Links

1. FY Fluid Dynamics on Dead salmon swimming.
2. Editorial in Nature: China sets a strong example on how to address scientific fraud. "New measures introduce what could be the world’s strongest disincentive for misconduct so far."
3. David D. Perlmutter in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Academic Job Hunts From Hell: Keep on Script. "The job interview is not a spontaneous exchange, it’s a minefield."
4. Debraj Ray and Arthur Robson in Vox EU: Certified random co-authors. "This column -- whose authors both have surnames starting with R, one of whom was once recommended a “wonderful paper” on which he was a co-author -- proposes a new mechanism for co-authorship. It involves a coin toss to order co-authors, and an institutionally ratified symbol to signal random order. Such a mechanism would be fairer and more efficient, and it would displace alphabetical order through voluntary participation alone."
5. Leonie Mueck in Nature Nanotechnology: Report the awful truth!. "Negative and null results are routinely produced across all scientific disciplines, but rarely get reported. The key to combat the biases arising from this mismatch lies in disseminating all details about a work." rather than just positive results."

Richard J. Light: "How to Live Wisely"

Harvard Graduate School of Education's Richard Light talks about an interesting seminar/discussion course in his NYTimes column [Hat tip to an alumnus from our department via e-mail]. The short course (more like a module running into several sessions) is built around a set of exercises which make the students not just think through their core values, but also consider situations where they might lead to conflicting conclusions. Here's one of them:

This exercise presents a parable of a happy fisherman living a simple life on a small island. The fellow goes fishing for a few hours every day. He catches a few fish, sells them to his friends, and enjoys spending the rest of the day with his wife and children, and napping. He couldn’t imagine changing a thing in his relaxed and easy life.

A recent M.B.A. visits this island and quickly sees how this fisherman could become rich. He could catch more fish, start up a business, market the fish, open a cannery, maybe even issue an I.P.O. Ultimately he would become truly successful. He could donate some of his fish to hungry children worldwide and might even save lives.

“And then what?” asks the fisherman.

“Then you could spend lots of time with your family,” replies the visitor. “Yet you would have made a difference in the world. You would have used your talents, and fed some poor children, instead of just lying around all day.”

We ask students to apply this parable to their own lives. Is it more important to you to have little, accomplish little, yet be relaxed and happy and spend time with family? Or is it more important to you to work hard, use your talents, perhaps start a business, maybe even make the world a better place along the way?

Typically, this simple parable leads to substantial disagreement.

Links: Higher Ed Edition

1. The most depressing thing you will read this month. Kendall Powell in Nature (April 2015): The future of the postdoc. "There is a growing number of postdocs and few places in academia for them to go. But change could be on the way."

2. As usual, Google has figured it all out!

3. Ivan Oransky in The Conversation: Unlike a Rolling Stone: is science really better than journalism at self-correction?

4. Richard Van Noorden, Brendan Maher & Regina Nuzzo in Nature (October 2014): The top 100 papers. "Nature explores the most-cited research of all time."

Links

1. A great infographic on migration patterns of international students.

2. Duncan Watts at BuzzFeed Books: Should you go to grad school? "It’s expensive, time consuming, and risky ... so is it right for you?"

   ... Certainly it was a great experience for me, but it’s not for everyone. Grad students are by nature competitive, analytical types who are already predisposed to overthinking everything, so the intensity and uncertainty of grad school make it a breeding ground for insecurity and anxiety. It’s definitely not something you should subject yourself to because you can’t think of anything else to do, nor should you suffer through it on the grounds that you’ll be happier with the academic career that it leads to. There are plenty of miserable academics out there as well, and lots of great and interesting things to do with your life that don’t require a Ph.D., not to mention the five to seven years that most people spend getting one. Don’t sign up for it lightly.

The Myth of STEM Shortage

Robert Charette sets the record straight in this IEEE Spectrum piece. It *is* US-centric, but I think there's something in it for folks elsewhere too.

Sidebar
* * *
See also Noah Smith: What Tech-Worker Shortage?

