contemporary343

If you haven't read it already, it's really worth digesting the arguments Vannevar Bush made regarding funding basic science in 1945 (Science: The Endless Frontier) which resulted in the NSF as we know it being founded:

https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/2023-04/EndlessFrontier75t...

"A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowl- edge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade, regardless of its mechanical skill."

I think FROs are certainly worth exploring, but if we're diverting vast amounts of funding to existing research infrastructure and talent to funding them, the opportunity costs are huge. This is not well appreciated, but universities are in fact very cheap places to do research compared to any modern alternative one might construct. I suspect FROs will end up being much more expensive just for structural reasons, and will end up re-discovering the university bundle slowly and piece by piece. Moreover, for many types of research they will have to effectively rebuild a range of infrastructure (facilities, equipment, etc.) that already exists at universities throughout the country.

None of this justifies blowing up the extensive basic research infrastructure we have today in pursuit of unproven experiments. Once they're proven, a conversation can be had about how to reconfigure existing assets and new government-funded approaches. But such discussions must include congress, the appropriators of the funds.

I think it's also a way to reduce funding to universities (which are politically disfavored), since other things like arbitrary reductions to indirect costs didn't work. It also defies both congressional will in the appropriations bill (which is directorate-specific) and of course the whole charter and mandate of NSF, from Vannevar Bush's original case for it.

Actually overheads for many universities were sometimes higher in the late 1990s (and there were some minor scandals associated with this). And remind me again, what fraction of our GDP is indirect costs to universities? (< 0.1%). And what are the benefits? Well, indirect costs are how the U.S. government builds up a distributed network of scientific and technical infrastructure and capacity. This capacity serves the national interest.

If you think you're going to help debt by cutting indirect costs and crippling university research permanently, may I introduce you to the foundational notions of a knowledge economy and how fundamental advances feed into technology developments that increase productivity and thus GDP. Permanently reducing growth is another way of making debt servicing worse.

In light of all of their actions, I really, genuinely do not understand what DOGE team members' mental model of the world is and what they view their purpose as. None of these actions align with any publicly stated goals, or even the privately reported ones. All I see is a destruction of state capacity that has already left America significantly weakened and less capable of responding to threats.

Definitely seems like a drug problem to me. He seems strung out of his mind if this article's sourcing is correct: https://www.wired.com/story/katie-stephen-miller-elon-musk-t...

“We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services,” they wrote. “We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE’s actions.”

“‘Move fast and break things’ may be acceptable to someone who owns a business and owns the risk. And if things don’t go well, the damage is compartmentalized. But when you break things in government, you’re breaking things that belong to people who didn’t sign up for that,” said Cordell Schachter, who until last month was the chief information officer at the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Are you familiar with how organizations have annual budgets? Doing it with zero notice in the middle of a fiscal year will be chaos. This is purely an attack.

Notice how no one is going after the F&A (indirect) rates for DOD R&D contractors…

The worst part is that it is immediate and retroactive to ongoing grants. This will immediately cause every single academic and medical research center to have an unsustainable deficit. It will simply cost too much to actually have researchers do the grants. They might return money to NIH and lay off faculty annd grad students.

I anm almost certain this will get a TRO from a federal judge while it’s litigated given how insane this is.

This is truly unconscionable and completely indefensible. All the Musk defenders have to realize that mass firing and zero base budgeting is fine and well for a private company like Twitter. But not for governments. Even if you don't believe in foreign aid, it is completely immoral and unethical to abandon all these people who are participating in clinical trials. You do it in an orderly way, allowing ongoing trials to finish the phase they are in.

This is a great entrepreneurial story too. Colin began this company out of his PhD research at Stanford a decade ago. A long, steady grind and finally out to production. Kudos to him and his team - a very rare accomplishment, and inspiring to see.

Worth remembering that ~2/3 of U.S. students in college are in public colleges and universities, not private ones like Vanderbilt. Prices have gone up there too (especially since state governments subsidize their public universities significantly less than they used to), but they are still pretty good deals given U.S. GDP per capita. In many states they can also be practically free depending on income level and typically provide excellent educations and career opportunities for most students.

I’m really not sure why this got flagged. It seemed like a well sourced and technology-focused article. Independent of this particular conflict, such automated decision making has long been viewed as inevitable. If even a small fraction of what is being reported is accurate it is extraordinarily disturbing.

If you insulate it in vacuum with an IR transparent window (unfortunately $$$) you can get substantially cooler than ambient: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13729

We've been pretty satisfied with Room and Board furniture, which is typically made in the US. While a bit more expensive it's not really that different from the $3K garbage price point and seems to last (so far).

Bluey is great. For younger ones, Tumble Leaf (sadly now discontinued) is also wonderful - clay-mation, gentle with lovely music and promoting a sense of discovery.

Surprisingly, perhaps less effects on the youngest cohort: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

"At 4.5 years of age, pandemic kids had higher vocabulary, visual memory, and overall cognitive performance compared with pre-pandemic kids."

The authors suggest that pandemic 2-year-olds developed better problem-solving skills, accelerating the increased cognitive performance by age 4.5

Although pandemic 2-year-olds had more socio-emotional risks early on, these seem to disappear by age 4.5

Most materials, aside from metals, of sufficient thickness have high high infrared emissivity. All white paints, for example, already did radiate heat upwards through the atmospheric window. These more reflective films are no more emissive than previous paints (they're all quite emissive to begin with!)

The only difference, optically speaking, really is that they are better solar reflectors.

There’s been a ton of development in super reflective materials since the first demonstration of daytime radiative cooling at Stanford in 2014. Ultimately though, reflectivity does drop with dirt and pollution exposure over time, even for these kinds of materials. So most super reflective materials plateau at a lower number long term outdoors.

