Academic Productivity

I’m now at the Max Planck institute for Human Development, Berlin.

I’ll be working on the large Knowledge Collider project (LarKC), an EU grant that aims to create a platform for real-time reasoning on the semantic web.

The semantic web is being around for years, but only now it’s getting enough momentum. This is an area where I think what we know about semantics in psychology may make an important contribution.

This is called web 3.0 and is supposed to be the next big thing.

What’s interesting about Web 3.0
The basic idea is that the web is written for humans who read text; but it could be a lot more useful if it was also written for machines that can ‘reason’ on structured information. Right now, a machine can do much inference on propositions. The basic unit on the semantic web is the RDF triplet, which is basically a [SUBJ, VERB, OBJ] proposition.

Many existing databases are converted to a format that is, basically, a propositional analysis. But most of the web is, of course, plain text and not amenable to straight conversion between some other structured format to RDF. There are ongoing efforts to do this automatically from plain text. And, as happens with ‘automatic propositional analysis’, it’s not very good. But the fact that some companies do have databases (which are structured information, and easily translated into RDF triplets) is very promising.

Imagine that a spider for a search engine could read on the amazon webpage:
[JoseQuesada, likes, Kintsch-12345]
[Kintsch-12345, hasTitle, Comprehension]

Or from the wikipedia page:
[Kennedy, said, Prop-9876]
Prop9876: [Ich, bin, ein-Berliner]

Then, a machine could draw a lot of interesting inferences; and browsing the web will not need to be reduced to keyword matching: people could construct queries in a language that operates with RDF (SPARQL) or we could make search engines to translate natural language into SPARQL.

If all this sounds to you like ‘making the web a humongous database’ or ‘the return of good old-fashioned AI’, you may be right.

The challenge now is to write something that can do reasoning with trillions of propositions in something close to real time. This larKC project puts together people from parallel computing, cogSci, and hardcore reasoning people to create a service like that. It has funding for 3 years.

I will be posting more on semantic web stuff here (when appropriate) but mostly on the larkc blog.

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Recently I met with someone who is the editor for one of the top journals in my field. We discussed what would increase your chances of pleasing a journal editor. He gave me three clear pointers that I thought would be interesting to the readership here. But, I also think I’m going to try a different method to get them to you: mail. There are about 2000 RSS subscribers, and only a few dozen email subscribers. I think it’s those subscribers show a lot of commit to what I have to say here and it’s about right that they get extra content. If you use RSS over email because you find it more convenient, then my apologies. You can always subscribe to get the content, then unsubscribe, although I plan to decouple the two sources and prepare extra content that goes to the mail subscribers only in the future.

As Jason calacanis and Nova Spivack put it:

Why have I been doing so much more Twining than blogging and social networking? First of all, I’m not interested in having a conversation with the entire general public, or ever being an A-List blogger, or interacting with networks of random strangers. What I want is to efficiently participate in many different specific groups and communities around particular interests and relationships I have.

I still think that ap.com could be a great community where we share really effective tips (this one email is probably one of these). Just a quick reminder that posting is open to anyone who has anything to say (posts are reviewed). There is a post describing how to make a post. And of course, the comments are open.

EDIT: Since lots of RSS subscribers felt alienated, I have added the content here. I hope you understand why I thought it might be sensible to keep it to a reduded audience. The error in my logic was that email subscribers show more commitment: in fact RSS subscribers think the technology is superior and that’s why they do not subscribe using email.

As promised in my blog post, here are three tips to increase your
chances of pleasing a journal editor (and getting your paper published).

(1) Don’t take no for an answer. This editor told me that in many cases the reviews were not completely damaging, but many authors assumed that the paper was beyond repair and never resubmitted. Sometimes, even though you didn’t get a ‘revise and resubmit’, you can write back to the editor and say that you do not agree with some of the reviewers’ points, and that you have fixed the paper. Note that you were not invited to resubmit, but you are doing it anyway. Sometimes the editor will agree with your point and keep the process going.

This little sneaky tactic can save you a lot of time waiting for another journal to start the process from scratch, not to mention psychological wear-and-tear taking rejections.

Note: my editor in question said he would be more than happy to reevaluate such cases, but he may be an exception.

