Just a quick follow-up to last week’s post on changes in higher education. The New York Times published an article on Friday, highlighting two new books on the future of the American academy and picking up some of the points I discussed last time:

The labor system, for one thing, is clearly unjust. Tenured and tenure-track professors earn most of the money and benefits, but they’re a minority at the top of a pyramid. Nearly two-thirds of all college teachers are non-tenure-track adjuncts like Matt Williams, who told Hacker and Dreifus he had taught a dozen courses at two colleges in the Akron area the previous year, earning the equivalent of about $8.50 an hour by his reckoning. It is foolish that graduate programs are pumping new Ph.D.’s into a world without decent jobs for them.

But the real meat of the article is an overview of some interesting, but slightly terrifying, proposed solutions:

As for the humanities, let professors do research after-hours, on top of much heavier teaching schedules. “In other occupations, when people feel there is something they want to write, they do it on their own time and at their own expense,” the authors declare.

The authors being “Andrew Hacker, a professor emeritus of political science at Queens College, and Claudia C. Dreifus, a journalist (and contributor to the science section of The New York Times)”. You can thank them below.

There’s nothing like an overtly contentious statement to bring in the traffic. And as they go, this is a pretty good one: “Why higher education is like a Ponzi scheme“.

The linked post is actually for a radio program, the content of which was based on this original article by a professor of psychology from the University of Kentucky. In it, she argues that there aren’t enough tenure-track jobs to support the PhD students coming through the system and that students are exploited to prop up the teaching and research of over-stretched professors:

“In short, I think academia shares many of the classic elements of a social trap: It is in most faculty members’ and departments’ best interests to recruit a lot of graduate students. Churning out PhDs is one of the major metrics of departmental ‘success’. Departments need graduate students to teach their classes, and faculty members need them to run their labs. Yet, as in any social trap, when everybody acts in their self-interest, a negative collective outcome ensues.”

Her solution? Not to accept any more PhDs:

“I’m no longer willing to pin my students’ prospects for their futures on an ephemeral job market that shines in the distance like a mirage … I don’t want to be part of the problem any more, and I think I will sleep better knowing that I am no longer contributing to an academic job market that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to a Ponzi scheme on the verge of falling apart.”

I take issue with some of the article being rather loosely written. For example, she states that during the admissions interviews, “I ask them [prospective students] what they want to do with their PhDs. They all reply that they want a tenure-track job at a research university.” (emphasis added). Now this may have something to do with psychology as a discipline, and she does comment that applied jobs in that field are in decline, but anecdotally I would say that a large portion of post-docs, let alone PhDs, are in those positions not to gain an academic post, but to acquire unique skills for an increasingly competitive private sector. To pull a number out of the air, I would say maybe 1 in 5 post-docs goes on to an academic post. And in the UK, this is all part of degree inflation: 1385 full-time doctorates where obtained in 1994/95 and 14165 in 2008/9, a 10.2 times increase! In the same period, the total number of full-time HE degrees obtained (only) rose by a factor of 6.7, from 15601 to 104260 (data from HESA). So in this case, we shouldn’t stress too much about providing everyone with tenured positions.

The corollary to the “all PhDs want academic jobs” thing is that, assuming consistent cohort sizes, it implies we should have the same number of PhDs as post-docs as lecturers as professors, lining up along a smooth career path. Clearly this isn’t the case: academia is inherently hierarchical, always has been and always will be.

But this, I think, is where things get interesting. Let’s make the heroic assumption that PhDs (and post-docs) are cheap labour. Is this such a bad thing, provided that these individuals enter into the arrangement with open eyes? This site is, after all, called academic productivity: if PhDs and post-docs can do teaching and research more cost-effectively than professors and tenured staff, wouldn’t that be better from a societal perspective?

For those of us in the UK, this may not be a hypothetical question. There is currently an “Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance” underway, led by Lord Browne (ex-chairman of BP). It has a pretty broad remit to consider how higher education should be funded while ensuring access for talented individuals and one idea I’ve heard suggested is that professors should do less teaching and instead leave it to post-docs or dedicated teaching fellows. From an economic perspective, the appeal is obvious: post-docs earn a fraction of the salary of professors, who of course can better use their time securing grants etc. Indeed, this already happens to some extent with tutorials and labs, but why not lectures as well? Why should a world famous professor be teaching first year calculus?

