Scientists are used to cutting corners to save money. It's why you can hire 4 highly trained graduate students in particle physics for the price of one system administrator.
We realize what this proposal means. A one way trip means we're going to die there. You will still have scientists lined up for the chance.
The PR people who have been pushing this research around the internet today did a truly amazing job. They took a pretty good surface science paper and made it look like the breakthrough of the year.
This research had nothing to do with computer chips. DNA origami has been around for a few years now, and this is the application of it to surfaces. When they have a *single* electrical measurement, you can start to get excited about electronics. When they have a functioning transistor, I could even live with a Slashdot headline about computer chips. This is jumping way ahead for a bunch of insulating organic molecules patterned on a surface.
If we were half as creative in our lectures, science classes would be much more popular (and make more sense to more people).
It is too bad that with very few exceptions, the "science" people most folks are aware of are actually cooks, special effects artists or politicians. It would be nice if more scientists were just known for good science.
Were I faculty at Loyola, I would find the IRB members who approved this and give them a very hard time, as this is not the kind of research I would want to be associated with. If he has done this without IRB support, I would ask that he be removed from the faculty.
I would point to his academic themed blog (linked to in the article), where he seems to go out of his way to belittle and further antagonize the non-academics who are complaining (he had a separate blog "in character" for his research, this is his "serious academic" blog). His response to an inquiry about the ethics of what he has done is to link to a discussion of similar researchers who seem to reach a conclusion that the ethics in MMO social research are complicated and suggests that transparency and respect of the other players is the best policy (in other words, he links to a blog that suggests he has acted unethically). That he is acting "in character" in his academic blog after the conclusion of the research and is not adhering to the "normal" research conduct of his field is, to me, totally unacceptable.
It's fine to say this is about a defense contractor, but really, this whole fiasco is to be expected when the basic research for the US is based almost entirely in academia.
It's stupid for the government to expect that a system largely based on foreign labor and open discussion (academic research) is a safe and appropriate place for our military research and training to be done.
If we want research to be done in a professional manner, we're going to have to train and hire professionals.
I have read that they are also trying to turn this species into vegetarians (tuna are predators). There is a worry that the stock of feed fish they use could be impacted by large scale tuna farming. Supposedly, Scandinavians have been trying to do this (unsuccessfully) with salmon as well.
There was a time when science was seen as the ultimate DIY profession, but now there's this idea that that particular mindset doesn't apply to science anymore, and it bugs me (obviously). Your definition of a DIY everyman is my definition of a good, average level scientist.
Look at astronomy, hobbyists really are able to compete with academic astronomers in terms of resources, and the collaborations between hobbyists and professionals are great! Very, very few scientists actually have multimillion dollars of funding, we build what we can't buy, we rent what we can't build. There's no rule that hobbyists can't do the same thing.
Do I expect to see garage particle accelerators? No way. Electronics, robotics, computers, astronomy, even rocketry... those already are good DIY fields, and I think some new areas of biology could easily join them.
When it comes to research, I hate that phrase: do-it-yourself. Who else is going to think your thoughts for you?
Frankly, just like with astronomy, if you can do the research, you're part of the club. Period. I don't think there needs to be any distinction between DIY hobbyist science, academic research and industrial science. There's good research and there's not-so-good research. If you can purify a protein in your garage that no one else has been able to, then the NIH should be happy to post your procedure and contact information somewhere.
The ideas he presented in his books have obviously stayed relevant across generations. So he's fallen behind part of the culture he helped to create, so what? I suppose Yahoo loses out, but he's really the one missing out here. Maybe the people close to him can change his mind, but it doesn't do any good to go bashing one of our philosophical heroes here just because he became an old man. Libraries are not bad, maybe they're even good, it's not like he's giving money to a controversial cause!
I don't know whether to find this comment funny or depressing...
For ITER specifically, one of the reasons the US wasn't involved early on was that ITER was promoting itself as a test for a commercial reactor. The US science community and the DOE didn't buy it, but were willing to fund a research focused reactor.
Sorry, you're wrong. Drexler didn't come up with "nanotechnology." Smalley's Nobel prize winning nanotechnology work was done 6 years before Drexler got his PhD and published his famous book, and neither of them came up with the original definition of nanotechnology (which was not molecular machining). There are plenty of people who got PhDs in "nanotechnology" before Drexler did, but they were all content for the piece of paper to say physics, chemistry or engineering. I don't think they're bad guys, and I don't think molecular manufacturing is crazy (pay attention to the changes Drexler made in his theories after his discussions with Smalley, they were useful, and as a good scientist he has adjusted his thinking to take into account new data). You'll notice I didn't complain about their goals! I'm complaining that these guys are not being good members of the community in this interview, that those of us who are working in the hands-on side of nanotechnology could use some help, and that these guys need to be sure to mention some of us when they're out talking with Congress and the press about our work. It always pisses me off to see theorists talking about experimental results as if it's trivial to do, and as if there's not even any point to mentioning who managed to do it.
