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There are two kinds of people who quit academia: those who want to produce research and those who don't. To the latter, I say, oh well, it perhaps was not the p
by AaronFriel 13y ago
There are two kinds of people who quit academia: those who want to produce research and those who don't. To the latter, I say, oh well, it perhaps was not the place for you. Good luck and best fortune.
To the former, I lament their opportunities outside of academia. Basic research, the research that built the foundation that makes this comment appear before your eyes and zips packets of data around to make this economy function, has been on the decline for near a decade now. And the decline in corporate, non-university basic research has been even more profound.
People who read Hacker News are probably in a better state than most when it comes to this, there are many choices of research lab to work at in computer science. For basic mathematical research, your choices outside of a university setting are a little more slim; and nearly nonexistent, if you, like most of the readers here, have ethical problems with producing classified research or working with 3 and 4 letter agencies of recent disrepute.
But to my peers in other academic programs - I wonder how much the world will lose because ethicists, geologists, and even people who are pursuing the art of pedagogy in advanced educational degrees are leaving academia.
Postscript: I don't mean any of the above to be exhaustive lists of academic fields affected or not affected. It's not just computer science that has ample opportunity for postgraduate research outside of a university, and it's not only the philosophers, geologists, and educators who are finding difficulty. To wit, I don't even know if that's the case for geologists, but I have heard of the woes of finding even graduate study programs in philosophy and education.
Post-postscript: I forgot to cite sources, and one summary, though five years dated, is here: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsb0803/start.htm?CFID=12379966&CFTOKEN=70354711&jsessionid=f0307725d648dd553ba513586d223fe107f4#declining http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsb0803/start.htm?CFID=1237996... - there the NSF documents declining basic research from industry and declining funding from government.
- PaulHoule 13y agoIt might gain. If you spend much time with the literature it's pretty obvious that U.S. agencies regularly blackball particular research areas. For instance, the tap got turned off suddenly on work on quasicrystals, MPI-style parallel computing, and on work related to the semantic web. In the meantime, huge amounts of research money goes down the drain in areas such as internet QoS.
- redblacktree 13y agoWould that this were more well known. I would have called myself a conspiracy theorist if I'd made that conclusion on my own. Sure, I'm aware of the halted embryonic stem cell research we had under Bush, but I had no idea it was happening with anything so seemingly-benign (or, at the least, neutral) as parallel computing.
- PaulHoule 13y agoParallel computing, at least based on the MPI paradigm, isn't benign. Once the DoD got the state of the art up to the point where they could get enough workers for Los Alamos and Sandia labs they didn't want to subsidize educating people from India and China in the techniques used to simulate nuclear weapons. As for other fields I think it's an issue of fashion and a zero sum game.
- redblacktree 13y agoWhat about the semantic web? What reason might the DoD have for cutting off that research? Edit: Never mind. Upon re-reading, I see that you chalked those up to fashion.
- PaulHoule 13y agoIt could be the DoD there. An astonishing number of people do semantic web related stuff in Virginia. They just don't publish what they do. ;-) Thanks to the government shutdown some of them weren't very busy and they made me a nice little piece of software...
- poulson 13y agoInteresting. As an active (but young) researcher in distributed-memory computing, I wouldn't say that the funding has been turned off. I would instead argue that many-core/GPU/MIC and MapReduce approaches took over as the parallel computing topics du jour.
- Guvante 13y ago> There are two kinds of people who quit academia: those who want to produce research and those who don't. The article calls out a third case, those who don't produce research because they aren't being paid enough. If you are being paid a teacher's salary, they can't really complain when you put forth a teacher's work (well they can, but not justifiably).