We're living in an insane moment in history where political labels and governing philosophy are extremely fluid and unrelated.
In this very specific example of home ownership... the neo-conservative ideal of universal home ownership was the driving factor behind enabling banks to give out large loans to people who generally did not meet actuarial requirements for large loans (this was also known as bank de-regulation). That didn't work out so well, and I'm not sure you'd find a lot of self-described "progressive politicians" willing to sign up for universal home ownership as a governing philosophy today.
High density, resource efficient, and environmentally friendly urban housing is instead the preferred model. And that implies renting... and maybe feudalism.
This is really about dark matter and the crazy ideas that crop up in physics when we don't understand something and lack the tools to even start figuring it out.
It's not scientifically reasonable to ascribe life to a set of physics that we don't have any direct evidence of existing, but it's fun to think about. In the past, this would just be written up as science fiction. I'd be interested to know if Caleb Scharf is a fan of Greg Benford, or any of the other physicist created science fiction out there that contains similar ideas.
Ah, this misconception keeps being put out there. I agree that graduate education is generally a poor investment, but it's not because of the cost.
A PhD in STEM typically does not require any student fees paid by the student. If your university is requiring you to pay fees out of pocket to do graduate research, you're at the wrong place. Run away very quickly. Not to put to fine a point on it, but in the US, the vast majority of STEM grad students are paid to go to grad school. More than that, if you're a potential immigrant to the US, the visa you need to be a student is much easier to get than what you need to work, and is almost always sponsored by the university.
There is a cost to getting a PhD, though. You'll spend 3-8 years making a very low salary, working on a project that may not go anywhere, for a degree that in the end you may not get. Your experience will not directly translate into marketable skills, and may not translate into a higher salary.
I have a PhD, and employ many scientists in PhD and non-PhD positions at a company. Our good junior scientists don't go to grad school because 1) they're paid at least double what they'd make as a grad researcher and 2) they see that in the real world, having a PhD does not translate directly into a better job.
There is a societal cost to subsidizing STEM grad students. First is an over-supply of labor. Again, very simply: we have too many PhDs. We produce many more PhDs than there are PhD level jobs available. This has been discussed many times on Slashdot in the last few years. Second, universities gain extraordinarily cheap labor that is generally paid for by external sources (grants). This creates a strong downward wage pressure. It's very easy for a company to go to a very good university and pay a research team a fraction of the market cost for performing a study. I have to justify the value of keeping our IP in house to maintain our internal professional science team.
The result is a job market that disadvantages higher education, and a higher education system that values grant winning more than job skills. In my field (physics) we've been on this downward spiral of growing disconnect between market and academy since the 1970s.
When you simplify a cell to something that has a positive and negative output to the overall organism, and add in an effect that increases the amount of negative output over time, you're going to find (surprise, surprise!) that aging "is a fundamental feature of multicellular life." That's not a conclusion, that's an assumption you've made at the start of your study!
To be fair, the authors of the study do cite two 50 to 60 year old papers discussing the (pre-modern-genetics) theory of aging that they are out to debunk.
Don't forget that the core mission of any university is education. While schools are performing a lot more research these days, that research is always in the context of training. As a commercial scientist working with a lot of universities, I have been frustrated with the seemingly inefficient policies, facilities, and labor contracting at universities until I realized that good work rightly comes second to good teaching at a school. (For example, "education first" is why students have access to shared facilities that would only be open to specialized full time staff in industry.) It seems obvious when put that way, but it changes the context of discussions like this.
There are a lot of AI students being picked up out of universities early because of increased demand and general advances in the field. This is great. The universities should be thrilled. They have done a great job getting those folks prepped for roles in the economy outside of academic training.
That can be frustrating to the PIs (professors) at universities who want to focus on research, but they also need to remember that research is their secondary goal.
Fields that find economic purpose don't disappear from universities, and basic research doesn't stop. There's never been an academic field that ended because it was too financially successful. The organizations that lead the way change.
The submitter should actually link the new paper here. The paper that is linked concludes that:
The use of BEV in countries relying on big shares of nuclear or renewable electricity would contribute to reducing GHG emissions at the national level, while, in countries with a highly carbon-intense electricity mix, electric cars would not necessarily contribute to GHG emission reduction targets than relying on ICE vehicle fleets.
