Thursday, January 14, 2010

Pledge drive: Want to know the TRUE unemployment rate for chemists?

In a recent In the Pipeline thread, commenter Jose said the following:
"Any geeks want to set up a website and do a social marketing campaign to get real data on unemployed/underemployed pharma-biotech chemists? If the ACS cannot get their act together, maybe it's time someone else did??"
If you believe the ACS member survey, the unemployment rate for chemists for 2009 is 3.8%. Do you believe that? I gotta say, I'm skeptical.

Would you like to find out otherwise? I would like to do a web survey on SurveyMonkey.com, where I could invite all chemists (regardless of ACS membership) to tell me their employment/unemployment status.

Problem is, an unlimited survey on SurveyMonkey is $200/year. While I'm willing to support a good portion of the cost, it would be nice to have some help. So, would you be willing to pitch in? Pledge your support in the comments and if I can get pledges for over 40% of the cost of the survey, we'll do this thing. What do you think?

6 comments:

  1. P.S. Obviously, those who pledge will receive recognition, my undying gratitude and some sort of exclusive reward.

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  2. Do you want me to write one for you in php? This would take around 10 mins out of my unemployed life. Just tell me what options you want in it and other things. I can even do real time graphing with it and some other bells and whistles for free.

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  3. A friend and I already print bumper stickers reading "Hire An Unemployed American Scientist". If interested then we could sell these things at cost. We are both unemployed but not "unemployed", meaning that we are unemployed but don't collect unemployed benefits. The ACS will no longer let me register as unemployed ACS members, hence we are a good example of how the statistics can be arbitrarily bent to the will of the establishment.
    -Fenton

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  4. How it is going to be any more trustworthy than ACS survey if it relies on self-reporting?

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  5. A9:44: Presumably because you don't have any incentive to lie about your own employment status.

    The going hypothesis about the ACS survey is that the survey pool (ACS members only) is not representative of the overall pool of chemists. By using the internet and accepting all comers, presumably, you can reach those who are not ACS members.

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looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20