This attitude that you just get an AFM and "push" atoms around (or whatever I'm doing) and it's a piece of cake is typical of what is left in the wake of such absent-minded theorists. I mentioned that I'm working on some of the technologies they talked about. I guess it's good enough for them to be excited about, but I'm some schmuck for actually doing it? Imagine now you're involved in funding nanotechnology research. Do you feel that someone just "pushing atoms around" should get funded? Do you wonder why they're having trouble getting experimentalists to work on molecular manufacturing?
The goals they're putting out for nanotechnology are generally real and reasonable (more efficient energy conversion, more targeted drug delivery, better chemical sensors, integration of biological and electronic systems). What is unreasonable is that they're essentially getting credit in the media (and in form of investments) for work which they have not done.
None of these guys has worked in a nanotechnology lab. None of these guys has tried to build something starting from atoms. I'm doing both. I work at an Ivy League University in a leading lab for some of the technologies prominently mentioned in that article, but I barely have funding just for this summer. The guy who invented the DNA origami work they're so excited about was recently fired by his University (did not get tenure). A little more support, both in the media and by the companies funding the Forsight Institute, would be really, really welcomed by those of us actually doing the work.
The MIT Media lab is great, but they're not known in the field for being experts on nanotechnology. Not mentioned is the world's best collection of nanotechnology researchers, which happens to also be at MIT, in the physics and engineering departments. If you're at MIT and you want to have a future in nanotechnology, forget the Media Lab, and find one of the professors working with Gene and Mildred Dresselhaus.
The US government is funding research. A lot of it. So much that a giant company like GM opening a *single* research lab is big news. Either directly (through grants and contracts) or indirectly (through tax incentives) the government is funding much of the industrial research that is done anyway.
Why has science stalled since the 70s? That's when the number of physicists being trained exceeded the demand. The job market for physicists tanked and has never recovered (due to an excess of government funding for training). Physics became very competitive (rather than collaborative), and focused on making very small incremental changes in niche areas so that you could keep your job (big risks are bad, now). We've make tremendous scientific progress, but the system isn't designed for rock-star leaders and breakthroughs any more. More industrial labs will only change that until growth saturates again.
We need to either stop training too many physicists (and make sure we're not doing the same with other fields), or live with what we have (which does work well, for anyone who is not a physicist). To encourage risk (and thus greater... or at least flashier scientific rewards), we need more long term grants and contracts (long term being >10 years). If I know a several year project can fail, but I'll still be able to pay the rent, I'm more likely to try something new. To actually answer the question, I would put those grants in solar fuel research.
UCI had a couple of systems in place. The first was traffic monitoring and throttling. That's what NACS put in to help with the traffic problems and peer to peer programs. Resnet put in CCA to deal with security, over the objections of NACS, the resident councils, the school of computer science and the graduate student government (which I was leading at the time). It was announced to students right after finals in the spring and implemented by August 1. The head of Resnet lost his job almost right away because CCA was such a disaster (we tried to pursue some purchasing irregularities regarding CCA at UCI, but literally ran out of money for lawyers... it was a bad year overall). In the end, Resnet management was replaced with NACS personnel because of this (at least for a couple of years).
You got the party line that most of the problems were due to students with viruses and "servers" (by which they actually meant routers and network switches). It took a year to get housing to agree that wireless routers could be allowed in campus apartments (though I'm not sure the official policies have yet changed). I'm not sure when they changed CCA settings to work with wireless routers, but at first it did not. They never gave a response as to why they thought the infrastructure in the graduate apartments could handle it; it clearly couldn't, and we had explained that to them before they purchased it. Poor infrastructure was a huge problem, but not something they would admit to in relation to network outages. We wanted them to put the ~$100k for CCA toward fixing that first. It did get fixed over the next couple of years.
The workaround with Linux and the user agent spoofing was not originally welcomed by Resnet. That information was originally spread on campus by members of the resident councils prior to institution of CCA, who were threatened with criminal prosecution for doing so. Fortunately the faculty, NACS and Cisco stepped in to prevent escalation. Maybe the people "on the ground" at Resnet had a much better attitude than the people at the top from the beginning, I never actually dealt with them. I imagine the undergraduates working the desks at Resnet could care less what official policies were. Maybe you talked with them after NACS took over. NACS was very friendly towards Linux users all the way to the top (that is, the head of NACS uses Linux), but I distinctly remember one housing official refer to Linux as a "terrorist program."
