Items sharing a similar topic, meandered onto in the depths of a major outpouring of procrastination…
The path less traveled by Andrea Schweitzer (via @mattleifer) on a different way to have a career as a scientist. And for a description of one of the most successful scientists from quantum computing, an interview with Ignacio Cirac (sent to me by Daniel.) Somedays, however, one might wonder about all the time professors spend working and contemplate the idea of death by tenure track. Or if you care a lot about the notion of tenure versus non-tenure AND you don’t mind reading redstate.org, you can amuse yourself reading Glorious Leader Gap: More Evidence Our Pretentious President Was Never a Law School Professor. Equally depressing, but perhaps in a different form, is the state of the astronomy job market. For better options, you might try computer science (unless of course you’re going to start screaming about DEH TOOK OUR JRBS OVER CCCCs, in which case, go ahead rant, but please include at least one link to statistics in your rant.)
Posters For Some, Minature American Flags for Others
“Ideal conversation must be an exchange of thought, and not, as many of those who worry most about their shortcomings believe, an eloquent exhibition of wit or oratory”
– Emily Post(er)
As a literature major physicist, one of the biggest culture shocks I’ve encountered when attending theory computer science conferences (STOC and FOCS) is the lack of a poster session at these conferences (or at least the ones I attended, which, truth be told, is not many.) Admittedly, I’m a sucker for free wine, beer, and cheese (or at least a cash bar peoples) and some of my warmest thoughts are of the science projects I did growing up (though I still think my eighth grade project was wrongly not awarded grand prize because the judges didn’t think I could have done the project.) But truthfully, I think I get more out of posters at conferences than most of the talks. And, in some deep sense, I find the lack of a poster session at these conferences nearly…anti-scientific. There. I’ve said it. Anti-scientific, Pontiff? Really? Well yeah I am prone to hyperbole.
Yes, I know that getting a paper into a top CS theory conference is the mark of acceptance and praise and “yes you are one of us” for the theoretical computer science community. And while I think that this system is inherently troubling for a few reasons, it doesn’t disturb me nearly as much as the suppression of ideas which are just “not good enough” or “too far on the fringe.” As far as I can tell, the inclusion of a poster session is strictly a positive: it gives students chance to discuss their work, it encourages breadth for a conference by allowing in submissions that might not fit with what is “in” at the moment, it is perhaps the best place I know to start a collaboration, and it encourages civil discussion of results that are…wrong.
Which brings me to my final point. I’ve been on the QIP program committee for two years now, and blessedly QIP does have a poster session (perhaps due to its hybrid nature combining physics and computer science.) This is great…for example in Santa Fe last year I learned about some very cool work the Dorit Aharonov and collaborators were doing from her poster (and a yelling match we had driving from ABQ to Santa Fe :)) as well as about some new results on the hidden subgroup problem over the Heisenberg group (okay I’ll admit that one is only really exciting to me!) In the course of these years we have, on the program committee, rejected posters from the conference. Now there are certain reason why I can imagine doing this, but it doesn’t really make me happy. For me, the only reason why one should reject a poster is that the poster should be off topic. For posters, because they’re just posters, damnit, I don’t even use the requirement that the paper is correct (sorry.) If QIP gets a paper on nonlinear fluid dynamics, then certainly reject the poster, but if you get a poster on P=NP? I say accept it as a poster (and I mean, it could be useful for the author to hear repeatedly why he or she is incorrect.)
So, if the QIP business meeting gets boring, and you want to stir up some debate, I suggest that someone raise the following question: what are our standards for poster session and are they ones that the conference should have? This might be especially relevant for QIP, which is increasingly computer science oriented (I said increasingly, not solely), and where there are certainly, say, implementation papers, that might get rejected (and I would argue they should be accepted: the beauty of quantum information science it’s crossing disciplines, and to cut of completely one discipline is like chopping your arm off.)
(One interesting issue for QIP is that for posters one submits the same 3 page brief note about the research that speakers submit. In most physics conferences when you submit a poster all you submit is an abstract, from which it is nearly impossible to judge whether the work is relevant/correct and so more posters are included.)
So, posters for all, says this scientific popularist.
The 1/6th People
@EricRWeinstein is at it again in twitterland, this time on the subject of the funding of science. For an intriguing read about the glut of Ph.D.s versus science funding, he links to his (circa 1998?) article titled: “How and Why Government, Universities, and Industry Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scientists and High-Tech Workers.” An interesting read, to say the least. Then @michael_nielsen points to Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion
Which brings me to the title of this post. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about funding. Actually ever since I started as a research scientist and then research faculty there really hasn’t been a time I’ve not been thinking about funding! Funding is, of course, important for all faculty, but for research faculty like me, who must pay their own salary, its even more important. While a non-research-professor may not get tenure for not getting funding, they live a very different life in which they get 10 months of salary for teaching (I also teach (when I can), because I think its important, because I like it, and because sometimes I flatter myself and think I might actually be imparting some useful knowledge down the branches of history.) To say this creates a slightly different calculus is true, though I don’t want to over exaggerate the differences: funding is seen as the lifeblood of a successful academic (never mind the content or lack thereof of the research, but we can save that for another day.)
