IVF clinics generally extract a few cells from an embryo for testing and sequencing prior to implantation. It's actually easier to do genetic testing in IVF than a normal pregnancy, but genetic testing at an early stage is now standard in the US for pregnancies in women over 35.
Yeah, you clearly have a different way of life than I do, and you obviously have made great choices for you regarding where you live and what you do.
The idea that work is one place, where you're not asked to go to other places during the day, or help shuttle people around, is quite a nice thing. Maybe "flexible working hours" is not the right phrase, but something more like "flexible work requirements." I run my own business, which is great for me, but not for biking. It's not ok for me to put off going to a client to swap out hardware, or to not go meet a potential investor who's across town and is available to meet on short notice. My car carries spare work hardware, kid's snacks and toys, and a backup suit. It all gets used pretty regularly.
I have biked to work at a previous job, It was absolutely wonderful, and I loved it. My personal and professional ambitions grew, and I chose to sacrifice an ability to be car-free. My point is simply that the lack of biking is not what generates stress in life, it's the stress of life that prevents biking.
People who cycle to work are people who: 1) Don't need to personally take care of their children in an emergency 2) Live close to work 3) Have flexible working hours and standards 4) Have a nice enough job to support an office and a place to put a bike
In short, cyclists have a lower stress life. I would argue very strongly that cycling to work is the result of a lower stress life, not the cause. It is not a lifestyle that most of us can afford for reasons that have nothing to do with cycling.
Introductory courses are hard because everyone has different ideas of where to start.
At high levels, international standards have existed for a long time. Decades ago, in the height of the Cold War, a Russian series of physics textbooks was the standard worldwide. It's still used today. It has some generic physics names, but is referred to as "Landau and Lifshitz." If we could use a Soviet authored standard set of physics books in the US in the 1960s, we could probably use international standards today as well.
I think the problem we have is that most people don't like being told what to do. If you're a school board member or a university trustee, you're not going to want to hear that your philosophy of how education should be done is not the standard, and that's just too bad.
Landau and Lifshitz is notoriously difficult for starting students, and its adoption led in part to the design of undergraduate physics education as a primer for graduate school rather than training to be a working scientist. This may sound irrelevant and minor, but that is a very different philosophy than most science and engineering fields, and it was just too bad for educators and students who thought BS Physics holders should be able to work in physics.
More on topic... many physics books (including Landau and Lifshitz) are available online already. Others are available at very reduced cost through Dover publishing. Often, the US government efforts to "modernize" physics textbooks (teaching 100 year old physics) pay professors to write new and expensive textbooks. When the granting agency that supplies all of your research funding recommends a textbook, it's very hard to say "no." An amazing amount of the publishing business in science is driven by unintended consequences of granting agency policies.
What is authorized and un-authorized use? Has Google made any effort to limit use to only the owner, or have they optimized to allow use by anyone who can talk to the device? If there's no authentication, log-in, or physical controls, there's no permission needed to use the device. What does the owner need to do to keep other people from using the device? Turn it off.
If this is real, Apple is very much behind the times when it comes to both sensor technology and understanding of the medical device market. Trying a spectroscopic approach (which appears to be the case) is way out of date, that's a generation behind even the FDA cleared tests, and isn't going to compete with the new generation of sensors being developed now.
Many of these technologies, particularly the non-invasive ones, are more available outside the US than inside. This has more to do with the way medical device manufacturers are paid than any technical limitation. Bluntly, being in the glucose monitoring business is a great way to lose a lot of money quickly. Yes, the market is big, but it's brutal. Apple's strength is not dominating low margin, highly regulated markets.
If you work for any company (or these days, a university) doing technology development, you're required to sign IP assignment agreements.
A good organization will list the specific IP being held as a trade secret as part of your exit agreement when you leave. The best situation for everyone is clarity and clear ownership of very specific items.
A bad organization will try to blanket claim everything it can extending past the time of employment. The trick here is, you don't have to sign those agreements. It's all a negotiation. I've worked at places where I did not sign the IP assignment agreement, and while the lawyers hated it, it's their own damn fault for crafting an agreement that was overly broad.
We can all debate until we're blue in the face whether the gender gap between an average woman and an average man is the product of perfectly reasonable individual choices or societal pressure.
What's really not debatable is that Google leadership has actively advocated for more oversight of business by the government, while simultaneously ignoring regulations when it comes to their own business.
Every other large government contractor has to file these reports. Every other large government contractor is judged by the labor department rules, not by their internal metrics.