(2) Write it clearly. In a world where everybody rushes papers for publication, a well-written paper feels like fresh air. How do you know your paper is well-written? Leave it alone for a week. If you come back to it and you cannot understand your own point at first read, rewrite. Use your lay-man friends, or people from a different discipline, as testers.

Another trick that I’ve seen good writers do is to use very large fonts so they concentrate on one paragraph at a time (one screen full of large fonts). They move to the next screen only when they are totally satisfied with their writing. This often involves rewriting each sentence a few times, and shortening it.

(3) Don’t resubmit in a week. It shows disrespect for the entire review process. If the reviewers and editor took a few hours of their time to make your paper better, by all means do not disregard the changes they propose. Rarely you can address all suggestions in just one week.

What happens when you take an extraordinarily large time to resubmit? I thought it’d be catastrophic, but this editor concretely thought that this is not an issue. Sometimes life gets in the way. By all means resubmit even if you think your reviews have forgotten about you. They probably have anyway even if you submit in a snap

Hope this helps!

-Jose

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Just learned that Randy Pausch has passed away. Most of you will have been exposed to his extremely moving talk on ‘how to get the things you want’ at CMU, his last lecture, when he was diagnosed with cancer and give only a few months to live. What I didn’t know is that he also gave a talk on time management.

What I liked the most is his first slide: The goal is FUN. This one, Tim Ferris got right, and he seems very successful at indoctrinating people with this idea. I really hope it works out, because I’d love to see more people having fun around.

However, I challenge you to find a single academic that can live the life that Tim is proposing! But that a different conversation.

Another crucial point is his understanding of the famous 2 x 2 table in , Stephen F. Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Key: the 2 and 3 are often misplaced; people tend to do important, non-urgent last (i.e. after non-important, urgent). So the best order for the four cells is:

Also: a recipe for having short meetings: stand up. That limits the time a person can talk to you (you both get tired).

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Anna Kushnir has an interesting letter to Wired where she describes how the proportion of women to men went from 7:1 in grad school to 1:7 in senior academic positions.

What is causing this switch? The comment section has a bunch of hypotheses. Worth a look.

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I while ago I designed a simple program to track how often I’m interrupted and to prevent myself from going into a ’shaving Yaks’ excursion every time I have to touch a browser.

The interruptron works by growing in size as your ‘unscheduled break’ (or procrastination escapade) elapses. It can cover your entire screen, so it’s hard to ignore. it also lets you save what you did and plot some basic stats.

It turns out people are actually using it. Even making videos about it:

I wasn’t very impressed myself when I released it to tell you the truth, but this little program seems to be a crowd pleaser. Another user asked for the source and is actually doing a rewrite. I was surprised when he told me about his background: he was the person responsible for the email engine of one of the most trafficked sites on the web. We’ll be working together and probably implementing more features, but don’t hold your breath.

Anyway, I didn’t announce it here in ap.com. Maybe it’s time to do it now.

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The new ap.com 2.0 is being out for a month now. Yay! But it seems that most users (yes, users, not readers) didn’t really take advantage of the new features.

The goal of ap.com 2.0 is to have more content for everybody. So what can you do to make ap.com 2.0 better? Simple. Start having fun. Did you know you can post (and everybody will see your post, if the editors like it)? There is a post describing how to make a post (hmm, I like recursion).

Comments now have new superpowers too. You can link to any page (where your own inventions lurk) and ap.com 2.0 will send you Google love. Most blogs have a ‘nofollow’ tag that tells Google not to leak juice. This is mostly done to fight spamming… but we trust you enough to let you operate at large. After all, you had to sign up for an account, so you must be human (are you?). Plus, we monitor comments closely. And this is all in line with our views on how to distribute credit in a fair way -and test soft-peer review ideas-.

You can have your own image on each post… although for that you need to upload one first at gravatar.com (takes seconds). This will help people recognize you. And did we mention it works on any blog on the entire intarweb? Still, most ap.com users don’t have a gravatar. Get one.

And where should you test your new shining gravatar? Why, on this thread about the interview with Mark Cornell. We have a few questions already, but the more questions, the meatier his response will be.

If you enjoy these kind of interviews, help us make them possible. And of course, feel free to invite some super-productive monster you know to be interviewed or to post some lifehacks he uses!

We will keep reminding you of new ap.com features until you use them or tell us to shut up already.

Oh, and by the way, this post took me 1:25. There’s very little time investment in posting a quick link or idea; you don’t really need to post a lengthy diatribe with references at the end (that’s for paper journals).

