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Physicist Peter Higgs: No University Would Employ Me Today
An anonymous reader writes "Peter Higgs, the physicist who laid the groundwork for the discovery of the Higgs boson and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics, says he doubts any university would give him a job today. Higgs says universities wouldn't consider him productive enough — though the papers he published were important and of high quality, he didn't have the volume necessary for serious consideration in today's competitive employment environment. 'He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today's academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: "It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964." Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.' His comments highlight the absurdity of the current system for finding researchers in academia. How many researchers of Higgs' caliber have been turned down for similar reasons?"
That ruins tenure.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That's the way it is. Keep the research papers churning, regardless of how utter crap they are, and more importantly keep the research grants flowing.
I remember the BBC did a programme a few years ago asking why people are so sceptical about science these days. This is exactly why.
Doing actually good research takes a lot of time. It is a sure way to not get tenure or to not even being considered for a position in the first place. It starts with your PhD taking longer than the ones of the streamlined cretins that never will have a deep though in their whole career. Academic research is pretty much dead at this time, what is being done is industrial research on the cheap and often with very low quality.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You completely misunderstand what this is about. The problem is that productivity is measured in number of publications, regardless of quality of said publications. Anything that can scape by the reviewers, often in a 3rd or 4th attempt counts. The guy that gets all his stuff published on the first attempt, because it is actually good, does not stand a chance, because he will never get the numbers.
The problem is that low quality publications actually represent negative productivity.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Me too. I'm a certified awesome bad ass ninja genius. But egghead academics think i should write papers and grant proposals instead of saving religious artifacts from nazis that will try to use them to win the war.
Yes, let's not take on any problems that might be hard (i.e. chance that we will fail) or take more than 3 months to get results.
Retard.
Go to most science and engineering departments in the U.S. today, and you'll find senior faculty members sitting on P&T (promotion and tenure) committees who would never qualify for tenure if they were judged by the same standards they apply to junior faculty. You'll meet assistant professors who've published more journal papers in two years (and brought in more research money) than a full professor has done in his entire career, while being told it isn't good enough by the P&T committee.
That double standard is not lost on the younger faculty, nor does not make them happy. To add insult to injury, the younger faculty generally tend to be better teachers, as well. It is a topsy-turvy world where the people in charge are often the least qualified of anyone there.
"Peter Higgs, the physicist who laid the groundwork for the discovery of the Higgs boson and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics"
Actually he shared the price with François Englert who (at least) equally worked on the boson.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Making sure someone is constantly busy in any intellectual field is a sure-fire way to kill any hope of creativity. The best ideas often come from moments when you can just clear your head completely or just play around with ideas on your own without worrying about your productivity. Modern society seems to have forgotten this.
Happy people make bad consumers.
This reminds me of my Health class in high school. At the end of the semester (it was a 1-semester class only, usually the other semester was used for driver's ed), the crazy old teacher gave everyone a grade on their notebook. His method for determining the quality of your notebook? The number of pages in it. I got a bad grade, because I wrote small and had few pages, even though I wrote down everything important. The guy next to me had giant writing, and filled up a bunch of pages just writing "Health is cool!" and got a high grade.
You think Universities would be more intelligent in their rating of professors than some idiotic old gym coach, but apparently not.
You've got it backwards - reviews tend to improve scientific work.
http://www.nature.com/news/rejection-improves-eventual-impact-of-manuscripts-1.11583
(tenured professors are paid substantially more than software engineers in the US)
Indeed?. That is so not true. Okay, those numbers are not great, but they are actually quite similar. The difference being that software engineers make that shortly after graduation, and tenure... well, first you'll need a PhD. Then some years as a postdoc. Then tenure takes what, 7 years or so? And during all this time the salary is quite low considering the work being required.
There is also the notion of "long tail" investments. Many technology companies make a conscious choice to invest, or not to invest in long tail. The idea is that out of that long tail, you may some day get a breakthrough.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
The problem is not science research. The problem and one which can be solved is that we have a pyramid in the research community. Thousands of low wage postdocs doing the grunt work for a small number of people that have tenure. And very very few of those postdocs if anything make it into a position when they gain access to tenure. And if that's the case they have to wait decades to get it. Now think to how things were 100-80-70 years ago. The pyramid was much less skewed, and young post docs actually had a good chance of gaining tenure after a normal length of time. :)
The corrective measure is not to increase producing thousands of insignificant research papers, but actually limit those that can enter into a science career. Make the exams very difficult, pick the brightest of the brightest. Give postdocs positions to them. Of course you must pay them accordingly so no more slave wages. And then within 10-15 years grant them tenure. And for God's sake send them into retirement when they get to 65-70 years of age.
Can politics accept such a situation ? The answer is left to the reader.
This reminds me of my Health class in high school. At the end of the semester (it was a 1-semester class only, usually the other semester was used for driver's ed), the crazy old teacher gave everyone a grade on their notebook. His method for determining the quality of your notebook? The number of pages in it. I got a bad grade, because I wrote small and had few pages, even though I wrote down everything important. The guy next to me had giant writing, and filled up a bunch of pages just writing "Health is cool!" and got a high grade.
