The explanation below may only make sense to you if you read this from an RSS reader. If you don’t please skip it.

Have you ever sent an email to the wrong person? Did wish you could pull it back? I just did this, but for our blog (!).

I was feeding a WP install of what will be our company blog, and then I did something nasty…

I was about to post from my desktop tool (word 2010, used to be live writer), and I hit ‘post’ on the wrong doc, and ‘about’ page, ‘google-translated’ from German; prose as horrible as one can get. The blog selected was academicproductivity.com, not our own. I immediately went to the admin page and removed it, so ap.com’s readers won’t see it. But the RSS feed… is another story. For a blog that was dead for a year, we still have >4000 followers. This was the first post to break a long silent stretch. I’d hate if you, the reader, think we resurrected, just to find out a nonsensical blog post.

Since we use feedburner, removing the post locally didn’t help. I had to log in at feedburner, and try to remove it from there. They have a ‘nuke’ option that should force a refresh. But it just didn’t work. I tried a few times, the nonsensical blog post was still there. The only option I could think of was to delete the feed from feedburner, in the hope that they do not broadcast it. But it was too late; all people who subscribe to ap.com’s RSS feed have received the post.

I apologize for kidnapping your attention without a good reason. I’m sorry you got involved in this, but silly mistakes do occur. I will be more careful in the future.

Since the feedburner feed is now gone, if you want to continue receiving updates from ap.com you’d need to resubscribe. Simply click again on the RSS icon on the address bar, and follow the steps there. In any case, we are not dead, and will continue writing for ap.com whenever we find something worth writing about.

We want anyone to be able to contribute to ap.com. One way to do this is to leave blog posts open (but with a review queue). We proposed this method here, but not many people seem to be making use of it.

Maybe writing a blog post is too time consuming, and the barrier of entry is too high. An easy solution is microblogging: services like twitter let you share a tiny bit of something interesting you found (with a link), and anyone following you will receive it.

The thing with microblogging is that it doesn’t take much effort to share. Many people (including me) thought it was silly at first, but now it’s mainstream.

Since twitter provides real-time search you can find what people talk about right now. If you want to monitor a special topic, chances are someone came up with a unique way of identify the topic. A spontaneous way of organizing information outside the ‘follows’ structure emerged: the hashtag. These are terms that start with #, example: #iranelection. We have set up #AcaProd for academicproductivity. If you have an idea, or read something outstanding that you would like to share with us, just tweet about it and add #AcaProd somewhere in the 140 characters. Your tweet then is easily found by anyone interested in the topic. We will display all tweets in our front page too.

I found myself sharing a lot of interesting stuff over twitter, and much more often than through a blog, so I have a good feeling about this.

Of course, you should keep sending ideas/suggestions/complaints using our email, blog@academicproductivity.com

In a supremely honest piece, (part II) T. H. Benton says that basically, it makes no sense to get a PhD in the humanities right now.

His predictions are gloomy (and I think this applies to other disciplines):

We are entering a period in which large numbers of tenured faculty members will be released under "financial exigency" only to be replaced by adjuncts doing essentially the same work for no benefits, no job security, and much less money. Those future adjuncts are the current crop of prospective graduate students, following their dreams, embarking on a "life of the mind," doing what they "love."

Kudos to the Chronicle for publishing opinion articles like these. Ycombinator thread here.

It’s becoming painfully obvious to many academic writers that, once we remove the romantic component, faculty positions are just not that desirable (see Greenspun’s Women in science for a similar view). I think it is important to make the facts as popular as possible, so those who remain in the academic track do it with full knowledge of what they are getting and what their prospects are.

In an impressive display on coherence, Merlin Mann (43Folders) declares moral bankruptcy of the ‘productivity Pr0n’ cult. This is something I have discussed before on ap.com (post: rethinking life hacks).

Merlin has declared he wants a new direction for 43Folders; it was harming people more than helping, since the time readers spent on the blog was taking them dangerously away from their goals. I like his new motto:

Ask yourself: Why am I here right now instead of making something cool on my own? What’s the barrier to me starting that right now?

