Paint it red

I grew up in a socialist country.

I’m reminded of it every time I hear that public health care is socialist, or that financial regulation is socialist, or that regulating the auto industry is socialist, or that taxation is “spreading the wealth” and therefore socialist. I don’t get the impression that this refers to the “socialism” of the Scandinavian variety. More likely, it refers to the Soviet Union and its then-satellite countries – exactly where I was born.

I suppose I should recognize those various socialist things – oppose them, even – as marks of the failed system that I grew up with. But I don’t. Instead, I try to find a way to explain life under socialism to someone who doesn’t know it and I come up short every time. It’s not just explaining why apples are not like oranges. It’s explaining why apples are not like hockey and oranges are not like patio furniture.

Yes, we did have more political repression and government regulation. Yes, we had censorship, rationing and fewer consumer articles. People understand that. But then you mention to someone the high prevalence of tooth decay, and they respond, “sure, I bet you didn’t have fluoridated water”, and then you don’t know if you’ll be able to answer that without going on about it for half an hour, so you smile, say that it was actually a little bit more complicated, and change the subject.

Take for example taxation. Do you think it’s socialist? If so, you’ll be interested to know that neither my parents nor I had ever filed a personal tax return before I left Poland at the age of 23.

I won’t be breaking no rocks

Tom Verlaine and Jimmy Rip:

Therein lies madness

This got me a bit puzzled: why would a comment on this post link to a BBC documentary on Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing?

Given that I don’t know as much about the history of mathematics as I probably should, and that I was too tired late last night to do anything more intellectually challenging, I ended up clicking through and watching all 10 parts of the documentary.

The mathematics involved – Cantor’s hierarchy of different-sized infinities, Boltzmann’s statistical mechanics and entropy, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem – is described remarkably well. An expert might quibble about how some of the explanations are ambiguous and imprecise, especially where it concerns Gödel’s work, but that’s a relatively small price to pay for being able to communicate the excitement, audacity and impact of mathematical ideas to a lay audience. The images and animations are, for the most part, well done and helpful. Several mathematicians and scientists (including Roger Penrose) were interviewed for the documentary, and I am guessing that experts were consulted quite extensively about the mathematical content.

That’s only one part of it, though. The movie chooses to focus on Cantor, Boltzmann, Gödel and Turing not only for their groundbreaking contributions to mathematics, but also for the mental anguish and personal tragedy in their lives. Boltzmann and Turing committed suicide, Cantor and Gödel suffered from mental illness and were hospitalized for it, and Gödel ended up starving himself to death. Now, I understand that these are undisputed historical facts. I also understand that troubled characters make for a more interesting movie. But I’m tired of watching the media portray mathematicians as socially challenged and mentally unstable, not to mention poorly dressed. You’d never know that it is quite possible for a great mathematician to be a well adjusted and fully functional human being, to have a long, happy and accomplished life, or to face and overcome adversity without developing a mental illness.

Congratulations…

… to Willard S. Boyle, the Canadian physicist who shares this year’s Nobel prize in physics with George E. Smith and Charles C. Kao.

The Canadian inventor of technology that led to the birth of digital photography won a Nobel Prize Tuesday. But physicist Willard Boyle had to move to the United States to do his cutting-edge work.

Dr. Boyle, who won the award with former colleague George Smith, warned that managers need to give scientists leeway to come up with the kinds of transformative inventions that are too often stifled by paperwork and red tape.

What scientists face today is “almost disgraceful … The bureaucrats want to get a hold of the money and ask for business plans. Now do you think that George Smith and I ever wrote a business plan? Not at all,” Dr. Boyle, now 85 and retired, told a reporter Tuesday. “You don’t have time to do that kind of baloney.” [...]

News of the prize comes as scholars in Canada and around the world are becoming increasingly concerned about the tendency of governments to wade into research by putting strings on funding. In Canada, moves by the federal government to fund projects directly rather than through arms-length granting councils have come under fire by the academic community, as have restrictions on some money given to the councils.

For recent examples of that, see here or here:

Each Strategic Research Network will receive $5 million over five years through NSERC. They were selected through a peer-reviewed competition and support the research priorities areas identified in the Government of Canada’s Science and Technology (S&T) Strategy.

Click through the first link above if you want to see what the nine networks are. I’m more interested in the list of priority areas:

For the 2009 competition, preliminary applications will only be accepted in three target areas (Advanced Communications and Management of Information, Healthy Environment and Ecosystems, and Sustainable Energy Systems), which have an increased competition budget due to additional earmarked funds received by NSERC.

