6 ms·

It's a violation of labor laws. Universities argue that they can bypass labor laws by calling it education but there have been some recent rulings against that

by guelo 10y ago

It's a violation of labor laws. Universities argue that they can bypass labor laws by calling it education but there have been some recent rulings against that argument in postdoc unionization cases.

tnecniv 10y ago
Actually, it allows both postdoc AND grad student unionization.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dnautics 10y ago
Sure, this kind of pressure from an advisor breaks labor laws, but a postdoc is going to do this anyways because their contract is short-term, and if they don't rack up an achivement in that time, they're either have to be 1) lucky 2) a superstar, or 3) going to be kicked to the curb in terms of finding future employment. Science is often not something you can arbitrarily knock down into a 9-5. E.G: The enzyme assay has to get done after you prep, and the prep is an 8 hour block of time after your cells are ready, and you have to do 10 hours of enzyme kinetic work... So you stay up all night. And it took you 10 months to figure out that this is the correct procedure, and now you have one year left in your contract, and you probably ought to be publishing and getting ready to give lectures for academic positions... So that's a straight month of 6 nights a week 100 hour a week work. You hold postdocs strictly to labor laws, and they are going to be at a disadvantage to the postdocs that are crazy enough to do what needs to be done. You hold all postdocs strictly to labor laws, and hard science simply doesn't happen.
- sndean 10y ago
  > You hold postdocs strictly to labor laws, and they are going to be at a disadvantage to the postdocs that are crazy enough to do what needs to be done. You hold all postdocs strictly to labor laws, and hard science simply doesn't happen. I experienced this as a grad student, too. You essentially were at a disadvantage if you had a social life. But you can extend this all the way down to high schoolers (or before?), where the kids out partying/socializing would be at a disadvantage to the kid studying alone in his room.
  - Someone 10y ago
    All the way down to kindergarten. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-china-schools-6ccb7bea-5fe2-11e6-8e45-477372e89d78-20160811-story.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-china-schools-6ccb...: "When Doudou Wong from Shanghai was four, she began attending additional math, Chinese, and English classes outside of her weekday kindergarten"
    - pjlegato 10y ago
      And the worst part: This sort of draconian training regimen doesn't even work. If it did, China would have far more Nobel Prizes than it does.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - yyhhsj0521 10y ago
        It works [1]. The problem is that Nobel Prize has little to do with kindergarten and average people. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/dec/03/pisa-results-country-best-reading-maths-science https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/dec/03/pisa-r...
        Noseshine 10y ago
        Test scores are a strange definition of "it works" in the given context.
      - ken47 10y ago
        Why are you assuming that the goal of the regimen is to produce Nobel Prizes?
    - imjustsaying 10y ago
      Shanghai is completely different from the rest of China. Comparing Shanghai education to US education is like comparing the best school district in the US to the average school district of China. As with many things the communists parade around, you will be shown the front gates, but you won't be shown anything past it lest you realize you're seeing the facade of a movie set.
- zimzam 10y ago
  Some tasks aren't fit for a single person: why can't one post-doc do the prep shift and a second post-doc do the enzyme work? The way we structure our research institutions is arbitrary: we can and should restructure them if they aren't working.
  - cshimmin 10y ago
    Often times at the bleeding edge of research, that one postdoc is literally the only person in the world who can do both tasks. Also, most research projects are short enough on funding as it is. So what if you declare that this lab either has to 1) hire two people do to this job in shifts or 2) simply not do the research at all? You get back to the same situation dnautics mentioned where the truly passionate/competitive researchers are going to be doing whatever it takes to get it done (or, with strict enforcement, the science just doesn't get done).
    - projektir 10y ago
