I agreee with you, to a point. Microsoft has taken this position a step further- government should be actively prohibited from working with GPL'd code. This much is evident from their stance on NSA Linux. If the NSA were to write some software from scratch and release it to the public, I would certainly argue that a BSD-style license or simply public domain would be ideal. However, I do not think they should be prevented from working on software with more restrictive licenses- and this includes truly proprietary ones.
The endpoint of Microsoft's argument would be that taxpayer-funded development could not be done with Microsoft's code under a shared-source agreement. This would prohibit any government agency and many universities from using Microsoft's code, eliminating any usefulness of the Shared Source program, and would probably just drive them further into the Free Software camp (even if they can't use the GPL).
I'm a native-born American citizen, and I'd far rather work with a bright, motivated foreign student who will return home when he's done than with someone like you. Obviously our system of government makes the hare-brained scheme you propose difficult or impossible to implement, but it's sad to see so such misinformation and bigotry spread here.
You clearly have a huge chip on your shoulder, and I suspect that, not financial issues, is what's really holding you back.
Blow me. Nationalism and racism are not the same, and the America/Nazi comparisons have been getting out of hand here. I think "Americans first" is pretty stupid in this context, but you're out of line.
I think the Government should make a law prohibiting Colleges and Universities from taking any foriegn students when there are American students who want the education--especially when financial aid is concerned! They need to be putting Americans first--not the other way around.
Financial aid to foreigners is not provided by the government anyway. You're calling for the equivalent of tariffs on American education. Should the government be allowed to dictate how many foreign students Harvard will admit next year? It's a private university, for Christ's sake.
I've made this point too many times, but there are not enough interested American students to fill all the graduate spots in our universities. And the contributions of foreigners are what helps make America into a scientific superpower. I'd much rather work with a Chinese student who has a fucking clue than an American who got in because the university was desperate for warm bodies.
That's a noble sentiment, but the reason the grad population isn't 90% American is because few Americans are interested in grad school, not because all those evil foreigners are taking spots away. Denying funding to projects with foreign nationals participating won't change the makeup of the grad student population, it'll just decimate it.
WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. I am applying to grad school, and currently work with scientists from all over the world. Without the huge number of talented foreigners who come to the US to study science, our nation's system of basic research- probably the best in the world- would be fucked. Read through any issue of a top-ranking biomedical journal, find every article written at an American institution, and see how few of them lack any conspicuously foreign (usually Chinese) name.
There is nothing wrong with reasonable security measures; the story doesn't tell enough for anyone to judge whether the NSA was being more paranoid than normal. However, to suggest that the US should look out for US students first is shortsighted and ignorant. The reason we have so many foreign students is because kids here don't want to go to grad school- they want to go to law school, med school, or simply get rich. I was a biology major at an Ivy League school, and very few of the other biology majors in my class intended to go to grad school.
The NIH (and others) do not pay for fellowships for foreign students and postdocs, which is appropriate. What you're suggesting, however, seems to be that the NIH should give priority to projects that are led 100% by American citizens. That's, like, almost none of them.
Um, no. If by the private sector you mean "corporations", that's absolutely wrong- American corporations are (usually) not especially good at basic research (Bell Labs being the exception that proves the rule). Or if you mean "private funding", you're also wrong- there isn't much of it. Certainly for biomedical research the bulk of funding comes from government agencies, and the overwhelming majority of basic research is being done with this money. So federal funding continues to be the lifeblood of academia.
Case in point: my employer (big university) was recently told that they had to let JAG recruit at our law school (despite the USAF's refusal to sign a non-discrimination pledge because of "don't ask, don't tell") or lose nearly $300 million per year in federal money, almost all of which goes to our med school, and virtually none of which goes to the law school. The administration caved- they didn't have a choice.
Petrol is not heavily taxed in the US, unless something fundamental has happened the last couple of years.
. . . and will continue not to be, because Americans above all others seem to consider it a "right" to drive anytime, anywhere. Plus, many people's traditional distrust of big government makes instituting new public transportation systems rather difficult.
There are reasons why this is so, however. I live in CT now, and it would be nearly impossible for me to run my life effectively without a car. I can walk to work, and reach most places in the city by walking or biking, but I can't buy groceries without the car. If I want to go to NYC, I always take the train, but if I want to go pretty much anywhere in CT I have to drive. I think this reflects the layout and evolution of Connecticut's cities more than anything else; if I lived in New York (which may yet happen) I wouldn't even bother to own a car.