Will Merlin succeed? Or will he be captured by the gravitational field of cheap self-help advice? We will have to wait until the next episode of 43Folders: the saga.

>

Precisely two years ago, Shane posted our first mission statement. Simple and ambitious as it was, that post pretty much sums up why we are still here.

There’s been a lot of work behind the curtains, lots of lessons learned (“we shouldn’t just mention sex in the titles whenever possible. We should also try to mention alcohol”) and a few, intense epiphanies (“A mincer in 3d perspective. On top of everything, half-way into the mincer, a brain: it must be very recognizable”). After 2 years, we are a 2.5k subscribers strong community and it’s time to celebrate and finally get more productive drunk.

A big thank you to all our readers, guest contributors and imperturbable partners for making this blog happen.

[CC-licensed geekcake courtesy of freakgirl]

Michael Nielsen has a great post on why open science is failing to take off. His main point is that science was never that open to start with, but thanks to the communication needs of the time and the technology available people developed the peer review system. A system that is now hauting us, while top scientists disregard current technology (mostly web-based) that makes the current system look silly.

By the way, Nielsen knows what he is talking about; he wrote the standard text on quantum computation the most highly cited physics publication of the last 25 years according to Google Scholar.

The first example he uses is Nature’s open peer review system:

Inspired by the success of amazon.com and similar sites, several organizations have created comment sites where scientists can share their opinions of scientific papers. Perhaps the best-known was Nature’s 2006 trial of open commentary on papers undergoing peer review at Nature. The trial was not a success. Nature’s final report terminating the trial explained: There was a significant level of expressed interest in open peer review… A small majority of those authors who did participate received comments, but typically very few, despite significant web traffic. Most comments were not technically substantive. Feedback suggests that there is a marked reluctance among researchers to offer open comments.

His second example is the usual suspect: wikipedia.

Seigenthaler has described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible research tool".

Nielsen marvels as scientists missing the point of wikipedia:

[...] You’ve bought into the current game, and take it for granted that science is only about publishing in specialized scientific journals. But if you take a broader view, you believe science is about discovering how the world works, and sharing that understanding with the rest of humanity.

I’m thinking lately that Thompson research (Web of science, -WoS- endNote) have a monopoly on academic journal access, and are making millions.

They have partnerships with journal publishers; those charge universities, and for the general public it’s ‘please insert coin to continue’ ($20-25 per article!). These are articles we write, and we don’t get paid a dime. Plus, we actually benefit if the general public has access to them.

Even though most blogs are so-so, give an amateur access to the same journals we use, and lots of motivation, and he may come up with original research rivaling the one we do at the ‘walled garden’ of the universities.

Enter Google scholar and zotero. Not that far from Web-of-Science/endnote. Open. Accessible to anyone. Sometimes better. For example, Zotero does things that endnote cannot do, most importantly capturing references from all kinds of websites such as amazon. Google scholar offers citation counts that may be more accurate than the ones in WoS; they do not agree (at all) with the ones that WoS produces, since for Google scholar, an article published online is still one citation, whereas WoS looks at published journals only (the establishment).

What if all articles were accessible to everyone? (have you read ‘the right to read’ by Stallman?):

For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college—when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan.

This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her—but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong—something that only pirates would do.

I just came back from the library here at Max Planck. All the good books are taken and since there’s no deadline to return them, I"ll have to bother my peers to get the book from their office. I asked if we could have an electronic version of these books, and the answer was that the publishing companies didn’t provide that. I wonder why. And of course they must be investing enough money on lawyers to fight google’s book project to feed a few small countries for years.

