Re: Rising Above The Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future

Straydog wrote:

<snip>

Many of the grad students I knew from my grad school days kept low profiles after they received their degrees.

One went to work for an electronics firm, though, apparently, she was part of a group that was granted a patent a year or two ago. Another received an award, tried to start a company but couldn't get any funding for it, and, as far as I can tell, is working for a company completely unrelated to what he studied.

I don't recall any of them publishing anything.

Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is trash)


As relates to the above comments going back many lines, most patents, also, as a measure of significance, do NOT make any money. I recall that the fraction of all patents that make money is in the single digets percent.

Many of them don't even have to make sense or, for that matter, be practical.

<snip>

Isaac Newton seldom published because he was feared that his ideas would be pilfered.

Then, of course, you have those researchers who, rather than writing one
good paper based on their results, divide them so that they get two or
three publications.


Or more. Its a strategy to pad the CV. Lots of people "buy into" this, and sometimes the average "padder" even can't tell that someone else is padding their CVs, either.

I'm sure that there are some researchers with established reputations who engage in that. They may spend the earlier part of their careers to gain those respective reputations and then start padding because they either become lazy or the CV padding was the objective all along.

<snip>

Even if those ideas are published, they may appear initially in lesser-known or obscure journals. Often those publications don't appear in literature searches, which slows their disemmination.


Quite a bit of what passes for recognition is "recognition by the snobs"--or, it takes a "'Harvard' (etc) guy to recognize another 'Harvard' guy" and thus, if you are not in the elite category, then you are dust from the starting line. Recognition by the snobs often means that the manner of communication is not by research->publish->read cycle, but rather by verbal-rumor-from-conference->bzzz-bzzz-bzzz-on-the-
telephone->more-bzzz-bzzz-bzzz-on-the-telephone with muck-muck #2, and, etc. (i.e. the high muck-mucks don't even read the literature). 

Or verbal-rumour-from-earlier-conference -> bzzz-bzzz-bzzz-at-current-
conference-wine-and-cheese-party.

<snip>

Don't forget student evaluations.


In the research universities, where one's survival depends only on grants and luck with avoiding bad politics, research professors (who, almost by definition, don't teach) don't have to worry about this.

At my alma mater, I wasn't aware of any professors who weren't required to teach. Whenever I had to fill out an evaluation, there was a notice on the form about how the student should think carefully about what he or she said as there could be consequences for the prof in question. What those consequences were was never specified.

<snip>

Then there's the tendency to fund ideas which easily understood or are already popular. 


Yep.

 So something in, say, nanotechnology would likely receive

money because a lot of people are working in that field.


Even better: bioterrorism. Or, any "X"-terrorism. (footnote) 

Or anything that gets attention in the popular media, such as fuel cells.


footnote-depends on your government's budget for targeted research. Back in early '80s, basically lousey proposals in HIV-AIDS got funded much more easily than non-HIV-AIDS proposals. Lots of those guys who went for the fads got tenure. And, the ones not in HIV-AIDS? They lost their money
because NIH took money out of non-HIV-AIDS research. So much for funding _quality_.

I was reminded of that last night when I watched the movie "Contact" on a cable channel up here. The main character, played by Jodie Foster, had her funding cut and the project cancelled because the funding agencies weren't interested in what she was investigating.

<snip>
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