Are You Doing Research?
extravagaria.com
extravagaria.com
Things might be different at (say) IBM Research Zürich, doing work on atomic force microscopy, but that sort of thing seems to be the exception rather than the rule in industrial R&D. I don't know if I would have expected to see hardcore science at Sun Labs where the article writer's friend worked.
However, if you're running a megalab and have lots of political clout, it's very important to keep anyone from thinking carefully and trying to look for inconsistencies. Academic empires fall from people doing things like that.
On the other hand, there were only a handful of professors at the Rockefeller University, where I went to grad school, who I respected as scientists. One of them had a Nobel prize. The rest didn't. The rest of the Nobel prize winners in that campus lousy with them you could have defunded and put out to be homeless on the streets and had no real effect on the advance of science.
You don't get anywhere by doing and not thinking. You don't get anywhere by thinking and not doing. Things like this don't have to be (and are not) black and white.
I'm curious how some of you in a startup and non-startup handle employees doing research. I'll give a quick example and then propose a personal problem for those who want to skip my dribble. ;)
EXAMPLE: I've held various levels of IT positions at various companies. Great. At times, you need to do more than just read a quick article or blog post, you need to do some serious reading (and testing) if you are doing some major changes. At times, this reading was met with dirty looks or snide remarks from upper management, but I was lucky 90% of the time and my immediate boss would back me up. For clarification, I would also spend hours reading (and testing) at home.
I understand the thought of not paying someone in corporate to read, but at some point, I think it should be reasonable to allow employees to read on the job. How do you police it? That's a different conversation.
(unless you want to read personal dribble you can stop here)
Personal anecdote: in two different jobs I became the "go to" research person. In one instance, I stopped coding, but I kept writing algorithms. Nothing at all fancy. But my teammates loved it. One specific colleague and I worked together regularly to come up with faster and cleaner ways to do some complex business logic in our web applications. I'm not much of a sports person, but everyone else was...my nickname was "special teams" and they would call me in where there was a problem.
Sure, he could have done this on his own, but I worked better as a generalist, a problem solver. I do not like coding for work, I love doing it on the side. I was in heaven, so was he. Clients were happy.
The problem? There are not many jobs, at least that I can find, where I can say "Yeah, I don't want to code, I just want to be your 'special teams' guy." I mention this to say, be careful where research takes you. I might suggest that you let it improve your skills or go full-research route. Sitting in limbo between the two isn't pretty.
And, for the record, Richard Feynman did not do very much paper reading. I know, I know, a very special case, but I had to say it...
Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, it seems to actually be MUCH more efficient (if you have smart people to talk to): trying to find the good papers in the middle of the sea of publications/noise is a very time consuming task.
I'm at my most "research productive" with a pen and paper in the cafeteria after about a month of the right stimuli!
For background, I'm getting a PhD in CS.
It seems like research labs are few and far between, and (unfortunately) I can't stay a grad student forever.
For example, at my current job, I have plenty of time to sit around and think about new trading strategies and no deadline for producing one that makes it into production. New ideas then go through prototype and back-testing stages, and most never see the light of day. This isn't at all considered to be a problem.
The only bullet point that my job doesn't satisfy is the first-- the types of strategies I'm working on simply aren't sufficiently deep to warrant investing years in developing the initial version of any one of them.
That's strange. If you do your job properly, why shouldn't you get paid even if it is by the taxpayer?
And even there, you could say everyone is "stealing" from the public goods all the time. (if you hunt and eat an animal, then you have stolen it from the rest of the people).
What is a public good? Who decides what is public?
If I hunt and eat an wild animal, i.e. one that was not raised on a farm, I am not stealing it from anyone. By your definition the only way I am not stealing it is if I kill it and divide equally to everyone.
To pay less taxes you could either relocate to some place with less taxes (this is quite possible in the US, since state and city taxes vary). Or you could work democratically to change the system. If you really want to live in any place approximating anarcho-capitalism, you would have to move to a 3rd world country.
If one could opt out of taxes, that would be the end of the tax system. Of course no individual wants to pay for the public services. Everybody want the other guy to pay! In the same manner, you could ask why one cannot opt out of the penal system. --- As to the "hunting as theft" issue: as long as there are plenty of animals to hunt, you are not taking from anyone. That was the state of affairs 100,000 years ago. When resources are limited they must be managed/taxed in some way. Humanity has not solved most of these issues at this point. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
So you could ask: when did I agree to those japanese fishing vessels depleting the fisheries next to my shores, do I have a choice in the matter? Their fishing raises the price of wild fish and serves as a de-facto sushi tax, only you don't get to eat any of the sushi...
My point is, we are not in the paleolithic period anymore. The world is too complex and resources are too few for fully individualistic economic philosophies.
Look at the decoding of the human genome. No company has a patent on that because public institutions did it first.
If you're curious, here's a patent list and some background on the company:
https://www.celera.com/celera/intellectual_property
Sure, oil companies spill oil sometimes; but they (should) have to pay for that.
Big telcos tend to have monopoly status, and exploit consumers, but they do that not because they are companies, but because they are in a patron-client relationship with the government.
Some companies produce tremendous benefit to society; others produce small benefits, which matter a lot in the aggregate.
I know IBM have a pretty big research organisation, but how easy it is to get there, and how secure the positions are I have no idea.
I don't really see why taxpayer funded research is bad, and I say that as a taxpayer not a researcher.
Instead you could work in Ad targeting/personalization, where you will help trick people into clicking on ads for products they have no interest in, while invading their privacy in borderline-illegal ways.
Or you could do for-profit research whose only purpose is to convince decision makers to buy X, regardless of the true reality. (drug companies put billions into this type of work)
Or you could work in Microsoft Research or similar environments. It is actually quite similar to academia in many regards. The funding is also mostly taken by force (of monopoly, many individuals and companies have no choice but to work in Microsoft Office due to deliberate format incompatibilities).
I'm not sure of the situation in the US but in Canada we have something called: Scientific Research & Experimental Development (SRED) program, where the government will reimburse a company a percent of the money spent on R&D.
Judging by what w3m and lynx show me, they're doing User-Agent sniffing to serve up pages. Isn't that a violation of the Geneva Convention at this point?
They have no good reason behind whitelisting browsers.
> The latest version of Safari, Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer is required
I see two browsers on a fairly fast release schedule. Do they really update their User-Agent filter on Firefox's release cycle? On Chrome's release cycle? At that point, they might as well be specifying patch levels; pick a minimum version and keep with it.
Or, you know, design a site up to modern standards, because if you absolutely need everything in the HTML5 spec to host a blog you might as well actually listen to a web dev once in a while.
Not all of us are on the iphone. I guess the audience is being selected.