I'm afraid you seriously fail to appreciate the competitive nature of science. It is a star system something akin to what you see in Hollywood. But you don't get kudos for acting ability or charisma, but from the ideas, observations, and results that you present to the community that resonate. Your reputation will drive the amount of resouces allocated to you. I'm talking about $5e6 to $1e8 type grants collected by true players.
I suppose at the lower college levels,university levels, and in government labs there is some deadwood. But these people absorb practically none of the serious public funding of science, and they tend to still provide reasonable administrative and teaching services.
I would also mention that the *consumer* can get pretty low service from "free market" forces, just like governments can provide poor service to tax payers. Competing proprietary standards comes to mind, leading to either incompatibility or monopoly.
When I decry public funding of science, I'm blasted because people say that the free market won't pay for certain research. Now I see a more evil side of it -- and I fear that we'll see more investigations like this if I'm right. What can we do to combat humanity's deep need for self preservation in a scientist having the same human drives, especially when it is funded straight out of our pocket involuntarily?
As a practicing scientist, I can tell you that while the self preservation instinct will tend to make you take less chances and do more "conservative" science, it does not lead you to start lying and fabricating results.
Why?
From your "market values perspective": this (lying) is a path that leads to growing if not spectacular decay of your reputation and eventually a serious loss of credibility (and thus no more research grant approval, which is under peer review as well.) Yes, cronyism happens, but if your work is poor, you will cease to be supported in the long term. This is fair enough for those who require assitance with their moral compass.
From another perspective: most scientists go into science because they value the rewards of the honest intellectual experience it provides. Not because they want to make a buck. They need to put food on the table like everybody else, but, fortunately, lying and cheating are not required to maintain this level.
I'm a free market guy -- I truly believe that everyone performs actions that help themselves first (and others, secondly, if they want to continue doing what they do).
Does this mean you sell out your friends, family, spouse, values for the right price? This scares me.
The whole MS Office suite is such an obvious example of atrophy by monopoly. Everything smacks of stagnation with such obvious awkward constructs, interfaces, and semi-bugs. Eg Excel: - arbitrary (and silently breaking) limit on path lengths in file names (how can that persist into this decade?) - Arbitrary row number limit (2^16). - A graphing package that is laughably awkward - For such ballyhoed "ease of use" and GUI design, you quickly end up in VB script-land to do some pretty obvious stuff (like merge select columns in different sheets, or output csv's of all sheets in a workbook, etc. etc., on and on)
Eg. Word: how about citations? What a joke!!! It doesn't have to be EndNote, but gawd its ability to (silently) delete citations, unorder them, etc, is really special. Botched figures wrap-around, etc. Layout screw-ups, etc. This story is well known.
What does the MS office team actually do with its time between releases? I would guess mainly just develop new proprietary formats to force upgrades.
While whatever original products were absorbed by MS to make Office were probably innovative in their day, you can just tell when you use these recent releases that there is no freshness to them. Or, for that matter, is there any freshness to MS's general approach to the concept of "office productivity". I *never* get that feeling "wow, that is pretty impressive, thoughtful, clever, etc..." when I use MS. I am always astounded at how lazy, stupid, and dull so many things are, compared to what they could be.
They really seem to be clueless, but more likely they just don't care. So you end up spending all sorts of time and money buying add-on crap for low level functionality that solves some niche problem effectively but never acts with the whole system in concert.
I have always felt queasy about OO (or KOffice for that matter) so closely following the dubious path set by MS for "productivity" applicaitons.
BTW: Special non-Office MS product mention goes to: (Windows) Explorer, navigation hell, with no simple bookmarking facility... (say like NeXT 15 years ago) How hard is this, MS? So I spend $20 for a file navigator app which is pretty good. Course, this is no help with Open/Close dialogue boxes which often have a mind of their own. Great, we get to navigate though all those folders for the 25th time today because this current app likes to bring up a default directory in a tiny un-resizeable panel without the (registry-only poke-able) nagivation favourites at the side.
This is a great effort to bring the unnecssarily expensive current array of commercial probe microscopes to a price level more in line with hobbiest and lower-education-tier optical microscopes and telescopes. I know the guy (Andre Schirmeisen) running the show and we discussed this kind of thing since being in grad school together back in Montreal. Kudos to him and the Muenster team for making it reality.
The spread of GPL-style ideas to hardware is really interesting in the sense of community fostering. A similar story was reported in Slashdot a while back for the digital oscilloscope Bitscope which seems to have captured quite a following. In a different vein, the Intel Play QX3 optical microscope, while propriety, has spawned an active mod community. It will be interesting to see if nanotech enthusiasts pick up on the Muenster SXM project in the same way. Let's hope...
Good point, but the difference here is one of popular appeal. There's not much popular interest in (albeit very useful) scientific equipment like HPLC or NMR systems. An X-ray diffraction pattern is too abstract for most people to appreciate.
With the current (passe yet?) media flirtation with the chimera of nanotechnology, a project like this has more direct appeal. If you can construct from plans or a kit, or even buy for the price of a non-professional optical microscope or telescope a working STM/AFM, I think that's really something. Probe microscopes are a particularly good case for pursuing this DIY approach because they are fundamentally quite simple, and the images they create can be, on a superficial level, immediately understandable.
While its true that modern designs use the versatile quadrature tube configuration, the point in this project appears to be to keep things low cost and simple. Thus they use a parallel stacked piezo design that, for a given piezo material, must require lower voltage for a given displacement.
