Thanks for sharing this. I think it is a very good summary from a PhD student perspective. Now let me give you some more information :)
Academia wants to do research - and not pay minimum wage (not even to Tenured Full Professors - ask them how much they make from their grant during the months they are paid). Professors have figured out how to screw PhD students, and their own peers, thanks to competition.
If you look at any PhD student in a stream/major that has a value proposition, chances are - the student is imported. And in these streams (which matter?), research is value-less. Because there is no incentive to do any valuable work. Unfortunately, universities get lucky still - once in a while. Thankfully, this is beginning to end. Perhaps someone can quantitatively study this.
Interesting times - But first - in the US - health care needs a reboot ;-)
Your university commercialization office will disagree. Check with them. From what I understand, it is illegal to release your code in CC0 or MIT unless you have taken permission from the commercialization office (Some universities allow GPL without explicit permission). Have you checked your contract ? Your work is not yours if it has any value. The value belongs to the university (mostly) - which also means you have no incentive to work on valuable stuff.
I think Elsevier is least of UCs problems. It's a distraction from the real ones.
Grad student at Berkeley. The commercialization office only takes an interest if your work is high profile enough and has enough commercialization potential. Plenty of UC researchers release CC0 or MIT license code without issue.
Elsevier may be only one of many problems for the UC community, but that doesn’t mean it’s a distraction—- millions have been wasted every year subsidizing their profits. And Elsevier’s rent seeking business model is a problem for more than just the UCs. Hopefully this decision will end up being Elsevier’s death knell.
As enabled by Bayh–Dole Act [0]. Reversing this law would put publicly funded research back into the hands and minds of the public. This is the very law that creates a perverse incentive for universities to operate as for profit corporations, even with public dollars.
Surprised that you were downvoted because this was actually the problem that led to the act: IP for work done for the federal government (not by the federal government) was often difficult to make use of.
Those seeking to use government-owned technology found a maze of rules and regulations set out by the agencies in question because there was no uniform federal policy on patents for government-sponsored inventions or on the transfer of technology from the government to the private sector.
From the wikipedia article that was referred to:
Prior to the enactment of Bayh-Dole, the U.S. government had accumulated 28,000 patents, but fewer than 5% of those patents were commercially licensed
Not saying I understand the complexities but an outright repeal doesn't seem like it would address this underlying systemic problem. Maybe times have changed.
They haven't changed. Some government agencies excel at basic research (NIH, DOE, NASA, etc.), but for a multitude of reasons, they don't do product development. (And having worked at one of these agencies for several years, I think it would be a terrible mistake to change this - even though I personally have very mixed feelings about how Bayh-Dole has worked out.)
Some large fraction of patents are useless and will never be commercially licensed because it would never make any sense to pay a dime for them. A further fraction would demonstrate market failure if they were licensed - there's something much better that isn't patented, so if people are obliged to do the worse patented thing AND pay commercially for a license then we've made everything worse. So "more than 5%" might be a bad sign anyway.
This is what happened to audio codecs for years for example, several alternatives are superior to MPEG Audio Layer III (today you should use Opus), but the MP3 patent holders could expect their revenue to keep flowing for their inferior alternative anyway.
A certain kind of person really wants a patent, the same way someone might really want to win themselves a Hugo. I guess employer can think of it as a relatively expensive employee retention benefit, OK, we'll pay for your useless patent filing and we'll get you a laminated front page you can pin up in your cubicle. Go you.
Clarification: This thread is referring to work funded by the Federal Government (not done by Federal Government). And I would agree with @sitkak - that perhaps that BD act needs to be cut down - for starters. But we do need more to fix Universities.
Imagine a VC that demanded ownership of 100% of all code you developed and user data you collected in return for accepting any investment from them. Would any good startup take the money? Without Bayh-Dole, the government would be in the same position as that hypothetical VC.
Innovation is about money, not ideals. More money flowing into research universities is a good thing.