Once we had CCA, we wanted to make it voluntary for graduate students and postdocs. This is what is done on many campuses. There were plenty of people who actually liked it and were mad at us for fighting it at all. The undergraduate student government in particular was a big fan and did not want to see it go away, for the same reasons you gave (there were no undergraduate resident councils at the time to have an opinion, not sure if there are now).
The biggest fight over whether housing was allowed to impose CCA on us involved certain Computer Science and Engineering grad students who were seeking to have the housing administration accounts audited. The meetings I had with faculty and housing administration on CCA ended up changing into general housing administration and rent discussions. In the end, the head of student housing was also sacked.
Bet you never knew politics like that was going on at UCI. CCA was a very big deal, and changed the careers of quite a few administrators as well as helping to launch the career of at least one of the Comp. Sci. grad students involved (who was studying network security).
This is a popular new trend in university network "security." It will be hard to find a school which is not at least considering this.
I have been at a university (UC Irvine) where a system like this (Cisco Clean Access) was put into effect by the housing department despite people in the computer science department and central computing services pointing out that the aging network infrastructure could not support it. When the network went down immediately after activation, they did not admit any mistake and blamed the outage on malicious users. Students who were found using or advertising workarounds (using a virtual machine, user agent spoofing) were disconnected from the network and threatened with criminal lawsuits. Good times were had by all.
My suggestions are: -live off campus, no matter what school you're at (it took UCI 3 months to go from first suggesting such a system to ruining their network) -when you need to use the internet, get a connection through a research lab, not a student lab or general network (if research labs have to have this system, leave the school, all the good faculty have already left)
The problem is not money. The grandparent is justifiably frustrated, but hasn't thought things through all the way. Doubling scientist salaries would be nice for those of us who currently have jobs, but would end up making the economic problems of science worse.
The problem is, we're producing 15 PhDs for each professor (on average, in physics) and there simply are not jobs for all those people. For every scientist who goes to those websites and can enter their salary for the research they're doing, there are 2 or 3 who are working in a job that does not require a PhD because they couldn't find anything else (and they're not going around bragging about it). So you waste 6 years working your ass off for very little little money. Often you extend this 4 to 6 more years as a postdoc before giving up and heading to some high school to teach. There is significant pressure, by the time you're in your mid-30s, to find your first "real" job and get onto that $70k track somehow... that's where the ethics problems come from.
It's not that getting a PhD is a bad decision, but that we (scientists near the top of this chain) are misleading those at the bottom into trying to get a PhD. We need many, many people working for as little as possible to do all the experiments we need done to stay in front of our competitors. Failure means we can't pay our students and postdocs, which means they can't pay their rents, which gets ugly really fast. Without that army of graduate students, science doesn't happen in the US. Once we can't justify paying someone $20k/year to lead multi-million dollar projects, we fire (graduate) them. Makes no sense. We tell them this is all a great thing, and that every one of them is special and will go on to form many start-up companies and be fabulously wealthy. Instead, they head back home and get out of science. Oh, lots of them went into investing and banking. Yeah, it turns out it's not good to have bitter ex-scientists trying to game the markets with fake science.
Bottom line. We need fewer scientists. Getting a PhD should be for those who really, really dream of being a professor. Research Master's and M.S./M.B.A. programs need to be more common. We need to actually give these students the tools they need to start companies, create jobs and (why not?) make cars. I agree, buy American.
By the way, NEVER trust a professional organization, i.e. geology.com, to give an honest view of salaries in their field. They're in the business of recruiting new members (new students for the machine), not providing reliable information.
Sadly, your experience of not having control of where you live to do research is fairly common in science. If living in one particular place is very important to you, or not traveling at all is desirable, you made (half of) the right decision. Don't do nothing. There are still people out there looking for research assistants who do not have, nor want PhDs.
That was written 15 years ago, and not much has changed. On the other hand, the more people in physics who think like this, the higher the chance we can start making changes.
Are you sure you're not just looking at students who graduated 10 years ago? Industry jobs in physics, at least, have dried up in that time, but we're still pumping out the students. You're fortunate to be working in an area which retains an active industrial side, my complaints are about those areas of academia which do not have that, but still are energetically recruiting and training students. I've been through Ivy League and UC physics departments and both produced ~ 1 PhD high school teacher a year, banking is more common on the east coast. Even in industrially strong fields, I've seen a collaborator's student end up with a $28K/year postdoc at UCSF. To me, that's someone taking advantage of a young scientist to such a degree that it becomes a question of ethics. Personally, I can not justify offering people such low salaries on the basis that they're going to enjoy the work or that I am such a huge benefit to their career that it will be worth it.
