4 ms·

It's SHAMEFUL that academics like Stein who dedicate their lives to developing amazing open-source software do not get funding and frequently fail to get tenure

by cs702 10y ago

It's SHAMEFUL that academics like Stein who dedicate their lives to developing amazing open-source software do not get funding and frequently fail to get tenure. These individuals truly are making the world better!

raverbashing 10y ago
See the before-the-last slide Academia values mindless papers over actual results.
- chestervonwinch 10y ago
  To be clear, this is a side effect of using publication count as a surrogate for an individual's total contributions to an academic field. Everyone knows this is the metric for success, so you either have to optimize for it, or risk looking like a failure.
algeom 10y ago
Most academics do not get funding or tenure. Most funded academic mathematicians lose funding at some point. The funding rate for NSF grants in mathematics is certainly less than 33%, and one can only submit a standard proposal once per year. The competition is FIERCE. (I've been on panels: it is terrifying to see who doesn't get funded.) Ask any mathematician -- theorem prover or software writer -- about excellent people she knows who have lost their grants. You will instantly get multiple examples. Mathematicians who write software are no more likely to be "truly making the world better" than those who prove theorems and teach hundreds or thousands of students every year. I'm not saying anything about Stein here. He's a rare mathematician: strong on theory and practice, a passionate advocate for his causes, and a respected teacher. But there is a danger of missing the real point here -- most good things don't get funded or recognized. This has gone on for centuries. The funding situation now in the US (for both theory and practice) is better than it has been almost everywhere for almost all time.
- douche 10y ago
  It seems trivially obvious that a better use of funds at many universities would be paying for actual academic research at a few hundred K per year, vs a big-name football coach, with all the associated staff, assistants, equipment, etc, for tens of millions per year.
  - niels_olson 10y ago
    Except the ROI on the football program is obvious and huge compared to literally any department at the university.
    - tmptmp 10y ago
      Since when it has become acceptable that the goal of academic institute is/should be dirty ROI? And then why just football? Start funding cabaret, rave parties and poll-dance events as they surely will have more ROI. Sports has been the undoing of US education in schools [1] earlier and now it seems even in higher ed. The sooner they get rid of sports from educational institutes the better for them. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-case-against-high-school-sports/309447/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-case...
      - niels_olson 10y ago
        I was on staff at a small science and engineering school with a top 25 football team, and I was the faculty rep for the cycling team. I had no love for football, and I say that as someone who played in highschool. Until I saw the finances and realized they funded the entire sports program. As much as it pained me, I had a hard time complaining after that.
      - gohrt 10y ago
        High school is not the same as college. Also, The Atlantic is not a reliable source. It prints garbage like this: "Football at Premont cost about $1,300 a player. Math, by contrast, cost just $618 a student." even though everyone at the school takes math, very few play football, and not everyone involved in football is a player.
dcposch 10y ago
I think nontraditional research organizations like YC Research and Google's Project Zero can solve this problem. -- Open source basic infrastructure -- everything from Sage to OpenSSL -- suffers from a market failure. We rely on these foundational projects for billions of dollars a year in commerce, but they often get minimal funding and are supported by semi-broke volunteers working in anonymity. * GPG is maintained by one guy, who was about to give up before a few people threw coins in his tip jar after this story a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003791 * OpenSSL was comically underfunded and underappreciated until Heartbleed happened and people remembered how much it matters Stein's story is powerful and shows how neither traditional companies nor universities help here. In the world of math software: * The companies created a bunch of closed-source walled gardens (Mathematica, Matlab, etc). * The universities were unwilling to support free and open tools. They gave tenure and support only for authors of research papers, not tools, no matter how useful or widely deployed. Even the guy who made NumPy and SciPy didn't get recognition for it---wtf. I think that these new, independent organizations with rich patrons can fill in the gap. Organizations like YC Research, Project Zero, and Canonical. We need more of them.
- banach 10y ago
  These projects are a crucial part of the infrastructure of the modern information society. The solution to a lack of funding for these things is not charity from rich patrons, but governmental investment based on taxes.
  - niels_olson 10y ago
    I tend to disagree. The government incentives are aligned toward large long term investments, not individual DaVincis or Galileos
    - banach 10y ago
      But that's exactly my point. Software development and maintenance requires long-term investments.