      > Often times at the bleeding edge of research, that one postdoc is literally the only person in the world who can do both tasks. I thought we just said earlier how easily replaceable this post-doc is. Not buying it. Bleeding edge of research doesn't really exist, it just doesn't move fast enough to have any sort of "bleeding edge". It's slowed down by lack of money and poor management and too much bureaucracy far more than it is by someone not working long hours. As has always been true with these things. This is why startups will, sadly, end up beating academic science over time. Because startups are bleeding edge. "It has to be this way!" is a very difficult claim to verify, you can't expect others merely to accept it, you must prove it, and I have seen very little evidence so far, including from my own experience with people who did research at university.
      - johncolanduoni 10y ago
        > Not buying it. Bleeding edge of research doesn't really exist, it just doesn't move fast enough to have any sort of "bleeding edge". It's slowed down by lack of money and poor management and too much bureaucracy far more than it is by someone not working long hours. As has always been true with these things. You're thinking of bleeding edge as "new drug that at least shows up in some pop-sci stuff". People working in labs come up with new methods of doing X in situation Y all the time because X and Y can both be crazy specific to a certain line of inquiry. A thousand of those lines of inquiry will likely be explored before anyone outside of their extremely specific area of study notices. Your sampling bias is pretty irrelevant to the process. As a concrete example, maybe you need to apply a novel algorithm to a high frequency data source (e.g. a single photon counting module). So you need to program an FPGA with a deserializer to do the processing (in lieu of wasting money on a DAQ that can pump data into your computer at a few GHz sampling rate), and only one postdoc understands the algorithm and FPGAs well enough to do it. Does that sound like a crazy, unusual, made-up scenario? > This is why startups will, sadly, end up beating academic science over time. Because startups are bleeding edge. Have you seen how hard it is for startups that actually work on bleeding-edge scientific work to take off? Is that not something that Y-Combinator (for example) has specifically been looking for a more hybridized model for? Most research done at university is a very risky bet even for startups, especially if you want not just a result but a marketable result. Want some concrete examples of the system working? Take a look at the envelope that quantum information research has pushed in the last 5 years. On the theoretical computer science side, you've got people like Scott Aronson answering significant open questions at a dizzying rate (read his blog for some basic, well-explained evidence). Meanwhile you've got groups like Martinis'[1] making the first quantum computer that can accurately simulate a different quantum system. All with a huge amount of collaboration in a social network of scientists that spans the globe. Where's your evidence that startups are the hammer-screwdriver-impact-driver combo that solves all of humanity's intellectual problems with but one institution? Because that's a much stronger claim than "academia does moonshot research that wouldn't get done otherwise and its not the scientific equivalent of another day another CRUD app". [1]: http://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~martinisgroup/publications.shtml http://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~martinisgroup/publications.shtm...
- Retric 10y ago
  Sounds like this just needs automation. Further people working 100 hour weeks make so many mistakes their work flat out can't be trusted. And should automatically be rejected by any sane review board on that basis alone. Not that it will be but as has been shown many times 'modern' science is fairly broken.
  - pjlegato 10y ago
    You are correct that automation would help out a lot technically, at least in some science fields. There are two cultural issues, though: 1) Automation won't be used in many cases since automation is not how the advisors did things when they got their PhD. They usually don't care if the student has a better idea for how to do things than theirs, even (especially) if the student is technically correct. 2) Even in cases where they do automate some procedure and save a lot of labor, the grad student is simply expected to use that time to do that much more new / additional work.
    - sseagull 10y ago
      Exactly. They will be put to work figuring out how to automate thing, and we will be back to where we started. In order to automate something, you have to actually discover and refine the process first
  - jostmey 10y ago
    Won't happen while labor is cheap
    - pmoriarty 10y ago
      It will if people start going to jail.
