Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to sabbatical we go...

It is now 7 days and counting before I head off on sabbatical, not to return till August 2014. I'll be heading to the Simons Institute to think big thoughts about the theory of data, (or was it big data about theory, or maybe just the theory of big data). After that, I'll be enjoying the fine life at Google for a semester, followed by a visit to MADALGO in Aarhus (because big data in Europe just tastes better, you know).

I've been using this summer to nurse my psychic wounds from six years of the grind, and gently slide into sabbatical mode. The rush of joy that comes everytime I delete a departmental email without reading beyond the subject tells me I'm ready :).

So far, advice I've received on how to conduct myself during a sabbatical includes:

• Don't plan too much
• Work very hard, but on something other than your current research
• Have an adventure, and if work happens, don't blame yourself. 
• Say NO repeatedly (this also applies to life post-tenure, apparently). I maybe took this advice a little too literally and managed to decline a review request in about 0.5 seconds, which surprised (and possibly annoyed) the editor who had made the request. 
• Do something different (or do something that you've been meaning to do for years but never got a chance to). 

What else ? 

And there you have it..

Time now to read this: "Why are associate professors so unhappy"

And for some Sunday entertainment

(dare I say XKCD-style) Flowcharts for the life of the tenured and untenured professor. A collaborative School of Computing effort between my colleagues John Regehr, Matthew Might and myself (who says professors can't collaborate inside a department!).

Incidentally, we also make up the vast majority of our department's blogging presence.

Future-proofing research

Every now and then, we get called upon to project our work into the future. Usually, it's in a grant proposal (especially in a CAREER proposal). Sometimes it might be part of strategic planning at a faculty retreat. It even shows up in solicitations for position papers at various venues (for example this recent one that was circulating on a faculty list). It definitely comes up at faculty interviews, although I usually view it as a hazing ritual or the equivalent of "Nice weather we're having, aren't we?"

I understand the short-term imperative for such things: it's good to know that there are timelines in which your work has some kind of measurable impact, and even better to know that there's more than one (BPP vs NP, anyone?).

But I get the sense (and maybe I'm just off base here) that this kind of future prediction business is more common in non-theoryCS areas. My archetypical story for what happens if you ask theoreticians about future directions is Jeff Erickson's hilarious tale about his interview at MIT.

Of course the most famous example of future projection is in mathematics ! So maybe my premise is doomed ? But somehow I don't think so. I don't think mathematicians since Hilbert go around proposing future directions for entire areas (although there might be general consensus on key open problems), and I think theoryCS has absorbed much of this ethos (although I don't think that's true in theoretical physics).

I ask because I always feel awkward when asked questions like "where is going in the next X years ?" or even worse, "where SHOULD be going in the next X years". Maybe the more reasonable question is "where's all the activity and ferment happening right now". 

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Ranking departments topologically rather than totally.

The US news rankings came out a while back (Jon Katz had two posts on this). As usual, this will prompt a round of either back-slapping or back-stabbing, depending on whether your department ranking went up or down (ours didn't change at all, which could also be a bad thing).

What I'd like to propose is a completely different way of doing rankings.

It's generally accepted that the place where rankings make the most difference is in graduate admissions, and there's a secondary effect in faculty hiring (since faculty want to get good students to work with). The general belief is that students will tiebreak between universities based on ranking, in the absence of more contextual information.

But it's also insanely silly to obsess about the relative rankings of (say) the top 5 schools, or to exult in your movement from 53 to 47 in the rankings. What I believe is generally true is that there are rough strata (antichains in a partial order, if you will) in which departments are generally of equivalent rank. Spending time and energy trying to optimize within such a statum is a useless waste (which doesn't mean that people don't LOVE to do it, because any activity is positive activity, right ? ... right ? ....)

What we do keep track of, and is interesting, is which universities our admits reject us for, or accept us in place of. If I'm not Stanford or MIT, but students are rejecting me only to go there, then I'm not happy, but I feel minor relief that at least they're not rejecting me for the University of Obscurity in Scarceville, Podunkistan.

But of course we know what this is ! it's a topological order ! So I propose the following tiering scheme:

A department is at tier k if "all" departments it is rejected for are at tier k-1 or less. 

Note 1: We have to define "all" carefully - there's always someone who's (say) following a boyfriend or girlfriend, or really wants to live in some town, etc etc. My preferred definition of "all" would be "at least 80%" or some large figure like that.

Note 2: If in fact people did select universities based on the "current" ranking scheme, this order would reflect that. Of course I don't believe this will happen

Note 3: This might even allow for more fine grained analysis based on subject area. Depending on the areas of the admitted students, one could create stratified orders by area.