---

The situation is so dismal that governments everywhere are now pouring billions of dollars each year into myriad efforts designed to boost the ranks of STEM workers. President Obama has called for government and industry to train 10 000 new U.S. engineers every year as well as 100 000 additional STEM teachers by 2020. And until those new recruits enter the workforce, tech companies like Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft are lobbying to boost the number of H-1B visas—temporary immigration permits for skilled workers—from 65 000 per year to as many as 180 000. The European Union is similarly introducing the new Blue Card visa to bring in skilled workers from outside the EU. The government of India has said it needs to add 800 new universities, in part to avoid a shortfall of 1.6 million university-educated engineers by the end of the decade.

And yet, alongside such dire projections, you’ll also find reports suggesting just the opposite—that there are more STEM workers than suitable jobs. One study found, for example, that wages for U.S. workers in computer and math fields have largely stagnated since 2000. Even as the Great Recession slowly recedes, STEM workers at every stage of the career pipeline, from freshly minted grads to mid- and late-career Ph.D.s, still struggle to find employment as many companies, including Boeing, IBM, and Symantec, continue to lay off thousands of STEM workers.

How do people react when someone says, "I'm a math major"?

On his G+ stream, +John Baez posted this video, and said this in his commentary:

I can't honestly say "math is hard" for me - at least, not compared to other things. For me it's always been one of the easier things to do well. However, that just meant I got far enough that I met people who were a lot better at math than me: actual geniuses. So her advice that you should give yourself some slack - that applies to me too. Trying to gain a sense of self-worth from doing something better than other people is self-defeating. I'm happiest when I forget that baloney and focus on the beauty of the task at hand. [Bold emphasis added]

Here's the video:

Convocation Speeches

It has been a loooong while since one of these posts appeared here. Here are some classics (one of them is pretty old, and the other two are from this year).

1. Tim Minchin at the University of Western Australia (2013): video (also embedded below), text.

2. George Saunders at Syracuse University (2013): text, noisy video.

3. David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College (2013): audio at YouTube, text.

Absolute Must-Read Post of the Year

The Awesomest 7-Year Postdoc or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-Track Faculty Life.

That's the title of the post by Prof. Radhika Nagpal, professor of computer science at Harvard. The post lays out, with a great deal of humour, the specific schemes and hacks (including "I stopped taking advice") that helped Nagpal navigate a 7-year long journey to tenureland. To me, the best part of her piece is the way she frames her junior faculty job -- as 7 long years of job security! It is this framing that allows her to enjoy the journey. The rest of the article offers some great tips for prioritizing travel and service commitments, work-life balance, recovering from bad news, and time management.

Here's an excerpt -- really, you should go read all of it, like, right now!

And in that moment it suddenly dawned on me what was taking me down. We (myself included) admire the obsessively dedicated. At work we hail the person for whom science and teaching is above all else, who forgets to eat and drink while working feverously on getting the right answer, who is always there to have dinner and discussion with eager undergrads. At home we admire the parent who sacrificed everything for the sake of a better life for their children, even at great personal expense. The best scientists. The best parents. Anything less is not giving it your best.

And then I had an even more depressing epiphany. That in such a world I was destined to suck at both.

Needless to say it took a lot of time, and a lot of tears, for me to dig myself out of that hole. And when I finally did, it came in the form of another epiphany. That what I can do, is try to be the best whole person that I can be. And that is *not* a compromise. That *is* me giving it my very best. [Emphasis in the original]

Bad at Math

Ben Orlin, who is now a math teacher, has a fabulous personal essay on What It Feels Like to Be Bad at Math. An excerpt:

As the day [of my presentation in the seminar class on topology] approached, I began to panic. I called my dad, a warm and gentle soul. It didn’t help. I called my sister, a math educator who always lifts my spirits. It didn’t help. Backed into a corner, I scheduled a meeting with the professor to throw myself at his mercy.

