Reinaugurating the blog

I was so busy in the last few years and left this blog unnattended. Now that my administrative duties diminished, I want to start posting again. It was never my intention to be the sole contributor. If you wish to post science and technology related topics here, please contact me. Depending on the case I may give you posting privileges. The only rule I wish to maintain is thst the posts and comment must be in english.

Posts and Comments on this blog

I have been receiving lots of anonymous comments on one particular post. I may be wrong, but these comments seem to be computer generated. I decided, therefore, to forbid anonymous comments, sorry for the trouble.

Anyway, I want to state that this blog is maintained by me, but it is not private. If you are interested in posting here, please contact me, telling something about your ideas.

CALPHAD XXXVII - Fifth day June 19th 2008

The first days of CALPHAD were occupied (besides watching the technical sections, of course) with explorations of the environment at Saariselkä. Some of us went to the Urho Kekkonen nature Park, which starts just about 1Km from the hotel. The participants in this adventure are the three musketiers: André, Karin and José as the photo proves (Dartagnan here takes the picture).





The start of the trail is deceiving. What seemed to be a rather boring ladscape turned out to be a nice example of Scandinavian nature. We had even disturbed some locals, as these photos prove (including a rather daring activity by André).

















After that we proved that God is Computational thermodynamicist, since the only days with sunshine in the whole time were the days (or, better said, night) of the Midnight sun party and the excursion day in Tankavaara. The first photo shows our special guest (i.e. the sun) shining at midnight in the Kaunispää mountain, the second photo show our fellow calphadians searching for the samples of their next assessment. Next comes the banquet and the departure from Saariselkä.

CALPHAD XXXVII - Third day June 17th 2008

So much for the daily basis, but at least now I have learned how to download my photos to the computer using the memory card directly. Most of us arrived at Helsinki on saturday, 14th. The first CALPHAD "meeting" then took place at Helsinki´s airport on sunday morning, waiting for the only flight to Ivalo. Some photos from the happening:
















We arrived at Ivalo at lunch time and went to the hotel, transported by a sympathetic bus driver with excellent english skills (he received a compliment by John Cahn!). The rest of sunday was spent at looking for a place to lunch (the hotel restaurant, were I first tasted Renndeer meat) and visiting the "big" city of Saariselkä. We found what is important for a CALPHAD meeting, how the photos below proove:


Some of the highlights of the first day were:
- Tetsuo Mohri´s talk on CVM
- B. J. Lee´s talk on grain boundary energies
- John Agren´s talk on irreversible thermodynamics

CALPHAD XXXVII - First day June 15th 2008

It was a long period of silence, but I am returning back with my regular posts. I hope to contribute in a daily basis while I am attending the CALPHAD XXXVII conference, which takes place this time in Saariselkä/ Finland. For now I have to report the arrival of all people in the very strange place, where the sun never goes down (at this time of the year). Next I will post more informations and some photos, stay tuned.

Labour productivity

A recent report of the International Labour Organization (ILO) entitled "Key indicators of the Labour Market 5th edition" is being throughly discussed in Brazil today. This report publishes a ranking of countries in terms of the productivity of the labour force. The reason for the noise here under the equator is that the position of Brazil in this ranking got worse in comparison with 10 years ago. To explain this "disappointing" performance, some analysts are blaming the low level of education of the brazilian population. I would like to launch an alternative hypothesis: the low level of education of the brazilian population is not the cause, but the consequence of the "disappointing" behaviour in this list. My intuition tells that the low level of technology in the brazilian enterprises allowed the desconstruction policy applied to the education in the last 20 years: an educated population is not interesting to these low tech industries, since this would require better salaries.
Think about this...

"Applied" versus "fundamental" research

From time to time we hear, here in Brazil, some bureaucrat (sometimes even governors and presidents) talking about "applied" (meaning, technological) research as a kind of opposite to "fundamental" (meaning, academic) research. Although this kind of nonsense is also observed in other countries (particularly I remember one of the last ministers of science and technology of the Kohl government in Germany saying something like that), it seems to be more widespread here under the equator.

In my opinion there are only two kinds of researches: good ones and bad ones. Of course some misguided minds of the academy may be doing research only for the sake of the research. This is not "academic", it is simply bad! As it is bad to do technological research funded only by government money, without a (paying) link from the industrial sector of the country. Should we do "free" research to foster our industry? This should be denounced to the WTO as a hidden economic subside!

I agree that a government should be allowed to promote research in some critical areas, like it was the case of the genoma project, but the creativity of the scientist should not be hindered by allowing only "meaningful" research to be funded.

Let us prove this by absurd, suppose we decide to fund only socially relevant science. Surely a noble intent. Who will decide what is socially relevant? It is my guess that this will be done by a committee of three to four people. Suppose the wisest scientists are chosen to form this commission (not likely to happen), even so we exchange about 10000 thinking heads by three to four! As the popular wisdom tells, 10000 heads think better than three to four.

Another reason to let the researcher do science at his/her will is the impact on the new generations. Once I was lecturing materials science for the freshmen's year of the Escola Politécnica and there was this exercise about carbon nanotubes. After the class, one student asked me who has working on that in my department. I answered that no one did and that the technology behind that exercise was so weird (it was an experiment by IBM, who built a CMOS transistor using a carbon nanotube as gate, mounting it using an AFM) that it was unlikely that this would become commercial anytime soon. But who knows? Suppose that a real breakthrough in microelectronic device technology would come by some similar technique. Should our engineers need to learn after the university what is a carbon nanotube to survive in the job market? Research in those areas, which are not directly linked to the country reality, is necessary for the sake of our students. They must be well prepared to face the competition and this can be done only by lecturers who are aware of the major developments in the world, and this is done using research.