gtmitchell

6 ms·

1.
by gtmitchell 1y ago
Unsurprising. It's the natural byproduct of overproduction of scientists, brutally competitive job markets, and the shortsighted decisions to use publications as the primary metric for hiring and promotion decisions. Anyone who is ala
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by gtmitchell 1y ago
Hopefully I can move back into the laboratory. I'm a scientist who moved into lab software admin a few years ago, and there are days I miss it a lot.
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by gtmitchell 2y ago
Any advice for PhD dropouts? I spent years and years pushing against that boundary in an obscure corner of my field and it never moved. What little funding I had dried up and I left grad school with a half finished dissertation, no PhD, a
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by gtmitchell 2y ago
In the US at least, it is entirely possible to teach at a university without a PhD. Community colleges are full of instructors with masters's degrees, and tons of classes offered by major universities are taught by graduate students o
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by gtmitchell 2y ago
I think this result is obvious to anyone who has spent any time in the academic world, although it is nice to see some solid numbers behind it. The harsh truth is that key to academic career advancement is who you know much more than what y
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by gtmitchell 2y ago
A generation ago or two ago, it was common for chemists to use taste and smell as a tools for qualitative evaluation of chemical compounds. So older scientific literature is full of all sorts of knowledge that was obtained in ways that are
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by gtmitchell 2y ago
I immediately Ctrl-F'd for 'funding'. There's your problem right there. If there's no money to support graduate students, you're never going to get enough researchers to replace the ones you have. Additionall
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by gtmitchell 2y ago
That brings back memories. One of my first research projects in school was doing sketchy things with a Quanta-Ray Nd:YAG laser. I remember the distinct 'tack-tack-tack' sound of the Q-switching at 10 Hz which I used to create a la
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by gtmitchell 2y ago
As someone whose early scientific career was destroyed by null results, no. No one will publish your negative results. Unless you win the lottery and stumble across a once-in-a-generation negative result (e.g. the Michelson–Morley experime
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by gtmitchell 2y ago
"Just be yourself". Such terrible, useless advice to give to someone who is struggling with dating.
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by gtmitchell 2y ago
I also wish there were ways to publicly acknowledge (and hopefully support) those who spend years of their lives working towards PhDs they never finish. For many it is a deeply private loss, with so few people knowing what happened and eve
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by gtmitchell 2y ago
As a chemist who has actually done micro fabrication work, this reads to me like a classic case of a non-chemistry company trying to do chemistry R&D and finding out it’s a lot more complicated to follow all the rules than they thought
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by gtmitchell 2y ago
Rome had the advantage of access to essentially unlimited forced labor in order to build and maintain their infrastructure. Modern engineering is absolutely superior to Roman engineering, but we do have to contend with budget constraints,
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by gtmitchell 2y ago
And according to recent investigations, we know approximately 70% of those ‘active’ users are actually bots.
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by gtmitchell 2y ago
I’m reading this more like “New York Times reporter discovers used electric vehicles exist, cost less than new ones.” Used EVs have been affordable for years. In fact, cars like the Nissan Leaf have depreciated so quickly that they’re a do
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by gtmitchell 2y ago
It should be obvious at this point that Valve simply does not care about TF2. There is no one at the organization that does more than the absolute bare minimum to keep the servers up and the loot crate cash rolling in. At this point, I thin
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by gtmitchell 2y ago
This is far more common that you would think. Just a generation ago, science degrees required students to learn foreign languages (Russian, German, French, etc.) so they could read journals to be kept up to date on the latest scientific fi
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by gtmitchell 2y ago
Me, more or less. I knew in 4th grade wanted to be a scientist. And I went on to get a few chemistry degrees. Currently work in the pharmaceutical industry.
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by gtmitchell 2y ago
As a counter example, I will offer my own experience in graduate school. I was one of the few married students and observed that nearly all the successful graduates students had the following in common: 1. They had competent PhD advisors
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by gtmitchell 2y ago
That’s only really true for bicycle with modern rubber wheels. Attempting to ride through the mud or on rough surfaces with wooden wheels would have been much more challenging (not to mention uncomfortable).
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by gtmitchell 3y ago
This is a systemic social problem, not a technology problem. If researchers wanted to double check every single one of their citations for subsequent retractions, they would simply have their graduate students do it. The root of the proble
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by gtmitchell 3y ago
I’ve always been profoundly jealous of countries with right to roam laws and dream of a day when we might have some thing similar in the US. Here in the west we have so much public land that is effectively closed to access due to wealthy la
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by gtmitchell 3y ago
The maps are hidden gems. Don’t want to spoil it, but be sure to click the link on a few of them. It’s top notch British humor.
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by gtmitchell 3y ago
A very thorough preliminary report. I've worked for a long time in quality systems, and this is a perfect example of a systemic failure. They've got work being handed off between Boeing employees and 3rd party contractors with i
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by gtmitchell 3y ago
Honestly, I think anything that brings more attention to the stupendously wasteful travel habits of wealthy individuals such as celebrities and politicians is a public good and should be encouraged. Ms. Swift has essentially unlimited resou
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by gtmitchell 3y ago
I'm a scientist that through a lateral career move has ended up doing something akin to software development. This means for the last few years I have attended daily scrum meetings for the project I'm working on. Perhaps it'
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by gtmitchell 3y ago
This is sadly unsurprising. I have a foreign language degree and a bit over a decade ago, I spent some time trying to get a translation side-job off the ground. Even then it was clear that , except for a select few languages, it was a race
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by gtmitchell 3y ago
I've been regularly using ChatGPT for translating technical documents. It does a great job, definitely better than Google Translate.
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by gtmitchell 3y ago
We're trying to use technology to solve a legal / political issue, which predictably ineffective results. Unfortunately, I don't even think improved state oversight will help until the underlying issue of qualified immunity i
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by gtmitchell 3y ago
I spent a lot of my time in graduate school fabricating transmission diffraction gratings using electron beam lithography. Turns out making a bunch of nanometer-scale straight metal lines one a flat surface is a lot harder than you would th

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