academic-industry-military complex, the key to be an advanced nation

The difference between academic institutions of an very advanced nation and second rated nation is R&D driven versus education only.

In most countries, universities are mainly for higher learning and getting an education, a degree.
but for country like US, the role of the universites are fostered for R&D has direct implication to industry purposes.

Higher education nowadays is somewhat overrated . Because education by definition means stuffs that are outdated, past knowledge, it's only good for fundamentals.

But doing industrial related R&D means innvoation, getting ahead of others.

US has some of the most R&D driven academic instituions in the world.

How to become R&D oriented? equipments! tools ! high precison instruments at low cost price. The key is for the academic instituions is has all the most advanced tools like an industrial companies,.

Here's how the governemnt would step, provide funds for the academic instituions to buy the tools.
China can make euqipments at a fraction of the cost. For example, western supercomputer costs a few millions each, but a Dawning series supercomputer in china only costs $100K. A multi-million dollar tester can be made for fraction of the cost.

If CHina can make advanced but inexpensive tools to their academic institutions then they are become R&D driven instutions, their research can benefit the industry and military.

the key is for academics deemphasis theoretical study, abstract learning and more industry, practical R&D related research.

Industrial R&D capable academic institutions can make supplemental income by selling their findings to the industry. Of course their findings would be under IP protection. This way, the school can pay the students some supplemental income. So when they graduated, they couldn't find a real job outside, they can still do R&D at school for some money for living. It's not big money for at least help for living expensive.

I see a lot of countries have many college graduate jobless, unemployed. after few years, they are becoming useless. All because their academics don't innovate, not involve in the industry circle, not being productive, except teaching outdated stuffs. To become an advanced nation will depend how many R&D capable academics a country can field.

There's a stroy.
awhile ago, there was a professor named Samueli, he was an electrical engineering professor is UCLA in Los Angeles. He didn't like teaching, instead he spent time doing research, and getting his students into VLSI chip design. He paid his students for some money for living expense.

After a few years, his research finally came through.. he and his group students formed Broadcom, a big company in US.

He was bad professor, lazy in teaching, but very good enterpreneour and provide jobs for his students. and forming a big company. he was very famous in LA and in UCLA. He received high honor in school not because of his teaching but his R&D and bring tremendous fame and success to the school.
Now, that's what I am talking about,

Your story is about an independent, not a government financed story. Nothing can be further from your thesis.

Government cannot decide technological direction because government bureaucrats, who don't know a bit from a byte (do you?), know crap about technology and should not be allowed to dictate which and where it would go.

The US has many failures on government, DOD and DARPA sponsored IT related projects alone.

One of the most notorious was that the DARPA wanted to remove and go ahead controlling processor architecture development from the commercial industry like Intel and Motorola, and shape processor evolution according to government and military dictates. It gave specifications to Intel to build this "uber-processor", which basically was a processor that could interpret and execute the ADA programming language in the system hardware directly without the need for a compiler to create binary code.

So a lot of money, billions were spent on a project, that resulted on a chip that processed ADA slower than RISC chips running on compiled ADA code.

After such disasters, the DOD was content merely picking off the best the commercial industry has to offer, under the acronym COTS.

The Japanese industry, led by MIT (Ministry of Technology), themselves had a long string of failures, the most notable was the ballyhoed Fifth Generation Computer project that was designed to leap past IBM and the US computer industry with a mainframe designed to operate in parallel clusters and process LISP code directly. LISP is an artificial intelligence language.

The project wasted so much resources and in the end MIT quit from the computer business together. At the end of the say, the Japanese wasn't anywhere closer in wrestling the high end computer business from IBM.

All the stupid misdirections failed to anticipate, and was completed upended by the introduction of RISC architectures from companies such as Sun Microsystems. Likewise, all the government sponsored IT projects, from developing the next generation of computer systems to computing languages, all went bunk compared to open market architectures and systems such as Unix. One computing legacy left by the US government is the ADA programming language, but which does not have much of a market outside of defense industry and US aerospace, and certainly not much internationally.

The Japanese government interference on the Japanese telecom industry meant creating standards that was incompatible with the rest of the world, especially when the rest of the world has gone to GSM, with US half CDMA, half GSM. And thanks to that, Japanese celphone manufacturers were effectively locked into their own market, while Nokia, Motorola, Blackberry, and Samsung ran away with the rest of the market.

Chinese government is now repeating the same mistake by dictating their own 3G standard.

If you are designing computers this cheap with this much capability







I don't really see the need for the government to interfere. Encourage perhaps, make an example, certainly that can be encouraged. But mandate no. It looks to me the stuff can stand on their own two feet.

