Academic Productivity

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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When we first discussed the idea of academic productivity blog, our first thoughts were about the irony of it - how would writing a blog about productivity increase my productivity? And we were blogging about productivity rather than working, surely we wouldn’t be best placed person to give productivity advice? If you really want to be productive, you should stop reading this and do some work. But if you are reading this, then it suggests that you want to be more productive. Being more productive is what this is site is about. Both for you and for us.
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