Building better scientists and engineers. http://blog.phds.org ...someone who forgoes current income in order to forgo future income." Choice comment from a letter to the Economist in response to their recent article, The Disposable Academic Sat, 22 Jan 2011 17:42:00 +0000 http://blog.phds.org/2011/1/22/the-phd-student-is 2011/1/22/the-phd-student-is A prediction: many postdocs will face higher taxes in the years to come. Why? A recent supreme court ruling on the tax status of a similar group: medical residents. Some postdocs are not required pay social security taxes because their fellowships are not classified as compensation (it's an issue I don't pretend to understand well, but the NPA has a useful summary of postdoc-related tax issues here ). Having to pay social security could make a significant difference in postdocs' take home pay - it's about 7% of your income. And it could mean a hit to universities, too, since employers contribute an equivalent amount. Something to look out for. Fri, 21 Jan 2011 17:49:00 +0000 http://blog.phds.org/2011/1/21/taxing-times 2011/1/21/taxing-times Fellow mathematician Jordan Ellenberg has an unusual take on the NRC's rankings: in Slate he compares the NRC's approach to ranking graduate programs to a new method psychologists are using for classifying mental illnesses. The article is worth reading in full, but the gist of it is that there are two standard approaches to dealing with high dimensional data sets: you can cluster items into groups, and you can use statistical techniques to reduce dimensionality, typically by discarding dimensions that carry the least amount of information. The NRC uses one method, and Ellenberg thinks they might benefit from using the other. The forthcoming Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is switching from a clustering-centric approach to a dimension reducing approach, replacing clusters like "narcissistic personality disorder" with a collection of 6 measurements ("negative emotionality, introversion, antagonism, disinhibition, compulsivity, and schizotypy"). This is apparently leading to grumblings from psychologists who find value in the clusters as opposed to the more abstract 6-dimensional vectors. The NRC has also chosen a dimensionality reduction approach, boiling 20 program measurements down to a single quality dimension. Ellenberg suggests that a clustering approach might be more helpful, and cites a recent experiment: > The NRC, on the other hand, might have done better to toss the idea of rankings entirely, and just clustered the departments into natural groupings. The statistician Leland Wilkinson ran a quick and dirty clustering on the NRC data for math departments. He found that the departments broke up into five clusters: 10 elite departments, a big group of 59 upper-tier departments, 47 lower-tier departments, and two smaller clusters whose meaning, if any, isn't clear to me. This is much coarser information than a full ranking—but it has the advantage of not depending on politically contentious choices as to which criteria matter most. It's an interesting idea, and I think there's some value to the approach. Indeed, the Carnegie Foundation already does something similar for universities, though probably not in a particularly statistically rigorous fashion. Having well chosen clusters would provide for saner comparisons - it doesn't really make sense to compare some kinds of programs directly, as they really cater to very different audiences with different goals. That said, I very much doubt that the clustering approach would prove any more satisfactory than what the NRC actually did. Do you think that a prospective student or department chair would be any happier to learn that a program fell into a set of 59 "upper-tier departments" than to know that the program ranked between 16th and 27th on the NRC's quality scale? While a clustering approach sidesteps the need to explicitly choose important criteria, there is very much a devil-in-the-details problem. Different clustering approaches can yield very different clusters. Even the simplest methods involve many choices - at the very least you have to choose a measure of similarity, and that in turn will emphasize and de-emphasize different program characteristics. You're essentially trading an explicit, principled choice about what's important for an implicit and opaque choice. Regardless, I'd be curious to see more details of Wilkinson's approach. I imagine he just did some kind of k-means clustering - simple, but likely interesting. Tue, 11 Jan 2011 02:29:00 +0000 http://blog.phds.org/2011/1/11/the-mathematics-of-narcissism 2011/1/11/the-mathematics-of-narcissism A heartening holiday article in the NY Times this week: A Master’s for Science Professionals Sweeps U.S. Schools. The Professional Science Masters is catching on big time: > The degree, which a few universities quietly pioneered in the mid-1990s, combines graduate studies in science or mathematics and business management courses. In 2008, 58 universities were offering the professional science master’s degree, or P.S.M., according to the Council of Graduate Schools in Washington. By the start of this academic year, the number had nearly doubled to 103, and is set to climb further. The number is certain to grow because the professional science master’s degree is being adopted by at least six state university systems. The great thing about the PSM is that interaction with industry plays a big role in the degree. Students spend time in internships so they learn skills that they can't get in universities, and industry gets technology transfer through students. More importantly, to run successful programs, universities have to build relationships with local companies, which is a great way for faculty members to get clued in about what kinds of skills working scientists outside of academia really need. Kudos to the Sloan Foundation for getting the ball rolling and to the NSF for additional funding. A PSM + a PhD sounds like a much more effective ticket to a great industry job than a regular PhD. Given the ratio of PhDs to faculty positions, we'll need a lot more PSMs. Tue, 28 Dec 2010 17:19:00 +0000 http://blog.phds.org/2010/12/28/professional-science 2010/12/28/professional-science This weeks Economist has an article subtitled, "Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time" (subscription required). Many of the items reported are familiar for those who read phds.org, but a few new things stood out: PhD production is growing rapidly outside the