Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Tue, 19 Mar 2013 17:00:00 PDT Joyce Hung http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101209/09015312207/dailydirt-basic-science-deserves-some-respect.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101209/09015312207/dailydirt-basic-science-deserves-some-respect.shtml budget cut of $283 million this year, eliminating (up to) ~1,000 research grants. It's a shame because over the years many NSF-funded projects have resulted in discoveries that have turned into commercial products with significant benefits to society. Unfortunately, for people outside the scientific community, it's easy to overlook these impacts when trying to decide where to cut spending. Here are a few examples of why basic science deserves some respect.

• Sad fact: Funding for basic science research makes up less than 1% of the federal budget. Even sadder is that cutting the small amount the government spends on basic science will have little impact on short-term fiscal goals, but its negative effects on the economy will be felt for decades to come, potentially costing the U.S. billions of dollars in missed future opportunities. [url]
• Lasers are an example of how a discovery in basic science can eventually lead to a revolutionary invention. The first laser was built in the 1950s, but practical applications for lasers didn't appear until decades later. Today, lasers are a multi-billion dollar industry and are key to many technologies used in manufacturing, communications, medicine, entertainment, and scientific research. [url]
• Cutting funding for basic science research will impact young investigators the most. Actually, brand new tenure-track professors are somewhat insulated because there's always some money set aside for them. It's the just tenured professors that will feel it the most, as they try to compete for grants against the entire population, which includes Nobel laureates, National Academicians, and more well-established researchers. [url]

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]]> urls-we-dig-up http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20101209/09015312207 Wed, 7 Nov 2012 17:00:00 PST Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100904/22445810905/dailydirt-bad-science-is-coming-to-get-us.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100904/22445810905/dailydirt-bad-science-is-coming-to-get-us.shtml

The number of retractions from scientific journals has increased tenfold over the past decade. But it's not clear how much is misconduct and how much is honest scientific mistake... [url]

Data detective Uri Simonsohn has published his statistical methods for exposing the suspicious data of social psychologists. Lies, damn lies and statistics... but at least statistics can be used to ferret out the lies. [url]

Apparently, the UK is notorious for its bad science journalism. We're talking "labvertisements" -- industry/product-funded science stories about (possibly fake) studies conducted by questionable scientists with dubious methods. But at least they're honest about it and take their research with a huge grain of salt. The US just re-packages many of these reports as serious news. [url]

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]]> urls-we-dig-up http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100904/22445810905 Mon, 6 Aug 2012 17:00:00 PDT Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100902/11383610879/dailydirt-how-do-you-solve-problem-like-academia.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100902/11383610879/dailydirt-how-do-you-solve-problem-like-academia.shtml

Associate professors are unhappy (significantly less satisfied than assistant or full professors)... with the monotony of writing research grants, publishing and teaching. Maybe it's a mid-life crisis, or just the realization that there's not much appreciation for teachers in general. #firstworldproblems? [url]

The problems with academia are nothing new -- graduate education has been called the "Detroit of higher learning" for a while now. Full-time professors probably shouldn't complain too much around grad students and adjunct professors, though. [url]

Tenured CS prof Terran Lane explains why he resigned from his position to go work at Google. "We're being paid partly in cool. If you take away the cool parts of the job, you might as well go make more money elsewhere." [url]

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]]> urls-we-dig-up http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100902/11383610879 Mon, 28 Jan 2008 14:39:02 PST Timothy Lee http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080125/17003874.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080125/17003874.shtml campus piracy stats were bogus raises an interesting question: why have colleges been so quick to roll over and accede to Hollywood's demands? Greg Sandoval points out that universities could have done their own studies a long time ago and had hard numbers to dispute the industry's accusations. If, as now appears to be the case, colleges are only responsible for a fairly small fraction of illegal file sharing, it makes the industry's demands that academia bend over backwards to help Hollywood in its anti-piracy fight a little unreasonable. The really screwy thing about this is that the movie industry is a relatively small part of the American economy. The industry's revenues in 2006 were just $42 billion. For comparison, Harvard alone has an endowment of $35 billion, and altogether the higher education sector has assets in the hundreds of billions of dollars. If they chose to stand up to Hollywood's bullying techniques, they would have little trouble mounting an effective legal defense. And given that Hollywood seems determined to paint students—academia's customers—in the worst possible light, it seems only appropriate that colleges be more proactive about countering unfair negative stereotypes of college campuses.

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