  - dnautics 10y ago
    when you're at the bleeding edge, if you try to automate your way out of a solution, you will develop poor judgement. One of my grad student cohorts worked on a project where she automated large swaths of her project (which still required about 40-60h prep time). Early on during one of her group meetings, I urged her to take a closer look at her findings and not use automation for her work, but she didn't. I specifically warned her that "she might be chasing ghosts for years", and to not take my warning as any sort of judgment on her character. Later, she found that the thousands of observations she made were artefactual, a result of the automation kit she was using. Nonetheless I have a lot of respect for her for twisting the arm of her PI to allow her to publish the retraction report. Original report: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pro.363/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pro.363/full Retraction report: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pro.2339/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pro.2339/full
- Kenji 10y ago
  Sure, this kind of pressure from an advisor breaks labor laws, but a postdoc is going to do this anyways because their contract is short-term, and if they don't rack up an achivement in that time, they're either have to be 1) lucky 2) a superstar, or 3) going to be kicked to the curb in terms of finding future employment. Living under a bridge would be better than enduring this kind of stress. People have to take a step back and look at their lives. Nobody can work so much consistently without mentally and/or physically damaging themselves in significant and lasting ways.
  - dnautics 10y ago
    To say nobody can do that is overgeneralization. Some people can (A surprising number of scientists are ultramarathon runners). But also, a lot of people going through the scientists do wind up mentally damaged, and many of them become PIs.
    - projektir 10y ago
      I believe it's extremely harmful for science to assume that the only people who can contribute meaningful science are those that a) put up with awful work conditions and b) can be ultramarathon runners. You don't see a problem with that selection process? Does that correlation not alarm you? May want to consider how many people would not have survived that kind of environment.
      - dnautics 10y ago
        I think you're missing the deep cynicism there. I don't think the stress or long hours can be done away with, but there are ways that the reward can be made worth it. I don't think that the monetary situation can be changed by fiat. The problem there is that there is an oversupply of labor, and trying to wave a magic wand to fix (monetary) compensation without recognizing the supply/demand curve is going to cause problems: Namely, that the demand for scientists will go down, and the promotion of scientists will become increasingly arbitrary. Instead of getting better scientists, we'll be paying a smaller number of bad scientists more money.
- ageofwant 10y ago
  Absolute nonsense. This is simply bad management. This task should be handled by a team that is managed by simple tools available since people stared to write shit down. So your paper have a few more authors and the Prof can claim he rightfully needs more postdocs, more postdocs get employed, have real lives and will by simply being able to sleep be vastly more productive. Real science will get done faster, better, with better paper trails and attract smarter people to the field that will currently simply not stand for this kind of shit.
- pmoriarty 10y ago
  "The enzyme assay has to get done after you prep, and the prep is an 8 hour block of time after your cells are ready, and you have to do 10 hours of enzyme kinetic work... So you stay up all night." I don't get it. Why can't this be done by multiple people in 8 hour shifts? The medical profession is also pretty insane for making its residents work crazy hours and get almost no sleep for 24, 36, or even more hours a shift. It never made sense to me, especially as these people are risking their and other people's lives by going without sleep for so long.
  - throw_away_777 10y ago
    Of course it can (and should) be done by multiple people, but there is an essentially unlimited supply of postdocs and graduate students from China and India who are willing to work long hours. A graduate student salary is peanuts for a US citizen compared to industry, not so for someone from a third-world country. This isn't hyperbole - more than half of the graduate students at my University were not born in the US. Graduate students 3-4 years into their PhD face tremendous pressure not to quit, and you usually make the decision to go into graduate school very early in your career.