Would Dr. Boyle and Dr. Smith have qualified? Well, they could fall under “Advanced Communications and Management of Information”, if they were doing their work today. But they did it 40 years ago. That’s right. Digital photography may be relatively new, but Boyle and Smith first came up with their idea back in 1969, almost 20 years before I saw a Commodore 64 for the first time. Boyle retired in 1979. Would it have been a “priority area” back then? At Bell Labs, it didn’t have to be. That’s the point.

I’m sure that the strategic networks are doing excellent work. But what the rest of us need is, in Dr. Boyle’s words, “a chance to do the things [we] want to do.”

Thank you, Dr. Boyle, for speaking for us.

Oy-oy-oy

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) on gay marriage: “Not only is it a radical social idea, it is a purely socialist concept in the final analysis.”

I’m on ur payroll, sipping ur sherry

An offensive and uninformed rant from The Globe And Mail:

“My colleagues do everything they can to get out of teaching,” says Rod Clifton, who works in the faculty of education at the University of Manitoba. “They’d rather not have the students around, because they’d rather do research and stand around and sip sherry.”

Canadian universities now have about 800,000 undergraduates. But as enrolment soared, teaching loads – with the help of strong faculty unions – went down. In Mr. Clifton’s department, for example, the teaching load is six hours a week for one semester of 13 weeks, and nine hours a week for another 13 weeks. That adds up to 195 hours spread over just 26 weeks a year – less, if someone has administrative duties. Of course there’s prep time and marking and so on. But it’s still not much.

Let’s start with the teaching workload. In my department at UBC, we are expected to spend 40% of our time on research, 40% on teaching, and 20% on administrative work. That would translate to 2 full working days out of a 5-day business week spent on teaching. Our normal teaching load is 3 courses per year. They’re generally not distributed uniformly throughout the year, but if they were, we’d teach 1 course in each of the three 4-month semesters. Each course has 3 lecture hours per week, plus the required 3 office hours per week, more if students ask for additional appointments. Ms. Wente dismisses the “prep time and marking and so on” as “not much”, but I would say that for each lecture hour there are at least 3-4 additional hours spent on class preparation, selection of homework assignments, preparation of midterms, providing instruction to the TA’s, marking, answering email from students, maintaining a course web page, and other such. That adds up to 18-20 hours per week – somewhat more than the two 8-hour days.

Gender dependent

That’s what I thought when I read the articles linked below, even though gender is never mentioned explicitly. Instead, there seems to be an implicit assumption that everyone involved is male. (Presumably white, too – but that would be a story for someone else to write.)

First, there’s this stunning book review by Scott McLemee, linked also at Crooked Timber:

The most powerful figures in this system [Italian academic promotions], says Gambetta, tend to be the least intellectually distinguished. They do little research, publish rarely, and at best are derivative of “some foreign author on whose fame they hope to ride…. Also, and this is what is the most intriguing, they do not try to hide their weakness. One has the impression that they almost flaunt it in personal contacts.”

[...] Gambetta argues that the cheerful incompetence of the baroni is akin to the mafioso’s way of signaling that he can be “trusted” within his narrowly predatory limits.

“Being incompetent and displaying it,” he writes, “conveys the message I will not run away, for I have no strong legs to run anywhere else. In a corrupt academic market, being good at and interested in one’s own research, by contrast, signal a potential for a career independent of corrupt reciprocity…. In the Italian academic world, the kakistrocrats are those who best assure others by displaying, through lack of competence and lack of interest in research, that they will comply with the pacts.”

Also, this from the comments at CT:

I experienced this in a past position, and reached the same analysis as Gambetta. My attempts to signal that I would leave if I didn’t get better treatment were exactly the wrong ones to send. The people who won the battles were those signalling “I can never go anywhere else, so I will fight to the death to get my way here”.

I’d be interested to know how many of those incompetent-and-proud-of-it academics are female. Because, at least over here on this side of the Atlantic, somehow I don’t see a lot of female professors (or lawyers, or businesswomen) showing off their weaknesses on purpose.

In case you were interested…

Yes, I did enjoy my vacation.

Reverse triage is a losing game

Maclean’s interviews the “big five” university presidents in Canada:

Over the course of a 90-minute video conference, the big five presidents said their institutions must be given the means and mandates to set themselves still further apart from the rest of Canada’s universities—to pursue world-class scientific research and train the most capable graduate students, while other schools concentrate on undergraduate education. The vision they described would be a challenge to the one-size-fits-all mentality that has governed Canada’s higher education system. [...]

