91–100 of 204 posts
Higgs isn't alone in remarking that he would not have had the time today to conduct the kind of work he did in the 1960s. Brian Greene has remarked that today’s grant-driven academia would not have allowed Einstein the luxury of a decade in which to develop his General Theory of Relativity. Eric Weinstein wrote that, "We have spent the last decades inhibiting such socially marginal individuals or chasing them to drop…
The numbers make the problem clear. In 2007, the year before CERN first powered up the LHC, the lab produced 142 master's and Ph.D. theses, according to the lab's document server. Last year it produced 327. (Fermilab chipped in 54.) That abundance seems unlikely to vanish anytime soon, as last year ATLAS had 1000 grad students and CMS had 900.
In contrast, the INSPIRE Web site, a database for particle physics, currently lists 124 postdocs worldwide in experimental high-energy physics, the sort of work LHC grads have trained for.
The situation is equally difficult for postdocs trying to make the jump to a junior faculty position or a permanent job at a national lab. The Snowmass Young Physicists survey received responses from 956 early-career researchers, including 343 postdocs. But INSPIRE currently lists just 152 "junior" positions, including 61 in North America. And the supply of jobs isn't likely to increase, says John Finley, an astrophysicist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who is leading a search to replace two senior particle physicists. "For the most part, I don't think departments are looking to grow their particle physics programs," he says.
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previou...
A warning to non-western members about values at CERN:
"The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value of Y)" [where Y>X]
source: LHCb calorimeters : Technical Design Report
ISBN: 9290831693 http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264
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Meh, still funny, and the jokes are often more clever than your typical network fare. EDIT: I love that I get downvoted for saying that I like a show. You guys must be a blast at parties.
I remember when hacker news had a culture that was embarrassed about making contentless unproductive comments like this. The article is about Peter Higgs and the current academic environment. The Hacker News thread contains a prolonged debate about the merits of some TV show. and then this comment.
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So... you pick out one joke you don't like and presume that no one else should like the show? Right... so you don't like it. Who cares? I certainly don't. I like it. There, I cancelled out your dislike.
No, I just don't think making references for their own sake is particularly clever. But if you like that kind of joke and you like the show, that's great. It's not something I would judge you as a person for. Heck, I'd be happy to suggest Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore , if you haven't read it already.
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A few days? People get upset if you haven't replied in an hour. Seriously though, long periods of solitude is not what we need. I'd not be productive if I became a hermit, but I'd be a lot more productive if I had periods of quiet time, punctuated by moments of discussion. This is how thinkers and artists (and hackers) worked for a long time, before we wrongly convinced ourselves that being interruptible improves pro…
It's not about solitude so much as the ability to control the contents and direction of our thoughts. Being responsive on email often requires giving up that control, fragmenting our attention and preventing the formation of larger thoughts. It provides short term gains, but we don't see what we're losing.
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The purpose of TBBT is not to entertain nerds, it's to acclimatize everyone else to the new normal where nerds hold a form of status. In 2013 nerds can be very rich, their fields can be very influential, and their intelligence can be useful to normals. Normals, however, don't understand how to relate to nerds in a post-high school environment. Their previous social training has been to simply ostracize and bully. TBB…
> laughing at the nerds not with them I think there is quite a lot laughing at normals going on in TBBT, too.
Honest question... i'm not sure
I feel like the inability to focus for long periods of time is holding back progress in many areas. If we can't even stay away from email for a few days, how can we clear our minds of conventional thinking?
A few days? People get upset if you haven't replied in an hour. Seriously though, long periods of solitude is not what we need. I'd not be productive if I became a hermit, but I'd be a lot more productive if I had periods of quiet time, punctuated by moments of discussion. This is how thinkers and artists (and hackers) worked for a long time, before we wrongly convinced ourselves that being interruptible improves pro…
And, relevant to the topic: he is quite productive, but I don't think he would make it in academia at his current output rate. It does help that he splits his work into separate papers, though, and that he publishes 'dull' papers about his tooling, too (IIRC, the original plan was to have two volumes of TAOCP. Now, we have 4 plus fascicles plus some books about the software he wrote to lay out his books and create the fonts therein)
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My problem is then I'll get too many phone calls. And for me, a phone call is more disruptive to my workflow then an email. Then again, that's probably just because I dislike talking on the phone in general.
I solved this problem too. People know that I hardly ever answer my phone either, unless you arranged to call me. If it's important, leave a voicemail with a reason why you called not just some "call me back" contextless shit. By "arranged to call me" I mean sending me an email and asking if you can call and at what time. I check mail about 3 times a day. We really new to get over this instant communication fad. It's…
There are things that can get resolved literally 100 times faster by talking than by e-mail or text or whatever. Not everything requires that urgency, but back-and-forth in e-mail can end up being a huge time sink for both parties.
Higgs isn't alone in remarking that he would not have had the time today to conduct the kind of work he did in the 1960s. Brian Greene has remarked that today’s grant-driven academia would not have allowed Einstein the luxury of a decade in which to develop his General Theory of Relativity. Eric Weinstein wrote that, "We have spent the last decades inhibiting such socially marginal individuals or chasing them to drop…
Higgs isn't alone in remarking that he would not have had the time today to conduct the kind of work he did in the 1960s. Brian Greene has remarked that today’s grant-driven academia would not have allowed Einstein the luxury of a decade in which to develop his General Theory of Relativity. Eric Weinstein wrote that, "We have spent the last decades inhibiting such socially marginal individuals or chasing them to drop…
Academia has been a force for stagnation well before the 1900s. e.g. Einstein wasn't working in Academia when he released his 1905 General Theory of Relativity paper. He spent 1901-1908 working in the patent office while releasing papers outside of Academia. Only in 1908 he was appointed lecturer in acknowledgment of his existing works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Patent_office
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_Papers#Special...
If you want to figure out what's wrong with Academia I suggest asking economists who deal with incentives and market forces as a subject of research as opposed to the anecdotes of a few well-meaning physicists. Yes, the physicists are clearly smarter. But with few exceptions they're just not trained or equipped to asses these problems.