How outsourcing will transform scientific research • Hacker News Board

Re: How outsourcing will transform scientific research

#21

Post by roel_v » Tue, Aug 16, 2011, 8:20 AM UTC

elizabethiorns wrote: post #6

jessriedel wrote: post #5

I have no idea what they are outsourcing. Could someone explain?

Hi Jess - Science Exchange allows scientists to outsource individual experiments to specialist labs and facilities. For example gene expression profiling can be outsourced to specialist microarray providers. This is becoming a bigger and bigger issue as technology advances and scientists are forced to become more specialized.

I guess you're better off calling it 'lab exchange' or something then. There's no 'science' being exchanged, just some elbow-grease work (I don't know anything about the field you're in, so I may be oversimplifying, but I know some lab techs in the life sciences and it seems you don't need to be particularly bright to do that kind of work - just have, admittedly quite thorough, skills training).

Re: How outsourcing will transform scientific research

#22

Post by smackay » Tue, Aug 16, 2011, 9:49 AM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #5

I have no idea what they are outsourcing. Could someone explain?

Outsourcing is already reasonably well establihed in biology. There are a number of companies, notably from South Korea, that offer sequencing, probe library creation and a host of other services that take the grunt work out of a lot of lab work. The services are cheap and the results are very reliable. The real benefit of all this is that is opens up the field to a lot more people that could otherwise not afford the infrastructure in equipment and lab staff.

Re: How outsourcing will transform scientific research

#23

Post by _delirium » Tue, Aug 16, 2011, 11:27 AM UTC

thefool wrote: post #11

The one potential problem with going down this road is that even fewer people will have a broad understanding of what is going on in complicated experiments as labs are increasingly encouraged to specialize in a technique. Without some incentive for such people to exist, it seems likely that "obvious" connections between different fields may be missed for extended periods of time as people focus on executing incremen…

I'm somewhat more worried about just the lack of vertical integration, rather than even the cross-field collaboration. The more you treat parts of your experiments as black-boxes done by someone else, the more likely it is you might misunderstand some details of what exactly is happening, and draw the wrong conclusions. It requires the abstraction boundaries being very good, anyway, so that nothing gets changed at one level that actually impacts another level's results, without the sides communicating. If it's the same people, or at least people who see each other daily in the same lab, they're much more likely to notice that a "minor" change in a detail is actually experimentally relevant, due to how the result will be used somewhere else, or assumptions about the process that were baked into an equation, or something along those lines.

Even in a field like CS this happens a lot; tons of benchmarks are screwed up or at least misleadingly reported because someone didn't 100% understand the entire stack on which their part was running, and what its implications were for their results.

Re: How outsourcing will transform scientific research

#24

Post by 700ravens » Tue, Aug 16, 2011, 11:57 AM UTC

What this author considers a novel, future direction for science is something that I call "going to work in the morning." The US Department of Energy operates many user facilities distributed around the country, including nanotechnology centers, electron microscopy centers, neutron facilities, and X-ray facilities. (I run an instrument at one of the X-ray facilities.) Access to these facilities is free to the user and available through a peer-reviewed proposal system. In many cases, these facilities provide access to equipment and experimental techniques that don't exist at individual institutions. In some cases (notably at the nano-centers) capabilities are provided that might be available at a university or a company, but the nano-center provides access to a very broad suite of instrumentation as well as access to expert staff. While there might be a concern that the proposal system would cater to insiders (as one commenter discussing CERN suggests below), that is not my experience. I regularly have new folks coming to use my instrument.

My caveat here is that my field is in the physical sciences, while the author works in the life sciences. The user facility concept is specialty of the DoE and, while DoE user facilities do serve many life science users, it grew out of a physical sciences funding agency. Still, the user facility concept works well and is a model that could address the sort of distributed yet collaborative science that the author describes.

Re: How outsourcing will transform scientific research

#25

Post by virmundi » Tue, Aug 16, 2011, 12:01 PM UTC

rebel19 wrote: post #7

Has outsourcing really revolutionized IT?

From my limited view, not really. I've worked at multiple large insurance companies (I'm a consultant) over the past 6 years. For many it has created a large set communication disruptions that are hard to overcome. Also, many outsourcing companies have poor quality control mechanisms. I've been at multiple clients where an Indian firm "delivered" code that wouldn't compile.

