What Dai (the Stanford professor) is actually claiming is that specially functionalized nanotubes gather at the back end of the digestive tract, and seem to dissapear. Pure nanotubes cause all sorts of problems. There's an important distinction there, but this is still good news for nanotube (and cancer) research.
I agree with your sentiment that the relative intelligence of scientists could be increased, but I think it's a problem of too many not-quite-smart-enough people rather than a lack of intelligent people.
If the wages for an intelligent scientist are best for that person NOT doing what they're trained in, doesn't that show that there are not enough jobs in that area? That says to me that there are either too many people being trained for the available science jobs, or the people on Wall Street are the morons (Isn't there anyone intelligent studying economics who can do some data mining? Why do they have to hire people who spent 10 years studying something else? Why can't they just teach some business students the same math we physicists learn?).
The job application process for many scientific positions reflects the abundance of available labor. Most research jobs for a new PhD in my field are filled without advertisement. The way you apply for a job is to send your CV out to as many people as possible. Hopefully one of them will need to hire someone and will find your name in the stack of CVs which have been sent to them. I've heard this from scientists at Intel, in academia and at national labs. That does not sound like a field which is suffering from a lack of talent.
You're right that most people following my career path are not in it for the money, but just to be really clear: the wages are shit. I have made a higher salary working as an unskilled construction worker than I have producing high level, practical research in a business friendly field. Now, I can greatly increase what I make after I finish my PhD research. That still means I may make less than I would have had I gone into teaching high school science. Postdoc salaries at Berkeley, for example, start at ~$31000, which is less than the ~$35000 starting salary for teachers in Oakland (which is also a more stable job, and carries better benefits). Does that mean that postdocs at Berkeley are dumber than Oakland teachers, or that there is more competition to be a postdoc at Berkeley than to teach in Oakland?
I'm not talking about late career scientists, who may have lots of job opportunities, but the number of newly minted PhDs versus the number of available jobs for that group. To own your own patents or do side consulting at that point in your career is very unrealistic. The job market is such that you must give up your rights to such things at this level, or risk competing for private funding with less risky, more well established scientists.
Despite all that, I would continue to make my current crap salary if it meant I could keep working on cutting edge research I like, and salary will probably not be a big factor for me in deciding where I work next. It's partially that kind of mindset which causes these problems.
Take all the scientists Congress just put out of work and get them working on solar fuels (biofuels are nice, but don't actually remove fossil fuel dependence). No extra grants until we get that. Making the US a main fuel supplier for the world, in a clean way, would do a lot for our economy, reputation, and international influence.
Actually, we've had driverless cars in California before. There was a big test of a driverless car system in San Diego in 1997, that's why the law is there.
It's mentioned in the wikipedia driverless car article.
Photovoltaics are great, and biofuel is nice, but why not just directly generate fuel from sunlight? I haven't heard of the particular technique the Sandia guys are using.
The technique most people are using is based on titanium dioxide catalysis in UV light. Japan is crazy for this stuff. It oxidizes pollution, makes it easier to clean buildings and windows and breaks water into oxygen and hydrogen (it's also in paint and sunscreen). It also can convert (reduce) CO2 into alcohols or methane in the right kind of atmospheric conditions, unfortunately not our atmospheric conditions. For the last 10 years or so, a few people have been looking at new crystal structures and dopants to enhance its efficiency, sunlight adsorption and reductive properties.
A big guy in this field is Masakazu Anpo, I think his papers describe all of the above.
While this kind of technology gets going, you're going to see a lot of press releases talking about reducing emissions and increasing efficiency of fossil fuels, but the end goal is to replace fossil fuels.
1. Find proteins. 2. Attach to a surface (his tags work well). 3. Make link to nanotechnology (half-baked links are easier). 4. Put out a press release claiming to be the first person to put proteins on a surface.
Unfortunately, it's hard to find scientists willing to get into politics. That's why we're not getting the direction and oversight we need, and why we don't have people in Congress who can speak intelligently to a scientist.... but a congress of 100% scientists? I'd rather have the lawyers.
