Monday, April 09, 2012

Striking Infographic of the Day


Like the previous infographic, this one too is about women in MIT. Specifically, the number of women faculty in MIT's School of Science during the period 1963-2006, taken from Prof. Nancy Hopkins' article -- Diversification of a University Faculty: Observations on Hiring Women Faculty in the Schools of Science and Engineering at MIT -- published in the March/April 2006 issue of MIT Faculty News Letter.

The two big jumps, one in the early 1970s and the other in the late 1990s, are striking, aren't they? Here's Prof. Hopkins:

igure 3a shows the total number of tenured and untenured women faculty in all six departments in the School of Science from 1963 (when there was a single woman faculty member) through 2005 (when there were 36 women faculty). The curve rises steeply twice: once between 1972-1976 and once between 1997-2000. These rises do not reflect contemporaneous increases in the size of the faculty during those periods. The number of male faculty at several relevant years is shown in the numbers at the top of the graph. The number of male faculty actually decreased (from 259 to 229) during the rise in female faculty between1997-2000, due to an early retirement program. As of 2006, there were 36 female faculty and 240 male faculty in the School of Science at MIT.

I deduce that the first sharp rise in the number of women faculty in Science, beginning in 1972, is the result of pressures associated with the Civil Rights Act and affirmative action regulations. In particular, in 1971 Secretary of Labor George Schultz ordered compliance reviews of hiring policies of women in universities. All institutions receiving federal funding were required to have such plans in effect as of that year. In addition, a group of women faculty and staff worked to persuade MIT to hire more women faculty at this time (M. Potter, personal communication). The second sharp rise, between 1997-2000, directly resulted from Dean Birgeneau’s response to the 1996 Report on Women Faculty.

Academic Advice: Grad School, CV, Academic Talk, etc.


Grad school ...:

  1. An old post by Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance: Unsolicited Advice: Part Deux. Choosing a Grad School [this and its predecessor post became a part of the discussion in this post just the other day]

    How prestigious is the school and the department? Prestige is something that is much more relevant (to the extent is is relevant at all) to your undergraduate school than your grad school. Not that it’s completely irrelevant, but the prestige of your advisor is more relevant than that of your department, which is much more relevant than that of the university as a whole. Of course, there are tight correlations between these different kinds of prestige, but they are not perfect.

    Although we had a debate about this in comments to the previous advice post [here's the link -- see the debate take off with the very first comment!], I still think that the identity of the school/department from which you get your Ph.D. is essentially irrelevant to ultimately getting hired as a faculty member. This is not some utopian perspective that we live in a perfect meritocracy in which where you come from doesn’t matter; rather, what matters is where you are doing your postdoc(s), not where you went to grad school. Of course, where you do your postdoc might be affected by where you go to grad school! But more important is who your advisor is.

  2. Ross McKenzie at Condensed Concepts: Should you work with a young turk or an old fart?

    ... old farts may offer you wisdom, experience, and stability. Hopefully, they have learnt from the mistakes they made when they were a young turk and are now more effective at picking good research topics, particularly ones suitable for students, and will produce publishable results in a reasonable time. They may also be able to quickly see dead ends and save you a lot of time. On the other hand, they may be stuck in a rut in an old research field and be getting distant from nuts and bolts technical details. ... [Bold emphasis in the original]

  3. My own take on choosing advisers: Just avoid the jerks.

    Bottomline: Do everything you can to figure out who the jerks are. And avoid them.

    Corollary: If it takes some time before you discover the jerk in your boss, it's never too late. Dump him/her immediately, and move on: change your adviser, university, field, line of work, whatever! Life is too short and precious to spend around nasty people.

Academic CV, academic talks, etc:

  1. Joshua Eyler in The Chronicle: The Rhetoric of the CV. What you put into (or omit from) your CV (and how it is crafted) says a lot about you; for example:

    Never include your graduate school GPA or the scores you received on your comprehensive examinations. Doing so amounts to a significant rhetorical blunder, because you are emphasizing your role as a student rather than as a future colleague. Don't worry: The rest of your materials will demonstrate your intellectual prowess. There is no need to undermine your candidacy by overtly calling attention to your grades.