Well there are a couple reasons. First, many professors enjoy it. Teaching enables them to keep in touch with students and the contact is not one way: students can often ask off-kilter questions that inspire new ideas for research. Second, for new lecturers, teaching is an essential part of professional development. It provides a valuable opportunity to practice presentational skills and, through the planning and preparation of course materials and activities, it can help lecturers to solidify their existing specialist knowledge while also learning new material.

Another rebuttal is that students will demand to be taught by professors. I can’t say the extent to which is true but clearly, higher education is increasingly being seen as a paid-for service with the accompanying “client” expectations. If I go to university X for course Y, it may be because of their Nobel prize winning professor and I may be very cross indeed if that person never sets foot in a classroom. To some extent, I think this is an issue of managing expectations. Universities should offer prospective students courses taught to the highest standards, supported by quality assurance mechanisms like training for teachers and regular feedback from students. But this does not mean that the professors should be doing the teaching per se. There’s no reason to think that a well-trained teaching fellow couldn’t develop and deliver a course as effectively (if not more) than a tenured professor who may excel at research but not teaching.

All of this is to say that calling academia a Ponzi scheme is (obviously) a bit sensational. However, academia is certainly a hierarchical institution and its functioning does depend on the cost-effective labour of PhDs and post-docs. Indeed under current budget constraints in the UK, this labour will become increasingly important and may substantially redefine the delivery of undergraduate higher education. It doesn’t mean that potential PhDs should be discouraged from entering the system but certainly there needs to be upfront clarity about their true role and career prospects.

I just found this presentation, and thought it’s worth bringing it to the attention of ap.com readers:

Anita de Waard is the director of Disruptive Technologies at Elsevier. A company that has a position with such a name has my sympathy. Looks like publishers are slowly realizing that they can have a huge impact on how science is done, and how fast it moves, if they simply paid more attention to modern trends.

Only habit prevents us researchers from realizing that the media we use the most, a paper article with a review cycle of years, is woefully wrong in this day and age.

A somewhat related idea are the 5 stars of open linked data:

★ make your stuff available on the web (whatever format)

★★ make it available as structured data (e.g. excel instead of image scan of a table)

★★★ non-proprietary format (e.g. csv instead of excel)

★★★★ use URLs to identify things, so that people can point at your stuff

★★★★★ link your data to other people’s data to provide context

If scientists and publishers have opendata in mind (and the trend is there!) doing research becomes more fun immediately (no more mails to the authors asking for data that get no response). Seeing that the academic publishing industry has at least one person (Anita) that gets it makes me feel good. Looks like Elsevier has a head-start.

Peter Drucker: "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."

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?

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.

Is blogging writing? Of course! You say. I would have said the same, before I encountered Jaron Lanier’s essay:

The question of new business models for content creators on the Internet is a profound and difficult topic in itself, but it must at least be pointed out that writing professionally and well takes time and that most authors need to be paid to take that time. In this regard, blogging is not writing. For example, it’s easy to be loved as a blogger. All you have to do is play to the crowd. Or you can flame the crowd to get attention. Nothing is wrong with either of those activities. What I think of as real writing, however, writing meant to last, is something else. It involves articulating a perspective that is not just reactive to yesterday’s moves in a conversation.

What he means is simply that what ‘serious writing’ is about may well have nothing to do with blogging. Blogging is closer to stream-of-conciousness, barely any revisions; ‘serious writing’ for an academic paper implies maybe three paragraphs a day (depending on how much you know the topic!), lots of going back-and-forth with collaborators, and attention to wording that would make a lawyer look sloppy.

And of course, no matter how many readers you may have, blogging will do nothing in an academic CV. Even though some academics publish impressive ideas in their blogs! (examples: Peter Turney’s, Luis von Ahn’s, insert your fav. science blog here).

