Research budget cut down in Spain

According to a spokesperson of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, the 2010 research budget will be decreased by 15% as compared to 2009. This is a dramatic change in relation to the overall direction that the Spanish government has been holding for the last few years, in which a policy of sustained growth in R&D funding was systematically applied.

Controversy is served. Despite the well known world-wide recession that affects Spain as much as any other western country, a 15% cut down is disproportionate when compared to other areas of the national budget, which, again according to government spokespersons, will suffer much smaller reductions, no reductions at all, or will even be increased.

With this post I want to show my disagreement with the Spanish government’s policy of applying the most severe budget cut down in the research area. No al recorte del presupuesto en I+D.

No al recorte del presupuesto en I+D

Do me a favour

We have elections in Galicia this Sunday. Current president Touriño had his face neatly decorated like this at my usual bus stop tonight:

Defaced 1

The photo is crappy because it was made with my phone camera and it was dark.

Where are the sysadmins?

Recently I have been trying to find a sysadmin for our lab. Hopeless. Where do you find one?

Our government-dictated recruiting system is so stupid that we cannot hire the person we want. Rather, we specify the criteria that the person should meet and a panel in Madrid runs the whole selection process. A few months later, somebody turns up with a signed contract under his/her arm and you are supposed to smile and be happy with him/her for a couple of years.

To add insult to injury, the criteria that the Madrid guys would take from us are supposed to be outlined in a few paragraphs. Part of these criteria must address the university degree of the individual to be hired.

As you can imagine, the outcome of this nonsensical policy is quite random. Sometimes you get brilliant people, sometimes you get people that are severly mismatched to their position.

Oh well. I digress. So, what am I supposed to write in a few paragraphs so that the best possible sysadmins are selected? What kind of degree is logical to expect from a top sysadmin?

Wikipedia says that there’s no single path to becoming a sysadmin, and this quite matches my own experience. The good sysadmins I’ve met come from all sorts of funny backgrounds, from biology to history to commerce & economics.

Help!

Congratulations

Congrats to all my Australian friends, now that Howard has lost the elections.

Now it’s only a matter of time until Bush leaves too.

Open letter to Linden Lab

You read it.

Decouple, graphically

A few days ago I wrote a brief post about decoupling academic research from industrial development. A few people have asked me about it; it seems that I didn’t make it clear enough.

Look at this picture:

My R&D Model

 

This picture corresponds to an ideal world, not to our reality. In the diagram, circles represent activities and rectangles represent entities. The three large coloured rectangles represent the dynamics of individuals (blue), academic research (green) and industrial development (red). Solid arrows depict the sequence of activities, and dashed arrows depict contents (such as information or things) being deposited into or taken from entities.

Decouple

Galicia will duplicate its number of scientists in four years.

That’s what El Pais says on 20 December 2006. The new Galician Plan for Innovation, Science and Technology 2006-2010, just presented to the public, will spend 800 million € in order to create its own “Silicon Valley”, foster private funding of research and create several technology centres. The report mentions that an “investors’ club”, based on the concept of “business angels” imported straight from the USA, will be created for this purpose. Oh my god.

Why can’t they see that they are screwing up an already screwed up situation?

I have already talked about this here and here. To say it again and summarise: industry is made of private companies. Private companies have the primary goal of making profit, and therefore will only participate in research that is more or less guaranteed to bring money in. This means low risk, tight control and reduced exploration of the solution space. Precisely the opposite of what research is. Research, in order to obtain results, needs high risk, loose control and free exploration of the solution space.

Bullfights

I am a Spaniard but I don’t like bullfights. Not only I don’t like them; I think they should disappear, as public executions in the town square have disappeared from most developed countries.

Bullfights have declined in popularity and frequency quite a lot in the last few decades, fortunately. However, they seem to move enough amounts of money as to keep working. There is a segment of the population who like and support them, too.

I guess people also supported and liked public executions in the town square a few centuries ago. But, eventually, they died or just shut up. Laws against barbaric practices were passed and the “tradition” thus forgotten. It would be nice to see bullfighting go the same way: forbidden by law and forgotten by people.

Some people would disagree with me arguing that bullfighting is a tradition, part of their identity, and abolishing it would kill their roots and break their connection to the community. Or something like that. Well, I guess that abolishing public executions also broke the tradition and killed some roots. It’d better.

I am not going to enumerate here the reasons why I think like this; plenty of details have been described elsewhere. If you think like me and can read/write Spanish, drop by this web site and post something.

Public vs. private funding in R&D

You have probably realised about the current trend of governments to rely more and more on private money to fund research. The USA are well known for going that way, and Europe is now trying to head in that direction too. The 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission is heavily geared towards “industry-driven research”. I have talked about this before, but yesterday, reading the Sunday supplement of El País, something stirred inside me. Again.

Pere-Joan Cardona, a Catalonian biomedical researcher of my own age, leads the Tuberculosis Experimental Unit at a small research foundation in Spain. They are about to start the clinical trials of a vaccine that may prove revolutionary. The interview that El País publishes is full of interesting and fun details, but one of Cardona’s remarks about the state of research in Spain and Europe is especially delightful:

In order to really innovate, public funding is necessary [...] Only the public system is able to generate knowledge without the need of guaranteeing commercial profitability.

This reminds me of something that a Dutch academic said a few weeks ago in a meeting to which I was also attending:

Let’s leave industry to solve their own problems, without the governments having to take care of them.

Are you listening, EC?

India rejects cheap laptops

It seems that the Indian government has rejected Negroponte’s “One Laptop per Child” scheme. The reasons they give include that the programme is “pedagogically suspect” and that they’d rather spend their money in other, more necessary infrastructures than in these laptops.

Have I heard this before? I think so.