US. This means possibly additional opportunities in overseas universities, but greater competition for filling them.: > Between 1998 and 2006 the number of doctorates handed out in all OECD countries grew by 40%, compared with 22% for America. PhD production sped up most dramatically in Mexico, Portugal, Italy and Slovakia. Even Japan, where the number of young people is shrinking, churned out about 46% more PhDs. This statistic was particularly striking: > the production of PhDs has far outstripped demand for university lecturers. In a recent book, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, an academic and a journalist, report that America produced more than 100,000 doctoral degrees between 2005 and 2009. In the same period there were just 16,000 new professorships. I'm puzzled by their PhD production numbers - 100,000 sounds pretty low to me - but the 6-to-1 ratio of PhDs to professorships sounds similar to what I've heard for the fraction of life sciences postdocs that ever get tenure track positions. Indeed, from Richard Freeman: > There is a glut of postdocs too. Dr Freeman concluded from pre-2000 data that if American faculty jobs in the life sciences were increasing at 5% a year, just 20% of students would land one. PhDs outside of academia often end up doing things not closely related to their studies, so their advanced degrees don't buy them much additional earning power: > A study in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management by Bernard Casey shows that British men with a bachelor’s degree earn 14% more than those who could have gone to university but chose not to. The earnings premium for a PhD is 26%. But the premium for a master’s degree, which can be accomplished in as little as one year, is almost as high, at 23%. In some subjects the premium for a PhD vanishes entirely. PhDs in maths and computing, social sciences and languages earn no more than those with master’s degrees. The premium for a PhD is actually smaller than for a master’s degree in engineering and technology, architecture and education. The suggested remedies are standard fare: better training in transferable skills and better metrics. One interesting concrete realization of the training improvements is the UK's New Route PhD . Mon, 20 Dec 2010 16:18:00 +0000 http://blog.phds.org/2010/12/20/the-disposable-academic 2010/12/20/the-disposable-academic So says the Measures of Effective Teaching Project, a major ($45M) effort to assess teacher quality funded by the Gates Foundation. Preliminary findings were released earlier in the week. Key quote from the report: > When a teacher teaches multiple classes, student perceptions of his or her practice are remarkably consistent across different groups of students. Moreover, student perceptions in one class or one academic year predict large differences in student achievement gains in other classes taught by the same teacher, especially in math. In other words, when students report positive classroom experiences, those classrooms tend to achieve greater learning gains, and other classrooms taught by the same teacher appear to do so as well. There's no reason to believe that graduate students (or undergraduates for that matter) would be any less able to assess the quality of their instruction. One important thing to note is that the questions asked were not about how much students liked their teachers: > Student feedback need not be a popularity contest. We asked detailed questions about various aspects of students’ experience in a given teacher’s classroom. Some questions had a stronger relationship to a teacher’s value-added than others. The most predictive aspects of student perceptions are related to a teacher’s ability to control a classroom and to challenge students with rigorous work. Presumably control of the classroom is much less of an issue outside of K-12, but I would imagine it would not be too difficult to craft some useful questions about challenge in the classroom. One interesting experiment: in their assessment of graduate programs, the National Academies asked a set of students in a few subjects a set of questions about their perceptions of the quality of their education. I'd be curious to see (1) how much assessments varied from department to department, (2) to what extent assessments agree with external assessments of quality, and most importantly (3) what departmental attributes are most strongly associated with student perceptions of quality. Fri, 17 Dec 2010 02:23:00 +0000 http://blog.phds.org/2010/12/17/students-know-effective-teaching-when-they-see-it 2010/12/17/students-know-effective-teaching-when-they-see-it From Wired, an alternative to agencies and foundations for science funding: 3 different Kiva-style microfinance organizations that pool small donations from many individuals to fund particular projects. This kind of thing can't scale to anything NIH-like - the NIH's annual budget is literally one million times greater than the total raised by all three projects - but the process is interesting. Consider what your project proposal would have to look like if you were going through a source like EurekaFund. Instead of dense, highly technical, carefully footnoted proposals, you would need to produce a readily understandable summary web site, figure out ways to publicize your work, and have a proposal that is directed more at an educated lay audience. All these things would be valuable exercises for scientists in general. For one thing, having more understandable explanations of the potential impact of one's work would likely make scientific witch hunts more difficult. Better dissemination mechanisms would likely also increase the impact of one's work - after all, your research does no good if nobody knows it exists. Here's an interesting idea for the NSF: require that proposals include a 1-2 page summary suitable for an educated, non-specialist audience and include these summaries in their online database of proposals. Or better, request/require that funding recipients disseminate findings online and report the URL to the NSF so that results of work (including work in progress) can be included in the database of funded projects. That way the NSF can show impact. An interesting thought experiment: imagine what the funding process would look like if grant recipients had to raise some minimum amount of funds (say, a few thousand dollars) from the general public, with self-funding and donations from family excluded Fri, 10 Dec 2010 02:31:00 +0000 http://blog.phds.org/2010/12/10/science-funding-an-alternative-approach 