This roll out is a great example of why meaningful oversight (and competent competition) is necessary in the government. If Issa had been doing this 6 months ago, the healthcare website may have worked. You don't need to like him, but in this case, putting the screws to contractors and government personnel is the right thing to do.
Musk is a guy who rightly saw his physics career was going nowhere and switched gears to something much more useful and profitable. The trade off is, he can't make statements like this and be taken seriously. Even if he's right about something technical, his history is that his business interests come first.
I routinely turn off my gadgets when I'm spending time with my family. I don't want to be distracted during the small amount of time my work schedule allows me to focus on non-work life. When I'm with my family, the only people who legitimately need to be able to reach me in an emergency are right there with me.
I don't know if NIF is snakebit or just really good at putting out bad information, but this kind of distasteful and misleading marketing of science has been associated with them since their beginning. AAAS is being generous in assuming that their press department would have stepped in and clarified things.
The truth of the matter is that NIF is run by Lawrence Livermore National Security Corporation, a private group formed by defense contractors and academics. They're managed this way specifically to separate themselves from the government. There are plenty of people who are not on the government payroll, who are there working right now, who could have stepped in and corrected everyone's misconceptions. They chose not to.
Kids like that are a good example of what can be done by high schoolers. They also show that universities are very useful. Jack did his work with a professor, based on published work by several other professors and students. It's because guys like George Whitesides and Charlie Johnson publish and talk about their work that he was able to pick it up. Working in a well run lab is an inherently collaborative experience, and experiencing it early can be very useful.
Benefits flow both ways. Sometimes in academic groups, there's such a focus on doing funded research that people forget to try things just because they should. Young scientists are very good at pushing the older guys to keep trying out new stuff.
NASA can't 1) be the space engineering source for DoD and 2) be the open space science community for the world. TFA misses the point that political support for these measures was created when NASA knowingly broke rules on employing foreign nationals on classified projects.
Like every other scientist, space scientists need to decide how comfortable they are working on secret projects. In the end, if you take the money, you take the restrictions too. NASA should hand anything Congress wants classified over to other agencies and focus on the pure science.
I am a nanotube scientist, and I support this comment.
As a field, we need to stop the hyperbole. It's embarrassing. They're doing a nice job of integration, but to claim any kind of fundamental advancement is absurd and irresponsible.
As an industrial scientist, this kind of misleading stuff makes my job significantly harder. Your typical non-expert doesn't realize that these guys did not achieve the aims claimed in the press release and are no where near to achieving them. If I do want to make meaningful advancements in manufacturability or performance, I first have to teach investors and business partners that the academics in my field are all lying to the public... not a good starting point.
Making nanotube transistors in the method specified is just as environmentally risky as silicon, if not more so, as it requires two silicon wafers to produce one wafer of electronics.
Anyone who thinks modern games are all dumb shooters should take a stroll through some of the independent games on Steam. We're in the middle of a great period in video games. If you're not having fun, wake up and smell the Kirbal Space Program.
If you want to stay in physics, you'd better get used to this. This is the way the real world of science works.
You've had some comments from academics, but from an industrial physicist, I can say that over 50% of my job is walking a co-worker through a problem I've already solved. This isn't useless at all, you'll need to be able to explain your work to people who aren't specialists in your area.
If you really feel some of the work you're doing is a waste of time, you need to be able to convince the professor that you shouldn't be doing it. How are you going to convince a boss in the future that you can tell the difference between a useful science task and a waste of time?
Already done for you! Toyota and Mercedes have taken the technological lead on vehicle based radar systems. The radar sensors you're seeing on high end cars right now are solid state, mass produced and very functional. Go out to a Lexus dealer, you probably wont find a new car on the lot that doesn't have front and back linear radar arrays (they're assuming you're driving on a relatively flat road).
It's been a while since DoD really wanted cutting edge radar/lidar research.
While teaching is used in evaluating some professors, the best universities and the best professors get the large majority of their funding and fame from research.
If you're bringing in $1M+ a year in grants and contract research, no university is going to care a bit about your teaching prowess or lack thereof. If you're not able to do that, welcome to the non-tenure track world.
Graduate education in science and engineering doesn't include pedagogy. If teaching mattered, it would.
It's really no different here in the US. It's rare to find a high level government scientist who doesn't have some arrangement with a university. At the very least, we all have our personal networks which help drive our citation counts.
This isn't a problem. Every time I've been on a funding review committee, people abstain from reviewing proposals which even look like a conflict of interest. My impression is that within US scientific culture, overt cronyism is not tolerated, while assistance in putting together the best plan and the best teams is seen as a good thing (subtle, but important distinction there).
I think we're much better off admitting that good scientists will have multiple roles in the community and we'll just try to make the best use of them we can.
