I might agree with you that it isn't NASA's role to fund the question, 'Is our civilization sustainable and will we go the way of the Roman empire', perhaps NSF could fund it. What is certain to me however is that the question is a very serious one and I for one do not want our civilization to come to an abrupt end just because of some right-wing ideology or even more irrational because a religious group tells us that God said it would and therefore there is nothing we can do about. This is a Darwinian test for us, those who want to keep our civilisation going that those who either don't care, or are just being irrational. It is worth studying, by who is another matter.
Definitely practical. Since I teach both undergraduates and graduates, I know that undergraduates simply lack the knowledge and skills. Also if they don't want to do a PhD then most likely they also lack the motivation and that is a significant impediment to a project. You don't do a PhD for the money but for the chance to do something original and worthwhile (Pay is about 26K) per year. One could pay more but society as whole isn't fully aware of the need for high level research and therefore is unwilling or unable to foot the bill. Recall that during the election that even educated politicians such Sarah Palin announced that research on Drosophila was a waste of money, of course many of us know that work on this organism has had a profound impact on genetics, molecular biology and most significantly embryo development. It is difficult to justify to the general population some of the high end research that an advanced civilization such as the US carries out because it is so completely out of their normal experience.
I quite agree with you. Most open source text books are inadequate compared to pay for books for all the reasons you outlined. I write software and a lot of prose for a living and I have no doubt in my mind that software writing is far far easier than writing a good text book. If you think about it, software can be logically correct but can at the same time be sloppily written while still useful. Indentation doesn't have to be perfect or even present, variables names don't have to be spelt correctly, even algorithms don't have to be perfect and source organization can be haphazard so long as the original author knows what's going on. A book on the other hand not only has to be logically correct, but also look good (check out the CK-12 open source books that California has chosen, the layout is pretty bad), has to be clearly organized and above all read well (with out spelling or grammatical errors). A book also has far more facets to it including text, figures, problems sets (plus answers!), index etc. Anyone who has tried or has written a substantial book will know how difficult and time consuming it is to produce a good text book.
Did you check the formatting in ck12, it looks terrible. The math fonts in sentences are larger than the font used in the sentence text so that all the equations stick out. Now if they'd used an open formatting system like LaTeX they wouldn't had that problem. I think I would prefer to buy a $1 second-hand book from the 1950/40s that use this, at least there were far more problems in the old books.
Having used the GUIs in Visual Basic and Qt I would quite go as far as saying that signal/slot pairs is just like visual basic (VB). With VB you just click on the component (button etc) and it takes you directly to the code. In Qt you use this amazingly inept way of connecting stuff together visually by way of wires. I've never understood why other development environments have never taken the VB (or Delphi for that matter) route in GUI design. For simple GUIs it is highly productive, meas you can focus on user experience and coding rather than worrying about to to actually layout the controls.. But what is even more amazing most developers don't even know there are simpler way to build GUIs. Having said that I would agree that Qt is a very excellent toolkit, I just wish they would modernize the GUI construction end of it.
I would like to add that I think open access has a number of beneficial side effects because of the costs involved. In my own work, if I think the paper isn't that significant or perhaps all aspects of the research haven't been investigated I will send it to the preprint archive at arxiv. However if I think it can get through peer review I will sent it to an open access journal. The fact that it will cost me 1k-3K to publish means that I am more inclined to write a longer paper and a more substantial one, in fact one idea is to consolidate a bunch of related ideas from my preprint papers. The fact that closed access journals are free means that the system has been abused with either mediocre paper being published or by encouraging paper slicing to maximize the number of papers published.
In conclusion, I take the opposite view by suggesting that open access with associated costs, increases the quality of the science but also reduced the dross.
I think what you're talking about is akin to socialism, i.e the government provides the services. Sure, somethings can be kick started by government (eg space travel) but I don't think it's viable model for all services.
It's nothing to do with officials at AMTRAK, its because freight has priority on the track and it isn't profitable to run passenger trains. I'm not sure actually if there is any profitable line service in the world. I imaging the Chinese train is either a government funded one or a joint effort with the private sector.
Don't forget that our freeway system was partly built so that the military could move troops etc rapidly from one part of the country to the other. I bet you that if there were a military reason for having a high speed train network, we'd have one tomorrow. Why do you think NASA is funded? Because we want to do science in space?? Most big projects in this country are done because there is a military advantage in doing it, otherwise it doesn't happen.
We're talking more about basic research not applications. Real applications of stem cell may be 10/20 years away and speculative, not something, as a shareholder, I would want a company to do. You might say well neither should our government support this kind of speculative long term research. The trouble is, the US is not an isolated country, other countries will pick up the tab (eg China!) instead and their home companies will get the patents and profits and we as tax payers and business owners will ultimately suffer in the long run. I would rather we spend a little now (0.1 cent per day) and reap the benefits later.
How do you think the US has managed to stay at the top for so long? It's a combination of good business, strong laws and plenty of R&D, a partnership between the government and the people.
I think the right-wingers are trying to kill this country. Government has always stepped in assist in places where industry cannot and basic R&D is one of them.
