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Can Science Survive?
- PaulHoule 11y agoLotsa issues. Back in the bad old days at Cornell, back when there was still an Engineering Library with paper volumes, you could go in the stacks and it was really obvious that there were multiple shelving units filled with certain conferences that went on and on but never produced any real results. (Internet QoS, for example.) There are also are areas that are promising where hardly any research gets funded. (For instance, in the US you would think that RDF and the semantic web are completely blackballed for getting research funding) Talk to a scientist and he will tell you a pound is still worth a pound and that academic freedom is alive and well, but they go ahead filling out grant proposals in the sterile areas that are funded and leave it to the grad students, to be worked like racehorses and discarded, to grumble about what might have been.