To me, the underlying problem is a lack of scientifically knowledgeable political leadership. Politicians don't want to hear about this and don't understand it. It would be nice if some of them were knowledgeable enough to take a critical look at the ways priorities in the grant giving agencies are determined. And really, it would be GREAT if Congress could figure out whether we have too few or too many scientists being trained in this country. My feeling is that we have far too many for the level of government and private funding we have available. I would like to see some conservative goals for the number of government funded grad students in a given field per year to try and rein in excessive growth and encourage growth in overlooked areas.
Of course, I don't have and probably never will have an NIH grant. Just because physics funding didn't double, doesn't mean we don't have the same problems.
Now that the US government has out-competed all the private basic science laboratories, we're kind of stuck.
I would be thrilled to have a company telling me what to do and paying me for it, but why should they do that when some government (US, EU, China...) will pay for basic research and grant them patent rights on the resulting engineering?
From one point of view, what we've done gives our companies an unfair advantage. From another, it's good business. That's why our science system is being duplicated in Asia and Europe.
Has the government lost money on scientific research, or has the increased economy led to more tax dollars? Should the government be required to spend "political capital" to increase the economy, or does that just make sense?
First, get out your electron microscope (what, you don't have one?), and get your pumps ready to go. Then make sure your x-ray spectroscopy system is installed, and that your photodetector has been cooled properly. Get out a piece of silicon, or pure copper or something like that and calibrate your detector and software. Then, you can load in your "titanium" item and analyze it. Not only will you find out just how much titanium is in there, but if you get good with the system, you can find out exactly what kinds of impurities you have around, without grinding bits of it off.... at least, that's what I did...
The basic piezoelectric effect (movement from applied voltage and voltage from applied movement) was discovered in the late 19th century. You can get piezoelectric crystals all over the place. Quartz crystal watches use this stuff.
I'm wondering what exactly "Macro-Fiber Composite" means. In those blurbs they talk about creating single crystal MFCs, how do you get a single crystal composite? I wonder why they don't put their papers online since they're publicly available.
In the short term, we are going to need many more nuclear plants than we have now... I was talking about the long term.
While it's true we don't have the infrastructure in place to build 250000 square kilometers of solar cells in the next decade, we also don't have the infrastructure in place to build 4000 Nuclear Power Plants any time soon, which is what it would take to get 4 Tera Watts of energy (not just electricity) we need with 1000 Mega Watt Nuclear Plants, and that's just for us. You don't think we'll find a way to harvest solar energy cheaply. I don't have faith that the worldwide political situation is going to allow us to sprinkle thousands of reactors all over the place or create, refine and transport the fuel securely for that many. My office is right on top of a research reactor, which is absolutely safe, and still the people nearby fight to get rid of it. They say it may be safe, but it's a "target."
At least I can go into my lab and work on the solar problem.
While I would love to get rid of PR saps and hedge fund assistants, I think you're underestimating how much solar power is available. A square about 500 km on a side with 10% efficient solar cells would provide the United States with the same amount of energy (not just electricity) we use today. That's not a very big area at all compared to the amount of farmland we use, which is itself not very big compared to the amount of land available. Wise land use in the US alone could provide the world with a gluttonous energy budget... assuming we make it past the next few decades.
While things may be rough on them in the short term, in the long term we'll have to find something other than energy scarcity to get rid of useless people for good.
I work on nano-bio technology, and I really don't see how his program is going to help me with any of the real problems associated with making useful medical devices. I don't need another visualization program, or ideas of what nanotechnology can do.
We need access to better lithography equipment, nanostructure growth, optical sensors and other mundane, macro scale equipment. Oh, and we need more funding and time to figure out how nanoelectronics interacts with hundreds (thousands?) of biological processes and compounds before anything is put inside anyone. But... that practical stuff isn't as interesting as some neat fictional videos. I guess if he can convince the politicians that nano is a good thing I'm all for it, but the molecular biologists have better graphics, and frankly, better systems for drug delivery. We may not need nanobots for that by 2015.
It's fine to support more science spending, but there are problems with doing it through the military. The people in charge of distributing much of the military R&D budget are not scientists or engineers. This results in contracts going to companies because they have some retired officer on their board or the CEO is friends with some high ranking official. The poster child for taking military research spending out of the hands of bureaucrats is Black Light Power. Those guys are strait up charlatans, who got away with fleecing the US government because of their military connections.