You think Universities would be more intelligent in their rating of professors than some idiotic old gym coach, but apparently not.
Did the gym coach tell you how it was being marked? Because, if he did, then you had a clear success criteria, and you failed to follow instructions.
Now, if he didn't tell you it was being marked that way, that's just bad teaching practice. But no one is claiming that the universities are deceiving candidates - they're just requiring quantity, not quality. That's a different scenario than you described.
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
I've often wondered lately if there are enough dissatisfied PhD-dropouts and overworked junior professors that if we got together, we could start a new college and directly compete against these attitudes (both the problems with professors and research, and the problems with the student curriculum and lack of teaching enthusiasm in general). I am quite seriously interested in doing exactly this if I could build up a coalition and some funding.
as keep churning out papers environment is not a place to be learning hands on skills from people who have done the work in that in environment it may be a TA reading out of the book.
Did the gym coach tell you how it was being marked? Because, if he did, then you had a clear success criteria, and you failed to follow instructions.
It's been a couple of decades, but IIRC he didn't tell us this until shortly before the end of the semester, right before we were graded on it.
And regardless, how idiotic is it to grade someone based on the number of pages of their notes anyway?
But no one is claiming that the universities are deceiving candidates - they're just requiring quantity, not quality.
Yes, but how do you expect to get quality publications with a policy like that? Why even bother? It just doesn't make any sense at all. Only a complete moron would judge quality based on quantity.
You completely misunderstand what this is about. The problem is that productivity is measured in number of publications, regardless of quality of said publications. Anything that can scape by the reviewers, often in a 3rd or 4th attempt counts. The guy that gets all his stuff published on the first attempt, because it is actually good, does not stand a chance, because he will never get the numbers.
The problem is that low quality publications actually represent negative productivity.
There have been alternative methods to quantitatively assess qualitative measurements. If it were possible, I like to think we'd be doing it.
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
What kind of stuff are you smoking for regarding "number of pages written" as a valid sign of quality?
When I'm grading my students, I take the number of pages as a very rough indicator on how much time they spent (with all other stuff like text size, paragraphs,... being equal). Doesn't mean, however, that this quantity equals quality.
And even if he did tell them the criteria before - that still doesn't make it a good criteria. And blindly following instructions is never a good idea.
This is a result of attempts to use "quantifiable metrics". The original idea is great: By having a numerical measurement of a workers productivity (whether that worker is a floor-sweeper or a physicist), we reduce the effects of bias, favoritism, etc in evaluating employees. The problem though is that it is impossible to produce a good metric for many types of work. When a poor metric is used, we strongly motivate workers to maximize that metric, not their "real" productivity. There is a nearly identical problem in school grades: we want to eliminate bias in grading so we use "standardized tests". Pretty soon teachers are teaching the test, not the subject.
In my opinion, where I work the most productive scientists are not the ones who publish the largest number of papers.
The problem is that the quality of a scientist is measured by the number of publications and the reputation of the journal or conference they published their work. However, both values do not measure quality. The first is just quantity and can be achieved by spreading results over different publications, which lowers the overall quality of every single publication. The second tries to correct this, by factoring in that good publication channels do quality checks with peer review. However, that fails when you look into peer review process. While in general it is a good idea, there are several problems with this. First, the review may miss the point of the publication especially when it is a new thought. Second, reviewer are more convinced of work which they know the author or the professor also listed in the author section. And third, even with good reviews, the program committee favors known and liked scientists over unknown scientists. So there is a lot of bias at work. Finally, the reputation of a publication channel is determined by its impact in the past. Even if it is crap right now, it is rated higher than a good publication just because of the history.
Beside these problems, the present system limits science and its potential outcome as scientists optimize for it. An alternative would allow for more think time. However, this is not possible with the present system. He does not propose a new one, but we should start thinking about a new one or lose our ability to innovate and increase our understanding of the universe.
I am a tenured full professor at a mid-to-leading rank European
university. I work each day for several hours on ideas I consider interesting, publishing
if the results seem useful. I also take seriously my teaching duties (mostly low level courses that no one else wants).
However I refuse to play office politics or participate in advancing the careers of others (like writing articles for them). And while this excludes any possibility of promotion it is a fair trade-off for having the peace and tranquility required to research difficult ideas.
So problems that Higgs mentions exist also at lower levels. Either you play their game or else you get shunted out.
You completely misunderstand what this is about. The problem is that productivity is measured in number of publications, regardless of quality of said publications.
ok guy, what do you suggest as an alternative? because P is right, tenured professors make a lot of bank and some of them are really crappy and entitled. i await your solution to this problem.
You've nailed the problem -- the LPU -- least publishable unit -- do the absolute minimum amount of research to crap out a paper.
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
"In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy."
