What is Digg?82 Comments
- diggstown, on 08/28/2008, -1/+70An icon that inspired several generations of engineers is no more. It really hasn't been the same for well over a decade, but only the memories can remain now. I suppose that a place where the social value of research is held in higher regard than the economic viability of the work is too romantic of a concept to exist in today's corporate world.
- parax, on 08/28/2008, -0/+41I think this has a lot to do with the annual bottom line. Such research only pays off in the long term and a new generation of corporate executives want to pad the bottom line *now*, they don't care about value over a 25 to 50 year period. The current era of intense marketing, with heavy focus on being first to market, front-loads the company's value.
Their current plan is like realizing how much energy you could conserve if you remove all the dead-weight the engine adds. You'll coast a lot farther but once you come to a stop, game over.
It's a shame that management never really understands the inherent value of R&D. The fundamental physics lab is going to look terrible when you ask "How much value did this division add last year?" But it's the work horse of the system, it's the thing that keeps bring new innovations long after marketers have run out of ideas on how to pump up the current ad campaign. With a giant company like AT&T, if you're not the one doing the research, you'll just be playing catchup as your competitors enjoy the fruits of discovery. With Bell Labs closed, you can't expect the company to remain relevant more than another 15 years, if that. With the ever-accelerating rate of advancement, closing the lab might shuffle them into obscurity in 5 years. - branjb, on 08/28/2008, -0/+26:(
- riskybeats, on 08/28/2008, -4/+27You win THIS round jebus.
- DreadPirate, on 08/28/2008, -0/+22That is a shame. I used to work at an office just down the road from the old bell labs in Murray Hill, NJ and always thought it was cool to think that the computer age started in those labs.
- coldskool, on 08/28/2008, -1/+23Crawl back in your hole..
- pstroll, on 08/28/2008, -5/+24Bell labs died after the break up of ATT in the 80s.
- jhaks, on 08/28/2008, -1/+18Then stop using technology and bring your stupidity somewhere else.
- taylorhempel, on 08/28/2008, -1/+17Bose is proof of what never choking your research department will accomplish.
Sad to hear this about Bell Labs. :( - gasoline, on 08/28/2008, -1/+16Saying on digg that science is gay is like shouting "***** you nazi scum!" and driving a BMW.
- DteK, on 08/28/2008, -0/+14I think you mean unix. and yeah, its a stretch
- xenuxenuts, on 08/28/2008, -2/+14The way our business and government leaders act now days, it's like they're shorting stock in America's future.
- absurdist, on 08/28/2008, -0/+11You hit the nail precisely on the head. This is exactly what's wrong with the entire American economy right now. The short-term focus on "maximizing return to shareholders" (shorthand for "sucking all the money we can out of the company and distributing it to top management before the company implodes, hopefully not while we're still running it") is killing any investment which doesn't have immediate returns. And in the long run it's going to kill the U.S.'s competitiveness in the world economy.
- diggopolous, on 08/28/2008, -0/+11It's a s t r e c h
- paulsabo, on 08/28/2008, -1/+12I blame Scientology.
- diggstown, on 08/28/2008, -0/+9Companies donate to charity, why not look at investing in R&D for the public good as a form of social charity? Maybe the tax advantages of doing this aren't laid out well, but they should be.
- 30thElement, on 08/28/2008, -0/+8Don't feed the trolls.
- DrSnugglebunny, on 08/28/2008, -0/+7Buried, blocked, and reported. Bye. Bigoted little child.
- CasualReader, on 08/28/2008, -0/+7parax has it right about the short term and long term payoff for basic research. What worries me more is that the whole country seems to have this mind set. We constantly have to fight in congress to continue funding basic research in the government and university labs. Major corporations not only cut their research divisions but cut the heart out of the rest of the company's expertise by "early retiring" the best and brightest of the rest of their people. Precious skills go out the door. How do you expect to encourage long term growth if you look only as far ahead as the next quarterly report? People who try looking at the long term effects are considered fools.
- Palaceguard, on 08/28/2008, -0/+7You are ***** trash
- AndrewMoyer, on 08/28/2008, -0/+7I knew a guy that worked for Bell Labs... he shared a few of his experiences, the coolest of which was about how he wrote software used by a thermal sensor matrix, hand-crafted by some of his best friends and associates, that was essential to studying more efficient IC internal layouts... and he was doing all of this back when my parents were in diapers practically. His research was essential for spreading the heat out more evenly, keeping certain parts of the chip from frying while other parts remained cool. No doubt his research is a rock in the foundation of what has become modern computing. I would imagine all of this stuff is modeled now (using computers), but they didn't exactly have that ability back then. Really interesting to hear his stories considering I'm in the computer field myself now.
- lonesomewolf, on 08/28/2008, -0/+6100% agreement. These are the corporate raiders. They are raiding future intellectual property to short-term profits since that is what the Street measures success on.
- grey580, on 08/28/2008, -3/+9I bet the real reason is that the imminent release of alien technology is the culprit.
Or at least that's the rumor that I just started. ;p - blinkatron, on 08/28/2008, -0/+6Physics is single most important science there in terms of it's affect on humanity, and it gets the least amount of funding... gotta love it.
- gasoline, on 08/28/2008, -0/+6So true.
- CasualReader, on 08/28/2008, -0/+6It's hard to persuade the stockholders to invest money would pay off in ten years if their focus is on the quarterly report and their idea of "long term" vision is one year.
- 16x9, on 08/28/2008, -0/+6That's true to a point. But in my opinion it certainly damages the concept that many people put forward that business is the solution to all problems.