I would wager most grants given by the federal government go to universities or non-profits, so it seems like it would make perfect sense to make them release their research publicly.
Grad student at Berkeley for 3+ years. I've never heard of anyone mention or discuss this before among many people constantly publishing reasonably valuable code under open source licenses.
Any country that is dealing with China today should think twice. A dictatorship (till death do us part) with brains - capitalism - faster than the capitalists. China wants to grow, at everyone else's expense. Walking shoulder to shoulder with every terrorist nation on the planet (You know a person from the friends they keep). Suppression (Tibet, Hongkong, Taiwan). I think its time the world woke up? I am glad the Trump team is listening.
Yea, Trump wouldn’t want to tarnish his name by buddying up to a human rights abuser like China. That would be like turning a blind eye to the abuses of Saudi Arabia, Russia, and North Korea. /s
Pretty confident Trump’s angle on China is economic, not humanitarian.
Historically, the first people to colonize most of the western United States were Spanish, Mestizos and Mulattos coming up from Mexico not long after Hernán Cortés' conquest - i.e. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Pobladores
I don't understand why dproblem's reply is not just downvoted, but flagged... Literally Trump's doing nothing else that retaliating to China's own trade war that they've been waging for the past decade+... Except within a much more powerful and ruthless political system.
> I don't understand why dproblem's reply is not just downvoted, but flagged...
I'm not sure the flagging is specific to that post. I think I've noticed a trend in the past few weeks where flagging of downvoted comments is much more common.
It almost makes me miss Slashdot's commenting / meta-moderation system.
I understand that and I agree China's trade practices were unfair and needed to be addressed. The way to do that is with co-ordinated and concerted international pressure based on consensus. Up against a united international front, China would have little option but to concede.
However Trump is a nationalist and a unilateralist so he's simply incapable of doing it. Incidentally this is why nationalists are almost universally also climate change deniers - because climate change is a global problem that requires global collaboration and agreement, which Nationalists can't stomach. It's useful to understand the political forces behind a lot of these policies and therefore the connections between them.
Instead of working with allies, the US is lashing out at both China and the tech companies trading with it as a group. This is forcing the tech companies to ally with China and start tech collaboration and transfer projects with them in order to save themselves. The Hygon Dhyana and Zhaoxin projects are examples of this. So instead of the non-Chinese international community being rallied against China, they are being forced in bed with them. Doing so also involves tech companies withdrawing investment and resources from the USA in order to limit their exposure to US trade sanctions.
Long term, it's probably the single biggest and most counter-productive trade and technological development own goal in history. Pulling out of the Iran deal might beat it though. The way it's pushed Europe into collaborating with Iran on financial and trade links, sidelining the US payments systems, while also giving Iran the freedom to breach enrichment limits is definitely up there.
I couldn't agree with you more, the only way to deal with China is a united front, and China knows that, that's the reason they have been reducing tariffs for import from other countries.
It is easy to complain generally, but is is better to be specific about what ways you think America is not free. Americans still enjoy great freedom of speech and association, for example. No Lèse-majesté in the land of the free. There is a lot of propaganda but that isn't necessarily inconsistent with freedom.
The real issue is there is a risk that economically speaking America is less free than China. For all that what China does with intellectual property is illegal under American law, it is very free. The US would for sure like them to be a little less free with IP. America's policies over interest rates also look decidedly like the sort of thing that a centrally planned economy would try and execute; it handicaps building savings which might give China an advantage if they are more middle-class-savings-tolerant.
That is balanced by the strictly superior American rule of law, for all its warts. But America has given themselves some interesting competitive handicaps.
POSTSCRIPThttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_reven... For reference, China has a ratio of 4:1 private to public income vs America with a 2.6:1 ratio. Technically, China might be running a smaller government. Or lying, it is hard to know.
POSTPOSTSCRIPT Hong Kong and Taiwan are nearly 9:1. Capitalist paradise is in Asia. Nothing lower down the list looks appealing to me.