I don't think I would say unlimited funds, the total NSF budget this year is about 5 billion, i.e it is finite, unlike the military budget which does seem at times unlimited.
I remember a lot of slashdot readers complaining that Government should get out of basic research and let private industry do it. Sure, some basic research can be done by private industry but as we see from this news piece, private industry has no real immediate interest in funding basic R&D. That's why, slashdot readers, we need some of our taxes diverted to fund basic R&D. For those who hate that thought, remember that we only contribute about 8 cents each per day for the National Science Foundation.
Another way to look at this that we spend as must in two weeks in Iraq as we spend on basic R&D for a whole year.
As I wrote in a previous post, this is definitely not true, at least in the sciences. There is *no* tenure credit for writing a text book, what matters is grant money.
The contribution of textbook writing or even chapter contributions is minimal to getting tenure. What really matters is how many grants you can pull into the University. Universities get roughly 33 cents on every dollar that is won through a grant and there are no strings attached to that 33 cents.
Writing a good text book can take up to 6 man months. Very few people are willing to do this for nothing because of the work involved, and it's not like coding. Coding is immediate and the end result is 'alive', writing takes much more time and the end result is a static object.
Except they have similar devices in San Francisco, New York and Boston and they don't suffer the same problems. The issues are therefore not as simple as you suggest. I think one of the problems was that they placed them in districts that already had drug users and prostitutes. Now if you stuck them in nice areas you might get a different story.
Of course that was generated, the added value is in the extra taxes the government gets. By educating the workforce we get a higher paying workforce which in turn pay more taxes. How much tax do you think the government gets of Big Mac employees? Income tax comes from the educated middle class. You should think of government expenditure as an investment, it's a long term one but I'm will to invest for the long term.
Actually I thought the article was rather funny and the prose was quite decent. It's one of the few articles that I've read right through to the end. It caught my attention.
Do you think as lay people, we should tell federally funded scientists what to work on? I for one would like to see research done on many fronts, we can afford it as a society given the vast sums of money society spends on a worthless war. It is ironic though that many of the techniques being used to investigate cancer today were developed from work done in the 50s and 60s on viruses that infect bacteria. Now if you were in charge, I presume this work would never have been funded, let's be honest who really cares whether bacteria get infected or not, better tackle cancer first then worry about other areas of research?
Slashdot Mirror
I might agree with you that it isn't NASA's role to fund the question, 'Is our civilization sustainable and will we go the way of the Roman empire', perhaps NSF could fund it. What is certain to me however is that the question is a very serious one and I for one do not want our civilization to come to an abrupt end just because of some right-wing ideology or even more irrational because a religious group tells us that God said it would and therefore there is nothing we can do about. This is a Darwinian test for us, those who want to keep our civilisation going that those who either don't care, or are just being irrational. It is worth studying, by who is another matter.
Are you suggesting we shouldn't study how the stimulus money is being spent and what effect it might or might not have?
Definitely practical. Since I teach both undergraduates and graduates, I know that undergraduates simply lack the knowledge and skills. Also if they don't want to do a PhD then most likely they also lack the motivation and that is a significant impediment to a project. You don't do a PhD for the money but for the chance to do something original and worthwhile (Pay is about 26K) per year. One could pay more but society as whole isn't fully aware of the need for high level research and therefore is unwilling or unable to foot the bill. Recall that during the election that even educated politicians such Sarah Palin announced that research on Drosophila was a waste of money, of course many of us know that work on this organism has had a profound impact on genetics, molecular biology and most significantly embryo development. It is difficult to justify to the general population some of the high end research that an advanced civilization such as the US carries out because it is so completely out of their normal experience.
I quite agree with you. Most open source text books are inadequate compared to pay for books for all the reasons you outlined. I write software and a lot of prose for a living and I have no doubt in my mind that software writing is far far easier than writing a good text book. If you think about it, software can be logically correct but can at the same time be sloppily written while still useful. Indentation doesn't have to be perfect or even present, variables names don't have to be spelt correctly, even algorithms don't have to be perfect and source organization can be haphazard so long as the original author knows what's going on. A book on the other hand not only has to be logically correct, but also look good (check out the CK-12 open source books that California has chosen, the layout is pretty bad), has to be clearly organized and above all read well (with out spelling or grammatical errors). A book also has far more facets to it including text, figures, problems sets (plus answers!), index etc. Anyone who has tried or has written a substantial book will know how difficult and time consuming it is to produce a good text book.
Did you check the formatting in ck12, it looks terrible. The math fonts in sentences are larger than the font used in the sentence text so that all the equations stick out. Now if they'd used an open formatting system like LaTeX they wouldn't had that problem. I think I would prefer to buy a $1 second-hand book from the 1950/40s that use this, at least there were far more problems in the old books.
Having used the GUIs in Visual Basic and Qt I would quite go as far as saying that signal/slot pairs is just like visual basic (VB). With VB you just click on the component (button etc) and it takes you directly to the code. In Qt you use this amazingly inept way of connecting stuff together visually by way of wires. I've never understood why other development environments have never taken the VB (or Delphi for that matter) route in GUI design. For simple GUIs it is highly productive, meas you can focus on user experience and coding rather than worrying about to to actually layout the controls.. But what is even more amazing most developers don't even know there are simpler way to build GUIs. Having said that I would agree that Qt is a very excellent toolkit, I just wish they would modernize the GUI construction end of it.