I used to live in Seattle, which has a similar problem- very spread out metropolitan area. Good bus system, okay for the occasional trip downtown, but annoying if you have to do it every day or travel a long ways. They've been trying to get mass transit working for years, and it's been an absolute embarassment and a huge waste of money (to the disgust of well-meaning folks like my parents, who voted for it).
I've heard speculation that the car thing may reflect Americans' tendency to rush around. In NYC, the subway is usually faster; otherwise, people want to be at work ASAP, without any hassle or inconvenience. If you're a minute late to the bus stop in Seattle you've lost 30 minutes of your day, and it'll often take you twice as long to get to work anyway. In contrast, one of my co-workers came from London, and said he could spend 45 minutes walking to work or 2 hours driving.
For the purists: I'm going to have to re-read the book, but Jackson does make some big changes to plot (far bigger in the plot-sense than substitutiing Arwen in or eliminating Tom Bombadil).
Oddly, I thought many of these improved the movie. It made it into a more coherent whole than it otherwise could have been, and emphasized some themes that are harder to pick out of the books.
I think I liked it better in some ways. It looked gorgeous, there was less exposition, and the characters just keep getting better.
The Ents, in fact, were one of the only things that didn't really do much for me. That and the winged steed- I had high expectations for that, and they just weren't fulfilled for some reason.
I'm going by what the developer of the program told me- he might be wrong, but he's work on four different platforms simultaneously. I think it's something specific about their GLX implementation that makes it much faster.
Their GLX implementation offers features that are non-existent in Mesa.
One piece of software I use almost daily essentially requires the NVidia driver if you use it on Linux, because of display lists. The difference in speed is simply ridiculous.
If I understood the article, the drivers aren't going to be Open Source / Free Software. So I don't see why I would support them...
Yeah, there are so many other companies with superior products who will give us every single bit of code in their drivers. Besides, who needs 3D acceleration on Linux anyway? I suppose I can just take my 3D apps and run them on Windows.
Good example, but read his resume closely- it helps prove my point. He had access to the right people and was able to work for a long time at a stable position. His connections enabled him to get jobs where people let him do real work. I'm not questioning his talent- his work looks awesome- but he didn't exactly break into the field. And academic environments are very different from industry.
But I believe his example proves my point that in a new field (in his case, deep water exploration and recovery), precise credentials don't matter.
If somebody thinks you can help him win the Nobel Prize, he'll hire you. If you use letters after your name and a resume to convince him of that, fine. If a 30-minute conversation does the trick--hey, that'll work too.
This all sounds great. There are two problems:
1. Bioinformatics is a hot field, but not really a new enough of one to be a true meritocracy the way you describe. It's very important, but there are already many people actively doing research or getting their degrees. You can't just break into the field (unless you already have a scientific reputation). Barring a degree, a lot of publications helps- but that's going to take a while and involve considerable effort.
2. You have to get to the point where you get the 30-minute conversation first. This is harder than it sounds. I was offered only one interview, and landed a job that was aimed at PhDs or really advanced people (I was not even through with college). However, all of the people interviewing me knew my boss personally. So I was aided by my connections, and it took a while to get those. Had circumstances been different, they probably wouldn't have bothered to contact me.
(I ended up not taking the job- it would have forced me to wait much too long to attend grad school, and didn't quite pay enough to make that worthwhile. Though I confess I still wonder if I made a stupid mistake. . . most jobs for people at my level are along the lines of "database jockey" or "web monkey". These people wanted me as a scientist, probably the highest compliment they could have paid me.)
Yeah, I actually work in bioinformatics right now, and I'm going to switch fields entirely to something where I can concentrate on the science rather than talk about what hot shit bioinformatics is. Too many idiots (with and without PhDs) are going to be flocking to the field because they read in "Fast Company" that the field was booming.
Unless you have a PhD in CS or Bio right now or will be getting one soon, I suspect it will be too late to start in bioinformatics. By the time you are considered qualified enough to get a real job, the market will be saturated.
It convinced me that credendials, and even past experience, may not be the best indicators of future success.