Genomics is an incredibly well funded field. This is not like rocketry where the core technology is only used by a few big contractors and government agencies. There are hundreds of very competent small contract research organizations in the US competing for business.
Looking just at the "non-traditional cutting edge hardware" part of genetics, DARPA has a $50M+ program, Living Foundries, that many of the people mentioned in the X-Prize have won grants under.
When you have a situation where even fringe ideas are well funded in powerhouse mainstream laboratories (i.e. George Church), things will move along pretty well.
(Prices for sequencing haven't dropped significantly in the last few years, but what do you expect? There needs to be some time in between hardware upgrade cycles, not everyone is Intel. The last few years haven't exactly been the best, economically.)
Would someone with decades of experience developing DoD computer systems and networks at the highest levels find a job in Silicon Valley?
Yeah, I think so.
I have a feeling such people (whether elderly, female or from Mars) are in great demand right now at otherwise youthful homogenized companies.
A better question is: would Navy junior lieutenant Grace Hopper be assigned to a high profile research project at Harvard? There are all sorts of reasons that wouldn't happen.
$2000 a month is about what the average non-PhD technician/junior scientist on a government funded basic research project makes in the United States. A junior PhD will make about twice that. Astronomy is not a particularly well funded branch of science (compared to molecular biology or nanotechnology, for example), I would expect their technicians to generally make less than average.
If you want to work in basic research (in any capacity other than PI), be prepared to live very frugally.
1) you really expect to get $10 billion in corporate donations?
2) anyone who can make it through the state of California's environmental, legal and political gauntlet and build ANY dedicated passenger train system from LA to San Francisco deserves an award.
The problem is not that we don't know how to build great trains, the problem is that we don't know how to build a large project across multiple counties in California.
That's a completely false choice. This is just deflection.
I spent several years lobbying my state legislature (California) for increased university funding and decreased tuition. The bottom line is that even with increased state funding (which we got one year), the universities raise tuition. Meanwhile, the operating budgets of the universities are continually going up, as are the revenues, regardless of what the state does. The dominant funding source (as in, more than 50% of the total) for many "good" state universities is federal research funding. Half of that funding goes into the general operating budget for the university (sometimes more than half). This is why you have minor university administrators making 10x more than key professors. There's plenty of fat they could cut, but 7 figure salaries for non-public facing (aka non fund-raising) administrators takes precedence over education.
RuBisCO as a carbon capture catalyst is less efficient than current inorganic catalysts and fundamentally prevents the complete scale up of biofuels. There are economic reasons to start with biofuel as an alternative to fossil fuels (anyone can make the raw materials for biofuel), but at some point we're either going to have to be ok with drastically altering the genetics of plants or we'll have to move to a more traditional chemical manufacturing model.
I never meant to imply that R&D shouldn't be under civilian control! I agree with you 100% on that. SPAWAR is a largely civilian organization, and that's a good thing too. Often people use the word "Navy" to describe ONR, and I'm not sure that's appropriate at all, which is why I called it out.
To clarify my comment on the "bad" system: you have an internal R&D team and a purchasing-and-support team with no meaningful collaboration between the two. Imagine being a developer and having to go through the Pentagon to talk with one of the support engineers. That should be one organization focused on everything from development to in-field support.
ONR does not build or buy things for the Navy, ONR is an R&D funding agency which prototypes things it hopes the Navy will use. It's a civilian office with civilian metrics (publish papers in scientific journals and put out press releases). Sometimes you get very good people (or programs) there that manage to get things tested on ships.
SPAWAR is the Navy sub-agency that manages and purchases all the software for the Navy. When they're talking about this, it will happen.
This isn't a good system, but it's the one Congress has put in place.
Collaboration and sharing results is standard in science and has been for the last few hundred years. Practically speaking, patents on their own are meaningless for new scientific advancements and do nothing to prevent or encourage scientific advancement. They're a non-issue. What does matter is how much it costs to read the published results.
The equivalent to open source in science is open access. CELL is not open access. As a result, I (as a scientist without access to CELL) don't have access to their results in the final form. Nor do I have access to their raw data or any discussion of the analysis. How is this open?
There is a reason we use different materials for high end optical and electrical switches. In material science we unfortunately see this all the time, where an optics group measures some interaction in a highly controlled environment and then projects that result onto a very complex electrical circuit. Generally optics groups which get published in places like Nature don't consider that they're measuring properties that are not actually relevant to a practical electrical circuit and not the only properties which might influence something like switching speed.
We could now step off an a wonderful discussion of rewarding over-reach in science, how the peer-review system is broken and how the publications-as-achievement system has derailed meaningful scientific advancement...
