λk.(k blog): Posts tagged 'rambling'urn:https-www-williamjbowman-com:-tags-rambling-html2023-09-18T17:44:45ZAcademia Is a For-Profit Industryurn:https-www-williamjbowman-com:-blog-2023-09-18-academia-is-a-for-profit-industry2023-09-18T17:44:45Z2023-09-18T17:44:45ZWilliam J. Bowman
<p>An ill-advised blog post in which I speculate that academia is actually for-profit, but not in the usual sense of “profit”.</p>
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<p>Profit is often narrowly construed as about money. It’s not; it’s about value, particularly surplus value. Money is a proxy for value, and often a useful one.</p>
<p>In academia, however, money is not a good proxy for value. I’d argue the primary proxy for value is academia is paper and citation counts, although there are others. And by these measures, academia operates like a for-profit industry with many of the problems that entails: concentration of market power by accumulation of capital, the exploitation of labour, the externalizations of costs, all following the drive for ever higher surplus value. By disguising itself as non-profit, by eschewing money as value, academia disguises these issues.</p>
<p>If paper and citation counts represent value, whence profit? To profit is not to merely produce things of value, but to seek to produce surplus value, and use the capture of that surplus value to incentive production. If papers represent value, then surplus value would represent papers and citation counts beyond what is required to produce the embodied knowledge. If academia were for-profit, we’d expect structural incentives to produce more and more papers and citations, and to produce them more efficiently (or at lower cost anyway). We’d expect to see that academic institutions measure success by increasing profit (i.e., papers and citations). That, for example, academics are hired and retained based on their ability to bring profit to the employing institution. We would expect capital to accumulate that makes increasing profit easier, so some groups accumulate profit that they can reinvest into increasing numbers of papers and publications.</p>
<p>Some of these are easy to test; the others are testable with some straightforward data collection and analysis. I’m not going to do that now because (1) I’m bad at numbers (2) research is my job and no one is paying me for this.</p>
<p>Academics and universities do judge their success, at least in part, by the number of papers and citations. See for example https://csrankings.org for one formalization of this; it’s like the Dow of CS universities. Or something. Researchers are hired and rewarded based on publication count and citations. These go into the hiring packets for new faculty and faculty up for tenure. Some contracts have specific publications counts you have to hit to make tenure. This is analogous to high-level management positions with profit targets; missing them could well get you fired.</p>
<p>On it’s face, this isn’t necessarily a problem, and in some ways, is less problematic than a for-profit economy in general. At least papers represent knowledge, so we’re incentivizing the production of knowledge. The reasons I dwell are: (1) an incentive to optimize a proxy, a metric, is IMO bad; it leads to <em>perverse</em> incentive, i.e., incentives to optimize merely the metric at the expense of the thing measured. This might not be a problem but for: (2) while papers represent knowledge-as-value, this value can be exchanged for monetary gain, so exploitation of the paper metric is profitable in the usual sense, and at the expense of knowledge.</p>
<p>So, does the “profit” motive lead to exploitation? I’d say so, and in the same predictable ways as the usual profit motive. The easiest ways to increase production and decrease costs aren’t do hard work at making things more efficient, but to lie, cheat, and steal. We see these are work in academia. Made up data, plagiarized papers, etc. But let me zoom in on some higher level stuff.</p>
<p>Exploitation of labour happens, at least until tenure. Grad students are often exploited and receive only a part of the value of their labour, although interesting I’d argue that by the measure of paper and citation count, less exploited than other industries. Grad students usually receive an equal share of the paper count and the citations. However, they might put in a disproportionate share of the labour required to produce a paper. I’ve heard of cases where students are cut out of a paper they worked on, or a supervisor puts almost no work in but receives a paper and citations. Very capitalist—they provided the capital to produce the paper, even if they provide no labour, and receive a share of profit in return. Importantly, though, junior faculty (at least) are exploited as well. Here, it’s not by a direct superior, but indirectly by the institution, through a series of committees of “peers”. “Publish or perish” means they must produce value, papers, or be replaced by the many workers willing to step into the scarce high-demand faculty positions. Even highly respected workers who miss arbitrary targets are denied tenure, because they don’t produce enough profit. Exploitation of the individual worker only ceases if they get tenure, although systemic exploitation continues. In this view, I guess tenure is finally accumulating enough capital to become a capitalist, and live off the rents of capital accumulated? You never have to produce another paper again. Here, the exchange of “profit” for profit seems important.</p>