Re: China's own 3G standard. China's population could be a game changer in this case, since it has enough of a internal market.

crobato said:

The Japanese government interference on the Japanese telecom industry meant creating standards that was incompatible with the rest of the world, especially when the rest of the world has gone to GSM, with US half CDMA, half GSM. And thanks to that, Japanese celphone manufacturers were effectively locked into their own market, while Nokia, Motorola, Blackberry, and Samsung ran away with the rest of the market.

Chinese government is now repeating the same mistake by dictating their own 3G standard.

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True, sometimes it doesn't work out. But Japan has done a remarkable job of resurrect itself after WWII. Their style of doing things from a bigger picture has done more good than harms.

Of course government doesn't know specific technologies but it should support homegrown stuffs over foreign stuffs everyday, even if the home grown stuffs are not the optimal the first try. Maybe 2, 3 try it will succeed. And it will worth it at the end.

crobato said:

Government cannot decide technological direction because government bureaucrats, who don't know a bit from a byte (do you?), know crap about technology and should not be allowed to dictate which and where it would go.

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I think you are taking a few examples and generalizing them too much. Look, government can be smart or government can be stupid. A well guided government industrial policy is a very powerful thing.

What scientific or technological advancement is NOT made with any government help at all? Government always helps with funding, subsidies, tax breaks... Pure private sector innovation is relatively rare.

The reason is because science and technology involves massive positive externalities, the market cannot invest an optimal amount of capital into S&T research because the private incentive to research is less. There is a social interest in S&T research.

Your examples show that government funding has to be smart, and has to be accountable to taxpayers. It doesn't mean that government funding is a bad thing at all.

antimatter said:

True, sometimes it doesn't work out. But Japan has done a remarkable job of resurrect itself after WWII. Their style of doing things from a bigger picture has done more good than harms.

Of course government doesn't know specific technologies but it should support homegrown stuffs over foreign stuffs everyday, even if the home grown stuffs are not the optimal the first try. Maybe 2, 3 try it will succeed. And it will worth it at the end.

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That's correct. Foreign tech standards have the advantage of being the status quo. Tech standards tend to be monopolistic, and the first in the market has an advantage because it can set up barriers against others.

That's why the government needs to push the domestic technologies until they have a foothold in the market too. Once you kick start the domestic industries, then they can stand on their own.

Your examples show that government funding has to be smart, and has to be accountable to taxpayers. It doesn't mean that government funding is a bad thing at all.

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Government funding is not a bad thing. Government mandating can be a double edged sword. Government trying to manage progress is the bad thing.

All the failed examples shown happened in democracies with accountability. Yet they still failed.

Of course, government has to fund, manage and lead technological developments in the military sector. The military is after all, part of the government function.

But it becomes another matter when it comes to the private economy.

That's correct. Foreign tech standards have the advantage of being the status quo. Tech standards tend to be monopolistic, and the first in the market has an advantage because it can set up barriers against others.

That's why the government needs to push the domestic technologies until they have a foothold in the market too. Once you kick start the domestic industries, then they can stand on their own.

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Technology standards can also be agreed upon, work with a consortium and through consensus. No man can be an island anymore, especially with technology.

Any country that tried to form countering standards have fallen back. The locking of the Japanese telecom industry proved to be a decisive mistake, and the industry raveled back to using GSM, W-CDMA and Symbion. GSM is one example of a global agreed standard. The reason why in the US, we suffer with a cell phone industry less efficient and robust than in Europe and Asia, is because the US has two competing standards on celphones, GSM and CDMA, where as in Europe and Asia, you got GSM.

Motorola had its own standard before, I-NET and pretty much left that in a niche. A standardized celphone lets you roam, while another cannot.

In the past, we have seen other standards too, from PS2 ports to USB to PCI.

When you conform to global standards, you are in fact, making your product compatible with the globe. You are finding new markets.

Its funny that one talks about setting domestic standards, when your Loongson based computers are running on Linux, one of those global open standards.

A well guided government industrial policy is a very powerful thing.

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This very notion is an oxymoron, because you can't expect a policy to be well guided when first the taxpayer gives the government a blank check, and then the government passes that blank check on to someone else.

As I said before, it is a necessity for the government to fund sectors such as defense, because of the high costs involved. But the notion that all R&D must be centralized is an extremely inefficient one, because it gives one entity, the government, the monopoly to set prices, or bestow the invention to companies arbitrarily. This system is inherently unsustainable, because it kills innovation by the private sector, thus wiping out the very domestic industry that government is supposed to enhance, and sets prices that are either too high to capitalize on the monopoly position or too low, which would delay the recovery of investment. Just a bad idea when applied to a wider scale.

The best situation is a global, open standard.

The next best situation is a local standard where licenses are owned by locals.

The worse situation is a foreign standard where licensing money is paid to foreigners.