I was sweating in the elevator up to his office. The worst thing was that I admired him. Most world-class mathematicians view teaching undergraduates as a burdensome act of charity, like ladling soup for unbathed children. He was different: perceptive, hardworking, sincere. And here I was, knocking on his office door, striding in to tell him that I had come up short. An unbathed child asking for soup.

Teachers have such power. He could have crushed me if he wanted.

He didn’t, of course. [...] [Bold emphasis added]

Bonus: Fistfuls of Sand: (or, Why It Pays to Be a Stubborn Teacher) from Orlin's blog.

Links

1. My colleague Vishwesha Guttal has some very good advice for students who write to professors asking for short-term positions: How to write an email/application for a short-term or summer research internship/project?

2. Lisa Wade at Sociological Images: How many PhDs are professors? [Some data on the academic job market in the US].

3. William Bowen in CHE: Walk Deliberately, Don't Run, Toward Online Education.

4. Frances Woolley at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative: Why "Culture" is a Lousy Explanation.

   ... [Culture] has no only trivial predictive value. Will the preference for sons persist over time, or will it gradually fade away? Cultural explanations cannot say: culture simply is what it is.

   Another problem with "culture" is that it can explain anything. People in Uttar Pradesh select for sons?" It must be their culture. People in Kerala don't select for sons?" It must be their culture. Since "culture" is compatible with any conceivable set of facts, it is not falsifiable.

Video of the Day

Grad School Scam [via Fabio Rojas]:

Assessing Academic Researchers

...the Stanford Chemistry department way.

From the Angewandte Chemie April 2012 editorial by Prof. Richard N. Zare:

How do we judge someone’s worth as a researcher?
[...]
We do not look into how much funding the candidate has brought to the university in the form of grants. We do not count the number of published papers; we also do not rank publications according to authorship order. We do not use some elaborate algorithm that weighs publications in journals according to the impact factor of the journal. We seldom discuss h-index metrics, which aim to measure the impact of a researcher’s publications. We simply ask outside experts, as well as our tenured faculty members, whether a candidate has significantly changed how we understand chemistry.

That is, 'outside expert opinion' through 10 to 15 letters of recommendation from international experts. Perhaps more RTI compliant than the MIT way of assessing tenure-worthiness?

These views are presented by Prof. Zare, while discussing the tenure system followed by Stanford CY dept., as a contrast to the evaluation based largely on "scientometric" data being followed by some of the universities in China and India that he learnt during his recent trip.

He goes on to discuss the inadequacy of h-index and citations to judge the early career of a researcher.

More... [DOI 10.1002/anie.201201011]

(Thanks to an email share by Prof. Krishnaiah)

Advice to Young Faculty and Researchers

No, not by me. At least until the very end of this short note.

How to get tenure at MIT?

Achieving tenure is not possible merely by checking off a series of accomplishments; MIT does not have a list of specific, objective criteria for tenure such as a minimum number of publications in designated journals.

More here [pdf].

Its not all 'tick-nology' at the MIT we gather.

Learning Outcomes

Fresh semester begins today. I begin it by learning new things. Or may be old things in a new way. For instance, I understand 'learning outcomes are not learning objectives'. Because

The learning outcomes approach recognises and encourages learner-centred learning.

That is from a document (pdf download) recommended to me; for assisting primarily 'academics with teaching and unit of study development commitments' in writing their 'learning outcome' in 'higher education courses'.

BTW, 'unit of study', in a language which address Chennai auto drivers as 'transport executives', means 'subject' (a la Thermodynamics).

Michael Lewis on the Fourth Cookie

This is the best commencement speech of 2012.

European Universities and the Two Body Problem

Just a quick note to link to the Crooked Timber post and comments thread on how European universities handle the issue of academic spousal accommodation (one version of which is the Two Body Problem that was the topic of a couple of posts in recent months).

Lots of interesting views in the comments thread there. Go take a look!

Two Body Problem: Cultural Differences?

