Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!nrl-cmf!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!hplabs!hplabsz!taylor
From: eugene@ames-pioneer.arpa (Eugene Miya N.)
Newsgroups: comp.society
Subject: Re: University Education and Industry Needs
Message-ID: <1459@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM>
Date: 22 Jan 88 19:18:42 GMT
Sender: taylor@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM
Organization: NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
Lines: 68
Approved: taylor@hplabs

As to the original question of:

 	"Why should industry give [money to universities] and
 	 then resign all control?"

Ever hear of charity?  Your company doesn't have to, but
then you don't have to recruit people from Universities either.

Several things strike me:

1) Are David Packard and William Hewlett fools for donating so much of
   their personal money to a wide variety of charities?  (Yes, I think
   Hewlett must have been a fool, I got a scholarship from him ;-)

1a) Did Bell Labs benefit by giving Sony transistor technology?

2) Can the decline of so called "rust belt" industries be
   tied to a lack of research?

3) What's the balance in time to do research versus the complete decline 
   of the company for a lack of products?  Peter Denning talks about 
   "eating seed corn" - how do these time frames affect hiring new blood?

I noticed something deficient in the way NASA hired people versus
the way LLNL [Lawrence Livermore National Labs] hired people.  Some of 
this is documented in Star Warriors.  The people in NASA (and many other 
places) tend to say "Get back to me when you get your PhD."  This is not 
how LLNL's physicists hire a talent. They identify bright students as 
Seniors, invite them for summer positions or nurture and classify their 
school work early, and groom them for positions at the Lab via the 
Hertz Foundation among others.

GRANTS are another thing.  If a company has specific needs, it deserves 
to call the shots on money for specific problems.  Not everyone is 
interested in project XXX, but with a country as big as ours, there's 
bound to be someone interested.

Have companies really done research in the past?  Well yes and no.
Some wise companies have endowed chairs and research fellows (sort of 
like charity again).  How much is a Ken Thompson [Unix luminary at AT&T]
worth if he does nothing more than develop one program? ;-)  Compare that 
to Edwin Land ["Polaroid Land Cameras"] with over 500 patents (note: neither
have a PhD, and Land didn't even graduate Harvard).

We have some stunning examples of good research labs: IBM, Bell Labs,
NIH [National Institute of Health], the National Labs and Research Centers, 
Xerox PARC [Palo Alto Research Center], DECWRL/SRC [DEC Western Research
Lab], HP Labs, but look at the nature of these labs compared to certain other
industries: metalurgy labs, chem labs, small, some private, etc.
many centered aound specific expensive resources: computers, telescopes,
accelerators, etc.  But there's also other "research climate" issues.

> "New Scientist" had a fascinating editorial a few months ago ...

One of the Nobel Laurates at LBL [Lawrence Berkeley Labs] who worked on the 
Astroid extinction hypothesis also wrote about the nature of resaearch 
funding in "Science" several years ago.

> As Universities have become more interested in expensive areas of
> research (like particle physics...

This is the big science problem.  Alas what can you do?  It's getting
more complex.  Every few years there's a shake out away from big
science, but it does get bigger and more expensive to learn a fraction
more than we knew before.  I could say more (specific example), but I'll
refrain.

Eugene Miya