What exactly does 'truly successful' mean here? If Nobel prize is the standard that's ridiculous. As someone who is a fairly successful (by conventional metrics) tenured academic at a top-10 school in the physical sciences, this was really dumb advice but not atypical from previous generations (along with: "make sure you have a wife at home to take care of everything" which, btw, was the more common advice to get, since almost every male academic had a wife and kids)
It is quite possible to get grants, do valuable work, advance your field (and get awards, if that's your jam) and still live a pretty normal life. In my case my spouse is also a successful (by conventional metrics) academic, and we have kids. It's not without challenges, but it's quite plenty of positives. And neither of us are charismatic geniuses. We have talents, sure, but the more important thing is that we are organized.
The unequal impact highlighted here is very real. As the man in a dual-career academic couple, I have actively worked (along with my wife of course) to counter it. Simple examples include strongly encouraging and supporting a spouse, including crucially owning/ being the primary point person on childcare - especially needed when they are in the midst of grant applications or important conference presentations, even in early childhood years.
are you a professor at a tier-1 university (you say "tenured academic at a top-10 school in the physical sciences")? Is it in an expensive city? what's your h-index? How much time do you spend writing papers and going to conferences, versus doing research. Is it lab work or theory? how much money do you bring in? Do you work weekends? Do you ever have to go to a conference and it means your spouse has to do extra work around the house?
You run a lab on $1M/year (grant money?). When I was a PI over a decade ago, that's enough to employ at best 2-4 research scientists.
What I actually meant was salary- because if you live in an expensive city, it's almost impossible to buy a house on an academic salary. Certainly you could buy in the worst part of town, far from your institution, with higher crime rates and lower quality of houses...
$1M / year is on the upper end in the engineering school I'm at (average faculty brings in less than half that). I mostly have Ph.D. students (as do most people in my field) that cost ~$100K/ year incl. overhead, or postdocs that cost ~$150K/ year incl. overhead. Things are very different in medical schools where staff scientists are more common and also you have to fund your own salary.
Total household income is > $450K/year, which along with lots of saving early in our career, allows us to live in a home close to work and in a nice neighborhood.
Everyone's experience will be different, and we are certainly lucky, but I am in a pretty similar situation to a dozen other recently-tenured faculty I know in my career/life stage at my university. We work hard, but the differences in hours etc. relative to my friends working at various Bay Area companies seem modest. YMMV.
Your experience is atypical in my field (medical biology/ML/drug discovery)/region(SF Bay Area). Think UCSF/UC Berkeley. My professor at UCSF was soooo happy he could hire starting professors at $70K a year (20 years ago; now it's about $120K).
A typical PI would have $10M/year in grants, have no grad students (or 1-2), only postdocs (who are already publishing), live fairly far away (45+minute commute). Once they reach full tenure it's about $250K/year salary (with summer free, but usually 1 day a week consulting with pharma instead), plus a heavy teaching load. And every single one of them is working nights and weekends to just barely keep up.
I looked at that, and concluded there was no way for me to be happy, and moved to industry, where I get paid more, work less, and have a far better work/life balance. I even have more time to do independent research and publish than I ever did as an academic. So I'm always interested in what attributes people who managed to pull off the "two body problem" in the physical sciences are doing.
It's true that there are major differences in academia across different fields. NIH funding is typically so much more $$ than NSF[1] -- and I wonder if this has an effect on how these fields are structured and thus who enters them. In particular, could the soft money[2] salary encourage people who are willing to take that bet?
But also UCSF/UCB's biomed stuff is kind of a different machine as far as I can tell -- it's not as focused on training (hence, fewer students and more postdocs/post-PhD researchers) and more akin to a traditional industrial research lab. But then: who are they teaching exactly at UCSF (where's the "heavy teaching load" coming from) if there are so few PhD students -- med school students?