An hour into our conversation, the five presidents had called for more research money, the ability to concentrate more on graduate education, fewer undergrads, more international students, and the right to charge higher tuition in return for increased financial assistance to the least affluent students.

The self-selected Big Five are the University of British Columbia, University of Alberta, University of Toronto, McGill University, and Université de Montréal. And what about everyone else?

A system of winners and losers, in other words? Naylor is quick to argue the opposite. “Canada would probably be well-served to have a large number of small liberal arts universities, more than we have now. And to see those as somehow losers in a game of higher education strikes me as wrong.”

The presidents of smaller universities don’t see the logic of improving Canadian science by cutting off their faculty from research opportunities. There are indeed excellent researchers at smaller schools such as McMaster or Waterloo. They have never signed up to work at “small liberal arts universities”.

But what if such a solution were good for Canadian science overall, if not for the small universities in particular? I don’t believe that. You don’t have to take my word for it – see this Inside Higher Ed article on a recent study of the “much-ballyhooed decline in the international standing of American higher education”:

The paper, “Is the U.S. Losing Its Preeminence in Higher Education?” (which is available for purchase from NBER [the National Bureau od Economic Research]), acknowledges that the closing of the gap in research productivity between the U.S. and other countries that intensified in the 1980s has resulted to a significant degree from the expansion of research in Europe and especially East Asia. But it also identifies a slowdown in research output in the United States beginning in the 1990s — a slowdown that is largely attributable, writes the author James D. Adams, to public universities. [...]

Compensation for researchers, for example, rose 1 percent faster a year at private universities than public ones throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the study finds, suggesting “reasons for top scientists to migrate from public to private universities.”

And while the rapid expansion of federal research funding benefited public institutions even more than private universities during this time, Adams finds, state obligations to cover Medicaid costs and equalize public school spending, among other demands, meant that “growth of mostly federal research dollars is canceled out by the slower growth of state dollars in public universities.”

Adams is then quoted as saying that if this trend is not reversed, “the decline in the U.S. share of world science will likely persist.”

It would appear that having a Princeton and a Harvard does not really compensate for the decline of the U.S. public university system. I suppose that it does not help that Harvard has its own share of problems – but that’s a different story. Because the point is, the public system is just as important for the overall U.S. excellence in research as its ivory towers. You can’t build a good ivory tower on a desert island: there needs to be a broad net cast out to catch the best brains and to send them both to the ivory towers and the best public universities. The Big Five presidents actually acknowledge as much later in their interview:

“Could it be that we simply aren’t producing enough radically disruptive innovators, breakthrough scholars, proportionate to our numbers?” Naylor asked. “It could be that we simply get to a certain point and don’t quite break through the ceiling.”

To produce or lure the world’s best scholars, UBC’s Toope said, universities need to graduate more students with higher degrees. “Both at the level of a master’s but even more importantly at the level of Ph.D.s, we are not producing at the level of our American colleagues, and actually many others in the OECD,” he said. “I suspect that’s an indicator of a relative lack of overall performance at the highest levels.”

But the problem starts even lower, Alberta’s Samarasekera said, with a limited supply of undergrads. “We do very well in terms of statistics on post-secondary education in the OECD,” she said, but those statistics can be misleading because they include Canada’s large population of community college students. “The actual number of university graduates per capita, we’re middle of the pack or lower. And that’s the group that eventually supplies the Ph.D.s and the innovators and the disruptive thinkers.”

Actually, that’s not quite how it works. Many of Canada’s best undergraduates get their Ph.D. degrees south of the border; conversely, Canadian graduate schools attract students from the U.S. and many other countries. Among those graduates who stay in the academia, it is common to hold at least one temporary position, often two or more, before settling down in a tenure-track job. Again, borders are often crossed in the process. It’s not necessarily the best Canadian undergraduates who end up in our graduate schools, nor are our faculty recruited directly from our graduate schools.

But on a higher level, the idea is sound: a thriving high-level research community does need a wide pipeline feeding into it. That pipeline should not come to an end with the binary sorting of entry-level faculty between ivory towers and community colleges. Here’s hoping that this is not what anyone had in mind.

Everything I needed to know about research, I learned from the Wroclaw dwarves

When embarking on a research project, a dwarf must be ambitious and aim high. Do not be intimidated by a particularly high doorstep or lamppost base. They are all meant to be climbed.

Naturally, research ain’t easy and many a dwarf will feel overwhelmed at times.

But don’t underestimate the power of collaboration. Two dwarves can always accomplish more than one. If they want to, of course.