You have a good point that wanting to work in science is part of the reason people accept lower salaries to do it. However, arguing about how much MDs make doesn't change the fact that there are plenty of people who enjoy their jobs who are also paid reasonably well. If, as we keep telling the politicians, science is crucial to the economy and health of the country, we should be trying to recruit the best people into it and keep them working where they are most effective. There are many people who spent years training to be a scientist and then left for fields like banking because science did not offer the benefits they were looking for. Are we only losing the *worst* scientists to higher paying jobs?
If science is actually unimportant, then our current system is great as it minimizes the cost of having this perk of civilization around. In that case, we should be honest with the people going into it. When recruiting students, do you tell them your work is unimportant in the grand scheme of things and that if they work for you they should not expect to be paid well? (You know, the truth.)
There's this machismo idea that only the "hardcore" among us deserve to do research. That's great those of us at the top, I love being hardcore. Are we treating those students ethically who end up teaching high school with a "hardcore" research PhD, or who go on to be car dealers or bankers? Wouldn't they have been better off making that decision earlier? Why do we have to mislead them to get them to work in our labs?
This is really the problem, isn't it? One day, we'll be responsible for these jerks who insist on learning safety the "hard way."
I think we have to stop the total lab turnover. There have to be permanent academic research positions created in the physical sciences similar to what you have in medicine. We need people who are not postdocs, but not faculty. Most PhDs don't want to end up in a technician position, but if we were able to offer long term contracts at salaries competitive with faculty salaries, I think it's possible to retain some good people in the lab longer than just a few years. I don't think tenure is possible, but they do have that for technicians in medicine.
What that gives you is training for new students which is consistent year to year, someone in the lab you can trust to look out for the best interests of the lab long term (not short term in-and-out, look the other way postdocs like us). It should also result in better science.
I've seen a few physical science labs that have technicians like that, and they run better or worse than average depending on the quality of the staff. Use your spouse as your technician? Bad idea. Use someone who's good in the lab, an early student who ends up sticking with you for 20 years? Great lab. Great research. Better planning.
She was an undergraduate, not a graduate student, let alone a PhD. She wasn't even a science major.
Why did she have a key? Why was she allowed in the lab alone? Why was she told to work with lithium?
If this was a mistake made by an experienced researcher, I would agree with you wholeheartedly, but letting her in the lab was a serious mistake in judgment on the part of the PI.
The way graduate students are used in academic labs is unethical.
These are people who are told that their part-time pay for full-time (or more) work is offset by the opportunities that working in an academic lab and receiving an advanced academic degree will bring them. This is flat out not true. Prospective graduate students are misled into thinking that they have a place waiting for them at the top of academia or in charge of an industry lab.
Congress and the media are told that we have a shortage scientific labor. Meanwhile, there is so much labor available to academic research labs that they are often getting people to work for them for free. It is absurd that postdocs working in commercially relevant fields of physics make less money than a construction worker or fast food manager. Why is that? It's not because there's a shortage of labor. At least the postdocs are employees.
Why are we basing our research infrastructure on a rotation of untrained students? Why do we force those who are best at labwork to immediately move on to desk jobs? It certainly does nothing to promote safety, as people who know what they're doing are very quickly replaced (that's kind of the idea) and labs are structured and encouraged to keep the average level of competance low (it's education, right?). The whole thing makes no sense to me.
I couldn't disagree more that the new UI is faster for equations or symbols. In the old UI, I was able to put a button wherever I wanted that would open the equation editor, or open my preferred add-on equation editor. Like buttons? Go crazy, make all your own buttons, record macros, download add-ons. Not so with new versions of Office.
Is it word or powerpoint that doesn't have a built in subscript button? That I have to worry about that, that the UI is so different between tools is very frustrating. Segregating customized buttons into ribbon purgatory and making it much more complicated to make your own buttons was a horrible, horrible decision.
I've mapped ((a)) to auto-correct to the greek symbol alpha and made other work arounds like that. I can't stop every sentence to mouse around to the symbol interface. That's not so different from old versions, but I would like to see Office move towards a more flexible UI, not a more restrictive one.
You know, we're still typing. Typing efficiently means having both hands on the keyboard. If one of my students claimed he could be "halfway efficient at writing documents" with one hand on the mouse, I would tell him to shoot for "all the way efficient" and get that other hand back on the keyboard.
Slashdot Mirror
Scientists are used to cutting corners to save money. It's why you can hire 4 highly trained graduate students in particle physics for the price of one system administrator.
