We follow all students; we are required to do so for our NIH Training Grant. Of course, the most recent graduates typically go on to postdocs first, although some jump directly into industrial positions. My field is pharmacology, so there are still opportunities in industry. I do think that I'd have a hard time ethically pitching the program to incoming graduate students if I were in a field in which the output of PhDs greatly exceeded the supply of high-level jobs that are at least science-related.
I don't think there is anything improper about a new graduate student moving into a low-paid postdoc position. A first postdoc is still a training position, and it gives a PhD the opportunity to demonstrate productivity in a more independent role. But occasionally you do meet people who are on their 4th academic postdoc, and who are clearly not competitive for a faculty position. They might be making $60K, but they need to do something else to move up from there.
I'm not saying that there's a lack or nonexistence of good or great 2D platformers, I'm simply saying that the greatness of 2D platformers in general has been greatly hyped and overestimated.
Yet they seem to be enjoying a renaissance on hand-helds. Some of the classic platform series, such as Sonic and Castlevania are doing well enough to support continued development of new titles in the classic 2D format.
Cross-species cloning has been done. What is not clear is just how close the species have to be. If birds don't work, you could try a species that has remained morphologically basically the same since the time of dinosaurs--the alligator.
You have a good point that wanting to work in science is part of the reason people accept lower salaries to do it. However, arguing about how much MDs make doesn't change the fact that there are plenty of people who enjoy their jobs who are also paid reasonably well.
But probably less than they would have to be paid if the job were not enjoyable. Job enjoyment is a perk, like health support or retirement, and it has a value.
If science is actually unimportant, then our current system is great as it minimizes the cost of having this perk of civilization around. In that case, we should be honest with the people going into it. When recruiting students, do you tell them your work is unimportant in the grand scheme of things and that if they work for you they should not expect to be paid well? (You know, the truth.)
I generally find that my students have a pretty realistic understanding of what salaries are like in science, and do not suffer from any delusion that they can expect to be paid according to the social importance of their work. These days, most of them come in with the expectation of an industrial rather than academic career, as work in industry provides more rapid and predictable advancement. Of course, sometimes people change their minds after a few years, and decide that they'd like to make more money. Fortunately, they generally are able to move into science-related careers with a higher salary scale.
Are we treating those students ethically who end up teaching high school with a "hardcore" research PhD, or who go on to be car dealers or bankers?
I don't think that I've ever had a student become a high school teacher, car dealer, or banker. Every student that I know of (and we make considerable effort to track them for our Training Grant renewals) has gone into some kind of career that allowed them to make use of their scientific training, but some are now executives or analysts rather than researchers.
And, in a free market, "demand" would depend on productivity. If a worker produces two units of economic output per day then the worker's salary will be two units of economic output minus the cost of any capital (e.g. machines) that the worker is using.
And what is a "unit of economic productivity"? One can always make it true by definition, of course, simply by defining a unit of productivity as equal to that worker's pay for doing the work. But if you want to argue that that the pay is unfair, based on productivity, then you need some other way of measuring productivity--for example, how many bits of knowledge produced by a scientific worker equal how many square feet of floor cleaned?
You're pulling a lot of "facts" out of... the air. Not to mention that you are implicitly assuming that anyone who wants to has the education and ability to be a scientist (in contrast to what you assume about CEOs).
There are undoubtedly plenty of people with the ability to be CEOs and scientists who don't want to do either, but that is irrelevant. The economic issue is determined by the supply of labor--those who can do the job and do want to do that kind of work--relative to the number of such jobs available. If there are a lot of people who want the job, relative to the number of jobs, then the salary will be low, independent of the social value of the output of their labor. And if the government decides to stop funding basic scientific research of the type that is unlikely to attract private funding, scientific salaries will fall, not rise.
And, would the CEOs who bankrupted the world financial system be individuals who "demonstrated competence in high executive positions" - 'cause, if so, it may be time to rethink CEO hring criteria.
Perhaps it is. That is a matter for company boards and stockholders to consider, but for the purposes of this discussion, it is quite irrelevant. It does not matter how accurately the criteria for employment predict performance, so long as those criteria are perceived by those doing the hiring as the most predictive criteria available. But one thing is certain--if stockholders decide that any person with, say, a high school diploma has the same probability of being able to run a company successful as a guy with decades of experience running a profitable company, then the average CEO salary will drop like a shot.
