It is indeed sad what's going on in the U.S. with regards to Research funding. Maybe you can go directly to the public who sympathises, for example maybe a kickstarter of sorts for researchers?
Goodbye Academia
31–40 of 217 posts
Re: Goodbye Academia
#32Not to sound like some crazy person with the word SOCIALIST written on the inside of my forehead in neon colors, but: It should be possible for WhatsApp to get "only" $18 billion and scientific research gets the remaining $1 billion. About a 5% tax. That way, venture capitalists could claim to fund innovation and would actually be truth-tellers.
I didn't downvote you, but WhatsApp affects more people than obscure scientific research.
I understand your point. Startups can be be obscure in the same ways as research: Interesting idea, but turned out to be wrong. Interesting, and right, but no significant application in the broad world. Or not even a very interesting idea.
There's value to a system where plausible things get funded, even if only 1 turn out to pay for the 9 that suck.
Re: Goodbye Academia
#33Not to sound like some crazy person with the word SOCIALIST written on the inside of my forehead in neon colors, but: It should be possible for WhatsApp to get "only" $18 billion and scientific research gets the remaining $1 billion. About a 5% tax. That way, venture capitalists could claim to fund innovation and would actually be truth-tellers.
I didn't downvote you, but WhatsApp affects more people than obscure scientific research.
If it wasn't for obscure scientific research, WhatsApp wouldn't exist.
Re: Goodbye Academia
#34Trying to become a successful academic seems about as insane as trying to become a rock star.
Here's Peter Higgs on the subject of how academics today compares to the past: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-b...
Most people I know who went down the academic route have left the world or are seriously thinking about leaving. I know a couple people with positions at top universities, and around the age of 30 their careers are just starting, with tenure being potentially a coin flip.
And it always traps the most brilliant people. That's the worst part.
Re: Goodbye Academia
#35Can someone post some numbers please? How many people are getting doctorates (probably increasing)? How many faculty positions are there over time (probably increasing much less)? How much money per researcher is out there (probably shrinking RAPIDLY)? How can we measure if we are getting more lenient with giving out PhD's? Shouldn't only the cream of the crop get to do research, not just the ones who claim to love i…
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.
Re: Goodbye Academia
#36Not to sound like some crazy person with the word SOCIALIST written on the inside of my forehead in neon colors, but: It should be possible for WhatsApp to get "only" $18 billion and scientific research gets the remaining $1 billion. About a 5% tax. That way, venture capitalists could claim to fund innovation and would actually be truth-tellers.
It's funny to me when people call companies like Twitter "tech companies". What technology has twitter invented? There are open source clones with 70% of the features in It's time we got rid of this misnomer. Just because part of your company revolves around a piece of software you wrote doesn't mean you are a tech company. Writing software is not necessarily creating technology. Otherwise anyone who's written their…
You can write a superficial clone of any web app. But can you handle 8000 tweets/sec in real-time? The innovation is in the back-end.
Re: Goodbye Academia
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's funny to me when people call companies like Twitter "tech companies". What technology has twitter invented? There are open source clones with 70% of the features in It's time we got rid of this misnomer. Just because part of your company revolves around a piece of software you wrote doesn't mean you are a tech company. Writing software is not necessarily creating technology. Otherwise anyone who's written their…
You can write a superficial clone of any web app. But can you handle 8000 tweets/sec in real-time? The innovation is in the back-end.
It's been done notoriously badly at Twitter, no offense if you are an employee. Sure it's gotten better since they switched to the JVM, but still scaling to that size has been done by hundreds of companies now. Once there are textbooks out describing the techniques, you are simply implementing known methodologies with perhaps a few customizations and tweaks. I don't really see much innovation there TBH.
Re: Goodbye Academia
#38Can someone post some numbers please? How many people are getting doctorates (probably increasing)? How many faculty positions are there over time (probably increasing much less)? How much money per researcher is out there (probably shrinking RAPIDLY)? How can we measure if we are getting more lenient with giving out PhD's? Shouldn't only the cream of the crop get to do research, not just the ones who claim to love i…
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, curren…
The numbers make the problem clear
Right, so the problem is that there are way too many students. Is the burden on the upcoming students to discontinue their track or on the universities (etc) to slow admissions and hiring postdocs?
Re: Goodbye Academia
#39These kinds of things are daily discussions in laboratories all over the world. Everyone knows there's no future in academia, and so everyone is looking for an exit plan. I actively discourage people from doing a PhD. Academia is a horrible feudalistic system that doesn't pay well enough to keep the bright minds it attracts. There is no sense in being a post-doc for life. Much better to take that hedge fund job. The…
Are you sure it's feudalism? It seems to me that the problem is in the modern management methods and always expecting results and publications, and tying finance to that, which is very shortsighted. But maybe you could explain better what you mean and what's more feudal about current system than what it always had been.
Re: Goodbye Academia
#40Not to sound like some crazy person with the word SOCIALIST written on the inside of my forehead in neon colors, but: It should be possible for WhatsApp to get "only" $18 billion and scientific research gets the remaining $1 billion. About a 5% tax. That way, venture capitalists could claim to fund innovation and would actually be truth-tellers.
It's funny to me when people call companies like Twitter "tech companies". What technology has twitter invented? There are open source clones with 70% of the features in It's time we got rid of this misnomer. Just because part of your company revolves around a piece of software you wrote doesn't mean you are a tech company. Writing software is not necessarily creating technology. Otherwise anyone who's written their…
Companies like Twitter, Facebook, etc, regardless of what technology they invent that is of use for the public, often healthily contribute to the open source ecosystem. Twitter has contributed a lot to the Scala ecosystem, and Facebook to the PHP pseucosystem.
They also fund/maintain OS project they themselves use. Facebook, through their FriendFeed acquisition, obtained Tornado [1] and have maintained it very well since. I use Tornado every day.
I get your point but your anger is misplaced if you think the large "SV tech companies" don't "invent". You want tech companies that don't contribute anything to mankind? Look at purely closed source hardware companies.