by cs702 10y ago

raverbashing 10y ago

See the before-the-last slide Academia values mindless papers over actual results.

chestervonwinch 10y ago
To be clear, this is a side effect of using publication count as a surrogate for an individual's total contributions to an academic field. Everyone knows this is the metric for success, so you either have to optimize for it, or risk looking like a failure.

algeom 10y ago

Most academics do not get funding or tenure. Most funded academic mathematicians lose funding at some point. The funding rate for NSF grants in mathematics is certainly less than 33%, and one can only submit a standard proposal once per year. The competition is FIERCE. (I've been on panels: it is terrifying to see who doesn't get funded.) Ask any mathematician -- theorem prover or software writer -- about excellent people she knows who have lost their grants. You will instantly get multiple examples. Mathematicians who write software are no more likely to be "truly making the world better" than those who prove theorems and teach hundreds or thousands of students every year. I'm not saying anything about Stein here. He's a rare mathematician: strong on theory and practice, a passionate advocate for his causes, and a respected teacher. But there is a danger of missing the real point here -- most good things don't get funded or recognized. This has gone on for centuries. The funding situation now in the US (for both theory and practice) is better than it has been almost everywhere for almost all time.

douche 10y ago
It seems trivially obvious that a better use of funds at many universities would be paying for actual academic research at a few hundred K per year, vs a big-name football coach, with all the associated staff, assistants, equipment, etc, for tens of millions per year.
- niels_olson 10y ago
  Except the ROI on the football program is obvious and huge compared to literally any department at the university.
  - tmptmp 10y ago
    Since when it has become acceptable that the goal of academic institute is/should be dirty ROI? And then why just football? Start funding cabaret, rave parties and poll-dance events as they surely will have more ROI. Sports has been the undoing of US education in schools [1] earlier and now it seems even in higher ed. The sooner they get rid of sports from educational institutes the better for them. [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-case-against-high-school-sports/309447/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-case...
    - niels_olson 10y ago
      I was on staff at a small science and engineering school with a top 25 football team, and I was the faculty rep for the cycling team. I had no love for football, and I say that as someone who played in highschool. Until I saw the finances and realized they funded the entire sports program. As much as it pained me, I had a hard time complaining after that.
    - gohrt 10y ago
      High school is not the same as college. Also, The Atlantic is not a reliable source. It prints garbage like this: "Football at Premont cost about $1,300 a player. Math, by contrast, cost just $618 a student." even though everyone at the school takes math, very few play football, and not everyone involved in football is a player.

dcposch 10y ago

I think nontraditional research organizations like YC Research and Google's Project Zero can solve this problem. -- Open source basic infrastructure -- everything from Sage to OpenSSL -- suffers from a market failure. We rely on these foundational projects for billions of dollars a year in commerce, but they often get minimal funding and are supported by semi-broke volunteers working in anonymity. * GPG is maintained by one guy, who was about to give up before a few people threw coins in his tip jar after this story a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003791 * OpenSSL was comically underfunded and underappreciated until Heartbleed happened and people remembered how much it matters Stein's story is powerful and shows how neither traditional companies nor universities help here. In the world of math software: * The companies created a bunch of closed-source walled gardens (Mathematica, Matlab, etc). * The universities were unwilling to support free and open tools. They gave tenure and support only for authors of research papers, not tools, no matter how useful or widely deployed. Even the guy who made NumPy and SciPy didn't get recognition for it---wtf. I think that these new, independent organizations with rich patrons can fill in the gap. Organizations like YC Research, Project Zero, and Canonical. We need more of them.

banach 10y ago
These projects are a crucial part of the infrastructure of the modern information society. The solution to a lack of funding for these things is not charity from rich patrons, but governmental investment based on taxes.
- niels_olson 10y ago
  I tend to disagree. The government incentives are aligned toward large long term investments, not individual DaVincis or Galileos
  - banach 10y ago
    But that's exactly my point. Software development and maintenance requires long-term investments.