All academics are painfully aware that writing well takes time, and some know that writing well is not a prerequisite for having a successful blog.

So, basically, it doesn’t pay off to painfully slowly distill ideas for a blog post. In a sense, consuming blog posts –let alone microblogging 140-character blurbs- warrants you a so-so level of refinement. Lanier again:

Except when intelligent thought really matters. In that case the average idea can be quite wrong, and only the best ideas have lasting value. Science is like that.

Reading this literally, it means that if you want quality and polish, read science from the traditional source (i.e., peer reviewed journals) and not from blogs. Playing to the crowd –what bloggers must do, according to Lanier- does not require incredibly solid thinking; it’s a completely different skill.

Still, I’m convinced that some ideas’ natural ecosystem is the blog post, and some papers are unnecessarily elaborated and boring without necessity.

What I think could work is a hybrid between a focused paper (that nobody would read other than a close circle of scientists) and a blog post that ‘plays to the masses’ and tries hard to capture attention at the cost of rigor and polish.

And, is science really that far ‘above and beyond’ the pop culture of the internet? If anything, there are things that science can adopt from pop culture. Most scientists fail at communicating with the general public, and often, with their peers. Every time you go to a talk in a conference and cannot keep your concentration on it no matter how hard you try, it is a communication problem. Pop writers have that part down! It’s just a matter of time until we (or our scientific publishers) realize how much we could gain by being readable, popular, and accessible. If only selection committees would consider how much a candidate engages the public as a criteria! It doesn’t have to be the general public, but maybe at the very least other fellow disciplines.

Do you have examples of people in science that do just this?(Use blogs or popular books to get ideas across that would have died otherwise)? Please post in the comments.

This single Graham’s post explains more about productivity than most entire blogs on the topic out there. It was a revelation to me. Any day that has more than two non-clustered events  becomes wasteful automatically. It’s like your mind can anticipate the futility of trying to get in the zone only to get kicked out of it by a meeting. This also explains why the typical ‘maker’ (a postdoc, or grad student working close to the data) tends to gravitate towards late nights work stunts, whereas professors rarely do. In fact, one big difference between professors and grad students is the number of meetings they have to endure… Can you be a maker and a professor? If so how do you do it?

Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule

Cal Newport says people think that the more hard things they do, the more impressive they’ll be to potential employers. He calls this the diligence hypothesis. This is a leitmotiv in his blogging.

However, this trend of getting (and looking!) as busy as possible is not exclusive to undergrads (his audience). I don’t know any academic that doesn’t look stressed. We mostly hoard more tasks that they can realistically accomplish. But academics love their jobs (or so legend has it), whereas most people don’t. People who have day jobs say their long-term strategy for dealing with no life is to amass enough wealth to have more freedom of time to be able to do  things they love. We try to do the opposite: a job we love that invades every corner of our lives.

So the ideal Cal advocates is that of a hyperspecialist, that does one thing well, and that’s about it. This also fit the description of many successful academics: find a corner on your field where you are the undisputed king, and maybe start a fight with someone else on something obscure only the two of you care about. Penelope Trunk (one truly great blogger) seems to agree on the value of hyperspecialization in the corporate world too (and by the way, she does not recommend anyone to do a PhD ).

But are academic employers really impressed if you do that? I have no clue. It’s hard to guess what’s in the mind of hiring committees. But by looking at some recent hires on top depts in my field, I’d say it pays off to be an specialist, at least for an early career.

Cal got this very insightful comment (as usual):

I came to the conclusion that being stressed out and busy was for some reason a sought after way of being in western society.

Surprisingly, in the academia we manage to look really busy (as in trying new ideas) and hyperspecialized at the same time… Something doesn’t add up. Is being hyperspecialized a consequence of the market, or a way to alleviate stress (i.e., I don’t care about the theories that work two meters away from where I stand, I have plenty on my plate already)? Do you prefer to be perceived as a deep-but-narrow thinker or a risk-taking ‘trying new things’ explorer? Do you act in consequence with what you prefer?

Study Hacks » Blog Archive » Diligence vs. Ability: Rethinking What Impresses Employers