Physicist Peter Higgs: No University Would Employ Me Today 308
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?"
kind of ruins the point....... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
That ruins tenure.
Well, no.
Tenure is based on regularly contributing to research. The publishing frequency is not really the determining factor. Unless you're really, REALLY slow, and never REALLY publish.
Re:kind of ruins the point....... (Score:5, Insightful)
The publishing frequency is not really the determining factor.
I very much think you will find it is these days. The research that is being done today is mostly junk, cheap industrial research and that's based on keeping the grants and the patent applications flowing. If you aren't part of the team who buys into that and wants to do something that takes time and effort you're not going to fit in.
Re:kind of ruins the point....... (Score:5, Interesting)
I very much think you will find it is these days.
RCUK have thankfully acred to reverse this. To compete in university rankings in the UK you submit at most 4 papers from the past 5 years. No others count.
Re:kind of ruins the point....... (Score:5, Informative)
I very much think you will find it is these days.
RCUK have thankfully acred to reverse this. To compete in university rankings in the UK you submit at most 4 papers from the past 5 years. No others count.
I don't think you have that right. In Canada when we submit grant proposals to NSERC we can only include at most 4 papers from the past 5 years as well, but that is the copies for the referees to read. Your CV that you submit lists all of your publications in the last 6 years, and the referees certainly look at those. From discussions with my colleagues in the UK, it is the same over there. You submit a few best papers for the referee to read, but your CV better have listed all of the papers in the review period or you are sunk.
Re: (Score:2)
It's a bit different:
I had a bit of a brain-o. It's the REF (Research Excellence Framework) which ranks universities. That determines large amounts of funding for the universities, so they have started hiring researchers based on REF score. That's only done on top 4 papers.
Individual grants are still done the same old way.
Re:kind of ruins the point....... (Score:4, Informative)
The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the ranking of UK universities. The REF replaces the older Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), which happened every four years. The last RAE was 4 years ago, and the current REF is just finishing. Established academics have to submit 4 research outputs since the last RAE / REF. These are usually papers, but can be other things (systems you've built and so on).
The REF is a really big deal in UK universities, because it directly impacts the availability of research grants. The CVs of individual researchers are taken into account, but the REF / RAE score of the department is the biggest factor. If you have 4 papers in top-tier publications (conferences or journals, depending on your field), then it's very easy to get hired in the run up to the REF, because a lot of second tier universities are looking to find people who will bump them up the rankings.
Conversely, if you don't have the 4 publications (or other impressive things), then it's very hard to get a tenured position, but if you're not averaging one good paper a year then there's probably something wrong with you as a researcher: part of the point of publicly funded research is that the results are communicated to the public, and if you're not doing this then you're not keeping up your end of the deal.
Re:kind of ruins the point....... (Score:5, Insightful)
if you're not averaging one good paper a year then there's probably something wrong with you as a researcher
That is *exactly* what Peter Higgs is complaining about. His point is that great ideas don't come about once a year - and that if he was 40 years younger he wouldn't get positions because he wouldn't be fulfilling the quota - and thus great ideas are being lost in this treadmill.
Re:kind of ruins the point....... (Score:5, Insightful)
4 scientific papers in 5 years is a tremendous rate for more physical sciences. It's possible, in my observation, to have have a few basically "filler" papers in progress while the genuinely interesting or illuminating paper is published. But effectively publishing one significant paper a year, accepted to reputable journals, is a tremendous amount of work in most fields such as chemistry, physics, or engineering. Social science papers can publish analyses of analyses of analyses as "new" publichations, and have been doing so for decades. But in sciences where you have to actually collect raw data, it's very frequent publication.
Re: (Score:3)
Of course it's expected. The question is if it should be expected. Is it the right allocation of work to maximize scientific progress. Filling out spreadsheets with huge sets of random numbers would be a lot of work, too, but that would have little value, so it's not expected.
Is promoting the publication of lots of papers, which tend to be superficial and trivial, preferable to encouraging researchers to tackle profound problems, which may not result in a single publication for years? If requiring a high nu
Re:kind of ruins the point....... (Score:4, Interesting)
Until the fifth year, at which time they'd better have the papers ready for the performance review and any discussion of tenure track. So I'm afraid that's not a really meaningful exemption unless that professor has no plans for tenure track. It can even be worse. I've seen very gifted professors rejected for tenure, not because their research was not meaningful, but because their teaching was _so good_ that it frightened the existing staff into thinking that they'd have more expected of them. In one case, an intern at work asked me to help. I read the research papers: they were solid work, and far more clear than most other papers I'd seen in the field. Helping was politically awkward, and disenchanted me with a great deal of tenure evaluations. I do believe I did manage to help: partly by discussing the technical implications of the work with several of his reviewers, and partly by introducing him socially to the secretaries of the most recalcitrant professors. It's _amazing_ how much those secretaries control the information flow to and from their employers.
