In which Meredith gets along with people

[maradydd]

Yet another discussion with my adviser that didn't turn into a fight. I am, in a word, amazed.

(And he was even being critical this time: he pointed out a general use-case for QBE which my machine-learning library supports but my SQL syntax doesn't. So now I get to dive back into the grammar and fix that, but it won't be hard -- and it's the right time to do it, since I haven't really gotten started implementing ranking yet. So, look for that update sometime around the end of this month/beginning of next.)

Comments

[yllafairy.livejournal.com]

i'm so glad that in college, you only have to visit your adviser when you're required to do so - which is about once a year. this is very helpful, seeing as how advisers generally suck at advising, and the only purpose for the meeting is for you to state what you're about to do and have the adviser smile and nod (cause no way in hell she can make any sense of what you're going to do anyway... since when are sociologists compatible with physicists?!) um.. yeah ;)

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

I honestly like my adviser; he's a swell guy and very smart, but we have some very different ideas about things like free software (I'm passionate about it, he doesn't see the point), other people's licenses (he thinks that modifying other people's code is within the spirit of the law if you never release it, I'm paranoid), and how servers should be administered (I'm just not going to get into that one, it's too traumatic). He can be great to work with, but I've gotten so used to having arguments with advisers that I'm ready to leave academia for the real world.

That, and I could use the money.

[yllafairy.livejournal.com]

yes, money seems to be the one thing that academia is always short on. of course it makes sense, since all your work doesn't actually produce something that can be counted in monetary units....

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

of course it makes sense, since all your work doesn't actually produce something that can be counted in monetary units...

I don't think that's true -- particularly not in the CS field.

It has more to do with universities wanting to choose sources of funding that give them academic freedom. (Soliciting private capital as an investment is out of the question for early research, for instance, though university spin-off companies based on successful research are fairly common.) You can be funded from a university endowment, but if you're at a university that has limited funds earmarked for research, you're stuck appealing to the pencil-pushing grant agencies, who generally lack clue, and obtaining funding there is more an indication of your grant proposal authorship skills than anything else.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

universities wanting to choose sources of funding that give them academic freedom.

Which makes it all the more ironic that so many useful academic software projects are encumbered by totally absurd licensing schemes. (KEGG, SVM^light, I'm looking at you.)

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

Well, the key insight is that they want academic freedom for themselves. They also want to profit off of whatever they (or rather, their students) develop which could possibly have profit potential.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

...while leaving students on research-assistant salaries, as opposed to giving them any IP rights in the material that wouldn't have existed without their research and work. It's happened to people in the engineering and biosciences departments here, and I doubt it's different other places.

I'm particularly irritated at KEGG because a few years ago I tried talking with them about a license to let IDT develop some tools using their data. We would have housed a copy of the DB on our own servers and provided an interface for people to use for free, like with SciTools. Never mind that a university could have used the same provision model and gotten a license for free; because we're a Big Bad Corporation, they wanted an exorbitant licensing fee.

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

...while leaving students on research-assistant salaries, as opposed to giving them any IP rights in the material that wouldn't have existed without their research and work. It's happened to people in the engineering and biosciences departments here, and I doubt it's different other places.

Yep. You pretty much sign over all your IP rights when you get hired as a grad student, anywhere. If you're lucky, you'll get founders' stock in the spin-off if they recognise that they need to hire you in order for the company to be successful. Planning for this, however, means hiding key pieces of your research from the academic community. It's quite a scam.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

My answer to this so far has been to GPL everything that I think is even remotely useful.

[yllafairy.livejournal.com]

but that's still very different from working for, say, an architecture company, where the hours you put in directly translate into what you company can bill your client. so in a "real job" your hours can be specifically counted in monetary units, and even if you're part of the overhead, you're still helping the company work well and make money. whereas in an academia job, even if you get private capital, you usually count things in terms of results (like solving equations or getting a piece of code to work). your work does not "make money"... so you're not as likely to get rich writing string theory as you are coding microsoft excel.

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

but I've gotten so used to having arguments with advisers that I'm ready to leave academia for the real world.

Oh, that's so much worse in the real world. Enjoy not having clueless managers while you can.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Behold the reason why I am reluctant to leave IDT. Maybe that's why a lot of managers have so little clue -- Andy has it all.