Just checked and it's currently an annual stipend of £15k + fees paid from AHRC in our department. Probably gets you a lot less than in 1998 too! Partially funded would be just the fees paid (around £4k).
What exactly do researchers do?
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Just checked and it's currently an annual stipend of £15k + fees paid from AHRC in our department. Probably gets you a lot less than in 1998 too! Partially funded would be just the fees paid (around £4k).
Please explain/show how climate change being man made is "unscientific"?
I think the niche thing happens because a PhD / research degree has to make a reasonably strong contribution to new knowledge. For example in certain eras of history where no new evidence is available, you're left with exploring the same evidence from new (and sometimes odd) angles in order to fullfil "new knowledge".
There's also the effect of "in vogue" topics. Seen people change their research proposal purely so it's more likely to be funded.
Complexity...
These things have to be sold to governments and part of the lovely "professor" status is to demand a harem of researchers to do their evil bidding and credit a few folk in a paper while they sell it on to some industrialist. Different skills to pay the bills. The only people outside of this are bankers they are just greedy folk best to be avoided.
But things are more complex now, the only way to deal with a complex problem is to break it down into chunks then you will get a clever spod who sees a underlaying pattern in some of the papers links the little bits and it all starts again until the planet dies due to the thick people running the USA.
These things have to be sold to governments and part of the lovely "professor" status is to demand a harem of researchers to do their evil bidding and credit a few folk in a paper while they sell it on to some industrialist. Different skills to pay the bills. The only people outside of this are bankers they are just greedy folk best to be avoided.
But things are more complex now, the only way to deal with a complex problem is to break it down into chunks then you will get a clever spod who sees a underlaying pattern in some of the papers links the little bits and it all starts again until the planet dies due to the thick people running the USA.
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I thought it was about 110 but I won't argue.
This also drives me nuts when the memes pop up "Why haven't the Pharma's cured cancer yet?"
Err, because there's lots of them.
Not even a month ago you had ideas and said more research is needed. Now you're saying it's dead end street. What has changed in that short time?
Well partly I'm totally out of touch, this thread has refreshed my understanding a bit. I was probably focusing more on physics than other sciences. I was actually looking up PhD thesis from friends written back in 2002 and asking myself if any of this research was actually ever used.
It was also partly about funding and why research should be funded for research that's not ever used.
I was also genuinely curious as to what a researcher does all day, are they hard at it in the lab crunching numbers or doing experiments all day or are they making cups of tea, watching YouTube and going to talks.
I'm all the wiser now though after this thread.
Soldato
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simple, the reason it wasnt used is because when researched it turned out to not be all that useful, something you couldn't have known without paying someone to do the leg work of finding out.
as for what researchers do on a day to day basis, its very heavily defined by the subject and stage the researcher is at, really hard to give a general timeline because what a historian's phd experience will be is totally different to an engineer or a mathematician or a musician.
I'm sure I have but I don't remember.
Because whilst it may not be used now it can and often does lead to uses later on, or a better understanding of how things work together.
You don't just research the "useful" stuff because until you've done the research you don't know what is useful, or your research may not in itself be useful, but may increase the knowledge of a subject - for example who really needs to know how a dinosaur lived, we're never going to have to feed and care for them, except that by researching them you find out about the conditions of the planet at the time, and how animals evolve.
Research into space for example was largely "not useful" by industrial reasoning at the start (it was largely two superpowers having a contest to show who was "better"), right up until materials were found due to the needs of space that suddenly changed how we did things like cook, or build cars, or communicate, or to give an idea of how research in one area for commercial use opens up another completely unrelated one, IIRC the abundance of cheap micro drones owes a lot to the mobile phone industry where for the first time there was a real push for ultra miniaturised high performance motors that used small amounts of power, and for them to be made by their billions - a lot of the motors in drones can IIRC trace their ancestry back to the motors used to make your mobile vibrate.
My friend who works as a researcher has done stuff that has ended up being industrially viable (but not yet implemented AFAIK because it needs other stuff to catch up), he's also worked on stuff that turns out not to be viable yet but in 5-10 years when equipment that can make it is not just confined to a lab... and stuff that may not ever see the light of day outside the lab but might also end up getting used next week if someone somewhere needs to do something and it's the solution.
A heck of a lot of "pure" research is about finding out if something is possible, then often another research team will work with that to make it into something useful.
Even a lot of "silly" sounding research that gets done often has a reason, even if it's just understanding something like how the brain reacts to things and in what order (a study into laughter for example sounds silly, until you realise it helps map the brain function out).
Basically you never know when something you're researching is going to be useful, which is why you fund speculative and "pure" research as well as the obviously commercially viable things - things like particle accelrators and cold fusion research may not seem to be getting anywhere fast (in part because it's so costly and takes so long), but you can be fairly sure that along the way they've been making advances that quietly help in other fields, if just because the tools they need may not exist yet, nor not be accurate enough.
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Soldato
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It's interesting that many have focused on sciences in their replies, but a lot of Phds are on other subjects. Literature, arts etc.. some of it is a bit of a nonsense. Like researching the pottery makers of pre-inca civilisation. Others you don't pass unless you discover something new.
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researching pottery sounds like it's not useful, until it shows up on a bbc4 documentary.
same with a lot of the arts, it's easy to hold up science as the cornerstone of human advancement, but that doesn't mean there isn't a place for arts, culture and history.
i mean the arts (in netflix/amazon prime form) have done a damn good job alleviating boredom during recent events...
Yup - it is amazing if someone was to actually document it how many areas of research have ended up dead ends or not producing anything useful in their intended field/application only to be crucial components in ground breaking breakthroughs in other areas.
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Even pottery could have its uses. It might sound dull until you discover that some ancient culture had a technique that was lost to time and we currently cant replicate. There was a similar situation with ancient Roman concrete. Sounds dull and a stupid thing to study until you look closer and realise it's actually a massively important area of research.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40494248
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Or until it's used as ablative shielding to get a spacecraft safely through a planets atmosphere. But then again, I am slightly biased in that respect when it comes to ceramics.
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As a Ph.D student researching the use of Immersive Technologies in Education I was going to reply with a list of what I typically do on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Maybe even link a couple of my published papers. But then I read more of your replies and it's quite clear you're trolling, so I'm not going to waste my time.