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html ... By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. ... Since we began with a cosmological analogy, let us return to one now. An unfortunate space traveler, falling into a black hole, is utterly and irretrievably doomed, but that is only obvious to the space traveler. In the perception of an observer hovering above the event horizon, the space traveler's time slows down, so that it seems as if catastrophe can forever be put off into the future. Something like that has happened in our research universities. The good times ended forever around 1970, but by importing students, and employing Ph.D's as temporary postdocs, we have stretched time out, pretending that nothing has changed, waiting for the good times to return. We have about as much chance as the space traveler. ..."
"Although hardly anyone noticed the change at the time, it is difficult to imagine a more dramatic contrast than the decades just before 1970, and the decades since then. Those were the years in which science underwent an irreversible transformation into an entirely new regime. Let's look back at what has happened in those years in light of this historic transition.
The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science [due in part to continuing exponential growth that was soon to end]. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
At least for universities, there's an alternative way that professors who don't publish a lot can still be productive: they can, you know, teach students. That is nominally what universities are for, anyway.
The jury is still out on the utility of Higgs' research. And that's what the public uses as a metric. His work and that at the LHC may turn out to be nothing more than pure research. Or we may develop antigravity and finally get our flying cars. The problem is that the public will only use the latter result as a sign of success. And there is no way to predict a 'useful' outcome a priori of some research.
We do it because it will expand our collective knowledge and, if we are lucky, provide the occasional payoff.
Have gnu, will travel.
That is Higgs actual point. Because of the demanded quantity, it is not actually possible to do quality work anymore. He believes that under today's conditions, he would not have had his key insight at all. In fact, he doesn't believe that anyone else is likely to have such an insight under today's conditions.
Further, he states flat out that if he wasn't widely favored to win a Nobel Prize, he would have been fired. by the '80s. In other words, his employer was more interested in his celebrity than with his actual work.
Obviously, it's okbecause if he did tell you he's an idiot, he can't be an idiot since he told you up front that he was. But if he didn't tell you he's an idiot, then he certainly is an idiot.
Chaos, panic, disorder...my work here is done.
The problem is that low quality publications actually represent negative productivity.
Yep. but you will never get a bureaucrat to understand this. It's like in our hospitals - you can never convince administration that you actually WANT empty beds - because that means the population is healthy and empty beds are a sign of success of the health system. No, that won't fly. It's all about bed turnover per day, and bed occupancy rates.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Having the freedom to fail, then to be able to analyze and think about why you failed is one of the most important methods of learning. When you succeed , you really don't spend the time to analyze why, but you sure do when you fail.
In today's world, the importance of failure is not understood.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
How about forgetting the metrics obsession and focusing on actually assessing worth. Yeah, yeah, it's so hard to do that waaaaaah. The obsession with metrics is doing a lot of harm all over.
In particular, the quantity over quality which exists primarily because any lazy fool can count quantity but quality takes actual effort to assess.
Which is better, 100 metric tones of cholera infested dirty water or 1 kg of antibiotic? More and more, employers are preferring the dirty, infectious water.
Did the gym coach tell you how it was being marked? Because, if he did, then you had a clear success criteria, and you failed to follow instructions.
Fascinating.
Why did you go to college? Why were you in class? A lot of people answer that question by saying, "to get a degree." That's not right though, because there are cheaper ways of getting "a degree." You can buy one for much cheaper than college tuition, and for much less work.
So the next justification is that you can't use the degree you buy from a non-accredited university to get a job. Why not? Because employers expect that the degree means you have learned a minimum set of per-requisites they require in their employees. In fact, you're often asked to provide an official transcript, which shows the grades you got in specific classes they may deem relevant for the position you're applying for. With this in mind, would someone who was told how they were being graded really have a clear success criteria?
They'd have a way to achieve a high grade in the course, but that's not success. If I achieve a high grade in the course, but the grade does not correlate to my understanding of the material the class is supposed to cover, the professor failed my success criteria, by giving me a transcript that means nothing to the employers. When I go to an interview fresh out of college I'm being judged by degree, by my grades, and by comparison from other candidates who may have come to the same school, and taken the same classes. If an idiot classmate I had interviews first for a job I'm interested in demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the subject matter in an interview, despite having a despite having a degree in the field and a high gpa, then he may have cost me the ability to even get an interview at that location. Now the employer is thinking, "that university sucks for that degree, that guy's grades didn't mean shit. I'm not going to waste my time with this next guy."
But no one is claiming that the universities are deceiving candidates - they're just requiring quantity, not quality.
Which is deceptive to me, because I pay the university with the understanding they will train me in the field of my choice, and evaluate me fairly with regards to the knowledge that i've gained. Anything else, and I'm just throwing money away.
Similarly, a professor who is capable of writing a few quality papers is far more valuable than one who can write hundreds of low quality ones. The universities make their standards clear, but they're not selecting for what they're supposed to, and it's leading to lower quality of education.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
I agree that publishing a bunch of low quality papers is terrible, but you seem to be implying that a paper that doesn't get accepted on the first try is low quality. That's absolutely not true, and furthermore, the review process can be really helpful for making improvements to a paper - and I don't mean just enough to squeak by.
It's unbelievably idiotic and absurd... until you consider human nature.