We realize what this proposal means. A one way trip means we're going to die there. You will still have scientists lined up for the chance.
As a physicist, I always study my case law before starting an experiment.
These guys evidently noticed that we forgot to do that before starting this one.
The PR people who have been pushing this research around the internet today did a truly amazing job. They took a pretty good surface science paper and made it look like the breakthrough of the year.
This research had nothing to do with computer chips. DNA origami has been around for a few years now, and this is the application of it to surfaces. When they have a *single* electrical measurement, you can start to get excited about electronics. When they have a functioning transistor, I could even live with a Slashdot headline about computer chips. This is jumping way ahead for a bunch of insulating organic molecules patterned on a surface.
I'm a scientist and I love Alton Brown's show!
If we were half as creative in our lectures, science classes would be much more popular (and make more sense to more people).
It is too bad that with very few exceptions, the "science" people most folks are aware of are actually cooks, special effects artists or politicians. It would be nice if more scientists were just known for good science.
Were I faculty at Loyola, I would find the IRB members who approved this and give them a very hard time, as this is not the kind of research I would want to be associated with. If he has done this without IRB support, I would ask that he be removed from the faculty.
I would point to his academic themed blog (linked to in the article), where he seems to go out of his way to belittle and further antagonize the non-academics who are complaining (he had a separate blog "in character" for his research, this is his "serious academic" blog). His response to an inquiry about the ethics of what he has done is to link to a discussion of similar researchers who seem to reach a conclusion that the ethics in MMO social research are complicated and suggests that transparency and respect of the other players is the best policy (in other words, he links to a blog that suggests he has acted unethically). That he is acting "in character" in his academic blog after the conclusion of the research and is not adhering to the "normal" research conduct of his field is, to me, totally unacceptable.
It's fine to say this is about a defense contractor, but really, this whole fiasco is to be expected when the basic research for the US is based almost entirely in academia.
It's stupid for the government to expect that a system largely based on foreign labor and open discussion (academic research) is a safe and appropriate place for our military research and training to be done.
If we want research to be done in a professional manner, we're going to have to train and hire professionals.
I have read that they are also trying to turn this species into vegetarians (tuna are predators). There is a worry that the stock of feed fish they use could be impacted by large scale tuna farming. Supposedly, Scandinavians have been trying to do this (unsuccessfully) with salmon as well.
There was a time when science was seen as the ultimate DIY profession, but now there's this idea that that particular mindset doesn't apply to science anymore, and it bugs me (obviously). Your definition of a DIY everyman is my definition of a good, average level scientist.
Look at astronomy, hobbyists really are able to compete with academic astronomers in terms of resources, and the collaborations between hobbyists and professionals are great! Very, very few scientists actually have multimillion dollars of funding, we build what we can't buy, we rent what we can't build. There's no rule that hobbyists can't do the same thing.
Do I expect to see garage particle accelerators? No way. Electronics, robotics, computers, astronomy, even rocketry... those already are good DIY fields, and I think some new areas of biology could easily join them.
When it comes to research, I hate that phrase: do-it-yourself. Who else is going to think your thoughts for you?
Frankly, just like with astronomy, if you can do the research, you're part of the club. Period. I don't think there needs to be any distinction between DIY hobbyist science, academic research and industrial science. There's good research and there's not-so-good research. If you can purify a protein in your garage that no one else has been able to, then the NIH should be happy to post your procedure and contact information somewhere.
The ideas he presented in his books have obviously stayed relevant across generations. So he's fallen behind part of the culture he helped to create, so what? I suppose Yahoo loses out, but he's really the one missing out here. Maybe the people close to him can change his mind, but it doesn't do any good to go bashing one of our philosophical heroes here just because he became an old man. Libraries are not bad, maybe they're even good, it's not like he's giving money to a controversial cause!
I don't know whether to find this comment funny or depressing...
For ITER specifically, one of the reasons the US wasn't involved early on was that ITER was promoting itself as a test for a commercial reactor. The US science community and the DOE didn't buy it, but were willing to fund a research focused reactor.
Sorry, you're wrong. Drexler didn't come up with "nanotechnology." Smalley's Nobel prize winning nanotechnology work was done 6 years before Drexler got his PhD and published his famous book, and neither of them came up with the original definition of nanotechnology (which was not molecular machining). There are plenty of people who got PhDs in "nanotechnology" before Drexler did, but they were all content for the piece of paper to say physics, chemistry or engineering. I don't think they're bad guys, and I don't think molecular manufacturing is crazy (pay attention to the changes Drexler made in his theories after his discussions with Smalley, they were useful, and as a good scientist he has adjusted his thinking to take into account new data). You'll notice I didn't complain about their goals! I'm complaining that these guys are not being good members of the community in this interview, that those of us who are working in the hands-on side of nanotechnology could use some help, and that these guys need to be sure to mention some of us when they're out talking with Congress and the press about our work. It always pisses me off to see theorists talking about experimental results as if it's trivial to do, and as if there's not even any point to mentioning who managed to do it.