Outsourced IT can be helpful for some processes. This seems to be mostly grind work like using humans to automate testing. Rather than investing in a real automated testing tool, scripts are created and then given to a team in the country of outsource. They sit there clicking on links and buttons until something fails. Then, if you're luck, they send you an email detailing what buttons and data were modified before the failure. More often than not, you just get an email that says X didn't work for account Y. But better them than customers.

Re: How outsourcing will transform scientific research

#26

Post by flashingleds » Tue, Aug 16, 2011, 12:17 PM UTC

700ravens wrote: post #24

What this author considers a novel, future direction for science is something that I call "going to work in the morning." The US Department of Energy operates many user facilities distributed around the country, including nanotechnology centers, electron microscopy centers, neutron facilities, and X-ray facilities. (I run an instrument at one of the X-ray facilities.) Access to these facilities is free to the user an…

It does seem odd. What you're talking about is not even particular to big user facilities. If I don't have the (physics) facilities to do something, I just track down someone who does and ask them (which is not hard using google or looking at the relevant literature). The majority of the time they're happy to collaborate on the basis that they're on the paper. I think I'm missing some detail about this.

Re: How outsourcing will transform scientific research

#27

Post by blrgeek » Tue, Aug 16, 2011, 1:27 PM UTC

georgieporgie wrote: post #16

Outsourcing revolutionized the IT industry in the 1990s and 2000s It did? I thought it was generally accepted that outsourcing "IT" didn't really work out well.

Outsourcing != offshoring.

Notice GE GM BT Verizon etc don't have huge IT teams anymore? That's outsourcing. And it certainly worked.

For many basic IT services even ofshoring works well enough. Jury is out on offshored product development though.

Re: How outsourcing will transform scientific research

#28

Post by georgieporgie » Tue, Aug 16, 2011, 4:25 PM UTC

blrgeek wrote: post #27

georgieporgie wrote: post #16

Outsourcing revolutionized the IT industry in the 1990s and 2000s It did? I thought it was generally accepted that outsourcing "IT" didn't really work out well.

Outsourcing != offshoring. Notice GE GM BT Verizon etc don't have huge IT teams anymore? That's outsourcing. And it certainly worked. For many basic IT services even ofshoring works well enough. Jury is out on offshored product development though.

Notice GE GM BT Verizon etc don't have huge IT teams anymore? That's outsourcing. And it certainly worked.

I wasn't aware of this.

Re: How outsourcing will transform scientific research

#29

Post by jessriedel » Tue, Aug 16, 2011, 8:15 PM UTC

shadowfox wrote: post #9

jessriedel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the strong impression you have a very specific area or areas of science in mind, but you seem to speak in generalities. One can't outsource, e.g., physics, anthropology, or geology. So what specific fields typically run experiments which can be outsourced? Is it just biology?

In some sense some of experimental physics is getting "outsourced" already. For example (my understanding is that) there are many physicists working on experimental data coming out of CERN who are not participating actual design/running of the system. In that sense they are outsourcing the work to specialists.

This is a bad example, as those scientist are still part of the collaboration. (I was one of them.) The key part of outsourcing is that it is work done in exchange for money. And it's an exchange between two independent parties which are each self interested.

Otherwise, every time a business split up a project between multiple people or departments it would be "outsourcing".

Re: How outsourcing will transform scientific research

#30

Post by jessriedel » Tue, Aug 16, 2011, 8:16 PM UTC

roel_v wrote: post #21

elizabethiorns wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Jess - Science Exchange allows scientists to outsource individual experiments to specialist labs and facilities. For example gene expression profiling can be outsourced to specialist microarray providers. This is becoming a bigger and bigger issue as technology advances and scientists are forced to become more specialized.

I guess you're better off calling it 'lab exchange' or something then. There's no 'science' being exchanged, just some elbow-grease work (I don't know anything about the field you're in, so I may be oversimplifying, but I know some lab techs in the life sciences and it seems you don't need to be particularly bright to do that kind of work - just have, admittedly quite thorough, skills training).

Well, I don't have any problem with a romantic name, but there should at least be a clear description somewhere.