This is why government oversight sucks. Sometimes they're looking at things that don't make sense, sometimes it's counterproductive. Sometimes it's necessary. If Google really thinks the Labor Department approach is wrong, they should have been working their very significant political connections to change the rules to the right policy. Instead, they created political cover for themselves, and were happy to have everyone else subject to rules they disagreed with.
I think enough people here have worked in the kind of positions charismatic narcissists tend to inhabit to understand this. If you're the kind of person who thinks it's possible, even likely, that people around you have better ideas than you do, being responsible for deciding which idea is best is difficult. (If you really think it's easy to lead a group of people, guess what kind of leader you are...)
Gathering ideas from people around you and making sure credit goes to those people is the right way to run any organization, large or small. But it's much easier to shoot for action without argument, if you have the smile to get it. I think the result is that humble leaders don't last as long, they burn out or decide to change their focus more often.
This is the comment to read here. There are a lot of really bad startup companies out there, and very few good ones. Assuming you want to make a good one, this is all great advice.
There's a lot that goes into a good idea, and no one else believes your idea is good. The difficult part is convincing people your idea is good, no matter how obvious it is to you. Next: plan, plan, plan. Develop a thick skin, and get used to paying other people more than what you're making.
As multiple other people here have posted, the pharma industry spends at least $2.5B in R&D per new drug. Also, almost all of that is spent in the US, where the vast majority of new drugs are researched. To attract talent, pharma companies generally put their R&D in desirable places to live, have nice facilities, and pay good salaries. When you have a team of ~1000 scientists and doctors working for 5-10 years on a drug, you're going to spend a LOT of money. Just the cost of capital to develop a drug is staggering. The easy answer is to pay people less, and convince them to work in cheaper facilities... The rest of the world tried that and now virtually all the drugs are developed in the US.
One way to do fix this is to focus on spinning out R&D efforts as startup companies. This places the financial risk on the scientists doing the work, but also gives them much greater rewards for success, and an incentive to keep costs low. That's the giant problem with pharma development and marketing right now: no one has any real incentives to keep the costs down.
There are R&D grants for orphan drug development, and there are patient advocacy groups that help with clinical trials. We need to be able to get to a future where a "successful" small pharma effort is one with $5-10M of annual revenue.
Remember, I am a scientist. I know how much I pay to get access to papers and how difficult it is to get raw data. I'm also a government guy, I know all about unfunded mandates, and contracting clauses that are never enforced.
I am a scientist, and I've been a government scientist.
There is a HUGE (pun intended) difference between mandating that data is open and mandating that plans are developed to ensure open data. I've developed plans for all sorts of things that never actually happened.
The solid rocket boosters the shuttle used were also first stage rockets that were reused. The use case was different, parts from different previous launches were mixed around and re-combined, but the bottom line is that first stage re-use has been around for more than 30 years.
Those boosters parachuted into the ocean, which is a much simpler approach than a soft landing. To many of us, simpler still means better. Yes, they hit the ocean hard and bobbed around in salt water, and it required a very extensive re-build because it was solid fuel based. There's nothing inherently "wrong" with any of that, and it was a design and approach that worked (with one VERY notable failure). This begs the question, why go through all the work for the soft landing?
If the metric here is simply re-usability, previous rocket makers solved that problem decades ago.
SpaceX's metric is probably cost, though.
That's a great metric, maybe the BEST metric, but it's not what the article is about. Disappointingly absent from TFA about today's launch was the cost to SpaceX to refurbish and test the rocket, although we know the process took 4 months. (Launch price and refurbishing cost are not related yet, SpaceX took a loss here to prove a point.)
It is pretty shitty to all the engineers who came before and accomplished great things to pretend their work never happened simply because a cost focused news blurb is less effective than "aerospace history."
(first my disclaimers...) I'm a research scientist. I've worked in academia, for a government lab managing grants, and in private industry.
There are many good reasons to change the way science funding is done in the USA.
First, we all know here that there is a surplus of certain STEM labor, including a large number of the researchers (postdocs, grad students, etc.) funded by the government.
Second, there is a serious and long running lack of practical progress being made in science. By some metrics (# of degrees, # of papers), we are doing great, but by others (# of companies founded, return on investment, research efficiency) we are at a generational low-point.
Third, some practical STEM fields (i.e. medicine, manufacturing engineering) DO exhibit a labor shortage, and also rely on training programs largely outside the research grant driven model.
The budgets we're looking at in the government grant space are enormous. It doesn't seem that way to many researchers, but the annual NIH budget alone is about equal to all of the funding provided to all startup companies annually. There's a lot we can do with that, provided the right direction. NIH, for example, could be re-focused on grants for training medical doctors, PAs, nurses, etc., instead of researchers. Yes, that would slow research down, but it would also contribute significantly to lowering the cost of medical care, and it would be appropriate for the mission and people at the NIH. A mature approach to climate change might cut some climate research funding, but increase funding for faster roll-out of a power and transportation infrastructure free of fossil fuels. Surely such an infrastructure could be an obvious point of agreement between the right and the left; start the construction in coal country.
