I am a nanotechnologist. I've done great academic research, worked for the government, managed a few grants, and started a few companies.
It's very easy to hype the potential of nanotechnology.
On the other hand, it's very hard to get attention put on results from serious commercial efforts.
Granting agencies and our community are not good at supporting companies that do what we all tell each other needs to get done (i.e. NanoIntegris). We are great at supporting academic research groups that have a patina of commercial application (i.e. IBM).
As a field we've missed celebrating a number of major commercialization milestones. CNT and graphene electronics are available commercially! Who knew? For five years or so, you could find commercial graphene electronics in cell phone screens in Shenzhen. For the last two years, you could find commercial graphene biosensors at many big pharma companies. For the last year, you could buy CNT based high power RF electronics.
If we were interested in showing the real potential of the field, wouldn't the leaders want to show everyone that it IS working? We have actually met the NNI timeline for commercialization set in the 1990s. The goals we set out with 20 years ago seem to mean nothing to the hype machine we've created.
Simply put, how do we deal with the addiction to hype in nanotechnology, and focus a bit more on substantive accomplishment?
The concept is not that someone is 50 years ahead of their peers in science. The concept is that science is 50 years ahead of industry. That's actually pretty true, and this is a pretty common discussion in science.
Generally, you lose money when bringing cutting edge research to industry. I wish it were as easy as you make it seem.
I am an industrial scientist specialized in nanotechnology. I've seen the good and bad of how this works. If you have a single scientist working for a year to produce a groundbreaking gizmo, that means the gizmo costs about $100k to make (doesn't matter what the material cost is). Either you have a market where $100k gizmos can be sold (i.e. the military, which is part of why OP sounds like a conspiracy nut), or you have to show that building or renting the infrastructure to produce the gizmo cheaper leads to a profitable enough situation. That's neither fast nor easy.
The key to understanding postgraduate work in science is that it is not training and not preparation for anything, it IS scientific work. For the vast majority of us in science, we do not continue in scientific work after academic graduate and postdoc work.
This is because of the economics of scientific work. 1) We heavily subsidize research (not a problem in itself, but the labor market and overall metrics end up set by the government). 2) We prioritize publication over any practical metric such as jobs, public interest, or economic impact. 3) We bid out this work to organizations that can maximize publications for minimal cost, allowing them to violate just about any labor law they'd like in the process.
So "scientific research" is now defined as paper publishing. The people who "do" science are graduate students and postdocs, with a small number of other people directly involved. Once you're done with that stage of your career, either you're a professor, or your primary job is not "scientific research." Though we all tend to do a little publishing in industry and government, it's generally a very minor professional metric. PhDs entering industry have to play catch up on things like processional standards, the basic concepts of profitability, and the difference between technology and product.
Of course the people caught in the middle of this are doing poorly. They're in jobs that sound like a training position, but often there's no industry for them to train for. If there is an industry to train for, you're almost always better off taking a job right out of undergrad. The professors who manage our scientific workforce have no management training. The universities employing these folks are allowed to do things like charge them for the right to keep their job, and have special visas that ensure foreign labor can't leave the job. The "investors" in science (grant managers) have no actual metrics, oversight, or practical goals other than to maximize the churn of young scientists and papers through the system. So that's what we get.
As a young scientist, you can break out of this system. The key is to understand that virtually no one at a university is going to understand what you should be doing. Find one of the few companies making progress in a scientific field you like and ask someone there what to do. Oh, and do that before you apply to grad school.
First, why link to a press release and journal splash page when the actual study is public? That's just plain stupid.
So, now that we're actually looking at the data, it's clear that the main conclusion of the paper is only one of many that could be drawn. The biggest alternative conclusion is that students who adapt their sleep schedule to their class times do better than students who don't. The main argument of the authors is that it "may be difficult" for people to change their sleep schedule, and cite jeg lag studies, without ever addressing that jet lag clearly does not last an academic term and within a few days most people are functioning normally. I think the jet lag studies more clearly show that people can and do change their sleep schedules, and that it may take a week or two to do so.
This isn't a matter of misconduct, that's the wrong way to look at the current failure of science to... do science. (I am a scientist.)