And is funding for scientific research provided by the free market? Not in general, no: it's provided by the federal government. And, what little funding is actually provided by private corporations is based on the federal government imposing artificial monopolies (patents).
Again, this is quite irrelevant. Whether or not the funding is governed by the free market, the amount of funding for scientific research--whether it comes from the government, investors, or falls like mana out of the sky--will limit the number of research positions available, and this (along with the number of people who want those kinds of jobs and are perceived as qualified) will determine salaries.
Had I known then what I know now (about science salaries) I almost certainly would have chosen a different career. Fortunately for today's young people, there is growing awareness that a career in science has relatively low pay. Once it becomes widely understood that science is bad career choice, I suspect that we will see a fairly dramatic drop in the number of people who devote years of their lives getting the training necessary to be a modern scientist.
It's not too late. One of my students, after finishing his PhD, decided that he didn't really want to spend his next few years laboring for a pittance as a postdoc, and accepted a job with a private firm that pays probably 5-6 times what he would have received as a postdoc, plus bonuses. I've seen this happen a number o
Exactly like every MD would rather be working in medicine than in construction or fast food, so they accept lower salaries. And all those people who work sanitation get paid extra to offset how they would rather be working construction.
The supply of MDs is somewhat restricted by the limited number of slots available in medical school, so that the supply of MDs is artificially maintained low relative compared to demand, which distorts the market somewhat. Nevertheless, with the exception of a minority of "star" MDs (in elite specialties and at a level of skill and experience that is rare, and that thus commands exceptionally high salary), most people with the ability to get into medical school would do better financially in another profession. When adjusted for debt and lost salary plus interest during the long years in medical school and residency, the average MD simply does not do that well financially. Most of the people currently in medical school are motivated by a desire to do medicine rather than by the financial rewards.
There was indeed a period when the medical profession was very lucrative, because modern technology increased the perceived value of medical treatment, resulting in windfall profits for doctors. However, in a free market, such "spikes" in profitability tend to be transient. Much of that excess profit has now been bled off and redistributed by insurance companies and lawyers.
In a properly functioning economy, people are paid according to what they contribute to the economy (their "productivity").
Perhaps if by "properly functioning" you mean "non free-market," that statement might make some kind of sense. In a (mostly) free market economy such as ours, what people are paid depends upon supply and demand. Scientific positions are considered highly desirable (people who can do science frequently like doing it better than almost anything else), while the funding available for science is relatively modest (which means that the number of research positions is limited). The economic consequence is that the pay and benefits tend to be lower than for professions where the number of jobs is large relative to the number of people who want to do them.
There are all kinds of obvious counter examples to the idea that people should be paid on the basis of how unpleasant a job is.
Of course, since this is as obviously nonsensical as the notion that people should expect to get paid based upon "what they contribute." How unpleasant a job is affects the supply of labor for a job (the number of people willing to do it). But salary and benefits are influenced by demand (the number of jobs available) as well as the supply of labor.
Suppose you offered someone either a job as a CEO (with standard CEO pay) or a job as a janitor (with standard janitor pay), would the person really be expected to turn down the CEO job because being a janitor is just so much more desirable?
However, the reality is that the supply of people who have qualifications (very high demonstrated competence in high executive positions) for CEO jobs and who want to do that kind of job is small relative to the number of such jobs. On the other hand, the number of people who have the qualifications required for janitorial work and who are willing to do it is large relative to the number of jobs. Hence CEO jobs pay much better than janitorial jobs.
Or alternatively, because you HAVE TO follow a certain career path if you're in certain fields. First basic degree, then PhD, then postdoc. You don't get to choose this, if you want to be accepted as a competent researcher, and what's important, you have no leverage to complain about the wages, management, terms of contract or even safety. This is all pretty much at the discretion of the lab and professor. That argument of "they like the job so much" is applicable only up to a point.
If qualified people did not have a strong preference for doing scientific work, as opposed to working in the construction or fast food industries, then it would be necessary to offer them additional incentives to attract them work in the field. These could include monetary incentives, but it might also be possible to persuade them to accept a lower salary by offering instead non-monetary incentives such as those that you describe.