This attitude that you just get an AFM and "push" atoms around (or whatever I'm doing) and it's a piece of cake is typical of what is left in the wake of such absent-minded theorists. I mentioned that I'm working on some of the technologies they talked about. I guess it's good enough for them to be excited about, but I'm some schmuck for actually doing it? Imagine now you're involved in funding nanotechnology research. Do you feel that someone just "pushing atoms around" should get funded? Do you wonder why they're having trouble getting experimentalists to work on molecular manufacturing?
The goals they're putting out for nanotechnology are generally real and reasonable (more efficient energy conversion, more targeted drug delivery, better chemical sensors, integration of biological and electronic systems). What is unreasonable is that they're essentially getting credit in the media (and in form of investments) for work which they have not done.
None of these guys has worked in a nanotechnology lab. None of these guys has tried to build something starting from atoms. I'm doing both. I work at an Ivy League University in a leading lab for some of the technologies prominently mentioned in that article, but I barely have funding just for this summer. The guy who invented the DNA origami work they're so excited about was recently fired by his University (did not get tenure). A little more support, both in the media and by the companies funding the Forsight Institute, would be really, really welcomed by those of us actually doing the work.
The MIT Media lab is great, but they're not known in the field for being experts on nanotechnology. Not mentioned is the world's best collection of nanotechnology researchers, which happens to also be at MIT, in the physics and engineering departments. If you're at MIT and you want to have a future in nanotechnology, forget the Media Lab, and find one of the professors working with Gene and Mildred Dresselhaus.
The US government is funding research. A lot of it. So much that a giant company like GM opening a *single* research lab is big news. Either directly (through grants and contracts) or indirectly (through tax incentives) the government is funding much of the industrial research that is done anyway.
Why has science stalled since the 70s? That's when the number of physicists being trained exceeded the demand. The job market for physicists tanked and has never recovered (due to an excess of government funding for training). Physics became very competitive (rather than collaborative), and focused on making very small incremental changes in niche areas so that you could keep your job (big risks are bad, now). We've make tremendous scientific progress, but the system isn't designed for rock-star leaders and breakthroughs any more. More industrial labs will only change that until growth saturates again.
We need to either stop training too many physicists (and make sure we're not doing the same with other fields), or live with what we have (which does work well, for anyone who is not a physicist). To encourage risk (and thus greater... or at least flashier scientific rewards), we need more long term grants and contracts (long term being >10 years). If I know a several year project can fail, but I'll still be able to pay the rent, I'm more likely to try something new. To actually answer the question, I would put those grants in solar fuel research.
UCI had a couple of systems in place. The first was traffic monitoring and throttling. That's what NACS put in to help with the traffic problems and peer to peer programs. Resnet put in CCA to deal with security, over the objections of NACS, the resident councils, the school of computer science and the graduate student government (which I was leading at the time). It was announced to students right after finals in the spring and implemented by August 1. The head of Resnet lost his job almost right away because CCA was such a disaster (we tried to pursue some purchasing irregularities regarding CCA at UCI, but literally ran out of money for lawyers... it was a bad year overall). In the end, Resnet management was replaced with NACS personnel because of this (at least for a couple of years).
You got the party line that most of the problems were due to students with viruses and "servers" (by which they actually meant routers and network switches). It took a year to get housing to agree that wireless routers could be allowed in campus apartments (though I'm not sure the official policies have yet changed). I'm not sure when they changed CCA settings to work with wireless routers, but at first it did not. They never gave a response as to why they thought the infrastructure in the graduate apartments could handle it; it clearly couldn't, and we had explained that to them before they purchased it. Poor infrastructure was a huge problem, but not something they would admit to in relation to network outages. We wanted them to put the ~$100k for CCA toward fixing that first. It did get fixed over the next couple of years.
The workaround with Linux and the user agent spoofing was not originally welcomed by Resnet. That information was originally spread on campus by members of the resident councils prior to institution of CCA, who were threatened with criminal prosecution for doing so. Fortunately the faculty, NACS and Cisco stepped in to prevent escalation. Maybe the people "on the ground" at Resnet had a much better attitude than the people at the top from the beginning, I never actually dealt with them. I imagine the undergraduates working the desks at Resnet could care less what official policies were. Maybe you talked with them after NACS took over. NACS was very friendly towards Linux users all the way to the top (that is, the head of NACS uses Linux), but I distinctly remember one housing official refer to Linux as a "terrorist program."