Other metrics are more useful. My favorite is "research efficiency." This is a decidedly commercial metric, it's the amount of revenue or economic activity (in dollars) generated by $1 of scientific research investment. It's been going down since about 1980. Surprisingly, research areas pitched as "basic research" (i.e. math, astronomy) tend to do well with this metric. It's the research that's sold to the public as industrially focused (i.e. my field, nanotechnology) that tends to do the worst.
Another useful metric is the % of science PhDs who stay in science for at least 10 years after getting their degree. This measures how effective we are at training our scientific workforce. That's down significantly over the last 30 years as well. What we teach people now is not what they need to succeed in science after training (which is getting longer and longer).
The metric most scientists are looking for is reproducibility, or the percentage of papers which can be repeated by simply following the instructions in the paper. Papers have grown in length and complexity in the last 40 years. It's pretty hard to argue that reproducibility has actually gone down because older papers simply don't include details we now expect. Of course, this is very hard to measure in any case. That's the thesis of TFA. It doesn't change the very real feeling (and data) that science is somehow not delivering on our investment.
Misconduct is... you're going to have some when there are people involved. You're also going to have mistakes and papers which are disproven very quickly. I have a personal pet peeve for papers that promise extraordinarily cheap hardware by assuming labor is free, manufacturing can be done at large scale without investment in tooling, and working capital is free. Things like this are not actually misconduct, no matter how misleading they are.
Wow, you picked the wrong person to argue with here.
I spent my time in grad school leading the student government, and bringing to light the issue of the 50% of people who leave PhD programs. There is a lack of a link between dropping out and academic problems. I got bad administrators fired, I talked about this nationally, I lobbied Congress. What are you doing? Posting online?
I've chewed out Chancellors, Deans, Admirals, Grant Managers, and CEOs. I've quit jobs, left tenured positions, and put myself in financial distress to prove my points. And I'm a more successful, better scientist for it.
You don't study physics because it's too hard for you.
"Physics" isn't a side. It's work. It's offensive to use people like Jeff in your argument. He's put in the work. And the physics community ended up supporting him.
Go away back to the corners of the internet and know that you can't compete with people like me. You're too lazy to walk into the room where the discussions happen.
You've not been to the same colloquia I have. These are absolutely ideas that are discussed in physics departments. But please, tell me more about the conversations you know I have or haven't had.
I am a physicist. You caught one, congratulations.
I think you're spending a lot of time looking at web forums and not spending any time learning actual physics. In 11 years, you could have started from scratch with a Physics BS and finished a PhD by about now. If you'd done that, you would see that actual physicists have long ago incorporated much of what you're saying we don't acknowledge, and thrown out the things that don't match actual observations. It's great to be inspired by interesting theories to enter physics. I love science fiction, and it's why I got into physics. Being a professional physicist doesn't keep me from still appreciating science fiction.
Modern models can incorporate MHD at galactic scale, along with all of the other physical interactions we know of, and so we do incorporate all those things. If you don't like the way it's done, I encourage you to go get a Physics PhD and write your own models. If you don't like the typical assumptions, spend more time coding and less time complaining. Modeling is so easy today that these questions can be posed in a homework assignment for a grad student. (Really, you're getting worked up over homework assignment level physics.)
To physicists, "The Electric Universe" is an antiquated idea, with arguments many generations out of date. You're quoting 30 year old computer models, the proceedings of a minor conference 20 years ago, and a "this is your life, Jim Dungey" review focused on 1960s physics to complain about how modern astrophysics is done. You're referencing a theorist who's a retired engineer. The detail required for a convincing publication has increased dramatically over the last few decades, vocabulary changes every few years, and an understanding of what is "mainstream" changes about every year. It's hard to keep up for full time physicists. Referencing writing published to a much lower standard than what we're used to reading is not convincing.
I've worked with an older theoretician who wanted to get a modern take on his old approach. He sponsored (paid the salary & tuition of) a grad student in a different group with modern computational resources. That's the appropriate way to make the argument you're trying to make. Instead the Electric Universe guys are pretending that 30 year old techniques and publishing standards are good enough. They're not.
Last point, I promise. IEEE is an engineering society with no astrophysics community. It is inappropriate to publish an astrophysics paper there. That's journal shopping, and it is a violation of scientific ethics.