  2. Cosma Shalizi: The Academic Talk: Memory and Fear:

    The point of academic talk is to try to persuade your audience to agree with you about your research. This means that you need to raise a structure of argument in their minds, in less than an hour, using just your voice, your slides, and your body-language. Your audience, for its part, has no tools available to it but its ears, eyes, and mind. (Their phones do not, in this respect, help.)

    This is a crazy way of trying to convey the intricacies of a complex argument. Without external aids like writing and reading, the mind of the East African Plains Ape has little ability to grasp, and more importantly to remember, new information. (The great psychologist George Miller estimated the number of pieces of information we can hold in short-term memory as "the magical number seven, plus or minus two", but this may if anything be an over-estimate.) Keeping in mind all the details of an academic argument would certainly exceed that slight capacity*. When you over-load your audience, they get confused and cranky, and they will either tune you out or avenge themselves on the obvious source of their discomfort, namely you.

    Therefore, do not overload your audience, and do not even try to convey all the intricacies of a complex academic argument in your talk. The proper goal of an academic talk is to convey a reasonably persuasive sketch of your argument, so that your audience are better informed about the subject, get why they should care, and are usefully oriented to what you wrote if and when they decide to read your paper.

  3. Female Science Professor at Scientopia: Promote Yourself:

    I think a key question is: What is the purpose of the self-promotion? Is it essential to your progression in your career; for example, making you more visible (as an early-career scientist) to those who might eventually write letters as part of your tenure evaluation? Is it important for your tenure evaluation that you give invited talks? Is it a way to develop new collaborations and recruit excellent grad students and postdocs (important for any career stage)? Or do you just generally want to be more famous in your obscure field?

    In my discussion, I will focus on strategies for self-promotion as an essential element of career development, not for hunger-for-fame purposes. I am also writing from my point of view as a non-extrovert. You do not have to be loud, talkative, sociable, aggressive, or even supremely self-confident to self-promote in the interest of career development.

Saturday, April 07, 2012

Infographic of the Day


MIT Numbers: Women as Percentage of Total Undergraduates, Graduate Students, and Faculty: 1901–2012

What would the success of MITx mean for MIT?


Over at Inside Higher Ed, Steve Kolowich has an article on an interesting debate within MIT about MITx, its effectiveness, its potential, and its role within the institution. He links to two articles -- by Prof. Woodie Flowers and Prof. Samuel Allen -- that appeared in the MIT Faculty Newsletter [Update: Should have added here links to MITx: MIT's Vision for Online Learning by L. Rafael Reif and the editorial which appeared in the same issue]. While both are worth reading in full, the critique by Prof. Flowers is what I want to focus on.

Prof. Woodie Flowers takes a hard line against MITx in its current form arguing (among other things) that (a) "education" is not the same as "training", and that (b) online resources are probably good for "training":

I believe that education and training are different. To me, training is an essential commodity that will certainly be outsourced to digital systems and be dramatically improved in the process. Education is much more subtle and complex and is likely to be accomplished through mentorship or apprentice-like interactions between a learner and an expert. [...]

Education is the source of comparative advantage for students. Education is worth its cost. Person-to-person training often is not worth its cost.

To clarify a bit: Learning a CAD program is training while learning to design requires education; learning spelling and grammar is training while learning to communicate requires education; learning calculus is training while learning to think using calculus requires education. In many cases, learning the parts is training while understanding and being creative about the whole requires education.

And this is how he sees MITx:

I believe the “sweet spot” for expensive universities like MIT is:

  1. access to highly-produced training systems accompanied by

  2. a rich on-campus opportunity to become educated.

MITx seems aimed at neither.

Flowers is clear that the web offers a chance to develop effective training tools (he cites Khan Academy) by replacing textbooks with media-rich, interactive texts:

We seem to have decided to offer “courses” rather than participate in the exciting new process of replacing textbooks with more effective training tools.

Apple just announced their software system to support new-media texts. If they do for textbooks what iTunes did for music distribution, the tipping point will be passed.

All early indicators are that E. O. Wilson’s Life on Earth is the current gold standard for digital biology texts. The first two chapters are already offered through Apple’s new e-text system. These chapters are impressive. The entire text will require years of work by a talented team and already represents an investment of millions.

These are early days for online (or, more broadly, web-enabled) education, so it's not clear what may work well, what may not, and how much of the success/failure can be attributed to the use of the web. It will probably take a few years before these issues are settled with some (semi)definitive evidence. In the meantime, it's time for experiments, lots and lots of them.

