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ethereal · 03-29-2007, 08:14 AM

Have you checked the current state of affairs with how research grants are given, or how project proposals are accepted in academia? Almost all the money is going into projects that ultimately show very limited results with very limited applicability. At worse, they show no results at all but are done for political/personal purposes. Same with Ph.D. theses, people care more about getting the doctorate than in working on something truly revolutionary. Not everyone, but most.

I recently went to a software engineering conference with my dad, and almost ALL of the papers submitted dealt with abstract theoretical stuff with no practical basis and very limited applicability. A lot of it was incremental research into either highly specialized fields or over-researched topics. Nothing disruptive or breakthrough at all. We submitted our papers and did a presentation dealing with core essential problems in software engineering -- how all of software engineering is focused on finding and fixing bugs, but not on prevention of bugs. We have already developed a product with an order-of-magnitude increase in efficiency, so it wasn't just airy-fairy ivory tower stuff. Nobody understood the importance of it, except a few who ended up staying after the presentation to talk more.

Another personal example: my dad has another idea dealing with integrated circuit design. Right now IC chips are designed sequentially in stages, and if you screw up one stage you have to start all over. This basically leads to an exponential number of tries before you get a working chip design. My dad found a way to do it optimally in parallel, in one single process. He presented it at a research symposium with the top researchers in all of China's universities, and after a week-long debate they unanimously agreed it was a revolutionary idea and supported getting a research grant for it. What happened? Due to lack of connections (guanxi) with the top dogs in government / military / academia, it lost the research grant to some other projects that had barely any importance to society.

I think great people like Einstein, Newton, etc. are the exception and not the rule. We tend to see them as all the geniuses there are in the world, but for every Einstein there are a thousand unrecognized geniuses working in the background trying to get their work noticed for the benefit of humanity, despite the government/academic world trying to push them out of the way to protect their own interests. I believe Aaron, PATHS, and the rest of his crew belong to the latter category.

edit: to answer your post directly, one can only try for so long to get something accepted by a system that does not appreciate changes to the status quo or attacks on their vested interests. If I were them I'd give up a long time ago and try some other route (which seems to be what most of them have done, anyway

)

2nd edit: do you know how many scientists and professors would be out of a job if something like this was commonly accepted? Especially if this is something that they can't even understand? I think that should answer your questions about peer-review and publication

03-29-2007, 08:14 AM	#13 (permalink)
ethereal Senior Member Join Date: Nov 2006 Posts: 511	Have you checked the current state of affairs with how research grants are given, or how project proposals are accepted in academia? Almost all the money is going into projects that ultimately show very limited results with very limited applicability. At worse, they show no results at all but are done for political/personal purposes. Same with Ph.D. theses, people care more about getting the doctorate than in working on something truly revolutionary. Not everyone, but most. I recently went to a software engineering conference with my dad, and almost ALL of the papers submitted dealt with abstract theoretical stuff with no practical basis and very limited applicability. A lot of it was incremental research into either highly specialized fields or over-researched topics. Nothing disruptive or breakthrough at all. We submitted our papers and did a presentation dealing with core essential problems in software engineering -- how all of software engineering is focused on finding and fixing bugs, but not on prevention of bugs. We have already developed a product with an order-of-magnitude increase in efficiency, so it wasn't just airy-fairy ivory tower stuff. Nobody understood the importance of it, except a few who ended up staying after the presentation to talk more. Another personal example: my dad has another idea dealing with integrated circuit design. Right now IC chips are designed sequentially in stages, and if you screw up one stage you have to start all over. This basically leads to an exponential number of tries before you get a working chip design. My dad found a way to do it optimally in parallel, in one single process. He presented it at a research symposium with the top researchers in all of China's universities, and after a week-long debate they unanimously agreed it was a revolutionary idea and supported getting a research grant for it. What happened? Due to lack of connections (guanxi) with the top dogs in government / military / academia, it lost the research grant to some other projects that had barely any importance to society. I think great people like Einstein, Newton, etc. are the exception and not the rule. We tend to see them as all the geniuses there are in the world, but for every Einstein there are a thousand unrecognized geniuses working in the background trying to get their work noticed for the benefit of humanity, despite the government/academic world trying to push them out of the way to protect their own interests. I believe Aaron, PATHS, and the rest of his crew belong to the latter category. edit: to answer your post directly, one can only try for so long to get something accepted by a system that does not appreciate changes to the status quo or attacks on their vested interests. If I were them I'd give up a long time ago and try some other route (which seems to be what most of them have done, anyway ) 2nd edit: do you know how many scientists and professors would be out of a job if something like this was commonly accepted? Especially if this is something that they can't even understand? I think that should answer your questions about peer-review and publication Last edited by ethereal; 03-29-2007 at 08:27 AM.