Sticking to one time all year is great, but is this noon = peak sun comment a joke? You do realize this view is at least a century out of date. This is not how time zones work, this is how the (antiquated, broken) system we had before time zones worked.
I don't think anyone (with a brain) disputes that war and the stresses caused by military conflict are psychologically damaging to the very large number of people who actively participate in warfighting and have jobs associated with it. Over the four terms of the last two presidents, we've also lost the ability to have effective public oversight of military action. Overall, this is a huge problem, but it's not actually a counterargument to the first post. Both game violence and military violence can be real problems simultaneously.
Your heart's in the right place, but this is a bad question. Many countries use and have used trade barriers to great success.
Right now, you can look at Canada (agriculture) and China (manufactured goods) as growth-with-trade-barrier successes.
Historically, the US became a manufacturing power by having very high trade barriers through most of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. Japan rebuilt it's economy behind steep trade barriers after WWII. Alexander Hamilton and England's Henry VII (the "businessman" king) were protectionists.
But, you're right to point out that success often comes when you close (for a generation or two) and then re-open. What is the quality of life like behind trade barriers? It's not better. With trade barriers, you're effectively getting people to work harder for less money. This is something we're already doing very well in the US, and which we've found we can do with technological advancement faster and better than trade barriers. This is because developing new tech gives you access to new markets as you develop them, and during the highest profit stages of market development. Technology development is what we're good at, we should focus on that.
Uber is NOT a typical VC investment or a typical startup company. Often reports of VC activity and standards remove transactions involving Uber (and a few other choice companies) from their statistics and totals. The investments in Uber are so massive and strange that they skew the entire VC market.
That said, Uber is not the first company to run at billions of dollars of loss on the promise of future payoff, and they won't be the last. At least Uber is taking private investor money (which comes with the expectation of higher risk) rather than running this gamble on the public market, which was the big hit on Amazon for a long time.
The (bad) headline is from TechCrunch, but nothing that Facebook is putting out there seems to say "blue collar." As noted by everyone here, that's a stupid distinction that is not helpful in looking for employees or jobs.
Facebook instead is trying to help low-skilled people with limited professional experience find local jobs. That's still a strange business goal for Facebook, but at least it's a well defined group of people they have a chance to engage with.
I am a physicist. This is not how quantum mechanics works. Probability and randomness are the result of measurement and not knowing the starting conditions. Should you completely know the quantum state (singular) of all the interacting particles in your system, you could exactly predict the outcome. Our change of "quantum state" to "quantum states" is useful to describe what we observe in the real world, but requires an assumption that the two "states" we're looking at are at some point separated by an infinite distance. This is a fine approximation, but not fundamental to physics.
I am a nanotechnologist, and this is the BS typical of our field.
The effect they're looking at is reversibly changing the gate properties of the transistor by carefully spiking the voltage on one input. This is something you can do with a silicon transistor; the magnitude and reproducibility of the effect is driven by the defect density and thickness of the gate oxide. It's temperature dependent, atmosphere dependent... all this stuff is very scientifically interesting, there are a lot of papers and PhD theses you can write on this.
15 years ago, we saw this same effect in carbon nanotube transistors, and it was my turn to get excited about moving defects around to create and tune unusual transistor properties.
Mark Hersam, the lead author of this work, knows all this stuff. He knows memristor (and memtransistor) research goes back decades further than HP in the early 2000s. His abstract contains some of those references.
What we've always lacked and are still lacking here is some basic understanding of how this fits into the real world. How does this fit into any sort of system? What does "scalable fabrication" of (whatever nanotech device) actually require?
In nanotechnology, we have become truly excellent at producing bespoke devices with exotic materials and designs, but we (as a field and as individuals) have shockingly poor grasp of the problems we're supposed to be solving as well as the actual manufacturing processes we'll need to fit in to.
At the end of his abstract, Hersam suggests that the best use of his device design is to study defects in nanomaterials. This is a great example of the circular logic that has held nanotechnology back for 30 years.
Maybe this is telling us all that software apps are not as valuable as the VCs think they are. If it's that easy to copy, and there are effectively no barriers to copying, then what is the value? (The answer is marketing, of course... but that's the point, the software is not the value. Everyone needs to understand that ideas without implementation have no value, and that the value in implementation may come from a non-technical part of the business.)