> That is balanced by the strictly superior American rule of law
The rule of law is looking pretty tattered and worn in the US of A right now. What with the President committing obstruction of justice in plain view and his AG declaring that a sitting President may not be indicted for any crime.
Not to mention the grotesque violations of human rights that are happening at the network of concentration camps the current administration has repurposed.
The US is not running a network of concentration camps.
A hundred thousand illegal immigrants per month are being caught crossing into the US through the southern border.
No other liberal democracy - from Canada to Finland to Japan to Australia - would tolerate such a flood of illegal immigration. Not even remotely close. Canada freaks out when a couple thousand illegal immigrants cross into its territory from the US in a given month.
Holding illegal immigrants in detention facilities, because there is nowhere else to put them until they can be processed, is not the same thing as a concentration camp. Claiming that they're the same thing is a gross abuse of the term and its history.
No other "liberal democracy" has spent decades destabilizing democratically elected regimes, propping up dictators, and applying economic sanctions in nearby nations in the name of fighting communism, causing a massive flood of refugees fleeing those nations.
Why can't America try paying the cost of its actions for once, instead of pushing those costs on innocent families and children fleeing famine and violence?
Call a spade a spade. It's a concentration camp because it's a camp where undesirable people are concentrated. The fact that you think it's justified to employ concentration camps is a separate argument.
By your very broad definition, so is a PRISON. Which would mean every country on the planet runs "concentration camps", and render the term meaningless.
"Concentration camp" has a specific connotation. Calling this a concentration camp is like calling a terminal cancer ward a "death camp" because people go there to die.
Fault Trump with everything that's his fault, but suggesting that this is a precursor to mass graves and genocide is just hyperbole.
> "Concentration camp" has a specific connotation.
In my personal experience, "concentration camp" has been applied specifically to mean the camps operated by the German government in the 1930's and 40's, camps which intentionally tortured and murdered millions of innocent Jews, and certain other "undesirables" and enemies of the Nazi regime.
When I hear that term, I personally think of emaciated prisoners wearing striped uniforms, packed into cramped wooden shelves. I think of hopeless people peering out from behind barbed wire fences suffering under a regime of forced labor and starvation. I think of horrific death chambers filled with poison gas and choking, dying human beings and towering piles of dead bodies.
I personally can't get those images out of my head when I hear the term "concentration camp" and I would guess most other people in the US conjure up the same images specifically tied to Nazi Germany when they hear that term.
But NPR has an interesting article about the meaning and historical usage of "concentration camp." The subject arose when someone used the term to describe the sites where Japanese Americans were forcibly relocated during WWII.
The use of concentration camps as part of a planned ethnic cleansing campaign originated with the American governments efforts to relocate and exterminate the indigenous populations of the Southeastern United States see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Removal_Act if you want to pick up the trail.
> Calling this a concentration camp is like calling a terminal cancer ward a "death camp" because people go there to die.
No, it isn't. Concentration camps have existed throughout history and they haven't always been associated with genocide. But, you know, they do have a connotation of being associated with violations of human rights which is exactly what people are alleging about these detention sites.
The fact that it's not literally the holocaust doesn't mean it's not a concentration camp.
That's true. But post-holocaust, the term came to mean the holocaust camps. Growing up, I never heard it used any other way. For example I never heard the camps in which the US and Canada put their Japanese citizens in WWII called concentration camps, though in the original sense they were. Rather they were called internment camps, because by then "concentration camp" had come to be associated with the holocaust. So there's a semantic sleight of hand in people reviving the term for political use now. They're taking advantage of the extreme associations it now has, while protesting that they don't mean it that way.
> No, it isn't. Concentration camps have existed throughout history and they haven't always been associated with genocide.
It still is, because a "concentration camp" even in that sense still isn't just any camp where people are concentrated. It implies internment without charges, which is exactly what isn't happening here -- there is every expectation that there will be a proceeding to determine their immigration status, resulting in either release or deportation and not indefinite internment in violation of habeas corpus.