A thoughtful approach to science funding would encourage researchers to look beyond their next federal grant to other (private) funding sources, and would encourage (force) private funding sources to invest in transitional research. The UC pension system has been instrumental in fueling the startup economy for a long time by devoting 1% of it's money to funds investing in startup companies. If other groups did the same (... were forced to do the same...), we would increase the total amount of science funding by several orders of magnitude more than the total federal R&D budget. Prior to the 1990s, all large DoD contractors were required to spend 15% of their budget on R&D projects that were reviewed by government scientists to ensure they were actual R&D projects. Removing that requirement shut down a lot of very good industrial research programs. We learned then that most companies performing internal R&D can't compete with companies using subsidized academic R&D. That's an important lesson that the pharmaceutical industry is just now discovering, and it's an economic fact we need to fight. Reinstating requirements like minimum and audited internal R&D budgets for government contractors would also increase private spending on real research.
Not all research can use a "transition to private funding" model, so there is a need for continued blue sky research funding from the government. However, right now, we are saturated with the results of blue sky research and in serious need of support for transitional and applied research. As a nation, we are paying for this basic research, but we are not seeing the benefits of it. Some small amount is commercialized here, some is commercialized elsewhere, but a whole lot just gets forgotten. That's a waste, and it's stupid.
So basic research could be de-emphasized for a while, and non-government resources could be directed to lead to an overall increase in work and funding for researchers (while also delivering a profit... usually). That's another way of saying that a decrease in federal research funding could be done in a constructive way. We could even look at the labor market for cues as to whose graduate education we should be subsidizing. However, this is not what Trump is suggesting here... but it's nice to daydream about what an intelligent jobs-and-commerce science budget would actually look like.
IBM certainly has a well-earned reputation of being the premier industrial research lab in nanotechnology, but they also have a well-earned reputation for keeping the technology at the grant and publication stage much longer than necessary.
IBM invented the STM, but it was about 15 years before someone else brought one to market. IBM invented carbon nanotube transistors, ran the premier group in CNT research for over 20 years, and then shut it down without attempting to develop a product.
This would be ok, but they've also sucked up a tremendous amount of grant money and investment targeting nanotech commercialization over the last 30 years without actually commercializing any of the technologies they've worked on.
I am a nanotechnology researcher. I know and greatly respect many researchers at IBM. It's disappointing that the company has decided not to participate in developing products using their technologies.
UC Berkeley received $370 Million in federal grants (research dollars) last year. Of that $370 Million, $210.9 Million of those "research" dollars went to administrative costs and overhead (non-research, non-teaching activities). You're talking about an organization where people have an average salary above $200k with a guaranteed job for life. Don't cry for the universities, they're funded just fine. If they wanted to, they could have paid to do this right.
Yeah, that does work, and it's a good idea! But, it's very hard to scale. The challenge is finding a manufacturing technique that is cheap, will work across an entire wafer, has reasonable throughput, and has a low error rate. Surely, that's not too much to ask... Photolithography is very hard to compete with.
The timeline for carbon electronics is really, really long, predating transistors and silicon by decades. Carbon based electronics has had more than enough R&D for us to understand the basic properties and scaling challenges. The proof of this is that there are commercial products out there using these materials, made in commercial fabs. You just don't hear about them, because they have very little to do with the digital world (right now). Typically, you'll find these products in sensors and analog components. The particular strengths of carbon based electronics are an ability to carry lots of current in small channels (this is not just about resistivity, but also relates to chemical stability and thermal conductivity), and an ability to integrate seamlessly with biological material (this was initially just about carbon-carbon chemistries, but has grown to also encompass superior integrations of electronics with living systems).
These are different kinds of transistors, and don't operate the way (digitally) MOSFET silicon transistors do.
Diamond is a wide bandgap semiconductor (that's physics for insulator). In special conditions, it can perform well, but those conditions (ranges for temperature, humidity, and field strength) are not practical for consumer devices. Doping diamond is possible, but very difficult, and it still results in a material that is a pretty good insulator. Sorry, it's going to be a lab toy for a long time.