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This is big. Harvard University has a new policy: make your scholarly articles available free online.

As Slashdot commenter hawk describes it:

The academic publishing industry is a dinosaur in desperate need of elimination. It charges tens of thousands of dollars per school for journals that would be more useful as web sites–, not and available several months earlier. As it exists, journals are for the benefit of the publishing companies, not the world at large, academia, or the authors. The economic model is that the faculty write, are paid nothing, and the libraries pay huge fees to the publishing houses.
Will the publishers react to open up? I doubt it; they can’t.
The *real* result of this will be top articles going to online journals, which will first rival and then displace the printed journals. This is a good thing for everyone except the publishing houses.

But what’s in it for me, the end user of the paper? First, faster review cycles. Second, my ideas will reach a wider target (those who are not affiliated with a powerful library and cannot access them otherwise). Third, the ideas will get there faster. Forget about the close to a year delay between accepted and printed. Seeing “In press” in the reference list may be a thing of the pass soon. Fourth, if everything is online (imagine a journal article with a ‘comments’ section, open to anyone), then soft peer review is even easier and more transparent.

Nothing of this should be news, most people have their articles online anyway… but it sometimes breaks the agreement you have with the paper journal. Now that a large university makes this practice a policy, we’ll see other universities follow up soon.

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We have talked about Matt Cornell before on our post “Matt’s idea blog on GTD and Faculty Productivity“.

When I first found his blog, Matt mentioned that…

[He] would work with three self-selected early faculty members, coach them in the method, and hopefully give the director enough information to decide if the results merited a larger follow-on effort.

His latest blog posts have been covering interviews with productivity personalities (book authors and bloggers, as well as practitioners and consultants). His posts are consistently good, which is somewhat rare in the blogosphere.

I have talked Matt into being ‘interviewed’ here at ap.com. But instead of doing an audio interview as we did with Mark Forster, this time we want to stick to text. The advantage is that this time you can submit your own questions; he will read them and try to answer them. You are getting direct access to a consultant who has experience helping academics, so use it wisely.

In any case, this sounds like a fantastic opportunity to follow up on his work with academics. How well does GTD adapt to the academic world? Has he been able to measure performance before and after adopting GTD?

Use the comments on this blog post to send your questions. One question per comment; if you have several questions please post them separately.

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In this post I’ll show you two easy ways to submit a post. Note: if you have blogged before, this explanation may be unnecessary.

First method: use the built-in editor on our site

I’ll assume that you could sign in/log in just fine. Then you should see a blue Wordpress page with several options. One of them says “write”. Yo can click on it, and by default it will take you to an edit box. You can start typing away. Make sure you are on tab “write post” and not “write page”.

As you see, the obvious WYSIWYG icons for formatting text are there. The only one you might not recognize is the one in between the picture and spell-check: that is the post splitter. For long posts, you may want to insert a splitter so people get the “continue reading this post” message. Like what you should see about here

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We are proud to announce the birth of Academic Productivity 2.0. Over the last months we have been brainstorming on how to improve the blog and we are happy to announce a number of important news.

New look

We have redesigned the blog and created a new logo: a delicate metaphor on how the academia transforms raw ideas into… more mundane, consumable things.

It took quite a lot of work to get the current look working (and we ended up making very conservative decisions!). Load times should have improved as we have removed some plugins that were slowing things down.

Open contributions

We thought it’s ok to write our own ramblings, but we’d like to read yours too.

Academic Productivity 2.0 introduces an open registration system (default role: “Contributor”). This will allow to open up the blog for contributions from our readers. Other blogs have done this, and since we have been receiving a lot of valuable suggestions from our readers, we think it’s time to create a community of contributors. If you have ideas/hacks you want to share, sign up as a contributor or log in < ?php wp_loginout(); ?>(see link on the right side).

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Seth Godin is one of the luminaries of marketing. He posted something thought-provoking recently on his blog:

What if I told you about an industry which:

1. Indebts most of its customers, sometimes for twenty or more years a person
2. Not only consumes most of four years of its customer’s time, but impacts its prospects for years before even interacting with them
3. Enjoys extremely strong brand preferences between competitors and has virtually no successful generic substitutes
4. Dramatically alters relations within a family, often for generations
5. Doesn’t do it on purpose

…and

…according to most of the studies I’ve seen, there’s very little or no difference in the efficacy of one competitor vs. another.