<p>The analogy to capital accumulation holds as well. The more publications and citations you get, the easier it is to get more. To produce more and more citable papers requires grant funding, top graduate students, and post-docs. To get these, you need to have sufficient grant funding, and sufficient reputation and renown to attract top workers. In a typical for-profit industry, those with the most profit can afford to recruit the best talent, by paying more. In academia, though, salaries as in money are relatively fixed by institutions, not individual advisors (exceptions exist). Instead, academics compete largely on reputations—who can train you to produce, and get you the most, high quality publications. That is, who can help you acquire the most capital-of-academia. Profit should also be translatable into capital, and this happens. Grants and awards look, in part, at publications and citations (and, ironically, other awards received) to decide who gets awards. These grants and award fund more papers and citations. Higher profits lead to the accumulation of capital, which leads to higher profits. Metrics like the H-index even ensure papers and citations depreciate, unless they generate ever higher citations over time.</p>
<p>Costs of production get externalized. The most notable might be, as in many industries, greenhouse gasses. To produce papers and make them well known to gain citations often requires travelling, often internationally, often frequently. One other I worry about, although it’s unclear whether it’s a real problem, is the training of large numbers (I’d argue, unnecessarily large numbers) of PhDs. I’d argue we produce more than academia needs, except that we need them to produce research cheaply. In some places, there is pressure to increase the size of the PhD program. There’s a straightforward way to reduce these costs, and like in other industries, there’s no way in hell we’re doing it: produce less, or produce slower, or both. Of course, like in other industries, there’s reason. If we do stop producing sufficient profit (papers), people will lose their livelihood. Grad students may not get jobs if they don’t produce enough papers presented at international venues. Junior faculty may not get tenure.</p>
<p>I don’t think any of this is a particularly novel observation, except the explicit analogy as profit. And even that I doubt.</p>
<p>And the analogy isn’t perfect, and it’s complicated by the intersection with the money economy. That’s okay; no model is perfect, but some are useful. I think this for-profit model of academia is useful.</p>To academia or not to academiaurn:https-www-williamjbowman-com:-blog-2015-11-02-to-academia-or-not-to-academia2015-11-03T00:51:54Z2015-11-03T00:51:54ZWilliam J. Bowman
<p>I have not posted in a while. I have been busy starting to focus on what my dissertation topic will be. This has brought on lots of thinking about the future, including whether or not I want to go into academia. I used to be sure, but I have become less sure…</p>
<p>When I started doing research, I thought to myself “Ah, the freedom to set my own schedule, work on interesting problems, and not worry about whether or not my work is directly increasing profits!”. I think this is largely true… of graduate students. But the more I am in academia, the more concerned I am that professors have no such luxuries.</p>
<p>Professors seem to spend an inordinate amount of time on things other than research: teaching, preparing to teach, grading assignments of those being taught, applying for money, sitting on committees, reviewing applications, scheduling talks, scheduling visitors, reviewing papers, and so on. Between classes and committees and other such responsibilities, there is little freedom to set one’s own schedule.</p>
<p>I worry that this myriad of non-interesting-problem related responsibilities really prevent professors from working on interesting problems. I notice this particularly when I am the only one making progress on my advisor’s research projects.</p>
<p>I understand that there is more to doing research than sitting down and solving a new and interesting problem. I do like teaching, attending talks, meeting with other researchers, and reading papers, and I appreciate these other tasks that just must get done. But I am concerned that the majority of a professor’s time is spent on not-research, and that there seem to be weeks and months at a time that professors do not sit down and solve a problem—unless they deal with uninteresting things all day and start doing research at 11pm<sup><a href="#2015-11-02-to-academia-or-not-to-academia-footnote-1-definition" name="2015-11-02-to-academia-or-not-to-academia-footnote-1-return">1</a></sup>.</p>