What is happening is that more often than not, when something is not accessible with a click or two, I just don’t bother reading it. And I love the feeling of a paper book; but I know that getting it is more trouble than it’s worth most of the time. And I’m on a good institution. With lots of money to have an up-to-date library. What happens to the laymen out there in the real world? Well, they seem to be doing the same systematic biased reading, but at a larger scale. If something is not online, they won’t read it. That includes the ‘insert coin to continue’ papers published in traditional journals; when you are not within the walls of a fortress (education institution), you just don’t read it. I’m really curious about how many of our papers publishers sell at that special price of about 25$ a pop.

Are normal people outside the garden walls of academia missing what’s inside? Not fully. Today you can teach yourself anything. I have a friend that designed and built his own house without hiring an architect; everything he needed was available online. He learnt enough about structures, security, materials etc online, reading sites and asking around in forums. Even the hands-on work can be learned by asking construction workers, or just looking at them.

But I do think that full-access to academic publications by anyone may have a huge impact. For a start, it may increase the average quality of blog posts, something I’d really welcome ! It would also have an effect on how we write papers. If we knew that the general public (not only those hard-core into our filed) could potentially read our paper, I’m sure our writing styles would be a lot more palatable. And with time, some brilliant scientific contribution could come ‘out of a garage’ (instead of a well-known academic institution. The garage phenomenon happens everday with startups; why not in science? Of course, if you need tools out of the ordinary, like a particle accelerator, to do your work, forget it; but there are lots of expensive things people buy in their garages to foster their hobbies (Hi-fi equipment, parts for a sailing boat, etc). I wouldn’t be impossible to conceive someone buying scientific materials for their hobbies, like lab rats or stereotaxic instruments if you are into neurosciences ). For example, one of the top participants on the Netflix contest is in fact a psychology afficionado that doesn’t work under the dome of any university.

Because, let’s be honest, sometimes the university environment is not the most condutive to great work. If we could create an ideal intellectual environment in a living room or a garage, bypassing paperwork, teaching load, and other obstacles, it could be a lot of fun. And productive. In fact, it has happened. The legendary example is the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS). The IAS, where von Neumann’s machine was built, was basically a dorm near Princeton, but not officially affiliated with Princeton, started by some philanthropists who wanted scientists to stay there, have their lodging and food paid for, and get their science on.  Big time. Einstein was one of the first residents, as were von Neumann, Kurt Godel, and J. Oppenheimer.

Free access to publications and, what is more important, a stigma-free scientific society that accepts data and contributions from people working out of a garage, could make this possible.

Why the open science ideal is not happening

Here’s Nielsen’s main hypothesis: the old system of paper journals and snail-mail letters to reviews worked to incentivize sharing. However, in modern times the effect it has is just the opposite:

This is ironic, for the value of cultural openness was understood centuries ago by many of the founders of modern science; indeed, the journal system is perhaps the most open system for the transmission of knowledge that could be built with 17th century media. The adoption of the journal system was achieved by subsidizing scientists who published their discoveries in journals. This same subsidy now inhibits the adoption of more effective technologies, because it continues to incentivize scientists to share their work in conventional journals, and not in more modern media.

Some barriers are social; of course those in the establishment (i.e., journal editors and publishers) would be reticent to change. And economists would argue that no matter how easy it is – from the point of view of technology-  to disseminate information, people still pay for it gladly so there’s no point of giving it away for free. In fact, you should offer something in exchange for those people who are now getting paid for their efforts if you want them to support the ‘extreme open science’ movement. But here’s the catch: the authors are not really paid, so they would be all for it. The intermediaries (book and journal publishers, database creators, etc) are the ones who could have an interest in blocking an open science movement; but not the authors. In fact, in terms of money we get nothing for journal articles and next to nothing for books (With textbooks being the exception).

How the ideal world of open science looks like

Nielsen presents a few examples of working tools. Since 1991 physicists have been uploading their papers to the arXiv, often at about the same time as they submit to a journal. The papers are made available within hours for anyone to read.

Some fields work very well under a fully open paradigm already. The example he uses is programming. Some people would expect the level of shared code to be so-so, but this is not the case. A walkthrough the forums will show that top programming minds are sharing their ideas and having a kick out of it (it buids ‘street cred’).