by guelo 10y ago

It's a violation of labor laws. Universities argue that they can bypass labor laws by calling it education but there have been some recent rulings against that argument in postdoc unionization cases.

tnecniv 10y ago

Actually, it allows both postdoc AND grad student unionization.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

dnautics 10y ago

Sure, this kind of pressure from an advisor breaks labor laws, but a postdoc is going to do this anyways because their contract is short-term, and if they don't rack up an achivement in that time, they're either have to be 1) lucky 2) a superstar, or 3) going to be kicked to the curb in terms of finding future employment. Science is often not something you can arbitrarily knock down into a 9-5. E.G: The enzyme assay has to get done after you prep, and the prep is an 8 hour block of time after your cells are ready, and you have to do 10 hours of enzyme kinetic work... So you stay up all night. And it took you 10 months to figure out that this is the correct procedure, and now you have one year left in your contract, and you probably ought to be publishing and getting ready to give lectures for academic positions... So that's a straight month of 6 nights a week 100 hour a week work. You hold postdocs strictly to labor laws, and they are going to be at a disadvantage to the postdocs that are crazy enough to do what needs to be done. You hold all postdocs strictly to labor laws, and hard science simply doesn't happen.

sndean 10y ago
> You hold postdocs strictly to labor laws, and they are going to be at a disadvantage to the postdocs that are crazy enough to do what needs to be done. You hold all postdocs strictly to labor laws, and hard science simply doesn't happen. I experienced this as a grad student, too. You essentially were at a disadvantage if you had a social life. But you can extend this all the way down to high schoolers (or before?), where the kids out partying/socializing would be at a disadvantage to the kid studying alone in his room.
- Someone 10y ago
  All the way down to kindergarten. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-china-schools-6ccb7bea-5fe2-11e6-8e45-477372e89d78-20160811-story.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-china-schools-6ccb...: "When Doudou Wong from Shanghai was four, she began attending additional math, Chinese, and English classes outside of her weekday kindergarten"
  - pjlegato 10y ago
    And the worst part: This sort of draconian training regimen doesn't even work. If it did, China would have far more Nobel Prizes than it does.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - yyhhsj0521 10y ago
      It works [1]. The problem is that Nobel Prize has little to do with kindergarten and average people. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/dec/03/pisa-results-country-best-reading-maths-science https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/dec/03/pisa-r...
      - Noseshine 10y ago
        Test scores are a strange definition of "it works" in the given context.
    - ken47 10y ago
      Why are you assuming that the goal of the regimen is to produce Nobel Prizes?
  - imjustsaying 10y ago
    Shanghai is completely different from the rest of China. Comparing Shanghai education to US education is like comparing the best school district in the US to the average school district of China. As with many things the communists parade around, you will be shown the front gates, but you won't be shown anything past it lest you realize you're seeing the facade of a movie set.
zimzam 10y ago
Some tasks aren't fit for a single person: why can't one post-doc do the prep shift and a second post-doc do the enzyme work? The way we structure our research institutions is arbitrary: we can and should restructure them if they aren't working.
- cshimmin 10y ago
  Often times at the bleeding edge of research, that one postdoc is literally the only person in the world who can do both tasks. Also, most research projects are short enough on funding as it is. So what if you declare that this lab either has to 1) hire two people do to this job in shifts or 2) simply not do the research at all? You get back to the same situation dnautics mentioned where the truly passionate/competitive researchers are going to be doing whatever it takes to get it done (or, with strict enforcement, the science just doesn't get done).
  - projektir 10y ago
    > Often times at the bleeding edge of research, that one postdoc is literally the only person in the world who can do both tasks. I thought we just said earlier how easily replaceable this post-doc is. Not buying it. Bleeding edge of research doesn't really exist, it just doesn't move fast enough to have any sort of "bleeding edge". It's slowed down by lack of money and poor management and too much bureaucracy far more than it is by someone not working long hours. As has always been true with these things. This is why startups will, sadly, end up beating academic science over time. Because startups are bleeding edge. "It has to be this way!" is a very difficult claim to verify, you can't expect others merely to accept it, you must prove it, and I have seen very little evidence so far, including from my own experience with people who did research at university.
    - johncolanduoni 10y ago
      > Not buying it. Bleeding edge of research doesn't really exist, it just doesn't move fast enough to have any sort of "bleeding edge". It's slowed down by lack of money and poor management and too much bureaucracy far more than it is by someone not working long hours. As has always been true with these things. You're thinking of bleeding edge as "new drug that at least shows up in some pop-sci stuff". People working in labs come up with new methods of doing X in situation Y all the time because X and Y can both be crazy specific to a certain line of inquiry. A thousand of those lines of inquiry will likely be explored before anyone outside of their extremely specific area of study notices. Your sampling bias is pretty irrelevant to the process. As a concrete example, maybe you need to apply a novel algorithm to a high frequency data source (e.g. a single photon counting module). So you need to program an FPGA with a deserializer to do the processing (in lieu of wasting money on a DAQ that can pump data into your computer at a few GHz sampling rate), and only one postdoc understands the algorithm and FPGAs well enough to do it. Does that sound like a crazy, unusual, made-up scenario? > This is why startups will, sadly, end up beating academic science over time. Because startups are bleeding edge. Have you seen how hard it is for startups that actually work on bleeding-edge scientific work to take off? Is that not something that Y-Combinator (for example) has specifically been looking for a more hybridized model for? Most research done at university is a very risky bet even for startups, especially if you want not just a result but a marketable result. Want some concrete examples of the system working? Take a look at the envelope that quantum information research has pushed in the last 5 years. On the theoretical computer science side, you've got people like Scott Aronson answering significant open questions at a dizzying rate (read his blog for some basic, well-explained evidence). Meanwhile you've got groups like Martinis'[1] making the first quantum computer that can accurately simulate a different quantum system. All with a huge amount of collaboration in a social network of scientists that spans the globe. Where's your evidence that startups are the hammer-screwdriver-impact-driver combo that solves all of humanity's intellectual problems with but one institution? Because that's a much stronger claim than "academia does moonshot research that wouldn't get done otherwise and its not the scientific equivalent of another day another CRUD app". [1]: http://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~martinisgroup/publications.shtml http://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~martinisgroup/publications.shtm...