The industry is, unsurprisingly, US undergraduate college. Seth is a high-profile person, both on and off-line. So is Paul Graham.

Another industry that seems to commit the same sins is of course, the MBA. And this, too, has its critics: Josh Kaufman reasoned that paying around $150000 for the credential to manage a business wasn’t as compelling as it might seem when you can collect most of the books on the area and read them yourself.

But how am I going to get my skills certified, even if I acquire them by myself? How am I going to convince the human resources department of my employer to hire me? Well, easy: by doing admirable things. Instead of presenting a piece of paper, present your crowning achievement. Then going to college changes meaning completely. People may go into a classroom not to get a grade (a piece of the paper that is a ticket for a job), but to learn things that enable them to build better solutions to problems. Under this view, as Graham says, a job is “so-twentieth century”.

It seems that in recent times many people are independently proclaiming that “the emperor has no clothes”.

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This is a temporary post; it will be deleted soon. It’s intended for people who read ap.com between the night of Fri Nov 2nd and the evening of Sat Nov 3rd AND for those who subscribe to ap.com using RSS feeds.

We have been working really hard on a lot of new features these last few weeks. We like to call this project ap.com 2.0. We had an internal draft that was bouncing back and forth. It’s an announcement with all the new features that will be released soon.

The way we share this document is by posting it as a draft (wordpress, the software that runs ap.com, has this nifty document category). A draft is something that is not ready for public consumption.

What happened yesterday is that I edited the announcement draft with windows live writer (WLW), and saved the changes. Well, guess what. WLW defaults to public, so if you edit a draft and save the corrections, it saves it as public (I basically hit the shortcut S+ctrl+P and never even thought of checking).

The result is that the announcement when public long before we were ready (as you can see, ap.com still looks the same). I have returned it to draft status, but some people may have read it and could be wondering where all these things we mentioned are. Notoriously, RSS subscribers may still have this post in their feed (nothing I can think of can fix that).

This is a public apology for this premature announcement. We are still working on the new features (some may still take a while). I hope you understand, and I’m sure you will like the changes once the dust settles. Sorry about having kidnapped your attention unnecessary.

-Jose

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Dr. Pychyl has an interesting podcast series on procrastination. Is procrastination related to certain personality traits? Taxes and other aversive stuff: Why do we put it off? Give them a try if you are interested in those questions.

The main difference between these podcasts and the heaps of information that are available on the web about procrastination is that this comes out of a psychology lab.

If you find a good resource (even peer review ed ones ) on procrastination, please post it here.

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NOTE: Thanks Terri Yu (Yale) for submitting this resource to ap.com.

UPDATE: Terri has posted on his blog a collection of notes on the Fisher Files, sequence II. This is a fantastic resource overall, more so if you prefer reading over listening.

The Fisher files is a weekly podcast that focuses on being ‘thoughtful’ -call it strategy- by connecting small actions with larger aims. In the words of the author:

In a single day, we perform over two hundred small tasks: dial a phone, sharpen a pencil, open the computer, begin to type a paragraph. How do we connect all those small task to the larger aims of our lives? Are we even aware of what the larger aims of our lives are?

I have thought more and more about making and maintaining the connections between the large and small. Sometimes, these connections just fall apart for me and I find myself doing useless and irrelevant things. Other times, some connections are there and strong and I have an almost spiritual sense of mindfulness. The way the connections help me translate large aims to small tasks is not so much about productivity as they are about relevance.

Peter is a GTD practitioner, although not all the techniques described in the GTD book were useful for him -and I suspect not all are applicable to academics.

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Note: this is a contributed post by Cal Newport. If you like this, check his study hacks blog for more. If you have an interesting idea that supercharges your productivity and want to share it with our community, feel free to send it to us using the contact form. We’d certainly want to hear it!

-Jose

I’m a graduate student. A fourth year PhD candidate at MIT, to be precise. And I have an annoying habit. Whenever I get a chance to collaborate, chat, or hang around with successful professors in my field, I like to find out about their work habits. In doing so, I’ve discovered the following two trends:

1. The best young professors carve out a day each week to do nothing but research. This prevents the administrative nonsense that dominates their early professional lives from bringing their research momentum to a complete stop.
2. The best, distinguished, older professors — those who have earned light teaching schedules and have paid their dues on enough committees that in their final years before retirement can begin to untangle themselves from these obligations — isolate administrative nonsense to a small number of days. They might even, for example, have a single day each week to take care of this crap, and then spend the other four thinking big thoughts.

