Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
–Peter Drucker
Once upon a time the National Labs were paragons of excellence in science and 
engineering. No more. Over time the Nation has demanded that the Labs become paragons of accountability. The over-emphasis on accountability has ironically worked to drive excellence from the Labs. In an accountability-driven culture if no one is accountable for excellence, excellence dies. This is a direct consequence of our current over-managed and under-led status both locally and nationally.
Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.
–Peter Drucker
Today no one focuses on excellence except through a host of metrics that only give a shadow imprint of excellence. All the while a culture of excellence is not cultivated at all. Rather than do the things that lead to excellence, the culture of accountability acts to undermine it. Staff will avoid going to seminars or classes that would develop them professionally for the long-term because their current projects won’t pay for 
them. Continually the projects drive the staff to think only in a short-term tactical project-focused manner despite the damage done to their long-term development.
Consider attendance at a conference, which has become extensively scrutinized lately. 
Almost any conference I attend is a broad-brushed opportunity to develop professionally across a suite of projects present and future. The accountability culture only cares about what I am presenting, but nothing about what is presented to me. In other words attending a conference is all about what is the attendee is presenting.
The reality should be balanced between what is given and what is received. A large part of a conference is the exposure to new ideas, the current focus of a community and networking with other attendees. In fact most of the benefit has nothing to do with the reason given for attending. The culture of accountability misses the key points. A culture of excellence would have no problem is accommodating the proper perspective.
The explicit drive for excellence and professionalism has been destroyed by the “customer is always right” attitude. My experience is that the customer is almost always wrong, and could greatly benefit from treating the Labs as reservoirs of expertise that could greatly improve their judgment. Too often today the customers are simply taking knowledge and products from the Labs while doing little or nothing to support the foundation that created the expertise. As such the expertise is running dry, if the well of knowledge is not sustained it will die. Our current customer-focused accountability culture is hopelessly shortsighted. There is little or no focus on the long-term development of the Labs expertise. The research is becoming ever more customer-focused and tactical. The investments in long-term sustaining research are minimal in large part because the “customer” receives no perceived benefit in the short term. All the while the customers are happy to siphon off benefit from the expertise they do little to sustain.
Of course this entire philosophy gets the core of the problem. The lack of a broad-based societal imperative for supporting the development of societal expertise is troubling. This is in contra-distinction to the events following World War II when the system of National Laboratories came into existence. The benefits of the expertise were felt across the Nation and World and usually beyond the direct impact on the agency that sponsored the Lab. Quite often the Energy or Defense or NASA Lab produced breakthroughs that impact the work of the other Labs or industries. The benefit quite often spilled over into other activities such medicine or industrial production. Computing is the archetype of this cross-fertilization. Computing’s various breakthroughs came from numerous fields and ultimately spurred the creation of a massive industry. No system of accountability could have been responsible for what happened, it was the product of broad-based excellence in science. I would submit that the current short-term culture of accountability would have likely short-circuited the entire thing. I worry that our focus on accountability is probably undermining our future prosperity already.
A primary task of management in the developed countries in the decades ahead will be to make knowledge productive.
–Peter Drucker
The result is the nearly systematic destruction of an essential National resource. T
he true irony is that no one is accountable for this act violence against our National security. In fact it is hidden behind a veil of accountability standards that provide the façade that everything is being done well. We only assure that the terrible things are done efficiently. A large part of the devotion to accountability is couched in fear and suspicion. Excellence is founded on hope and trust guided by principle.
There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.
–Peter Drucker
The same thing is happening at Universities across the country too. The educational aspect of a university is the epitome of excellence, and any observation of the value system in place shows unequivocally that teachi
ng has less value than research. Our students are not simply burdened by student loans and the concomitant debt, but also by increasingly poor instruction. They are getting a worse education at a substantially higher price. At the core of the problem is money. Less societal support for education is driving universities to focus on research grants as a source for money along with the student loans. The grants drive emphasis from teaching and push a variety of inappropriate foci such as research associates, post-docs as labor, and adjunct professors as cheap teacher (adjuncts are another key measure of the value placed in teaching, which ain’t much!).
The combined effect of the erosion of excellence in Labs and Universities is hurting our Nation’s prospects for the future. No amount of accountability can fix this. Only by backing away from the current shortsighted philosophy can we recapture the excellence that once exemplified these institutions. It will require us to do a number of things we have lost sight of including long-term goals, trust for our fellow citizens, and the belief that we have things worth working together toward.
What gets measured gets improved.
–Peter Drucker
c manner that may not actually provide an accurate assessment of quality. At some point the disorder in the computation is too great and the quality is judged to be lower. This is done purely by expert judgment, not based on any sort of clear definitive measure or feature. The real issue is whether the computation is swirlier due to incipient errors that are on the verge of losing stability. This may inadvertently favor instability in the numerical method point-of-view (in fact, almost certainly).