Once we had CCA, we wanted to make it voluntary for graduate students and postdocs. This is what is done on many campuses. There were plenty of people who actually liked it and were mad at us for fighting it at all. The undergraduate student government in particular was a big fan and did not want to see it go away, for the same reasons you gave (there were no undergraduate resident councils at the time to have an opinion, not sure if there are now).
The biggest fight over whether housing was allowed to impose CCA on us involved certain Computer Science and Engineering grad students who were seeking to have the housing administration accounts audited. The meetings I had with faculty and housing administration on CCA ended up changing into general housing administration and rent discussions. In the end, the head of student housing was also sacked.
Bet you never knew politics like that was going on at UCI. CCA was a very big deal, and changed the careers of quite a few administrators as well as helping to launch the career of at least one of the Comp. Sci. grad students involved (who was studying network security).
This is a popular new trend in university network "security." It will be hard to find a school which is not at least considering this.
I have been at a university (UC Irvine) where a system like this (Cisco Clean Access) was put into effect by the housing department despite people in the computer science department and central computing services pointing out that the aging network infrastructure could not support it. When the network went down immediately after activation, they did not admit any mistake and blamed the outage on malicious users. Students who were found using or advertising workarounds (using a virtual machine, user agent spoofing) were disconnected from the network and threatened with criminal lawsuits. Good times were had by all.
My suggestions are:
-live off campus, no matter what school you're at (it took UCI 3 months to go from first suggesting such a system to ruining their network)
-when you need to use the internet, get a connection through a research lab, not a student lab or general network (if research labs have to have this system, leave the school, all the good faculty have already left)
The problem is not money. The grandparent is justifiably frustrated, but hasn't thought things through all the way. Doubling scientist salaries would be nice for those of us who currently have jobs, but would end up making the economic problems of science worse.
The problem is, we're producing 15 PhDs for each professor (on average, in physics) and there simply are not jobs for all those people. For every scientist who goes to those websites and can enter their salary for the research they're doing, there are 2 or 3 who are working in a job that does not require a PhD because they couldn't find anything else (and they're not going around bragging about it). So you waste 6 years working your ass off for very little little money. Often you extend this 4 to 6 more years as a postdoc before giving up and heading to some high school to teach. There is significant pressure, by the time you're in your mid-30s, to find your first "real" job and get onto that $70k track somehow... that's where the ethics problems come from.
It's not that getting a PhD is a bad decision, but that we (scientists near the top of this chain) are misleading those at the bottom into trying to get a PhD. We need many, many people working for as little as possible to do all the experiments we need done to stay in front of our competitors. Failure means we can't pay our students and postdocs, which means they can't pay their rents, which gets ugly really fast. Without that army of graduate students, science doesn't happen in the US. Once we can't justify paying someone $20k/year to lead multi-million dollar projects, we fire (graduate) them. Makes no sense. We tell them this is all a great thing, and that every one of them is special and will go on to form many start-up companies and be fabulously wealthy. Instead, they head back home and get out of science. Oh, lots of them went into investing and banking. Yeah, it turns out it's not good to have bitter ex-scientists trying to game the markets with fake science.
Bottom line. We need fewer scientists. Getting a PhD should be for those who really, really dream of being a professor. Research Master's and M.S./M.B.A. programs need to be more common. We need to actually give these students the tools they need to start companies, create jobs and (why not?) make cars. I agree, buy American.
By the way, NEVER trust a professional organization, i.e. geology.com, to give an honest view of salaries in their field. They're in the business of recruiting new members (new students for the machine), not providing reliable information.
Sadly, your experience of not having control of where you live to do research is fairly common in science. If living in one particular place is very important to you, or not traveling at all is desirable, you made (half of) the right decision. Don't do nothing. There are still people out there looking for research assistants who do not have, nor want PhDs.
Wow, thank you for linking that.
That was written 15 years ago, and not much has changed. On the other hand, the more people in physics who think like this, the higher the chance we can start making changes.
Are you sure you're not just looking at students who graduated 10 years ago? Industry jobs in physics, at least, have dried up in that time, but we're still pumping out the students. You're fortunate to be working in an area which retains an active industrial side, my complaints are about those areas of academia which do not have that, but still are energetically recruiting and training students. I've been through Ivy League and UC physics departments and both produced ~ 1 PhD high school teacher a year, banking is more common on the east coast. Even in industrially strong fields, I've seen a collaborator's student end up with a $28K/year postdoc at UCSF. To me, that's someone taking advantage of a young scientist to such a degree that it becomes a question of ethics. Personally, I can not justify offering people such low salaries on the basis that they're going to enjoy the work or that I am such a huge benefit to their career that it will be worth it.
