Ernie enters our research funding debate. He answers my claim that research funding must be justified, not only among peers, but also to the general public.

Recall that I say that you must be able to explain how receiving funding will help society. Among other things, I complain that training graduate students is often seen as a sufficient output. The implicit claim is that these graduate students are badly needed by industry, even if it is blatantly false:

Once there was a time when graduating with a Ph.D. in the hard sciences meant a one-way ticket to a successful career that offered intellectual satisfaction and prestige. A graduate education—requiring diligence, patience, and lots of commitment—was well worth the hard work. But it is a seller’s market no more. Students graduating with hard-earned doctoral degrees in the hard sciences these days are faced with a thinning supply of research grants and jobs. Yet the number of students getting accepted into, and graduating from, advanced programs remains fixed. Despite the harsh realities of the job market, research universities are contributing to the Ph.D. job crisis by neglecting to adjust the number of students being trained and failing to alter their curricula to make Ph.D.s better prepared for today’s economy.

I insist that public justification for the funding is needed because, the peers are bias [looking for more graduate students when society doesn't need more] and can’t decide which fields are more desserving [because few "peers" are truly multidisciplinary]. Ernie tells me that…

…this avoids the real issue, which is that federal funding for all fundamental research is on the decline. (…) What’s less arguable is that this decrease in funding, if not reversed, will do serious long-term damage to American scientific research.

Daniel might be okay with that. (He is, after all, Canadian.) I find it deeply troubling.

So, somehow, fundamental research is now exempt from justifying itself and must receive public funding even if it doesn’t benefit society? Where did this rule come from?

Was there always public funding? No. What happened? Among other things, Germany showed that publicly funded universities and research could greatly contribute to society.

That’s why we have public funding for research. And if research is no longer judged useful for society, then it stands to reason that it should be cut.

So, is a ben laden detector something worth funding? Well, if you live in a country where a sizeable majority thinks so, it seems you have few options: you work to change their mind, accept it and build ben laden detectors or you leave. That’s it.

Don’t stand tall and complain that your research fund is being cut claiming that you shouldn’t have to justify the value of your work. Sorry, you do have to justify it. You do have to convince your countrymen that you do useful work. And if you don’t do useful work, then don’t expect generous funding.

[Disclaimer: I consider I do mostly semi-fundamental research and I do have some research funding, at least enough to help one or two graduate students. Finally, as Ernie points out, I'm Canadian and our government is not yet looking for ben laden-focused research.]

Wow. According to Marshall, the New York Times reported last year that blogging can be an effective way to get a job:

“It’s a trend on the rise right now,” Mr. Gartenberg [industry analyst at JupiterResearch] said, “especially for employers, who get a much better sense of a person this way. Resumes and interviews are a very scripted process; read someone’s Web log and you get a good sense of that person’s thinking and perspectives.”

I actually believe this. If you are a small or distributed company, this might be a very effective way to find interesting potential recruits.

I don’t think universities are yet desperate enough to hire professors based on Ph.D. students blogs. But for many less “formal” jobs, this seems like a great way to go.

I must be honest: I hired people based on their web sites, and I’ve recommended to students that they setup a web site as a way to increase their employability.

Now, what about me? I’m rather nasty on this blog sometimes, so I probably decrease my employability. What do you think? Do I increase or decrease the probability that I’ll get a sudden job offer by running this blog?

Suresh is complaining against the current for-profit trend in research:

The desire for knowledge for its own sake seems almost quaint in these days of interdisciplinary research, justifying one’s bottom line, monetizing one’s research, and so on and so forth.

I read him in the following way: he is afraid that governments will stop giving money for pure research and keep their most generous funding for industrial-oriented research.

I actually disagree in the following way: if you need a lot of cash to do your research, you’ve got to justify the use of the money. Justify it to whom? To the people who give you the money. This seems only fair. If you want to do research for its own sake, and you also want a lot of money, well, tough.

Many people do research using their own time and very little money. They don’t have 10 assistants, one super-computer and a large operating budget. Einstein had none of these things. If you need these things, if you need a large budget, then justify it… explain how it will make the country you live in richer or safer… if you can’t, and still need the money, then beg. Or use a friend’s gear. I don’t know. Don’t claim that the government must fund pure research. I don’t buy it.

