faculty in the life sciences (well, the faculty who are American citizens, anyway) voted for Obama. I have yet to see any left-wing pressure groups making similar donations.
That said, plenty of scientists are also raging assholes, and I'm amazed at how easily experienced researchers can delude themselves into believing crappy data. They're just as fallible as anyone else. However, peer review tends to weed out the bullshit in the long term, and part of the basic training of most graduate students is learning how to rip apart journal articles and search for flaws.
Neocons are better defined as what the europeans call liberal - strong markets, weak democracy, and the belief that the strong-markets/weak-democracy model broadly betters the world, is desired by the world, and should be aggressively brought to the world.
Whoa, that's almost exactly backwards, especially the first part. European "liberals" tend to favor free markets and limited government; I'm not sure they have an opinion on democracy, but "weak" probably isn't the word I would have used. ("republican" would be more appropriate.) The origins of classical liberalism lie in opposition to mercantilist economies, authoritarian and aristocratic regimes, and repressive social mores. It is easily confused with libertarianism, but classical liberals tend to be much less dogmatic, and generally argue for their policies based on the greater good, not on abstract principles of freedom.
Neocons were originally far leftists who became conservative without abandoning their support for massive government intervention in society. The underlying goal may have changed, but the means stayed the same. The messianic beliefs espoused by Wolfowitz and others in the Bush administration may claim to support the basic tenets of classical liberalism (democracy + capitalism = happy people), but the idea that we can bring about a near-utopian transformation of society by force is fundamentally Marxist.
This is different from how the administration is throwing money at NIH. They will be funding projects (or, more likely given their history, consuming huge amounts of money while having not a whole lot to show for it). But it's a big first step toward the end goal of crushing private pharmaceutical companies so the government can take over drug development and manufacturing.
You don't really know anything about the NIH, do you? Labs that don't get results don't get their grants extended - the phrase "publish or perish" is very apt, especially as the competition for funding has grown more intense. (I think the rejection rate is somewhere around 85% and climbing.) The NIH has also never been in the business of drug discovery, at least not in the sense that pharma companies are; running three-phase clinical trials is very expensive and has very little scientific payoff (many drugs fail for reasons that have nothing to do with scientific merit). In fact, because of the Bayh-Dole act, the NIH essentially has no control over the commercialization of technologies developed with NIH funding. So the universities and research institutions sell the commercial rights to private companies. There is some debate about how much the pharma industry has profited from these licensed discoveries, but the idea that these federally-funded studies somehow compete with Big Pharma is nonsense.
Vijay Pande is a Stanford professor and funded primarily by the same agencies that fund most of the biomedical research in this country - most importantly, the NIH. (Disclaimer: they fund my work too.) He has full-time scientists (i.e. people who spent most of their 20s in school) and computer engineers writing code and assistance from hardware vendors (ATI/AMD and NVIDIA, at least). FAH is a great example of how to leverage distributed computing resources and volunteer effort, and it's an excellent technical solution to what is potentially a very expensive problem, but the intellectual effort is *not* distributed. I don't mean any of this as a criticism (I wish I had five petaflops at my disposal too), but this is not an example of "hobbyists" performing research free of bureaucracy. (In fact, the umbrella project for much of Pande's work now has a relatively large bureaucracy at Stanford, which surely wasn't suffering from a lack of bureaucracy to begin with.)
It has nothing to do with their education and everything to do with taxpayers money being used (in the form of grants) to pay for that education.
I'm a bit hazy on the specifics, but I believe that training grants may not be used for foreign nationals. For the first two years of graduate school, my stipend was paid from these grants, and most of my classmates were funded the same way. Foreign students, on the other hand, had to be funded separately, or so one of the professors told me.
Once students joined a lab and passed their qualifying exam, they were generally paid from the professor's grant money (usually NIH). However, at that point they're basically a full-time (at least!) researcher, and you're getting highly-trained labor (at least a BS plus advanced technical skills, and usually some real-life work experience, perhaps a publication record too) for around $40,000 per year once tuition/fees are included (the actual stipend is around $25,000). Postdocs get paid a little better (the base pay is slightly under $40,000), but that's for someone who spent most of their 20s in school and has a PhD or MD. I suppose we could just tell foreign students and postdocs to fuck off and try to run our national basic research infrastructure on American labor only, but I doubt you'll find qualified Americans rushing to fill the void for such low salaries.
Qian apparently sailed through the Cultural Revolution because he was obviously too valuable to mess with. Too bad the FBI wasn't able to realize that during *our* Cultural Revolution.