<p>I do not want to work until 11pm every day, because there are other things in my life that I like doing.</p>
<p>I am not even sure professors get to choose their own research agenda. This seems particularly true of tenure track positions. To get tenure, you seem to require lots of publications at highly rated venues. This does not encourage doing good work. It encourages doing popular, easy work; it encourages slicing good work as thinly as possible; it encourages padding papers with co-authors so they will pad their papers with you as a co-author; it encourages ignoring your students and your teaching; it encourages working too much to be healthy. If you do not get tenured, even if you do a good job, you are fired.</p>
<p>In general, incentives seem setup totally wrong. For instance, professors seem to need Ph.D. students to get any work done, possibly caused by the hundreds of other things they have to do. But this incentives them to hire more Ph.D. students, regardless of whether or not the market needs more Ph.D. students. Given how competitive the academic job market is, and how narrow the skill set a Ph.D. provides, I am not convinced the market needs any more Ph.D.s. As a final example, professors with tenure are not encouraged to do a good job at <em>literally anything</em>.</p>
<p>Instead, the incentives in academia should encourage solving novel, interesting, hard problems, but not punish you for getting there late or taking a long time. They should encourage collaboration, and not discourage discussing early work for fear of getting scooped. They should encourage doing good work continuously, and not lots of good work for 6 years followed by no incentives. They should encourage a healthy work/life balance.</p>
<p>At least in industry there is one clear motive: profit. If you can convince someone (with enough decision making power) that your interesting problem increases profits—brings in revenue, brings up productivity, brings down cost—you can do it. Maybe you can’t set your own schedule as easily, but that is changing. More and more companies allow flexible hours and telecommuting. There is a standard on how much your work: 40 hours a week. And you make double what you make in academia.</p>
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<p><sup><a href="#2015-11-02-to-academia-or-not-to-academia-footnote-1-definition" name="2015-11-02-to-academia-or-not-to-academia-footnote-1-return">1</a></sup> Personal communication about a senior researcher.</p>
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<p>TLDR: Follow me on Twitter if you want to see me share stuff.</p>
<p>For the last <code>n</code> months, I have been using <a href="https://www.ifttt.com/">IFTTT</a> to mirror my Twitter account to my Facebook account. I am going to stop doing this because neither Facebook nor <a href="https://www.ifttt.com/">IFTTT</a> support what I need to make this sensible.</p>
<p>I started using <a href="https://www.ifttt.com/">IFTTT</a> because, while I maintain a Facebook account and connect with several people exclusively through Facebook, I primarily use Twitter. Twitter is easier to use for me, partly because posts are shorter and I manage my time carefully, and partly because <a href="https://www.bitlbee.org/">bitlbee</a> gives me an interface that matches my natural environment. Unfortunately, Facebook is not great at the same sorts of things that Twitter is.</p>
<p>Twitter automagically supports links and pictures that you tweet, linking and embedding them as appropriate depending on your client. Twitter supports a much more active stream of thoughts. Twitter makes it absurdly easily to share other peoples’ thoughts with attribution, i.e., retweets. Twitter has course-grained privacy, and the usual workflow for having private and non-private tweets is via multiple accounts, which Twitter clients support.</p>
<p>On the other hand, Facebook requires you to explicitly tell it what to do. If you post a link, but do not claim it is a link, Facebook will merely hyperlink the URL rather than embed the link. Facebook supports longer posts but fewer of them. Facebook seems to encourage sharing your own thoughts. Although it does support sharing, it is not nearly as simple, and is easy to remove to original attribution (presumable for privacy of the original author). Facebook supports fine-grained privacy of individual posts, but this too requires more interaction, i.e., explicitly telling Facebook what to do.</p>