Also, just for reference, Spectralon, a sintered PTFE reflectance standard has had this level of solar reflectance for decades. So, in a sense, not that much new here. a sintered ceramic is gonna be expensive and will have a hard time competing with the simplicity of a paint based approach. Super white paints using various pigments have been well studied the last 5 years.

As a sidenote, this is from Gang Chen, former head of MIT's Mechanical Engineering department who was (rather shamefully in my opinion) wrongly targeted by Trump's China initiative. The government finally dropped the case acknowledging there was nothing there.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/20/science/gang-chen-mit-chi...

Some of this is universal, but much of her story is particular to how US med schools operate: their research faculty tend to be largely soft money in nature, so grant money is even more necessary than in other 'hard money' jobs in non-med school fields. Such a system is destined to fail when geniuses like Kariko pursue risky new territory for which large grants are hard to secure.

The really distasteful thing here is Penn as an institution. They have reaped the benefits of her work in terms of mRNA patent royalties (a very large number I believe), and of course reputationally. Yet, they treated her truly terribly and have never - and it seems like will never - acknowledge it. For example, Sean Grady, mentioned here as the one that essentially cleared out her lab in 2013 without telling her is the chair of neurosurgery at Penn Medicine. Will he apologize? I doubt it.

Some of this is universal, but much of her story is particular to how US med schools operate: their research faculty tend to be largely soft money in nature, so grant money is even more necessary than in other 'hard money' jobs in non-med school fields. Such a system is destined to fail when geniuses like Kariko pursue risky new territory for which large grants are hard to secure.

I'm genuinely not sure! The virtual pre-screen interview has become the de facto norm in my field, so it's not like it's surprising or unexpected. And it's not like we are looking for TED speakers here - anyone should be capable with sufficient practice and preparation.

If anything, I've seen people that look great on paper, coming from the pedigreed lab/ and fancy PhD institution fail at this stage. So perhaps there's some overconfidence there. Indeed, no one in our department had any connection to, or prior knowledge of, the candidate who was ultimately given the offer. Once they got past the initial screening, through both virtual and in-person interviews, their technical depth and breadth, teaching skills and overall collegiality shone through.

All that being said, I don't doubt that all the questionable things mentioned in the article above occur, and perhaps widely. But, there is hope! And there's no better place to start than those of us who are younger faculty.

As a professor who served on a hiring committee this past year in a top-15 engineering department in the US (and not in CS), some of this did not really ring as true to me. Overall, I came away more pleasantly surprised by our process than how I might have assumed it to be as a PhD student (where I assumed it was entirely based on favoritism). Based on the intersection of publication record, research statement and topic areas we were recruiting for this cycle (which was clearly advertised in our position), there were really only about 20-25 applications which were plausibly competitive.

We ended up doing a standardized set of Zoom interviews for about 15 of them - here too, many candidates were simply unable to clearly explain their past work and make a clear pitch for their vision and work (even with slides). This is an essential skill for running a lab and one any prospective candidate should practice and refine! From that point on the whole department was involved and, at least for us, everyone had an equal say and felt safe speaking up. ~4-5 were invited for on-campus interviews and one candidate was liked the most by nearly everyone, leading to a consensus.

As a public university, there are a lot of things we do in a standardized way, and sets of personal questions etc. we do not ask. Is it fair? I'll leave others to judge, as selecting one person to hire out of ~200 applicants is not an easy task. But I don't think it was capricious either. At our department, we intend for everyone who comes as an assistant prof to be tenured, so it is very much a long-term hire and commitment we are making. We take that job seriously.

What is concerning is there were even more allegations that weren't included because they could not offer anonymity to those providing them:

https://stanforddaily.com/2023/07/19/sources-refused-to-part...

Those micro-OLED displays alone will drive the cost that high. Still kinda shocked to see them at this scale and in a product!

The micro-OLED displays alone explain a lot of the price point.. along with apple silicon, really hard to see how Meta can compete at the high end.

This all ignores a basic financial reality underlying 'hard-money' academic positions: we are paid 9-month salaries that come from core funds (ie: teaching, paid for by tuition, government funds, etc.). Yes, bringing grants matters, but given that grant $ have not really changed in decades, it is a huge relief to not have to fund one's own salary (beyond 3 summer months). During dry spells, students can be supported on TAships or fellowships here and there, and if you relatively low-cost experiments, small internal grants can tide you by. This is the real reason you'd have trouble with this model. You'd then need grant $ to directly pay 100% of faculty salaries. Unless you can solve this problem I don't see scientists leaving universities.

The big exception is of course medical schools/ medical research, where faculty positions are largely soft money (some minimal base salary is usually covered).

Speaking as a tenured PI in the (applied) physical sciences, everything here is true but a lot of it boils down to a lack of perspective and imagination by many faculty running labs.

There are many positive examples out there of ensuring student career success in a supportive lab environment while also producing good research. These need to be amplified as role models.

There is a potentially valid criticism here since this is ultimately about what the school (with its tremendous resources) is choosing to focus its efforts on. Stanford's previous global climate and energy project was famously funded by oil companies (though I suspect this was mostly a PR thing for them in previous decades), so this is not surprising. But should their priorities be those of the school?

Also some interesting things happening behind the scenes where they are clearly keeping faculty from certain 'troublesome' departments out of the process.. but that's not really unusual in the university context.

On the flip side, I think folks are also over-estimating the importance of corporate sources of funding here. The real reason for this focus is on government funding and resources on this topic that the school will want to tap into.

We don't use the SAT in Canada. Instead it's course grades plus provincial final exams which are subject specific. Generally works pretty well..