

France excels at R&D, but Academia is overdue for disruption - RudeBaguette
http://www.rudebaguette.com/2012/05/09/r-and-d/?utm_source=hackernews&utm_campaign=hackernews

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CJefferson
I feel one big thing that the "cool" (as opposed to us 'uncool' academics) can
miss is that good research is hard. It is common to spend months on topics on
areas that don't work out, and years on topics that do. It doesn't fit the
modern high-speed of the internet, and it doesn't fit in 140 characters.

And of course, most research isn't particularly interesting to people outside
a fairly small area. I might come up with a new way of doing something
important in my research area 50 times faster than we did it before, but
explaining what I did struggles to fit in 15 pages, never mind 140 characters.
Personally I can't imagine what interesting research related-comment you could
fit in a tweet. Then again, I've never got twitter (which isn't something I'm
proud of -- sufficiently many people are using it that I am sure I'm missing
something.. just not sure what).

~~~
sb
Agreed. Besides the length issue of a tweet (which don't apply to blog posts,
as we all know from Steve Yegge) I also think that there is no incentive for a
researcher to participate in the social web--at least none that I can think
of. Actually, quite the contrary is true: yesterday's post on academic blogs
linked to the "serious engineering" blog, which contains the following line in
a post about time management:

    
    
      Do not read blogs and above all do not write them.
    

AFAIR, Matt Might had a somewhat different point of view, where he elaborates
on strategies how to publish blog posts out of presentations, etc. To me the
social web compares very well with the TV on the time-sink scale: you save a
lot of time by not doing it.

~~~
nernst
I'm fairly sure that line from Anthony Finkelstein is tongue-in-cheek.

Like any profession, academia is about networking. Social media can really
help here, and I think academics are slowly understanding this. There are two
problems: blogging/tweeting are lower priority than grant-writing, teaching,
marking, and paper-writing; and academics are usually older and (in my
experience) older people don't 'do' social media as much.

But in software engineering, at least, there is a good community of people on
social media. For example, the Never Work In Theory blog (of which I'm an
author), and various academics on twitter, like @profserious or @avandeursen.

------
NathanRice
As someone tangentially involved in the administration apparatus for large,
well utilized clusters, I have to dispel some myths related to "Cloud"
services and Amazon EC2 for computation. First, if your school has
institutional cluster services, these are FAR cheaper than cloud options.
Secondly, the type of systems that are good for scientific computation are not
the type of boxes typically deployed in the cloud; try to find a 48 terabyte
memory node in the cloud.

OSG/Teragrid are much better options than the cloud, though you do have to
jump through some hoops to access them. Believe me when I say it is worth it
though.

~~~
cing
Definitely agree. To give a ballpark figure, Compute Canada, the governing HPC
body in Canada provided a cost estimate to researchers who applied and
received dedicated computer allocation. Although, all this computer time is
actually "free" to the scientist:

"The average RAC award in 2012 was 500 core years and 50 TB years. From
Penguin Computing's website [list pricing from Feb 10th, 2012] the cost to
purchase a similar amount of computational time and ability would be $450,000.
($600 / server month where each server provides 8 cores) To purchase 50 TB
from SDSC [again, list pricing from Feb 10th, 2012] it would cost $30,000.
($600 / TB Year) Making the total value of the average RAC award nearly
$500,000. The cost to Compute Canada to provide this level of award is
$178,000 and that includes all aspects of user support, training and other
aspects not covered by commercial clouds."
([https://computecanada.ca/index.php/en/component/content/arti...](https://computecanada.ca/index.php/en/component/content/article/9-english-
catogories/169-cost-2012-rac-awards))

As a side-note, my groups award was above the average, The email to our
research group stated: "Providing these resources to your research group costs
Compute Canada roughly $4,669,960." I don't even want to calculate how much
that would cost on EC2!

~~~
bbgm
500 cores is approximately 32 cc2.8xlarge instances (16 cores/instance). If
you are running a highly utilized cluster, i.e. you are going for a one year
heavy utilization reserved instance, the compute part is going to cost you
~$262,000. If you went with a 3-yr RI, it would be $183,000/yr.

Or to put it differently, ~$0.04/core-hr prior to any volume discounts.

------
GuiA
The argument about France's strength at the end of the article is anecdotal
(and not argued at all), and the title is misleading.

(and as a French CS student who did his undergrad in France and started a PhD
in the US (and have many friends in PhD tracks in both systems), I'd actually
argue that France is better at "pure/abstract research" rather than R&D. Inria
is a very unusual organization, not representative of research in France at
all)

~~~
agravier
Some data: Inria is (AFAIK) one of the 3 major public research institutions in
France: CNRS (the largest, multiple scientific fields, 26k people), Inria (CS,
4k people), INSERM (Medical, 6k people). There are others, but they are much
less staffed. Anecdotally, I worked in a CNRS lab and I can tell you that it
was very much applied. But applied research was the stated goal of the lab,
and I can't say about the rest of the CNRS.