Slashdot Mirror
This roll out is a great example of why meaningful oversight (and competent competition) is necessary in the government. If Issa had been doing this 6 months ago, the healthcare website may have worked. You don't need to like him, but in this case, putting the screws to contractors and government personnel is the right thing to do.
News at 11...
Musk is a guy who rightly saw his physics career was going nowhere and switched gears to something much more useful and profitable. The trade off is, he can't make statements like this and be taken seriously. Even if he's right about something technical, his history is that his business interests come first.
I routinely turn off my gadgets when I'm spending time with my family. I don't want to be distracted during the small amount of time my work schedule allows me to focus on non-work life. When I'm with my family, the only people who legitimately need to be able to reach me in an emergency are right there with me.
I don't know if NIF is snakebit or just really good at putting out bad information, but this kind of distasteful and misleading marketing of science has been associated with them since their beginning. AAAS is being generous in assuming that their press department would have stepped in and clarified things.
The truth of the matter is that NIF is run by Lawrence Livermore National Security Corporation, a private group formed by defense contractors and academics. They're managed this way specifically to separate themselves from the government. There are plenty of people who are not on the government payroll, who are there working right now, who could have stepped in and corrected everyone's misconceptions. They chose not to.
Kids like that are a good example of what can be done by high schoolers. They also show that universities are very useful. Jack did his work with a professor, based on published work by several other professors and students. It's because guys like George Whitesides and Charlie Johnson publish and talk about their work that he was able to pick it up. Working in a well run lab is an inherently collaborative experience, and experiencing it early can be very useful.
Benefits flow both ways. Sometimes in academic groups, there's such a focus on doing funded research that people forget to try things just because they should. Young scientists are very good at pushing the older guys to keep trying out new stuff.
NASA can't 1) be the space engineering source for DoD and 2) be the open space science community for the world. TFA misses the point that political support for these measures was created when NASA knowingly broke rules on employing foreign nationals on classified projects.
Like every other scientist, space scientists need to decide how comfortable they are working on secret projects. In the end, if you take the money, you take the restrictions too. NASA should hand anything Congress wants classified over to other agencies and focus on the pure science.
I am a nanotube scientist, and I support this comment.
As a field, we need to stop the hyperbole. It's embarrassing. They're doing a nice job of integration, but to claim any kind of fundamental advancement is absurd and irresponsible.
As an industrial scientist, this kind of misleading stuff makes my job significantly harder. Your typical non-expert doesn't realize that these guys did not achieve the aims claimed in the press release and are no where near to achieving them. If I do want to make meaningful advancements in manufacturability or performance, I first have to teach investors and business partners that the academics in my field are all lying to the public... not a good starting point.
Making nanotube transistors in the method specified is just as environmentally risky as silicon, if not more so, as it requires two silicon wafers to produce one wafer of electronics.
Anyone who thinks modern games are all dumb shooters should take a stroll through some of the independent games on Steam. We're in the middle of a great period in video games. If you're not having fun, wake up and smell the Kirbal Space Program.
If you want to stay in physics, you'd better get used to this. This is the way the real world of science works.
You've had some comments from academics, but from an industrial physicist, I can say that over 50% of my job is walking a co-worker through a problem I've already solved. This isn't useless at all, you'll need to be able to explain your work to people who aren't specialists in your area.
If you really feel some of the work you're doing is a waste of time, you need to be able to convince the professor that you shouldn't be doing it. How are you going to convince a boss in the future that you can tell the difference between a useful science task and a waste of time?
Already done for you! Toyota and Mercedes have taken the technological lead on vehicle based radar systems. The radar sensors you're seeing on high end cars right now are solid state, mass produced and very functional. Go out to a Lexus dealer, you probably wont find a new car on the lot that doesn't have front and back linear radar arrays (they're assuming you're driving on a relatively flat road).
It's been a while since DoD really wanted cutting edge radar/lidar research.
While teaching is used in evaluating some professors, the best universities and the best professors get the large majority of their funding and fame from research.
If you're bringing in $1M+ a year in grants and contract research, no university is going to care a bit about your teaching prowess or lack thereof. If you're not able to do that, welcome to the non-tenure track world.
Graduate education in science and engineering doesn't include pedagogy. If teaching mattered, it would.
It's really no different here in the US. It's rare to find a high level government scientist who doesn't have some arrangement with a university. At the very least, we all have our personal networks which help drive our citation counts.
This isn't a problem. Every time I've been on a funding review committee, people abstain from reviewing proposals which even look like a conflict of interest. My impression is that within US scientific culture, overt cronyism is not tolerated, while assistance in putting together the best plan and the best teams is seen as a good thing (subtle, but important distinction there).
I think we're much better off admitting that good scientists will have multiple roles in the community and we'll just try to make the best use of them we can.