I would like to add that I think open access has a number of beneficial side effects because of the costs involved. In my own work, if I think the paper isn't that significant or perhaps all aspects of the research haven't been investigated I will send it to the preprint archive at arxiv. However if I think it can get through peer review I will sent it to an open access journal. The fact that it will cost me 1k-3K to publish means that I am more inclined to write a longer paper and a more substantial one, in fact one idea is to consolidate a bunch of related ideas from my preprint papers. The fact that closed access journals are free means that the system has been abused with either mediocre paper being published or by encouraging paper slicing to maximize the number of papers published. In conclusion, I take the opposite view by suggesting that open access with associated costs, increases the quality of the science but also reduced the dross.
I think what you're talking about is akin to socialism, i.e the government provides the services. Sure, somethings can be kick started by government (eg space travel) but I don't think it's viable model for all services.
I agree with you on the whole but I'm not even sure it is systems biology, isn't it more like synthetic biology?
You think Iraq is an investment!!?? Jesus Christ, get your head out of your ar****
It's nothing to do with officials at AMTRAK, its because freight has priority on the track and it isn't profitable to run passenger trains. I'm not sure actually if there is any profitable line service in the world. I imaging the Chinese train is either a government funded one or a joint effort with the private sector.
Don't forget that our freeway system was partly built so that the military could move troops etc rapidly from one part of the country to the other. I bet you that if there were a military reason for having a high speed train network, we'd have one tomorrow. Why do you think NASA is funded? Because we want to do science in space?? Most big projects in this country are done because there is a military advantage in doing it, otherwise it doesn't happen.
Because religious faith is totally illogical?
We're talking more about basic research not applications. Real applications of stem cell may be 10/20 years away and speculative, not something, as a shareholder, I would want a company to do. You might say well neither should our government support this kind of speculative long term research. The trouble is, the US is not an isolated country, other countries will pick up the tab (eg China!) instead and their home companies will get the patents and profits and we as tax payers and business owners will ultimately suffer in the long run. I would rather we spend a little now (0.1 cent per day) and reap the benefits later. How do you think the US has managed to stay at the top for so long? It's a combination of good business, strong laws and plenty of R&D, a partnership between the government and the people.
There is a fundamental difference, vacuum tubes are voltage controlled devices whereas transistors are current controlled.
I think the right-wingers are trying to kill this country. Government has always stepped in assist in places where industry cannot and basic R&D is one of them.
I don't think I would say unlimited funds, the total NSF budget this year is about 5 billion, i.e it is finite, unlike the military budget which does seem at times unlimited.
I remember a lot of slashdot readers complaining that Government should get out of basic research and let private industry do it. Sure, some basic research can be done by private industry but as we see from this news piece, private industry has no real immediate interest in funding basic R&D. That's why, slashdot readers, we need some of our taxes diverted to fund basic R&D. For those who hate that thought, remember that we only contribute about 8 cents each per day for the National Science Foundation. Another way to look at this that we spend as must in two weeks in Iraq as we spend on basic R&D for a whole year.
As I wrote in a previous post, this is definitely not true, at least in the sciences. There is *no* tenure credit for writing a text book, what matters is grant money.
The contribution of textbook writing or even chapter contributions is minimal to getting tenure. What really matters is how many grants you can pull into the University. Universities get roughly 33 cents on every dollar that is won through a grant and there are no strings attached to that 33 cents. Writing a good text book can take up to 6 man months. Very few people are willing to do this for nothing because of the work involved, and it's not like coding. Coding is immediate and the end result is 'alive', writing takes much more time and the end result is a static object.
Except they have similar devices in San Francisco, New York and Boston and they don't suffer the same problems. The issues are therefore not as simple as you suggest. I think one of the problems was that they placed them in districts that already had drug users and prostitutes. Now if you stuck them in nice areas you might get a different story.
Of course that was generated, the added value is in the extra taxes the government gets. By educating the workforce we get a higher paying workforce which in turn pay more taxes. How much tax do you think the government gets of Big Mac employees? Income tax comes from the educated middle class. You should think of government expenditure as an investment, it's a long term one but I'm will to invest for the long term.
You sound like the very person he was referring to, "screw you, newbie". I know the find command and I think the description is overly complex.
Actually I thought the article was rather funny and the prose was quite decent. It's one of the few articles that I've read right through to the end. It caught my attention.
Do you think as lay people, we should tell federally funded scientists what to work on? I for one would like to see research done on many fronts, we can afford it as a society given the vast sums of money society spends on a worthless war. It is ironic though that many of the techniques being used to investigate cancer today were developed from work done in the 50s and 60s on viruses that infect bacteria. Now if you were in charge, I presume this work would never have been funded, let's be honest who really cares whether bacteria get infected or not, better tackle cancer first then worry about other areas of research?