Graphene is a zero-bandgap semiconductor. That means that it never turns off, it just has varying amounts of "on." It's got great numbers on paper (resistivity, mobility). Doping graphene is something immoral scientists talk about doing. The reality is that doping graphene creates a different material that lacks the speed and chemical stability of normal graphene. Your conduction mechanism changes, your gating mechanism changes, your noise sources change. It's a mess. Also, it's really easy to dope graphene on accident and lose your high-end performance. It's the newest material in this space, and the one least understood in the manufacturing realm (despite that, it forms the basis for the commercial product linked above, so obviously it's understood well enough).
You didn't mention carbon nanotubes, but I will, because what was the point of getting a PhD in carbon nanotube electronics if I can't talk about them on Slashdot?! Carbon nanotubes remain the unattainable holy grail of digital electronics. You can have it all: the speed of graphene, the on-off ratio of silicon, low power requirements... It's just that you almost need to assemble your circuit by hand. It's been >25 years we've been working with these materials, and we still don't know how to properly control where they go on a wafer (well, maybe these guys know). The problem is that nanotubes want to make a heterogeneous mixed metal-semiconductor plate of spaghetti on the wafer, when you want clean rows of uniform semiconductor. The best guys in the world at this are up to producing postage stamp sized patches in the middle of the wafer. So... there's some work to be done there before anyone starts designing a processor.
Yeah, that's the way things used to be. As well, it was understood that it was more efficient to concentrate the talent all in one place, if possible. Return on investment, though, has been poor.
In the last year or two, the trend in startup funding has been toward "cockroaches." Those are companies that can survive and thrive in difficult economic times. Thrift has become trendy.
I'm not sure you're making the argument you think you are. How are you going to convince people to move to the Bay Area? "The best" people are not there anymore or are trying to leave. That was the point of TFA. So, yeah, I agree with you. If you have to convince people to move to your location, you're doing it wrong. That's why you shouldn't be in the Bay Area.
Austin, New York, San Diego, Boston, Washington DC, all are reasonable places to find the people you need to start a technology company.
Yeah, I'm going to echo some of the other comments back to you, it's stupid to decide to live in the Bay Area in the first place. You yourself moved to Austin, which is a great idea.
I had a startup company in the Bay Area for about a year, discovered the financial black hole that is Bay Area housing, and moved to San Diego as soon as I could. I own a 3 bedroom house here for the same cost as a one room studio in monthly rent in the Bay Area. Two of my employees bought houses last year as well. I have easy access to Bay Area VCs, it takes me 3 hours to get from my door to the door of any VC in the Bay Area, and there are flights hourly (at least).
So why would you base yourself or base your company in the Bay Area? It's a bad idea. As an employer or an investor, you're wasting money paying people bigger salaries than you need to, and the quality of life is crummy. Investors who want you to base in the Bay Area are not looking out for the health of the business, and should be avoided. Anyone working in the Bay Area needs to understand that their location is no longer an asset, it's a liability.
It's interesting to read the background on this. It's really about warranties.
Federal law is that a company can't insist that you use a particular vendor for repair or servicing to maintain a warranty. Now, that's unusual to think about because that's not what we're used to seeing in reality.
The reality is that if opening or servicing the electronics is so convoluted and difficult that damage is nearly certain when anyone without training opens it, then the warranty is voided by that damage. The training materials and tooling that are used by companies to train their own people in how to properly repair the electronics without damage would be made available to consumers in "right to repair" legislation.
If a company decides to make something that cannot be repaired... well, ok. It may be that laws like this simply push manufacturers to shut down their internal repair groups and stop supporting any warranty or repair at all.
This is a nice textbook version of what a board should do, but this is not nearly all of what boards do. It's also a very simplified version of what went wrong at Nokia, which started well before Elop (he historically terrible anyway).
Yes, you need the board to give advice and help steer a company, but there are a LOT of other ways you can get that advice. You have a limited number of board seats to fill, so each seat necessarily does more than just give advice. The strategy of how to approach these various technical and business challenges is being developed and vetted by different people than the board.
Each board member is there to also do something else such as provide voting support for management or certain investors, provide important connections, provide credibility that would otherwise be lacking, etc. Selecting the CEO of the company is going to fall to a small subset of the board with experience in that area (not Gore's strength). It is normal to see politicians on boards, particularly when company strategy depends significantly on government actions.
From one point of view, it is... disappointing that politicians are so highly compensated to represent companies. That's probably due to the mythology we have built around our greatest politicians.
From another point of view, there are a very limited set of people who can provide the kind of insight into the way government works, and the kind of credibility in interactions with the government that Al Gore can provide. There is real value in those skills, and it seems there are not many people who compete at Gore's level. Logically, we should want our companies and our government to work well together and understand each other.