I work in a nanotech startup. Competitors have bought our products to evaluate (reverse engineer). That's fine by me, copying our technology is ridiculously difficult. They quickly figure out that they're better off simply buying from us, which is what generally happens. We don't have to feel good that we set someone else's roadmap. In our case, the technical implementation is most of our value.
Either: We have to all understand that copying media we didn't actually make without the artists or owner's permission violates at least some social contract to treat artists fairly, despite how easy it is to copy things (even if it requires no action on our part) Or: We need to understand that sharing a little bit and sharing with everyone carries no distinction. Uploading to any sort of sharing service that is not intrinsically private is effectively giving something to the public domain. The distinction is easy to see if you're paying for security or using a site described as "social" for free.
In this case, the photographer uploaded his image to Snapchat... fast forward a few copies and re-postings and his image ends up with someone else's name associated with it on a news website. The root issue here is not copying from Snapchat, it's uploading to Snapchat in the first place.
I read TFA looking for the point. It seems the author has never actually built anything, and maybe doesn't understand how people outside of universities actually function.
There is, undoubtedly, a "best" person for a given job, and it is trivially simple to understand that a paper resume or academic ranking is not sufficient to gauge whether that person is the "best" for the position.
Ok, reading the article again just to see if I'm missing something... this article is simply a complete waste of time full of inaccuracies and vague opinion.
We need to stop calling concierge services, entertainment, and financial services "tech." It was fine 20 years ago, but we're past that now.
Outside of pharma, new companies based on actual new science are few and far between. There are measures associated with this: percentage of science phds staying in science (10-15%), research efficiency (inflation adjusted economic output of $1 of "basic research" has been going down for 30 years), market segmentation of new business investment markets (lots of service apps, some bio hardware & wetware, statistically nothing starting from chemistry and physics)...
A lot of the comments here are focused on the negatives of the current label of "tech." Privacy, for example, has little to do with technology, but everything to do with marketing and advertising. Google and Facebook are now marketing and advertising companies, not tech companies. (10-20 years ago they were tech companies, but it's time to update that definition.)
There are plenty of things like solar fuel, advanced nuclear reactors, and brain interfaces that we're good enough at doing in research labs right now to commercialize. For various reasons, the economics don't work to actually invest in commercialization on science based products.
The exception is pharma, and only because the high prices of drugs in the US can sometimes give a return.
Changing the definition of "tech" won't change these economics, but right now big increases in investment in entertainment and advertising are hiding a real economic weakness in science.
The number of companies listed is easy to understand, but the real important piece of information here is that the publicly listed companies are net buyers of equity, not sellers. (This is not in the summary... why?)
From TFA, "public firms have been net purchasers of $3.6 trillion of equity (in 2015 dollars) rather than net issuers."
That's amazing, and it says all you need to know about why companies aren't going public (if liquidity is the only actual benefit, there are easier ways to get that). The public market, between 1997 and now, has not invested in companies. Rather the opposite, investment and financing is flowing out of public companies, not in. In tech, we're crazy about startup companies, but the reality is that startup investing is less than 1% of the US investment market. So, what is everyone investing in?
I'm pretty sure that blurb is not from the report. The conclusions of the report are
The EU should thus consider what possible policy options may be appropriate to climate policy. For instance, by considering: - supporting initiatives such as "4 per mille" by incentivising agriculture to increase SOC; - providing greater incentives to increase carbon stocks in forests (EASAC, 2017); - reviewing and updating CCS development and demonstration programmes; - conducting research on reducing energy and resource costs of DAC; - maintaining a watching brief for other options to remove CO2 to compensate for sectors such as aviation where fossil fuels cannot easily be substituted; and - addressing the weakness of market forces to fund deployment of CCS (and ultimately viable NETs) owing to the low carbon price and questions over the eligibility of NETs within the Emissions Trading Scheme.
There's a lot of text around those bullets, but it doesn't read as doom and gloom to me.
