Category Archives: Science

Science

PRISM Bullshit and Hypocrisy

I’m not the only one harping on about open access to scientific journals. I’ve linked to at least two other blogs discussing the issue, and I’m sure there are hundreds more.

I wrote in January about an article in Nature that highlighted the PR offensive being launched by the major science publishers.

That effort has apparently borne fruit. The issue is well-covered by John Dupuis. A sad but interesting twist, which made the front page of Slashdot, is that these organizations bent on protecting their copyright lock-in stole images from Getty Images for their web site. As the post in that last link notes, the onslaught of complaints subsequent to hitting the Slashdot front page convinced them to go buy the images properly from Getty.

Just as Microsoft started the FUD machine as Linux gained prominence, watch for a truckload of FUD from PRISM in the days to come.

ADDENDUM: There’s a good summary post that quotes my statement just above (and those of many other science bloggers) here.

Rob’s Grad School Series, Part 3: From Grad Student to Professor

Rob‘s third post in his Grad School series is up, here. It highlights such stark truths as:

  • At the end of 6 years, if you haven’t published enough / gotten enough grants / done a good enough job teaching, you are fired.
  • Once you are “fired” by a university, no university of higher or equal rank will ever accept you for a job again.

As he comments on his list of what professors do all day:

Notice how “researching” or “planning science” isn’t on the list. If those things happen, they are squeezed in between all the other obligations. As a fellow student Tanya Crenshaw told me, “If research was like football, grad school would be a grueling boot camp that trains you to be the best quarterback you can be, and as soon as you graduate, you are hired into the position of head coach.”

Worth a read for grad students.

MareNostrum

Via Adventures in Applied Math, on Gizmodo, the world’s most gorgeous (possibly) supercomputer. It’s #9 in the world and #1 in Europe, and belongs to the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

Actually, the computer’s nice and all, but it’s really the “server room” that’s gorgeous. It’s installed in a glass enclosure, inside a former chapel.

See the photos at Gizmodo here.

Ph.D. student numbers increase while tenure positions hold steady

Hot on the heels of Rob’s post yesterday, comparing academia with crack dealing, P-Zed Myers over at Pharyngula discusses a recent article in Nature (Check, E (2007) More biologists but tenure stays static. Nature 448:848-849.) on the number of graduate students vs. tenure positions in biology.

The answer to Rob’s question about where the other students are going? In biology, it’s industry. My guess is that in Computer Science, it’s Google.

How grad school is like dealing crack

I can’t claim the analogy in the title as my own — it was drawn by my friend and sometimes colleague Rob. Based on a description of how crack dealing hierarchies work, and some observations of academic life, he states:

It turns out that crack dealing works on what is called a ‘tournament system’.
…
The irony is that for most people in the hierarchy, crack dealing is the most dangerous job in the world and pays less than minimum wage. People subject themselves to the punishment and risk for the chance to someday “make it big.” These “tournament systems” have one thing in common: to enter the tournament, you have to start at the bottom and work your way to the top. They occur among crack dealers, publishers, and hollywood producers.

I assert that grad school is a tournament system. The ratio in a typical school is usually 1 hot-shot professor/5 normal professors/5-8 postdocs/25 grad students/20-30 undergrads. Work at the lower levels is difficult and poorly compensated, barely above minimum wage. People put up with grad school for 6 years, 2 years of post-docs, and 5 grueling years of assistant professorship, all for the chance to “make it big,” i.e. tenure or freedom to direct your own research.

Like being the head of a drug ring, he observes that

… most people can’t all be taking jobs as professors. My department graduates 40-60 Ph.D. students a year. Other schools also seem to graduate 1 Ph.D. student per professor a year. A professor that “makes it” keeps tenure for 20 years, so turnover amongst professors is relatively low. If all Ph.D. students found a way to get tenure, then the number of Ph.D. should double at least every 2 years. However, the number of professors can’t be growing exponentially. Where are all these Ph.D. students going?

The whole post is here. He’s planning on exploring other facets of grad school and academia as the week goes on. Rob’s a very astute observer and all-around sharp guy, so it will probably be worth your while to follow these posts. I’ll also link to them here as they come up.