Retric 10y ago
Sounds like this just needs automation. Further people working 100 hour weeks make so many mistakes their work flat out can't be trusted. And should automatically be rejected by any sane review board on that basis alone. Not that it will be but as has been shown many times 'modern' science is fairly broken.
- pjlegato 10y ago
  You are correct that automation would help out a lot technically, at least in some science fields. There are two cultural issues, though: 1) Automation won't be used in many cases since automation is not how the advisors did things when they got their PhD. They usually don't care if the student has a better idea for how to do things than theirs, even (especially) if the student is technically correct. 2) Even in cases where they do automate some procedure and save a lot of labor, the grad student is simply expected to use that time to do that much more new / additional work.
  - sseagull 10y ago
    Exactly. They will be put to work figuring out how to automate thing, and we will be back to where we started. In order to automate something, you have to actually discover and refine the process first
- jostmey 10y ago
  Won't happen while labor is cheap
  - pmoriarty 10y ago
    It will if people start going to jail.
- dnautics 10y ago
  when you're at the bleeding edge, if you try to automate your way out of a solution, you will develop poor judgement. One of my grad student cohorts worked on a project where she automated large swaths of her project (which still required about 40-60h prep time). Early on during one of her group meetings, I urged her to take a closer look at her findings and not use automation for her work, but she didn't. I specifically warned her that "she might be chasing ghosts for years", and to not take my warning as any sort of judgment on her character. Later, she found that the thousands of observations she made were artefactual, a result of the automation kit she was using. Nonetheless I have a lot of respect for her for twisting the arm of her PI to allow her to publish the retraction report. Original report: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pro.363/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pro.363/full Retraction report: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pro.2339/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pro.2339/full
Kenji 10y ago
Sure, this kind of pressure from an advisor breaks labor laws, but a postdoc is going to do this anyways because their contract is short-term, and if they don't rack up an achivement in that time, they're either have to be 1) lucky 2) a superstar, or 3) going to be kicked to the curb in terms of finding future employment. Living under a bridge would be better than enduring this kind of stress. People have to take a step back and look at their lives. Nobody can work so much consistently without mentally and/or physically damaging themselves in significant and lasting ways.
- dnautics 10y ago
  To say nobody can do that is overgeneralization. Some people can (A surprising number of scientists are ultramarathon runners). But also, a lot of people going through the scientists do wind up mentally damaged, and many of them become PIs.
  - projektir 10y ago
    I believe it's extremely harmful for science to assume that the only people who can contribute meaningful science are those that a) put up with awful work conditions and b) can be ultramarathon runners. You don't see a problem with that selection process? Does that correlation not alarm you? May want to consider how many people would not have survived that kind of environment.
    - dnautics 10y ago
      I think you're missing the deep cynicism there. I don't think the stress or long hours can be done away with, but there are ways that the reward can be made worth it. I don't think that the monetary situation can be changed by fiat. The problem there is that there is an oversupply of labor, and trying to wave a magic wand to fix (monetary) compensation without recognizing the supply/demand curve is going to cause problems: Namely, that the demand for scientists will go down, and the promotion of scientists will become increasingly arbitrary. Instead of getting better scientists, we'll be paying a smaller number of bad scientists more money.
ageofwant 10y ago
Absolute nonsense. This is simply bad management. This task should be handled by a team that is managed by simple tools available since people stared to write shit down. So your paper have a few more authors and the Prof can claim he rightfully needs more postdocs, more postdocs get employed, have real lives and will by simply being able to sleep be vastly more productive. Real science will get done faster, better, with better paper trails and attract smarter people to the field that will currently simply not stand for this kind of shit.
pmoriarty 10y ago
"The enzyme assay has to get done after you prep, and the prep is an 8 hour block of time after your cells are ready, and you have to do 10 hours of enzyme kinetic work... So you stay up all night." I don't get it. Why can't this be done by multiple people in 8 hour shifts? The medical profession is also pretty insane for making its residents work crazy hours and get almost no sleep for 24, 36, or even more hours a shift. It never made sense to me, especially as these people are risking their and other people's lives by going without sleep for so long.
- throw_away_777 10y ago
  Of course it can (and should) be done by multiple people, but there is an essentially unlimited supply of postdocs and graduate students from China and India who are willing to work long hours. A graduate student salary is peanuts for a US citizen compared to industry, not so for someone from a third-world country. This isn't hyperbole - more than half of the graduate students at my University were not born in the US. Graduate students 3-4 years into their PhD face tremendous pressure not to quit, and you usually make the decision to go into graduate school very early in your career.