<p>I setup <a href="https://www.ifttt.com/">IFTTT</a> to simply mirror my tweets to Facebook, sharing them only with friends. However, I want some tweets to be public, and some to be friend-only. I want links and pictures to be automagically embedded. I want <em>my</em> tweets to appear without attribution, and retweets to appear with attribution. I only want some tweets to be mirrored.</p>
<p>While <a href="https://www.ifttt.com/">IFTTT</a> has some support for some of this, for instance, using hashtags to denote which tweets should be thought of as links and the link embedded, it does not support everything that I want. Part of this is on Facebook for not being automagical, but I think this is probably a feature for Facebook since too much automagic is not appealing to many users. I, however, like automagic.</p>
<p>So, I am turning off <a href="https://www.ifttt.com/">IFTTT</a>, and my Facebook posts will all but disappear. If you care about my random day-to-day thoughts, follow me on Twitter instead. All my Facebook messages go to <a href="https://www.bitlbee.org/">bitlbee</a> though, so I am still accessible through that.</p>Conference talks reconsideredurn:https-www-williamjbowman-com:-blog-2015-08-29-conference-talks-reconsidered2015-08-30T04:18:36Z2015-08-30T04:18:36ZWilliam J. Bowman
<p>A couple weeks ago, I wrote that I was beginning to hate conference talks. The next morning, I woke up with 50+ Twitter notifications caused by people debating that point. I have reconsidered my views.</p>
<p>In my earlier post, I point out that the typical advice I hear is “The talk should be an ad for the paper”. After several discussions, I think this is bad advice. Instead, <a href="http://composition.al/">Lindsey Kuper</a> and <a href="https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cmartens/">Chris Martens</a> encouraged me to ignore this advice and instead make my talk a performance.</p>
<p>At first, I was unsure what this meant. In fact, I am still not quite what this means. What does it mean to perform a paper? But I followed it anyway.</p>
<p>Essentially I tried to communicate, at a high-level, why I think this work is cool, and what parts of the work are most interesting. I tried to tell a story about what inspired this work, why I care about it, and what came out of it. I did not try to show many technical details; I showed only those necessary to tell the story of this work. I did not try to explain the particulars of all this work; I showed only those necessary to fit the work into the context of the story I wanted to tell.</p>
<p>I think the end result is actually an effective ad for the paper. However, by approaching the talk differently, I produced a much better talk (IMHO). And thankfully, I am not alone in that opinion. For example, I was very excited after my initial practice talk when Matthias called the talk “90% perfect”, in defiance of a NU PRL tradition of not dwelling on positive aspects and only giving constructive <em>criticism</em> after a practice talk.</p>
<p>A video of this talk is <a href="https://youtu.be/-vgWefEXHt0">online here</a>.</p>Conference talksurn:https-www-williamjbowman-com:-blog-2015-08-08-conference-talks2015-08-08T22:24:06Z2015-08-08T22:24:06ZWilliam J. Bowman
<p>I am beginning to hate conference talks. I am in the midst of writing a conference talk for my <a href="/papers#niforfree">recently accepted paper</a>. Although I have only given one conference talk thus far, I have attended several conference and listened to many talks. These experiences have convinced me that conference talks are largely pointless.</p>
<p>I do not find conferences to be pointless. The papers are usually well written, if dense. The conferences themselves always lead to interesting conversations with clever people. I always return from a conference filled with creative energy. And, I admit, I like the excuse to travel to interesting locales.</p>
<p>However, the talks themselves are pointless. Most talks I have attended are terrible. Those that are not terrible I do not remember much of anyway, except that I should go read that paper. Of those talks, I would have made the same decision after reading the abstract for the paper. The talks add nothing because the talk slots are too short to communicate any technical material.</p>
<p>It is not entirely the fault of the speakers. For one, there is little incentive to give a good talk. If you give a good talk, then maybe you convince someone to read your paper, and maybe people remember who you are. This might be important if you are on the job market, but it does not matter for everyone else. Besides, most people will forget the talk in a month, good or bad.</p>
<p>Even if you are a perfectionist so incentive does not matter, it is not easy to craft a good talk. Conference papers are often complex and dense pieces of work. Frequently, the papers omit many details due to space, so completely understanding the work requires not only the paper but a technical appendix or code artifact published separately. Authors (usually (maybe only sometimes)) spend a great deal of time polishing these papers and supplementary materials to effectively communicate a complex and dense piece of work. The slot for the conference talk is 15—20 minutes, in which a speaker much fit a 12-page paper plus supplementary material?</p>