The people above you are incompetent (cf. "Peter Principle") and will latch onto anything that they can use to judge you to avoid appearing as the incompetents that they are. Even when it makes no sense from an analytical point of view. We humans seem to be hardwired to avoid (being perceived to be, or actually) being wrong. (The book's also pretty good!)
Anyway, hope it wasn't too traumatic :).
HAND.
where money is the main criteria for any action, many things can and do go wrong. In particular when continuing exponential growth processes run by humans happen in a closed system with limited non-renewable resources.
Well by age 51 his work would have been mostly getting grants and managing PhDs ... if he got fired in 1980 it wouldn't really have impacted is scientific work.
The problem is that low quality publications actually represent negative productivity.
There is no such thing as negative effort, only effort. Anti-productivity can be beneficial if properly harnessed. When anti-products collide with normal outputs of productivity the energy released is explosive! --even enough to bring entire businesses to their knees. Re-engineering of entire product lines can create jobs at a geometric rate when analysed in the single dimensional domain. Massive numbers of researchers have dedicated time to advances in product particle research; Especially in the field of advert entangled anti-productivity. This very post and Slashdot itself would not be possible were it not for discovery of the charged anti-product-ion. Indeed, this is why the energetic event resulting from a productive business interacting with an equal or greater anti-production has been dubbed, "The Slashdot Effect".
Unfortunately, due to the nature of quantum entanglement there is no known way to predict an increase or decrease in overall productions due to a business's slashdotting. There is much debate over the degree to which the anti-productivity particles can be deliberately harnessed due to quantum uncertainty: Observation of A.C. currents provide evidence that one can either know when and where the slashdotting will occur (deemed a slashvertizment), or the rate and direction of products, but not both at once.
Administration just respond to incentives and try to corrupt the people providing those incentives. If they profited from by optimizing some weighted function of patient outcome and patient hospital time they would try to optimize that, but they don't so they don't.
So by your method, we'd select for good test takers, and exclude people with brilliant flashes of insight.
I suspect you would support rigorous testing and tracking in school, and to the extent that genetics plays a factor, we could simply select among children at, say, age 5, keep the ones who will be productive workers in menial jobs (Perhaps microchipping or marking them in some way), keep the ones who will be geniuses (I'm sure you would have been in that group) and put them in special schools. the menial workers would be maintained in growth and training facilities and given appropriate job skills according to physical characteristics as they develop: big and strong can become package handlers, well spoken and attractive can be waiters and news readers. Oh, and the ones who don't fit those two buckets (menials and scholars) we'll just use as part of a modest proposal for a solution to the need for increased protein in diets of factory farmed fish and animals.
Einstein didn't fail any exams. That's simple bullshit. He simply had a hard time getting into academia (even in the early 20th century who would have thought eh ?) and so took a patent clerk's job. But he did science research, especially before working on the science articles published in 1905. Did you know his PHD was about confirming the atomic hypothesis ?
He came up with a way to measure Avogadro's number and consequently confirm the atomic hypothesis (through the determination of the dimensions of molecules) at a time when a good portion of physicists thought atoms didn't exist. And Boltzmann one of the greatest scientific minds of the 19th and early 20 th century ended up suicide because of it.
Einstein was a scientific genius even before coming up with Special and the General theory of relativity.
I was like MOD THIS ONE UP! ... then I saw the end of your post.
The system isn't designed to support outliers - no one in the auto industry complains that they are having Ph.Ds design cars using CFD simulations and a lot of technical know-how. Would Ford have been able to start an automotive company and be challenging today? These moments of individual brilliance changing a field are few and far between. The entire system is geared towards improving the average, rather than gambling on the outliers.
Another differences is that the nature of research has changed as well (at least in the engineering side). Even a brilliant researcher requires massive computational facilities, expensive equipment, and a lot of programming. So they hire grad students and supervise them, which needs grant money. To convince your sponsors that they are getting their moneys worth, you need a lot of publications. If the sponsorship mentality is - "see what you can do, we aren't going to be looking at publication count", things would be quite different. But can you imagine the outrage if an academic gets a one million dollar grant and turns out one paper on the effect of honey-bees on rainfall or some such topic? The NSF is being held up as a political punching bag. Everyone is in a CYA mentality. Not the "try your best, and if it doesn't work we will still stand behind you because we want to cultivate an environment of innovation." mode.
and thank you for reading this week's episode of "Taking The Analogy Too Seriously"
join us next week when "hearing hoofbeats and thinking of zebras instead of horses" will be used to illuminate the principle of Occam's Razor
and DavidClarkeHR will ask "Are we on the Serengeti Plains of Tanzania? Because if we're on the Serengeti, I think this ruins the analogy"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You get what you measure for.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Yeah, but we all know Indiana didn't have any effect on the outcome finding the arch of the covenant. The Nazis would all have died regardless.
If Indiana had stayed out of it, the Nazis might have taken the Ark back to Berlin and opened it in front of the Hitler. WWII might never have happened. Tenure Denied!
