Academic Productivity

Disclaimer: this post may be relevant only for social sciences/psychology people. I found a nice thread on the Judgment and decision making (JDM) mailing list on the need for replications.

Lots of good posts on an interesting discussion. The mainstream view is that we simply don’t run enough replications because they are harder to get published. This leads to studies showing that replications are actually very hard, with only a small percentage (about 40% in the social sciences) being successful.  Robyn Dawes seems to thing that replications are overrated:

the “real” scientists do is to futch around until they get it “right.” The multiple study requirement just adds “first and second and third” studies, thereby wasting space and time.

There are comments on Increasing the Percentage of Papers Replicated, and some nice book recommendations on experimenter bias.

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Today, while googling for “tenure rat race”, I found Jonathan I. Katz’s page: “Don’t Become a Scientist!“. I find his honesty devastating:

Are you thinking of becoming a scientist? Do you want to uncover the mysteries of nature, perform experiments or carry out calculations to learn how the world works? Forget it!

Science is fun and exciting. The thrill of discovery is unique. If you are smart, ambitious and hard working you should major in science as an undergraduate. But that is as far as you should take it. After graduation, you will have to deal with the real world. That means that you should not even consider going to graduate school in science. Do something else instead: medical school, law school, computers or engineering, or something else which appeals to you.

Why am I (a tenured professor of physics) trying to discourage you from following a career path which was successful for me? Because times have changed (I received my Ph.D. in 1973, and tenure in 1976). American science no longer offers a reasonable career path. If you go to graduate school in science it is in the expectation of spending your working life doing scientific research, using your ingenuity and curiosity to solve important and interesting problems. You will almost certainly be disappointed, probably when it is too late to choose another career.

I think he is right in many levels. But let’s concentrate just on the simplest, easiest to measure: money.

If we academics do the computations proposed in Figuring Out Exactly How Much Your Time Is Worth [The Simple Dollar], we may be in for a surprise.

Basically, you determine your true hourly wage by subtracting all of your work-related expenses from your salary, then calculating the hours you devote to work each year (including commute and other time-sinks) and dividing your remaining salary by your total hours.

Since we work silly hours, the actual pay is quite ridiculous. Of course, one has to factor in the liberty to think, flexible hours etc.

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Have you considered the productivity loss associated to a disastrous computer crash (where you cannot retrieve any of your files)? HDs do die, and it is really time-consuming to get back to a working state.

Anyone who regularly works on more than one computer and needs access to the same set of files will benefit from using a syncing tool. The following scenario is pretty common but not efficient:

You are working on a desktop computer and a laptop at home, as well as on a desktop computer at your office. You routinely copies your Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, and other files over to USB flash drives, carry them between your home and workplace, and manually copy every file over to its appropriate directory within My Documents (or whatever home dir you use).

But Sometimes you get things wrong and clobber a newer version of a file with an older one, sometimes you move a file into the wrong place and ends up with duplicates that you must compare by hand, and sometimes you lose a chunk of her valuable work data when one of your computers’ hard drives crashes.

Most people don’t have a backup strategy in place. Everybody has colleagues that have had some kind of disastrous data loss, but somehow they think that their computer is immune to adversity, thieves, and hardware failures.

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I am PC bound, but my MAC jealously was aroused when I spied a new freeware app  “skim”:

Skim is a PDF reading and note-taking app for Mac OS X that is designed to make reading research papers and manuals better. Just like in Preview, you can search, scan, and zoom through PDFs, but you also get some custom features for your workflow…

I read about it on this blog.

Technorati Tags: skim - pdf - pdf management - pdf reader

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The Chronicle (newspaper) has a good website with a very active forum. I have been monitoring it for a while, and I can certainly say that there are very informative threads in there. It seems to be a very good place to get privileged hard-to-find information about subtle topics such as what is a good job offer, whether a particular department should be red-flagged because of internal fights, or how to negotiate a start-up package. This forum may well be old news for many, but it was an interesting discovery for me so I’ll just post about it just in case it’s useful for anyone.

They have a section on “balancing work and life”. I wonder how many similar forums centered around a profession have one. Scary.

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Ok, I think this is a class-A hack. This may be one of the biggest timesavers I have found in recent years.

This might be obvious, but if you spend a lot of time writing, then any number of keystrokes that you save, as small as it might seem, will result in large time savings.

A word autocompleter is a program that learns what you type most often and suggests it in real time while you are writing. I’m still wondering why this kind of functionality doesn’t come with the OS, because it is really straightforward to implement and useful beyond words. Some of you who have used unix shells or text editor are used to completing words by just pressing a key (tab is my favorite). Well, guess what, you can have that anywhere, not only on the shell: you can have completion in a word processor while writing papers. Of course, it’s handy to fill textboxes in any browser and write emails.

Some may think that saving a few keystrokes is not necessary a big time saver and that they type fast enough. Well, believe me, you haven’t tried one of these programs!

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Filehamster monitors changes to any kind of files, and keeps versions. I have seen that many academics just use a numbering system in the filename; filehamster is a bit more elegant.

If you are a programmer, you may know about versioning systems. They are convenient for large projects , particularly for those with more than one programer. However, they are not as easy to use as to justify the overhead when doing simple manuscripts.

Keeping versions helps the flow of writing, since no matter how much you mangle your manuscript, you can always go back to a previous version. And of course you can add comments to versions. Filehamster stays in the system tray and is pretty unobtrusive.

Filehamster is updated often, and each version fixes most of the annoyances of the previous one while adding features.

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There is a nice pdf reader comparison  at donationcoder.com. Since most academics rely on pdf quite a lot, choosing the right tool may save a lot of time and frustration.

The idea here is to have a tool that opens up as fast as possible, uses as little memory as possible, and lets you move around the pdf conveniently with the best rendering quality.

Some of the tools are obscure (great finds!). Most of them are tiny compared to the standard Adobe Reader, but do suffer quality- and feature-wise.

Adobe Reader 8 has the nicest quality of text, it is beautifully crisp; but even with the speed increase of version 8, the program is still something of a monster.

Foxit is very well known as the freeware alternative, it is not the smallest application of those tested, but it does use the least memory; however, the quality of its output is by far the worst!

Adobe’s new comer Digital Edition is still in beta, and has some annoyances (no custom install, all files added to library) but it is a fraction of the size of its big brother. Sadly the render quality does suffer; though not as poor as Foxit all the other applications tested produced more legible text.

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