It’s rare for a large fraction of grant money to be siphoned to a Dean’s discretionary fund. Typically some smallish fraction (maybe 10%, often significantly less) of indirect costs (which, depending on the funder and the negotiated F&A rate may be anywhere from 0% or nearly 100% on top of the direct costs that fund the research staff and materials, etc.) goes back to the subdivision overseen by that Dean to do with as they please. Everywhere I’ve worked, that amounts to a few (low single digit) percent of total costs being used in the way you describe. And many places return none of indirects to the unit overseeing the PI and so then it’s a cool zero percent.
IIRC Sometimes some of these units are tied to a mortgage. Renting it at a reasonable price could make the price of the unit to drop making the money lender wanting to renegotiate the mortgage contract.
There's a large (20,000+) volume of empty rent-stabilized units - in those cases, landlords say that a recent tenant protection law (HSTPA, 2019) makes it uneconomic for them to rent due to the expected difficulty of evicting non-paying tenants and the strict limitations on how much repair and investment work can be recouped from increasing rent.
My gut feeling is this doesn't entirely explain it, but any tenant is also more work than no tenant, so they may not want to do the work of signing a new lease and dealing with the work it will trigger for less than you're making per-head on your current tenants.
There's probably also a fear that if you let a new tenant in for lower rent, this might lower the rent other people expect and the problem starts snowballing.
Surely this works in a short timeframe where a landlord can make a tactical decision to let the property sit empty rather than rent it out for less than a threshold. Landlords can even collude on a minimal rent below which they will not rent. (Basically "hold the line"). But how is this sustainable in the long run? The money for the original mortgage has to come from some place. Not all landlords have an infinite supply of money to keep this practice going on for a few years. (There is no VC funding available for them).
With commercial units (eg - downtown San Francisco) it is even harder because with remote work, the jobs are never coming back to the city.
On mobile so don't have a ready link. Iirc a lot of commercial real estate can get into a death spiral if the loan they have which is based on a certain amount of income starts having less income. If I can find the explanation I will add it later.
> Naively, any rent is more than zero rent, so why let a unit sit empty?
There's a substantial cost in having a renter living there, both in dollars and risk. So if the rent isn't enough to cover those, it's cheaper to let it sit unused.
That does not make sense from a game-theoretic standpoint. You would be helping other landlords at your own expense. It would be better to let other landlords make that sacrifice and rent our your own properties for as much as you can get.
that's the thing. They are okay with helping other landlords because they themselves hold other multiple properties. There is more benefits by having the rates high than losing money on a few units.
It totally makes sense for the rental property owners.
The similarity you see between this DeepMind project, the DARPA program, and research in Tenenbaum's lab is not incidental: there's a steady stream of crosstalk and cross-training between machine learning researchers who engineering artificial intelligences and cognitive scientists who reverse-engineer human intelligences. (Note, for example, that Peter Battaglia, one of the co-authors of this DeepMind project, was a postdoc with Tenenbaum.)
That scans with observations from recent text-to-image works where there often seems to be an insight or two either left without citation or citing an unpublished work that they used to avoid testing an (ultimately) incorrect hypothesis.
I have seen some suggest that this is basically Google “allowing” the competition to catch up just to beat them a few weeks later but generally it just seems like they’re kind of all chatting with each other in the background instead.
At many universities (in the U.S. at least), on paper, it’s the technology commercialization department that makes the call about pursuing patent protection and the burden is on the PI to report all potentially patentable inventions before release so that the university has time to make the determination. In the case you describe, they’d in principle find you in violation of that policy, but in practice can’t because they don’t know about it unless you tell them.
Yes, I think you're right. It _depends_, as always. Mostly on the field, and in my case, on country. I am in Germany and Universitities are mostly State financed. There has been a pretty liberal trend at Universities in Germany the last 10 to 20 years, pushing towards open science for society (any society, not just Germans). We have such a department you describe, too, but no one has ever heard of it and its not really used, or lets say regulations exist but are not enforced. The University itself also pushes for Open Source publication and free sharing of results and technology, except for rare cases.
No matter how you say it, the acronym still sounds a little like "penis," there's no escaping it. I've seen this topic come up organically at least a dozen times.
Which arguably is better than the joke ... "Paper Not Acceptable Science" or "Probably Not Any Science"
This is an excellent example of why inferring causation from an observed correlation requires great care. Note that the study did not randomly assign valedictions to emails and observe the causal impact on response rate. Rather, they observed a correlation between the sign-off chosen and the response rate.
"Thanks" garners many responses because people use it in emails that make reasonable requests with a good chance of response.