> But, you know, they do have a connotation of being associated with violations of human rights which is exactly what people are alleging about these detention sites.
Then make that claim and not the other one. If they have no access to soap then assert that as the thing that needs to be fixed -- because at least that can be fixed. How do you make a detention facility not a "concentration camp" under a definition of "concentration camp" that just means any detention facility?
> How do you make a detention facility not a "concentration camp" under a definition of "concentration camp" that just means any detention facility?
You might just have to accept that in order to enforce some laws you're going to have to put people in mass detention and you may as well own that instead of trying to get people to not call it what it is because the term for it makes you uncomfortable.
Completely false in every way including the appeal to history.
The 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees grants refugees very specific rights that are absolutely being violated by this policy, and the term "concentration camp" has been used in many other cases other than WWII concentration camps to mean exactly the thing the U.S. is doing to refugees on the southern border. I definitely consider them concentration camps, while as yet not being death camps. There already should be holy hell to pay for having done yet again what we promised never to do the last time we had concentration camps, for Japanese-American citizens.
The word nation is not found in either the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution. I consider nationalism, nationalistic movements, to be anti-freedom, they engender only division, hatred, enemy seeking, scapegoating, and laws to protect and enhance such things. Who is free in the U.S.? Perhaps citizens? There is even a movement that only natural born citizens are real citizens, and naturalized citizens are second class and could have citizenship stripped from them after the fact if they violate certain laws. It's not enough to imprison them, they have to be stripped of citizenship, in this view.
What about all persons within the U.S. are they free? The constitution applies mostly to persons, not just citizens. Most all individual rights and protections apply to persons; citizens get some extra privileges like holding federal public office. And yet a great many Americans are very confused about this, thinking constitutional law, rights and protections only apply to citizens.
Therefore I put nationalism as my specific enemy of the American dream, and of freedom. Patriotism is quite nice, in particular as it relates to America as an asylum for most of its history. But when patriotism is infected with nationalism, it becomes jingoism, and that's dangerous. Eventually no one is free.
Yes, we do still have freedom of speech and association.
But the govt is attacking freedom of religion through "religious freedom" laws that allow discrimination against people who don't follow Christian behavior, in the opinion of any random Christian.
The president attacks the free press, labeling them traitors and "enemy of the people."
When part of the 1st amendment is under attack, all of it is.
The president says if you plead the 5th, you must be guilty.
The president wants to delay the census until he gets the answer that he wants from the supreme court.
When some of the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution in general, are under attack, then all of it is.
We are at risk of losing what was thought rock solid, and so we are that much less free. We may still be better off than some, but we are slowly losing that.
America did not elect this administration by a majority of the popular vote. The electoral college did.
It’s an artifact of the original founding of the country where there were checks and balances put in place to deny direct democratic rule.
It’s been slowly rolled back over many years, but until we get rid of the electoral college, it always has the possibility of ignoring the will of the people.
> America did not elect this administration by a majority of the popular vote.
This is technically correct. Less accurate, but implied, is that a majority of voters wanted a different president. That may be the case, but the evidence is not sufficient to confirm or reject it.
First off is that turnout is very low relative to the number of eligible voters. Secondly is that the electoral college and states' decision to only do "all-or-nothing" apportionment means that it's a totally rational decision to stay home if your state is not close, since your vote has no chance of affecting the election besides the value of signalling that opposition to the consensus exists.
If Lessig's scheme [1] works out to break the winner-take-all apportionment, we could at least start to see some meaningful turnouts because the battle for a single electoral vote can be a close contest. More likely to succeed by less interesting (because your vote does not contribute to a single outcome but just to the collective) we have the interstate compact [2], which this year has made good progress towards achieving a majority.
The electoral college is the tip of the iceberg. It is fundamentally undemocratic to have a winner take all first past the post race for head of state no matter what middlemen you put between the ballot and the winner.