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IVF clinics generally extract a few cells from an embryo for testing and sequencing prior to implantation. It's actually easier to do genetic testing in IVF than a normal pregnancy, but genetic testing at an early stage is now standard in the US for pregnancies in women over 35.
Yeah, you clearly have a different way of life than I do, and you obviously have made great choices for you regarding where you live and what you do.
The idea that work is one place, where you're not asked to go to other places during the day, or help shuttle people around, is quite a nice thing. Maybe "flexible working hours" is not the right phrase, but something more like "flexible work requirements." I run my own business, which is great for me, but not for biking. It's not ok for me to put off going to a client to swap out hardware, or to not go meet a potential investor who's across town and is available to meet on short notice. My car carries spare work hardware, kid's snacks and toys, and a backup suit. It all gets used pretty regularly.
I have biked to work at a previous job, It was absolutely wonderful, and I loved it. My personal and professional ambitions grew, and I chose to sacrifice an ability to be car-free. My point is simply that the lack of biking is not what generates stress in life, it's the stress of life that prevents biking.
People who cycle to work are people who:
1) Don't need to personally take care of their children in an emergency
2) Live close to work
3) Have flexible working hours and standards
4) Have a nice enough job to support an office and a place to put a bike
In short, cyclists have a lower stress life. I would argue very strongly that cycling to work is the result of a lower stress life, not the cause. It is not a lifestyle that most of us can afford for reasons that have nothing to do with cycling.
Introductory courses are hard because everyone has different ideas of where to start.
At high levels, international standards have existed for a long time. Decades ago, in the height of the Cold War, a Russian series of physics textbooks was the standard worldwide. It's still used today. It has some generic physics names, but is referred to as "Landau and Lifshitz." If we could use a Soviet authored standard set of physics books in the US in the 1960s, we could probably use international standards today as well.
I think the problem we have is that most people don't like being told what to do. If you're a school board member or a university trustee, you're not going to want to hear that your philosophy of how education should be done is not the standard, and that's just too bad.
Landau and Lifshitz is notoriously difficult for starting students, and its adoption led in part to the design of undergraduate physics education as a primer for graduate school rather than training to be a working scientist. This may sound irrelevant and minor, but that is a very different philosophy than most science and engineering fields, and it was just too bad for educators and students who thought BS Physics holders should be able to work in physics.
More on topic... many physics books (including Landau and Lifshitz) are available online already. Others are available at very reduced cost through Dover publishing. Often, the US government efforts to "modernize" physics textbooks (teaching 100 year old physics) pay professors to write new and expensive textbooks. When the granting agency that supplies all of your research funding recommends a textbook, it's very hard to say "no." An amazing amount of the publishing business in science is driven by unintended consequences of granting agency policies.
What is authorized and un-authorized use? Has Google made any effort to limit use to only the owner, or have they optimized to allow use by anyone who can talk to the device? If there's no authentication, log-in, or physical controls, there's no permission needed to use the device. What does the owner need to do to keep other people from using the device? Turn it off.
If this is real, Apple is very much behind the times when it comes to both sensor technology and understanding of the medical device market. Trying a spectroscopic approach (which appears to be the case) is way out of date, that's a generation behind even the FDA cleared tests, and isn't going to compete with the new generation of sensors being developed now.
There are several approaches to continuous monitoring of glucose, going back more than 10 years.
Many of these technologies, particularly the non-invasive ones, are more available outside the US than inside. This has more to do with the way medical device manufacturers are paid than any technical limitation. Bluntly, being in the glucose monitoring business is a great way to lose a lot of money quickly. Yes, the market is big, but it's brutal. Apple's strength is not dominating low margin, highly regulated markets.
If you work for any company (or these days, a university) doing technology development, you're required to sign IP assignment agreements.
A good organization will list the specific IP being held as a trade secret as part of your exit agreement when you leave. The best situation for everyone is clarity and clear ownership of very specific items.
A bad organization will try to blanket claim everything it can extending past the time of employment. The trick here is, you don't have to sign those agreements. It's all a negotiation. I've worked at places where I did not sign the IP assignment agreement, and while the lawyers hated it, it's their own damn fault for crafting an agreement that was overly broad.
We can all debate until we're blue in the face whether the gender gap between an average woman and an average man is the product of perfectly reasonable individual choices or societal pressure.
What's really not debatable is that Google leadership has actively advocated for more oversight of business by the government, while simultaneously ignoring regulations when it comes to their own business.
Every other large government contractor has to file these reports. Every other large government contractor is judged by the labor department rules, not by their internal metrics.