Um, sorry, but it's extremely difficult to go anywhere in the sciences without a PhD. I seriously doubt that will change any time soon. The people doing the hiring are biologists, and would not even bother to read the resume of a whiz-kid programmer unless he had some letters after his name.
The worst case was when I made a huge effort to improve a technical resource that was central to a paper written by several coworkers. I was added to the paper right before it was submitted and never even had a chance to read it- I was far too busy with school and protested loudly at the time. By the time I actually got a chance to read it, months later, I was familiar enough with the project and the data to realize that they'd done many things wrong. Had I been included from the beginning I would have never let my name go on the final project. Unfortunately, it was too late for me to fix this or to take my name off the paper (the paper had been accepted). I'm much more careful about this kind of thing now.
Most of the people who claim that HIV doesn't cause AIDS haven't bothered to do much reading either. Read these online articles, which actually give a complete list of citations which you can then explore:
As for the "prominent scientists", some of them are operating waaaay outside their area of expertise. Kary Mullis had one brilliant discovery and doesn't seem to have done much else, aside from taking acid and surfing. One particularly loud denier that I know of is actually a math professor known for his aggressive crusades against anyone holding opinions contrary to him. He was once caught making a bold claim about media coverage of AIDS that was quickly proved wrong by a reporter with LEXIS/NEXIS access.
Also, sometimes the relevant portion of an paper can be summed up in one sentence, or in the abstract.
Of course, which is why the article sort of misses the point. For instance, if I were to mention offhand in an introduction that protein synthesis by the ribosome is done by catalytic RNA, there is an obvious reference to cite [Nissen et al. (2000) Science etc.]. I know this is correct, it's been extensively covered, and I have a copy lying around somewhere, but I've never actually read it all the way through. You can just look at the abstract and that's plenty for these purposes- if I were extensively discussing the mechanism I'd need to thoroughly read the paper, but for an introduction I just need to mention the proper source.
Now, I could be making an error- what if they just pulled something out of their ass, or used sloppy methodology? Usually, people will just say "if it's good enough for the editors (and peer reviewers) of Science, who am I to argue?"
Or, you cite colleagues who you suspect would be obvious editorial choices to peer review your paper. You just add a sentence like "This has been previously discussed by a number of eminent scholars (fucking huge list of citations here)".
I've been in situations where I was basically done writing and then was told "um, okay, you should cite all these papers. just figure something out."
Yup! I've had the same happen to me. A bunch of people attend meetings, and get added to the paper. Perhaps a few of them helped proofread, but that's nothing like making an original scientific contribution. On the one hand, I was added to a number of papers based largely on my a) meeting attendance and b) technical expertise. This helps me immeasurably in furthering my career, except for the difficulty of explaining what I did on some projects (ranging from "absolutely zilch" to "constructed the web page"). However, when it was my turn to write a paper, about five people ended up as co-authors with minimal contributions.
I'm now in a position where I don't let that happen any more; I've asked to be taken off of papers because my contribution was minimal, and the last time I wrote something I stated up front who would be on the author list. I do not forsee that this will be a permanant solution, however; I'm still too junior a scientist to have much sway. I've seen other cases where someone asked to be added to a project because he "needed more publications", or where a senior investigator did not realize he was a co-author until well after the paper had been published.
Park is a badass. He's primarily anti-bullshit; read his articles on what he calls "Voodoo Science" (or the book of the same name) to get a better idea. He can be absolutely vicious at times but I have yet to see a situation where it wasn't called for. He's sort of like Carl Sagan crossed with Jesse Ventura.
He's been one of the few scientists (or journalists) to call the administration on its missile defense bluff, among other things; he's also repeatedly described the ISS as a waste of time and money- though he's clearly in favor of space exploration. His opinion of creationism is about as low as can be imagined.
I'm sure the guy can be a dickhead, and I'm sure he can be wrong occasionally, but we need people like him. The mass media tends to give pseudoscientific bullshit far more credibility than it deserves, and too many legitimate scientists keep their mouths shut or ignore the problem. In a society where John Edwards is the SciFi channel's top rated show, skeptics are vital.
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I agreee with you, to a point. Microsoft has taken this position a step further- government should be actively prohibited from working with GPL'd code. This much is evident from their stance on NSA Linux. If the NSA were to write some software from scratch and release it to the public, I would certainly argue that a BSD-style license or simply public domain would be ideal. However, I do not think they should be prevented from working on software with more restrictive licenses- and this includes truly proprietary ones.
