“There is little success where there is little laughter.”
Andrew Carnegie

The Plantation Analogy

"In the whole world, the official science has become an intricate administrative organism
...
On the one side of it – a landlord, a plantation/latifundium owner or something alike, who prefers to be addressed as “professor” or “scientific group leader”. On the other side – a number of volunteering plantation slaves (drudges/plodders/toilers), who are officially dubbed “doctoral students” or “postdocs”. These slaves are absolute volunteers, because nobody forces them at gunpoint to slog for the landlord. The latter ones consider and treat the former ones just as “chess pieces”, each of which has to obey a certain finite number of primitive game rules. Depending on the personality of the landlord, the analogy between the “scientific laboratory” and plantation slavery may be more or less sharp, but the basic features are practically the same in all the countries from USA – through Western Europe and Russia – till the Far East.
...
They definitely know that they are slaves and they are reminded about this fact every day several times a day, for the attitude of the respective landlords and their helpers towards the slaves is unequivocal.
...
The only master and profiteer in the whole plantation is the respective landlord – his/her direct profit is the social success exclusively for him/her – he/she will never share it with anybody. There is practically no scientific research in the plantations, no clear-cut programme, no knowledge mining, no sensible, useful results..."
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/blog/9293-globalization-and-scientific-research-trying-catch-black-cats-dark-rooms.html

PhD degrees are Pyrrhic Victories.

We are sorry to inform you...

http://imechanica.org/node/3353
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1106736.1106763

MJ, abused grad

Heal The Lab
Michael Jackson

There's A Place In
Your Heart
And I Know That It Is Love
And This Place Could
Be Much
Brighter Than Tomorrow
And If You Really Try
You'll Find There's No Need
To Cry
In This Place You'll Feel
There's No Hurt Or Sorrow

There Are Ways
To Get There
If You Care Enough
For The Research
Make A Little Space
Make A Better Place...

Heal The Lab
Make It A Better Place
For You And For Me
And The Entire Student Race
There Are Ideas Dying
If You Care Enough
For The Research
Make A Better Place
For You And For Me

If You Want To Know Why
There's A Boss That
Can only lie
He Is Strong
He Only Cares For
His own living
If We Try
We Shall See
In This Bliss
We Cannot Feel
Fear Or Dread
We Stop Existing And
Start Researching

Then It Feels That Always
Research's Enough For
Us Growing
So Make A Better Lab
Make A Better World...

Advisors...

...a plethora of advice and a paucity of assistance.

"Edison says, 'Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.' He may have been exaggerating, but the idea is that solid work, steadily applied, gets you surprisingly far. The steady application of effort with a little bit more work, 'intelligently applied is what does it. That's the trouble; drive, misapplied, doesn't get you anywhere. I've often wondered why so many of my good friends at Bell Labs who worked as hard or harder than I did, didn't have so much to show for it. The misapplication of effort is a very serious matter. Just hard work is not enough - it must be applied sensibly."
From: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.pdf

Oh... so thaaaaat's what advisors were supposed to do? Help to guide the application of effort? Sincerely, just avoiding to misguide would be already a good thing.