Talk:Lecture 2
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Lecture 2 Discussion
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Open Source Impact On Research
I was wondering what sort of impact the open source movement had on research and development in the IT world? It seems to me that the IT culture of sharing tools and resources in an "open" environment may be a factor of increasing technology advances even with little money spent on Research and Development. I would think this would not be the case with other industries; perhaps because other industries can’t produce these tools at “zero cost”. I understand that many "open source" projects have been funded by industry, and university alike, but it is also my perception, maybe it is a misperception that a large number of private individuals contribute to the open source community. It would be interesting to see information to prove or disprove this theory, and to see in the future if the open source culture will continue to grow or if it will give way to perhaps a more standard economic model.
Are you considering pieces of open-source software to be "technology advances" themselves, or are you focusing on how open-source tools and libraries make it easier to write new software? Are you using "technology advance" in a narrow sense that includes only clever things like rsync and bayesian spam filtering, or does any improvement over competing software constitute a technology advance? I believe that proprietary, hidden-source software is a more recent phenomenon than open-source software. By the way, I am one of those "private individuals" who contributes to open-source software (specifically, Mozilla and Firefox). --Jesse Ruderman
SMM: We'll try to get to this stuff on Open Source night. For now, it's interesting to note that many goods -- like drugs -- have substantial information content, so the OS game ought to work almost as well in other places. To some extent it does, only we fail to notice. See the Eric Von Hippel reading. But it's also worth thinking about how to stretch the model.
Why individuals participate is a great empirical question, you might want to think about this as a paper topic.
It's true that open software is older, but that was natural since it grew up in a government labs/university world.
Finally, I'm not sure about the distinction you're making on technology. There's an interesting question whether OS needs some buggy program as a nucleus to get started with. In that sense, it might be less fundamental. For most purposes, I'd say "an advance is an advance." If OS does any kind of advance well, that's good to know!
TedZ: personally, I've contributed to several Open Source projects. I have two reasons: first (and primarily), it looks good on your resume. In another case, I made some fairly significant contributions to an open-source game physics engine because I was so annoyed at them having some stuff _wrong_ that I just had to go in and fix it. I just couldn't bear to have a bad meme propogate.
Matching royalties instead of fixed subsidies
In lecture, we saw how subsidies supplementing patent royalties can cause desirable research to happen. The research is desirable because v - c > 0, but it doesn't happen without help because πv - c < 0. (π is the fraction of value that the patent holder can receive in royalties.) As we can see from the graphs on page 3 of the slides, subsidies fund some useless projects (v - c < 0) unless the funder requires matching payments, and more importantly, subsidies fail to fund some expensive research where v - c is small but positive. I have an idea that seems to solve both of these problems: promise to match patent royalties paid by other companies at a fixed ratio. If the funder estimates π correctly and chooses the ratio m such that (1+m)π = 1, then projects will procede when and only when v - c > 0. --Jesse Ruderman
Avichal 14:39, 8 Oct 2004 (PDT) I found this idea quite interesting. Now I confess, I'm in IT, and my knowledge about Economy is shaky at best. But the idea seems intriguing, ofcourse there is the standard problem of observability - apart from judging that (v - c)>0, sponsor would also have to judge π.
And there is the problem from the innovator side, that since the matching occurs 'ex post', there has to be significant assurance that the sponsor would not renege.
Avichal 08:07, 9 Oct 2004 (PDT) After thinking a bit further on this, I think I see one problem. How will the price be determined? And price and π are inter-related.
The incentive mechanism draws away the natural forces in the market which self-regulate it. If I hold a patent on , say a business process. I wouldn't sell it for too high, since very few people would buy it. I wouldn't sell it for too low since I would not make enough profit. However if I am going to be incented based on π then I may not care, and I may set the price really high. Since I know I will be incented by the sponsor instead.
Maybe this is simply a long way of stating that it is difficult to observe, and decide these values (π, v - c) 'ex ante'. But still since the incentive mechanism may affect the price and hence π, it may make it overly difficult for it to be adopted.
SMM: I think you've identified the main issues. The dirty secret in all this is knowing when Π is too low. If you just match all patent royalties in the economy, then you provide a windfall for projects that the patent system would encourage anyhow. This invites wasteful patent races and anyhow displeases the taxpayers. What you'd like to do is kick in some money for projects that won't be done otherwise, but then you have to figure out who really needs the extra money and who is lying to you.
WA State education and Classification of Research
Avichal 14:54, 8 Oct 2004 (PDT) I browsed through the slides which we could not cover (and I would encourage others to do so, if they haven't already), and the data presented about the state of education in WA state was alarming, to say the least. Actually, I must say, the tone of the whole lecture was a bit like a 'prophecy of doom'. But really if you look at the statistics, you do wonder, "How the hell have we managed to stay afloat so far?"
Coming back to WA state, the data basically shows that we have been importing talent from elsewhere to fill the jobs created in WA state (uh..thanks Microsoft for doing that almost single-handedly).