The endpoint of Microsoft's argument would be that taxpayer-funded development could not be done with Microsoft's code under a shared-source agreement. This would prohibit any government agency and many universities from using Microsoft's code, eliminating any usefulness of the Shared Source program, and would probably just drive them further into the Free Software camp (even if they can't use the GPL).
I'm a native-born American citizen, and I'd far rather work with a bright, motivated foreign student who will return home when he's done than with someone like you. Obviously our system of government makes the hare-brained scheme you propose difficult or impossible to implement, but it's sad to see so such misinformation and bigotry spread here.
You clearly have a huge chip on your shoulder, and I suspect that, not financial issues, is what's really holding you back.
Blow me. Nationalism and racism are not the same, and the America/Nazi comparisons have been getting out of hand here. I think "Americans first" is pretty stupid in this context, but you're out of line.
I think the Government should make a law prohibiting Colleges and Universities from taking any foriegn students when there are American students who want the education--especially when financial aid is concerned! They need to be putting Americans first--not the other way around.
Financial aid to foreigners is not provided by the government anyway. You're calling for the equivalent of tariffs on American education. Should the government be allowed to dictate how many foreign students Harvard will admit next year? It's a private university, for Christ's sake.
I've made this point too many times, but there are not enough interested American students to fill all the graduate spots in our universities. And the contributions of foreigners are what helps make America into a scientific superpower. I'd much rather work with a Chinese student who has a fucking clue than an American who got in because the university was desperate for warm bodies.
That's a noble sentiment, but the reason the grad population isn't 90% American is because few Americans are interested in grad school, not because all those evil foreigners are taking spots away. Denying funding to projects with foreign nationals participating won't change the makeup of the grad student population, it'll just decimate it.
WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. I am applying to grad school, and currently work with scientists from all over the world. Without the huge number of talented foreigners who come to the US to study science, our nation's system of basic research- probably the best in the world- would be fucked. Read through any issue of a top-ranking biomedical journal, find every article written at an American institution, and see how few of them lack any conspicuously foreign (usually Chinese) name.
There is nothing wrong with reasonable security measures; the story doesn't tell enough for anyone to judge whether the NSA was being more paranoid than normal. However, to suggest that the US should look out for US students first is shortsighted and ignorant. The reason we have so many foreign students is because kids here don't want to go to grad school- they want to go to law school, med school, or simply get rich. I was a biology major at an Ivy League school, and very few of the other biology majors in my class intended to go to grad school.
The NIH (and others) do not pay for fellowships for foreign students and postdocs, which is appropriate. What you're suggesting, however, seems to be that the NIH should give priority to projects that are led 100% by American citizens. That's, like, almost none of them.
Um, no. If by the private sector you mean "corporations", that's absolutely wrong- American corporations are (usually) not especially good at basic research (Bell Labs being the exception that proves the rule). Or if you mean "private funding", you're also wrong- there isn't much of it. Certainly for biomedical research the bulk of funding comes from government agencies, and the overwhelming majority of basic research is being done with this money. So federal funding continues to be the lifeblood of academia.
Case in point: my employer (big university) was recently told that they had to let JAG recruit at our law school (despite the USAF's refusal to sign a non-discrimination pledge because of "don't ask, don't tell") or lose nearly $300 million per year in federal money, almost all of which goes to our med school, and virtually none of which goes to the law school. The administration caved- they didn't have a choice.
I don't wanna be in your database.
Then don't listen to the recording. Duh.
Petrol is not heavily taxed in the US, unless something fundamental has happened the last couple of years.
. . . and will continue not to be, because Americans above all others seem to consider it a "right" to drive anytime, anywhere. Plus, many people's traditional distrust of big government makes instituting new public transportation systems rather difficult.
There are reasons why this is so, however. I live in CT now, and it would be nearly impossible for me to run my life effectively without a car. I can walk to work, and reach most places in the city by walking or biking, but I can't buy groceries without the car. If I want to go to NYC, I always take the train, but if I want to go pretty much anywhere in CT I have to drive. I think this reflects the layout and evolution of Connecticut's cities more than anything else; if I lived in New York (which may yet happen) I wouldn't even bother to own a car.
