You misread my post. I have admired the practice of science since I began to read. I am deeply concerned at the actions of scientists willing to cheat to get ahead. One source for my claim is this article from the NYTimes that states "In October 2011, for example, the journal Nature reported that published retractions had increased tenfold over the past decade, while the number of published papers had increased by just 44 percent." http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04... . As for Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics being less susceptible to sources of error including deceit I have no breakdown by area of study. Do you?

There is a lot of trouble with science. Scientists cutting corners and cheating. Retracting papers from journals is happening more frequently than ever before. Many papers are not reproducible and important descriptions of procedures or original data sets are never published. Affording all the necessary papers is difficult. Referees do not reject papers that have serious defects. Scientists pay to have themselves added as authors but make no contribution to the projects.

Before you move to the farm or the golf course, be aware that certain individuals have genetic predisposition to elevated risk of developing Parkinson's Disease from exposure to common pesticides. 11 different "safe" pesticides were associated with 2- to 6-fold increases in PD risk. Neurology February 4, 2014 vol. 82 no. 5 419-426

I thought we cut all of those trees down to make newspaper - before the newspapers went away

The US federal government should sell NSA, piece by piece. Interested bidders might be Google, Amazon, Microsoft, China, Russia, Switzerland, Israel, Comcast, Verizon, Cisco, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, the Vatican, New Jersey, Texas, Qatar, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the US Senate...

For a manager: Hire the best people, give clear direction, followup relentlessly, fire the losers. A good manager should hire the best people the budget will bear. They should 1) prepare clear, complete direction for each staff member and 2) communicate the direction to staff as a team and as individuals. They should follow up relentlessly-requirements are always changing and problems are always pressing time and effort estimates committed by staff members and by the manager; it's on the manager to know whether the direction for each staff member is out of date and to update direction to individuals and the team. Nothing is more important than dismissing poor performers. They consume enormous portions of the teams members' time for marginal output. When the team succeeds, publicly credit the team and publicly credit deserving staff members for their specific contributions. Money works well.

Comparing apples and oranges. Ba da bum. Sorry, all

I did not see any reference to the manager's responsibility to keep new work coming in and shaping the organization so that all stakeholders buy in to a reasonable if challenging set of expectations. That takes time and effort. If the product ships June 30, what is everyone doing July 1? Who is worrying about that back in January?

Thinking of my experiences on commercial development teams in the USA, I think you should be prepared 1) to deal with a lot of prejudice and 2) to find infrequent interactions that are compassionate and gratifying.

John C. Lilly invented an isolation tank. He would drop acid and spend hours in there. A weird genius got weirder. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Lilly

I worked as a contractor developing a system at FDA. It lasted for 5 years. Inside the Beltway, it's pretty much the same all over. Dysfunctional communications and ridiculous breakdown of authority not corresponding to lines of management. No accountability. Project management requirements that have never been followed by any project. No commitment to the output of requirements gathering. No requirements change control. No performance engineering. Inadequate testing. No acceptance process by the government. IT groups with oversight for contractor output that have never written a line of code. All in all, pretty sick and ugly. Prior to my project there were 5 failed attempts. My project followed PMI practices, worked them hard and succeeded.

Bell Labs used to like to hire teachers and re-train them for programmer and system test jobs. Re-treads was what some HR recruiters called them.

Completing time sheets when you're spending less than your baseline 40 hours working can bring a person otherwise behaving ethically to begin employing creative justifications to explain how sitting in your underwear in a spare bedroom reading slashdot is billable to the project's marketing budget

Every month this sort of article comes out. Maybe they are getting close. Somebody is going to get the cure or the vaccine but today the best treatment for humans is levadopa and that drug is from the 1950s. There are lots of things that can treat PD in a mouse or a monkey but for people, not so much. Although injection of Ganglioside GM-1 had a successful clinical trial.