I think we already have some evidence that short video explanations of concepts / phenomena / examples, à la Sal Khan, work well. Hour-long video lectures? Not much, unless they are delivered by rock-star teachers. As the experiments progress, we will get a clearer picture of the kinds of things that work well online. The IHE story also touches on this experimental nature of MITx:

The goal of developing virtual laboratories and software that automatically assesses students’ ability to vanquish complex problems and tasks is not to eliminate the need for real, live professors, says Sussman; it is to figure out what parts of the face-to-face delivery model can be automated so professors and students can double-down on the pieces of an MIT education that are oriented to apprenticeship.

MITx may have the official backing of its parent institution, and others, like Udacity and Coursera, may have the "brand pull" of some of their charismatic founder-teachers. [And a company called 2tor seems to be making waves, too, with its "expensive" model.] But these are all just early experiments -- online education is yet to get out of its Friendster days.

Friday, April 06, 2012

Cartoons


  1. xkcd on chemists.

  2. SMBC on mathematicians. [And this one, on the life cycle of a physicist, is worth another look/link!

Unintended Consequences of Regulations: PhD Thesis Factories


A company in Mylapore [in Chennai] that calls itself a “research guide organisation” agrees to work on a Ph.D thesis for a cost of Rs. 1.5 lakh.

“We should be informed about the title eight months in advance. We take care of the entire thesis — right from the title till the work is completed. We will be in constant touch with the candidate and every 15 days we will mail them the details. Also we train them for viva-voce,” says Ganesh, an employee of an outsourcing firm. His company claims that it has students from almost all the universities in India, and from other countries such as UAE and U.K. for master's work too. “In India, the demand for master's thesis work is less,” he adds.

Another company in Vadapalani [also in Chennai] offers to complete the thesis work in the engineering and science domains. “Our professors and experts are in various parts of the State. Some are attached to universities while others are full-time employees. The candidate can contact them over phone. The guide should not be informed as the thesis would not be accepted if it is prepared by someone else,” a staff at the company told this correspondent when asked about the procedures involved.

There's a lot more in M. Lavanya's story in The Hindu.

I got to this article through this post by L (who saw it in a G+ post by my colleague Vishwesha Guttal). L offers this explanation for this unethical trend:

The rush to somehow beg, borrow or buy a PhD is something I have been lamenting about in my blog. This is a fallout of the requirement by the UGC for a PhD if one wants one's scale etc. This is the driver of this gold rush.

This point was also made by Prof. S.R. Hashim in his talk in the Workshop on Academic Ethics held in Chennai last July.

‘Plagiarism cases are also fuelled by the race to publish more as our education system demands a Ph D degree with at least ten research publications as the minimum criteria for the post of professor’, noted S. R. Hashim (Forum for Global Knowledge Sharing). [Source: Richa Malhotra's Current Science report on the Workshop]

* * *

Related post: Final Year Project from 2005!

Thursday, April 05, 2012

Flynn Effect for the Physique?


... research by The Economist finds that the average British size-14 pair of women’s trousers is today more than four inches wider at the waist than a size 14 in the 1970s, and over three inches wider at the hips.

From this short post at Graphic Detail.

Research on Asterix et al


Following a comment by L that "As for actual comic books, Asterix deserves a thesis," I did a quick Google Scholar search for Asterix Obelix, and was surprised to find some 2400+ entries.

Long story short: most of it is pretty grim [see footnote], but this one is a gem: Traumatic brain injuries in illustrated literature: experience from a series of over 700 head injuries in the Asterix comic books. You can imagine the researchers having a lot of fun, and laughing all the way to their academic CV with a "Clinical Article". To paraphrase Asterix, "These Germans are crazy!"

Here's the abstract:

Background The goal of the present study was to analyze the epidemiology and specific risk factors of traumatic brain injury (TBI) in the Asterix illustrated comic books. Among the illustrated literature, TBI is a predominating injury pattern.

Methods A retrospective analysis of TBI in all 34 Asterix comic books was performed by examining the initial neurological status and signs of TBI. Clinical data were correlated to information regarding the trauma mechanism, the sociocultural background of victims and offenders, and the circumstances of the traumata, to identify specific risk factors.

