Foreigners at ORNL

A recent blog item of Frank Munger's deals with the travails of non-citizens at ORNL. While it's true ORNL overtly brands us as potentially dangerous with glaring red badges, the practical fallout of this and other measures is minimal, and things are somewhat easier than what I witnessed as an "Agent CEA" in the French National Laboratory at Saclay in the 1990s. No, the main obstacles hampering our attempts to get our work done come not from ORNL but from dealing with visas and green cards for lab members - a constant headache.

All this reminds me of my former mentor, Martin Karplus, who tried to move from Harvard to Paris in 1974. The Universite Paris VII (Jussieu) wanted to offer him a tenured professorship, but tenured professors were civil servants and thus had to be French. Enter Jacques-Emile Dubois , a lively man who I enjoyed chatting with occasionally while working with the French Chemical Society. Dubois was a chemistry professor at Jussieu, but he was also Head of Research at the French Minstry of Defence and he had connections high up in the Pompidou adminstration. Dubois got weaving and, sure enough, eventually a decree was published exempting university professors from the citizenship requirement. However, by that time I think Martin had had enough and he didn't leave Harvard (wisely maybe: even a Dubois couldn't cure the deeper sclerosis of the French academic administration), but he apparently received a number of thank-you letters afterwards.

An Open Letter to Sir Richard Evans

Dear Sir Richard,

As Chairman of BAE you were responsible for securing the largest arms deal in British history: the Al-Yamamah sales to Saudi Arabia, worth $67bn so far over 20 years and potentially $60bn more. Of course this created thousands of jobs in Saudi Arabia and the UK. Admirable!

However, there does appear to have been a slight problem with it, doesn't there?

I mean, it really did seem inordinately clever of your guys to manage to sell a military air traffic control system to the government of impoverished Tanzania in 2001 for $30m when Tanzania didn't even have an air force! There's salesmanship!

And now, finally, your company has admitted to "false accounting" over Al-Yamamah, Tanzania and other deals and agreed to pay $470m in fines. However, Sir Richard, is "false accounting" really the best description? Wouldn't bribery be more accurate?

For example, the US justice department has been investigating claims that $180m a year was transferred by BAE to Saudi Prince Bandar. And the Serious Fraud Office were just about to get going on you lot in 2006 when Tony Blair wrote a secret letter to them instructing them to stop the investigation for reasons of national security (i.e., Saudi threats).

Now, BAE's admission of "false accounting" means that there will be no trials and the company won't be blacklisted. And the fines are tiny compared to the deals, aren't they? It was still all well worth it, wasn't it? And for being the architect of the gigantic Al-Yamamah deal you were yourself well rewarded: a huge salary, a knighthood and considerable power within BAE. Two luxury homes in central London were made available to you by companies linked to al-Yamamah.

But don't you think an admission of bribery would be more appropriate? Restitution of the $67bn to the international companies that lost the deals because of your lubricative activities, maybe? Or, even better, and this is where a lowly molecular biophysicist comes in, setting up a $67bn research fund to develop alternative energy so that we can find ways to stop having to funnel huge sums of money to OPEC countries to buy oil, enabling Saudi princes in turn to transfer vast sums of money to eager BAE so they can retain multi-billion-dollar personal sweeteners. How about it, Sir Richard?

Yours sincerely,


Jeremy C. Smith.

Wonderful Video Compilation from one of our Graduate Students...

Splette Showreel 2010 from Thomas Splettstoesser on Vimeo.

Having got that out of the way maybe he can now concentrate on graduating??? (grin)

[small disclaimer: about one second of the video depicts cows and small furry animals succumbing to mercury poisoning - not something that happens very often in reality]

To be or not to be...

..a Norwich City football supporter.

On May 3rd 2009, when Norwich were ignominiously relegated to League One, I announced that I was no longer a fan...and marked the occasion with a bitter, fractious poem.
Now, given recent exploits of the lads on the field there here have been raised eyebrows as to why my green and yellow scarf is still studiously banished to the attic.

Well,

it is true that..

- Norwich are presently top of the table
- The misers have taken 44 out of the last possible 47 points
- They have shattered the club record for the consecutive number of home wins (11 and counting)
- They are packing them in Carrow Road to a point where even flocks of migrating geese have been reported to pause and perch upon the Barclay Stand to take in the spectacle.
- Manchester United's manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, after his team's comprehensive defeat by second-placed Leeds, was rumoured to have said: "Lucky we weren't drawn against Norwich otherwise we would have got a real hammering."


However, one's support should not be pledged lightly.

Therefore, under the following conditions only will I formally resume with the Canaries:

- Norwich are promoted this year.
- Ipswich are not relegated. [Yes, not. This may sound strange given that Ipswich are Norwich's sworn lifelong arch enemies, but there would be little point in them plunging down past us as we are flailing past them on the way up, would there? The existence of the local derby is quintessential. Perenially one place above the relegation bracket is the ideal purgatory for Ipswich.]
- (optional get-out clause, to be invoked facultatively): Norwich City win the World Cup in South Africa this Summer.

However, even were the above conditions to be satisfied, there would, of course, be no guarantee of a celebratory poem.....

Ice-adorned trees in my garden

Hope it thaws soon because I've been snow-bound at home for two days.

The flora and fauna of Pandora....

..,which are what made Avatar worth seeing, awaken the innate taxonomist in viewers.

Welcome, China, to the Club of Scientific Superpowers

Data, released today by NSF, illustrate quantitatively what many have been feeling over the last 10 years - that China is surging in the world of scientific research. Looking at the rate of change of many indicators, China will very soon overtake the U.S.

This has been interpreted in gloomy terms as a "worrisome trend showing erosion of U.S. competitiveness" and as indicating that the "U.S. dominance in science is at risk".

I would look at things a different way. I would welcome China to the club of scientific superpowers, applaud their progress over the last decade (which does not seem to have been mirrored by India, which arguably could have done as well), and try to see what we can learn from it.

Well, the U.S., to its credit, has lead the world in welcoming qualified foreigners to populate its research universities and fuel the creative technological drive the future always requires. But since time immemorial (meaning, at least since I was first in the States in '85-'89!) we have bemoaned the number of homegrown graduate students in the sciences. Local kids just don't seem to get motivated and curious about finding things out.

Compare this with the sentiment embodied in the following quote in Time Magazine from Energy Secretary Chu on a trip to Beijing: "In the U.S., rock stars and sports stars are the glamour people. In China, it's scholars. Here, Nobel laureates are the equivalent of Britney Spears." If this is truly the case, look forward to a fair fraction of the best and brightest of the youth of the presently 1.3 billion Chinese keenly dedicating their creative abilities to science.
And if, as is likely, the U.S. cohort remains mired in banker/rock-star/NFL fantasyland then China will quickly swamp the science stats.

How, then, will the U.S. remain at the table? Maybe the only way will be to rapidly further step up immigration of qualified talent from China? Rapid immigration isn't impossible - just look at Vancouver which, in the blink of an eyelid, has quickly become 30% Chinese, albeit not uniquely of the highly-qualified variety. But whether such an influx happens in the U.S. may well depend on whether we will continue have the means to attract the brightest over here. If not......