The best part of this is that this guy is proving that you don't have to follow one of the soul-crushing "normal" career paths in physics. The bad part of this is that having not done that, he's at a political disadvantage and probably can't get many people to pay him anything to do physics (though he does appear to have one grant).
With more publicity like this, the Dr. Strangelove stereotype of physicists may someday go away. Most of us are very reasonable people (also, anyone here could understand that paper if you did nothing but study particle physics for 8 years).
If you publish research in a scientific journal (even if you have to pay to read it), it is considered public domain. You won't find pharma companies talking about patentable research in papers or at conferences. You'll find lots of talk about the un-patentable parts of that research, or research that may not be profitable.
So... scientists already give up substantial rights to their work to publish papers. This has led to less financial incentive to become a scientist, but has created intense competition for respect and citations. Opening up the publications will further encourage the current system of citations-as-scientific-currency that exists.
There was a paper on the same subject, which was published online by the same journal a few weeks beforehand...
Looking at the dates detailed in the paper from Peter Burke's group, you can see that it was submitted in June and finished in September, while the paper from Alex Zettl's group was submitted in August and finished in October. Yet... neither of the articles has actually been published yet (they're both available online as pre-prints), and the press release only mentions the second paper.
Zettl's radio looks better in the lab (requires moving parts and a vacuum chamber), but Burke's getting a raw deal here.
Right. We've got the supreme court. They have the last say in any legal matters. We should have a committee of scientists appointed by the executive branch, approved by Congress, who have ultimate oversight over scientific oversight. The politicians can still set all the policy, but having a group of respected experts be the official last word on the government's understanding of science would be great.
Give credit to cats-paw for giving us the link to the abstract for the original paper and to the editors for putting this up rather than a link to some half-baked pseudo-science blog about it.
I think if I was not an experimentalist, I would want to study this area of physics (supernova observation). Going through the steps of a supernova exposes you to some of the most amazing physics we know of, and this research only adds to that.
I don't know, this all seems very Peter Molyneux-ish to me.
A developer is making an extremely complex game (like Black and White) after making a very sucessful simple game (like Populous). The complex game takes forever to finish, features are in limbo, there are lots of cool videos, but... is the game any fun?
Those are some nice straw man arguments. There isn't a rule against selling tickets to Asians, there is a law against large markups on ticket re-sales and a contract with ticket holders to re-sell tickets with approved brokers. StubHub had a choice to claim that either they were violating the law by re-selling tickets well above the printed price or that their users were violating the law by selling the tickets above the marked price. (Unlike copyright, this law refers to a limited commodity... this is more like insider stock trading than online music trading.)
The real problem is that StubHub really was encouraging people to break the law (and ticket agreement), they should be capping the re-sell ticket price to the printed price plus the legally allowed markup. They're a business devoted to ticket resale, they should know and follow the rules. It would be harder for the Patriots to get StubHub to turn over the names of people who have simply violated a private contract. It's obviously easy for the Patriots to get StubHub to turn over the names of people who are accomplices to a crime.
What you describe (having multiple data structures pointing to almost the same set of data, changing a reference and then re-merging data structures) is a much better analogy for the way quantum mechanics works than many-worlds.
But... if you want to test it out on any other physicists, you may want to clarify that you don't care about energy conservation on a small time scale (which is in physics).
The Wall Street Journal headline is a tautology. (Note that he's not talking about scientific misconduct, only honest mistakes, incorrect analysis or experimental design which could be improved.)
There are almost no areas of science we're "done" with. The most recent paper on a subject almost always points out where previous papers have gone wrong. Thus, the previous papers have some mistake such as a miscalculation, poor design or incomplete analysis. If you pick any paper published in a peer reviewed journal this month, there's a very high probability that at some point in the future it will be amended or improved by some other paper.
What Ioannidis *has* shown in his recent reports is that in genetics, not enough people are publishing on the same subjects. There are not enough "other papers" out there to check on the previous ones. The result is that papers which in other fields would be recognized as needing improvement are instead treated as the final word.
One of their programs is Science Books and Films, which sounds like what you're looking for.
I think it's a great idea to get kids reading and writing about science in English class. As a scientist, I wish I was a better writer. The difference between a good scientist and a great one is often communication and an ability to write in a clear, engaging style.
Slashdot Mirror
Another paper out this week seems to directly contradict that headline.