Making all information not just human readable but also machine readable; there are people wanting this left and right; some don’t even know they want it, but will once they see it at work. I’ll post more about this as my ideas develop. Working on semantic web issues makes for a good amount of thinking on this line.

Nielsen proposes friendFeed as an interesting place where barriers of entry are low, although he warns that most scientists won’t have the time for microblogging. He follows about 200 people he ‘knows’, and some collaboration could easily come out of friendFeed. For example:

Suppose that for a particular problem, Alice estimates that it would take her 4-5 weeks to acquire the required expertise and solve the problem. That’s a long time, and so the problem is on the backburner. Unbeknownst to Alice, though, there is another scientist in another part of the world, Bob, who has just the skills to solve the problem in less than a day. This is not at all uncommon. Quite the contrary; my experience is that this is the usual situation. Consider the example of Grossmann, who saved Einstein what might otherwise have been years of extra work.

This is the power of open science: social networking on steroids! It’s really true that in my experience at least, we park a problem because one of the steps is not trivial to do… only to learn, maybe years later, that this step is a solved issue in a neighboring discipline that we ignored. Better communication and networking (like in the fictional Alice example) would definitely fill this hole.

Another of Nielsen’s crucial points is in the line of our previous ‘attention economy’ posts: "Expert attention, the ultimate scarce resource in science, is very inefficiently allocated under existing practices for collaboration." This is a great topic for another blog post. If anyone wants to take it and run with it, please do (behold the wonders of a blog!).

A general reminder: Ap.com is an open blog. If you have something you want to discuss with the ap.com readership, feel free to make a post. It doesn’t have to be earth-shattering (as you see, I post both long and short things) to be interesting.

Ok, this is just a quick, relaxing post.
In your view who is the academic most likely to accidentally eradicate human life?

Following up on Jose’s musings on good and bad keywords for a productivity blog, I came across an interesting tool to visualize the evolution over time of aggregated social bookmarking tags for popular websites. It is actually a pretty old project called Cloudalicious created a few years ago by Terrell Russell (of ClaimID fame).

If you are a web metrics maniac like yours truly, you won’t resist plugging this tool into your favourite websites, so here’s the graph I generated for AcademicProductivity.com:


(source)

The first nice fact this graph suggests is that the more bookmarks a blog accumulates over time, the more stable the overall tag distribution tends to be, i.e. popular tags tend to get stronger and less popular tags (like tags used by a single user) to be pushed down the list. Obviously, only tags for the top node are displayed in the graph, not the sum of tags for each blog post (which might produce significantly different results).

Even so, the graph reveals some interesting facts about this blog’s core business. According to our del.icio.us readers we are mostly a blog about productivity (103 tags), academic (56 tags) or academia (50 tags), research (50 tags) and gtd (47 tags).

Possibly the most striking feature of this graph is the dramatic drop of bookmarks marked with tag gtd, that moved from a respected 2nd position about one year ago to the current 6th position.

Is there anything we can conclude from this? Is our focus drifting away from GTD? Do our readers find this blog less GTD-centred than one year ago?

I’m not sure I have a good explanation why this happened but I’d love to hear your thoughts. And if you’re intrigued by Cloudalicious, you can give it a try as well.

“Math is hard; let’s go shopping!”

-hacked Barbie

Summary: It looks like the difficulties of measuring  productivity make people use common sense to give advice on how to improve it instead of actually attacking productivity as a hard problem that needs empirical study. But people do follow barely tested advice on productivity. They are either too busy to afford dismissing it, or too pragmatic to believe that we can reach systematic, scientific productivity techniques.

There is a current craze about productivity in many forms (sometimes disguised as personal development). At least 4 of the top 100 blogs in the blogosphere are about productivity (according to technorati’s authority: lifehacker #6; Zen Habits #41; lifehack.org #66 43 Folders #73). There’s a current craze about personal productivity and personal development. The best treatment I have read recently is Cal Newport’s Flak magazine article. 