This topic involves deep-seated issues with each of these branches.
a standard applied, which amounts to “the more swirly the result, the better the method” (more swirly means more vorticity). An exemplar of this approach is the paper by Shi, Zhang and Shu in the Journal of Computational Physics, 186, pp. 690 (1993) 
My concern about this issue is that the higher order methods also contain insidious and problematic numerical instabilities that could potentially contribute to physically incorrect solutions. The current “swirlier is better” standard yields little or no guidance towards improving the methods or uncovering their shortcomings. The problems with these methods can manifest themselves as entropy violating solutions, which are by definition unphysical. An unphysical solution will produce more vorticity, and hence be swirlier by the standard applied in the community; it would be viewed as better. In fact it would be worse and dangerously so.
but also had large errors. These errors led to the destruction of vorticity, which made flows distinctly less swirly than reality. Modern methods provided the robustness of upwind methods with much smaller error, and much more realistic swirliness. The problem is that instabilities can lead to swirliness too and this standard leaves no room for determining the limits for methods. This is left for validation against experimental data. This is thoroughly unsatisfying because there is not a mathematical ground truth. Modeling and numerical effects are muddled together. Unfortunately, mathematics is not currently attacking this problem very aggressively (see my Applied Math critique 
What can be done to improve matters? One way would be to rely upon experimental comparison to decide quality. This leaves little guidance for improving the methods based on mathematical principles. Insofar as applied mathematics is concerned, a better theory for the development of these instabilities would enable guidance toward better methods. This is lacking today rather seriously. It would be useful to have a refined understanding of what unphysical solutions look like for these cases. Today such a characterization is not available to be applied. We are left with experimental comparison and/or expert judgment.
o Los Alamos and back. While in Los Alamos I am in a classified meeting, so no electronics. I also give a talk and will chair a session. With three to three-and-a-half hours of driving there isn’t much time for anything.
spotlight. While some conservative voices would point at the failing of government, I believe their aim is both spot on, and completely wrong. We don’t have a failure of government, we have a failing of governance both private and public. The problems with Ebola are exemplars of incompetence from both government and business with both contributing greatly to the debacle in Dallas.
The greater issue is the general crisis in governance in our country. No one seems to be able to do anything right. Government is ineffective and wasteful. Business is amoral and unethical. Neither should be acceptable. The only thing we are doing with any competence is directing more and more of our societal wealth into the hands of a very select few. This is being done in an intrinsically amoral and unethical manner despite its explicit legality since the laws are basically for sale.
ciety-wide incompetence. We need competence and effective governance from both private and public entities. I would argue that the problem is an unhealthy focus on the individual rather than the overall society. The narrow definition of success associated with the combination of short-term gains and organizational locality are making every decision tactical. This tactical decision-making benefits very few and leads to outcomes that hurt society at the large scale.
public sectors. The outcomes need to balance the good of the individual and society as a whole. We need to explicitly reject the governance that only benefits a precious few. In the long run a more balanced approach will lead to a far better future for everyone including those few who take nearly all the benefits today.
relatively well-known and successful professor came for a visit and gave a research seminar on his work. On the face of it, the talk looked interesting and topical. This rapidly faded when the talk unfolded for a very simple reason. The professor was limiting discussion to where he could prove results. If the flow he was studying became too energetic (too high a Reynolds number, or its equivalent, the proofs couldn’t be constructed). As a result the work had limited applicability to investigations because results can’t be proven for most applied problems. Most applied problems
avoids the situations of interest, can’t be demonstrated, or simply doesn’t demonstrate itself, I won’t make the effort because the mathematician hasn’t done their part to meet me half way. What should happen when we have important applied cases where results can’t be proven? Should the effort in math be given to expand the grasp of mathematics to handle these cases? Or should mathematicians work on proving weaker bounds or results?
computational, modeling and physics progress. This role has shrunk over time due to an unwillingness to get their hands dirty. There also seems to be a desire to look more like pure math, which leads to a lack of demonstration.
I have always found that the best way to make methods better is to continually break them. I will routinely torture methods to the breaking point fully knowing that “breaking” is itself complex. Methods break in many ways starting with a failure to converge to the “right” solution, or converge at the right rate, followed by a failure to converge to a solution, followed by a loss of stability. The improvement comes from understanding the cause of the failure, and changing the method to expand the range where a better outcome can be achieved. The process of failure is often demonstrably Edisonian, and the challenge is to provide the scientific, structural explanation for the failure to blunt the purely empirical edge. This tension is how progress and knowledge grow, and failure is the engine.
despite this failure is not encouraged because of superficial fears regarding perception. As a result we have come to accept mediocrity as success, losing almost any conception of what true success looks like. Our success is almost by fiat rather than achievement. We will ultimately pay the price of this orgy of over-evaluation unless something changes in how we view things.
I wrote this in a notebook a few weeks ago and it would be a good idea to explain myself. The lack of certainty and chaos in the Universe is obvious, yet so much of our modeling is based on deterministic thinking. This legacy of Newton pollutes so much of
― 
It is the enshrinement of mathematics as divorced from reality. The reason is several fold: the equations as given are patently unphysical, and singularities are a relic of the same Newtonian thinking that defines the Universe as a clock simply moving forward with complete determinism.
This is only one instance where determinism is hurting science. In general the modeling of the World or Universe proceeds along lines that implicitly expect determinism despite all the evidence to the contrary. A lot of the time the variation in behavior of a system is relatively small, or the nature of variability is reliable and can be captured in the constitutive laws. A problem that we are increasingly facing is the solution of systems where length and time scales where the variability exists are coming into the resolution of our codes. Continuing to promote the fallacy that the system is deterministic is simply wrong on the face of it.
The Regularized Singularity 