Results Seven hundred and four TBIs were identified. The majority of persons involved were adult and male. The major cause of trauma was assault (98.8%). Traumata were classified to be severe in over 50% (GCS 3–8). Different neurological deficits and signs of basal skull fractures were identified. Although over half of head-injury victims had a severe initial impairment of consciousness, no case of death or permanent neurological deficit was found. The largest group of head-injured characters was constituted by Romans (63.9%), while Gauls caused nearly 90% of the TBIs. A helmet had been worn by 70.5% of victims but had been lost in the vast majority of cases (87.7%). In 83% of cases, TBIs were caused under the influence of a doping agent called “the magic potion”.

Conclusions Although over half of patients had an initially severe impairment of consciousness after TBI, no permanent deficit could be found. Roman nationality, hypoglossal paresis, lost helmet, and ingestion of the magic potion were significantly correlated with severe initial impairment of consciousness (p≤0.05).

* * *

Footnote: A lot of the hits are from some particle physics experiments by groups named ASTERIX collaboration and OBELIX collaboration. Which is kinda fun in a geeky-quarky sort of way, but they ended up polluting the search results on research on Asterix.

Thursday Morning Fun


It's great to see this stinging attack by Stephen Colbert who goes after Rick Santorum's ignorant rant about what California universities (don't) teach:

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Rick Santorum Speaks from His Heart - California Colleges
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full EpisodesPolitical Humor & Satire BlogVideo Archive

Wednesday, April 04, 2012

How about writing a thesis on comic books ...


... in the form of a comic book? This awesome idea is what Nick Sousanis is running with, and I think it's great that his advisers/mentors at Columbia University's Teachers College are supporting him.

On his blog, Sousanis has been posting some of his work (including his HASTAC talk in which he presents some ideas that will presumably go into his thesis). I especially liked his letter / tribute to Prof. Maxine Greene the comic entitled Maxine Says.

He gets it exactly right when he highlights the superiority of the comics format over the "research paper":

"I know if I took a research paper I wrote of the same topic, the same density, there's no chance I could hand it to somebody on the street [and they would read it]. My mom might read it, but that's about where it would end."

Tuesday, April 03, 2012

Quantum Politics


David Javerbaum has a geeky-hilarious piece in NYTimes -- A Quantum Theory of Mitt Romney:

Complementarity. In much the same way that light is both a particle and a wave, Mitt Romney is both a moderate and a conservative, depending on the situation (Fig. 1). It is not that he is one or the other; it is not that he is one and then the other. He is both at the same time.

Probability. Mitt Romney’s political viewpoints can be expressed only in terms of likelihood, not certainty. While some views are obviously far less likely than others, no view can be thought of as absolutely impossible. Thus, for instance, there is at any given moment a nonzero chance that Mitt Romney supports child slavery.

Uncertainty. Frustrating as it may be, the rules of quantum campaigning dictate that no human being can ever simultaneously know both what Mitt Romney’s current position is and where that position will be at some future date. This is known as the “principle uncertainty principle.”

Entanglement. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a proton, neutron or Mormon: the act of observing cannot be separated from the outcome of the observation. By asking Mitt Romney how he feels about an issue, you unavoidably affect how he feels about it. More precisely, Mitt Romney will feel every possible way about an issue until the moment he is asked about it, at which point the many feelings decohere into the single answer most likely to please the asker.

Monday, April 02, 2012

R&D Spending at US Universities


The National Science Foundation has released the data for 2010 (2009 data can be found here).

Unsurprisingly, Johns Hopkins tops the list with a research budget of just over 2 billion dollars of which over 85% is from federal funding sources. The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor is at #2 with an R&D spending of $1.184; The Universities of Wisconsin and Washington, at #3 and #4, respectively, join Johns Hopkins and UMichigan to form the rather exclusive Billion Dollar Club.

And the total R&D spending in all the universities exceeded $60 billion in 2010!

A few years ago, I tried to estimate the R&D spending of Indian institutions -- it's a difficult and imprecise exercise because we don't get disaggregated data on academic R&D spending exclusive of spending for higher education [if you know of a source of such data, please let me know]. I arrived at a figure of about 450 million dollars for all of India].

I don't know what India's academic R&D spending is now, some five years since that exercise. Perhaps it has doubled to about a billion dollars? Maybe it's two billion dollars now?

