Jobs
drorzel | March 31, 2011Via Mad Mike, a discussion of why it sucks to be a biomedical scientist:
87% of my blog-related e-mail is from unhappy, bitter, troubled, distraught biomed grad students, postdocs, technicians, and early-career faculty. Others write to me with problems, but these tend to be of the "I'm frustrated with my advisor" sort rather than the "I'm being tortured, abused, deported, sued, and I fear my academic career is over" sort that I routinely get from biomed people.
I specify biomedical rather than the life science in general because, as far as I can tell, the ecologists and botanists and…
drorzel | March 30, 2011I got my student comments from last term's intro mechanics course yesterday, which is always a stressful moment. As tends to happen, they were all over the map, with some students really liking me and others absolutely hating me.
It struck me while I was reading through the written comments that the experience is a lot like reading Amazon reviews of my book. I think there's actually a decent analogy between the response of authors to reviews and the response of faculty to student evaluations:
-- Really good comments can make you feel great, but the negative ones make you feel worse. I've got…
mikethemadbiologist | March 8, 2011There's been a lot of interesting discussion about the poor job prospects of post-docs, much of which was sparked by this Nature News column by Jennifer Rohn. I responded with the idea that we need more research centers (although if what you want to do is teach, you should continue in academia). But what I find odd is that there really isn't an understanding of what a research center (or could be). For instance, Steve Caplan writes (and I don't mean to pick on him; I've had various exchanges with other people that are similar):
Jenny has proposed that it would be a good idea to have "…
mikethemadbiologist | February 26, 2011Recently, I argued that the widespread ignorance of the most basic elements of U.S. politics should be viewed as an educational failure--an adult educational failure--committed by the political press corps. Basically, the political news media, with some exceptions, are either failing to provide relevant information or actively promoting 'misinformation' (also known as propaganda). To give you a visual image of what I mean, I created a word cloud of the transcripts of the February 20th editions of ABC's This Week, NBC's Meet the Press, and CBS's Face the Nation. The size of the word…
mikethemadbiologist | February 26, 2011For today, anyway. Brad DeLong is the only one out there who is as flummoxed, not to mention frustrated, as I am about the complete lack of responsiveness by the political system to nine percent U3 unemployment, and one out of six U.S. workers being un- or underemployed. DeLong nails it (italics mine):
There is a line of argument that I do not understand -- even though it is made by economists I respect. It is that our current labor-market depression was baked in the cake from the moment that Alan Greenspan decided to keep interest rates low in the early 2000s, declining to stop would-be…
egrossman | February 22, 2011By Elizabeth Grossman
As I've watched the hearings House Republicans have been holding over the past couple of weeks on the economic impact of environmental and occupational health and safety regulations, I've been thinking about what I've learned about and seen of the working and environmental conditions in places that are now the hub of world manufacturing. I've been picturing the smog that hangs over Chinese cities. I've been thinking about the fatal despair of young high-tech workers at Foxconn and Samsung factories in China and South Korea, about the depressed wages and severe working…
mikethemadbiologist | February 21, 2011By way of Mark Thoma, we come across these two figures about wages. First, with the exception of workers near the top of the wage scale, things have pretty much flat-lined for three decades:
Women at the 50th percentile have seen an improvement, but keep in mind that they still lag considerably behind men in absolute terms. But the relationship between educational attainment and wage increases is stunning:
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 35% of workers has a college degree or higher. Basically, two-thirds of U.S. workers haven't seen any economic gains in thirty years…
mikethemadbiologist | January 27, 2011It would be for the best.
First, some general thoughts. I had the distinct sense Obama was trying to run the clock out. He knew he had to say something, but has no room to maneuver. Thanks to his mediocre first two years and his enabling of conservative talking points (which one wonders if that's not strategic, but ideological), the Democrats lost control of the House and have been boxed into a corner rhetorically. Related to that, he set the stage over and over again to box Republicans in, but then he mostly chickened out and rarely offered concrete proposals that would put them in a…
mikethemadbiologist | January 8, 2011I can't figure it, myself. By way of driftglass, we come across this report indicating massive employee dissatisfaction:
Workers can't wait to dump their employers: 84 percent of respondents to a survey say they plan to actively look for a new job this year.
That's up from 60 percent who said they planned to do so last year. Only 5 percent said they intend to stay in their current position.
The survey was done by Manpower subsidiary Right Management. "It's staggering," said Joanne Stroud of Right Management.
Senior leadership within organizations is largely to blame, Stroud said. While many…
mikethemadbiologist | December 13, 2010Or for that matter, any of the other tax cut silliness or fiscal austerity madness. Because to lower unemployment to where it was in early 2007 over the next eighteen months, that's what we'll have to do. The Slacktivist lays out the numbers:
Now, from 2007 through early 2009 the American economy saw some 8 million or so layoffs. These people were not fired, they were laid off.
The arithmetic involves large numbers, but it is not complicated. The economy gained 8 million unemployed workers and lost 8 million job openings. Those 8 million people could not just go get another job because…
mikethemadbiologist | November 30, 2010Nothing at all. Here's what I don't get about Obama's proposal to freeze federal workers' salaries: he got nothing in return. Just like he did with healthcare.