It follows pretty obviously that as countries clean up their power grid, electric vehicles become a better idea. The data shown in this paper, though, does not indicate that electric vehicles are cleaner to use compared to diesel or gasoline cars in every EU country. The reference data from the linked paper is from 2013, but this "old" paper was only published three months ago, not last year. In three months, we now have updated data? That's great, and it makes sense that electricity is cleaner today than four years ago, but where is that new data? Are we talking about a newspaper article or another peer reviewed publication? This is a horrible summary.
Tact and discretion are the skills you're overlooking.
These things have absolutely nothing to do with your ability to perform the technical parts of the job. Of people who have clearances, very few of them will actually need to DO something related to that clearance. There are a lot of people in the government who just take up space. However, if it comes up, it is necessary to have people who can work efficiently within a hierarchical organization with seemingly arbitrary rules while having access to incomplete information.
I've had a job that required this. It was fucking hard. The hard part had nothing to do with the technology (that part was trivial). The hard part was needing to accept and deal with the situations and people that were part of the job.
The assumptions built into these systems require that the economy grows at a steady rate.
We can grow the economy through labor pool growth, or through increasing labor productivity. Population growth is not the same thing as either of these things. Natural population growth is also not actually happening, we have sub-replacement birth rates in the US (this happens often). Our population growth is driven since the boomers mainly by immigration, which makes maintaining or growing our labor productivity very challenging (but we're good at this). Our labor pool is not actually directly coupled to population and is just now increasing above where it was in 2008.
At some point we have to look at creating sustainable policies. This isn't necessarily cuts, but should inform how we approach immigration policies and investment incentives in addition to expenditures. My point is simply that the that population increasing in size is neither guaranteed, nor directly linked to economic output, and is a horrible assumption to base an economy on.
As for selling more bonds... that's a whole other topic. Keep in mind there is a finite amount of money available for investment. Bonds alone aren't causing the problem, but we've had a decade of poor investment in new business, we're back to pre-1980 rates of business creation. Unlike population growth, new business (and the increased productivity and opportunities for immigrants that come with it) IS what our economy is based on.
Here, they looked at "research" results. As soon as you have "medical" results, you're constrained by law, not technology. Disrupting laws sometimes works (Uber), but usually not (Theranos).
I am a physicist (as are many commenting on this article... which makes sense).
The article on the electroweak force is not too technical, it's just bad. The Lagrangian derivation may be important to someone, but it is NOT the physics of the electroweak force, it's just the math. Why is it a big deal to combine two fundamental forces? How was this measured or observed?
Instead of "Lagrangian", you could just as easily have a detailed discussion of "Gargamelle", the experimental apparatus used to prove the interaction between the electromagnetic and weak forces on this page. Actually, go look that page up on Wikipedia, it contains a better summary of the Electroweak interaction than the page on Electroweak interaction!
Ok, so it's Wikipedia and we can all go change things... the problems with that are well detailed here. I fight my wikipedia battles on the graphene pages.
One reason this doesn't get pushed more, legally, is that there are a lot of other terms in the grant contracts that the universities really don't want enforced. The IP generated under a grant is also supposed to be owned by the government and publicly available. The facilities and equipment funded under a grant are also supposed to be public property. We'll get to that fight eventually, but the university lobby is now larger than the defense contractor lobby, so that's going to be a difficult fight.
The kind of researcher driven co-operative websites that you're wishing for do exist. Their user interfaces are not good and they have no search engine optimization (so don't show up on the first few pages when you search for something).
The simplest solution is that, if you're a scientist, you should only publish in open access journals or you should publish white papers either on something like arxiv ahead of peer review to establish copyright and an open access source before the journal publishes (they hate this, but tough for them). I am a scientist, and that is what I do. I work at a small company, so I also have a marketer who formats papers nicely and makes sure our open access white papers show up high in search rankings. My work is not publicly funded, but it's just smart to do this anyway!
So the person at the top of a scientific team gets the Nobel, and the people under that person get a solid career prospect and professional satisfaction. Sounds pretty good.
At a company, the upper management gets paid more than the employees.
In government, the president and other politicians get more credit than the career civil service and staffers.
Tom Brady gets more attention and money than his lineman.
I mean... this is how life works, organizations are powerful tools, and individuals get uneven rewards from that. If you want to fix some of the economic or "credit" inequality in science, start with graduate student stipends, not the Nobel. There are some sad cases of people missing out on Nobels, but there are SO FEW ways we in science are recognized by the world at large that I think I speak for all of us when I say it is absolutely worth it.
It's not a "wonder material." It's a new material, and it's got some interesting properties. The hype is really a problem. As I said, just a little looking finds some products, here's one.
