!Re: OT: Kevorkian who?

[Horace Greeley]

Hi, Sarah,

Quoting Sarah Fox <sarah@gendernet.org>:
> 
> Unfortunately it's even worse than that.  When I finally packed my bags
> and
> left academia in 1995, only 3% of grant proposals were being funded in
> my
> (relatively well funded) field.  I wasn't part of that more
> fortunate/influential 3%.  Neither was my postdoctoral sponsor, who was
> arguably the world's foremost researcher in his field.  He finally
> accepted
> a foreign grant to find ways to eradicate an imported species of snake,
> abandoning his real research.  Meanwhile, I worked on a collaborative
> project of very high priority/importance with the expectation that
> surely
> *that* project would be funded.  It was to preserve/digitize the
> nation's
> second largest biological sounds archive, upon which a almost a century
> of
> research is based.  (Tape degrades and falls apart.  Think evolution. 
> Think
> extinction.  Think new analysis techniques, e.g. fourier analyses,
> applied
> to old data.  Think replication.)  We were mistaken.  No funding for us,
> and
> no funding for Cornell (which has the largest archive).  Disgusted, I
> just
> left, merely a postdoctoral fledgling, because it no longer seemed
> "worth
> it."  This story is commonplace throughout American academia.

Yup - working at Stanford, I see it every day.  Massive amounts of money to 
things that seem to be able to make (almost instantaneously, of course) 
massive amounts of money.

To things that have less immediately realizable profit (legions of stuff, 
as you note)...well....

FWIW, the music world is not much different.

Peace,

Horace




> 
> Peace,
> Sarah
> 
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