This is why government oversight sucks. Sometimes they're looking at things that don't make sense, sometimes it's counterproductive. Sometimes it's necessary. If Google really thinks the Labor Department approach is wrong, they should have been working their very significant political connections to change the rules to the right policy. Instead, they created political cover for themselves, and were happy to have everyone else subject to rules they disagreed with.
I think enough people here have worked in the kind of positions charismatic narcissists tend to inhabit to understand this. If you're the kind of person who thinks it's possible, even likely, that people around you have better ideas than you do, being responsible for deciding which idea is best is difficult. (If you really think it's easy to lead a group of people, guess what kind of leader you are...)
Gathering ideas from people around you and making sure credit goes to those people is the right way to run any organization, large or small. But it's much easier to shoot for action without argument, if you have the smile to get it. I think the result is that humble leaders don't last as long, they burn out or decide to change their focus more often.
This is the comment to read here. There are a lot of really bad startup companies out there, and very few good ones. Assuming you want to make a good one, this is all great advice.
There's a lot that goes into a good idea, and no one else believes your idea is good. The difficult part is convincing people your idea is good, no matter how obvious it is to you. Next: plan, plan, plan. Develop a thick skin, and get used to paying other people more than what you're making.
As multiple other people here have posted, the pharma industry spends at least $2.5B in R&D per new drug. Also, almost all of that is spent in the US, where the vast majority of new drugs are researched. To attract talent, pharma companies generally put their R&D in desirable places to live, have nice facilities, and pay good salaries. When you have a team of ~1000 scientists and doctors working for 5-10 years on a drug, you're going to spend a LOT of money. Just the cost of capital to develop a drug is staggering. The easy answer is to pay people less, and convince them to work in cheaper facilities... The rest of the world tried that and now virtually all the drugs are developed in the US.
One way to do fix this is to focus on spinning out R&D efforts as startup companies. This places the financial risk on the scientists doing the work, but also gives them much greater rewards for success, and an incentive to keep costs low. That's the giant problem with pharma development and marketing right now: no one has any real incentives to keep the costs down.
There are R&D grants for orphan drug development, and there are patient advocacy groups that help with clinical trials. We need to be able to get to a future where a "successful" small pharma effort is one with $5-10M of annual revenue.
Ha Ha Ha. That's a load of BS.
Remember, I am a scientist. I know how much I pay to get access to papers and how difficult it is to get raw data. I'm also a government guy, I know all about unfunded mandates, and contracting clauses that are never enforced.
Did you read what you quoted?
I am a scientist, and I've been a government scientist.
There is a HUGE (pun intended) difference between mandating that data is open and mandating that plans are developed to ensure open data. I've developed plans for all sorts of things that never actually happened.
The solid rocket boosters the shuttle used were also first stage rockets that were reused. The use case was different, parts from different previous launches were mixed around and re-combined, but the bottom line is that first stage re-use has been around for more than 30 years.
Those boosters parachuted into the ocean, which is a much simpler approach than a soft landing. To many of us, simpler still means better. Yes, they hit the ocean hard and bobbed around in salt water, and it required a very extensive re-build because it was solid fuel based. There's nothing inherently "wrong" with any of that, and it was a design and approach that worked (with one VERY notable failure). This begs the question, why go through all the work for the soft landing?
If the metric here is simply re-usability, previous rocket makers solved that problem decades ago.
SpaceX's metric is probably cost, though.
That's a great metric, maybe the BEST metric, but it's not what the article is about. Disappointingly absent from TFA about today's launch was the cost to SpaceX to refurbish and test the rocket, although we know the process took 4 months. (Launch price and refurbishing cost are not related yet, SpaceX took a loss here to prove a point.)
It is pretty shitty to all the engineers who came before and accomplished great things to pretend their work never happened simply because a cost focused news blurb is less effective than "aerospace history."
(first my disclaimers...) I'm a research scientist. I've worked in academia, for a government lab managing grants, and in private industry.
There are many good reasons to change the way science funding is done in the USA.
First, we all know here that there is a surplus of certain STEM labor, including a large number of the researchers (postdocs, grad students, etc.) funded by the government.
Second, there is a serious and long running lack of practical progress being made in science. By some metrics (# of degrees, # of papers), we are doing great, but by others (# of companies founded, return on investment, research efficiency) we are at a generational low-point.
Third, some practical STEM fields (i.e. medicine, manufacturing engineering) DO exhibit a labor shortage, and also rely on training programs largely outside the research grant driven model.