I am a graphene researcher. Actually, I'm a commercial scientist working on graphene products. It's been... educational watching certain parts of my field fail to pay attention to the actual commercialization of graphene that's been going on around them for the last several years. If you look around with just a little effort, you can find real graphene enabled products (as in graphene plays an important role more than just marketing) for purchase right now.
Graphene doesn't "need" a 3D structure. For success, any new material needs good business cases, good product development, and good investment. We don't need more press releases about the "wonder material." This is a distraction.
I don't think many people here actually purchase or use dangerous chemicals on a regular basis. Certainly, this web developer blogger is not a chemical expert and is not the kind of person the journalist should have turned to for an expert opinion. I might be.
Generally speaking, chemical companies will not deliver dangerous chemicals to your home. Yes, you can get sulphur, nitrates, and charcoal at a nursery, and other chemicals at the hardware store and drug store, but these are usually in smaller bottles or lower concentration than research or industrial grade chemicals.
Your high school chemistry teacher had easy access to high quality chemicals because he was at a school. Essentially: private residence - no chemical deliveries; warehouse, school, hair salon, dentist's office, etc. - yes chemical deliveries. I'm not sure this was a legal issue, but it is definitely a "thing" that I've experienced. I'm met several other people around the US who have started companies out of their home that required research grade chemicals who had the same experience. Everyone I've met who has been in this situation did the same thing: we all worked with a local school, hospital, or specialized startup incubator for shipping and storage of our chemicals. That kind of makes sense.
Amazon has stocked high grade chemicals in large amounts and will ship to your house. Obviously, people had access to these chemicals in the past, but Amazon does make it a lot easier to get these things. It is reasonable to be concerned about that. A quick search on Amazon of some chemicals I've ordered (and been surprised to find there - hey, it IS convenient) shows that Amazon has taken this attention seriously and removed some of the research grade material they used to stock.
This black powder stuff may not be a big deal, but there has been some material on Amazon that was certainly eyebrow raising. I don't think it's there anymore.
There's an assumption in Science that when we publish papers, we're able to assume that the people reading our (specialized, idiosyncratic, jargon-laden) work understand the context and limitations of the field we're publishing in.
This is really a horrible assumption.
We could caveat the hell out of every sentence we write, but marketers, reporters, and political activists already ignore us when we do that. TFA here is essentially going back to the original work and pointing out all the caveats the press left out of their articles, but that the actual scientists included. We could double-down on jargon and try to be more like law and medicine - invent enough language to prevent understanding by non-experts. That seems pretty immoral. We could try to educate everyone better, but that's not realistic, no one has time to understand everything. We could just sit on research until we're absolutely certain it's right. That's going to require some fundamental changes to the way research is funded and careers are managed. If we stop taking money from people with ulterior motives, there will literally be no one to fund us.
What do we do? Do we just continue being pawns in these corporate and political games?
It used to be that the US would simply out-compete other countries when it came to investing in science and technology. Now there's a disconnect between the value the US government sees and the value US investors see.
Why are these companies courting Chinese investors? Even with all the hand wringing over high valuations, US investors don't value (most) US tech companies as highly as investors outside the US. These Chinese investors were willing to pay $1.3 billion for a company US investors have valued at $0.7 billion. If I was the CEO of Lattice (or an employee with stock), I'd be pretty upset right now.
If working on tech the government considers critical means you get 60 cents on the dollar for your work, we're not going to be getting a lot of good people working on that tech.
Moore's law is a stupid example of this, because obsolescence is physically built in to the "law", but the general idea that the economic output of science is decreasing is a real thing, and cuts across fields.
Most people won't notice this; most scientists don't notice this. It seems like the economy is ticking along, and things keep improving technically. If you dig into investing around science driven companies and look at the inflation adjusted spending required in R&D to produce a dollar of product sales, you'll see a general upward trend since the late 1970s.
This is most famous right now in pharmaceutical development. There have been papers published on this and talks at conferences on what has gone wrong for many years now.
There are a lot of theories flying around out there: that the easy projects have long been done, that businesses putting shareholder value above company vision has limited innovation, that government regulations have encouraged inefficiency, that replacing industrial R&D with university driven R&D was a mistake, that investors and grant managers are not as good as they used to be (our society has lost its sense of purpose), that business leaders are not as good as they used to be (our society has lost its courage), and that scientists and engineers are not as good as they used to be (our society has lost its mind).
Take your pick, I think there's some truth in all of them.
Did you read TFA? I got something very different than you did from that article.
