Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

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> Nothing is going to happen.

I'm a bit more pessimistic than that. They'll spend a ton of money buying (because we can't build -or even design - it ourselves) before we withdraw and declare success.

> and not because we don't know how, it was because of politics.

Politics contaminate our universities and research centers so deeply that it masks any selection for actual competence. I seriously doubt we could develop a window. Putting someone on the tourist track was the only way a Brazilian could fly. The tab was about US$ 20 million.

For all that it's possible to know, the AEB repeatedly attempted the incredibly stupid idea of launching satellites into LEO using solid-rocket fuel engines. Naturally, all attempts failed, but that didn't stop them from trying until they got 21 people killed on a launch pad explosion. Some conspiracy theorists say it was sabotage, but I don't think such a design warrants the effort - physics alone can take care of it.

As someone that is friend of people of Serpro.and know some of Air Force research I feel offended.

Brazil do have researchers and brains and money, and politics get in the way.... We have even particle accelerators of our own design! Also, the rocket project was not scrapped, it is only waiting for new engineers to be trained, since.the last accident killed all of them.

Did you knew, that the card to pay a phone is a Brazilian invention? Or the language Lua that drives games like World of Warcraft, Baldur Gate, Far Cry 2... Or that no country matched Petrobras drilling techniques yet, or that our army use locally invented radars, anti-air equipment and so on. Or that the air force has. a locally invented portable air traffic controller station ( for those curious: it runs Debian ), or that CNPQ is investing heavily in research about how to cure heart problems with stem cells, or that the state universities in Sao Paulo are so good with image recognition that French universities send their students here to learn.

Brazil has one of the best academia in the planet, heritage of the emperor Pedro II that had the vision and.created the current system, and created stuff like the agronomical research institute.

Also we have lots of brilliant people, here ( Carlos lattes for example, that died some time ago ) or elsewhere (I forgot the name of the guy that researches uniting brain with machines, now he works for Duke.University), also we obviously have money

Don't insult researchers, we clearly have political problems that end killing cool stuff like the OSORIO battle tank, but don't claim our academia is incompetent, if it was, other countries would not hire people trained.ed here.

Yeah, I agree that Brazil has a ton of brilliant minds and a very inventive people. But unfortunately, here in Brazil, ignorance is a bliss and a very profitable business.

Also, Brazil is the only country that treat treats his researchers like a fast food workers. Poor salaries (when gov. pay something) which obligates them in working on two or three part-time jobs, no gratitude (the phone card, the BINA system, which government didn't helped the inventor on recognizing the patent) and so on. That's why a researcher/cientist stays no more than 2 or 3 years in Brazil after graduation or research publishing.

That part, is unfortunately true.

My father met the telecom guys (phone card and BINA), and the government not only did not helped, but did things that made their situation worse, in the end no inventor got any money for his invention.

It is just that the guy saying that the other poster was wrong, and that we don't know how to do stuff, is not only wrong, but insults people that (maybe in a stupid manner) insists in doing stuff here.

There is a reason why one of the biggest Free Software conferences is here in Brazil, and why Maddog (from Linux Foundation) comes here so much (I personally bumped into him in conferences I got invited as speaker about 6 or 7 times, even one totally failed conference where I had like 20 people watching, Maddog was there!), the government invests heavily into IT research. (there is Serpro, Cobra, military, and several other cool stuff! The military in particular has several very insteresting non-weapon projects, the brazillian military seemly loves to make stuff that is good for civilian use)

Oh, c'mon. The Lua language is the only relevant software contribution from Brazil that I'm aware of.

The guys behind Lua had to invent a language because the country was commercially closed at the time. The program forbidding technology imports was called "reserva de mercado" (market reservation) and was supposed to incentive local manufacture of semiconductors.

It was a colossal failure and today Brazil is not only irrelevant in electronics but has possibly the most expensive appliances in the world. Anything here costs 3 to 4 times the USA retail price.

Unfortunately we have a long tradition in such idiotic regulations.

Can you cite examples of non-weapon projects of Brazilian military? (seriously, I'm curious here)

ITA (a university that belongs to Air Force) famously let students to opt out of military, and many went around doing cool stuff.

I once saw a presentation of their students once, there are even people that went on to make games and stuff like that.

Also the military here likes to help Linux in general, even submitting patches, the air force in particular loves Debian and Ubuntu (last I checked, they moved 100% of their servers to Debian and 100% of workstations to Ubuntu)

Then we have some air traffic control software being developed, firewalls, anti-virus, whatnot... This is what I learned on tech conferences (thus obviously it is related to tech)

Also I've heard of the military helping people make vehicle engines.

And then we have Taurus (a weapon manufacturer) that had some business with my family, and seemly the military asked them to do some civilian stuff too (like use their armour technology to make clothes for perilous jobs, for example Motorcycle helmets, also they use their gun steel technology for other things, like construction, building factory machines, car parts...)

