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Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

Also kind of an awkward title when the first sentence of the article is “Researchers from MIT and China have developed…” Like maybe spell out the actual institution like you did MIT (it’s in the article), and don’t say “MIT invents” in the title when it’s a joint effort?

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Indeed. The article links to the MIT News article https://news.mit.edu/2022/solar-desalination-system-inexpens...

The three involved researchers from MIT are grad student Lenan Zhang, postdoc Xiangyu Li, and professor Evelyn Wang and "four others" which are not mentioned by name in the beginning of the article.

At the bottom of the article, it's mentioned that Zhenyuan Xu from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China is one of those "four others".

One of the reasons I would never collaborate with anyone at MIT is that such collaborations are rarely equitable. Institutionalized credit theft is just the beginning, but yes, if there is joint work with MIT, usually the non-MIT researcher does the bulk of the work, and the MIT researcher gets the bulk of the credit.

Everyone wants to work with and associate with institutions like MIT, so MIT gets to pick the biggest fools.

(This isn't unique to MIT; that's true of many of the elites)

Unfortunately, having a big name from MIT on your grant application as co-applicant significantly increases your chances for funding. You get the money and do the majority of the work, they get to claim disproportionately much credit for the work. Win-win? (Doesn't sound like it, but that's how it works..)

Having sat on review committees, it actually worked the other way sometimes (and usually for the ones I was on, although in some cases, it took some lobbying on my part). There was one review committee member on one committee who wouldn't accept a grant unless it had a big-name university. She was a douchebag. For the most part, people were accommodating.

NSF and other agencies do have a call to this kind of outreach, and the program officer told me they often would pick a grant from a more deserving school over a big-name, even if the big-name received better reviews.

So it's sort of luck-of-the-draw. If you get someone like me, MIT will hurt your chances. If you get the douchebag lady, it will help.

NSF is probably butt hurt that MIT charges higher overhead on its NSF GRF to (presumably junior) PIs taking those grad students than if just on TA funding support.

(For the record, I support this, it protects the grad students, who are not showing up at MIT for the PI’s research in most cases and most junior PIs need to be taken down a peg or two)

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