I've worked in the past as part of the DoD Acquisitions Workforce.

CMMI is really just part of a broader obsession in DoD with project and program management. Abstractly, these are good things. When implemented correctly, they make debacles like healthcare.gov nearly impossible. Good planning, budgeting and in-progress evaluation are generally applicable to basic research projects, software development and building ships. We all want to work on projects which are well run.

The problem is, blindly stepping through the predefined process of project management has nothing to do with actually managing a project. You still need good managers who can recognize problems in the technical fields they're working with, understand what to do when problems crop up and are empowered to act. DoD in general fools itself into thinking it has people like this because the paperwork is done right. I suspect that's a fairly common problem.

We all know there's a problem with treating the "talent" (i.e. programmers) as interchangeable blocks using these systems. I think treating management the same way is worse. The ideas that management is mastery of a process and operates solely for organizational interest over individual interest are flawed, but central to things like CMMI.

If you want to do science on your own, you can and should incorporate. Be a non-profit if you'd like. The entrenched system which stifles non-university researchers gladly accepts small businesses and NGOs, as long as they have some funding.

The number one thing you should not expect about doing science, at any level, is that it will be cheap, quick or lean. When it comes to science those words mean the same thing as "violating environmental and safety law" or simply doing a piss-poor job.

If you want to do real chemistry or biology work, you will find that renting or begging lab space somewhere will be cheaper than actually making your garage legally suitable.

I think what this post is really about is how rudimentary geoscience is compared to similar fields like oceanography, astronomy and epidemiology. If it's a major story to see that there's a 50 year pattern on earthquakes in a particular area, that's not so great.

Our scientific research system is built around the process of joining a lab, mastering the work there, and then leaving. There are very few long term research partnerships. The people who stay in place are the professors, who generally do not do the research work.

So you join a lab, produce a few terabytes of data a year, pull a few publishable nuggets out of that and then leave. I have a few backup hard drives that move around with me with what I consider my most important data, probably total 1/10 of the data I have taken. After a few years, this data is really unimportant to me as the labs I have left have done a good job of continuing the research and I have to spend my time and money on something else.

The original data is eventually overwritten by researchers a few "generations" removed from me and that's the end of it.

I've seen many types of graphene antennas built and tested over the last several years.

The resistivity of very high quality graphene is about 1000 ohms per square. Any advantage you may get from graphene is offset by huge impedance losses. You're looking at 10 to 100 kOhm resistance for the antennas described in the article. That's simply not going to work in a realistic system, particularly one based around an electrically small antenna.

Who are the editors at these journals? They're largely former researchers from popular academic research groups.

Who are the government program managers looking at journal statistics to judge research quality? They're largely former researchers from popular academic groups.

Who are the university administrators creating the publish or perish environment? They're largely former researchers from popular academic groups.

These relationships are the defining characteristic of modern scientific research. Despite the heartache and frustration the system causes, it also produces a huge amount of value for the rest of us.

Over the last 30 years, the commercial labs, defense contractors and government facilities have all become subordinate to university R&D. This has combined the metrics university research has traditionally used with the competition of the private sector. If we want to change things, we need to change the basic structure of how we do research again.

We didn't like using private funding as a success metric. Now we don't like using citations as a success metric. Ok, what else can we use?

(Why was a poorly written press release linked instead of the actual paper?)

This paper shows how you can start with an extremely simple theory of electron interaction and build up to some very complicated, realistic superconducting behaviors. When varying the material properties of high temperature superconductors, you always see an antiferromagnetic material type near the superconducting material composition. For many years condensed matter physicists have suspected that this was more than a coincidence and that high temperature superconductors work because of finely tuned antiferromagnetic interactions between electrons. Although this paper simplifies electron interactions considerably (come on, we're physicists, simplification is what we do), it does fill in some of the larger holes in that theory and is an important step toward understanding the physics behind the phenomenological high temperature superconductivity models.

You're asking why it's a problem that the government excludes the majority of scientists from applying for funding. Wouldn't you just want the best teams and proposals?

I feel like the academic freedom comments are put out there mainly to try to get non-scientists at universities interested in this issue. To me, this is simply about spending tax dollars effectively. It does outrage me when I see a professor getting a big government R&D contract to research something I've already done, or could do at a much lower cost, when I didn't even have a chance to make my case.

I'm currently an industrial scientist, and have been a government scientist. In both of those positions, I am prevented from fully competing with academic, tenure track researchers for government R&D funding. Why?

The only special thing tenure track professors do is bestow PhDs on students. One, we don't need more PhD students; half of those kids should be going to medical school, really. Two, I still train and advise students as a non-tenured scientist, I'm just not the guy who puts the hood on them at graduation.

I compete with academics for patents and private investment. There is nothing stopping an academic from applying for the small business set aside funds, signing a research contract with a government lab, or competing with me for an investor's funds. But unless I'm in a tenure track academic position, I cannot even be considered for many government R&D grants. That's pretty stupid.

Reproducing 10 out of 13 experiments is really quite good.

I'm a materials physicist, and if I could reproduce that ratio of experiments in my field, I would be very happy and a little bit surprised.

This problem of non-reproducible results in science is due to poor training, poor writing, poor experiment design and a direct link between citations and funding.

As a former government oversight scientist, I can also say that the minimum recommended salary for a scientist with a PhD is significantly higher than the average postdoc salary. The government has tried many methods to increase postdoc pay, but the established professors and academic administrators push the salary down. I used to work with a few guys to convince their universities to allow them (allow!) to pay the higher standard government rate for grad students and postdocs, but there is tremendous and extraordinarily depressing pressure from academia to keep those salaries low.

These guys are talking about a 2D topological insulator. This is the current hot area of research in condensed matter physics, and is absolutely not a superconductor.

A topological insulator is best described as an insulator, which for very particular types of conduction (direction, location and energy limited) acts like a very good metal. It's really interesting, and scientists are trying to show it will have practical use, and these materials might end up in a computer chip in a few years, but...

There is a big difference between a lab effect and the real world. Carbon nanotubes have most of the same "non scattering" effects you'd hope to find in a topological insulator. Yet, in most actual devices, they do not conduct in bulk the way theory would suggest. For nanoscale systems (these are nanoscale systems) the environment around the material is nearly as important as the material itself, and scattering from the environment (oxides, metals, air) drastically reduces the performance of the material. There are ways around that, but the additional costs and engineering difficulty are generally enough to prevent any practical commercialization.

This roll out is a great example of why meaningful oversight (and competent competition) is necessary in the government. If Issa had been doing this 6 months ago, the healthcare website may have worked. You don't need to like him, but in this case, putting the screws to contractors and government personnel is the right thing to do.

News at 11...

Musk is a guy who rightly saw his physics career was going nowhere and switched gears to something much more useful and profitable. The trade off is, he can't make statements like this and be taken seriously. Even if he's right about something technical, his history is that his business interests come first.

I routinely turn off my gadgets when I'm spending time with my family. I don't want to be distracted during the small amount of time my work schedule allows me to focus on non-work life. When I'm with my family, the only people who legitimately need to be able to reach me in an emergency are right there with me.

I don't know if NIF is snakebit or just really good at putting out bad information, but this kind of distasteful and misleading marketing of science has been associated with them since their beginning. AAAS is being generous in assuming that their press department would have stepped in and clarified things.

The truth of the matter is that NIF is run by Lawrence Livermore National Security Corporation, a private group formed by defense contractors and academics. They're managed this way specifically to separate themselves from the government. There are plenty of people who are not on the government payroll, who are there working right now, who could have stepped in and corrected everyone's misconceptions. They chose not to.