Academic Productivity

Sometimes I wonder why many humans (me included) have trouble understanding probability. In cognitive science, probabilistic models are taking over most areas. Still, most people struggle with them. Could it be that the notation is just hard to swallow? What’s Wrong with Probability Notation? is a magnificent post that gives some basic reasons:

The first two issues arise in the usual expression of the first step of Bayes’s rule,

,

where each of the four uses of corresponds to a different probability function! In computer science, we’re used to using names to distinguish functions. So and are the same function applied to different arguments. In probability notation, and are different probability functions, picked out by their arguments.

This is one clear communication problem. Ideally we want more people to follow probabilistic reasoning. Doctors, judges, etc all show significant struggles when given probabilities (see e.g., Helping Doctors and Patients Make Sense of Health Statistics).

But how do we tackle this problem? Changing notation is easier said than done. In fact, anyone departing from traditional notation will have to convince reviewers that his notation is better… and add to the risk of cause a less-than-ideal impression.

Any ideas?

Google Scholar is probably the most useful tool on the web today for academics. However, there’s no API for it, and seems to add little to no features with time. I don’t think Google is going to give it the Axe any time soon, but … I can’t imagine ads getting clicked on scholar pages. And Google is a for-profit, so one never knows. In any case, it would not hurt to show Google that we care, and there’s one simple thing to do. If you want to support the creation of the API, you could drop by the google API forums and express your interest.

I went to a toastmasters meeting, and found some interesting tricks to improve presentations. For example, they count the "ahhs", "hmm" etc. Since then I’m surprised at how many scientific talks are filled with those. A minor thing, but very effective. I didn’t keep going to meetings because it looked to me that the presentation style they use is not very compatible with the academic one (e.g., practicing improvisation). But it got me thinking… what alternative talk styles are out there? Is the ’standard’ one the best? In a way, flying people all around the world to ’see’ the talk is a bit of a lost cause, because body language doesn’t weight as much as in other communication styles. Of course, the networking and face-to-face time, to work on ideas on napkins, may make up for it, but still…

What follows is a walk through alternative talk styles that you may want to try in your next conference. Some require you to be the organizer, and enforce certain rules. Others, you can try just being the speaker. On with the show!

Pecha Kucha is a presentation format in which content can be easily, efficiently and informally shown, usually at a public event designed for that purpose. Under the format, a presenter shows 20 images for 20 seconds apiece, for a total time of 6 minutes, 40 seconds. They took the name Pecha Kucha from a Japanese term for the sound of conversation ("chit-chat"). It was being aimed primarily at creative industries professionals.

A Lightning Talk is a short presentation given at a conference or similar forum. Unlike other presentations, lightning talks last only a few minutes and several will usually be delivered in a single period by different speakers. This has actually being already adopted by academics (I’ve been to one!) and in my experience, it’s adored by the audience and well attended.

Ignite is a style of presentation where participants are given five minutes to speak on a subject accompanied by 20 slides. Each slide is displayed for 15 seconds, and slides are automatically advanced.

Last we have the TED talk. The motto of TED is ‘Ideas worth spreading’. If you are an academic, you should ask yourself, ‘is any of my ideas worth spreading?’. So if someone invited you to give a TED talk, what would you talk about? What if you make your next invited talk a TED-like talk?

Feel free to report your experiences with alternative talk styles in the comments…

AcaWiki is a new wiki aimed at academics. They are asking for summaries of academic research. This could be an excellent exercise for students (i.e., don’t hand me your paper: post it to acaWiki, and let me know when I can look at it).

From reading the FAQ, It’s not clear to me that they are selling it right to the academic community:

What does AcaWiki offer to academic researchers?

AcaWiki offers a web 2.0 way of interacting with the public to increase impact. Research often languishes in academic journals, perhaps read only a few times by infrequent visitors. AcaWiki allows scholars to increase the impact of their research by enabling them to share summaries, long abstracts and literature reviews of their peer-reviewed work online. AcaWiki also encourages discussion by providing a talk page for each research paper.

Hmm, meh. While these are interesting reasons, I doubt academics will rush to fill in summaries. Discussion is covered by reference management sites such as citeUlike. And, of course, to make this work for academics, contributions to acaWiki must be well-evaluated by hiring committees… which is not going to happen any time soon. When faced when the decision of adding one more line to their CV or dedicating a similar stretch of time doing summaries of their articles for acaWiki, what would most academics do?

I still think this could fill a nice niche for student homework. Instead of leaving their work hidden in the HD of their T.A., posting it to acaWiki could be of use to the community. I often have to reread a paper because I’ve forgot most about it, and a good, crowd-refined summary would definitely help.

After 100,000 invites went out yesterday, the web is boiling with reviews. The best no-nonsense explanation I found is a chapter of a forthcoming O’reilly book.

If you got an account, I’ve been on the dev preview (intended for developers to build on but otherwise identical), my user is quesada@wavesandbox.com