Sometime last year, we had a great discussion in this post about whether it's better for an academic couple to be upfront about the fact that they are both looking for academic jobs at the same institution (as opposed to, say, applying as individuals in the hope that things will somehow work out). Many people were of the opinion that it was better to be candid about the "second body" right at the time of applying for the job.

That was in the Indian context. Would this advice hold in other job markets as well?

I just read a similar discussion -- the problem is the same (i.e., when is a good time to disclose the "second body"?), but the context is American. The difference is pretty stark: many commenters there appear to share the view of gerty-z, the author of the post, that the candidate has to wait until an offer is in hand before bringing up the second body. Here is the advice, in gerty-z's words:

Here is what I would advise my hypothetical postdoc: Bring up the second-body the minute you have an offer, and not a second sooner. At that point, the faculty has decided they REALLY want to hire you. There is incentive to "solve" the "problem". Instead of just avoid it.

The US laws prohibit personal questions about the candidate's spouse (and about many other things, including the candidate's age); they don't, however, do a good job of preventing people from prying / spying -- one of the commenters there says she "was quizzed once by the chair's wife while we were sightseeing post-formal-interview"!

* * *

Update: Just a couple of links suggested by commenters in two previous posts on this topic:

1. Coming as a Pair: Finding Jobs and Managing Careers in India by Jonaki Sen (who is a faculty member in the Department of Biological sciences and Bioengineering at IIT-K) at the India Bioscience website.

2. Love and the Two Body Problem (published in 2001 in Physics World -- free registration required).

Advice on Grad School ... from a Grad Student

Much of this kind of advice is from academics and other such ex-grad-schoolers. Here's an awesome essay from a current grad student: Graduate Student: To Be or Not To Be; published last month in the IIT-B Student Magazine Insight, it's by Karthik Shekhar, an alumnus who is now doing his PhD at MIT. Some excerpts:

Now back to what’s different about research – exams and quizzes are like short sprints but doing scientific research is the equivalent of running a marathon. You can maintain an extremely unhealthy lifestyle and impress your friends by outrunning them in short sprints thanks to your height or long legs (or vitamin supplements) but you cannot fluke a marathon. Analogously, many of us at the IITs have been ‘nurtured’ to cram lots of information [2] with little or no deep understanding, and reproduce it in a three-hour sanitized setting but real research is a different game. [...]

[...]

Most important lessons of life are learned in the gut, not in the brain [3]. It took me two and a half years into my PhD to understand that my IIT degree, despite its bells and whistles, had left many gaps in my education and work ethic that needed desperate attention. [...]

The footnote #2 in the text takes us to this:

[2] The coaching class empires are to be held singularly responsible for this malady. Yes, I think it is a malady.

Here's his very good advice on picking advisers:

... It is extremely important to pick an advisor who is concerned about your intellectual growth and not just your productivity. Students who are starting up are often swayed by credentials and fail to evaluate the human side of the research advisor: of how flexible he/she will be to your needs and whether you can look up to him/her as a mentor?

* * *

Thanks to Deepak Malani for the link.

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.

Punishing Good Deeds

David Perlmutter has an advice column in The Chronicle of Higher Education. His two recent entries have appeared in a new series on Good Deeds That Are Most Punished: Teaching and Service. Consistent with the premise -- No good deed goes unpunished -- they have amusing anecdotes. Here's one from the second piece:

Beware the kamikaze assignment. For new faculty members, good service deeds that are punished can be those that turn out either to be a colossal waste of time or, worse, end up angering the colleagues who will vote on your tenure.

Take the case of the assistant professor who was hired at a small, liberal-arts college that was increasing its research aspirations. The chair flattered him, saying, "We hired you because of your productivity and research talents; you can help lead the way for the department. I'd like you to write a report for us making recommendations about changing our annual review to put a greater emphasis on research."

The assistant professor felt empowered, threw himself into the project, came back with an incisive memorandum that would help propel the department forward to greatness ... and ended up alienating every single tenured faculty member. The chair, as may happen in such cases, backflipped and disclaimed any support for the tenure tracker who had now been labeled a troublemaker.