"Crisis" is a strong word, but there's no emotional distinction to the founder between worrying about how to best take advantage of when things go well and how to correct when things go poorly. Every decision can be important, and it feels that way. TFA focuses on problems, but it's also serious for a founder to skip out on an opportunity to leverage success.
If you're an investor, or an employee, it's much easier.
I'm a startup founder, I've never been to Burning Man, or any similar events, and probably never will be. I agree that those are not actually networking events, but I don't think it's ok to dictate the type of vacation someone should take. If raving in the desert is what someone needs to clear their head and make better decisions, they should do it. Not everyone gets the same thing from meditation and solitary introspection. Sometimes you just need something different. There are times I need to go take a peaceful hike by myself to reflect, and there are times I need to go to Vegas with an old friend to make bad decisions on purpose.
For a startup founder, your company is ALWAYS in crisis. Every week you're burning cash to keep things going. If you wait for the perfect time to take a vacation, you'll be waiting for a very long time. Whether you can bear to leave your co-workers working while you go is highly personal and unique to every situation... it's impossible to generalize.
Now, I've seen people who do take way too much time off, and do expect to come up with a miracle on the fly to replace the work they should have put in. But that's a different thing.
I had a professor do something like this in a graduate computational physics class. I ignored his batch file, and wrote my own stuff to finish the assignment. I got a 0.
I went in to complain to the professor about this, my answer was more elegant (faster, simpler code, right answer) than what he had done! He pointed out that I needed to learn how to work with a team, and that it wasn't always an option to re-write other people's code whenever you'd like. One of the points of the assignment was to understand how to work within the limitations of practical work.
Now, some... years later, managing people who work and code for me, I GREATLY appreciate this lesson. Doing the best thing, technically, is sometimes the wrong thing for progress of a project.
The catch here is that ACS is a scientific society. They're the American Chemical Society, and they're actually pretty good (as a society). They run good meetings, they have good resources for their members, and they actually (and unusually) pay attention to both the academic and commercial work in their field. The majority of the board of directors running ACS are currently faculty members somewhere or working at a national lab. There are no publishers on the board; all of the industry oriented board members are professional chemists.
I think your comment about inertia is right. Even in an organization that should understand that their approach to publishing is wrong, change is slow.
Many of the things you're talking about doing as an editor are not... valuable. The idea that there is value in prestige for publishing has been a disaster for science. This is a concept that is only about 40 years old, it is not some great tradition of science. Prestige publishing is immensely useful to professors and publishers, but not anyone else. We are at a historic low point for production of science that is useful or interesting to the general public when looking at per scientist or per dollar spent. We are epically failing to identify, execute, and communicate important research. In short, scientists and publishers do not know what "high quality" means anymore! Our current definition is incorrect!
Typesetting, formatting, web-hosting, indexing... if the authors and funders of the paper are not willing to do these things well, the work is not worth publishing. Think about what it means for the people funding research to abandon responsibility for it to someone else. I keep either open license or white paper manuscript versions of as many of my papers as I can on my website - that website also has significant SEO and search indexing work put into it. I do that because my funders insist on it, because they believe in the value of the work. It is truly eye-opening when your funder actually values your work. NSF, DOE, DoD, and NIH all manage or fund repositories of all of the reports produced by their grants going back decades (most not available online because of lobbying by publishers). Sci-Hub has a limited lifetime until these various agencies finish their transition to publicly available hosting of all of their funded results.
So what are you providing, really? Prestige publishing is a marketing tool for your journal, not a value for science. Hosting and formatting is something that should be done by any competent scientific funder. It should worry all of us that it is necessary for you to do this. That leaves us with peer review and editing.
These are valuable additions to a paper, but these functions can also be accomplished differently. The most traditional approach for review, the face-to-face meeting with experts, is why you have the conference in the first place. People are paying you to take part in that process! Either the conference is not functioning as a place to seriously discuss research (maybe save those honoraria for good session moderators), or peer review of the conference papers is simply a hoop-jumping exercise.
Discriminatory in this context has no negative connotation. It's responsible government.
There are many ways to provide equal treatment under the law. It is not always desirable or efficient to legislate and regulate for every possible situation. Instead of having a thick rule book, Vermont has a public committee who is responsible for permitting cable operators. Every operator, from small mom & pop shops to Comcast has to deal with the same government run committee, which the media and the public (should) have access to.
In a situation with quickly moving technology and in an industry with a history of misleading customers, this is a much better approach than simple rules making, where exploiting loopholes in enforcement or regulations can give an unfair advantage. Having a set of people involved helps the government enforce the letter as well as the spirit of the law on a permit-by-permit basis.