The budgets we're looking at in the government grant space are enormous. It doesn't seem that way to many researchers, but the annual NIH budget alone is about equal to all of the funding provided to all startup companies annually. There's a lot we can do with that, provided the right direction. NIH, for example, could be re-focused on grants for training medical doctors, PAs, nurses, etc., instead of researchers. Yes, that would slow research down, but it would also contribute significantly to lowering the cost of medical care, and it would be appropriate for the mission and people at the NIH. A mature approach to climate change might cut some climate research funding, but increase funding for faster roll-out of a power and transportation infrastructure free of fossil fuels. Surely such an infrastructure could be an obvious point of agreement between the right and the left; start the construction in coal country.
A thoughtful approach to science funding would encourage researchers to look beyond their next federal grant to other (private) funding sources, and would encourage (force) private funding sources to invest in transitional research. The UC pension system has been instrumental in fueling the startup economy for a long time by devoting 1% of it's money to funds investing in startup companies. If other groups did the same (... were forced to do the same...), we would increase the total amount of science funding by several orders of magnitude more than the total federal R&D budget. Prior to the 1990s, all large DoD contractors were required to spend 15% of their budget on R&D projects that were reviewed by government scientists to ensure they were actual R&D projects. Removing that requirement shut down a lot of very good industrial research programs. We learned then that most companies performing internal R&D can't compete with companies using subsidized academic R&D. That's an important lesson that the pharmaceutical industry is just now discovering, and it's an economic fact we need to fight. Reinstating requirements like minimum and audited internal R&D budgets for government contractors would also increase private spending on real research.
Not all research can use a "transition to private funding" model, so there is a need for continued blue sky research funding from the government. However, right now, we are saturated with the results of blue sky research and in serious need of support for transitional and applied research. As a nation, we are paying for this basic research, but we are not seeing the benefits of it. Some small amount is commercialized here, some is commercialized elsewhere, but a whole lot just gets forgotten. That's a waste, and it's stupid.
So basic research could be de-emphasized for a while, and non-government resources could be directed to lead to an overall increase in work and funding for researchers (while also delivering a profit... usually). That's another way of saying that a decrease in federal research funding could be done in a constructive way. We could even look at the labor market for cues as to whose graduate education we should be subsidizing. However, this is not what Trump is suggesting here... but it's nice to daydream about what an intelligent jobs-and-commerce science budget would actually look like.
IBM certainly has a well-earned reputation of being the premier industrial research lab in nanotechnology, but they also have a well-earned reputation for keeping the technology at the grant and publication stage much longer than necessary.
IBM invented the STM, but it was about 15 years before someone else brought one to market. IBM invented carbon nanotube transistors, ran the premier group in CNT research for over 20 years, and then shut it down without attempting to develop a product.
This would be ok, but they've also sucked up a tremendous amount of grant money and investment targeting nanotech commercialization over the last 30 years without actually commercializing any of the technologies they've worked on.
I am a nanotechnology researcher. I know and greatly respect many researchers at IBM. It's disappointing that the company has decided not to participate in developing products using their technologies.
UC Berkeley received $370 Million in federal grants (research dollars) last year. Of that $370 Million, $210.9 Million of those "research" dollars went to administrative costs and overhead (non-research, non-teaching activities). You're talking about an organization where people have an average salary above $200k with a guaranteed job for life. Don't cry for the universities, they're funded just fine. If they wanted to, they could have paid to do this right.
Yeah, that does work, and it's a good idea! But, it's very hard to scale. The challenge is finding a manufacturing technique that is cheap, will work across an entire wafer, has reasonable throughput, and has a low error rate. Surely, that's not too much to ask... Photolithography is very hard to compete with.
The timeline for carbon electronics is really, really long, predating transistors and silicon by decades. Carbon based electronics has had more than enough R&D for us to understand the basic properties and scaling challenges. The proof of this is that there are commercial products out there using these materials, made in commercial fabs. You just don't hear about them, because they have very little to do with the digital world (right now). Typically, you'll find these products in sensors and analog components. The particular strengths of carbon based electronics are an ability to carry lots of current in small channels (this is not just about resistivity, but also relates to chemical stability and thermal conductivity), and an ability to integrate seamlessly with biological material (this was initially just about carbon-carbon chemistries, but has grown to also encompass superior integrations of electronics with living systems).
These are different kinds of transistors, and don't operate the way (digitally) MOSFET silicon transistors do.
Diamond is a wide bandgap semiconductor (that's physics for insulator). In special conditions, it can perform well, but those conditions (ranges for temperature, humidity, and field strength) are not practical for consumer devices. Doping diamond is possible, but very difficult, and it still results in a material that is a pretty good insulator. Sorry, it's going to be a lab toy for a long time.