I used to live in Seattle, which has a similar problem- very spread out metropolitan area. Good bus system, okay for the occasional trip downtown, but annoying if you have to do it every day or travel a long ways. They've been trying to get mass transit working for years, and it's been an absolute embarassment and a huge waste of money (to the disgust of well-meaning folks like my parents, who voted for it).
I've heard speculation that the car thing may reflect Americans' tendency to rush around. In NYC, the subway is usually faster; otherwise, people want to be at work ASAP, without any hassle or inconvenience. If you're a minute late to the bus stop in Seattle you've lost 30 minutes of your day, and it'll often take you twice as long to get to work anyway. In contrast, one of my co-workers came from London, and said he could spend 45 minutes walking to work or 2 hours driving.
For the purists: I'm going to have to re-read the book, but Jackson does make some big changes to plot (far bigger in the plot-sense than substitutiing Arwen in or eliminating Tom Bombadil).
Oddly, I thought many of these improved the movie. It made it into a more coherent whole than it otherwise could have been, and emphasized some themes that are harder to pick out of the books.
I think I liked it better in some ways. It looked gorgeous, there was less exposition, and the characters just keep getting better.
The Ents, in fact, were one of the only things that didn't really do much for me. That and the winged steed- I had high expectations for that, and they just weren't fulfilled for some reason.
I'm going by what the developer of the program told me- he might be wrong, but he's work on four different platforms simultaneously. I think it's something specific about their GLX implementation that makes it much faster.
One piece of software I use almost daily essentially requires the NVidia driver if you use it on Linux, because of display lists. The difference in speed is simply ridiculous.
If I understood the article, the drivers aren't going to be Open Source / Free Software. So I don't see why I would support them...
Yeah, there are so many other companies with superior products who will give us every single bit of code in their drivers. Besides, who needs 3D acceleration on Linux anyway? I suppose I can just take my 3D apps and run them on Windows.
Moron.
Good example, but read his resume closely- it helps prove my point. He had access to the right people and was able to work for a long time at a stable position. His connections enabled him to get jobs where people let him do real work. I'm not questioning his talent- his work looks awesome- but he didn't exactly break into the field. And academic environments are very different from industry.
I would like to salute Mankinds greatest discovery, Qauntum Physics. This shows teh flexibility of the human brain
Sounds like your brain is a little too flexible right now. Go home and sleep it off, dude.
But I believe his example proves my point that in a new field (in his case, deep water exploration and recovery), precise credentials don't matter.
If somebody thinks you can help him win the Nobel Prize, he'll hire you. If you use letters after your name and a resume to convince him of that, fine. If a 30-minute conversation does the trick--hey, that'll work too.
This all sounds great. There are two problems:
1. Bioinformatics is a hot field, but not really a new enough of one to be a true meritocracy the way you describe. It's very important, but there are already many people actively doing research or getting their degrees. You can't just break into the field (unless you already have a scientific reputation). Barring a degree, a lot of publications helps- but that's going to take a while and involve considerable effort.
2. You have to get to the point where you get the 30-minute conversation first. This is harder than it sounds. I was offered only one interview, and landed a job that was aimed at PhDs or really advanced people (I was not even through with college). However, all of the people interviewing me knew my boss personally. So I was aided by my connections, and it took a while to get those. Had circumstances been different, they probably wouldn't have bothered to contact me.
(I ended up not taking the job- it would have forced me to wait much too long to attend grad school, and didn't quite pay enough to make that worthwhile. Though I confess I still wonder if I made a stupid mistake. . . most jobs for people at my level are along the lines of "database jockey" or "web monkey". These people wanted me as a scientist, probably the highest compliment they could have paid me.)
Yeah, I actually work in bioinformatics right now, and I'm going to switch fields entirely to something where I can concentrate on the science rather than talk about what hot shit bioinformatics is. Too many idiots (with and without PhDs) are going to be flocking to the field because they read in "Fast Company" that the field was booming.
Unless you have a PhD in CS or Bio right now or will be getting one soon, I suspect it will be too late to start in bioinformatics. By the time you are considered qualified enough to get a real job, the market will be saturated.
It convinced me that credendials, and even past experience, may not be the best indicators of future success.