No researcher has a God-given right to large funding. In fact, this very assumption is what is killing true research: we’ve come to measure research by how much funding is given. Hence, if no funding is given, no research is done.

I even go the other way: many funding agencies throw their money away without enough care. For example, the current trend to keep funding more and more graduate students on the basis that we are training “highly qualified personnel” is shameful. The government says to the public: we are investing money in training more graduate students because we need them in this new century… but the truth is that we really don’t need that many graduate students and that many of these students would have been better off doing something else with their lifes. My previous post was about Tim Bray… Tim started out in a university project, but as far as I can tell he never was a graduate student. [ Update: indeed Tim doesn't have a graduate degree.] This was no handicap to him, obviously.

Do I believe in “knowledge for knowledge’s sake”? Absolutely. Do I think that governments must fund “knowledge for knowledge’s sake” above and beyond the funding universities already receive as institutions of knowledge? No.

Where I live, most university professors get to spend half their time doing research. They usually have access to decent computers and related technological support. They even get funding to go to conferences. All of this is pretty standard. I claim that on this basis, they can easily do research for its own sake…

(Sorry Suresh if I misunderstood you.)

This is brilliant! ACM Queue is publishing an interview with Tim Bray (of XML fame) done by Jim Gray (of data cube and database transactions fame). Tim now runs Web technologies for Sun Microsystems. Tim Bray basically says that RDF and Semantic Web are a no go but we knew that’s what he thought.

However, there are many cool quotes. Try to find the pattern in these:

My CEO, Tom Jenkins, agreed to turn me loose to work on it myself, and I spent six months basically doing nothing else and built the crawler and the interfaces. (…) I lost weeks and weeks and weeks of sleep, hacking and patching and kludging to keep this thing on the air under the pressure of the load.

Lark was the first XML processor, implemented in Java. I wrote it myself. I used it also as a vehicle to learn Java. It shipped in January 1997 and actually got used by a bunch of people. (…) So, I let Lark go. It was fun to write and I think it was helpful, but it hasn’t been maintained since 1998.

Some of the people working in syndication were extremely upset about XML’s strictness, saying, “Well, you know, people just can’t be expected to generate well-formed data.” And I said, “Yes they can.” I went looking around and found that there are some quite decent libraries capable of doing that for Java and Perl and Python, but there didn’t seem to be one for C.

So sitting on the beach in Australia I wrote this little library in C called Genx that generates XML efficiently and guarantees that it is well-formed and canonical.

See the pattern? Tim Bray is a hacker with a degree in mathematics and computer science. [Tim doesn't have a graduate degree.] And he changed the world.

But his life was not always easy:

Microsoft really went insane. There was a major meltdown and a war, and I was temporarily fired as XML coeditor. There was an aggressive attempt to destroy my career over that.

(Note that the interviewer, Jim Gray, works for Microsoft!)

In an earlier post, I tried to predict what the next Gutenberg printing press or the next Web would be like. I predicted that ubiquitous massive storage would be the next big technological advance and that it would bring three new challenges: the need to bring data warehousing to the masses, the need to bring security to the masses, and the need to move all social software to the Wikipedia level and beyond.

Scott had this comment which is worth repeating here:

I think the third — the rise of social conciousness in cyberspace — is right on. Of course, it’s hard to be more specific. The one thing I’m fairly sure of is that the Next Big Thing will be familiar — it won’t be part of some alien new world. It will be a reflection of what people have been for a long time. What is important to people? Mainly, we communicate with each other. We communicate useful get-through-the-day facts and longer range planning. We gossip and small-talk to maintain or strengthen social relationships. And we produce and consume art to fulfill some deeply ingrained need to find resonance with other people. (Oh yes, and pornography, which is kind of in a class by itself.) So far, the big things in IT have all been direct reflections of those social needs: the Web, e-mail, instant messaging, cell phones, Napster/KaZaA, Skype, “social networking”, iTunes, video-on-demand, etc. I expect this web of communication to mature into something in which reputation and recommenation are pervasive — in a way that mirrors practices that we are already comfortable with, but with dramatically increased efficiency and/or accessibility. The open question for me is whether the increaase in efficiency or accessibility will be sufficient to have an impact approaching that of Gutenberg’s press.