Isn't this what impact factor metrics like the H-index (and improved versions) are designed to address? Those take into account the "quality" of a given paper, as measured by its citation count, as well as the number of papers (productivity). Of course, the citation count may not be an accurate measure of quality, I guess. It's probably simplistic, but certainly better than just counting papers published.
"The slave who knows his master's will and does not get ready...will be be beaten with many blows."Luke 12:47-48
while working in the patent office...
Only a complete moron would judge quality based on quantity.
. . . or an MBA.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I see no smiley, so I assume you have missed the point.
He is saying that the 20-something year old Peter Higgs would have no chance to get a job at a university _now_ .
I don't know. Global Warming is based on some fairly common sense.
This is why people migrate from one region to another, and have done so for millions of years of human history and pre-history.
You hang out in one place for a while, and the population builds up, and the piles of shit and garbage become unmanageable. So you go someplace new. When there's enough people, and nowhere else to go, because you've covered the entire face of the fininte sphere that is the earth, you know you have to start managing your pollution. Thomas Malthus came up with a theory that many people thought was common sense at the time. Ultimately, he was right, even though he didn't forsee things like the Haber Bosch process giving us an extra century and a half of food production and geometric population growth. But in-fact, our industrial waste was already beginning to change the climate of the entire planet.
It is not common sense to believe that you can infinitely fill a finite container. It is "magical thinking", at best. Selfish opportunism at worst.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I think you misspelled "i.e." as "or".
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.
The only thing that annoys me more than people who refuse to analyze anything quantitatively, is those who insist on creating meaningless metrics so they can pretend to be analyzing everything quantitatively. It's the B-school and accounting mentality - you're all scientific and stuff if you attach a number to everything, no matter how you come up with that number.
The system needs some intelligence. Academic performance should be reviewed by peers rather than by numbers. Just like performance reviews in industry, a bright person or two taking a tour is a lot better than someone looking down the columns in a spreadsheet and seeing "comrade, you haven't made your bi-daily quota!"
Einstein was a scientific genius even before coming up with Special and the General theory of relativity.
Henri Poincaré came up with the special theory of relativity in 1902, David Hilbert did come up with the general theory in 1915.
David Hilbert came up with a variational principle for the equations of general relativity. But all the physical insights and principles came from Einstein. The Mach principle. The equivalence principle is Einstein's work dating back to 1910.
The post newtonian approximation to GR equations is Einstein's work. The existance of gravitational waves in Einstein's work. That's why GR is Einstein's theory and nowadays and even in 1915 Hilbert's contribution was recognized as relevant but not fundamentally so. GR would have existed either way even without Hilbert's contribution.
As for Poincare'. Many physicists were aware that the fitzgerald-lorentz transformations were necessary to guarantee the invariance of the maxwell's electromagnetic laws. But you're missing the point, those transformations pre-Einstein required the intricate distinction between real frame of reference and "phony" frame of reference. What is the physical significance of this "phony" frame of reference. In other terms the equations by themselves didn't give you an insight into why these trasformations were necessary for electromagnetism.
Einstein took a leap that even giants like Poincare' were unable to do. He based the special theory of relativity on two principles (and this required abandoning the concept of absolute time, something anathema to Poincare' and his generation of physicists). And by doing this he explained fully where these fitzgerald-lorentz transformations (that are a group) came from. This was the doing of a genius. Poincare' never managed to take the leap because he was not ready to abandon the concept of absolute time.
Which is a weird thing for someone to say about the UK university system. The RAE / REF count an average one paper per year. That is what counts towards the department's ranking (which determines its funding), and so that's what departments care about when hiring people for tenured positions. Will they have the four top-tier publications required for the top rank in the REF? (or fewer for universities that aren't aiming for the top rank). Someone who published 20 crappy papers will be far less attractive than someone who published four good papers, because they'll both have to nominate their four best papers for the assessment, and so the first person will look really bad in the next assessment.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Peer review. Which is how it's supposed to be done, except that the peer reviewers know that the administrators are going to count papers, and anyway, they can't take too much time to do a good job because they have to get some papers published.
It also means your hospital is too big, and that's what the administration is upset about.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
If theoretical physicists are re-purposed as fundraisers by age 51, then that just enlarges on his point.
Congrats on 'forgetting' that Higgs shares this discovery with François Englert. Entry written by chauvinist Englishman?
what?
this isn't education that you're describing here...that's not how "teaching" works
the goal isn't to "do what the teachers says" or "get a good grade"
the purpose is **to learn the subject & to think independently**
we all know what tests are for...to test our knowledge of a subject...verification of learning
if the test doesn't measure what is being taught (health) and instead only measures something abstract then ***it is fully the teachers fault that the student got a bad grade***
this is fully on the teacher for being a bad educator
Thank you Dave Raggett
yes for sure, but there's much more to identify, b/c if you "follow the money" it leads to some interesting places...
for the government...Most of the research grants come from R&D for a specific project (ex: DARPA, a vaccine) or the NSF (ex: archaeology, astronomy, CS, etc)
the government, at least in the US, is another way of saying "the voters"....the US has had enough people fall for the "Austerity" charade that virtually every public university, including the two that employed me, cut their budgets b/c the **STATE** budget was being cut artificially.