Um, sorry, but it's extremely difficult to go anywhere in the sciences without a PhD. I seriously doubt that will change any time soon. The people doing the hiring are biologists, and would not even bother to read the resume of a whiz-kid programmer unless he had some letters after his name.
The worst case was when I made a huge effort to improve a technical resource that was central to a paper written by several coworkers. I was added to the paper right before it was submitted and never even had a chance to read it- I was far too busy with school and protested loudly at the time. By the time I actually got a chance to read it, months later, I was familiar enough with the project and the data to realize that they'd done many things wrong. Had I been included from the beginning I would have never let my name go on the final project. Unfortunately, it was too late for me to fix this or to take my name off the paper (the paper had been accepted). I'm much more careful about this kind of thing now.
Most of the people who claim that HIV doesn't cause AIDS haven't bothered to do much reading either. Read these online articles, which actually give a complete list of citations which you can then explore:
The Relationship between HIV and AIDS
The vidence that HIV causes AIDS
As for the "prominent scientists", some of them are operating waaaay outside their area of expertise. Kary Mullis had one brilliant discovery and doesn't seem to have done much else, aside from taking acid and surfing. One particularly loud denier that I know of is actually a math professor known for his aggressive crusades against anyone holding opinions contrary to him. He was once caught making a bold claim about media coverage of AIDS that was quickly proved wrong by a reporter with LEXIS/NEXIS access.
Also, sometimes the relevant portion of an paper can be summed up in one sentence, or in the abstract.
Of course, which is why the article sort of misses the point. For instance, if I were to mention offhand in an introduction that protein synthesis by the ribosome is done by catalytic RNA, there is an obvious reference to cite [Nissen et al. (2000) Science etc.]. I know this is correct, it's been extensively covered, and I have a copy lying around somewhere, but I've never actually read it all the way through. You can just look at the abstract and that's plenty for these purposes- if I were extensively discussing the mechanism I'd need to thoroughly read the paper, but for an introduction I just need to mention the proper source.
Now, I could be making an error- what if they just pulled something out of their ass, or used sloppy methodology? Usually, people will just say "if it's good enough for the editors (and peer reviewers) of Science, who am I to argue?"
Or, you cite colleagues who you suspect would be obvious editorial choices to peer review your paper. You just add a sentence like "This has been previously discussed by a number of eminent scholars (fucking huge list of citations here)".
I've been in situations where I was basically done writing and then was told "um, okay, you should cite all these papers. just figure something out."
Yup! I've had the same happen to me. A bunch of people attend meetings, and get added to the paper. Perhaps a few of them helped proofread, but that's nothing like making an original scientific contribution. On the one hand, I was added to a number of papers based largely on my a) meeting attendance and b) technical expertise. This helps me immeasurably in furthering my career, except for the difficulty of explaining what I did on some projects (ranging from "absolutely zilch" to "constructed the web page"). However, when it was my turn to write a paper, about five people ended up as co-authors with minimal contributions.
I'm now in a position where I don't let that happen any more; I've asked to be taken off of papers because my contribution was minimal, and the last time I wrote something I stated up front who would be on the author list. I do not forsee that this will be a permanant solution, however; I'm still too junior a scientist to have much sway. I've seen other cases where someone asked to be added to a project because he "needed more publications", or where a senior investigator did not realize he was a co-author until well after the paper had been published.
I think we are far more likely to get a space drive from a message from the stars than these crackpots.
:)
1000 times zero still equals zero.
Park is a badass. He's primarily anti-bullshit; read his articles on what he calls "Voodoo Science" (or the book of the same name) to get a better idea. He can be absolutely vicious at times but I have yet to see a situation where it wasn't called for. He's sort of like Carl Sagan crossed with Jesse Ventura.
He's been one of the few scientists (or journalists) to call the administration on its missile defense bluff, among other things; he's also repeatedly described the ISS as a waste of time and money- though he's clearly in favor of space exploration. His opinion of creationism is about as low as can be imagined.
I'm sure the guy can be a dickhead, and I'm sure he can be wrong occasionally, but we need people like him. The mass media tends to give pseudoscientific bullshit far more credibility than it deserves, and too many legitimate scientists keep their mouths shut or ignore the problem. In a society where John Edwards is the SciFi channel's top rated show, skeptics are vital.