I think this has to do with that fact that the military here has some... funding issues. And thus need to cooperate a lot with civilian sector to get anything done.

Oh, and famously, the army built some stuff for the federal government that ended being on schedule, and used less money than budgeted (that they returned), although this was supposed to be normal, it was so exceptional that people think it is totally amazing and awesome (here federal government projects IF they don't fail outright, tend to blow both the budget and deadlines, and have shitty quality, result of hiring contractors and not checking ever if they are doing a good job or not, plus corruption).

I am a brazilian and I didn't know ANYTHING about those things. Thanks!

Yeah, we did all of that. But not much more than that.

While we can enumerate Brazil's academic contributions, we can't do the same for, say, they US. And that's the whole point.

There are lots of smart people here. They are not producing much of value, for whatever reason.

> As someone that is friend of people of Serpro.and know some of Air Force research I feel offended.

Don't be. There are pockets of excellence surrounded by fluff. The fact remains that we, as a country, do not produce a lot. We can be proud of a little thing here, a little something else there, but not much more. And it's very sad.

We also have a cronic underdog syndrome perpetuated by countless broad opinions such as this. That only helps to undermine any kind of effort to change the culture of low self-esteem into a culture of excellence.

Feel free to demand more, but please do not undervalue every thing.

> We also have a cronic underdog syndrome perpetuated by countless broad opinions such as this.

You not noticing my acknowledgement of the pockets of excellence further demonstrates this point. I am not perpetuating this underdog syndrome, but I am pointing out several failures brought by a systemic attitude of politeness over correctness. Academic research thrives on correctness alone.

>Politics contaminate our universities and research centers so deeply that it masks any selection for actual competence.

This is a serious claim backed by no evidence whatsoever. It's an idea that permeates brazilian academia, it's understandable to some extent, but fails to accomplish anything other than undermining ongoing researches.

Richard Feynman on education in Brazil:

http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education

After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant. When they heard “light that is reflected from a medium with an index,” they didn’t know that it meant a material such as water. They didn’t know that the “direction of the light” is the direction in which you see something when you’re looking at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized, yet nothing had been translated into meaningful words. So if I asked, “What is Brewster’s Angle?” I’m going into the computer with the right keywords. But if I say, “Look at the water,” nothing happens – they don’t have anything under “Look at the water”!

(...)

Since I had gone to Brazil under a program sponsored by the United States Government, I was asked by the State Department to write a report about my experiences in Brazil, so I wrote out the essentials of the speech I had just given. I found out later through the grapevine that the reaction of somebody in the State Department was, “That shows you how dangerous it is to send somebody to Brazil who is so naive. Foolish fellow; he can only cause trouble. He didn’t understand the problems.” Quite the contrary! I think this person in the State Department was naive to think that because he saw a university with a list of courses and descriptions, that’s what it was.

I wouldn't be surprised if the same criticism could be applied to several institutions throughout the world. When I think about how U.S. is one of the countries where creationism thrives the most, it's clear to me that the problem Feynman is talking about affects everyone and every science. Also, this is not proof of politics masking actual competence.

C'mon, the Latin America's biggest and most populous nation remains a long way behind the OECD average and in most cases lags behind most of its Latin American neighbors.

Research in Brazil is a joke, as anything else related to education. Privately funded research is almost non-existent and public universities have typically a 2:1 relation between staff and students - all of them are pretty inefficient. Private universities are expensive scams.

With all its deficiencies, USP is a top university and produces valuable researches. That's no joke at all. Just look at the Lattes curriculum of both its faculty and graduates. MIT, Harvard, Princeton —those are awesome universities but they are expensive too, not a thing most people can afford. Studying at USP costs nothing. That's quite an achievement. I don't mean to be overlook the problems. I'm just pointing out an important difference.

> Studying at USP costs nothing.

It just doesn't cost for the (few) students themselves.

And isn't that remarkable? I think it is.

Given how heavy taxation is, how many chairs it offers (10k) for the whole country, and how unequal is the access to those chairs for the average citizen, I don't find it as remarkable.

It's remarkable you think there is something like free money.

USP tuition is paid for by taxpayers.

Wait, careful with the strawman there. Yes, USP is funded by taxpayers but the students themselves don't have to pay anything. The reasoning behind this choice is that the cost of a student in that University can be shared by everyone because the value of the knowledge produced there is also shared by everyone. People who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford college-level education are given the chance to study.

It's a decision that is aligned to the principles of social democracy. You could argue against it, take a more neoliberal stance, but that's not the point. My point is that USP is trying to do something different.

I wish I knew more about how private universities in US are funded. I have a feeling that aside from the tuition students pay they still receive some sort of aid from the government.

True, everything has it price. But it's also true that free market is not really free.

Couldn't agree more.

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