Congress and the media are told that we have a shortage scientific labor. Meanwhile, there is so much labor available to academic research labs that they are often getting people to work for them for free. It is absurd that postdocs working in commercially relevant fields of physics make less money than a construction worker or fast food manager. Why is that? It's not because there's a shortage of labor.
Basic economics. Quite simply, it is because nearly every postdoc would much, much rather be doing science than working in the construction or fast food industries. And in general, people are willing to accept a lower salary for doing something that they like doing than they will accept for doing something that they don't like doing.
At my university, students are required to complete the same safety training as employees before they are let loose near a laboratory bench. Labs are regularly inspected for to verify that they are following safety standards. Nevertheless, I see no way that university laboratories, which have many graduate students with just a few years of experience, will ever be as safe as industrial labs in which the average employee has much more practical experience.
If this were simply an academic debate, you would be right in your comments about cranks. But this isn't an academic debate. This debate affects people directly. Governments are enacting policies, people's reputations are being made and destroyed, money is moving in quantity to the detriment of other proven issues, and fear is being sown in the population. Therefore, yes, absolute faith and trust must be paramount.
And since absolute certainty never occurs in science (indeed, the scientific consensus about the cause, extent, and danger of global warming is about as close as it ever gets), nothing is ever to be done about anything...
Deaths are the most accurate indicator. Disease rates are unreliable, because they are so strongly influenced by changes in diagnosis.
So you are arguing that emergency treatment in hospitals just coincidentally improved around the time that doctors begin to push patients to reduce their cholesterol levels? Do you have any evidence? For example, can you show that deaths have been reduced as much or more in patients who do not reduce their cholesterol as in those who do?
The other side of the debate, which is political; it deals with what policies (if any) should be put in place to combat climate change. And in this realm, we are being bombarded by "it's settled science", "it's going to happen", "we have to act in ten years or it'll be too late", etc. ad inf. And the unseriousness of these positions is made clear by radical flaws in models such as the one referenced in this article.
So in the crankosphere, an improvement in a model that was previously acknowledged to be an approximation has already mutated into "a radical flaw."
Of course, if you want to find out what the settled science says, you can always consult the report of the International Panel on Climate Change, or the reports of independent elite scientific societies such as the US National Academy of Science.
But just as, to a crank, any improvement of a model becomes "a radical flaw" that invalidates all conclusions, the science is never "settled" so long as there is some scientist, somewhere who disagrees (and of course, on any topic, there is always someone who disagrees)
Science is had not, historically, been infallible.
I dare propose that it is also not infallible today.
This obvious fallacy is a virtually infallible indicator of a crank--science is not infallible, therefore any result I don't like is most likely wrong.
A fairly reliable indicator of a crank is the conviction that the dominant view is a house of cards, and the most recent finding, whatever it is, is about to bring the whole thing down. Press releases tend if anything to overstate the significance and novelty of a result, but what does the press release say? The lead sentence is "Oceanographers have long known that the 20-year-old paradigm for describing the global ocean circulationâ" called the Great Ocean Conveyor â" was an oversimplification. " And as far as the impact on climate theory, "this finding may [my emphasis] impact the work of global warming forecasters." Doesn't exactly sound like a startling, paradigm-shifting result, does it?
So while we'll have to wait for the modelers to incorporate the new data to see what the real impact is, I think that it is safe to say that anybody who is seizing upon this finding at this early stage as casting doubt on global warming certainly qualifies as a crank.
The perennial war cry of the crank is "If this one thing is wrong, then nothing they say can be trusted!"
Of course, in the real world, all data has flaws, and all interpretations are subject to revision. So a demand for absolute perfection gives the crank license to engage in cherry-picking, rationalizing away the data he doesn't like, while accepting that which feeds his obsession.
Real science doesn't work that way. When new data comes in, or errors are found in old data, the scientist carefully reassesses conclusions in the light of the new evidence.
Why would anyone in the market have had an interest in loaning to high-risk individuals if it wasn't for the "affordable housing" and "homeownership for all" agenda pushed by both the Clinton and Bush administrations?