The apportionment of credit for academic papers is rife with both confusion and abuse. The need for citable publications is so large that people who had no meaningful involvement with a project are being listed as authors, to protect their academic careers. Other students or technical staff who collaborate extensively are ignored in favor of tenure track staff, to help reach their required number of publications. I'm afraid that the result is often "co-authors" who have no idea what the original research established, or how. I've even seen listing someone as a "co-author" used to prevent them from publicly disagreeing with the results. The "co-author" status is, I'm afraid, may never have been a reasonable way to measure research publication due to frequent abuses.
Re:kind of ruins the point....... (Score:5, Interesting)
Universities cannot care because they are not human beings, they are institutions.
It's up to the teachers to care. This is my belief as a lifelong teacher in higher education.
I don't mean to demean your point, but anthropomorphization of institutions, corporations, governments, etc has made it easier for us to get into the situation we're in today, at least in developed nations.
In the US, institutions are supposed to care, corporations have human rights and religious beliefs and can be involved in elections and government is ascribed all manner of human attributes. It cheapens the human attributes and it gives non-human entities an exalted status they do not deserve.
Re: (Score:3)
Correct, and it's those individuals that either care or don't care. Institutions do not care. They do not have memories. They do not have souls.
It's a minor point, but I object to giving these entities, made up of humans, specifically human qualities in themselves.
I can point to many instances where giving such entities (corporations, institutions, governments) human characteristics has led us to no good, and can find no instances w
Re: (Score:3)
I don't think that's under dispute. The objection seems to be to the needless anthropomorphizing of such organisations. Much the same way that Dijkstra objected to people anthropomorphizing computers, and for much the same reasons - it leads to sloppy patterns of thinking. Some people on this board have the same reaction to "Information wants to be free" as well.
The
Re: kind of ruins the point....... (Score:3)
You have must have a very different definition of "a limited amount of data" than I do. Either that or you're not aware how much data the LHC generates.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Well if it takes a Nobel then it sounds like there's an easy fix for people like him: Just run for office as a democrat.
Re: (Score:3)
Actually it was more of a swipe against the Nobel prize...Obama isn't the only lemon it's been issued to.
Money, Money, Money..... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Money, Money, Money..... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
I think some research needs to be done and a paper written about that phenomena.
Re: (Score:3)
Only one paper? You're never going to get a grant for that.
Re:Money, Money, Money..... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
No. There is a distinct difference between poor quality science and bad science.
There's also the public tendency to reduce everything to a simple answer, when it's rarely simple.
Re: (Score:2)
No. There is a distinct difference between poor quality science and bad science.
That statement ironically confirms everything I'm pointing out and the reality distortion field much of the scientific community lives in.
There's also the public tendency to reduce everything to a simple answer, when it's rarely simple.
When you see a heck of a lot of anti-depressant drugs handed out for ailments that aren't even psychological, it becomes obvious to even the public what is going on.
When the same things start cropping up time and again Occam's Razor becomes even more applicable, and yes, it is that simple regardless of the scientific community's refrain that you don't understand what i
Re: (Score:2)
Your only example is proof perfect tha
Re: Money, Money, Money..... (Score:2)
The comment re: antidepressant drugs is amusingly largely a result of both our current form of healthcare (which emphasizes profits not care) and specifically the so-called "war on drugs" which while it has not yet actually criminalized pharmacological knowledge has certainly gone a long way to make sure the average person doesn't get a chance to learn. Pharmacology is complex, yes, but its not impossible, and one of the very first things you learn is all drugs are different (by virtue of being different c
Re:Money, Money, Money..... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Here is your lab, here is your staff. We will pay for your lab and your staff for the next five years, plus materials and equipment and a small petty cash budget for operations (computers, pizza parties.) You have five years to produce a quality research paper that is accepted for publication on the first shot. No paper, no promotion. No science happens, you're back to teaching undergrads for the rest of your career. Go!"
Re: (Score:2)
First they said butter is bad for you and actually recommended margarine. And now some say butter is bad for you but margarine is worse. And others say butter is ok. They said consume more carbs. Now some say less. They said eggs and high cholesterol stuff were bad for you. Now some say eggs are OK. I'm betting more will change their minds about this, especially on stuff like squid (which is high cholesterol but low in saturated fats).
