John Tierney has a piece in the Times today pooh poohing people who are concerned about the role of corporate money science: Corporate Backing for Research? Get Over It He may well be right to say > Conflict-of-interest accusations have become the simplest strategy for avoiding a substantive debate. The growi... read more

I got my job at Google due in large part to having a friend working there in a similar position. My Microsoft job I found through a friend of a friend. My postdoc advisor at Dartmouth had met me previously at a conference. The same for my stint at Rice. And so on. Pretty much the only job I've ever gotten witho... read more

The title says it all: "Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go". A particularly grim line: > ...some responsible observers expect that hiring may be down 40 percent this year. What is 40 percent worse than desperate? Something that rings true beyond the humanities is the author's characterization ... read more

In Wired this week: Darpa: U.S. Geek Shortage Is National Security Risk The reason for the concern: > According to the Computer Research Association, computer science enrollment dropped 43 percent between 2003 and 2006. Hm. Why might that be? There is a great paper by Richard Freeman that makes a strong c... read more

An article in this week's Business Week advocates spending $20 billion per year on basic research with the goal of creating future jobs. The interesting thing: they suggest that the most effective way to spend the money is not on expanding existing research infrastructure (e.g. universities or national labs), but r... read more