I'm a firm believer US ballots are way too broad and have people direct electing (almost always first past the post) way too many positions, especially esoteric and irreverent ones like justices, sheriffs, school boards, etc. For representative democracy to legitimately work we need people electing representatives to appoint and delegate the responsibilities of government on their behalf, because of those that actually do vote (only about 60% of voting age peoples do) 99% don't actually vet individual candidates for every one of the 12+ direct elections they are participating in on the ballot every year.
Even when I try to do that, information on these esoteric position candidates is so sparse and I'm so hugely unqualified to judge what makes a good district magistrate or police chief its mostly a waste of time - I end up going off very limited information on anyone running, often people running without opponents, for positions whose function I cannot fully understand because specialization for my locality on whatever they do isn't readily available.
That is a fully intentional design, though. Both parties have it in their self interest to bloat the ballot with tons of esoteric positions so voters feel choice paralysis and fatigue and just start voting party line en masse without actually auditing the people they are actually electing.
Its a mockery of democracy and republicanism, though. I should be voting for a professional representative to make these decisions on my behalf in forum, and if I did only have a, preferably, singular elected role I vote for with multiple winners where I just need to judge all the candidates for that one function whom I could then rank at the ballot people would be much less privy to falling under the total influence of party lines when voting. Which, being against the interest of the ruling duopoly, would never practically happen anywhere except where the demographics are so skewed in favor of one or the other they are nigh guaranteed to win anyway.
This country was not founded as a direct democracy, was not intended to be a direct democracy, and absent a Constitutional amendment cannot be made a direct democracy. States are supposed to have a voice -- going to a direct democracy completely removes almost all of the states in favor of a few small high-population states, which leaves all the rest of the states unrepresented in the Presidential election. It's the same reason we have a Senate -- to represent the states in government, and a house -- to represent the people in government.
Federalist 68 applies to any conversation on the original intent of how the Electoral College was supposed to work. Unfortunately, state legislatures long ago perverted this system by making the worst possible people in America the Electors, by law: party loyalists.
By definition a party loyalist is not a deliberative person, as described in Federalist 68. And further, party loyalists are the people most centrally located in bitter partisanship, the very thing that lends itself to "cabal, intrigue, and corruption" referred to as things most to be avoided, in Federalist 68.
We have all permitted this perversion of something that, despite its also racist past, could actually be useful but is instead detrimental. The Electoral College could play a role if we were serious, but Americans right now take their TV shows more seriously.
After the next 6 years of "America being greater", I am sure that your concern will definitely be a sticking point to returning to a majority rule election system.
Getting rid of the Electoral College would destroy America. You would basically have two large areas control the whole process. Nope, no thank you. The only reason it failed last time is Hillary failed to understand it.
Mind blowing that a majority of the people might win a democratic election.
Its all hyperbole overshadowing the root problem - first past the post non-proportional elections are hugely undemocratic. You need proportional legislatures where you have both multiple winners per race for better proportional distribution and alternate votes to first past the post regardless of what they are - STV, ranked choice, IRV, etc. Anything is better than what we have now.
What we really need is approval voting / range voting. First past the post creates polarization because it causes there to be two parties and requires every issue to be bifurcated into on of those two boxes, and if your preferences don't all perfectly align with party lines then welcome to hell.
But the problem with proportional representation systems is that they would require flipping over the table in the US. Senators are from specific states, Congressmen are from specific districts, and that part of the system isn't the broken part, it's actually helpful -- if your state or district has a specific problem then you have a specific person who actually cares about it because your vote matters more to them than the vote of someone else in some other place.
But apply range voting to the same districts and states and you don't end up with a two party system, because two very similar candidates no longer split the vote with each other. Then anybody who can represent a given district or state better than the incumbent can win the election regardless of party affiliation, and you're no longer stuck choosing between two party platforms because now there are twelve.
If the people who currently vote are a representative sample of all people eligible to vote, this would change nothing at all.
They're not, so what would end up happening is that both parties would spend more time pandering to the people who currently could vote but don't, the additional votes would end up split evenly between the two parties and the difference from the status quo would be modest at best.
