[kalimanzaro]

Regrettable that academia didnt learn from industry how to deploy, only how to spin. When everything is framed as an "investment", researchers aren't incentivized to discover but to squeeze out "returns" even when there arent much

[mjburgess]

Perhaps, more precisely, it's a shame that governments turned research funding into a private sector game like start-up funding.

It seems no mystery why western governments are saying insane things like they need to be competitive in the quantum computing space: their frontal-lobes (the research industry) has been hijacked by the hype machines formerly constrained to the private sector.

[cycomanic]

This really it's the nail on the head and it has other consequences.

I was talking with a colleague about how it is to lead a research group and essentially it is very much like running a start up always in the phase of trying to attract funding without the prospect of things ever becoming self sustainable and there being a great monetary reward.

[Animats]

This is so bad it's not even clear what they are spinning. Is this a memory device? A compute element? What?

Physicists have been fooling around with yttrium iron garnet for decades.[1][2] It apparently has really weird interactions between photons and magnetic fields. That's promising, because semiconductors came from studying weird interactions between electric charge and current flow in unusual solid materials. Yttrium iron garnet been tried experimentally for microwave phase-shifters and beam-forming antennas, but doesn't seem to have appeared in products yet.

So, decades of papers, but no products yet. There's real physics there, but the hype is overblown. Probably because someone needs funding and grad students to work in this obscure area.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/physics-and-astronomy/y...

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41535-017-0067-y.pdf

[gumby]

> Regrettable that academia didnt learn from industry how to deploy, only how to spin.

Hey, this was from phys.org and spin matters a lot to certain physicists!

More seriously: with funding being less prevalent and the cultural shift to the dominance of commerce-worshipping Gradgrinds, university press offices and even individual professors are under a lot of pressure to point out the practicality (which today means “marketability”) of everything, even an abstract mathematical proof!

I can’t count how many academic presentations I’ve heard that ended with 15-20 minutes with the author trying to justify the work. They are professors, not business people, and they almost always sound like they are struggling to jump through that hoop. The time would have better been spent talking further about the actual subject matter!