Dr/Mr/Mrs/Mdm/Ms, circle according to your assumptions

This article on the front page of Today set off a minor rantfest by a (male) co-worker: “What? How dare they just call him a ‘Mr’? Don’t they know he’s an eminent professor and a ‘Sir’? And he just deserves a ‘Mr’?”

Gee, well, now you know how a lot of women PhD holders feel! Nice to see that the shoe is on the other foot, for a change.

Interestingly though, although the Today article is attributed to Bloomberg, the original Bloomberg article doesn’t make any references to titles at all. Yep, someone at the editing office probably plugged those in without thinking.

Now for two questions:

1) Would there be a similar rantfest if the people referred to in the article had been female?

2) If the paper published a correction tomorrow, would they have done the same if the people referred to had been female?

Leaving out professional titles when you’re talking about people in their professional capacity is not about bruised and sensitive egos.

It’s about simple respect and equity.

If you were to write a document where you refer to a male PhD holder as “Dr”, it’s only fair to extend the same courtesy to a female PhD holder. Otherwise, the message you’re sending is that a degree earned by a female is worth less than that of a male.

And here, the perpetrators are quite often women themselves, sadly enough.

Maybe we can get some real work done before the end of the century…

A look at the R&D scene in Singapore:

The labeling of the coloured dots will be left as an exercise for the reader.

A*STAR to open up its R&D facilities to SMEs

Now all you little startups out there can get to use state-of-the-art equipment at our premier research institutions, courtesy of A*STAR and Spring (gee, I wonder who there was involved in this…)!

Yeah, right.

WTF ARE THEY THINKING?? ARE THEY EVEN THINKING??

First off, notice that the institutes listed are all from the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC). Surely there must be some SMEs interested in biomedical research, and who would need to use some specialised equipment specific to biomedicine? The sentiment on the ground is that the dudes in charge are slowly phasing out research in the area of physical sciences and engineering, and the institutes under SERC are slowly being relegated to mere button-pushers and service providers for others. Recent events (like restructuring at a certain RI) certainly don’t help alleviate this feeling.

There are other more practical considerations why such this scheme is a bad idea:

Time: As it is now, much equipment is quite heavily utilised by staff and students. It is not uncommon for two-week wait times for characterisation tools like field emission scanning electron microscopes and atomic force microscopes. And we’re not just talking office hours here, a lot of the equipment is available 24/7, and are booked (and used) practically 24/7. With more external users coming in, this situation is just going to get worse.

Of course, there’s always the uniquely Singaporean solution of throwing more money into this, by just purchasing more equipment. Sure, we’re all for it – who doesn’t like shiny new toys? Except that tender processes and hardware installation and commissioning can take a long time (1 year+), and where are we going to find a place to house it? Fusionopolis isn’t going to be up for another few years. Besides, even if there is new equipment, we run into the second issue:

Manpower: R&D equipment don’t run by themselves, much as we wish they could. No, they break down, they need maintenance and TLC, they need human hands to keep them chugging along. In laboratories where managers have their heads screwed on straight, there are usually qualified personnel whose sole job is to ensure that the tools are maintained and calibrated regularly. Often, these are guys with diplomas and other basic degrees, but that’s not to say that their work is any less worthy than that of PhD-level researchers. You need both – people to come up with ideas for experiments, and people to make sure that the equipment’s running correctly to be able to do the experiments. Here in Singapore though, in the drive to recruit more PhDs, a few places seem to have neglected this fact. At DSI, for example, it is common to find PhDs in charge of lab equipment for common use – not one but several, and he has to deal with things like maintenance, repair, vendors; tasks that can take up a large fraction of his time. With this, it’s no surprise that their equipment failure rates are high, for how can anyone juggle 2-3 projects in addition to making sure that equipment stays up? And now you’re going to invite outsiders to use the machines, which requires even more time on the part of the researchers?

SNFC, on the other hand, has the right idea – a common nanofabrication and characterisation facility, with dedicated staff doing regular maintenance. Equipment downtimes are less frequent, and the staff are knowledgeable about the capabilities and limits of the equipment – this is something extremely invaluable when it comes to planning experiments.

Tooling: R&D equipment are often geared towards particular types of samples – it can’t be too big, or too small, or too thin, or too round. Some high production tools are able to handle only large samples like 8″ or 12″ wafers. Small startups though, tend to work with smaller geometries and prototypes rather than something for large production runs. If they want to be able to use some equipment, sometimes it may be necessary to do some retooling – all of which take time and manpower. Plus, when that happens, in-house research at the RI cannot proceed with the modified tool. Would researchers be willing to give up their equipment for a month (5-10% of a total project’s duration) while someone else messes with it for their own special needs? Not bloody likely.

Contamination: Which brings us to the biggest problem – that of contamination. Anyone working on any kind of materials or fabrication research faces this problem. A miniscule amount of contamination can often kill your samples – be it a small magnetic particle in a superconductor, or a slight whiff of oxygen in a reactive sample. Equipment is often the major source of this, and in laboratories, it’s not uncommon to find three or four identical tools, each dedicated to different materials or processing techniques. Some places are stricter with contamination control than others – in IME for instance, if what you’re doing isn’t compatible with their CMOS line, it’s not even going to get anywhere near the cleanroom. Contamination is a serious problem, because the effects are not always evident immediately, and it can take a long time to track down.

So now we bring in external users, with their own set of requirements which may or may not be compatible with the cleanliness requirements of the RIs’ equipment. Perhaps it’s even proprietary – if you come up with some secret formula X and want to do some testing on it on a particular tool, whoever’s in charge of the tool is going to want to know what’s in it before allowing you on it. An NDA would probably be necessary, but knowing the ridiculous amount of bureaucracy in this country, getting one drafted is going to take a while.

So what’s to be done? Allow SMEs in and watch our own RI projects suffer from the above? Or apply really stringent conditions and stifle the growth of SMEs?

No, wherever you have a problem, there’s a business opportunity. How about a privately owned facility with their own characterisation, fabrication and manufacturing tools, all available for use for a fee? Anybody interested? Come talk to me and we’ll discuss business plans.

X-periment! 07 aftermath

Random Fermi-calculated figures for our station:

Kids entertained: ~500
Adults stumped: ~700
People wanting to understand our experiment: ~200
People really, really, really wanting to understand our experiment: ~10
People parking their kids at our station while they go off somewhere else: ~15
People asking about the institute: ~20
People asking for advice on a particular technology: ~50
People asking about quack medical therapies: ~10
People asking for directions to Comex, restaurants, toilets or the Esplanade: ~8
Crackpots: ~3
Pieces of equipment gone missing in action: 0 (WOW! A FIRST!)
Trips to Homefix for emergency repair supplies: 7
Trips to fast food outlets: 12
Bottles of water consumed:~30
Helpings of free ice-cream: 15

One big event over. Now, there’s only the rest of Science Month 07 to go…

Aquatic Xenomorphs!

Moray eels are scary creatures indeed. Who would have thought they’ll have two sets of jaws – one normal set like any other animal, and a second set further within its throat, which they can extend forward to get a better grip on any unfortunate prey they catch.
It would also explain this tangled mess:

(From Fishing Singapore – Ken’s Fishing Haven)