There are other industries policed this way. Construction, insurance, and medical research are a couple of examples.
Slashdot Mirror
We're living in an insane moment in history where political labels and governing philosophy are extremely fluid and unrelated.
In this very specific example of home ownership... the neo-conservative ideal of universal home ownership was the driving factor behind enabling banks to give out large loans to people who generally did not meet actuarial requirements for large loans (this was also known as bank de-regulation). That didn't work out so well, and I'm not sure you'd find a lot of self-described "progressive politicians" willing to sign up for universal home ownership as a governing philosophy today.
High density, resource efficient, and environmentally friendly urban housing is instead the preferred model. And that implies renting... and maybe feudalism.
This is really about dark matter and the crazy ideas that crop up in physics when we don't understand something and lack the tools to even start figuring it out.
It's not scientifically reasonable to ascribe life to a set of physics that we don't have any direct evidence of existing, but it's fun to think about. In the past, this would just be written up as science fiction. I'd be interested to know if Caleb Scharf is a fan of Greg Benford, or any of the other physicist created science fiction out there that contains similar ideas.
Ah, this misconception keeps being put out there. I agree that graduate education is generally a poor investment, but it's not because of the cost.
A PhD in STEM typically does not require any student fees paid by the student. If your university is requiring you to pay fees out of pocket to do graduate research, you're at the wrong place. Run away very quickly. Not to put to fine a point on it, but in the US, the vast majority of STEM grad students are paid to go to grad school. More than that, if you're a potential immigrant to the US, the visa you need to be a student is much easier to get than what you need to work, and is almost always sponsored by the university.
There is a cost to getting a PhD, though. You'll spend 3-8 years making a very low salary, working on a project that may not go anywhere, for a degree that in the end you may not get. Your experience will not directly translate into marketable skills, and may not translate into a higher salary.
I have a PhD, and employ many scientists in PhD and non-PhD positions at a company. Our good junior scientists don't go to grad school because 1) they're paid at least double what they'd make as a grad researcher and 2) they see that in the real world, having a PhD does not translate directly into a better job.
There is a societal cost to subsidizing STEM grad students. First is an over-supply of labor. Again, very simply: we have too many PhDs. We produce many more PhDs than there are PhD level jobs available. This has been discussed many times on Slashdot in the last few years. Second, universities gain extraordinarily cheap labor that is generally paid for by external sources (grants). This creates a strong downward wage pressure. It's very easy for a company to go to a very good university and pay a research team a fraction of the market cost for performing a study. I have to justify the value of keeping our IP in house to maintain our internal professional science team.
The result is a job market that disadvantages higher education, and a higher education system that values grant winning more than job skills. In my field (physics) we've been on this downward spiral of growing disconnect between market and academy since the 1970s.
Video conferencing is great, but we're still social animals that interact better when we can shake hands, read body language, share a meal, etc.
When you simplify a cell to something that has a positive and negative output to the overall organism, and add in an effect that increases the amount of negative output over time, you're going to find (surprise, surprise!) that aging "is a fundamental feature of multicellular life." That's not a conclusion, that's an assumption you've made at the start of your study!
To be fair, the authors of the study do cite two 50 to 60 year old papers discussing the (pre-modern-genetics) theory of aging that they are out to debunk.
Don't forget that the core mission of any university is education. While schools are performing a lot more research these days, that research is always in the context of training. As a commercial scientist working with a lot of universities, I have been frustrated with the seemingly inefficient policies, facilities, and labor contracting at universities until I realized that good work rightly comes second to good teaching at a school. (For example, "education first" is why students have access to shared facilities that would only be open to specialized full time staff in industry.) It seems obvious when put that way, but it changes the context of discussions like this.
There are a lot of AI students being picked up out of universities early because of increased demand and general advances in the field. This is great. The universities should be thrilled. They have done a great job getting those folks prepped for roles in the economy outside of academic training.
That can be frustrating to the PIs (professors) at universities who want to focus on research, but they also need to remember that research is their secondary goal.
Fields that find economic purpose don't disappear from universities, and basic research doesn't stop. There's never been an academic field that ended because it was too financially successful. The organizations that lead the way change.
It follows pretty obviously that as countries clean up their power grid, electric vehicles become a better idea. The data shown in this paper, though, does not indicate that electric vehicles are cleaner to use compared to diesel or gasoline cars in every EU country. The reference data from the linked paper is from 2013, but this "old" paper was only published three months ago, not last year. In three months, we now have updated data? That's great, and it makes sense that electricity is cleaner today than four years ago, but where is that new data? Are we talking about a newspaper article or another peer reviewed publication? This is a horrible summary.