My favorite valediction is still "I am, &c.," which is short for "I am your humble and obedient servant". Not sure whether my colleagues appreciate it as much as I do...
"&c" is the archaic form of "etc", the ampersand being a ligature of "et" - Latin for "and".
As far as I can tell the "&c." version was popularized by the 1944 novel "Anna and the King of Siam".
So it literally means "I am, etc.", which I assume only expands to "I am your humble and obedient servant" in a humorous way. Might be taken the wrong way.
&c was widely (exclusively?) used in the 18th century. I happen to have been looking at this newspaper ad most recently: https://i.imgur.com/ALe5XeT.jpg
The inference is that the second book (Airs &c &c) will also be of Airs, Minuets, Gavotts, and Reels (or something similar).
Also, 18th-century letters routinely end with some snowclone of "your most humble and obedient servant", with many writers eliding some or all of it with &c since it was understood.
Amusingly "ampersand" is derived from the time when it was the 27th letter of the alphabet just known as "and", one would recite the alphabet as "..., x, y, z, and, per se, and", contracted to ampersand.
>"&c" is the archaic form of "etc", the ampersand being a ligature of "et" - Latin for "and".
"etc" is an abbreviation for and contraction of "et cetera", Latin for "and so on". "&c" is, I think, an artifact of a particular time in history when writing skills were spreading rapidly but the process of writing itself was cumbersome and time consuming, necessitating macro-type abbreviations like that. It's not particularly archaic.
It is Latin shorthand created by Cicero’s educated slave, Tiro. The system was created to record senate meetings and conversations for Cicero to go over later.
I am from the UK and work with a lot of Americans. I often sign off emails with "Cheers," which gets a lot of positive comment.
As well as being what you might say when clinking glasses, in the UK "cheers" is a jovial way of saying "thanks" as well as something you might say for "goodbye" so works in all these contexts simultaneously.
I've been doing Cheers for a long time too. Nice to see it towards the top. I prefer a more casual friendly tone and I'm pretty sure I started using it after seeing someone from the UK sign off all emails like that.
Yep, Brit here in the US too, and 'Cheers' is my sign-off-of-choice. I'm told that I only get away with it because I'm British though, and my American colleagues would feel awkward using it :)
I have a similarly positive experience with "Cheers". I always like it when someone uses it, and I often use it myself. Works really well with people you already established a connection with.
The Italian word "ciao" [0] comes from the word "slave", meaning exactly that - "I am your humble servant". Became popular in Venice and then spread elsewhere.
I'm born and raised in Italy and TIL. Makes sense, ciao -> sciao -> schiavo (slave).
BTW, interesting fact: "The Venetian word for "slave", s-ciào [ˈstʃao] or s-ciàvo, derives from Medieval Latin sclavus, a loanword from Medieval Greek Σκλάβος, related to the ethnic "Slavic", since most of the slaves came from the Balkans."
I'll be extremely sad if one day we'd have to lose the most common salutation because somebody deemed it offensive.
In the Royal Navy, written letters to the captain [1] have to be signed off with "I am honoured to be, Sir, your obedient servant". I remember (in 2010) people thought this was stupid and instead used something like "Yours sincerely". But this ran contrary to regulations, and it was announced that letters would be rejected if not signed properly. Time moves very slowly in the RN.
[1] There are codified degrees of formality for written communications. Formal, demi-formal, and others used more operationally. I am talking about first-tier formal letters to senior officers in this case.
I had someone tell me on the phone and email - "I kiss the ground you walk on". I thought it was just weird and it caught me off guard on the phone the first time.
Candidly - your colleagues most likely don't appreciate it as you do, whether they know the meaning or not.
As I'm sure you're aware, in some countries, servitude is the greatest honor. But in many, it isn't; it signals 1) that you are lesser than or 2) you are very malleable person who may make a good fall person or dirty deed underling or 3) they don't believe your words and just think it's kind of creepy
I really appreciate that some countries consider it an honor, and I don't know where or who you work with, but there's a very good chance that your favorite valediction is not only underappreciated, but not appreciated at all.
Hope that's not the case but your closing comment sparked me to be candid about it for consideration.
The parent comment says that, of all the information-finding tools that hardly anyone uses, library resources are the best, not that library resources are the best information-finding tools; there's no contradiction between what the two of you have noticed.
I think you misunderstood one or both of the comments. The original commenter was saying that for certain use cases, the library tools are far superior to typical web search tools. Then the other commenter was saying they disagree, saying that the library tools are only good if you know exactly what you want, and how they prefer Google Scholar.