What Dai (the Stanford professor) is actually claiming is that specially functionalized nanotubes gather at the back end of the digestive tract, and seem to dissapear. Pure nanotubes cause all sorts of problems. There's an important distinction there, but this is still good news for nanotube (and cancer) research.
I agree with your sentiment that the relative intelligence of scientists could be increased, but I think it's a problem of too many not-quite-smart-enough people rather than a lack of intelligent people.
If the wages for an intelligent scientist are best for that person NOT doing what they're trained in, doesn't that show that there are not enough jobs in that area? That says to me that there are either too many people being trained for the available science jobs, or the people on Wall Street are the morons (Isn't there anyone intelligent studying economics who can do some data mining? Why do they have to hire people who spent 10 years studying something else? Why can't they just teach some business students the same math we physicists learn?).
The job application process for many scientific positions reflects the abundance of available labor. Most research jobs for a new PhD in my field are filled without advertisement. The way you apply for a job is to send your CV out to as many people as possible. Hopefully one of them will need to hire someone and will find your name in the stack of CVs which have been sent to them. I've heard this from scientists at Intel, in academia and at national labs. That does not sound like a field which is suffering from a lack of talent.
You're right that most people following my career path are not in it for the money, but just to be really clear: the wages are shit. I have made a higher salary working as an unskilled construction worker than I have producing high level, practical research in a business friendly field. Now, I can greatly increase what I make after I finish my PhD research. That still means I may make less than I would have had I gone into teaching high school science. Postdoc salaries at Berkeley, for example, start at ~$31000, which is less than the ~$35000 starting salary for teachers in Oakland (which is also a more stable job, and carries better benefits). Does that mean that postdocs at Berkeley are dumber than Oakland teachers, or that there is more competition to be a postdoc at Berkeley than to teach in Oakland?
I'm not talking about late career scientists, who may have lots of job opportunities, but the number of newly minted PhDs versus the number of available jobs for that group. To own your own patents or do side consulting at that point in your career is very unrealistic. The job market is such that you must give up your rights to such things at this level, or risk competing for private funding with less risky, more well established scientists.
Despite all that, I would continue to make my current crap salary if it meant I could keep working on cutting edge research I like, and salary will probably not be a big factor for me in deciding where I work next. It's partially that kind of mindset which causes these problems.
Take all the scientists Congress just put out of work and get them working on solar fuels (biofuels are nice, but don't actually remove fossil fuel dependence). No extra grants until we get that. Making the US a main fuel supplier for the world, in a clean way, would do a lot for our economy, reputation, and international influence.
Actually, we've had driverless cars in California before. There was a big test of a driverless car system in San Diego in 1997, that's why the law is there.
It's mentioned in the wikipedia driverless car article.
California is WAY ahead of the curve.
Photovoltaics are great, and biofuel is nice, but why not just directly generate fuel from sunlight? I haven't heard of the particular technique the Sandia guys are using.
The technique most people are using is based on titanium dioxide catalysis in UV light. Japan is crazy for this stuff. It oxidizes pollution, makes it easier to clean buildings and windows and breaks water into oxygen and hydrogen (it's also in paint and sunscreen). It also can convert (reduce) CO2 into alcohols or methane in the right kind of atmospheric conditions, unfortunately not our atmospheric conditions. For the last 10 years or so, a few people have been looking at new crystal structures and dopants to enhance its efficiency, sunlight adsorption and reductive properties.
A big guy in this field is Masakazu Anpo, I think his papers describe all of the above.
While this kind of technology gets going, you're going to see a lot of press releases talking about reducing emissions and increasing efficiency of fossil fuels, but the end goal is to replace fossil fuels.
Makes one (1) Tenured Professor:
1. Find proteins.
2. Attach to a surface (his tags work well).
3. Make link to nanotechnology (half-baked links are easier).
4. Put out a press release claiming to be the first person to put proteins on a surface.
Congratulations, you're tenured!
I agree completely.
... but a congress of 100% scientists? I'd rather have the lawyers.
Unfortunately, it's hard to find scientists willing to get into politics. That's why we're not getting the direction and oversight we need, and why we don't have people in Congress who can speak intelligently to a scientist.