You have a good point that wanting to work in science is part of the reason people accept lower salaries to do it. However, arguing about how much MDs make doesn't change the fact that there are plenty of people who enjoy their jobs who are also paid reasonably well. If, as we keep telling the politicians, science is crucial to the economy and health of the country, we should be trying to recruit the best people into it and keep them working where they are most effective. There are many people who spent years training to be a scientist and then left for fields like banking because science did not offer the benefits they were looking for. Are we only losing the *worst* scientists to higher paying jobs?
If science is actually unimportant, then our current system is great as it minimizes the cost of having this perk of civilization around. In that case, we should be honest with the people going into it. When recruiting students, do you tell them your work is unimportant in the grand scheme of things and that if they work for you they should not expect to be paid well? (You know, the truth.)
There's this machismo idea that only the "hardcore" among us deserve to do research. That's great those of us at the top, I love being hardcore. Are we treating those students ethically who end up teaching high school with a "hardcore" research PhD, or who go on to be car dealers or bankers? Wouldn't they have been better off making that decision earlier? Why do we have to mislead them to get them to work in our labs?
This is really the problem, isn't it? One day, we'll be responsible for these jerks who insist on learning safety the "hard way."
I think we have to stop the total lab turnover. There have to be permanent academic research positions created in the physical sciences similar to what you have in medicine. We need people who are not postdocs, but not faculty. Most PhDs don't want to end up in a technician position, but if we were able to offer long term contracts at salaries competitive with faculty salaries, I think it's possible to retain some good people in the lab longer than just a few years. I don't think tenure is possible, but they do have that for technicians in medicine.
What that gives you is training for new students which is consistent year to year, someone in the lab you can trust to look out for the best interests of the lab long term (not short term in-and-out, look the other way postdocs like us). It should also result in better science.
I've seen a few physical science labs that have technicians like that, and they run better or worse than average depending on the quality of the staff. Use your spouse as your technician? Bad idea. Use someone who's good in the lab, an early student who ends up sticking with you for 20 years? Great lab. Great research. Better planning.
She was an undergraduate, not a graduate student, let alone a PhD. She wasn't even a science major.
Why did she have a key? Why was she allowed in the lab alone? Why was she told to work with lithium?
If this was a mistake made by an experienced researcher, I would agree with you wholeheartedly, but letting her in the lab was a serious mistake in judgment on the part of the PI.
The way graduate students are used in academic labs is unethical.
These are people who are told that their part-time pay for full-time (or more) work is offset by the opportunities that working in an academic lab and receiving an advanced academic degree will bring them. This is flat out not true. Prospective graduate students are misled into thinking that they have a place waiting for them at the top of academia or in charge of an industry lab.
Congress and the media are told that we have a shortage scientific labor. Meanwhile, there is so much labor available to academic research labs that they are often getting people to work for them for free. It is absurd that postdocs working in commercially relevant fields of physics make less money than a construction worker or fast food manager. Why is that? It's not because there's a shortage of labor. At least the postdocs are employees.
Why are we basing our research infrastructure on a rotation of untrained students? Why do we force those who are best at labwork to immediately move on to desk jobs? It certainly does nothing to promote safety, as people who know what they're doing are very quickly replaced (that's kind of the idea) and labs are structured and encouraged to keep the average level of competance low (it's education, right?). The whole thing makes no sense to me.
I couldn't disagree more that the new UI is faster for equations or symbols. In the old UI, I was able to put a button wherever I wanted that would open the equation editor, or open my preferred add-on equation editor. Like buttons? Go crazy, make all your own buttons, record macros, download add-ons. Not so with new versions of Office.
Is it word or powerpoint that doesn't have a built in subscript button? That I have to worry about that, that the UI is so different between tools is very frustrating. Segregating customized buttons into ribbon purgatory and making it much more complicated to make your own buttons was a horrible, horrible decision.
I've mapped ((a)) to auto-correct to the greek symbol alpha and made other work arounds like that. I can't stop every sentence to mouse around to the symbol interface. That's not so different from old versions, but I would like to see Office move towards a more flexible UI, not a more restrictive one.
You know, we're still typing. Typing efficiently means having both hands on the keyboard. If one of my students claimed he could be "halfway efficient at writing documents" with one hand on the mouse, I would tell him to shoot for "all the way efficient" and get that other hand back on the keyboard.