11–20 of 170 posts
I know you Silicon Valley people think that farmers are a bunch of hicks and an easy target to be disrupted. No f-ing way. Cornell University has many departments that are good, but when I look at the agriculture and vet school they are beyond anybody else. Ag schools do research which is relevant to the technological and business problems of their industry. They do plenty of work on genetic engineering, chemistry an…
Now, I don't think all academic research has to be relevant to industry. I'm getting kind of sick of this tactic, where this fake concession is made before going on about how academia isn't designed well enough to deliver to industry. If authors of articles like this didn't care about the efficiency of academia to deliver them research, what's the big deal if there are a bunch of people somewhere running around in ci…
I know you Silicon Valley people think that farmers are a bunch of hicks and an easy target to be disrupted. No f-ing way. Cornell University has many departments that are good, but when I look at the agriculture and vet school they are beyond anybody else. Ag schools do research which is relevant to the technological and business problems of their industry. They do plenty of work on genetic engineering, chemistry an…
Now, I don't think all academic research has to be relevant to industry. I'm getting kind of sick of this tactic, where this fake concession is made before going on about how academia isn't designed well enough to deliver to industry. If authors of articles like this didn't care about the efficiency of academia to deliver them research, what's the big deal if there are a bunch of people somewhere running around in ci…
If you want to work on problems irrelevant to industry, go nuts.
If you want to work on problems relevant to the industry, it helps to double-check that your problems are relevant to the industry.
The desire to work on problems relevant to industry is coming from academia, not the author.
Academics are in an insanely competitive environment, where what is rewarded is bringing in grants/high impact publications. There are a very select few academics that are so brilliant and have such sterling reputations they can afford to not play this game (like Matt Welsh's former advisor) but most young researchers don't have this luxury.
For example, Peter Higgs, the Nobel prize winner who postulated the existence of his namesake Boson, flat out said that: "I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system" (http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-b...). He spent several years of quiet research without publishing anything to develop his theory - a young professor doing the same now is unthinkable. The most highly successful young scientists I know now are incredibly career driven and optimize ruthlessly for the kind of output that tenure committees are looking for.
Basically, if you want researchers to incorporate best practices (tests, version control, well commented code, etc) and to actually attempt ambitious longterm research programmes, make sure that's what you reward, and remember you cannot just reward success. By definition, something ambitious has a high possibility of failure - if failing means that your career is destroyed, then people won't do it.
> I know this sounds like a waste of time because you probably won't get a paper out of it It's unfortunate that a "lessons learned" paper summarizing a sabbatical in industry doing customer-facing work would not be publishable. Surely it's far more useful to other academics than most papers. It'd definitely be more broadly relevant. My wife is a professor in a practical field and I'm always sad to hear what counts a…
I also don't feel academia is obliged to any particular promise of delivery, but that's kind of independent.
Academic research that unknowingly (or sometimes even knowingly) duplicates secret industry work is much more valuable than this discussion indicates. Sure, it's not valuable _to Google_ for someone to publish things they already know. But everyone else benefits. If people at Google want their research to stop being duplicated, they should publish it. Of course, if your goal is that Google adopt your new system in th…
> I know this sounds like a waste of time because you probably won't get a paper out of it It's unfortunate that a "lessons learned" paper summarizing a sabbatical in industry doing customer-facing work would not be publishable. Surely it's far more useful to other academics than most papers. It'd definitely be more broadly relevant. My wife is a professor in a practical field and I'm always sad to hear what counts a…
I'm sad that journal reputation often trumps practicality of not exactly "breakthrough" articles that are nonetheless extremely interesting. One could argue that blog-reading should form an important part of being well-read in the literature, but again there's the concern over quality of research & insights that leads us to journals in the first place.