Because you can charge high-risk individuals higher interest. So loaning to high-risk individuals can be extraordinarily profitable, if you can figure out a way to average out the risk.
This isn't rocket science--unless you get all of your "information" from right-wing talk radio.
Since Nintendo cannot reasonably be expected to evaluate whether a mod is a source of problems, a repair will necessarily involve restoring the system to its stock status. It is not unreasonable for there to be an extra charge for this extra work.
I agree that chirality implies some kind of autocatalytic process to amplify weak natural chiral bias or statistical fluctuations, but I don't agree that it is diagnostic for life. After all, crystals self-assemble, so a planet dominated by large crystal structures could be highly chiral.
Self-assembly is only part of the definition of life--there also needs to be mutation, and the mutation has to affect the propagation of subsequent generations.
Generally when games release simultaneously with movies, they tend to be disappointing, because the rigid release date forces the game to come out whether it's really finshed or not
I find it weird the way people are obsessing about this. I barely noticed it. Dr. Manhattan was clearly intentionally depicted at the very trough of the uncanny valley, barely even human. He looked no more naked than a horse.
You pretty much lose any comics cred if you don't at least know about Watchmen--probably one of the two or three most critically acclaimed modern comics works.
It's like not having ever heard of "The Spirit."
It was one of the first post-modern reexaminations of the costumed superhero them. Taking the basic comic book notion--grown men dressing up in silly costumes to fight crime--and asking the question, "What sort of people would actually do this, and why?" Additionally, it addresses the question of what the political impact would have been of an actual godlike superhuman back in the Viet Nam era.
I'm looking forward to the long version. I thought the movie was a wonderful adaptation, but a lot had to be cut out, and I think the time was too short to properly appreciate the complexities of the plot. It would probably have fared better as a cable miniseries, with a dozen episodes or so.
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We follow all students; we are required to do so for our NIH Training Grant. Of course, the most recent graduates typically go on to postdocs first, although some jump directly into industrial positions. My field is pharmacology, so there are still opportunities in industry. I do think that I'd have a hard time ethically pitching the program to incoming graduate students if I were in a field in which the output of PhDs greatly exceeded the supply of high-level jobs that are at least science-related.
I don't think there is anything improper about a new graduate student moving into a low-paid postdoc position. A first postdoc is still a training position, and it gives a PhD the opportunity to demonstrate productivity in a more independent role. But occasionally you do meet people who are on their 4th academic postdoc, and who are clearly not competitive for a faculty position. They might be making $60K, but they need to do something else to move up from there.
Yet they seem to be enjoying a renaissance on hand-helds. Some of the classic platform series, such as Sonic and Castlevania are doing well enough to support continued development of new titles in the classic 2D format.
Cross-species cloning has been done. What is not clear is just how close the species have to be. If birds don't work, you could try a species that has remained morphologically basically the same since the time of dinosaurs--the alligator.
But probably less than they would have to be paid if the job were not enjoyable. Job enjoyment is a perk, like health support or retirement, and it has a value.
I generally find that my students have a pretty realistic understanding of what salaries are like in science, and do not suffer from any delusion that they can expect to be paid according to the social importance of their work. These days, most of them come in with the expectation of an industrial rather than academic career, as work in industry provides more rapid and predictable advancement. Of course, sometimes people change their minds after a few years, and decide that they'd like to make more money. Fortunately, they generally are able to move into science-related careers with a higher salary scale.
I don't think that I've ever had a student become a high school teacher, car dealer, or banker. Every student that I know of (and we make considerable effort to track them for our Training Grant renewals) has gone into some kind of career that allowed them to make use of their scientific training, but some are now executives or analysts rather than researchers.
And what is a "unit of economic productivity"? One can always make it true by definition, of course, simply by defining a unit of productivity as equal to that worker's pay for doing the work. But if you want to argue that that the pay is unfair, based on productivity, then you need some other way of measuring productivity--for example, how many bits of knowledge produced by a scientific worker equal how many square feet of floor cleaned?