First past the post creates a polarized two party system independent of what percentage of the population votes.
> Or, for nobody to vote, which would trigger chaos.
That would never happen because the fewer people who vote the more incentive there is for anyone go to vote, because your vote counts more when other people don't.
It's more effective in general to cast a protest vote for a third party you know won't win than to stay home -- especially since they often need a certain percentage of the vote for ballot access or public financing. And if enough people do that then the third party actually wins. Then ideally they can do away with first past the post.
Yes but also, people in rural areas should not have a dictatorial say in what those who live in urban areas do.
If democracies like the USA (Canada has a similar problem) simply counted the votes, the majority of the country would be happier with the outcome. From a pragmatic standpoint, this is a good thing.
"U.S. Cities are Home to 62.7 Percent of the U.S. Population, but Comprise Just 3.5 Percent of Land Area"
You might have a system where neither side can force anything down the other side's throat. To do that, you might need something like one legislature where the cities predominate, and another where the rural has more sway. You might call it a "bicameral legislature" or something.
I'm not sure why in a democracy, the majority of people don't have the majority of the power. If they happen to be urban / rural, so be it.
The developed world is becoming more urban because we do not need that many people in the rural industries any more. It's that simple. Fighting for their 'rights' just makes the country non-competitive. We need to actively incentivize and assist those in rural areas find a way of life where the economy is actually happening.
We should measure people not in the amount of land they own or occupy but as individuals, and every one of them should have equal merit in deciding how society is run.
As it is I could have a substantial unequal share in representative interest moving to a sparsely populated state than I would living in a major metro area. There is absolutely no way to consider that as anything other than a mockery of democracy.
That FOMO is rampant; if you’re waiting for the startup to prove its tech, you’ve likely missed the investment boat already.
Just saying, there is definitely some rationale to it, esp when considering how investment portfolios are precipitated on a few huge winners and 99% losers.
@dyrosla FOMO: Thank you for the explanation. I am trying to understand. The lottery ticket on the back of engineers and workers. Any thoughts on how long is this game going to last? Now China is playing the same game, but with relaxed rules - to speed things up on FOMO? Do I understand this correct?
I’m not sure if I understand you- FOMO is just the fear of missing out on investing in a company that has a likelihood of making it big.
In the case of Magic Leap, VCs bought into the team’s background and expertise and banked on the likelihood of their success/impact if successful and decided to risk it. It doesn’t mean they were 100% sold- just that the risk/reward calculation they made was favourable.
Had they waited for Magic Leap to be a ways farther in their tech, (and had Magic Leap delivered), the price of entry to invest would be astronomical and the opportunity would have been ‘missed out’ on.
Why was a biomedical engineering guy (with absolutely no background in AR/VR/graphics/CS/...) being given a billion dollar to do something that is not up his ally at all?
What are we missing here? Which Team? I never understood this story.
> The answer to why it makes sense in that case, is that there are so few other viable alternatives to deal with swarms of drones (none currently).
There are - if the AF was functional. Any viable alternative has to have the same form - low price, and distributed - from none of the Military contractors.
Summary: You an mix the coordinates obtained from celestial navigation (stars) with signals of opportunity (Electromagnetic sources like FM) to find the position without GPS.
Problems: Anytime a military advertisement happens (LN-120G Stellar-Inertial-GPS from Northup G.) - if you don't see the total price of the unit, know that it was a waste of money and resources.
Academia wants to do research - and not pay minimum wage (not even to Tenured Full Professors - ask them how much they make from their grant during the months they are paid). Professors have figured out how to screw PhD students, and their own peers, thanks to competition.
If you look at any PhD student in a stream/major that has a value proposition, chances are - the student is imported. And in these streams (which matter?), research is value-less. Because there is no incentive to do any valuable work. Unfortunately, universities get lucky still - once in a while. Thankfully, this is beginning to end. Perhaps someone can quantitatively study this.
Interesting times - But first - in the US - health care needs a reboot ;-)