The NSF data on US universities are worth keeping in mind (Johns Hopkins is bigger than all of India!) when people pipe up with questions about when India will become a scientific superpower.

T-Shirt Slogan


We do it on the table
periodically.

Found just below a stylized picture of, what else, the periodic table on the T-shirt of a student in the Solid State and Structural Chemistry Unit at IISc.

D. Balasubramanian on Democratic Societies in Animal Species


In the latest column in his fortnightly Speaking of Science series in The Hindu, Prof. Balasubramanian does a great job of presenting in a popular format a bunch of studies of social lives of animal species -- wasps and cockroaches, red deer and chimpanzees. Fascinating stuff!

Here's the section where he talks about the work of Prof. Raghavendra Gadagkar, a colleague in the Centre for Ecological Sciences at IISc:

Professor Raghavendra Gadagkar of the Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore is a well known “eusociologist” who specializes in insect group behaviour of wasps and bees. He recently described to us how a colony of wasps or bees organizes itself and optimises resources. He points out that while the colony has a queen, workers and drones, this is no monarchy. The queen does not proclaim what the colony should do. (We call her the queen, rather anthropomorphically, since all she does is sit around and lay eggs, and is pampered by a retinue of ‘assistants').

She too is just a worker, a special type of worker whose job is just to keep on laying eggs. There are no palace intrigues, and she too can be, and is, overthrown or displaced by another ‘egg laying machine'. When the colony is divided into two, the second queen-less part makes its own queen.

The “queen” is of course more important than the average worker, but she is not a dictator whose order the colony must obey. It is a group activity, with each member playing its role by common agreement.

How do scientists design experiments to answer questions such as "Do members of species X "practice a ... form of democracy"? Balasubramanian gives an example from the work on cockroaches:

How does one devise an experiment to arrive at such an important conclusion? Halloy's experiment was simple and decisive. He placed the group of cockroaches in a large dish that had three shelters.

The cockroaches did much “consultation” among themselves by touching and probing each other through their antennae, and after such consultation, divided themselves into groups and ran towards the shelters, away from the light (recall they like dark and no light).

The surprise was in the result. Each shelter could hold 50 insects. Yet when 50 cockroaches were used in the experiment, they divided themselves into two groups — 25 went off to shelter 1 and 25 to shelter 2, leaving shelter 3 vacant. When the researchers brought far larger shelters, each housing far more than 50, the cockroaches formed a single group and all went into a single shelter.

Sunday, April 01, 2012

If you are on Facebook


Or, for that matter, any other social networking site, you should read John Brownlee's post about an iPhone app called Girls Around Me: This Creepy App Isn’t Just Stalking Women Without Their Knowledge, It’s A Wake-Up Call About Facebook Privacy.

The post's title says it all!

Charlie Stross expands on Brownlee's story to flesh out the whys and hows of the incentives that drive social networking sites [via Brad DeLong], and their implications for people using those sites:

The problem is this: all social networks run on the principle that if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. They operate as profitable businesses because they encourage users to channel their social interactions via their network, perform data mining on the interests that users disclose, and present the users with advertisements tailored to their interests (which are consequently much more likely to result in a successful sale).

However, to make such micro-targeted advertising practical, the social networks need to motivate their users to disclose information relevant to advertisers. There's no point marketing bacon to Jews or Muslims, so religion is relevant. There's no point marketing turkey to vegans or wheat products to coeliacs, so dietary preferences and medical conditions are relevant. If a user is a member of a subculture associated with a distinctive clothing fashion, that information is relevant to garment vendors. And so on. So Facebook, Orkut, G+ and so on all attempt to induce their users to maximize their self-disclosure and to tie their accounts to as many useful third-party information sources as possible.

You may have noticed that Facebook provides privacy controls, for those who are sufficiently worried about stranger danger to want some illusion of control. Unfortunately the vast majority of people have no idea how widely visible "show to all" really is, or that it might enable the users of apps like "Stalking Targets Around Me" to identify and track them. And it is not in Facebook's commercial interest to promote the use of privacy controls [Emphasis in the original]. If someone is using the privacy controls with all the settings jacked up to 11, it becomes very unlikely that long-lost friends and relatives will be able to make contact with them through Facebook. Which is a lost advertising opportunity, and therefore detrimental to the revenue stream.