Eating vegetables has always been a good thing. If you at least eat salads regularly, you cannot screw up your life too badly.
Re: (Score:2)
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
I can confirm that (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
And in industry they do no research at all any more.
Re: (Score:2)
And in industry they do no research at all any more.
Incorrect.
There is plenty of research done by industry (well, depending on the industry). It is generally not pure research, though. It's focused and should bring some sort of competitive advantage. Also, industry will not publish to the same extent, or in the same manner, because it isn't pure science.
Maybe this is less true in CS than it is in biology or psychology, but I don't even need to check for sources to know that pharmaceutical companies and chemical companies both do quite a bit of research.
Re:I can confirm that (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's suppose you're the fund manager and you want to maximize impact of your dollars. But there are too many researchers applying for grant. What do you do? You divest rather than invest, and hope that one of the projects will churn out useful outcome.
If you want to focus your money for deeper impact, people will definitely accuse you of favoritism. It is hard to prove innocent because research is, intrinsically, a very specialized craft, and only very specialized people understand the qualifications. Sometimes experts don't agree on the qualifications either. Once you are accused and unable to prove yourself innocent, your career as a fund manager would be ruined due to academic misconduct allegations. If you distribute your funds fairly and squarely, people can still accuse you of favoritism, but at least you have plausible deniability.
From a researcher's point of view, research is really about begging money to do things you want to do. Or if you end up not doing what you want to do, simply begging money. Historically only the nobles have the time and money to do research. This is what I always tell my friends:
Re: (Score:2)
Let's suppose you're the fund manager and you want to maximize impact of your dollars. But there are too many researchers applying for grant. What do you do? You divest rather than invest, and hope that one of the projects will churn out useful outcome.
By and large, true. In our current (overall) deflationary environment.
Re: (Score:3)
Me too. I was unwise enough to choose to do longitudinal human research. I'm competing with people whose papers require data from ten mice over a couple of weeks. Or better yet, some Excel jockeying on data somebody else spent time collecting.
I got frustrated once and explained to the project PI (a physician) on a group teleconference once what had been done, and what had yet to be done, for a paper. There was silence, then "uh, that sounds like, uh, a lot of work."
Re: (Score:2)
That's pretty good. My father's was pretty short at 42 pages. The really cool thing is that he did the the whole PhD program in one year. It was an Ivy league school too. They didn't bother making him do a master's.
Re: (Score:3)
A labmate of mine just defended and one of the dinosaurs on his committee frowned when he saw the thin dissertation. His work was sound, but he writes in a very concise manner and kept the figures only as large as they needed to be. He passed alright, but he got much more gruff from this one professor and the consensus seems to be that the short length is partially to blame.
(The dinosaur's lab is well-established, with students who fly through in no time by running established experiments on new materials.
The double standard (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Can We Compete Against Them? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Can We Compete Against Them? (Score:4, Insightful)
Good luck with your accreditations. I'd be willing to bet that there are a few 'pedigree' requirements with regard to your faculty. That said, if you make enough news with your 'alternative' you might be able to get people to not care.
Unfortunately for someone like me, any contract I work for the government usually has strict degree/education standards.
Re: (Score:2)
I've thought of the same thing. Put in the charter that all administrators must be academics in good standing, where good standing means they're doing productive research, as assessed by randomly assigned peer-reviewers.
Re: (Score:3)
I disagree - being an academic takes all your time, and being an administrator also takes all your time. I'd like my administrators to have enough time to be good administrators!
Now, I think that all administrators ought to have once been academics, otherwise they don't actually understand the problems that they need to deal with, but not that they still are active researchers.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Brown University used to not issue grades to students. I sometimes wonder if starting to issue grades was a mistake. Yes, it's motivational, but it can also distract from serious thought and reflection.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
And how is that different from anywhere else? The old judge the young, on a standard that didn't exist before, and doesn't apply to them.
Case in point - How many senior managers are more qualified (educationally) than the people they are hiring?
Re:The double standard (Score:5, Insightful)
Quite correct, but you're missing the obvious. In the case of your senior manager, their decision to hire a more qualified person means that there should be an improvement from one generation to the next. As long as that trend continues, we can reasonably expect things to keep improving as time goes on. In the case of a full professor hiring someone who can churn out more papers of a lower quality, we're actually pretty much assured that we'll see a step backwards from one generation to the next. As long as that trend continues, we can reasonably expect that the quality of research will decline as time goes on.