Except that the Cultural Revolution really did do an amazing amount of damage to China's scientific progress - it took them decades to recover, since some of their brightest minds were shipped off to the countryside to work in collective farms. In the Soviet Union, while physics and engineering prospered, their biology was essentially worthless because of the dominance of Lysenko and his ideas. The other totalitarian states of the 20th century had similarly awful records - some German physicists rejected the work of Einstein because it was "Jewish Physics," and Enrico Fermi left Italy because his wife was Jewish and the Fascists had started passing anti-Semitic laws.
I agree that the example you give is a near-suicidal mistake for any country to make, and certainly not the only example either (Oppenheimer was also treated poorly), but the USA has usually done a much better job of avoiding such mistakes than authoritarian regimes.
It takes drastic environmental change to knock everyone out of that local maximum and maybe look for a new one.
I've never been clear on the distinction between P.U. and catastrophism (not in the Velikovsky sense, though). When I first learned about the fossil record, a major point was the mass extinctions that have occurred throughout history. The "Cambrian explosion" is thought to have followed the extinction of >80% of all species, where entire phyla were wiped out. Perhaps not coincidentally, all modern phyla were present in the Cambrian era. (If memory serves there were several even worse extinctions that followed.) The naive but obvious conclusion I drew from this is that massive changes in ecosystem and depopulation of niches increased the potential for adaptive radiation as organisms moved into new niches. This would also mean that more mutations might yield an increase in fitness, since what determines fitness would be so drastically different. In a stable ecosystem, in contrast, niches don't get emptied or added and hence populations stay more static.
Is this part of the modern evolutionary theory? (I am a biophysicist, but I don't know much about evolutionary theory.)
You'd have to cross reference this with the funding of those universities... In lots of places universities are state funded, so they aren't as wealthy as the ones in the US.
The majority of US academic scientists, however, receive significant amounts of money (in many cases, all of their funding) from the government, regardless of whether they work at a private or public university. It's worth pointing out that the US has traditionally (over the last half-century) poured tons of money into basic research, to a greater extent than many European countries that have almost entirely public educational systems.
So, let's stop talking about China and start talking about something we might be able to change: America.
Who says you can't do both? Boycott the ISPs who turn over data at the slightest provocation, don't listen to censorious broadcasters, and find alternatives to companies that enable authoritarian regimes to remain standing. Oh, and figure out ways to evade surveillance that both Americans and Chinese can use to fool the assholes who want to run our lives.
I'm more worried that China is up-front about government tyrrany and people here think that's just fine and we shouldn't judge. China is currently trying to export its model of government and economy to the rest of the world, same as we do, and some nations are paying attention. This isn't good for their citizens or, in the long term, for us.
Students in China did not "die for freedom" in Tian'an men Square. This is a Western myth. They were mere puppets, and their strings were being pulled by crime organizations and Western governments.
I see we have a Maoist in the audience. Is any movement against authoritarian government simply a tool of Western imperialists? Is wanting other people to enjoy the same rights under a liberal democracy that we in the USA have cultural chauvinism? Do you not believe in the concept of universal human rights? While we're on this subject, what's your opinion on the case discussed in the article?
I'm frankly sick and tired of hearing this moral relativism applied to human rights. Islamic law as currently practiced in, say, Iran, allows the government to execute you for consensual adult sex. China just threw someone in jail for exposing government propaganda and routinely tortures religious minorities. I don't think it's bigoted or imperialist of me to say that these actions are awful and immoral. I don't think we should invade them, but I will do everything I can to promote alternatives, and that includes boycotting any company that supports such totalitarianism.
Look at what has happened to Russia. Obviously it's better for Americans that the USSR is not there anymore, but Russia has been in a shithole for the last 15 years, and is only beginning to climb out of it.
Seventy years of communism followed by fifteen years of rampant corruption will do that to a nation. If the US hadn't won the Cold War the way it did Russia would have collapsed on its own anyway thanks to their ridiculous economic system and intellectually bankrupt leadership. (Of course, Bush may do the same for us.)
Put another way, those students were traitors. And do your research; we gave them plenty of opportunities to stand down, and they refused.
Since we have freedom of assembly and speech in our country, the idea that a mass demonstration against the government constitutes treason is a little hard to swallow. In fact, our constitution states that the government is responsible to the people, not the other way around. I know there are plenty of people here who'd like to see antiwar demonstrators rounded up and shot, but we have laws against that, unlike China. What's your excuse for the persecution of the Falun Gong and Christians in China? Are they traitors too?
The fact that the founding documents of the USA make strong statements about liberty seemingly has no bearing on whether or not authorities will erode said liberties.
Agreed, but I would never defend our past failures either. We may have ignored our principles many times in the past, but that's different from having no principles at all. What I find inexplicable is that someone thinks that individual liberty and freedom of thought/speech are a bad idea. And I really hope (often futilely) that people who think that way aren't in a position to influence our national policy.