From the introduction
...humanity will require all possible tools to limit warming, and these technologies include those that can make some contributions to remove CO2 from the atmosphere even now, while research, development and demonstration may allow others to make a limited future contribution. We thus conclude it is appropriate to continue work to identify the best technologies and the conditions under which they can contribute to climate change mitigation, even though they should not be expected to play a major role in climate control at the present time.
Anyone who spends five minutes thinking about how carbon capture would work should understand that that's a pretty self evident statement.
Slashdot Mirror
My favorite feature of Windows Phone is that it still runs at the same (moderate) speed that it did 5 years ago when I got it.
I am a nanotechnologist. I've done great academic research, worked for the government, managed a few grants, and started a few companies.
It's very easy to hype the potential of nanotechnology.
On the other hand, it's very hard to get attention put on results from serious commercial efforts.
Granting agencies and our community are not good at supporting companies that do what we all tell each other needs to get done (i.e. NanoIntegris). We are great at supporting academic research groups that have a patina of commercial application (i.e. IBM).
As a field we've missed celebrating a number of major commercialization milestones. CNT and graphene electronics are available commercially! Who knew? For five years or so, you could find commercial graphene electronics in cell phone screens in Shenzhen. For the last two years, you could find commercial graphene biosensors at many big pharma companies. For the last year, you could buy CNT based high power RF electronics.
If we were interested in showing the real potential of the field, wouldn't the leaders want to show everyone that it IS working? We have actually met the NNI timeline for commercialization set in the 1990s. The goals we set out with 20 years ago seem to mean nothing to the hype machine we've created.
Simply put, how do we deal with the addiction to hype in nanotechnology, and focus a bit more on substantive accomplishment?
The concept is not that someone is 50 years ahead of their peers in science. The concept is that science is 50 years ahead of industry. That's actually pretty true, and this is a pretty common discussion in science.
Generally, you lose money when bringing cutting edge research to industry. I wish it were as easy as you make it seem.
I am an industrial scientist specialized in nanotechnology. I've seen the good and bad of how this works. If you have a single scientist working for a year to produce a groundbreaking gizmo, that means the gizmo costs about $100k to make (doesn't matter what the material cost is). Either you have a market where $100k gizmos can be sold (i.e. the military, which is part of why OP sounds like a conspiracy nut), or you have to show that building or renting the infrastructure to produce the gizmo cheaper leads to a profitable enough situation. That's neither fast nor easy.
The key to understanding postgraduate work in science is that it is not training and not preparation for anything, it IS scientific work. For the vast majority of us in science, we do not continue in scientific work after academic graduate and postdoc work.
This is because of the economics of scientific work. 1) We heavily subsidize research (not a problem in itself, but the labor market and overall metrics end up set by the government). 2) We prioritize publication over any practical metric such as jobs, public interest, or economic impact. 3) We bid out this work to organizations that can maximize publications for minimal cost, allowing them to violate just about any labor law they'd like in the process.
So "scientific research" is now defined as paper publishing. The people who "do" science are graduate students and postdocs, with a small number of other people directly involved. Once you're done with that stage of your career, either you're a professor, or your primary job is not "scientific research." Though we all tend to do a little publishing in industry and government, it's generally a very minor professional metric. PhDs entering industry have to play catch up on things like processional standards, the basic concepts of profitability, and the difference between technology and product.
Of course the people caught in the middle of this are doing poorly. They're in jobs that sound like a training position, but often there's no industry for them to train for. If there is an industry to train for, you're almost always better off taking a job right out of undergrad. The professors who manage our scientific workforce have no management training. The universities employing these folks are allowed to do things like charge them for the right to keep their job, and have special visas that ensure foreign labor can't leave the job. The "investors" in science (grant managers) have no actual metrics, oversight, or practical goals other than to maximize the churn of young scientists and papers through the system. So that's what we get.
As a young scientist, you can break out of this system. The key is to understand that virtually no one at a university is going to understand what you should be doing. Find one of the few companies making progress in a scientific field you like and ask someone there what to do. Oh, and do that before you apply to grad school.
So, now that we're actually looking at the data, it's clear that the main conclusion of the paper is only one of many that could be drawn. The biggest alternative conclusion is that students who adapt their sleep schedule to their class times do better than students who don't. The main argument of the authors is that it "may be difficult" for people to change their sleep schedule, and cite jeg lag studies, without ever addressing that jet lag clearly does not last an academic term and within a few days most people are functioning normally. I think the jet lag studies more clearly show that people can and do change their sleep schedules, and that it may take a week or two to do so.
