President Eisenhower warned of this. In the world of climate science, we have come to know this simple equation as demonstrated by some of the most zealous proponents of climate change:
No Alarm = No Funding + No Glory
Dr. Lonnie Thomspon and his false alarm over Mt. Kilimanjaro, coupled with him being made famous by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth while seeking more research money to study a problem that is actually more related to land use and evapotranspiration than global warming comes to mind as an example. Andrew Resnick has written a letter published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science that suggests researchers are “addicted” to funding, much like drug addicts. His words, not mine.
Click image to enlarge
Source: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/06/11/1407369111.extract
Davidmhoffer:
I agree the substantive point in your post at June 15, 2014 at 7:17 am which is http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/14/in-pnas-a-surprising-letter-systemic-addiction-to-research-funding/#comment-1662561 but I write to dispute a minor – although important – point you make.
As you say
And you suggest how to obtain the research which could provide a model capable of providing the “results”.
But you provide an erroneous implication when you say
Actually, that is not right. Many important research findings are not patented precisely because the patent would reveal valuable information. And the information in a patent may not enable the patented device to work.
Much commercial research which is published gets published for reasons of advertising and is not replicable in a useful manner. Indeed, I published such a paper in the 1980s, and I provide a footnote which explains this as illustration.
Richard
Footnote
I devised a mensuration method while employed by the UK’s Coal Research Establishment (CRE). Incidentally, older Americans may be aware of Joseph Bronowski who was a CRE Research Director who made TV programs e.g. The Ascent of Man.
The technique used an optical microscope and a digital stepping stage to obtain the coordinate position of any point on a 10 cm x 10 cm planar surface to a precision and accuracy of +/- 0.5 micron. I published a paper in microscopy that explained how this was achieved. The method provides such extreme accuracy that it was copied for use by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) which sets metrology standards in the UK.
My paper explained
* the equipment and its use,
* how the specimen, equipment and laboratory had to be temperature controlled,
* how the stepping stage had to approach each measured point from the same directions,
* and etc..
But anyone copying the system in the paper would not have a viable system at least not for more than two years. The reason for this is that the system measures to better than the tolerances of the drives of the stepping stage. Hence, each individual coordinate point needs to be calibrated and such calibration would take more than two years even using automated calibration.
However, I had devised an algorithmic method which enabled calibration of the system with 99% confidence for each coordinate point to be obtained in under three hours. Indeed, this calibration method was the real value of the development. But anybody building the system described in the paper would need to employ CRE to provide its calibration. CRE would not have allowed me to publish the paper if the paper had included information about the calibration method.
davidmhoffer says
Excellent responses today, eloquent and succinct a pleasure to read.
So, has anyone ever seen this data?
Well, have they?
Michel
bob sykes says: June 15, 2014 at 5:14 am
“…. Lonnie Thompson and his wife are worshipped at tOSU. And the hallways of his edifice on West Campus are still decorated with Mann’s original hockey stick graphic. A while ago, the student paper “The Lantern” wrote that he had finally agreed to archive his data and grant access to it. I don’t know if that is true or not. There has been a University policy for years that federally funded data must be archived and made available, but no one has ever been able to make Lonnie obey that rule.”
Eric Worrall says:
June 14, 2014 at 4:11 pm
“Or a related problem, printing circuit board tracks made of metal on 3D plastic constructions.”
—————–
HA, I like that.
How about “printing” some of the components themselves ….. that those metal “tracks” connect to?
That would increase component “density” and decrease assembly “time”.
Kudos to Dwight Eisenhower for being able to foresee such a development. It might be worthy of coining a natural law – D.E.’s ‘forecast’ is certainly better than climate science’s. The slowdown, the asymptote of discovery of the hard sciences since pre-mid 20th Century had this consequence. Scientists tend now to bask in the genius of engineering developments – to be sure engineers will have a bank of science that can still give us new stuff (the misnomer ‘rocket science’ is one of the more egregious examples of the basking – er, it’s rocket engineering, folks).