Note 4: No I have no clue how to get this data, but many departments informally maintain this information (I know we try to get this info when we can), and it's not like the current approach is dripping with rigor anyway.

Note 5: If you're an administrator, you'll hate this when you're trying to move to a higher level, and you'll love it when you actuall make the move. The problem with the lack of granularity might annoy some people though.

On the dominance of the Ivies..

Via Cosmic Variance:

Exhibit A:

“One thing we all must worry about — I certainly do — is the federal support for scientific research. And are we all going to be chasing increasingly scarce dollars?” says Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard’s new president.

Not that Faust seems worried about Harvard or other top-tier research schools. “They’re going to be—we hope, we trust, we assume—the survivors in this race,” she says. As for the many lesser universities likely to lose market share, she adds, they would be wise “to really emphasize social science or humanities and have science endeavors that are not as ambitious” as those of Harvard and its peers.

Exhibit B:

Mario Capecchi: 2007 Nobel Laureate, Ph.D Harvard (1967). Associate Prof. Biochemistry (Harvard) (1969-1971)
Moved to U. Utah (1973).

Through a series of bold experiments begun in the 1980s, Capecchi demonstrated that he could alter any gene in a mouse cell by replacing it with a modified version. At the time, scientists were skeptical that such altered DNA could be targeted to a particular gene. But Capecchi was not to be deterred. Indeed, his studies demonstrated that it is possible to replace an intact, functional gene with a modified version that can zero in on the corresponding DNA in the chromosome.

And finally:

Some 50 universities are located in the Boston area. Rather than collaboration, Capecchi felt that the thousands of researchers were working in isolation on projects that promised "immediate gratification." As he explained, "Everyone is so aware of what everyone else is doing. 'What's new?' was asked every day. That limits you to short-term returns, posing questions that you know can be answered in six months."

In contrast, the University of Utah in Salt Lake City offered "a relaxed atmosphere, where you could work on projects whose outcome may take 10 years. The relative isolation tends to make you more focused on the biological question you're working on.

"It was a good choice," said Capecchi of his decision to relocate to the U of U in 1973.

Academia vs Industry: Hierarchies...

Universities, and the people within it, often like to project the image of an egalitarian society. "This is your university", "A university is made up of professors", "WE run the place", and so on. Nowadays, in the era of 'university-as-business-enterprise', these buzzphrases are often supplemented by, "we're all partners in this enterprise", and other business metaphors.

There's one obvious way in which this is fiction: the tenured/non-tenured divide is vast, and dominates the thinking of the untenured in many ways. Continuing the business metaphors, the tenured/untenured divide is like the partner-associate divide at law firms or investment banks.

But factoring that out, there are more subtle hierarchies: the administrative pathway (chair to dean to provost) is one obvious one, and there are class hierarchies based on funding output, fame, and other parameters like that.

In itself, this is not particularly noteworthy: where humans exist, hierarchies are sure to follow. What I find interesting to observe is how the lack of an institutionalized hierarchical structure (that we see in a company) removes some of the obvious external cues that help us slot into our various positions in the hierarchies. In other words, you have to be reasonably socially aware to pick up on the signals that indicate hierarchical patterns in academia, and once you do, you have to constantly remind yourself that they exist, otherwise you run the risk of silently crossing lines that you shouldn't be crossing.

The key issue here is that the natural tendency to form hierarchies is in this case going counter to the professed semi-fiction of equality, and it's the conflict between the two views that makes for an interesting social dynamic.

In all the ink that gets spilled about academia vs industry, this is one of the more subtle issues that crops up. I doubt it makes a difference to anyone's decision on which way to go, but it's curious nonetheless.

A day in the life...

Here's a list of things I did today:

• I taught one lecture of my class
• I attended a departmental committee meeting
• I had a meeting with collaborators to work out a paper outline for something we're submitting
• I met with my student and did some nontechnical advising
• I had a (brief) discussion with a collaborator about a pending grant proposal.

In other words, I covered the entire gamut of activities one might expect of an academic - with one significant exception. Did you notice it ?

Nowhere in there was any actual research done ! Gaaaah !

Tenure committee is to Colombian drug cartel as ...

Via HWTW, a hilarious advice piece to new profs by Phil Ford at Inside Higher Ed, adapted from a Notorious B.I.G rap, "The Ten Crack Commandments". The article is great, but the comments are even funnier.

And this is a problem how ?

On Harvard's search for a new president:

The growing financial importance of research also could pressure Harvard to tap a scientist, something it hasn't done since 1933.

But Harvard also could go the other way -- picking a nonscientist who could rise above turf battles and reassure the rest of the school that America's oldest and richest university isn't becoming a giant science lab.

I don't get it. Being a giant science lab is a BAD thing ?