In fact, lifehacking is a trend of the 21st century. The idea is to reduce the things that bother you in your life (or reduce the time it takes to complete them) while increasing the quality and quality of the experiences that you like. This is pretty intuitive, but is this a working definition of whatever personal productivity is? Hardly. Today, anything that solves an everyday problem in a clever or non-obvious way might be called a life hack.

Hacks are by definition, unsystematic. Everything goes, as long as it works. This is the contrary to the incremental evolution of scientific thinking. Even though sometimes there are large changes in the form of paradigm shifts, most of the time progress is incremental and lineal.

The advantages are clear: one can build on the knowledge acquired by the previous generation.

But do we have the same incremental progress in personal productivity theories? If there anything remotely similar to a science of productivity? Should people follow only empirically tested advice about productivity?

Wikipedia didn’t have a definition for personal productivity; but look at this gem from the social productivity definition:

The term productivity is etymologically derived from the Latin word producere, which means “lead or bring forth, draw out” (from pro- “forth” + ducere “to bring, lead”). It connotes in a general sense, the state of being productive, fertile or efficient. It is often confused with “efficiency”, “rationalization” or “profitability”.

So for a start, it seems that there aren’t very good definitions of the kind of knowledge worker productivity that is so ‘in vogue’ in blog posts everywhere and that should be measured carefully by those organizations who care about it. Which, now that I think of it, are mostly every single organization nowadays! And the available definitions are directly imported from mechanistic approaches to physical products that are not really that useful. Whatever intellectual productivity is, it’s not related to ‘cranking widgets’.

Instead, there’s a cult-following of people who, rather than offering a rational definition of productivity, are actually masters at producing rules of thumb that work. That is, they are lifehackers. They produce hacks. The essence of a hack is that it works.  But do we know they work? How well? How easily can they be adopted? Are they all-terrain hacks? We have no idea. Most of the hacks we all use and learn from the books are essentially untested empirically; most are reported by their inventor to work well in their personal experience. What I’m trying to discuss next is, should we really worry about this? Can we test any better?

Note that the term hack may have negative meaning. In programming a hack is a brilliant solution (and a hacker is a respected member of an elite). But it’s also used as something quickly put together, barely tested, and that works only by miracle. It’s an ugly solution that may break if you really stare at it. Something you may not want to do, because code has aesthetics, and hacks are by definition aesthetically repulsive. Human languages have semantics that are really fun. As you see, the same term can have two opposite meanings. That’s why computers don’t get semantics all that well.

Here,  lifehacking is fully enjoying this dualism. Hacks are great; hacks are bad. Which one do you really mean?

Giving advice about how to improve productivity

I have to say that I have a lot of respect for those authors  lifehackers. However, it hits me that they are not super-human in their achievements. The first two authors do feature their own lives prominently in their blogs, so the public can see what they have achieved and feel inspired.

The last two best-selling book authors are remarkable in that there’s nothing in their lives that would highlight them as specially productive; At least, they do not show off their achievements publicly. They do not blog about their live achievements. But note that this does not deter people from buying their books and following their advice.

But do these techniques really work? The obvious answer is: we still don’t know. Nobody has run any systematic comparison to see whether people using these techniques are in fact more efficient or not (!). This is a very hard experiment to run, since most people won’t agree to follow certain practices just because you have assigned them to a certain treatment.

Essentially, I’m saying that the entire general public (‘the internet’) follows unproven advice. This is a bit shocking. But why? Is it that difficult to study productivity the right way?

Studying productivity with the scientific method

Psychology is no stranger to constructs that are hard to measure and define. Let’s look at a few examples. Intelligence, as much as a slippery concept as it is, has several standardized tests. Conscious awareness, a feature that may well distinguish humans from animals, is an active topic of study which has experienced a lot of progress in the recent years.

How come productivity is still a virtually empty scientific field? Productivity cannot be a harder nut to crack than intelligence or consciousness.