Tact and discretion are the skills you're overlooking.
These things have absolutely nothing to do with your ability to perform the technical parts of the job. Of people who have clearances, very few of them will actually need to DO something related to that clearance. There are a lot of people in the government who just take up space. However, if it comes up, it is necessary to have people who can work efficiently within a hierarchical organization with seemingly arbitrary rules while having access to incomplete information.
I've had a job that required this. It was fucking hard. The hard part had nothing to do with the technology (that part was trivial). The hard part was needing to accept and deal with the situations and people that were part of the job.
The assumptions built into these systems require that the economy grows at a steady rate.
We can grow the economy through labor pool growth, or through increasing labor productivity. Population growth is not the same thing as either of these things. Natural population growth is also not actually happening, we have sub-replacement birth rates in the US (this happens often). Our population growth is driven since the boomers mainly by immigration, which makes maintaining or growing our labor productivity very challenging (but we're good at this). Our labor pool is not actually directly coupled to population and is just now increasing above where it was in 2008.
At some point we have to look at creating sustainable policies. This isn't necessarily cuts, but should inform how we approach immigration policies and investment incentives in addition to expenditures. My point is simply that the that population increasing in size is neither guaranteed, nor directly linked to economic output, and is a horrible assumption to base an economy on.
As for selling more bonds... that's a whole other topic. Keep in mind there is a finite amount of money available for investment. Bonds alone aren't causing the problem, but we've had a decade of poor investment in new business, we're back to pre-1980 rates of business creation. Unlike population growth, new business (and the increased productivity and opportunities for immigrants that come with it) IS what our economy is based on.
Here, they looked at "research" results. As soon as you have "medical" results, you're constrained by law, not technology. Disrupting laws sometimes works (Uber), but usually not (Theranos).
I am a physicist (as are many commenting on this article... which makes sense).
The article on the electroweak force is not too technical, it's just bad. The Lagrangian derivation may be important to someone, but it is NOT the physics of the electroweak force, it's just the math. Why is it a big deal to combine two fundamental forces? How was this measured or observed?
Instead of "Lagrangian", you could just as easily have a detailed discussion of "Gargamelle", the experimental apparatus used to prove the interaction between the electromagnetic and weak forces on this page. Actually, go look that page up on Wikipedia, it contains a better summary of the Electroweak interaction than the page on Electroweak interaction!
Ok, so it's Wikipedia and we can all go change things... the problems with that are well detailed here. I fight my wikipedia battles on the graphene pages.
One reason this doesn't get pushed more, legally, is that there are a lot of other terms in the grant contracts that the universities really don't want enforced. The IP generated under a grant is also supposed to be owned by the government and publicly available. The facilities and equipment funded under a grant are also supposed to be public property. We'll get to that fight eventually, but the university lobby is now larger than the defense contractor lobby, so that's going to be a difficult fight.
The kind of researcher driven co-operative websites that you're wishing for do exist. Their user interfaces are not good and they have no search engine optimization (so don't show up on the first few pages when you search for something).
The simplest solution is that, if you're a scientist, you should only publish in open access journals or you should publish white papers either on something like arxiv ahead of peer review to establish copyright and an open access source before the journal publishes (they hate this, but tough for them). I am a scientist, and that is what I do. I work at a small company, so I also have a marketer who formats papers nicely and makes sure our open access white papers show up high in search rankings. My work is not publicly funded, but it's just smart to do this anyway!
So the person at the top of a scientific team gets the Nobel, and the people under that person get a solid career prospect and professional satisfaction. Sounds pretty good.
At a company, the upper management gets paid more than the employees.
In government, the president and other politicians get more credit than the career civil service and staffers.
Tom Brady gets more attention and money than his lineman.
I mean... this is how life works, organizations are powerful tools, and individuals get uneven rewards from that. If you want to fix some of the economic or "credit" inequality in science, start with graduate student stipends, not the Nobel. There are some sad cases of people missing out on Nobels, but there are SO FEW ways we in science are recognized by the world at large that I think I speak for all of us when I say it is absolutely worth it.
It's not a "wonder material." It's a new material, and it's got some interesting properties. The hype is really a problem. As I said, just a little looking finds some products, here's one.
I am a graphene researcher. Actually, I'm a commercial scientist working on graphene products. It's been... educational watching certain parts of my field fail to pay attention to the actual commercialization of graphene that's been going on around them for the last several years. If you look around with just a little effort, you can find real graphene enabled products (as in graphene plays an important role more than just marketing) for purchase right now.