Nothing.
And he is out of his fucking skull if he thinks either the Republicans or the Very Serious People are going to give him credit for this. All they will do is say this is a good start, and then demand even more. Oops, we find that this isn't even called a good start, but only a token one.
Is there anyone at the White House who has ever negotiated for anything? I can understand bargaining this away (I wouldn't be happy…
mikethemadbiologist | November 28, 2010Or, at least, don't obey Massachusetts law and receive the healthcare they are entitled to. Esterline Technologies demonstrates that much of what passes for 'rational business decision making' is actually ideology combined with petty personal vendetta. From Yves Smith:
This story illustrates how far some companies are willing to go to preserve their bottom lines and assert their right to operate in an unfettered manner, even when that includes breaking the law and violating contracts...
Esterline is in the process of shuttering its Tauton manufacturing operation, Haskon Aerospace, which…
mikethemadbiologist | November 27, 2010Chris Matthews makes a very good point (no, really) about our complete failure to upgrade our infrastructure:
We used to build trains and subways and airplanes for the world. Now we read about trains running three hundred miles an hour in France and China and we piddle along on Amtrak like we're on a buckboard.
Why can't we build railroads -- rapid railroads to unite this country instead of making the vast continent between New York and LA "fly-over country" for the bi-coastal elite to look down on? Why don't we build "anything" anymore? Would we build the subway systems of our country today…
mikethemadbiologist | November 20, 2010Keep in mind that this GE plant primarily makes parts for defense contracts--these jobs are provided by a guaranteed contract:
General Electric Co. has made an unusual offer to the state: Give us $25 million in tax credits, and we won't cut any more than 150 positions at our aircraft engine plant in Lynn.
The conglomerate has already cut the Lynn plant's workforce by 600 jobs and could cut 150 more. But General Electric said that if it receives the state aid to help fund a $75 million retooling of the plant, it would maintain the remaining 3,000 jobs for six years.
If you're thinking this…
mikethemadbiologist | November 15, 2010What I find most disturbing about the Simpson-Bowles report, among many disturbing things, including a number fetish, is that our political discourse, which is usually mostly irrelevant, has become even more so. Why?
Because we're focusing on the wrong deficit.
While this deficit proposal is obviously an attempt to shift the debate rightward by proposing an arbitrary amount of GDP to be spent on government--and thereby 'limit'* the scope of government--it is having a far more insidious effect. Many progressives and liberals (here, here, here) feel the need to respond to this proposal,…
mikethemadbiologist | November 13, 2010Certain things make me bang my head against the wall. Politically, one of those things is the complete lack of real concern over the employment deficit by our political betters, especially by Democrats. Here's the latest installment of stupidity (italics mine):
To fight the worst recession since the Great Depression, Congress started giving the unemployed additional weeks of federally-funded unemployment benefits in July 2008 on top of the 26 weeks always provided by states. The benefits became more generous in 2009 to the point where in hardest-hit areas, the jobless are eligible for 73…
drorzel | November 8, 2010The American Institute of Physics has a statistics division that produces lots of interesting analyses of issues relevant to the discipline. A couple of them were released just recently, including one on the job status of new Ph.D.'s (PDF). The key graph from the report is this one:
The text of the report talks up the recent decrease in the number of post-doc jobs and increase in potentially permanent positions, but the long term trend looks pretty flat to me-- averaged over the thirty years of data, it looks like a bit more than half of new Ph.D.'s have always taken post-doc positions, and…
mikethemadbiologist | October 28, 2010Regarding their op-ed page, The New York Times seems eager to provide misinformation via Thomas Friedman columns. It's a fascinating business model. Besides, being lectured by Tom "Suck on This" Friedman completely blows up the irony meter. His latest inane--and factually incorrect--burbling:
Let's kowtow even more to public service unions so they'll make even more money than private sector workers, so they'll give even more money to Democrats who will give them even more generous pensions, so not only California and New York will go bankrupt but every other state too.
Then, of course,…
mikethemadbiologist | October 20, 2010I've never been one for long-distance psychoanalysis, especially of political figures. I don't know them, and, besides, I'm not really competent to make a clinical judgment. Instead, I follow Paul Krugman's simple rule of punditry:
Long ago -- basically when I started writing for the Times -- I decided that I would judge the character of politicians by what they say about policy, not how they come across in person. This led me to conclude that George W. Bush was dishonest and dangerous back when everyone was talking about how charming and reasonable he was. It led me to conclude that Colin…
mikethemadbiologist | October 6, 2010Once again, Janet Stemwedel reminds us why we keep professional philosophers around. On Monday, in response to cancer researcher Scott Kern's moaning about how cancer researchers don't work hard enough, I asked if science was a job or a calling? Janet framed the question far better than I did (and go read the whole thing--there's lots of good stuff in there):
...if scientific researchers and the special skills they have are so very vital to providing for the needs of other members of society -- vital enough that people like Kern feel it's appropriate to harangue them for wanting any time…