2010/12/10/science-funding-an-alternative-approach The New York Times recently launched a crowdsourcing initiative to see how people would choose to balance the federal budget. The Times gave people the option to pick and choose from a collection of budget cutting measures that had been proposed by various committees and think tanks: The Simpson/Bowles deficit commission, the Cato Institute, the Sustainable Defense Task Force, etc. Savings for each of the initiatives were calculated by the Congressional Budget Office, the Tax Policy Center, and various economists. Overall, they presented people with a balanced, sanity checked set of choices and asked them to choose among them. It's been an interesting exercise with some results that have been surprising (at least to me). The Republicans, perhaps inspired by the Times, have decided to undertake their own crowdsourced budget cutting project. Their initial phase involves having people identify "wasteful" NSF spending. Unlike the Times' project, this one is more of a free-for-all, with participants being egged on to attack specific projects. > Step One: Look for Questionable Grants > Click here to open the National Science Foundation website. In the "Search Award For" field, try some keywords, such as: success, culture, media, games, social norm, lawyers, museum, leisure, stimulus, etc. to bring up grants. If you find a grant that you believe is a waste of your tax dollars, be sure to record the award number. > > Step Two: Submit Award Numbers > Use this form to submit the award numbers of grants that you believe are wasteful; we will publish a report outlining the grants identified by the YouCut community. If you search on the suggested terms, you come up with some surprising presumed targets. A search for "success" yields as its first result a grant in support of UMBC's very successful program to increase minority participation in the sciences. Is this really the kind of thing we want to go after in budget cutting? "culture" turns up lots of things on bacterial culture, but also a grant that looks at Latino youth learning and development and one that looks at free software development. Not being an sociologist, I can't speak to the value of the first grant, but in my own field, free software is *incredibly* important, and understanding the preconditions for successful open source projects is vital. There are few more cost-effective ways of supporting IT than encouraging more open source / free software development. I have no idea what "media" is meant to turn up. Perhaps this grant on the ethics of synthetic biology? Given how potentially scary synthetic bio could turn out to be, thinking about ethics early seems like a wise move. Maybe this (awesome sounding!) grant in support of automated identification of emotional state? Seems like a great way to pinpoint potential terrorists in crowds or to have your computer respond to you in ways appropriate to your mood. I challenge readers to figure out what specific grants Eric Cantor had in mind for the suggested search terms. Look out, NSF grant recipients. Your fates may be about to be decided by the masses. Thu, 02 Dec 2010 16:06:00 +0000 http://blog.phds.org/2010/12/2/nsf-in-the-crosshairs 2010/12/2/nsf-in-the-crosshairs Science has a fascinating study at the University of Colorado at Boulder: a simple, 30 minute intervention erased the gender gap in physics grades in a randomized, double-blind study. (Here are two summaries for those without a subscription.) The gist: in weeks 1 and 4 of the 15 week course, students spent 15 minutes writing about either things that they valued or things that someone else might value . For women in the treatment group, the gender gap in exam scores largely vanished (women's scores were below men's, but not by a statistically significant amount), and they outperformed men slightly on a standardized test of physics knowledge. Men outperformed the women in the control group. From the abstract: > Values affirmation reduced the male-female performance and learning difference substantially and elevated women's modal grades from the C to B range. Benefits were strongest for women who tended to endorse the stereotype that men do better than women in physics. The outcomes are consistent with existing research on stereotype threat, and the intervention is similar to standard mechanisms used in psychology for priming) people. The experiment certainly sounds promising enough to warrant replication - that would be a great (and probably quite inexpensive) thing for an interested foundation to catalyze. What I wonder is, assuming that this can be proven to work, what is the mechanism for getting more physics (or other S&E fields with big gender disparities) classes to adopt this kind of remedy? Certainly it is something that is far outside of what people have experience with. Wed, 01 Dec 2010 15:26:00 +0000 http://blog.phds.org/2010/12/1/gender-differences-in-science-a-cure 2010/12/1/gender-differences-in-science-a-cure Harvard CS professor and blogger Matt Welsh just announced that he will be leaving Harvard to join Google. His reasons sound similar to my own motivation for leaving Dartmouth 12 years ago for Microsoft: > The cynical view is that as an academic systems researcher, the very best possible outcome for your research is that someone at Google or Microsoft or Facebook reads one of your papers, gets inspired by it, and implements something like it internally. Chances are they will have to change your idea drastically to get it to actually work, and you'll never hear about it. And of course the amount of overhead and red tape (grant proposals, teaching, committee work, etc.) you have to do apart from the interesting technical work severely limits your ability to actually get to that point. At Google, I have a much more direct route from idea to execution to impact. I can just sit down and write the code and deploy the system, on more machines than I will ever have access to at a university. I personally find this far more satisfying than the elaborate academic process. For me, it is much more interesting to actually *do* things than to write papers about hypothetically doing things. Academia doesn't always do a great job at supporting doers, which I think is a real shame, since practice often drives theory. In any case, Google is a great environment for researchers with the right mindset. Welcome aboard, Matt! Tue, 23 Nov 2010 16:35:00 +0000 http://blog.phds.org/2010/11/23/leaving-academia 2010/11/23/leaving-academia