- morgauo, on 08/28/2008, -0/+6Very sad indeed. Looking for a positive note... When all the corporate research is gone and fundamental discoveries only come from government and university labs will there be a more open flow of information with less patent/copyright issues?
- MxM111, on 08/28/2008, -1/+6Let's be frank, that laboratory was possible due to AT&T monopoly. It was all downhill after the breakup. The smaller business with high competition can not afford to put huge amount of money to fundamental research which may or may not become profitable in 10 years.
As much as I liked Bell Labs, this kind of research is better suited for universities. - jbmcb, on 08/28/2008, -0/+5Bose might be a poor example. They've made pretty much the same mediocre sounding "Acoustimass" system for decades, along with their staple 901's which aren't half-bad. I mean, really, you can hear dialog coming out of their "bass cube" or whatever it's called. I'd expect they spend a ton of money on market research, but not much on actual acoustics.
A better example might be Dolby or Harman International. Both spend a lot of money on research and regularly present papers at AES. - DteK, on 08/28/2008, -0/+4Dennis Ritchie works out of Murray Hill. Apparently this has been in the works for some time, check his home page for some history http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/index.html
- Spetz, on 08/28/2008, -0/+4What a shame.
- deleo, on 08/28/2008, -0/+4This is a very sad event for scientific R&D in the United States. As has been said, top research univerities like MIT, Harvard and Stanford do this type of research, but Bell Labs was an icon in basic science R&D. Their work laid the foundation for the U.S. economy today.
But big corporations are focused on short term profits, and George Bush loves religion and hates anything to do with science, so the U.S. is probably going to fall pretty far out of the game if something doesn't change. Look for China to be the nation of the 21st century! - CasualReader, on 08/28/2008, -0/+4Government and University scientists often get patents on their work, or the university or other lab may have an agreement about the patents. My personal worry is that the patent ownership and/or secrecy may move overseas.
- sankarsan, on 08/28/2008, -0/+4Moving out of fundamental physics research to focus on immediate marketable areas seems to be an absolutely short sighted decision to be.So now the traditional Bell Labs is going to be just another of many coporate R&D wings.
- thcobbs, on 08/28/2008, -0/+4And the monopoly of ATT made possible the computer you used to post that derision. I'm not saying if they were good one way or another, but just think about who you are actually insulting.
- analogs, on 08/28/2008, -0/+3The Bell Labs text-to-speech converter was one of my favorite web sites in the 90's.
http://www.research.att.com/%7Ettsweb/tts/demo.php
(I know it says AT&T but I think they bought it. It used to say Bell Labs a few years ago.) - las3rjock, on 08/28/2008, -0/+3"The break up of mother bell is the major reason why our phone bills are so cheap."[citation needed]
- norman619, on 08/28/2008, -0/+3This is one of the trade-offs when you take your company public.
- majordanger, on 08/28/2008, -0/+3Well I guess we know it all.
Everything has already been invented, so let's shut down the Patent Office too. - DrunkenDigger, on 08/28/2008, -2/+4Sad to see it go but hopefully the Labs efforts towards wireless, nanotech, etc will pay off in a different way.
- Dustin00, on 08/29/2008, -0/+2"That view is shortsighted and may drastically curtail the Labs' ability to come up with truly innovative discoveries."
Also, if you were excited to do cutting edge physics work and had the chops for it... you're now looking for a job somewhere else.
I wonder how many employees are going to quit in the next year. - diggstown, on 08/28/2008, -0/+2@norman619:
The charitable contributions are. Perhaps there is a way of investing in R&D where a certain percentage of the output is provided under Public Domain licensing. A percentage of the money allocated toward this effort should be treated the same way.
Obviously a lot of thought would need to be put into doing this correctly as a half-baked plan would create too much opportunity for corruption. Done properly though, it would effectively be public financing of technology research that leverages the facilities and brainpower of the corporations while subsidizing the cost of the research facilities and resources of the corporations. The public gets some of the results of the R&D provided to them without the constraints of a corporate patent holder and the company has subsidized research. Students will once again flock to engineering disciplines as the demand for good researchers increases outside of academia.
I'm sure there are some opportunities to do this right now, but we need more. - jamessavik, on 08/28/2008, -0/+2It's a sad day when we decide that "it ain't invented here".
Back to my garage/lab- ba-wah-hah-ha! - DiggItalia, on 08/28/2008, -0/+2Bell labs's still alive.. they've closed the material physics and semiconductor research branches only..
- norman619, on 08/28/2008, -0/+2diggstown:
Would that be a tax write-off? - panteradactyl, on 08/29/2008, -0/+2is it ok that i got all i needed from this story from the description?
- cwcentral, on 08/28/2008, -2/+4Unfortunately, fundamental physics research has either gone to pure theoretical (string theory, particle physics-- basically philosophical stuff), or business oriented (Quantum computers, fiber optics). Both offer paradigm changes, but show no promise of discovery nor innovation. I just don't see the curiosity and passion Physicists used to have 10-15 years ago.
Funny that stuff like space science, non-linear/chaos theory, and multi-variable problems and macro-physics are not much of a focus nowadays. It's bad that the number of grads in Physics are becoming smaller and smaller year over year, which IMO is disturbing. - DrJG, on 09/01/2008, -0/+1cwcentral - Some truth in the last paragraph - especially the last line - but it isnot clear what is wrong about theoretical part. Relativity was as pure theory as it can get.
Thinking of pure theoretical research as irrelevant is what has made the shareholders of Lucent close the fundamental physics research. On the other hand ability to think of what might not pay of immediately in terms of gratification below mind levels is what separates human species from others majorly. - Traze, on 08/28/2008, -0/+1Absolutely.
Odd no one over 35 seems to care....
And even a lot under 35.... -
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