There are undoubtedly plenty of people with the ability to be CEOs and scientists who don't want to do either, but that is irrelevant. The economic issue is determined by the supply of labor--those who can do the job and do want to do that kind of work--relative to the number of such jobs available. If there are a lot of people who want the job, relative to the number of jobs, then the salary will be low, independent of the social value of the output of their labor. And if the government decides to stop funding basic scientific research of the type that is unlikely to attract private funding, scientific salaries will fall, not rise.
Perhaps it is. That is a matter for company boards and stockholders to consider, but for the purposes of this discussion, it is quite irrelevant. It does not matter how accurately the criteria for employment predict performance, so long as those criteria are perceived by those doing the hiring as the most predictive criteria available. But one thing is certain--if stockholders decide that any person with, say, a high school diploma has the same probability of being able to run a company successful as a guy with decades of experience running a profitable company, then the average CEO salary will drop like a shot.
Again, this is quite irrelevant. Whether or not the funding is governed by the free market, the amount of funding for scientific research--whether it comes from the government, investors, or falls like mana out of the sky--will limit the number of research positions available, and this (along with the number of people who want those kinds of jobs and are perceived as qualified) will determine salaries.
It's not too late. One of my students, after finishing his PhD, decided that he didn't really want to spend his next few years laboring for a pittance as a postdoc, and accepted a job with a private firm that pays probably 5-6 times what he would have received as a postdoc, plus bonuses. I've seen this happen a number o
The supply of MDs is somewhat restricted by the limited number of slots available in medical school, so that the supply of MDs is artificially maintained low relative compared to demand, which distorts the market somewhat. Nevertheless, with the exception of a minority of "star" MDs (in elite specialties and at a level of skill and experience that is rare, and that thus commands exceptionally high salary), most people with the ability to get into medical school would do better financially in another profession. When adjusted for debt and lost salary plus interest during the long years in medical school and residency, the average MD simply does not do that well financially. Most of the people currently in medical school are motivated by a desire to do medicine rather than by the financial rewards.
There was indeed a period when the medical profession was very lucrative, because modern technology increased the perceived value of medical treatment, resulting in windfall profits for doctors. However, in a free market, such "spikes" in profitability tend to be transient. Much of that excess profit has now been bled off and redistributed by insurance companies and lawyers.
Perhaps if by "properly functioning" you mean "non free-market," that statement might make some kind of sense. In a (mostly) free market economy such as ours, what people are paid depends upon supply and demand. Scientific positions are considered highly desirable (people who can do science frequently like doing it better than almost anything else), while the funding available for science is relatively modest (which means that the number of research positions is limited). The economic consequence is that the pay and benefits tend to be lower than for professions where the number of jobs is large relative to the number of people who want to do them.
Of course, since this is as obviously nonsensical as the notion that people should expect to get paid based upon "what they contribute." How unpleasant a job is affects the supply of labor for a job (the number of people willing to do it). But salary and benefits are influenced by demand (the number of jobs available) as well as the supply of labor.
However, the reality is that the supply of people who have qualifications (very high demonstrated competence in high executive positions) for CEO jobs and who want to do that kind of job is small relative to the number of such jobs. On the other hand, the number of people who have the qualifications required for janitorial work and who are willing to do it is large relative to the number of jobs. Hence CEO jobs pay much better than janitorial jobs.
If qualified people did not have a strong preference for doing scientific work, as opposed to working in the construction or fast food industries, then it would be necessary to offer them additional incentives to attract them work in the field. These could include monetary incentives, but it might also be possible to persuade them to accept a lower salary by offering instead non-monetary incentives such as those that you describe.
Basic economics. Quite simply, it is because nearly every postdoc would much, much rather be doing science than working in the construction or fast food industries. And in general, people are willing to accept a lower salary for doing something that they like doing than they will accept for doing something that they don't like doing.
At my university, students are required to complete the same safety training as employees before they are let loose near a laboratory bench. Labs are regularly inspected for to verify that they are following safety standards. Nevertheless, I see no way that university laboratories, which have many graduate students with just a few years of experience, will ever be as safe as industrial labs in which the average employee has much more practical experience.
And since absolute certainty never occurs in science (indeed, the scientific consensus about the cause, extent, and danger of global warming is about as close as it ever gets), nothing is ever to be done about anything...
Deaths are the most accurate indicator. Disease rates are unreliable, because they are so strongly influenced by changes in diagnosis.
