Tag Archives: academia

Managing science funding

Posted on by

Inside Higher Ed has a short article on how the additions to the NIH and NSF budgets in the stimulus pose a challenge for program administrators:

One need only look back to the aftermath of the doubling of the NIH budget, Cicerone said, when we “got into a pickle now where they’re oversubscribed [in terms of demand for grants] now that we’re back to level funding.” The agency arguably financed too many projects that required longterm funds to sustain, and many universities built up their research programs in ways that put them in a bind when the flow of funds slowed.

Also worth looking at is a book review of How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment by Michèle Lamont.

ITA 2009 : part I

Posted on by

I’m not going to organize these posts by topic, mostly because I don’t think it makes a big difference. This is a small selection of the talks which I attended at the Information Theory and Application Workshop that happened last week here at UCSD.

Continue reading →

reviewing in the air

Posted on by

In the last year and a half, I’ve been getting more requests to review papers, and I’ve been flying more. Surprisingly, they work well together, since I find airplanes to be a great time to work on paper reviews. I can’t really use my laptop on the plane, so I’m forced to sit with the paper and read it. There’s no internet to look up references, so I have to make sense of the paper on its own terms. This helps a lot when trying to evaluate how clear the exposition is. Finally, a plane trip is a chunk of time in which your distractions are limited, so it’s a good chance to really dig into a paper. The contiguous chunk of quiet time is an elusive beast in the world of research, and while the confined space of economy class is not conducive to proving lemmas (at least for me), it’s not bad for checking the proofs of others.

Professorial Hotness

Posted on by

Via Crooked Timber (where else?) comes a report of a paper on RateMyProfessor that looks at the Hotness of profs across different fields. It’s a bit weird to me that all of Engineering gets lumped into one category (but Marketing gets its own?), but at least its a mite above Computer Science. At Berkeley the CS people emphasize that they are in their own “division” — they want to create a distance from the EE country cousins I guess. Of course, there it’s Computer Sciences — would more science make them hotter or notter?

When you’re at the bottom of the chart you take solace in small things. Even the Math folks are hotter than us! It must be the sarongs.

Manuscript Central is not so central(ized)

Posted on by

I’m sure others who (perhaps secretly) read this blog have run into the Manuscript Central site. Several of the IEEE Transactions do their paper submissions via this site, which is a bit barebones for the money they are probably shelling out. However, there is no sharing of user data across different Transactions, so one has to make up a whole new profile and a whole new account for each different journal. That takes the Central right out of Manuscript Central.

I assume what brings this about is that the IEEE does not negotiate the contracts with MC, and instead each society is left to their own devices. Might it be possible to pool resources and develop a peer-review system that could be freely used by IEEE societies and integrated better into the IEEE site? It would probably save money in the medium-to-long run, especially if a lot of different societies signed on.

prove as you go or scaffold first?

Posted on by

I had an interesting conversation two weeks ago about the working process for doing theory work in CS and EE. We discussed two extremes of working styles. In one, you meticulously prove small statements, type them up as you go along, getting the epsilons and deltas right and not working on the next step until the current step is totally set. I call this “prove as you go.” The other is that you sketch out some proofs to convince yourself that they are probably true (in some form) and then try to chase down the implications until you have the big result. When some deadline rolls around, you then build up the proofs for real. This could be thought of as “scaffolding first.” Fundamentally, these are internal modes of working, but because of the pressure to publish in CS and EE they end up influencing how people view theory work.

Continue reading →

Yudof and accountability

Posted on by

The University of California wants to “provide greater accountability at the institution after several years of criticism by lawmakers and others who viewed the president’s office as bloated and unresponsive.” This comes not that long after a major strike by service workers over wage stagnation. Meanwhile, despite a budget crisis, the university spends $10m renovating Yudof’s house. The longer you put off renovation the more expensive things are, so it needs to be done now. Besides, a house lasts a long time while the meal eaten by janitor’s kid is gone in 30 minutes.

blogging to resume next week

Posted on by

Sorry for the extra-long hiatus. I have come down with a post-thesis case of repetitive stress injury, which makes my right arm feel like it is being pulled out of its socket/shoulder blade and then run over by a horde of angry clowns on tiny tricycles.

I will be blogging soon from the warmer climes of southern California — on Monday I will start a postdoc at UCSD’s Information Theory and Applications Center. I am very excited about it! I will be working on… something TBA. We shall see…