Thus you don't need expensive, fancy and/or potentially dangerous high-voltage amplifiers, particulary important for a do-it-yourself project where high school kids might be building the system.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid you seriously fail to appreciate the competitive nature of science. It is a star system something akin to what you see in Hollywood. But you don't get kudos for acting ability or charisma, but from the ideas, observations, and results that you present to the community that resonate. Your reputation will drive the amount of resouces allocated to you. I'm talking about $5e6 to $1e8 type grants collected by true players.
I suppose at the lower college levels,university levels, and in government labs there is some deadwood. But these people absorb practically none of the serious public funding of science, and they tend to still provide reasonable administrative and teaching services.
I would also mention that the *consumer* can get pretty low service from "free market" forces, just like governments can provide poor service to tax payers. Competing proprietary standards comes to mind, leading to either incompatibility or monopoly.
When I decry public funding of science, I'm blasted because people say that the free market won't pay for certain research. Now I see a more evil side of it -- and I fear that we'll see more investigations like this if I'm right. What can we do to combat humanity's deep need for self preservation in a scientist having the same human drives, especially when it is funded straight out of our pocket involuntarily?
As a practicing scientist, I can tell you that while the self preservation instinct will tend to make you take less chances and do more "conservative" science, it does not lead you to start lying and fabricating results.
Why?
From your "market values perspective": this (lying) is a path that leads to growing if not spectacular decay of your reputation and eventually a serious loss of credibility (and thus no more research grant approval, which is under peer review as well.) Yes, cronyism happens, but if your work is poor, you will cease to be supported in the long term. This is fair enough for those who require assitance with their moral compass.
From another perspective: most scientists go into science because they value the rewards of the honest intellectual experience it provides. Not because they want to make a buck. They need to put food on the table like everybody else, but, fortunately, lying and cheating are not required to maintain this level.
I'm a free market guy -- I truly believe that everyone performs actions that help themselves first (and others, secondly, if they want to continue doing what they do).
Does this mean you sell out your friends, family, spouse, values for the right price? This scares me.
More than seriously...
my rant...
The whole MS Office suite is such an obvious example of atrophy by monopoly. Everything smacks of stagnation with such obvious awkward constructs, interfaces, and semi-bugs.
Eg Excel:
- arbitrary (and silently breaking) limit on path lengths in file names (how can that persist into this decade?)
- Arbitrary row number limit (2^16).
- A graphing package that is laughably awkward
- For such ballyhoed "ease of use" and GUI design, you quickly end up in VB script-land to do some pretty obvious stuff (like merge select columns in different sheets, or output csv's of all sheets in a workbook, etc. etc., on and on)
Eg. Word: how about citations? What a joke!!! It doesn't have to be EndNote, but gawd its ability to (silently) delete citations, unorder them, etc, is really special. Botched figures wrap-around, etc. Layout screw-ups, etc. This story is well known.
What does the MS office team actually do with its time between releases? I would guess mainly just develop new proprietary formats to force upgrades.
While whatever original products were absorbed by MS to make Office were probably innovative in their day, you can just tell when you use these recent releases that there is no freshness to them. Or, for that matter, is there any freshness to MS's general approach to the concept of "office productivity". I *never* get that feeling "wow, that is pretty impressive, thoughtful, clever, etc..." when I use MS. I am always astounded at how lazy, stupid, and dull so many things are, compared to what they could be.
They really seem to be clueless, but more likely they just don't care. So you end up spending all sorts of time and money buying add-on crap for low level functionality that solves some niche problem effectively but never acts with the whole system in concert.
I have always felt queasy about OO (or KOffice for that matter) so closely following the dubious path set by MS for "productivity" applicaitons.
BTW: Special non-Office MS product mention goes to:
(Windows) Explorer, navigation hell, with no simple bookmarking facility... (say like NeXT 15 years ago) How hard is this, MS? So I spend $20 for a file navigator app which is pretty good. Course, this is no help with Open/Close dialogue boxes which often have a mind of their own. Great, we get to navigate though all those folders for the 25th time today because this current app likes to bring up a default directory in a tiny un-resizeable panel without the (registry-only poke-able) nagivation favourites at the side.
Windows is just so f'ing ad hoc.
G.
This is a great effort to bring the unnecssarily expensive current array of commercial probe microscopes to a price level more in line with hobbiest and lower-education-tier optical microscopes and telescopes. I know the guy (Andre Schirmeisen) running the show and we discussed this kind of thing since being in grad school together back in Montreal. Kudos to him and the Muenster team for making it reality.
The spread of GPL-style ideas to hardware is really interesting in the sense of community fostering. A similar story was reported in Slashdot a while back for the digital oscilloscope Bitscope which seems to have captured quite a following. In a different vein, the Intel Play QX3 optical microscope, while propriety, has spawned an active mod community. It will be interesting to see if nanotech enthusiasts pick up on the Muenster SXM project in the same way. Let's hope...
-- graham
Good point, but the difference here is one of popular appeal. There's not much popular interest in (albeit very useful) scientific equipment like HPLC or NMR systems. An X-ray diffraction pattern is too abstract for most people to appreciate.
With the current (passe yet?) media flirtation with the chimera of nanotechnology, a project like this has more direct appeal. If you can construct from plans or a kit, or even buy for the price of a non-professional optical microscope or telescope a working STM/AFM, I think that's really something. Probe microscopes are a particularly good case for pursuing this DIY approach because they are fundamentally quite simple, and the images they create can be, on a superficial level, immediately understandable.
-- graham
While its true that modern designs use the versatile quadrature tube configuration, the point in this project appears to be to keep things low cost and simple. Thus they use a parallel stacked piezo design that, for a given piezo material, must require lower voltage for a given displacement.
Thus you don't need expensive, fancy and/or potentially dangerous high-voltage amplifiers, particulary important for a do-it-yourself project where high school kids might be building the system.
-- graham