Old judging the young is not the problem, nor is the problem that a different standard is being applied. The problem is that a worse standard is being applied.
Addendum (Score:3)
"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 [theguardian.com] who (at least) equally worked on the boson.
This (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Disciplined Minds in a Big Crunch (Score:3)
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/ [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 profe
Re: (Score:2)
This thread has to do with Physics. I have a graph I keep around showing how federal funds have been allocated to research by discipline over time. We've been in an age of biology since the late 1970's. But, the same pressures and day of reckoning are at hand. The trouble with physics is, of course, it did its job too well. All the "practical" problems were "solved" ages ago and got spun off to engineering. So too is it with biology research. Eventually the public, and political funders, will wake up and re
Re:This (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it's not forgotten. Just not emphasized. There is nothing in the Big Book of How Science Is Done that says 'progress' has to happen. There are fits and starts. TImes when people seem to be making headway in some fields, not in others. Times when research is well funded and times when it isn't. Times when society needs to be introspective and re evaluate what it's doing and how it's doing it (perhaps now).
There is no single best way here. At present, there is a whole bunch of crap science being done, but there are also pretty impressive gains in knowledge on a regular basis. I certainly can't keep up with anything other than a tiny fraction of it. Higgs is probably right that he could not get a University job at present, mayhaps he could get some rich billionaire to keep him in funds for a couple of decades (the usual way science was funded before big government - got us into the Industrial Revolution).
Science is not the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
From primary school all the way through college, my mutant ability was to do superhumanly well on tests. I tended to place somewhere in the top tenth-percentile (99.9%). My grades were good, but not that good -- I didn't do very well at straight memorization, and I didn't have much drive to do well on larger projects. I met a few others who tended to score exceptionally well on tests, and I saw that this pattern was pretty common.
The current system is broken, for reasons described in the summary and in some
Re: (Score:2)
Why must senior researchers have "tenure"? Why is it important that they can't be sacked if the university no longer wants to keep them on?
Re:Science is not the problem (Score:4, Interesting)
Tenure historically was important for arts and philosophy. The idea was that you could say things that were unpopular in safety because nobody could fire you.
Research professors don't really have terribly meaningful tenure anyway, because if you aren't performing you can't get grants and/or the university may deny you students. Either of those essentially means you're washed up.
This is why we need more tech / trade schools (Score:2)
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.
Honest Research (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Don't forget failure (Score:4, Insightful)
In today's world, the importance of failure is not understood.
Re: (Score:2)
In a system (Score:2)
Who does the research? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
The system that really leads to low quality (Score:4, Interesting)
No Surprise (Score:3)
You get what you measure for.
Impact factor metrics (Score:2)
Re:Impact factor metrics (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, if e.g. all you have ever published are four papers, your H index cannot go above four, even if those four papers are the best papers ever and each of them gets more citations than all the other papers in the world combined.
Also, the H index by its very nature gives advantage to people doing lots of collaborations, because that increases the chance that your collaborators (or people associated with them) will cite your articles (in part because some of them are also their articles, and in part because they are simply more likely to recognize your papers because they know you). Of course doing lots of collaborations doesn't imply you're a better scientist. It just means you're better at networking.
Re:But what system does he suggest instead? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:But what system does he suggest instead? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Y
Re:But what system does he suggest instead? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re:But what system does he suggest instead? (Score:5, Insightful)
If theoretical physicists are re-purposed as fundraisers by age 51, then that just enlarges on his point.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Idiocy (Score:5, Informative)
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 [ted.com]. (The book's also pretty good!)
Anyway, hope it wasn't too traumatic :).
Re:But what system does he suggest instead? (Score:5, Funny)
Only a complete moron would judge quality based on quantity.
. . . or an MBA.
Re: (Score:2)
I think you misspelled "i.e." as "or".
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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 t
Re: (Score:2)
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"
not education (Score:3)
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 taugh
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
You've got it backwards - reviews tend to improve scientific work.
http://www.nature.com/news/rejection-improves-eventual-impact-of-manuscripts-1.11583
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re:But what system does he suggest instead? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
It also means your hospital is too big, and that's what the administration is upset about.
Re: (Score:2)
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 fiel
Re: (Score:3)
Re:But what system does he suggest instead? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re:But what system does he suggest instead? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re:But what system does he suggest instead? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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!"
Re: (Score:3)
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).
Re:Me, for one! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
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!
Re: (Score:2)
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 p