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Most time managing programs out there use to-do list, and most of us just have trouble completing them. There’s no bullet-proof approach, but the Zen habits blog has a list of possible kick-starters:

Have you gotten good at organizing your tasks in a to-do list, but have trouble actually executing them? You’re not alone. (…)

Unplug. The biggest distractions come from connectivity. Email, feeds, IM, Twitter, phones. Unplug from these connections while you’re working on your single task.

Baby steps. Don’t think in terms of having to tackle an entire work day, or an entire list of stuff to do. That’s overwhelming.

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I have recently found that Calvin has moved his email newsletter into a new blog format. Calving is an accomplished MIT student who has published two books (!) on productivity for students: How to Become a Straight-A Student and How to Win at College. His blog has categories such as  Student Productivity and Study Tips with good advice for undergrads and grad students, although honestly, I think even higher-ups in the academic food chain could benefit from these tips.

Example posts:

Monday Master Class: Downgrade the Importance of Writing in Paper Writing

Dangerous Ideas: Sorry Paul Graham, I Think it Does Matter Where You Went to College (Watch out for his “dangerous ideas series”! He is trying to be provocative, and doing it well!)

A highlight of this blog is the educated comments it gets:

There is a world of difference between the questions that are thought out by someone else (the teacher), for the purpose of measuring someone other’s (the student’s) understading of a subject, and the questions that someone (the enterpreneur) has to first figure out are meaningful and then answer him/herself.

We haven’t talked about productivityhacks before because it was more oriented to undergrads, but this is not a good enough reason to deprive ap.com readers from excellent content. I think the actual social divide in the academic world is more like those who worry about getting grades, and those who don’t. This make a huge difference in how your life is organized. Grade-seeking people have their schedule done for them (they know for sure when they’ll need to study like crazy and when they can relax). They normally have lots of social support, since classmates have exactly the same schedule -and they are a legion-! The other side of the divide is for people who people who have to make their own schedule (sometimes, imposing it on others), and can suffer social isolation since their peers do not have the same time constraints, and there are few of them.

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If you have followed ap.com for any amount of time, you have realized that I really like Paul Graham’s ideas. He has just published an essay where he uses data from his Y! combinator to prove that having a degree from an elite university does not increase your chances of being successful when going for a startup. He argues that the ’startup test’ is a lot more useful to infer a person’s value than the tests that she needs to pass to e.g., getting good grades during high school or getting accepted in a prestigious college: “a high school record that’s largely an index of obedience”. I agree. I think his logic is impeccable.

This new essay just adds on his idea of “prestige is just fossilized brilliance”. Elite institutions capitalize on prestige, but it is not clear -at least from Paul’s analysis- that prestige converts well into real-life success, which I guess is what companies try to hire for. I think academics fight for prestige (clearly, money is not the currency they fight for!). And I think prestige is the wrong thing to look for!

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If you were happy to find that the new Office 2007 equation editor is a lot more like LaTeX, and that equations didn’t look as bad in Word as before, think again.

Microsoft is pushing a proprietary markup language (OOXML) that clashes with what Nature and Science own typesetters use, so they will simply reject the paper. This might be a good time to read Dario’s own ode to the beauty of LaTeX.

• Leading journals reject Word 2007 files - ZDNet UK
• Wikipedia: OOXML

Technorati tags: typesetting, latex, math, markup, OOXML

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From Mark J. Perry’s blog, I just learned that the average UAW worker with a high school degree earns 57.6% more compensation than the average university professor with a Ph.D. Considering that there are plenty of academic positions that do not enjoy the average salary mentioned in the blog post, this is something to worry about. Average Postdoc salaries according to the NSF are nowhere closer to this figure, and you have to add the uncertainty of these positions (they are always short-term) and mobility demands (expect to move to a different university sooner or later). And of course, academic work longer hours and suffer a lot more psychological stress than car factory workers.

Where did things go this wrong? Do our markets demand cars, and not knowledge? Is education so unimportant in our current economy? These statistics are borderline insulting, no matter how you try to justify them.

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