crowdsourcing

There are only a few buzzwords which irritate me more than this one. But what exactly is crowdsourcing? According to Wiktionary, it means “delegating a task to a large diffuse group, usually without substantial monetary compensation”.

my yawning gap year

28 February 2009. I woke up in the morning (hey, that sounds like blues!) realising that I am not going to work today, or next week, or next month. Freedom!

When I were a lad, the concept of gap year was unheard of. After the school, young men were facing a choice of either university or a two-year spell in the army — or, with any luck, three-year spell in the navy. As exciting as it was, the military stint never appealed to me; six years in the university looked so much more prudent. I started working full-time couple months after graduation (and I was working part-time for almost three years before that). Work, work, work. Work.

We were taught that regular employment is good and absence thereof is bad. I don’t know, I quite enjoy the fact that I can sleep as much as I want while I am, er, on me career break. Speaking of which: according to Wikipedia,

The <gap year> market demographic is split into those aged 18—24 (pre, during and post university), 25—35 (‘career gap’, also known as ‘Career Break’ and ‘Career Sabbatical’) and 55—65 (pre and post retirement gappers).

Now I know: mine is post-sabbatical pre-preretirement gap — apparently underoccupied ecological niche.

no landing cards for me

Yesterday, while waiting in a queue to the passport control at Stansted airport, I was pondering how lucky I am to have British passport. I don’t have to fill the landing card anymore.

back in my student years

Circa 1986. The professor at our department of biophysics is saying (to nobody in particular):

«Я только что сказал моим студентам что работать в науке надо много. А теперь я надеваю пальто и иду домой.»

“I just told my students that in science one has to work a lot. And now I put on my coat and go home.”

what’s wrong with science blogging?

There was an interesting post by David Crotty entitled Science and Web 2.0: Talking About Science vs. Doing Science on The Scholarly Kitchen blog.

Even without new online technologies, scientists already spend a substantial portion of their time communicating. They share results with peers, plan future experiments with collaborators, give talks, write papers, teach, etc.

Frankly, I don’t see why any of these activities are incompatible with blogging. Quite the reverse: blogging can be a way to improve the communication. If you give a presentation, whether at a conference or in a classroom, why not to post it online? And is there any better way to share your results than to blog about them?

New social media endeavors ask scientists to devote even more time to communication, but it’s unclear where participants are supposed to find that time. Every second spent blogging, chatting on FriendFeed, or leaving comments on a PLoS paper is a second taken away from other activities. Those other activities have direct rewards towards advancement. It’s hard to justify dropping them for activities backed by vague promises that “you will be one of the early adopters and will be recognized and respected for this in the future.” That’s a tough gamble for most to take, and scientists are unlikely to risk current status for a leg up in the event that sweeping societal changes occur in how we fund, employ, and judge scientific achievement.

Thus, it is inherent conservatism of those who are “unlikely to risk current status” that prevents the scientific community from embracing new technology. If so, then that’s too bad for science. But really, should we worry?

The author discriminates between scientists and people who talk about science, for example... teachers. Excuse me. I heard there are many people in academia whose positions include a lot of teaching. On the one hand, “scientists are no different than other humans” (and most people don’t blog, ergo most scientists shouldn’t either). On the other hand, it is implied that they require the communication tools different from “mainstream” ones. I do recall that in 1980s there was a belief that scientific computing should be done on specialised workstations, not PCs or Macs. Now most of the scientific computing is done exactly on the same PCs and Macs.

The blogging in science may never become a mainstream activity. Or maybe it is the future of scientific communication. Consider this: people blog because they like blogging, not because they have nothing else to do. Also, people go to science because science is fun. While writing grant proposals and, in most cases, writing research papers is not fun. (That also explains why reading grant proposals and most research papers is not fun either.) The sooner scientists leave these not-fun activities behind, the better. Or so one can hope.

i use the eighty/twenty rule

The Pareto principle, widely known as 80-20 rule, has been used, abused and ridiculed innumerable times. Perhaps the funniest joke involving the rule is this one:

Chicago Driving 80/20 rule: 80% of your waving will be done with 20% of your fingers.

i ask too many questions

I am getting tired of constant rewriting of my CV. (Not that I did any this year, you understand, but this is besides the point.) But then, I am easily tired of any repetitive useless work. Why don’t they have an analogue of OpenID in the world of CVs? That would save everybody’s time and effort, right? Right. And the answer is: maybe they (whoever “they” are) don’t want to save anybody’s time and effort. That will put all those CV writing agencies out of business, and it’s bad for the economy.

Consider this template for application for employment. The template itself is only six pages, however I guess the complete application should be the size of a short monograph. Here are some highlights (colouring is mine).

The application must be structured as specified by the template below,

or else.

4 DECLARATION OF INTENT/VISION
Describe your vision and your plans for the future with respect to both scientific and educational activities, within the framework of the employment sought (maximum one page).