This isn't a matter of misconduct, that's the wrong way to look at the current failure of science to... do science. (I am a scientist.)
Other metrics are more useful. My favorite is "research efficiency." This is a decidedly commercial metric, it's the amount of revenue or economic activity (in dollars) generated by $1 of scientific research investment. It's been going down since about 1980. Surprisingly, research areas pitched as "basic research" (i.e. math, astronomy) tend to do well with this metric. It's the research that's sold to the public as industrially focused (i.e. my field, nanotechnology) that tends to do the worst.
Another useful metric is the % of science PhDs who stay in science for at least 10 years after getting their degree. This measures how effective we are at training our scientific workforce. That's down significantly over the last 30 years as well. What we teach people now is not what they need to succeed in science after training (which is getting longer and longer).
The metric most scientists are looking for is reproducibility, or the percentage of papers which can be repeated by simply following the instructions in the paper. Papers have grown in length and complexity in the last 40 years. It's pretty hard to argue that reproducibility has actually gone down because older papers simply don't include details we now expect. Of course, this is very hard to measure in any case. That's the thesis of TFA. It doesn't change the very real feeling (and data) that science is somehow not delivering on our investment.
Misconduct is... you're going to have some when there are people involved. You're also going to have mistakes and papers which are disproven very quickly. I have a personal pet peeve for papers that promise extraordinarily cheap hardware by assuming labor is free, manufacturing can be done at large scale without investment in tooling, and working capital is free. Things like this are not actually misconduct, no matter how misleading they are.
Physics isn't rhetoric. There is a right answer. And yes, we're all assholes in physics. You found us out. Congratulations.
Wow, you picked the wrong person to argue with here.
I spent my time in grad school leading the student government, and bringing to light the issue of the 50% of people who leave PhD programs. There is a lack of a link between dropping out and academic problems. I got bad administrators fired, I talked about this nationally, I lobbied Congress. What are you doing? Posting online?
I've chewed out Chancellors, Deans, Admirals, Grant Managers, and CEOs. I've quit jobs, left tenured positions, and put myself in financial distress to prove my points. And I'm a more successful, better scientist for it.
You don't study physics because it's too hard for you.
"Physics" isn't a side. It's work. It's offensive to use people like Jeff in your argument. He's put in the work. And the physics community ended up supporting him.
Go away back to the corners of the internet and know that you can't compete with people like me. You're too lazy to walk into the room where the discussions happen.
You've not been to the same colloquia I have. These are absolutely ideas that are discussed in physics departments. But please, tell me more about the conversations you know I have or haven't had.
I am a physicist. You caught one, congratulations.
I think you're spending a lot of time looking at web forums and not spending any time learning actual physics. In 11 years, you could have started from scratch with a Physics BS and finished a PhD by about now. If you'd done that, you would see that actual physicists have long ago incorporated much of what you're saying we don't acknowledge, and thrown out the things that don't match actual observations. It's great to be inspired by interesting theories to enter physics. I love science fiction, and it's why I got into physics. Being a professional physicist doesn't keep me from still appreciating science fiction.
Modern models can incorporate MHD at galactic scale, along with all of the other physical interactions we know of, and so we do incorporate all those things. If you don't like the way it's done, I encourage you to go get a Physics PhD and write your own models. If you don't like the typical assumptions, spend more time coding and less time complaining. Modeling is so easy today that these questions can be posed in a homework assignment for a grad student. (Really, you're getting worked up over homework assignment level physics.)
To physicists, "The Electric Universe" is an antiquated idea, with arguments many generations out of date. You're quoting 30 year old computer models, the proceedings of a minor conference 20 years ago, and a "this is your life, Jim Dungey" review focused on 1960s physics to complain about how modern astrophysics is done. You're referencing a theorist who's a retired engineer. The detail required for a convincing publication has increased dramatically over the last few decades, vocabulary changes every few years, and an understanding of what is "mainstream" changes about every year. It's hard to keep up for full time physicists. Referencing writing published to a much lower standard than what we're used to reading is not convincing.