Here's a headline from 2011, "Indiana state government unearths $320 million in unknown tax revenue" http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/09/politics/indiana-missing-money/
2011 is **the same year all State Universities went on a hiring freeze**...Including mine, Ball State University
It's *****ALL BULLSHIT POLITICS******
Thank you Dave Raggett
If verification is impossible, then the work and the paper is rubbish.
He's long since retired: it was a comment on the challenges facing the generation after the generation after his.
Engineering professors can get paid pretty darn well... I looked up the salary of one of mine at Georgia Tech, and he apparently makes close to $200K (over, including reimbursed travel).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Perhaps you need to refer to the original article. And I suspect that you have misunderstood the antecendant used by the GP.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You misunderstand. It's impossible to verify a scientific theory, though one should be able to replicate the results. But the possibility of falsification is what makes a theory scientific.
WRT verification, all you can say is "It fits the available evidence, and of that evidence xxxx was not known at the time the theory was constructed." You can NEVER prove it true.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Sun come up, sun goes down, he had the only holodeck on DS9, never a miscommunication. You can't explain that.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Is stubbornly ignoring reality really a sign of intelligence? Somehow how doubt that.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Lots of people here seem confused about how academics are evaluated. I sit on on tenure and promotion committees and lots of awards committees. I have seen many cases where someone with fewer, but better, publications wins out over someone with lots of publications. The people who evaluate these things are not idiots. They're usually carefully selected to be knowledgeable about research in the candidate's area. Even if they're not, then they rely on external evaluations from experts. The system is not as broken as most people here think.
So you think all complete morons are MBAs?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Not if ignoring the instructions gives no advantages, neither to you, nor to someone you want to help, nor the society as a whole.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Well, how about this for a system: instead of counting how many papers a researcher publishes, count the number of times a paper he has written has been cited by somebody else.
This is truer measure in any case. I recently had occasion to review the information science research literature on ontologies, and discovered that about 5% of the literature was absolutely vital to read, and were cited by a substantial fraction of papers in the field -- hundreds of times in my own literature search, and likely thousands of times in total in peer reviewed literature.
About 20% dealt with abstruse and narrow technical topics which were nonetheless useful to people working in the field; or were case studies. Such papers make up the bulk of citations in the research literature, although any single such paper probably gets only a few dozen citations. Still that's useful work.
The remaining 3/4 of papers are trivial, a complete waste of anyone's time to read. They may score a handful of citations, but from authors scraping the bottom of the barrel. They're so trivial, obvious, and unoriginal.
Odd side note: the less an author has to say, the more elaborately he says it. The really important papers tend to be written in straightforward, easily understandable prose. The trivial papers read like parodies of academ-ese.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Papers are not scientific models (they may describe scientific models, of course). The argumentation in the paper can be verified (or falsified, if wrong). And so can the mathematics it uses. You can also verify that the equations they use really say what the authors claim they say, and where the authors cite other articles as source, you can verify that the information they claim to get from there is indeed found there.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The Mach principle came from Mach. That's why it is called Mach principle. However you are (somewhat) right about the equivalence principle (only somewhat because the equivalence principle as such already had existed for quite some time; Einstein's ground-breaking insight was that it not only applies to the gravitational acceleration of masses, but to all physical processes).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Because, if he did, then you had a clear success criteria, and you failed to follow instructions.
And? I would think that anyone with a brain would already realize that's a terrible idea to begin with. I don't consider it a failing to not follow such ridiculous instructions.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
He is saying that the 20-something year old Peter Higgs would have no chance to get a job at a university _now_ .
Of course he would have no chance now. His physics knowledge would be utterly outdated. Heck, he wouldn't even yet know about the Higgs particle! ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
So the next justification is that you can't use the degree you buy from a non-accredited university to get a job. Why not?
Because worthless employers think that some worthless pieces of paper are more valuable than others, of course.
Because employers expect that the degree means you have learned a minimum set of per-requisites they require in their employees.
Such employers are lazy, ignorant, and incompetent
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Not if ignoring the instructions gives no advantages, neither to you, nor to someone you want to help, nor the society as a whole.
Exactly. If the whole point is to learn to follow instructions, and you don't follow instructions... well, you fail.
And, lets face it, we're talking about Gym Class, not Medical School, where, incidentally, you also learn to follow instructions (only, they call them procedures).
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
Quantity is not a good indicator of quality, I wouldn't claim otherwise (except in certain circumstances, where it is).
... and suddenly you're not happy with the terms ... it sounds like the other party isn't the one with the problem. If you had an implicit understanding that was contrary to the explicit contract with a university, and your notion of what you deserve is different from the facts, well ... I feel bad for you. But I don't think you automatically deserve something more.
... it's a bad relationship, and you can always leave, but you can't blame the university for letting you in.
And if you contract for something, and don't receive what you've agreed upon, you've been wronged.