For those reading along:
[1] Think medical/biomed/bioeng/pharma/etc. (NIH) vs physics/astronomy/computing/social science/etc. (NSF)
[2] "Soft money" means your (PI) salary is paid from the grants you get; don't get enough grants to cover your salary and you're out, typically, if you can't get a friend to sponsor you under their grants.
$10M/ year seems unusually high, even for med schools - are you sure those are annualized costs? Perhaps it's because I'm familiar with the more basic science (non clinical trial) parts of NIH, but a typical R01 is $250K-$500K/ year in direct costs so that would imply having to hold ~15 of them (with overheard) to reach $10M/year.
It seems like $10M in total value of active grants in a given year (~5 R01s) might be more typical (though the standard for tenure I've heard of in med schools is maybe ~2-3 R01s, so 5 would make you top tier and highly sought after).
For clarity, when I'm referring to $1M/year in annual funding, that's coming from ~6-7 active grants whose total value might be in the $5M range total.
R01s are too small to be worth applying for, typically. Or rather, most PIs have an R01 that pays for themselves and maybe some travel and publication feeds. Most of these people end up making center grants or finding other mechanisms (like non-NIH funding, such as CZI).
There's no way I personally would have been able to manage 5-6 active R01s a year; but then, when I did grant review, I noticed that other folks did a lot of copy/pasting and exagerating about their publications significance, which is not something I was willing to do.
I think Xerox has been trying to unload PARC for a while, and this just seems like a way for them to do it and get a tax write-off since it's a 'donation'. PARC has already been doing a lot of government contract work, and I've seen teams from PARC and SRI compete for certain programs, so there's definitely synergy there. But I think PARC was historically more commercially oriented than SRI, so there will be some cultural differences internally.
Over time Xerox has gone quite far from where it was when PARC was founded and I think internal support for it had weakened a lot.
The bigger problem both orgs have historically had is on compensation and retaining talent. A lot of people tend to leave or get poached by major companies and their R&D units - lots of former PARC folks at X, and lots of former SRI folks across various robotics companies.
Xerox went through the process of making PARC a wholly-owned subsidiary in 2002 (which is around the time the parc.com domain was created to replace the parc.xerox.com subdomain). This was presumably as part of trying to sell of PARC, in part or as a whole.
Xerox's revenue has been slowly declining over that time (~$15B from 2002-2009, ~$20B 2010-2013, ~$10B 2014-2019, ~$7B 2020-2023). There's likely a few business-related reasons they are doing this donation now.
> I think Xerox has been trying to unload PARC for a while
I wonder why some corporations don't see the value of R&D, or even "incidental" R&D, when you develop something revolutionary while you work on something profitable.
As an academic editor for a society journal this is ridiculous. Most of this process is automated and takes a grand total of 15 mins of time. Also, Nature charging $10k for open access while PLOS charges more like $2k should tell you what’s going on here
Most publishers do not have this process automated, I assure you. Even so, the theory that an automated process requires no maintenance does not hold water.
For a high-prestige journal, you get 50 submissions per 1 published article.
Let's reject 80% of them right off the bat from the editorial desk.
We now have twenty articles left to properly peer review. I had originally said 15, so let's make it 15.
In order to get three peer reviews in an article, you have to email thirty people, because the conversion from "request to peer review" to "get a review" is 10%. So, to get 3 peer reviews, you have to email 30 people, and then maintain a funnel (some people dont respond, some people say maybe, some people say yes, but in a month, etc. etc. then reminders, follow-ups, etc.) until the peer review is done.
$200. Let's say the total cost of an employee is $50 / hour (salary + insurance + taxes). Surely it's plausible that it takes a total of 4 hours, spread across multiple months, to maintain multiple (start at 30 and then drop) threads of communication that eventually get a review to completion.