<p>“No! Obviously as a speaker you must <em>not</em> do that. The talk should be an advertisement for the paper. It should be an overview of the paper. It should communicate the key technical ideas and convince people to read the paper.”</p>
<p>What silly advice. I hate advertisements. Why should I sit through sessions and sessions of advertisements?</p>
<p>“No! Obviously as an audience member you must <em>not</em> do that. Just go read the abstracts and find the talks you want to attend. Skip the rest to have conversations with colleagues and authors.”</p>
<p>Okay, so the audience is going to read the abstract to convince them to see a talk that convinces them to read the paper of which they just read the to convince them to see the talk that convinces them to read the paper? This is circular reasoning that wastes the time of both the speaker and the audience.</p>
<p>As a speaker and writer, I have already spent a lot of time and effort on the paper. I have crafted the abstract and introduction to communicate the key technical ideas and give an overview of the paper as precisely and concisely as possible. Shortly thereafter, I have carefully written the rest of the paper to effectively communicate the technical contributions in as much detail yet as concisely as page limits allow. Besides, I had to write them anyway to effectively communicate my research. Why should I reproduce these efforts in a short talk that must communicate less due to the nature of the talk and the audience?</p>
<p>As an audience member, if I want an overview of the paper, the abstract and introduction section provide this. The author already spent a great deal of time writing these sections, which communicate more thoughts in less time than the talk will. If I want more details, these sections are conveniently located with the rest of the paper. Besides, I need to read the abstract anyway to figure out which talks to attend and which papers to read. Why should I then sit through a talk that advertises a paper that I have already decided whether or not to read?</p>
<p>“Well the talks give an excuse and talking points around which we can organize a conference.”</p>
<p>Well why can’t we find a better excuse or better talking points? Why not give longer highly-technical talks that supplement the paper, or questions-and-answer style talks for those who have read the paper and want more? Or why not make the papers more open ended so talks can be more speculative?</p>
<p>I do not know what should go in place of the current conference talks, but the current system seems utterly pointless and results in completely wasted effort.</p>A much lower cellphone billurn:https-www-williamjbowman-com:-blog-2015-07-13-a-much-lower-cellphone-bill2015-07-14T01:13:02Z2015-07-14T01:13:02ZWilliam J. Bowman
<p>My monthly cellphone bill averages less than $10 per month. I have a smartphone. I have data, texting, and voice, and I use them. Let me tell you how I achieve such a low bill.</p>
<p><em>Disclaimer</em>: I will get a credit if you sign-up through my referral link, but so will you.</p>
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<h2 id="introduction">Introduction</h2>
<p>I sacrifice a little bit of convenience for a dramatically lower bill. First, I don’t have a contract. I pay based on my usage. Second, I route all of my texting and voice through the internet, and completely disable the standard text and voice services from the cell service provider. Instead, I route both through my data plan. This means I never pay for using text or voice, I pay only for data usage. Lastly, I am nearly always connected to wifi, and I keep 4G disabled normally. This prevents me from using data much at all, keeping my data usage low.</p>
<p>I gain some conveniences a normal cell service doesn’t provide. I can make and receive calls and text for free while overseas as long as I’m on wifi. I have a spam filter for voice and texts, so I haven’t received a telemarketing call in ages. I can respond to texts from my computer or my phone, whichever is most convenient. My voicemails are transcribed so I can read them, when the machine learning algorithm does a good job.</p>
<p>I accomplish all this via a combination of <a href="https://zfl16e28t96.ting.com/" title="Ting Referral Link">Ting</a> and <a href="https://www.google.com/voice/" title="Google Voice">Google Voice</a>.</p>
<h2 id="ting">Ting</h2>
<p><a href="https://zfl16e28t96.ting.com/" title="Ting Referral Link">Ting</a> is my cell service provider. They use the Sprint network. They do not have contracts; instead they provide a tiered pay-per-use service. They do not have any hidden fees. Their customer service has been exceptional in my experience.</p>