I've worked with an older theoretician who wanted to get a modern take on his old approach. He sponsored (paid the salary & tuition of) a grad student in a different group with modern computational resources. That's the appropriate way to make the argument you're trying to make. Instead the Electric Universe guys are pretending that 30 year old techniques and publishing standards are good enough. They're not.
Last point, I promise. IEEE is an engineering society with no astrophysics community. It is inappropriate to publish an astrophysics paper there. That's journal shopping, and it is a violation of scientific ethics.
Last country to use solar observations to set their time was Nepal in 1986.
Sticking to one time all year is great, but is this noon = peak sun comment a joke? You do realize this view is at least a century out of date. This is not how time zones work, this is how the (antiquated, broken) system we had before time zones worked.
I don't think anyone (with a brain) disputes that war and the stresses caused by military conflict are psychologically damaging to the very large number of people who actively participate in warfighting and have jobs associated with it. Over the four terms of the last two presidents, we've also lost the ability to have effective public oversight of military action. Overall, this is a huge problem, but it's not actually a counterargument to the first post. Both game violence and military violence can be real problems simultaneously.
Your heart's in the right place, but this is a bad question. Many countries use and have used trade barriers to great success.
Right now, you can look at Canada (agriculture) and China (manufactured goods) as growth-with-trade-barrier successes.
Historically, the US became a manufacturing power by having very high trade barriers through most of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. Japan rebuilt it's economy behind steep trade barriers after WWII. Alexander Hamilton and England's Henry VII (the "businessman" king) were protectionists.
But, you're right to point out that success often comes when you close (for a generation or two) and then re-open. What is the quality of life like behind trade barriers? It's not better. With trade barriers, you're effectively getting people to work harder for less money. This is something we're already doing very well in the US, and which we've found we can do with technological advancement faster and better than trade barriers. This is because developing new tech gives you access to new markets as you develop them, and during the highest profit stages of market development. Technology development is what we're good at, we should focus on that.
Uber is NOT a typical VC investment or a typical startup company. Often reports of VC activity and standards remove transactions involving Uber (and a few other choice companies) from their statistics and totals. The investments in Uber are so massive and strange that they skew the entire VC market.
That said, Uber is not the first company to run at billions of dollars of loss on the promise of future payoff, and they won't be the last. At least Uber is taking private investor money (which comes with the expectation of higher risk) rather than running this gamble on the public market, which was the big hit on Amazon for a long time.
The (bad) headline is from TechCrunch, but nothing that Facebook is putting out there seems to say "blue collar." As noted by everyone here, that's a stupid distinction that is not helpful in looking for employees or jobs.
Facebook instead is trying to help low-skilled people with limited professional experience find local jobs. That's still a strange business goal for Facebook, but at least it's a well defined group of people they have a chance to engage with.
I am a physicist. This is not how quantum mechanics works. Probability and randomness are the result of measurement and not knowing the starting conditions. Should you completely know the quantum state (singular) of all the interacting particles in your system, you could exactly predict the outcome. Our change of "quantum state" to "quantum states" is useful to describe what we observe in the real world, but requires an assumption that the two "states" we're looking at are at some point separated by an infinite distance. This is a fine approximation, but not fundamental to physics.
I am a nanotechnologist, and this is the BS typical of our field.
The effect they're looking at is reversibly changing the gate properties of the transistor by carefully spiking the voltage on one input. This is something you can do with a silicon transistor; the magnitude and reproducibility of the effect is driven by the defect density and thickness of the gate oxide. It's temperature dependent, atmosphere dependent... all this stuff is very scientifically interesting, there are a lot of papers and PhD theses you can write on this.
15 years ago, we saw this same effect in carbon nanotube transistors, and it was my turn to get excited about moving defects around to create and tune unusual transistor properties.
Mark Hersam, the lead author of this work, knows all this stuff. He knows memristor (and memtransistor) research goes back decades further than HP in the early 2000s. His abstract contains some of those references.
What we've always lacked and are still lacking here is some basic understanding of how this fits into the real world. How does this fit into any sort of system? What does "scalable fabrication" of (whatever nanotech device) actually require?