To me, the underlying problem is a lack of scientifically knowledgeable political leadership. Politicians don't want to hear about this and don't understand it. It would be nice if some of them were knowledgeable enough to take a critical look at the ways priorities in the grant giving agencies are determined. And really, it would be GREAT if Congress could figure out whether we have too few or too many scientists being trained in this country. My feeling is that we have far too many for the level of government and private funding we have available. I would like to see some conservative goals for the number of government funded grad students in a given field per year to try and rein in excessive growth and encourage growth in overlooked areas.
Of course, I don't have and probably never will have an NIH grant. Just because physics funding didn't double, doesn't mean we don't have the same problems.
Now that the US government has out-competed all the private basic science laboratories, we're kind of stuck.
I would be thrilled to have a company telling me what to do and paying me for it, but why should they do that when some government (US, EU, China...) will pay for basic research and grant them patent rights on the resulting engineering?
From one point of view, what we've done gives our companies an unfair advantage. From another, it's good business. That's why our science system is being duplicated in Asia and Europe.
Has the government lost money on scientific research, or has the increased economy led to more tax dollars? Should the government be required to spend "political capital" to increase the economy, or does that just make sense?
First, get out your electron microscope (what, you don't have one?), and get your pumps ready to go. Then make sure your x-ray spectroscopy system is installed, and that your photodetector has been cooled properly. Get out a piece of silicon, or pure copper or something like that and calibrate your detector and software. Then, you can load in your "titanium" item and analyze it. Not only will you find out just how much titanium is in there, but if you get good with the system, you can find out exactly what kinds of impurities you have around, without grinding bits of it off. ... at least, that's what I did...
The basic piezoelectric effect (movement from applied voltage and voltage from applied movement) was discovered in the late 19th century. You can get piezoelectric crystals all over the place. Quartz crystal watches use this stuff.
I'm wondering what exactly "Macro-Fiber Composite" means. In those blurbs they talk about creating single crystal MFCs, how do you get a single crystal composite? I wonder why they don't put their papers online since they're publicly available.
In the short term, we are going to need many more nuclear plants than we have now... I was talking about the long term.
While it's true we don't have the infrastructure in place to build 250000 square kilometers of solar cells in the next decade, we also don't have the infrastructure in place to build 4000 Nuclear Power Plants any time soon, which is what it would take to get 4 Tera Watts of energy (not just electricity) we need with 1000 Mega Watt Nuclear Plants, and that's just for us. You don't think we'll find a way to harvest solar energy cheaply. I don't have faith that the worldwide political situation is going to allow us to sprinkle thousands of reactors all over the place or create, refine and transport the fuel securely for that many. My office is right on top of a research reactor, which is absolutely safe, and still the people nearby fight to get rid of it. They say it may be safe, but it's a "target."
At least I can go into my lab and work on the solar problem.
While I would love to get rid of PR saps and hedge fund assistants, I think you're underestimating how much solar power is available. A square about 500 km on a side with 10% efficient solar cells would provide the United States with the same amount of energy (not just electricity) we use today. That's not a very big area at all compared to the amount of farmland we use, which is itself not very big compared to the amount of land available. Wise land use in the US alone could provide the world with a gluttonous energy budget... assuming we make it past the next few decades.
While things may be rough on them in the short term, in the long term we'll have to find something other than energy scarcity to get rid of useless people for good.
I work on nano-bio technology, and I really don't see how his program is going to help me with any of the real problems associated with making useful medical devices. I don't need another visualization program, or ideas of what nanotechnology can do.
We need access to better lithography equipment, nanostructure growth, optical sensors and other mundane, macro scale equipment. Oh, and we need more funding and time to figure out how nanoelectronics interacts with hundreds (thousands?) of biological processes and compounds before anything is put inside anyone. But... that practical stuff isn't as interesting as some neat fictional videos. I guess if he can convince the politicians that nano is a good thing I'm all for it, but the molecular biologists have better graphics, and frankly, better systems for drug delivery. We may not need nanobots for that by 2015.
It's fine to support more science spending, but there are problems with doing it through the military. The people in charge of distributing much of the military R&D budget are not scientists or engineers. This results in contracts going to companies because they have some retired officer on their board or the CEO is friends with some high ranking official. The poster child for taking military research spending out of the hands of bureaucrats is Black Light Power. Those guys are strait up charlatans, who got away with fleecing the US government because of their military connections.