Graphene is a zero-bandgap semiconductor. That means that it never turns off, it just has varying amounts of "on." It's got great numbers on paper (resistivity, mobility). Doping graphene is something immoral scientists talk about doing. The reality is that doping graphene creates a different material that lacks the speed and chemical stability of normal graphene. Your conduction mechanism changes, your gating mechanism changes, your noise sources change. It's a mess. Also, it's really easy to dope graphene on accident and lose your high-end performance. It's the newest material in this space, and the one least understood in the manufacturing realm (despite that, it forms the basis for the commercial product linked above, so obviously it's understood well enough).
You didn't mention carbon nanotubes, but I will, because what was the point of getting a PhD in carbon nanotube electronics if I can't talk about them on Slashdot?! Carbon nanotubes remain the unattainable holy grail of digital electronics. You can have it all: the speed of graphene, the on-off ratio of silicon, low power requirements... It's just that you almost need to assemble your circuit by hand. It's been >25 years we've been working with these materials, and we still don't know how to properly control where they go on a wafer (well, maybe these guys know). The problem is that nanotubes want to make a heterogeneous mixed metal-semiconductor plate of spaghetti on the wafer, when you want clean rows of uniform semiconductor. The best guys in the world at this are up to producing postage stamp sized patches in the middle of the wafer. So... there's some work to be done there before anyone starts designing a processor.
Yeah, that's the way things used to be. As well, it was understood that it was more efficient to concentrate the talent all in one place, if possible. Return on investment, though, has been poor.
In the last year or two, the trend in startup funding has been toward "cockroaches." Those are companies that can survive and thrive in difficult economic times. Thrift has become trendy.
I'm not sure you're making the argument you think you are. How are you going to convince people to move to the Bay Area? "The best" people are not there anymore or are trying to leave. That was the point of TFA. So, yeah, I agree with you. If you have to convince people to move to your location, you're doing it wrong. That's why you shouldn't be in the Bay Area.
Austin, New York, San Diego, Boston, Washington DC, all are reasonable places to find the people you need to start a technology company.
Ah, but then I'd be in Fresno...
Yeah, I'm going to echo some of the other comments back to you, it's stupid to decide to live in the Bay Area in the first place. You yourself moved to Austin, which is a great idea.
I had a startup company in the Bay Area for about a year, discovered the financial black hole that is Bay Area housing, and moved to San Diego as soon as I could. I own a 3 bedroom house here for the same cost as a one room studio in monthly rent in the Bay Area. Two of my employees bought houses last year as well. I have easy access to Bay Area VCs, it takes me 3 hours to get from my door to the door of any VC in the Bay Area, and there are flights hourly (at least).
So why would you base yourself or base your company in the Bay Area? It's a bad idea. As an employer or an investor, you're wasting money paying people bigger salaries than you need to, and the quality of life is crummy. Investors who want you to base in the Bay Area are not looking out for the health of the business, and should be avoided. Anyone working in the Bay Area needs to understand that their location is no longer an asset, it's a liability.
It's interesting to read the background on this. It's really about warranties.
Federal law is that a company can't insist that you use a particular vendor for repair or servicing to maintain a warranty. Now, that's unusual to think about because that's not what we're used to seeing in reality.
The reality is that if opening or servicing the electronics is so convoluted and difficult that damage is nearly certain when anyone without training opens it, then the warranty is voided by that damage. The training materials and tooling that are used by companies to train their own people in how to properly repair the electronics without damage would be made available to consumers in "right to repair" legislation.
If a company decides to make something that cannot be repaired... well, ok. It may be that laws like this simply push manufacturers to shut down their internal repair groups and stop supporting any warranty or repair at all.
This is a nice textbook version of what a board should do, but this is not nearly all of what boards do. It's also a very simplified version of what went wrong at Nokia, which started well before Elop (he historically terrible anyway).
Yes, you need the board to give advice and help steer a company, but there are a LOT of other ways you can get that advice. You have a limited number of board seats to fill, so each seat necessarily does more than just give advice. The strategy of how to approach these various technical and business challenges is being developed and vetted by different people than the board.
Each board member is there to also do something else such as provide voting support for management or certain investors, provide important connections, provide credibility that would otherwise be lacking, etc. Selecting the CEO of the company is going to fall to a small subset of the board with experience in that area (not Gore's strength). It is normal to see politicians on boards, particularly when company strategy depends significantly on government actions.
From one point of view, it is... disappointing that politicians are so highly compensated to represent companies. That's probably due to the mythology we have built around our greatest politicians.
From another point of view, there are a very limited set of people who can provide the kind of insight into the way government works, and the kind of credibility in interactions with the government that Al Gore can provide. There is real value in those skills, and it seems there are not many people who compete at Gore's level. Logically, we should want our companies and our government to work well together and understand each other.