Posterminaries
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Double Entendre de Matiere (or for those who really speak French-Double Sens Substantiel) All Quiet on the Materials Front You needn't look to Kansas any longer to find the silent majority, those conservative patriots who refrained from noisy rhetoric but, to the consternation of the pollsters, let their votes speak for them on election day. We have met the silent majority and they are us. (Only a minority of us would say "they are we.") Scientists, perhaps the quietest organ of the body politic, have Kansasized the research laboratory.
Undisciplined Materials Much is made of the idea that materials research is not a discipline but a field comprising many disciplines while subscribing to none. It is therefore no coincidence that creativity abounds in our field. We have license to question and break all the rules—the quintessence of a lack of discipline.
Material Witness Next time your materials research is challenged as an irrelevant sandbox waste of taxpayers' money by a budget slashing member of Congress, take advantage of the likelihood that the member has a background in the law. Remind her or him that material, as in "material witness," in and of itself means relevant. Materials convey solidity, concreteness, and substance. Our metal is being severely tested in these austere times. We must steel ourselves against the dislocations of funding cuts.
I Can See Clearly Now Apparently there is another similarity between science and the law. The optimal way to see things through to the most reliable conclusion is not to see at all. Justice is blind and only double blind control studies adequately validate our drugs and other visionary products. These precautions protect us all from the foibles of blind ambition.
Unpopular Popular Prose It's difficult enough to translate noncontroversial science into lay language for the general populace. Popularizing topics such as the true meaning of risk from nuclear power, from high-voltage power lines, from industrial effluents, or from genetically engineered vegetables produces decidedly unpopular prose.
Picture originally worth Now a defense conversion MARK-DOWN of 50% (plus additional discounts for dual-use customers) Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 195.133.56.104, on 22 Jun 2020 at 21:41:59, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at MRS BULLETIN/NOVEMBER 1994 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1557/S0883769400048557
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POSTERMINARIES
The Medflies of Management States like Hawaii and California go to great lengths to keep out pests that, if allowed in, would overrun valuable, but more docile, species. Now think about what happens when an exciting entrepreneurial idea is spawned inside the protected boundaries of a research division in a large organization. Carelessly opening the laboratory door exposes the concept to the bureaucracy of wheel-spinning committees, short-, medium-, and longrange planning (including the mandatory 5-year business plan), reorganizations, and quarterly reports. There is no anal
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