"Christopher M. Kelty" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > okay, but then we are talking about professionals, not academics whose > bread and butter is supposed to be research (which is, incidentally, > what the author identifies himself as in the first sentence). Better > to compare them with doctors and lawyers, than academics... why > wouldn't nanotechnologists, for instance, be driven to insularity? > there's no such thing as professional nanotechnology right now either?
Actually, there isn't. There are chemists and materials scientists, but precious few "nanotechnologists". Of course, ever since the feds made a few hundred million in "nanotechnology" funding available, a lot of synthetic organic chemistry and materials science has been relabeled "nanotechnology", and for quite obvious reasons. > And yet all the nanotechnologists I know in university describe > themselves as engineers... You're at Rice, so you're clearly not talking to the right ones if they call themselves engineers. The folks who are most interesting in your neck of the woods are the chemists, though Richard Smalley is now dead. (He was the co-discoverer of fullerenes, and taught at Rice in Chemistry for many years.) > but they are researchers first, and what counts in terms of salary, > prestige, etc. is in fact related to their insularity, not their > putative ability to communicate what they are doing, which I must > say, none of the ones I know can do with any success. Academic engineering, like the academic study of literature, suffers from a lack of exposure to the real world, and the rewards are often more for getting published than for doing important work. However, in terms of an inability to communicate, the fault seems to lie more with those who teach them how to write than with those who teach them how to engineer. I pine for the days when words like "utilize" would have been eliminated from people's vocabularies by ninth grade... -- Perry E. Metzger [EMAIL PROTECTED]