However, if you've agreed to a contract
I don't disagree with your statement about quality, and I think you are correct that a university should train you in that field. I think you're wrong though - If a university is clear in what they are offering, and you don't want that BUT still went ahead with the relationship? Well
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
Because, if he did, then you had a clear success criteria, and you failed to follow instructions.
And? I would think that anyone with a brain would already realize that's a terrible idea to begin with. I don't consider it a failing to not follow such ridiculous instructions.
Obviously not a great way to evaluate Gym class. Maybe the coach should have counted the number of pushups each person could do. That would be better, right?
... well, it's a mind-numbingly stupid waste of time, but hey, quantity counts now, doesn't it?
No. Obviously not. Quantity is rarely better than quality. On the other hand, if someone says "for every hour you sit in this chair and do nothing, I'll give you $50", and you do it for 8 hours
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
I'm not seeing your point. I don't consider blind obedience to be a good thing. I don't even consider grades (especially not high school grades) to be very important, if that's what you're trying to get at.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Is stubbornly ignoring reality really a sign of intelligence?
How is not following idiotic instructions ignoring reality? The only people ignoring reality are the ones who come up with these idiotic instructions, or the ones who cause these people to do so.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Not if ignoring the instructions gives no advantages
I'd say it does carry an advantage: Sticking to your principles. I consider not being a drone to be an advantage in and of itself.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I'm not seeing your point. I don't consider blind obedience to be a good thing. I don't even consider grades (especially not high school grades) to be very important, if that's what you're trying to get at.
I have not said any of that, and I've agreed with you, so I'm not sure what you're asking ... but thank you for sharing your opinion.
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
I've always been pretty interested in ontologies. What did you consider the vital literature to be? Is any of it not behind a paywall?
Cheers,
Greg
This is so simplistic. Very forward thinking papers are seldom cited a lot, because few understand them. They typically get rediscovered decades down the track, and *those* get cited a lot.
Also gaming the number of citation metric is relatively easy and is being done now. No system is ideal.
I just got a more senior researcher ask me that I cite his (irrelevant) paper. Citations are often like reviews: people are likely to cite/accept papers of people they know. And it sucks.
I attended grad school during the early 90s and left ADB, but with a Master's. Went into the software industry (video games, defense, etc.) and made good money, but have ended up in a Ph.D. program at a top-20 university, working at a research institution getting paid more than I made in industry, while being allowed to do my dissertation on a topic I've studied for years, which would never have a chance of getting funded under a grant because it's too blue-sky. I brought my own funding for the degree, so advisors were more willing to entertain "out there" ideas and let me work on exactly what I want to (not much risk to them). As it stands, I will probably end up with Ph.D. research that gets a lot of attention in my field once I'm done because other students can't afford to work on such risky (and promising) subjects. Other students are doing research here that they have to because that's what they're grants require them to work on.
I realize that other disciplines (Physics, Biology, etc.) require large amounts of money for research, and my discipline is different in that it doesn't (CS), but I do think that doing things normally (postdoc, tenure track, etc.) isn't so productive these days. I know many poor, miserable postdocs who will never have a tenured position, and I know many tenured professors who aren't that happy.
I wonder: why is everyone wanting a tenured professor job? Maybe the promising research is going to come from people who don't follow the traditional route.
It could take a long, long time before something is found to be useful. People have been studying prime numbers for a few millenia but it's only when computers came out that they attained rockstar popularity in the real world. The rest of mumber theory may have little direct use, but without a massive pile of those "useless" theorems and a bunch of very talented people who have explored the field so thoroughly you won't have good reason to believe that RSA does what it does. There are researchers who focus on practical research, but those can only be done on top of the soil of deep and broad fundamental research. Without fundamental research the practical guys would run out of ideas to exploit.
This is already checked for, and already gamed: We get wonderful things like socially trading citations, and making sure your grad students only work on things very similar to your core work, to make sure they cite your work, and keep citing it in the future.
Unfortunately, they're not worthless employers. They're the mechanism that dispenses the pellet after you press the bar.
Even an intelligent lab rat knows that.
The whole system is broken, which is Higgs' point.
Well, in our modern industrial society, 'doing what you are told' is an important part of what 'the system' wants teachers to assess. And a lot of people who are 'in charge' want all Educational programs to become more vocationally oriented.
When I went to Tech School, about half the grade was based on attendance, the other half on the dots you shaded in on the same 100-blank multiple choice test blank each Friday for each course. It doesn't mean I wasn't allowed to ask penetrating detailed questions during the lecture, but it did mean a portion of the other students would groan every time I raised my hand, because it was going to be a question about electronics and not something that would 'be on the test.' People would often actually ask that as a follow up question to mine.
Wanting to know too much brands you as a troublemaker, and employers like to know stuff like that. Fortunately they didn't keep a negative score regarding that issue in Tech School.
You've covered a lot of ground in your hand-waving paragraph that tries to explain Global Warming. Also 'ultimately he was right' isn't a penetrating review of Malthusian-ism, which is still an unsettled theory. Really.
I with your last paragraph about 'common sense' but not in the sense that you want, because common sense isn't science.
