Are You Doing Research?

http://extravagaria.com/wiki/pages/M7k9z7a/Are_You_Doing_Science.html

by lispython • 14 years ago

92 44 14 years ago

ank2862• 14 years ago

A lot of research time is spent on finding that "aha!" moment, where you everything you have thought of coalesces into a force that makes pursuing your educated guess worthwhile.

DigitalJack• 14 years ago

Look at me still talking while there's science to do.

derleth2• 14 years ago

I'm interested in how they managed to cleanly remove the entire meat of the blog post without damaging any other aspect of the site. Is JavaScript really that ... petty ... or did they have to work hard to achieve that effect?

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?

solox3• 14 years ago

"Your browser is not supported. The latest version of Safari, Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer is required ..."

They have no good reason behind whitelisting browsers.

derleth2• 14 years ago

Also:

> 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.

msg• 14 years ago

Broken in android for me too. (htc desire, gingerbread, Browser)

Not all of us are on the iphone. I guess the audience is being selected.

Atrag• 14 years ago

As someone that does research full time in an academic setting, I am happy to hear someone talking about (and refuting) what I can imagine some companies calling a "research" position. I agree with him on his points, and I hope this drives home a point to some people who may be in a similar situation.

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...

lepacheco2• 14 years ago

Paper reading is one of the ways of learning what else is out there. You can substitute that with talking to other people. Which Feynman did a lot, judging from the stories in his books.

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.

ank2862• 14 years ago

Publications from reputable journals are easier to find than to find smart people firsthand who are experts in the field.

tehwalrus• 14 years ago

this post IS my PhD. it feels very unproductive compared to my old real job, but I wouldn't have written the piece of code I've just bashed out without all the reading (often incomprehensible) books and coding the broken things I have over the past 6 months.

I'm at my most "research productive" with a pen and paper in the cafeteria after about a month of the right stimuli!

javert2• 14 years ago

Does anybody know of a realistic way to pursue research (by this definition) as a career, without becoming a grant-seeking professor (I have moral qualms about taking taxpayer money)?

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.

ryporter• 14 years ago

You could consider a job in Finance researching new trading strategies. While this is certainly very far from pure research, a job in this area can satisfy most of the bullet points listed in the article.

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.

forinti• 14 years ago

"I have moral qualms about taking taxpayer money"

That's strange. If you do your job properly, why shouldn't you get paid even if it is by the taxpayer?

montecarl2• 14 years ago

It is always wrong to steal. Even if you think you deserve the money.

lifebeyondfife3• 14 years ago

Doing research for a company has the end goal of benefitting that companies' shareholders. Doing research for a publicly funded institution has the end goal of benefitting society.

Look at the decoding of the human genome. No company has a patent on that because public institutions did it first.

Nursie• 14 years ago

Get yourself into one of the big corps with a huge R&D section?

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.

pharrington• 14 years ago

May I ask why you have moral problems with being paid by the taxpayer? To me it seems funding science is one of the better things the government does with its revenue.

amit_m3• 14 years ago

So you have a problem in taking taxpayer money for working on science that advances all of mankind?

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).

decasteve• 14 years ago

Work for a tax-credit seeking company?

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.

MaysonL• 14 years ago

Google Jeff Hawkins

philprx• 14 years ago

not supporting unknown browsers by blocking just suck. Baaad website ;-)

Agathos• 14 years ago

A month at the bench can save you an hour in the library.

rozap• 14 years ago

This is definitely a massive overstatement. I think it's true in almost any industry, that the best results come from a balance of these things.

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.

Major_Grooves• 14 years ago

Despite this, I know that a lot of professors in top labs do not like you to do reading in the laboratory. Yes - they expect you to read academic papers and know everything - but that is for your own time. When you are in the lab you do experiments (my experience was in genetics/biology). In fact I knew of a lab where you had to leave a note on your bench with your whereabouts if you were going to be away for longer that 10 minutes. These were very successful labs.

jibjaba• 14 years ago

I wonder who was deciding what to do at the bench and how those decision makers were spending their time. I would be willing to bet they spent a lot of work hours reading up on the latest developments.

madhadron• 14 years ago

They are successful in the sense that they get lots of grant money and the professor has lots of political power in the field. They churn out papers. Thinking back over my reading, though, I'd say they're underrepresented per capita in producing really interesting science. What you are describing is also a peculiarity of biology and some parts of chemistry. It doesn't work that way in physics or in much of engineering.

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.

jmmcd• 14 years ago

Research is not the same as science. This article is about research. The title is wrong.

tferraz• 14 years ago

I agree. Also , who starts a research without the faint idea of how and where to look? Reading a book for me would be pre-research. At least in a company, where we have r&D.

lifebeyondfife3• 14 years ago

Based on the conditions listed at the end of the article, I think a lot of people in academia aren't doing research/science. --former scientist.

xaa• 14 years ago

Truth. Real scientists spend most of their time writing grants.

lifebeyondfife3• 14 years ago

One of the reasons I left immediately after finishing my PhD. If I wanted to jump endlessly from platform to platform, I had Sonic the Hedgehog for that.

wwalker3• 14 years ago

I work in the R&D division of a microprocessor company. Most of what we do, I would call "research", but not quite "science". We investigate things that are too risky or time-consuming for our product design groups to look into, with an eye towards making our company money in the future. We fund Ph.D. students in electrical engineering and computer science at university labs, and collaborate with them. But we don't (generally) push back the frontiers of human knowledge in our day-to-day work.

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.

kreilly• 14 years ago

I like this as a definition of research in a corporate environment: "We investigate things that are too risky or time-consuming for our product design groups to look into, with an eye towards making our company money in the future."

babblingdweeb• 14 years ago

Outside of a "traditional" lab setting...I don't see a conversation about research on the "job" here.

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.

Are You Doing Research?

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