So you are arguing that emergency treatment in hospitals just coincidentally improved around the time that doctors begin to push patients to reduce their cholesterol levels? Do you have any evidence? For example, can you show that deaths have been reduced as much or more in patients who do not reduce their cholesterol as in those who do?
And yet, cardiovascular death rates have dropped with increased effort to reduce cholesterol, just as predicted.
So in the crankosphere, an improvement in a model that was previously acknowledged to be an approximation has already mutated into "a radical flaw."
Of course, if you want to find out what the settled science says, you can always consult the report of the International Panel on Climate Change, or the reports of independent elite scientific societies such as the US National Academy of Science.
But just as, to a crank, any improvement of a model becomes "a radical flaw" that invalidates all conclusions, the science is never "settled" so long as there is some scientist, somewhere who disagrees (and of course, on any topic, there is always someone who disagrees)
This obvious fallacy is a virtually infallible indicator of a crank--science is not infallible, therefore any result I don't like is most likely wrong.
A fairly reliable indicator of a crank is the conviction that the dominant view is a house of cards, and the most recent finding, whatever it is, is about to bring the whole thing down. Press releases tend if anything to overstate the significance and novelty of a result, but what does the press release say? The lead sentence is "Oceanographers have long known that the 20-year-old paradigm for describing the global ocean circulationâ" called the Great Ocean Conveyor â" was an oversimplification. " And as far as the impact on climate theory, "this finding may [my emphasis] impact the work of global warming forecasters." Doesn't exactly sound like a startling, paradigm-shifting result, does it?
So while we'll have to wait for the modelers to incorporate the new data to see what the real impact is, I think that it is safe to say that anybody who is seizing upon this finding at this early stage as casting doubt on global warming certainly qualifies as a crank.
The perennial war cry of the crank is "If this one thing is wrong, then nothing they say can be trusted!"
Of course, in the real world, all data has flaws, and all interpretations are subject to revision. So a demand for absolute perfection gives the crank license to engage in cherry-picking, rationalizing away the data he doesn't like, while accepting that which feeds his obsession.
Real science doesn't work that way. When new data comes in, or errors are found in old data, the scientist carefully reassesses conclusions in the light of the new evidence.
No, he said that they are different things.
A newspaper and a history book are two very different things, but nobody would say that history has "nothing to do" with the news.
Weather is short term and local. Climate refers to long term regional trends.
Because you can charge high-risk individuals higher interest. So loaning to high-risk individuals can be extraordinarily profitable, if you can figure out a way to average out the risk.
This isn't rocket science--unless you get all of your "information" from right-wing talk radio.
Since Nintendo cannot reasonably be expected to evaluate whether a mod is a source of problems, a repair will necessarily involve restoring the system to its stock status. It is not unreasonable for there to be an extra charge for this extra work.
I agree that chirality implies some kind of autocatalytic process to amplify weak natural chiral bias or statistical fluctuations, but I don't agree that it is diagnostic for life. After all, crystals self-assemble, so a planet dominated by large crystal structures could be highly chiral.
Self-assembly is only part of the definition of life--there also needs to be mutation, and the mutation has to affect the propagation of subsequent generations.
Generally when games release simultaneously with movies, they tend to be disappointing, because the rigid release date forces the game to come out whether it's really finshed or not
I find it weird the way people are obsessing about this. I barely noticed it. Dr. Manhattan was clearly intentionally depicted at the very trough of the uncanny valley, barely even human. He looked no more naked than a horse.
You pretty much lose any comics cred if you don't at least know about Watchmen--probably one of the two or three most critically acclaimed modern comics works.
It's like not having ever heard of "The Spirit."
It was one of the first post-modern reexaminations of the costumed superhero them. Taking the basic comic book notion--grown men dressing up in silly costumes to fight crime--and asking the question, "What sort of people would actually do this, and why?" Additionally, it addresses the question of what the political impact would have been of an actual godlike superhuman back in the Viet Nam era.
I'm looking forward to the long version. I thought the movie was a wonderful adaptation, but a lot had to be cut out, and I think the time was too short to properly appreciate the complexities of the plot. It would probably have fared better as a cable miniseries, with a dozen episodes or so.