<p><a href="https://zfl16e28t96.ting.com/" title="Ting Referral Link">Ting</a> also provides remarkable control over your devices. The following features are provided by default for no extra charge. You can setup call-forwarding per device. You can setup alerts and/or automatically disable services when you approach a certain usage. For instance, you can get an email and autoamtically disable data on your device—until manually re-enabled—just before your usage reaches the next tier. You can even disabled services such as incoming/outgoing voice, text, or data per device. You can change how your number is displayed in outgoing calls.</p>
<p>My <a href="https://zfl16e28t96.ting.com/" title="Ting Referral Link">Ting</a> device is setup to allow incoming and outgoing data, outgoing phone calls (for emergencies), and nothing else. I have an alert setup to notify me and disable data when I approach the second tier. I have never gone beyond the first tier usage, which costs $3 for up to 100MB of data in a month.</p>
<h2 id="google-voice">Google Voice</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.google.com/voice/" title="Google Voice">Google Voice</a> serves my phone number. <a href="https://www.google.com/voice/" title="Google Voice">Google Voice</a> will provide a new number for free in your choice of area code, or allow you to port your existing number for a one-time fee for $20. <a href="https://www.google.com/voice/" title="Google Voice">Google Voice</a> will allow you to setup call forwarding to multiple other phone numbers, or none. It allows you to make VOIP calls, and send and receive texts via Google Hangouts. It comes with a spam filter for voice and texts, which works as well as Gmail’s spam filter in my experience. It includes a voicemail transcription feature, and can email you the transcribed voicemail or send it to Google Hangouts, or both.</p>
<p>My <a href="https://www.google.com/voice/" title="Google Voice">Google Voice</a> setup sends texts, calls, and voicemails to Google Hangouts, which is installed on my iPhone. I never use the built-in texting or phone call features. I do not forward calls or texts to any other number.</p>
<h2 id="a-simple-how-to">A simple how-to</h2>
<p>To move to <a href="https://zfl16e28t96.ting.com/" title="Ting Referral Link">Ting</a> + <a href="https://www.google.com/voice/" title="Google Voice">Google Voice</a>, first you need a phone capable of being used on the Sprint network. You can use an unlocked iPhone, or many Android devices. On their website, <a href="https://zfl16e28t96.ting.com/" title="Ting Referral Link">Ting</a> has a <a href="https://ting.com/byod" title="Ting Devices">list</a> of devices that are compatible with their network, and the option to purchase a used or refurbished device through a third-party vendor.</p>
<p>Next, register for and port your existing number to <a href="https://www.google.com/voice/" title="Google Voice">Google Voice</a>. This may take some time. Opt-in to texting and voice through Google Hangouts, instead of through the out-dated Google Voice app. You may need to put some money on the account before it will allow outgoing calls. Calls within the US are free and you can refund the balance at anytime.</p>
<p>Then, sign up for <a href="https://zfl16e28t96.ting.com/" title="Ting Referral Link">Ting</a> using your device. If you follow my referral link, you may get a $25 credit. Allow them to assign you a new number. If you follow my setup, you won’t use this number.</p>
<p>On your <a href="https://zfl16e28t96.ting.com/" title="Ting Referral Link">Ting</a> device, disable texts completely and disable incoming voice. Consider setting up some alerts for your data usage. Change your the outgoing number displayed by your phone to you <a href="https://www.google.com/voice/" title="Google Voice">Google Voice</a> number.</p>
<p>Now install and setup Google Hangouts on your phone. Give it a test run.</p>
<p>Finally, leave your phone in airplane mode with wifi enabled. If you’re not near wifi and need to use data, disable airplane mode temporarily, but remember to enable it again when you are done.</p>Writing About Writingurn:https-www-williamjbowman-com:-blog-2015-06-19-writing-about-writing2015-06-19T20:11:06Z2015-06-19T20:11:06ZWilliam J. Bowman
<p>I need to write more.</p>
<p>In order to practice writing clearly and concisely,</p>
<p>to organize my thoughts,</p>
<p>to let small thoughts grow,</p>
<p>to store my thoughts in a less imperfect storage medium,</p>
<p>I need to write more.</p>
<p>And so begins a weekly<sup><a href="#2015-06-19-writing-about-writing-footnote-1-definition" name="2015-06-19-writing-about-writing-footnote-1-return">1</a></sup> Rambling.</p>
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<p><sup><a href="#2015-06-19-writing-about-writing-footnote-1-definition" name="2015-06-19-writing-about-writing-footnote-1-return">1</a></sup> hopefully.</p>
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