And I did not include in that calculation anything that even remotely includes any other administrative costs, or, heaven forbid, "how much the CEO makes"
>> In order to get three peer reviews in an article, you have to email thirty people, because the conversion from "request to peer review" to "get a review" is 10%. So, to get 3 peer reviews, you have to email 30 people, and then maintain a funnel (some people dont respond, some people say maybe, some people say yes, but in a month, etc. etc. then reminders, follow-ups, etc.) until the peer review is done.
All that is either handled automatically -sending emails to people who submitted articles on online submission systems- or performed by unpaid editors -soliciting reviews, desk rejection or communicating with authors to request clarifications or respond to questions, chasing reviewers, and so on, and so forth.
But, hey, if the editors in your journal get paid for all this drudgery, then please let me know where to apply.
> Most publishers do not have this process automated
This kind of points to rent-seeking or cartel behavior, doesn't it? If this was a competitive market a publisher could get an upper hand by automating and offering their services at a lower rate.
The costs are minimal to handle rejected submissions. Most of the work is done by reviewers.
And no it doesn’t cost that much.. that’s the rate with a fat 50% margin, corresponding to the massive profits Elsevier rakes in. It’s just a tax on the system
The MIT article is cited in this research paper and it is likely that it has been the one which inspired the start of this research.
However the progress made from the very primitive device described by MIT and the high-performance prototype made by the Chinese team has been huge.
The Chinese have used completely other materials, which enabled also a long lifetime, not only a better efficiency. There are many new constructive details which contribute to an increased efficiency. The design methodology used by the Chinese for the lossless optical filter is far more advanced and it enabled a much better filter with much less layers.
The MIT article showed an interesting idea, for which it was not clear if it can be successful in practice, while this shows a real device that needs only minor changes in order to become suitable for mass production (e.g. the replacement of HfO2 with TiO2 in the window coating and the replacement of the O-ring used in the prototype with hermetic glass-alumina bonding).
This device could be easily converted into a commercial product in a couple of years.
He admitted to publishing a paper with authors he didn’t know.. and which external evidence suggests had authorship for sale. These people are a disaster for science..
“We are not going to distribute this material, considering the proprietary nature of our processes and the intellectual property rights that exist.”
The fact that they are going to making independent verification impossible makes me highly highly suspicious. Most scientists I know in their position would be sharing the material widely (even ahead of publication) to have replication from other parties, to bolster this claim. Until there is replication, I trust NOTHING from this group which has outright fabricated data previously.
Extraordinary claims, from those who have previously faked data, require independent third-party verification.
Rapa Nui arrived between 300 and 1200CE, from eastern Polynesian islands (Cook and/or Marquesas). Both genetics and cultural similarities confirm this. Tectonic plate movements take (hundreds of) millennia more to have a meaningful impact here.
As entertaining as they are, unfortunately these conspiracy theories are usually a bit racist since they deny agency to the actual cultures that have made this monumental architecture. Which is to say, the implicit comment in many of these ridiculous theories (including ancient aliens or whatever) is: "there's no way Polynesian culture could accomplish this".
Of course, there is plenty of archeological evidence of precisely how the moai were built, and why they were later toppled.
I haven't come across that at all. And actually it's the opposite. That the conventional view is that the ancient culture is very primitive, while the alternative ("conspiracy theorist") views are that the people were more technologically advanced than given credit for.
What are these conspiracy theories? If I'm on the same page as you, these discussions are all around trying to reason about forgotten history. No conspiracy required.
It is quite possible to get grants, do valuable work, advance your field (and get awards, if that's your jam) and still live a pretty normal life. In my case my spouse is also a successful (by conventional metrics) academic, and we have kids. It's not without challenges, but it's quite plenty of positives. And neither of us are charismatic geniuses. We have talents, sure, but the more important thing is that we are organized.
The unequal impact highlighted here is very real. As the man in a dual-career academic couple, I have actively worked (along with my wife of course) to counter it. Simple examples include strongly encouraging and supporting a spouse, including crucially owning/ being the primary point person on childcare - especially needed when they are in the midst of grant applications or important conference presentations, even in early childhood years.