To jump on another topic, we discussed how research in DARPA Cyber Security research being classified and it's impacts. Now I don't remember the source (uh..my fading memory :-)), probably in the Asprey book, but there was something about Non-residents not being able to work on federally-funded university research projects (presumably the ones related to specific fields). Well, I think that would be catastrophic - given what I just learnt from the last slide (#113) that "roughly half of the Ph.D.s in engineering and computer science were awarded to non-residents"
Diwaker 21:53, 9 Oct 2004 (PDT): Just to add to your point about non-residents and federal funding -- most of the graduate fellowships (atleast in computer science), both federal and otherwise are not available to non-residents. Many a times this deprives non-resident students of funding, thus (potentially) impacting innovation in the long run (an extreme example would be where a talented student has to quit studies). I'm not sure if data exists to make a case in either direction.
Who Wins the Research Debate, Republicans or Democrats?
Okay, so now let's get a little bit controversial. In honor of an important election coming up in 3 1/2 weeks, I'd like to get opinions on which party people think typically makes a greater impact on university research. In class we spoke about issues which I think will continue to haunt us no matter which party is in power, but I also found a comment made in one of the readings for this week to be surprising. The comment stated that republicans typically prefer to fund basic research while democrats prefer to fund research for the "next big product." To me it seems like basic research is the goal of university researchers and this would point at researchers preferring republican candidates. However, I typically get the impression from the media that a great majority of university professors are democrats. Is this apparent inconsistency because professors have more important political concerns then what type of research is promoted, because the media is giving me the wrong impression, or because while republicans prefer basic research and democrats prefer researching the next big product the republican funding is still far less than democratic funding? --Jeff West (UW)
[John Spaith:] I think the key point, as you suggest above, is that professors have more important political concerns than just their funding. I'll add the proviso that they must think the Democrats will still put $$ into their pockets. If they think the $ will get cut off and their jobs are at stake, they may turn to the party they may not agree with on other issues. A good example is a former boss who came to the US as a physist to work on the (now canceled) particle accelerator down in Texas. Economically he was a hard-core Republican, socially he was a hard-core Democrat. This seems to point to him being a Libertarian, except that he wanted the government to massively fund stuff like particle accelerators. So up until Iraq he backed the Republicans. Also the company he and I work for had some anti-trust headaches back in 2000 and Bush was (rightly I think) viewed as more friendly. But this again is having the gun put to your head (research cut off, having your company sliced into 200 pieces by the Feds) that makes you favor one party of the other.
Assuming your research $ is reasonably secure with either party in charge, then you're going to vote along your other beliefs. I once had a PoliSci prof who had pictures of Fidel Castro and Khadaffi in his office. I imagine that even if Bush came out with a check for 5 million dollars and offered to give this prof a back rub, the prof would still would vote Nader. The rest of academia has a similiar (though not so extreme) leftward slant. I believe Knuth wrote something like over %90 of his collegues in CS were athiests or agnostics. If you look at 2000 Presidential elections, how this works out is pretty clear. 2/3 of people who go to church every week voted Bush, 2/3 who didn't voted Gore.
[Damon May:]
It's pretty tough to figure out where, exactly, the candidates and their parties stand on discretionary spending on research. Consider this statements from georgewbush.com:
"The President commits 13.5 percent of the total discretionary spending to research and development – the highest level in 37 years."
Of course, as we know, the vast majority of that increase went to the life sciences; but at any rate, this statement on his website seems to portray him as a pretty science-friendly guy. What about this statement from the second debate, then?
"Non-homeland, non-defense discretionary spending was raising at 15 percent a year when I got into office. And today it's less than 1 percent, because we're working together to try to bring this deficit under control."
So he's made a marginal increase in the slice of the pie that goes to R&D... but he's slowed the growth of the pie by 93%.
That would be a very dangerous statement to make in front of a group of research scientists, whose livelihood depends on that spending! But when speaking in front of the nation, research takes a backseat to defense.
As for Kerry, we know that "The Kerry-Edwards plan will restore the discretionary spending caps of the 1990s to ensure that spending - outside of education and security - does not grow faster than inflation" (johnkerry.com). Again, "discretionary spending" seems to be almost a dirty word, with connotations of waste. And again, security is paramount. But I haven't been able to track down many details about how he plans to manage R&D funds, except for the repeated broad statement that he will "invest more in research and development". Has anyone else had more luck?
Bush has a record, so we have some idea of what he'll do to research spending in the future; but the issue is so far down on both candidates' list of priorities that it's hard to know exactly where they stand.
[Joanna Muench:] But research is about more than money coming in. As we've been discussing in class, the product of research is knowledge, and deriving value requires that knowledge be broadly disseminated. The Bush administration's tendency to quash dissenting views does not endear them to researchers in any number of disciplines, notably earth sciences and life sciences. Back in June, 5000 scientists and engineers wrote an open letter to Bush denouncing his misuse of scientific research in estabilishing public policy. Bush demoted the Presidential Science Advisor position to a level that no longer participates Cabinet meetings. Advisory panels are carefully selected to match administration beliefs. A friend of mine was approached by the Bush administration for a position on an advisory panel on Artic research, but turned down when she failed the global climate change litmus test. Almost all the Artic oceanographers failed that one (I believe they found someone with an MS who is not a principle investigator). What is the value of research that is stifled?
Industry And Academia Weigh In:
In December, the Council on Competitiveness -- an organization of CEOs, university presidents, and labor leaders -- will release the recommendations from its yearlong National Innovation Initiative. The report seeks to identify key steps the U.S. should take to keep its leading role as an innovator in the global economy.
Panel: Kerry would take new approach to tech issues:
On the outlook by both the presidential candidate on tech issues.
Diwaker 22:44, 9 Oct 2004 (PDT)
