Academic Productivity

This topic will be retaken here at ap.com often. For a start, here is a quick post on advantages of reading pdfs off the screen

You can do searches. Do you know where the paragraph you are looking for is? If you remember a word, you can find it easily.

(more…)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you sign up for our mailing list or subscribe to our RSS feed!

Internet Marketers (IMs) have an advantage over other professions: they have pretty detailed statistics to use as feedback. For example, they have as indicators hits, time between buys, length of their customer lists, and ultimately… the money they make! They check these statistics daily.

Musicians are punished horribly when they fail performing a passage, not only by their peers but when practicing alone, by their own musical sense jumping in disgust!

In other professions, for example academics, we don’t get such a direct feedback. We may get feedback by how many papers we get published a year, but this is too coarse of a measure, and it only comes in yearly.

We may also consider our rate of success getting funding, but this is again a coarse measure, since we apply to at most dozens of grants in a lifetime.

In teaching, we may get a more direct feedback in that students are normally very expressive and their faces reflect how well our current lecture is doing. Yearly evaluations are also evidence of our performance. But nothing this immediate and direct is available when, say, you are writing a paper.

(more…)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you sign up for our mailing list or subscribe to our RSS feed!

This is one more post on the Hamming series about how to select your research career topics.

It takes courage to think about important unsolved problems. (Excepting of course the officially canonized problems, such as Hilbert’s, Fermat’s Last Theorem, P = NP, …). But the solutions that made a difference were to problems that were not even recognized as such!

(more…)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you sign up for our mailing list or subscribe to our RSS feed!

Today my post will be a bit more high-level than usual. Most of us select scientific topics without paying much attention to overall strategy (i.e., which ones may produce the most benefit).

On this, the best piece of writing I have found is Richard Hamming’s famous essay “You and Your Research” (which is a transcription of a talk he gave at bell labs, e.g., here, and here), Richard Hamming suggests that you ask yourself three questions:

1. What are the most important problems in your field?
2. Are you working on one of them?
3. Why not?

“If you do not work on an important problem, it’s unlikely you’ll do important work. It’s perfectly obvious. Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them.”

(more…)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you sign up for our mailing list or subscribe to our RSS feed!

Prof. John Perry (Standford) might be onto something with his Structured Procrastination idea:

the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

Source: Structured Procrastination

Now, if only someone came up with a way to use Structured Procrastination to increase productivity, that’d be a big hit. A recommended read.

(more…)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you sign up for our mailing list or subscribe to our RSS feed!