Graphene doesn't "need" a 3D structure. For success, any new material needs good business cases, good product development, and good investment. We don't need more press releases about the "wonder material." This is a distraction.
I don't think many people here actually purchase or use dangerous chemicals on a regular basis. Certainly, this web developer blogger is not a chemical expert and is not the kind of person the journalist should have turned to for an expert opinion. I might be.
Generally speaking, chemical companies will not deliver dangerous chemicals to your home. Yes, you can get sulphur, nitrates, and charcoal at a nursery, and other chemicals at the hardware store and drug store, but these are usually in smaller bottles or lower concentration than research or industrial grade chemicals.
Your high school chemistry teacher had easy access to high quality chemicals because he was at a school. Essentially: private residence - no chemical deliveries; warehouse, school, hair salon, dentist's office, etc. - yes chemical deliveries. I'm not sure this was a legal issue, but it is definitely a "thing" that I've experienced. I'm met several other people around the US who have started companies out of their home that required research grade chemicals who had the same experience. Everyone I've met who has been in this situation did the same thing: we all worked with a local school, hospital, or specialized startup incubator for shipping and storage of our chemicals. That kind of makes sense.
Amazon has stocked high grade chemicals in large amounts and will ship to your house. Obviously, people had access to these chemicals in the past, but Amazon does make it a lot easier to get these things. It is reasonable to be concerned about that. A quick search on Amazon of some chemicals I've ordered (and been surprised to find there - hey, it IS convenient) shows that Amazon has taken this attention seriously and removed some of the research grade material they used to stock.
This black powder stuff may not be a big deal, but there has been some material on Amazon that was certainly eyebrow raising. I don't think it's there anymore.
There's an assumption in Science that when we publish papers, we're able to assume that the people reading our (specialized, idiosyncratic, jargon-laden) work understand the context and limitations of the field we're publishing in.
This is really a horrible assumption.
We could caveat the hell out of every sentence we write, but marketers, reporters, and political activists already ignore us when we do that. TFA here is essentially going back to the original work and pointing out all the caveats the press left out of their articles, but that the actual scientists included. We could double-down on jargon and try to be more like law and medicine - invent enough language to prevent understanding by non-experts. That seems pretty immoral. We could try to educate everyone better, but that's not realistic, no one has time to understand everything. We could just sit on research until we're absolutely certain it's right. That's going to require some fundamental changes to the way research is funded and careers are managed. If we stop taking money from people with ulterior motives, there will literally be no one to fund us.
What do we do? Do we just continue being pawns in these corporate and political games?
It used to be that the US would simply out-compete other countries when it came to investing in science and technology. Now there's a disconnect between the value the US government sees and the value US investors see.
Why are these companies courting Chinese investors? Even with all the hand wringing over high valuations, US investors don't value (most) US tech companies as highly as investors outside the US. These Chinese investors were willing to pay $1.3 billion for a company US investors have valued at $0.7 billion. If I was the CEO of Lattice (or an employee with stock), I'd be pretty upset right now.
If working on tech the government considers critical means you get 60 cents on the dollar for your work, we're not going to be getting a lot of good people working on that tech.
Moore's law is a stupid example of this, because obsolescence is physically built in to the "law", but the general idea that the economic output of science is decreasing is a real thing, and cuts across fields.
Most people won't notice this; most scientists don't notice this. It seems like the economy is ticking along, and things keep improving technically. If you dig into investing around science driven companies and look at the inflation adjusted spending required in R&D to produce a dollar of product sales, you'll see a general upward trend since the late 1970s.
This is most famous right now in pharmaceutical development. There have been papers published on this and talks at conferences on what has gone wrong for many years now.
There are a lot of theories flying around out there: that the easy projects have long been done, that businesses putting shareholder value above company vision has limited innovation, that government regulations have encouraged inefficiency, that replacing industrial R&D with university driven R&D was a mistake, that investors and grant managers are not as good as they used to be (our society has lost its sense of purpose), that business leaders are not as good as they used to be (our society has lost its courage), and that scientists and engineers are not as good as they used to be (our society has lost its mind).
Take your pick, I think there's some truth in all of them.
Did you read TFA? I got something very different than you did from that article.
"Crisis" is a strong word, but there's no emotional distinction to the founder between worrying about how to best take advantage of when things go well and how to correct when things go poorly. Every decision can be important, and it feels that way. TFA focuses on problems, but it's also serious for a founder to skip out on an opportunity to leverage success.