The best part of this is that this guy is proving that you don't have to follow one of the soul-crushing "normal" career paths in physics. The bad part of this is that having not done that, he's at a political disadvantage and probably can't get many people to pay him anything to do physics (though he does appear to have one grant).
With more publicity like this, the Dr. Strangelove stereotype of physicists may someday go away. Most of us are very reasonable people (also, anyone here could understand that paper if you did nothing but study particle physics for 8 years).
If you publish research in a scientific journal (even if you have to pay to read it), it is considered public domain. You won't find pharma companies talking about patentable research in papers or at conferences. You'll find lots of talk about the un-patentable parts of that research, or research that may not be profitable.
So... scientists already give up substantial rights to their work to publish papers. This has led to less financial incentive to become a scientist, but has created intense competition for respect and citations. Opening up the publications will further encourage the current system of citations-as-scientific-currency that exists.
Looking at the dates detailed in the paper from Peter Burke's group, you can see that it was submitted in June and finished in September, while the paper from Alex Zettl's group was submitted in August and finished in October. Yet... neither of the articles has actually been published yet (they're both available online as pre-prints), and the press release only mentions the second paper.
Zettl's radio looks better in the lab (requires moving parts and a vacuum chamber), but Burke's getting a raw deal here.
Right. We've got the supreme court. They have the last say in any legal matters. We should have a committee of scientists appointed by the executive branch, approved by Congress, who have ultimate oversight over scientific oversight. The politicians can still set all the policy, but having a group of respected experts be the official last word on the government's understanding of science would be great.
Give credit to cats-paw for giving us the link to the abstract for the original paper and to the editors for putting this up rather than a link to some half-baked pseudo-science blog about it.
I think if I was not an experimentalist, I would want to study this area of physics (supernova observation). Going through the steps of a supernova exposes you to some of the most amazing physics we know of, and this research only adds to that.
I don't know, this all seems very Peter Molyneux-ish to me.
A developer is making an extremely complex game (like Black and White) after making a very sucessful simple game (like Populous). The complex game takes forever to finish, features are in limbo, there are lots of cool videos, but... is the game any fun?
Those are some nice straw man arguments. There isn't a rule against selling tickets to Asians, there is a law against large markups on ticket re-sales and a contract with ticket holders to re-sell tickets with approved brokers. StubHub had a choice to claim that either they were violating the law by re-selling tickets well above the printed price or that their users were violating the law by selling the tickets above the marked price. (Unlike copyright, this law refers to a limited commodity... this is more like insider stock trading than online music trading.)
The real problem is that StubHub really was encouraging people to break the law (and ticket agreement), they should be capping the re-sell ticket price to the printed price plus the legally allowed markup. They're a business devoted to ticket resale, they should know and follow the rules. It would be harder for the Patriots to get StubHub to turn over the names of people who have simply violated a private contract. It's obviously easy for the Patriots to get StubHub to turn over the names of people who are accomplices to a crime.
What you describe (having multiple data structures pointing to almost the same set of data, changing a reference and then re-merging data structures) is a much better analogy for the way quantum mechanics works than many-worlds.
But... if you want to test it out on any other physicists, you may want to clarify that you don't care about energy conservation on a small time scale (which is in physics).
The Wall Street Journal headline is a tautology. (Note that he's not talking about scientific misconduct, only honest mistakes, incorrect analysis or experimental design which could be improved.)
There are almost no areas of science we're "done" with. The most recent paper on a subject almost always points out where previous papers have gone wrong. Thus, the previous papers have some mistake such as a miscalculation, poor design or incomplete analysis. If you pick any paper published in a peer reviewed journal this month, there's a very high probability that at some point in the future it will be amended or improved by some other paper.
What Ioannidis *has* shown in his recent reports is that in genetics, not enough people are publishing on the same subjects. There are not enough "other papers" out there to check on the previous ones. The result is that papers which in other fields would be recognized as needing improvement are instead treated as the final word.
They've developed some educational programs, and have a list of online resources.
One of their programs is Science Books and Films, which sounds like what you're looking for.
I think it's a great idea to get kids reading and writing about science in English class. As a scientist, I wish I was a better writer. The difference between a good scientist and a great one is often communication and an ability to write in a clear, engaging style.