Genomics is an incredibly well funded field. This is not like rocketry where the core technology is only used by a few big contractors and government agencies. There are hundreds of very competent small contract research organizations in the US competing for business.
Looking just at the "non-traditional cutting edge hardware" part of genetics, DARPA has a $50M+ program, Living Foundries, that many of the people mentioned in the X-Prize have won grants under.
When you have a situation where even fringe ideas are well funded in powerhouse mainstream laboratories (i.e. George Church), things will move along pretty well.
(Prices for sequencing haven't dropped significantly in the last few years, but what do you expect? There needs to be some time in between hardware upgrade cycles, not everyone is Intel. The last few years haven't exactly been the best, economically.)
Would someone with decades of experience developing DoD computer systems and networks at the highest levels find a job in Silicon Valley?
Yeah, I think so.
I have a feeling such people (whether elderly, female or from Mars) are in great demand right now at otherwise youthful homogenized companies.
A better question is: would Navy junior lieutenant Grace Hopper be assigned to a high profile research project at Harvard? There are all sorts of reasons that wouldn't happen.
$2000 a month is about what the average non-PhD technician/junior scientist on a government funded basic research project makes in the United States. A junior PhD will make about twice that. Astronomy is not a particularly well funded branch of science (compared to molecular biology or nanotechnology, for example), I would expect their technicians to generally make less than average.
If you want to work in basic research (in any capacity other than PI), be prepared to live very frugally.
1) you really expect to get $10 billion in corporate donations?
2) anyone who can make it through the state of California's environmental, legal and political gauntlet and build ANY dedicated passenger train system from LA to San Francisco deserves an award.
The problem is not that we don't know how to build great trains, the problem is that we don't know how to build a large project across multiple counties in California.
That's... a really good point.
We're still on simulated space elevators.
That's a completely false choice. This is just deflection.
I spent several years lobbying my state legislature (California) for increased university funding and decreased tuition. The bottom line is that even with increased state funding (which we got one year), the universities raise tuition. Meanwhile, the operating budgets of the universities are continually going up, as are the revenues, regardless of what the state does. The dominant funding source (as in, more than 50% of the total) for many "good" state universities is federal research funding. Half of that funding goes into the general operating budget for the university (sometimes more than half). This is why you have minor university administrators making 10x more than key professors. There's plenty of fat they could cut, but 7 figure salaries for non-public facing (aka non fund-raising) administrators takes precedence over education.
RuBisCO as a carbon capture catalyst is less efficient than current inorganic catalysts and fundamentally prevents the complete scale up of biofuels. There are economic reasons to start with biofuel as an alternative to fossil fuels (anyone can make the raw materials for biofuel), but at some point we're either going to have to be ok with drastically altering the genetics of plants or we'll have to move to a more traditional chemical manufacturing model.
I never meant to imply that R&D shouldn't be under civilian control! I agree with you 100% on that. SPAWAR is a largely civilian organization, and that's a good thing too. Often people use the word "Navy" to describe ONR, and I'm not sure that's appropriate at all, which is why I called it out.
To clarify my comment on the "bad" system: you have an internal R&D team and a purchasing-and-support team with no meaningful collaboration between the two. Imagine being a developer and having to go through the Pentagon to talk with one of the support engineers. That should be one organization focused on everything from development to in-field support.
ONR does not build or buy things for the Navy, ONR is an R&D funding agency which prototypes things it hopes the Navy will use. It's a civilian office with civilian metrics (publish papers in scientific journals and put out press releases). Sometimes you get very good people (or programs) there that manage to get things tested on ships.
SPAWAR is the Navy sub-agency that manages and purchases all the software for the Navy. When they're talking about this, it will happen.
This isn't a good system, but it's the one Congress has put in place.
Collaboration and sharing results is standard in science and has been for the last few hundred years. Practically speaking, patents on their own are meaningless for new scientific advancements and do nothing to prevent or encourage scientific advancement. They're a non-issue. What does matter is how much it costs to read the published results.
The equivalent to open source in science is open access. CELL is not open access. As a result, I (as a scientist without access to CELL) don't have access to their results in the final form. Nor do I have access to their raw data or any discussion of the analysis. How is this open?
There is a reason we use different materials for high end optical and electrical switches. In material science we unfortunately see this all the time, where an optics group measures some interaction in a highly controlled environment and then projects that result onto a very complex electrical circuit. Generally optics groups which get published in places like Nature don't consider that they're measuring properties that are not actually relevant to a practical electrical circuit and not the only properties which might influence something like switching speed.
We could now step off an a wonderful discussion of rewarding over-reach in science, how the peer-review system is broken and how the publications-as-achievement system has derailed meaningful scientific advancement...