There are a few psychologists who care about productivity, but chances are you (who have read several months worth of productivity blog posts ) have never heard of them. But this would be the topic for an entire new post, so I’ll just skip it.

But the fact is that nobody knows what productivity is doesn’t prevent people from writing extensively about how to improve it. Worse, knowledge workers have a great time reading those writings and following the advice given.

Most blogs use something close to common sense to generate recommendations:

“common sense” [...] equates to the knowledge and experience which most people have, or which the person using the term believes that they do or should have.

Edw519 observes a common pattern in blog posts (Although he was referring to Paul Graham essays, which are probably a category of their own!):

<EssayFormula>

Observe Something (mostly objective)

Generalize (subjective leap)

Expand (more subjective)

Conclude & Recommend (very subjective)

Let It Go (expose bullseye)

</EssayFormula>

This is remarkable different from what we are taught is good practice to generate useful knowledge; it’s kind of a proto-scientific method based on just personal experience. And it’s spreading like fire on the net thanks to self-publishing being so easy.

Blogs and ‘pop-sci’ books (well, sometimes not even pop-sci but the lowest class of off-the-self, armchair philosophy, self-help books) abound. In fact, the self-help market in 2008 will move 11 billion dollars (!).

Personal productivity blogs use personal experience (that is, an n=1 experiment design) as their only source of evidence. But that doesn’t prevent tens of thousands of individual readers to follow their advice.

The fact is that productivity is a huge, tasty, cute open problem that many people will try to solve in the next few years. Here’s an attempt to promise a x10 increase in productivity without even knowing how. His point is sound:

As far as I can tell, no company in America is focusing on the heart of the productivity problem. And the software tools that are supposedly about “productivity” are really about “collaboration and goal-setting.”

So why are so many people taking advice with people who basically don’t test or test in impoverished conditions (n=1)? Well, maybe they have realized that their experience is all they have. as Terry Grossman says,  “Life is not a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study. We don’t have that luxury. We are operating with incomplete information. The best we can do is experiment with ourselves.”

If that wasn’t enough of a reason, we can look at which other areas of their lives people take barely tested advice: investment, medical, career. Do we ask for a track record of a doctor healing the particular illness we have? not really, we follow the general feeling of trustworthiness he transmits and we generalize from weak evidence such as similar illnesses he has fixed that we heard by word of mouth. And don’t get me started with investment advice: people are happy to give it to you even if they make less money than you!

In fact, following thoroughly tested advice is basically the exception, not the norm. We scientists may be biased thinking that everyone should be following only knowledge that can be empirically tested. And even this assertion may be way too radical even for scientists; let’s be honest, there’s plenty of untested, but religiously followed, rules in most scientific fields. Plus you have a large proportion of so-called sciences where empirical testing is only an adornment (social sciences in some cases -as much as I hate to admit it).

Conclusion

Although application of the scientific method is hard, it may be worthwhile for such an in-demand area as knowledge worker productivity. If science can handle topics such as consciousness, productivity should not be scary. The current landscape is millions of readers following advice from hundreds of bloggers and book authors offering personal experience instead of replicable, tested rules. This will not change overnight even if such a science existed. In fact, following weak evidence to make important decisions is a pervasive fact in our society.

I always wondered how people see the academic world from outside. How do we gauge the interest of the general public on what academics have to say (on average)? One easy way to look at this question is to see the how often people will read an article that has the word ‘academic’ on it.

A proxy on what people read nowadays is digg.com. And the tool to see how often people digg academic posts is now available in Dan Zarella’s blog. Given a keyword, the tool will return data on the average number of links accumulated by stories popular on Digg that mentioned that keyword. This is done with 2007 data.

Well, behold what happens when you enter “academic”:

And compare it to what you get when you type “productivity”:

Why is this important? Well, on average, a single digg increases traffic by 0.10%. So a story that gets 3,000 diggs results in an increase in total traffic to the referring site by 300%.

So, from now on we are a^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H productivity blog