If you're an investor, or an employee, it's much easier.
I'm a startup founder, I've never been to Burning Man, or any similar events, and probably never will be. I agree that those are not actually networking events, but I don't think it's ok to dictate the type of vacation someone should take. If raving in the desert is what someone needs to clear their head and make better decisions, they should do it. Not everyone gets the same thing from meditation and solitary introspection. Sometimes you just need something different. There are times I need to go take a peaceful hike by myself to reflect, and there are times I need to go to Vegas with an old friend to make bad decisions on purpose.
For a startup founder, your company is ALWAYS in crisis. Every week you're burning cash to keep things going. If you wait for the perfect time to take a vacation, you'll be waiting for a very long time. Whether you can bear to leave your co-workers working while you go is highly personal and unique to every situation... it's impossible to generalize.
Now, I've seen people who do take way too much time off, and do expect to come up with a miracle on the fly to replace the work they should have put in. But that's a different thing.
I had a professor do something like this in a graduate computational physics class. I ignored his batch file, and wrote my own stuff to finish the assignment. I got a 0.
I went in to complain to the professor about this, my answer was more elegant (faster, simpler code, right answer) than what he had done! He pointed out that I needed to learn how to work with a team, and that it wasn't always an option to re-write other people's code whenever you'd like. One of the points of the assignment was to understand how to work within the limitations of practical work.
Now, some... years later, managing people who work and code for me, I GREATLY appreciate this lesson. Doing the best thing, technically, is sometimes the wrong thing for progress of a project.
The catch here is that ACS is a scientific society. They're the American Chemical Society, and they're actually pretty good (as a society). They run good meetings, they have good resources for their members, and they actually (and unusually) pay attention to both the academic and commercial work in their field. The majority of the board of directors running ACS are currently faculty members somewhere or working at a national lab. There are no publishers on the board; all of the industry oriented board members are professional chemists.
I think your comment about inertia is right. Even in an organization that should understand that their approach to publishing is wrong, change is slow.
Many of the things you're talking about doing as an editor are not... valuable. The idea that there is value in prestige for publishing has been a disaster for science. This is a concept that is only about 40 years old, it is not some great tradition of science. Prestige publishing is immensely useful to professors and publishers, but not anyone else. We are at a historic low point for production of science that is useful or interesting to the general public when looking at per scientist or per dollar spent. We are epically failing to identify, execute, and communicate important research. In short, scientists and publishers do not know what "high quality" means anymore! Our current definition is incorrect!
Typesetting, formatting, web-hosting, indexing... if the authors and funders of the paper are not willing to do these things well, the work is not worth publishing. Think about what it means for the people funding research to abandon responsibility for it to someone else. I keep either open license or white paper manuscript versions of as many of my papers as I can on my website - that website also has significant SEO and search indexing work put into it. I do that because my funders insist on it, because they believe in the value of the work. It is truly eye-opening when your funder actually values your work. NSF, DOE, DoD, and NIH all manage or fund repositories of all of the reports produced by their grants going back decades (most not available online because of lobbying by publishers). Sci-Hub has a limited lifetime until these various agencies finish their transition to publicly available hosting of all of their funded results.
So what are you providing, really? Prestige publishing is a marketing tool for your journal, not a value for science. Hosting and formatting is something that should be done by any competent scientific funder. It should worry all of us that it is necessary for you to do this. That leaves us with peer review and editing.
These are valuable additions to a paper, but these functions can also be accomplished differently. The most traditional approach for review, the face-to-face meeting with experts, is why you have the conference in the first place. People are paying you to take part in that process! Either the conference is not functioning as a place to seriously discuss research (maybe save those honoraria for good session moderators), or peer review of the conference papers is simply a hoop-jumping exercise.
Discriminatory in this context has no negative connotation. It's responsible government.
There are many ways to provide equal treatment under the law. It is not always desirable or efficient to legislate and regulate for every possible situation. Instead of having a thick rule book, Vermont has a public committee who is responsible for permitting cable operators. Every operator, from small mom & pop shops to Comcast has to deal with the same government run committee, which the media and the public (should) have access to.
In a situation with quickly moving technology and in an industry with a history of misleading customers, this is a much better approach than simple rules making, where exploiting loopholes in enforcement or regulations can give an unfair advantage. Having a set of people involved helps the government enforce the letter as well as the spirit of the law on a permit-by-permit basis.
There are other industries policed this way. Construction, insurance, and medical research are a couple of examples.