I see analogies in other arts. We had a great age of poets, but there are only so many words and so many rhymes and so many facets to the human condition and even a limit to imagination that we naturally get fewer and fewer great poets with time. Oh we predictably slid over into non-rhyming poetry as a temporary hope – more metaphorical stuff for a while (I’m fond of Beat generation poetry), but today, no one can make a living at it – except where grants are supplied to produce a slim arty hardbound folio.
Classical music did about the same thing. For composers, there are only 12 notes and fewer octaves and the baroque folk had a field day with them. There followed a period of poor near-plagiarists until finally the barren edges of cacophony began to be scraped and weird low level harmonics explored in the 20th C. Stravinsky stuff was one step a way from an explosion in a coat hanger factory. Classical music today is basically PERFORMANCE of the old stuff, pretty much what physics is all about. The end of the 19th C. saw the birth of modern pop music- ragtime and progressions up through blues, jazz and rock. It seems to have had a similar compressed history. In the new stuff, the thrill is gone. You don’t even have to be able to sing. There is a lot of retrospection now in performance, seeking quality in the past.
I could go on about painting, architecture and sculpture, the masters, the cubists who ran out of geometry quickly, architect boxes which have little more to do, it seems, but to make buildings higher and higher, for fanciful with less utility (Dubai’s skyline is the Stravinsky of architecture); Michelangelo to bent boiler plate… Dark matter and strings oddly also evoke Stravinsky. All these white lab coats and horn-rimmed glasses are new age performance scientists now. Without the largess of these obscenely giant grants where would they be? They may be becoming to big to fail?
One of the greatest truisms of all times is the concept of: ‘The dead hand of government.’
Hence government and climate research.
richardscourtney;
But anyone copying the system in the paper would not have a viable system at least not for more than two years.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Yes agreed on everything you said. Some patents never get filed precisely to protect the IP and some get filed in a fashion that makes is deliberately difficult to replicate. But my main point to Nick Stokes stands.
Good to see you commenting again by the way.
Pres. Eisenhower’s words:
We see this all the time. My field (public health) lurches from crisis to crisis, primarily because rent-seeking academics and cash-starved government agencies seek a new teat to feed upon. Let me count a few….PCBs, asbestos, bioterrorism, bird flu….all created vast, powerful constituencies that withered and died when the funding stream halted.
As an honest scientist, I find it maddening. I’m one of the “solitary inventors, tinkering in his shop” and it’s been getting damn hard to keep it up lately.
I’ve been saying this for 5 years, but now someone’s published it in PNAS, it must be true……
The only interest in this story is that it’s now acceptable to say it in the mainstream academic press.
The content is such old news it makes Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch look like 14 year olds…..
Dr K.A. Rodgers says:
June 14, 2014 at 5:28 pm
It ain’t so much the scientists who are addicted to funding but their lords and masters in admin who cream at least 15% off the top.
This is 100% accurate. My thesis advisor was often at odds with university admin because he funded all of his research through private and industry grants. The administration REALLY wanted to get their hands on this money, claiming that all research grants needed to pass through administration’s hands first where it would then be divvied. Unfortunately for the admin you can’t exactly make a Sicilian give you money.
Daniel S. Greenberg _Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion_
But it’s both government grants and business executives getting too cozy with the professorial set. Everyone’s trying to funnel other people’s earnings into their own pockets.
Andy: If you look at the changes in large research universities over the past half or quarter century, you will see that the amount of building space devoted to scientific research has exploded. Research universities have been relatively successful at getting donors to pay for major new buildings, but most of the funding needed to keep those buildings and the people inside them running comes from the government. Intellectual freedom is great in other areas, but universities can’t afford many science professors that aren’t pulling in large grants. For example, the US spends about $65B/yr on science. Stanford University, which spends a total of almost $5B per year receives about $1B/yr in government funding (not counting SLAC) mostly for sciences (including medicine) and about $0.8B from tuition.
You dont become present by being humble.