5 SCIENTIFIC EXPERTISE
5.1 Description of research activities (maximum two pages). <...> The description should include an assessment of the applicant’s independence and productivity.

6 TEACHING EXPERTISE
6.1. Self-reflection over the role of teacher
The description of teaching expertise should make clear not only what the applicant has done but also how it has been done, why it was done in just this way, and the results. The applicant is to state his or her fundamental educational principles and the way these are expressed in practice.

What could be the “results” I wonder. “90% of my students became managers”?

The self-reflection is to have a maximum length of five pages when applying for employment as professor or senior lecturer, and a maximum length of one page when applying for employment as postdoctoral research fellow or associate senior lecturer.

You see, even poor research post-docs are not free from writing this nonsense.

9 PERSONAL ASSESSMENT
The applicant should describe his or her own personality in a manner that makes it possible to assess the ability to work with others, and the suitability for employment as described in the job announcement.

(Isn’t it the job of the evaluation committee to decide on the suitability for employment? Is anyone going to write “I am not suitable for employment” anyway?)

My first reaction was: are they bonkers? I mean, who is going to write all this rubbish? And perhaps more importantly: who is going to read it?

Calm down, I tell myself, there must be some sense in it. I can think of two reasons to insist that the application conforms to this template. First: to reduce the number of applicants. Most people have better things to do and therefore won’t even bother. Second: to pre-select those candidates who are ready to sacrifice a few days of their lives to write a long meaningless document that nobody is going to read. It gives the prospective candidates a taste of things to come. In academic world, it is not reading that counts, it’s writing.

loose ends

Ten years ago or so, I attended the lecture of Sydney Brenner. And what a treat it was. He managed to keep the audience’s attention for an hour without showing a single slide or using any other prop.

debating tenure

In one of Friends episodes, Ross is getting tenure and is very excited about it. (You can tell that the series was drawing to the end.)

“You know what the best part about this is? I can never be fired.”

Here is another thing Ross gets wrong, although he simply repeats a popular myth. But what exactly is tenure? The latest (October/November 2009) issue of Academic Matters is dedicated to this strange creature, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

In words of Michiel Horn,

Tenure is not without drawbacks. But these are the price that has to be paid to protect the innovative, the unconventional, and the unpopular, those whose fields of academic specialization have fallen into disfavour and, most of all, those who do work, sometimes very important work, that takes a long time to complete and leads to no commercially useful results.

On the contrary, Michael Bliss argues that

The claim that tenure is a necessary precondition of academic freedom is inherently and monstrously unjust to non-tenured academics. These are the scholars, often more adventurous and outspoken than the old and established, who most need academic freedom. To them the institution of tenure is as though society offered a guaranteed annual income to everyone but the poor. Words like “hypocrisy” and “dishonesty” come to mind.

The essay of Mark Kingwell is probably the best-written one:

All in all, tenure remains sacrosanct because nobody with any standing has a stake in criticizing it. There is another major factor in tenure’s culture of belief and that is simple psychology, exacerbated by the rampant professional envy of the academic world. The main reason people want tenure is because other people have it. Many academics do not admit this, maybe not even to themselves, because standard arguments about academic freedom are available to them, arguments that make tenure’s critics look crass.

But now try offering a few deeper objections. Who needs academic freedom in a constitutional democracy, where freedom of expression is already guaranteed? Or, more slyly, what possible objection could there be to speaking frankly about topics in which most people have utterly no interest?

In his view, instead of protecting academic freedom, tenure actually stifles it:

Unfortunately, but to nobody’s surprise, the institution of tenure tends to make academic departments conservative. Since tenure decisions are made by senior faculty, all of them tenured themselves, there is a natural tendency to reproduce the status quo. Academics deny this, but their acts betray them.

Sandra Acker investigates whether the tenure is still a gender issue.

The various forms of appraisal and evaluation may incorporate unacknowledged gendered norms. Most of the assessors (senior faculty) are men, and the reward system is biased toward research and publications rather than teaching and service. In one study, the “successful academic” was described in interviews as “someone whose first priority was research, who worked long hours, who defined themselves in terms of their work, who had experienced no break in career, and who had an uninterrupted forward movement in their career profile.”

Pat Finn advocates the abolition of tenure in favour of granting academics the same job security as ejoyed by other professionals.

Academic freedom is special, prized, and to be defended at all costs. Tenure is not.

She acknowledges, however, that her opinion is unlikely to be embraced by academia anytime soon:

So tenure will likely remain unchanged. And academics will continue to defend it when challenged by critics who believe in the myth of “a job for life”.

ants in the sugar-bowl

In her brave, honest and funny book, The Wisdom of Whores, Elizabeth Pisani kicks a lot of asses and sacrifices quite a few sacred cows “on the untidy altar of Reality”. First-hand facts and elementary maths are there to expose myths such as that AIDS is necessarily “a development problem”. Or that “more premarital sex translates into more HIV”. The myths that cost billions of dollars. And human lives.