So how do I get by? If I tell you my secret I’d have to kill you. (Okay, yeah, I’ll admit my secret: pure blind luck!) And let me just say to the funding agencies who have supported me thankyou, thankyou, thankyou! Heh. But one thing that really bothers me a lot is a policy that I must say I find nearly immoral. In particular I would point to the policy of the NSF to only fund faculty for 2 months of salary across all of their grants. Of course only a faculty member could ever call a rule like this immoral, especially in a world which knows much greater problems than the petty sagas of a first world researcher. But to me this policy reeks of ethical problems. (And yes, you can get exceptions, but you, dear reader, are you going to write a grant where you press this boundary? Really? Every grant I write will be asking for an exception.)
Immoral? Really, Mr. Pontiff? Okay stick with me here. Let’s just think about what this means from the perspective of value. Think of the NSF as a consumer of science. By saying it will only pay 2 months salary for faculty it is effectively saying that it only values one sixth of a faculties effort (at most.) Across all research grants. Okay, so faculty (most) teach, so maybe there is a reason the NSF should only be paying for 1/6th of their time (want to know what the real ratio of time they spend on the grant is? Bet it’s not 1/6th.) So let’s set aside this complaint.
No what is worse for me is the way in which this changes the balance of NSF funding. Suppose I get a NSF grant for three years for, say $100000 per year (not an unusual size.) If one is really lucky one lives at a place where you could pay 1/6th of your salary from this and then one graduate student for the year (doesn’t work for me but may work elsewhere.) In effect this means that the NSF is effectively equating 1/6th of a faculty with a graduate student. Now personally, I find that this disturbing. First, there is no way I’m worth 6 graduate students (ask my grad students if you want proof of this.) And further this is exactly the sort of funding equation that causes the glut in academia: the NSF funds the students but not the end point of where these students will go. As I’ve said in the past, I’m all for increased funding of sciences (special interest group, you know!), but only if this in a manner where the end point of the education is not necessarily inside of academia. But if you look at what the NSF is funding, I’d be hard pressed to argue that it is designed to produce well educated scientists who can work outside of academia. I call this the 1/6ths problem: the NSF is pricing into its support of research 6 graduate students per faculty, should we be surprised if single faculty positions routinely draw greater than 300 applications?
Now this is all a lot of complaining from a guy whose got a good job, where he gets to work on some awesome stuff. So despite the fact that I don’t like this policy at all, it would be bad if I just complained and didn’t point out any way to fix the problem. One way would be to change the policy, but this doesn’t quite do it for me. What I would like to see is pay-go. That is the NSF funding of graduate students should only be able to provide such support if it can project that the economy or its future funding can support said graduate student. Currently the NSF is funding people who it does not continue to support, and ill prepares these students for jobs outside of academia. Fix these (by increasing the ratio of faculty/student funding, or funding better preparation of students for jobs outside of academia) and I think we will all be better off. Except for me (who will be emailing his PM trying to explain why he wrote a blog post containing the words “NSF” and “immoral.”)
Gell-Mann on Conventional Wisdom
Via Asymptotia, an interview with Murray Gell-Mann (who just turned 80. Happy Birthday Murray!) I particularly like the comments at the end of the article:
Battles of new ideas against conventional wisdom are common in science, aren’t they?
It’s very interesting how these certain negative principles get embedded in science sometimes. Most challenges to scientific orthodoxy are wrong. A lot of them are crank. But it happens from time to time that a challenge to scientific orthodoxy is actually right. And the people who make that challenge face a terrible situation. Getting heard, getting believed, getting taken seriously and so on. And I’ve lived through a lot of those, some of them with my own work, but also with other people’s very important work. Let’s take continental drift, for example. American geologists were absolutely convinced, almost all of them, that continental drift was rubbish. The reason is that the mechanisms that were put forward for it were unsatisfactory. But that’s no reason to disregard a phenomenon. Because the theories people have put forward about the phenomenon are unsatisfactory, that doesn’t mean the phenomenon doesn’t exist. But that’s what most American geologists did until finally their noses were rubbed in continental drift in 1962, ’63 and so on when they found the stripes in the mid-ocean, and so it was perfectly clear that there had to be continental drift, and it was associated then with a model that people could believe, namely plate tectonics. But the phenomenon was still there. It was there before plate tectonics. The fact that they hadn’t found the mechanism didn’t mean the phenomenon wasn’t there. Continental drift was actually real. And evidence was accumulating for it. At Caltech the physicists imported Teddy Bullard to talk about his work and Patrick Blackett to talk about his work, these had to do with paleoclimate evidence for continental drift and paleomagnetism evidence for continental drift. And as that evidence accumulated, the American geologists voted more and more strongly for the idea that continental drift didn’t exist. The more the evidence was there, the less they believed it. Finally in 1962 and 1963 they had to accept it and they accepted it along with a successful model presented by plate tectonics….