~~~
kleim
You forgot CEA (nuclear and renewable energy, microelectronics, defense,...
16k people).

~~~
agravier
You are right but it seems that the CEA is an établissement public à caractère
industriel, while the ones I cite are établissements publics à caractère
scientifique.

However, you are right, this distinction seems pretty arbitrary to me, as the
ONERA (aerospace) too is classified as "industrial" and not "scientific"
research establishment.

------
ylem
I think this post misses a number of things. For example, take peer review.
The system is not perfect--but peer review takes time and expertise. It's not
as simple as a "like". When I review an article--I check for consistency. If
necessary, I go through the references. At times, I make sure that errors have
been propagated correctly. Then, there are broader issues such as relevance.
In short, it's labor intensive and sometimes there are bad referees--but
overall, I think the system is better than a simple comment system. In modern
terms, you might call it "curated" content--the referees and editors help
increase the signal to noise ratio in the sea of papers that are submitted.

For conferences--while the presentations are important, so are the
conversations in the halls, at dinner, etc. It's useful to have face to face
conversations with your collaborators and to make new ones.

There have been some changes--like for initial program committee meetings for
conferences sometimes take place using webex/gotomeeting given the diverse
timezones/countries of members. Some experimentation has been done with using
second life for the first stage of grant reviews--but at the end, physical
meetings are necessary. For conferences themselves (in physics), you are
paying on average less than $1000--even for conferences with ~10,000 people.
But--conferences do cost money to organize--I made a mistake for the first
workshop I organized by charging too little...

Things are gradually improving--slides from the invited talks are hosted
online for the major conference from my field. Mobile schedules could be
improved...

Others have commented on the EC2 question--but one other thing to consider is
whether their architecture is suited to a given problem. We're investigating
this now.

While Hadoop is good for some problems, it may not be appropriate for others.
This is generally true of a number of the points in the article--use the right
tool for the right job--don't just use it because it is new...

------
eshvk
There actually is a really strong community of mathematicians at
mathoverflow.net. Also, I know quite a few academics who tweet about their
research but these are definitely the exception rather than the norm.

A simple reason as to why academics aren't "socially connected" is that they
don't need to be. The academic social network exists informally and is more
tightly knit than a social network of say programmers, so I don't necessarily
have to be your facebook friend or follow you on twitter to be able to get in
touch with you through 2-3 hops

As far as blogs are concerned, one reason to write blogs is for purely
didactic purposes. I definitely know tons of Grad students who use to prepare
their notes and put them on their web pages or local servers to fulfill that
need. The other reason: To transmit your ideas to wider audience is much a
more harder problem to solve. Mathematical abstractions get progressively
harder to communicate if your understanding of the basics is weak, example,
you would definitely need a background in vector spaces to understand
functional analysis. I remember reading a blog recently where the author ( a
machine learning academic) had written about his experience in implementing a
stochastic gradient solver for online learning in Clojure: There were a couple
of comments complaining that there was no context. While, I definitely see
where those folks are coming from, it would take too long and a good deal more
posts to be able to break down a couple of book's worth of ideas before you
get to what you want to talk about.

------
PeterisP
Reading and writing tweets is a pleasant time-waster that should be seriously
limited if you want to achieve something serious, not encouraged. The same
applies also to HN, of course, where I am now wasting time to avoid research
:P

There are enough (and too much) scientific stuff to read in any interesting,
active research topic; the bottleneck is in the researcher's ability to read
and understand, not in lack of content.

And even peer reviewed articles in respectable publications quite often are
garbage and/or wrong. If your proposal "let's do stuff this way" isn't even
peer reviewed, then it's most likely not worth reading - since there's a too
high chance that it's one of:

a) duplicate of something that was already done in 1970'ies by someone else,
and abandoned as it's not practical in real life due to X,Y and Z that you
haven't considered yet; b) misleading or simply not true, as it's not
researched / repeated / analyzed enough; c) Simply useless.

After all, if it was correct, novel and interesting, then there are quite a
lot incentives for putting it to 'traditional' publishing; so if you're not
publishing it 'properly' then it's an indication that you are doing it because
your content is not publish-worthy, as people tend to squeeze as much
publications as they can out of any decent, publish-worthy research.

------
alain94040
Actually, call me a twitter-blase, but I'm not so excited and upbeat about
Twitter anymore. The fact that people tweet stuff during a presentation don't
get me excited. I'd rather they listen and learn from the presenter. Then I
can say mission accomplished (as a conference organizer).

I just know too many great people who don't spend any time on Twitter, and
frankly, why should they? I see a lot of self-promotion, "social media"
experts retweeting to death. Real people saying interesting things? Some, but
not enough to keep me engaged.

------
ori_b
I dread the day that scientists try to condense their research into 140
characters. Reading well thought out blog posts would be great, but to be
honest, the ideal would simply making it easier for me to find out what the
best papers are.

------
ktizo
I always assumed that scientists generally do not participate in the wider web
as much due to having much faster academic links than the average net user
could even dream of.

However, that said, there are many things that can be improved upon that the
wider web would be great for. Academic publishing is one obvious one and the
Elsevier boycott is a strong indication that this is well underway.

Data collection and sensing is another, which with the new class of cheap
networked devices like the Rasperry Pi, as well as pads and smartphones, could
well be something that is worth putting some thought into.

Distributed computing and mass collaboration is another obvious one, however
it seems that academics can often get this more or less for free, if you look
at examples like folding@home and the NASA moon crater identification project
thingy, so there might not be so much requirement for things like EC2 or
mechanical turk, when compared to getting people to donate resources for
nothing.

~~~
ylem
Also, a friend's lab at NIH is using mechanical turk...

~~~
ktizo
That's cool, I'm more than prepared to find out I'm talking bollocks on this.

Any idea what they are doing with it?

