Comments on: My painful lesson for the week

By: Vladimir Levin

Vladimir Levin — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 03:16:54 +0000

Clearly someone should get a career grant (etc) in management to study how to make the grant process and associated overhead more efficient. I too do wonder about the traditional way of doing things in academia. For example, are conferences really necessary at all in this day of the Web? Still, I think it would be very dangerous to start cutting a system as productive as American advanced education to the bone without a thorough understanding of what one is doing. It’s easy to go “cut this! slash that!” But there really is nothing like what the US does anywhere in the world. It should be considered a national treasure.

By: Noah

Noah — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 05:58:58 +0000

Argh, I don’t understand the joke! Can someone please explain it to me?

By: Scott

Scott — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 23:44:34 +0000

Anon grad student: I agree with you that there are large inefficiencies in the way grant money is spent, owing to lack of flexibility. However, the obvious solution to the problem that you describe is probably the opposite of what Eric Cantor and his friends would want! Namely: give people who are doing good research a lump sum, then sit back and give them wide discretion as to how much student support to pay, whether to rent office space, etc. (For example, I'd certainly pay my grad students more were the option available.)

By: Anon grad student

Anon grad student — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 23:27:37 +0000

Very interesting. As a grad student, I’d sure like to have even one half of that 75-80k/year which apparently is being spent on me. In fact it points out some pretty ridiculous inefficiency in the system– which seems to vindicate Eric Cantor (hurts me to say that, being a radical leftwinger). Why can’t Scott and his students write their papers from their own homes? (For those who’d say “because you can’t get grants without affiliation”, how does that make NSF and the universities anything more than a protection racket?)

By: Scott

Scott — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 23:15:28 +0000

lylebot and Mike: Thanks! I stand corrected about the actual overhead rate being r/(1+r), where r is the quoted rate. (For some reason, I’ve always had trouble keeping track of dollar amounts to within more than an order of magnitude. )

By: Mike Freedman

Mike Freedman — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 22:51:58 +0000

Regarding overhead: It’s not quite as bad as Scott says, although it depends if you count grad student “tuition” as overhead.

Most universities take somewhere between 50-65% “overhead” — my own, Princeton, takes 62%. Which means for ever dollar I spend, I need to pay the university $1.62.

What that means is that a single grad student, once I include their “half” tuition that the university charges (~18K), salary (20K), summer salary (8K), computing fees, and overhead, comes to 75-80K / year. (Sidenote: if you consider tuition as overhead — which is sure seems like it after students stop taking classes — then overhead actually looks more like 150%, which is pretty ridiculous.)

So a CAREER grant for 5 years at $500K (which is standard for CAREER) funds a SINGLE grad student per year, plus $20-25K left over for (1) conference travel, (2) misc (including student laptop, etc.), and (3) 1-1.5 month of PI salary.

If you’ve never tried making “payroll” yourself (which turns out also to be the job of professors), the money goes a lot faster than you think!

By: lylebot

lylebot — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 19:42:56 +0000

Also, think about how much Google is worth to today’s GDP. Just in the sheer amount of time it saves it must be worth billions. But a company like Google would not exist without fundamental research in CS theory, systems, and AI (not to mention other fields like information science, library science, etc) funded by the NSF. At the time it was funded, much of that research would’ve looked ridiculous on its face. And yet it ended up with a huge return on investment to the federal government.

By: lylebot

lylebot — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 19:11:18 +0000

I don’t think MIT takes 50%. You put together your budget, then add 50% of it to that to cover overhead. That means MIT is taking 33% of the total.

Overhead rates are formally negotiated between universities and federal research bodies, by the way. It’s not like NSF is just acquiescing to MIT’s demand for money.

For a grant with two PIs, two grad students and two months of faculty summer support plus overhead gets you very close to the upper limit of NSF “small” grants, and you still need to find room to get those grad students to conferences and stuff. They really aren’t that much money in the grand scheme of things. A small business (which is essentially what a lab is) would run through a lot more cash in a much shorter period of time.

By: chazisop

chazisop — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 17:59:26 +0000

First of all… Those conjectures about certain subclasses is all complexity theory is. Without them, people would still wonder why they can’t find a good algorithm for that problem and they couldn’t even think of building a quantum computer, because they wouldn’t know if it is worth it. Plus, those conjectures are always reasonable and this comes from a person who thinks that there’s a good chance that P=NP but prefers living in the real world.

Plus, you cannot distinguish between sciences now, can you. As it was said in the original posts, every research can be expressed so that it sounds trivial . Classical example of our times is people that don’t even know what a particle is saying that LHC is a big tunnel so that scientists can play ping pong spending billions.

As a final note , I am a student in Greece at the moment. Students and even professors have to pay themselves for the conferences . My department has 800 students and its funding for this year was 1200 dollars (facilities+salaries excluded, but it would be a good idea to take some photos from our “facilities). Yeah, go figure. The whole budget (everything included) got slashed 40% down and professors lost around 8000 dollars. So you should take a good look in this number everyone and instead of fighting each other, work together to come to an agreement about funding, or risk becoming more like us.

By: Scott

Scott — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 17:57:41 +0000

Anon grad student: I think you're uninformed or misinformed on several points. 1. There are lots of in-work physicists with PhDs who get a lot more than $500,000 to work toward building actual QCs! They've made major advances, but they haven't built a scalable QC yet. That's because the problem is hard. You should suggest to your out-of-work friends that they apply to one of the many labs working on this, if they're interested! 2. The amount of money that goes toward quantum computing theory is a minuscule fraction of the amount that goes toward quantum computing implementation---probably a few percent (depending on how you measure; the boundary between theory and implementation is a blurry one). Yet, without theorists like Bernstein-Vazirani and Shor discovering the possibility of a quantum speedup in the first place, there would've been no reason for any of the implementation efforts. 3. Essentially every quantum computing paper ever written is available for free on quant-ph, if you're interested to look. So the only question is whether those papers should also be submitted to pricey journals. As I wrote above, I've been saying since I was a grad student, to anyone who cares to listen, that the answer is a resounding no! That's why I support open-access journals like Theory of Computing.