The problem is that the current system is worse than random selection, much worse. It actively keeps the really good people out.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Indeed. That promotes gaming the numbers. Those that try it the honest way are out of luck...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
And yes, that is an actual problem. My own rate of reviewing papers is between 2h (obvious BS and I do not even need to look it up) and several days. Most reviewers take less time. I actually got follow-up questions from PCs where I was the odd reviewer out, i.e. the only one that caught the well-packaged nonsense.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
So you are saying administrators are amoral scum? Fits my available data...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
No, no, I do not imply that at all. There are papers that actually do something new and get rejected because the reviewers did not get it. Happened to me several times. ("Reject because work is not compared with other publications doing the same thing." Well, sometimes it _is_ original work and there are no others doing the same thing. After all is that not the primary task of a PhD student, find something new and worthwhile that has not been published to death? But if you actually do that, you have a problem publishing. How I hate these cretin reviewers.)
No, what I was talking about is the conference shopping some people do with crappy papers, just submit unchanged again and again until somebody takes it. I saw that at a conference on a non IT-Security topic that frequently got really bad IT security papers. Unfortunately for the submitters, these got handed to me, because the organizer knew me. I think in 5 years, not a single one was of acceptable quality, and some were outright fraud, but cleverly disguised.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This is better, but it can completely fail for _original_ research. It can take years or even decades for people to follow up on it. So, no, that does not fix things either.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
There is a nearly identical problem in school grades: we want to eliminate bias in grading so we use "standardized tests". Pretty soon teachers are teaching the test, not the subject.
I don't see a problem with this, as long as the test covers the material that is supposed to be learned. The reason standardized tests came into play is because of all the students graduating without basic skills.
1. These metrics always increase every year
2. They always seem to have a little energy of their own
Lambda-CDM of academic publishing? Eventually the most important results will be entirely out of reach of the academic horizon?
-l
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A point, but now we are into Bayesian reasoning rather than the normal philosophy of science.
P.S.: The assertion is even more limited than you suggest. Many sciences are observational rather than experimental in nature, and the observations available to be made may not either validate or refute some particular theory. (E,g,: Was there ever a three toed dinosaur? Perhaps there is no evidence that there was, but that's not proof, as the record is quite incomplete. That would be a theory that could be plausibly confirmed, but not falsified. But it's also not one that would be strongly believed in the absence of evidence.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
"Our rulers at the present day, with their machines and their preachers, are all occupied in putting into our heads the preposterous notion that activity rather than contemplation is the object of life."
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Cowper_Powys
The term "Mach's principle" was coined by Einstein, who was crediting Mach for the basic idea, even though Einstein came up with the specifics.
How about this:
A paper cites others. Others cite the paper.The number of a paper being cited will be divided by the number of cites in the paper. The quotient will be what counts.
Now no points in cite trading.
Nothing of value can be achieved because it's not like it was back in the good old days? Oldfartism.
Yup. For the paper I'm reviewing at the moment the journal has helpfully sent a reminder five days after I agreed to review it. I appreciate their effort to reduce review times, but that's a bit ridiculous.
I've slept on a junky bed in the cold in my life too (during winter in Pittsburgh with a 40 minute slog through the snow each way to CMU where I was hanging out at the robotics institute, not able to afford to pay for much heat). I think you missed my point, or I obviously was not clear enough about it. Remember, this is in the context of a Nobel prize-winning scientist saying no one would hire him if he were starting today. The original poster says he or she needs a degree (at great personal cost) to make a difference in the world (including to make a meaningful life from that by contributing to science). I point out how I got a fancy degree and it really does not help that much in doing meaningful work. It certainly could have helped me make a lot of money most likely hurting other people in some monopolistic/cronyistic way (like via the FIRE sector of the economy where lots of Princeton grads go), but I was not into that way of life.
As for science, ignoring most colleges flunk out half their freshman class ultimately, consider this:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"Why does anyone think science is a good job?
The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:
age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s
This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.
Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias."
If you want to make a difference in the world or even just in your own life, you have to just go out and do something of healthy value to the world (or at least yourself). But that is not what much of academia claims and the original poster seems to feel that he or she is being scammed by academia but can do nothing about it Thus the cake (diploma) is a lie (in many cases). I know -- I got a good piece of that "cake", but it still wasn't very filling or very healthy. Did it have some benefits? Sure. But it is also quite possible I would have done better in life without college (and especially pursuing grad school) at all, because they were great opportunity costs, great financial costs, and such experiences were also in many ways disempowering.
Or for a different perspective, words from someone who chose to become a carpet cleaner to have a good interesting life:
https://web.archive.org/web/20030206110440/http://www.unconventionalideas.com/bstcarer.html
"...
The point is that as a professional carpet cleaner, I don't need to look very far for challenge and stimulation. No, the work isn't easy, and can be physically demanding, but as you will gather from my descriptions, it isn't all repetitive drudgery either.
Many people get misled when seeking a career. They turn their backs on work which is supposedly beneath the ability o
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The Big Crunch by David Goodstein: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.