Diary of a Sad Physicist
Writing a blog is for me (1) amusing and (2) amusing. Can anyone take anything that I write on a blog seriously? Well sometimes people do. Many eons ago (okay, I lie, it was 2005), I wrote a post about the then new “h-index.” The h-index is an attempt at trying to find a better way of “ranking” citation counts. As such, it is, of course, nothing more than another meter stick in the long line of lazy tenure committee metric sticks. But it’s also fun! Why is it fun? Because calculating any “metric” is fun for people like me who spent their childhood involved in such mind expanding tasks as counting the number of loads of wood we did before we finished stacking all that had been cut. But that’s just me.
Sadly, for others my original post provoke an amazing amount of hatred and anger. Thus is the diary of “Sad Physicist.” Did I endorse this index as the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and tenure. Of course not. What do you take me as, an academic bent on analyzing everything within sight through the eyes of Science! Pfft.
Okay, you ask, well why am I writing about this subject now? Well today, after over three years, the Sad Physicist, the one commenter of most venom about that post, has reappeared! Welcome back friend! So I thought it would be a good chance to collect the original dialogue, you know for posterity. Maybe one could even count this article as a citation, thus increasing Sad Physicist’s h-index! Always helpful, the pontiff is.
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Slow Science
The “slow movement” is a vast beast: there’s Slow Food, Slow Travel, Slow Money, and even, I kid you not, Slow Reading. These movements all begin with the premise that modern culture emphasizes ever increasing speed and convenience (cue the Eagle’s: “Listen, baby. You can hear the engine ring. We’ve been up and down this highway; haven’t seen a goddam thing.”) The prescribed medicine is a moderance in life. More smelling of the roses (but watch out for Ringo), more taking the long road, and most definitely more chewing your food slowly. While the movement suffers from large doses of overly nostalgic pastoralism, I find myself resonant with the slow movements search for a good pace and balance in how I try to live my life.
Thinking about this the other day (while chewing slowly, of course) I wondered, well, what about “Slow Science?” And like most thoughts you think might not have ever been thought, it turns out that this phrase has come up before: “Taking time to savour the rewards of slow science” Lisa Alleva, Nature 443, 271 (2006). To quote from the letter:
In shedding the ambition of my peers, I have discovered a secret: science, slow science, is perhaps the most rewarding and pleasurable pastime one could ever hope for. My supervisor’s lab is small — two postdocs only, with no teaching responsibilities. We are free to read the literature, formulate ideas and carefully plan our experiments so as to execute thoughtful strategies. We do not plough through genomes hoping to discover something interesting; we formulate a theory, and then we go in and test it.
Perhaps we are old-fashioned, but I feel my education as a scientist has benefited far more from my five years of slow science than the preceding five years of fast science. What’s more, we are on the brink of something big, exciting and wonderful, that spurs my slow science forever onwards.
So what about it? Who’s in for a slow science movement?
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The Secret Order of the ArXiv
The astro/physics blogosphere is all atwitter about papers the Nature embargo policy (See Julianne If a paper is submitted to nature does it still make a sound, the cat herder Hear a paper, see a paper, speak no paper, and he of less than certain principles Unhealthy obsessions of academia. He of uncertain principles loses the catchy title contest 🙂 )
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Comments?…I Don't Have to Show You Any Stinkin' Comments!
One of the more interesting “problems” in Science 2.0 is the lack of commenting on online articles. In particular some journals now allow one to post comments about papers published in the journal. As this friendfeed conversation asks:
Why people do not comment online articles? What is wrong with the online commenting system[s]? I think this is one of the central issues in Science 2.0.
Or as Carl Zimmer commented on comments appearing at PLOS One a few years back:
What I find striking, however, is how quiet it is over at PLOS One. Check out a few for yourself. My search turned up a lot of papers with no discussion attached. Many others had a few comments such as, “This is a neat paper.” There’s nothing like the tough criticism coming out about the new flagellum paper to be found at PLOS One.
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Too Few Wrong Papers?
After watching Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk* it occurred to me to go back and look at my own scientific papers and try to assess them for how creative they were. Some things you should just never do, I guess, but it did lead me to an interesting question.
* The first 2/3 of the talk is excellent, ending not as great. I’m heartily in support of his cause, but it felt to me like he was implying that this was the one and only problem with the education system, which I find hard to swallow.
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Quantum Sloan Winners
Congrats to the quantum tenure odds booster award winners Sloan award winners:
Robert Raussendorf, UBC
Hartmut Häffner, UC Berkeley (Go Bears!)
Alán Aspuru-Guzik, Haavard
Scott Aaronson, MIT (that other Tech school)
Andrew Houck, Princeton
Subhadeep Gupta, University of Washington
Lance lists the theoretical computer scientist winners.