In nanotechnology, we have become truly excellent at producing bespoke devices with exotic materials and designs, but we (as a field and as individuals) have shockingly poor grasp of the problems we're supposed to be solving as well as the actual manufacturing processes we'll need to fit in to.
At the end of his abstract, Hersam suggests that the best use of his device design is to study defects in nanomaterials. This is a great example of the circular logic that has held nanotechnology back for 30 years.
Maybe this is telling us all that software apps are not as valuable as the VCs think they are. If it's that easy to copy, and there are effectively no barriers to copying, then what is the value? (The answer is marketing, of course... but that's the point, the software is not the value. Everyone needs to understand that ideas without implementation have no value, and that the value in implementation may come from a non-technical part of the business.)
I work in a nanotech startup. Competitors have bought our products to evaluate (reverse engineer). That's fine by me, copying our technology is ridiculously difficult. They quickly figure out that they're better off simply buying from us, which is what generally happens. We don't have to feel good that we set someone else's roadmap. In our case, the technical implementation is most of our value.
Either:
We have to all understand that copying media we didn't actually make without the artists or owner's permission violates at least some social contract to treat artists fairly, despite how easy it is to copy things (even if it requires no action on our part)
Or:
We need to understand that sharing a little bit and sharing with everyone carries no distinction. Uploading to any sort of sharing service that is not intrinsically private is effectively giving something to the public domain. The distinction is easy to see if you're paying for security or using a site described as "social" for free.
In this case, the photographer uploaded his image to Snapchat... fast forward a few copies and re-postings and his image ends up with someone else's name associated with it on a news website. The root issue here is not copying from Snapchat, it's uploading to Snapchat in the first place.
I read TFA looking for the point. It seems the author has never actually built anything, and maybe doesn't understand how people outside of universities actually function.
There is, undoubtedly, a "best" person for a given job, and it is trivially simple to understand that a paper resume or academic ranking is not sufficient to gauge whether that person is the "best" for the position.
Ok, reading the article again just to see if I'm missing something... this article is simply a complete waste of time full of inaccuracies and vague opinion.
We need to stop calling concierge services, entertainment, and financial services "tech." It was fine 20 years ago, but we're past that now.
Outside of pharma, new companies based on actual new science are few and far between. There are measures associated with this: percentage of science phds staying in science (10-15%), research efficiency (inflation adjusted economic output of $1 of "basic research" has been going down for 30 years), market segmentation of new business investment markets (lots of service apps, some bio hardware & wetware, statistically nothing starting from chemistry and physics)...
A lot of the comments here are focused on the negatives of the current label of "tech." Privacy, for example, has little to do with technology, but everything to do with marketing and advertising. Google and Facebook are now marketing and advertising companies, not tech companies. (10-20 years ago they were tech companies, but it's time to update that definition.)
There are plenty of things like solar fuel, advanced nuclear reactors, and brain interfaces that we're good enough at doing in research labs right now to commercialize. For various reasons, the economics don't work to actually invest in commercialization on science based products.
The exception is pharma, and only because the high prices of drugs in the US can sometimes give a return.
Changing the definition of "tech" won't change these economics, but right now big increases in investment in entertainment and advertising are hiding a real economic weakness in science.
The number of companies listed is easy to understand, but the real important piece of information here is that the publicly listed companies are net buyers of equity, not sellers. (This is not in the summary... why?)
From TFA, "public firms have been net purchasers of $3.6 trillion of equity (in 2015 dollars) rather than net issuers."
That's amazing, and it says all you need to know about why companies aren't going public (if liquidity is the only actual benefit, there are easier ways to get that). The public market, between 1997 and now, has not invested in companies. Rather the opposite, investment and financing is flowing out of public companies, not in. In tech, we're crazy about startup companies, but the reality is that startup investing is less than 1% of the US investment market. So, what is everyone investing in?
I'm pretty sure that blurb is not from the report. The conclusions of the report are
There's a lot of text around those bullets, but it doesn't read as doom and gloom to me.
From the introduction
Anyone who spends five minutes thinking about how carbon capture would work should understand that that's a pretty self evident statement.
My old iPhone 3G would like to have a word with you about that "OSes that are compatible with its older phones" claim.
You're right that I don't know WHY Apple bricked my phone with an OS update, I simply know that they did.