Fwd: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic | The Economist

[Owen Densmore]

In reference to an earlier conversation:
        http://www.economist.com/node/17723223?story_id=17723223 

I doubt they got it all right, but food for thought.

If I had a wish for the new year, it would be to have Dave West's 1-credit course curriculum succeed, starting at the Complex.

    -- Owen



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[Nick Thompson]

Owen,

I used to say to applicants, "I have no idea whether there is a job at the
end of this rainbow, but if you can live on meager salary we pay you, it is
a chance to do what university professors do for 4 or 5 years.  Make sure
you enjoy it while you are doing it, because the pleasure of doing it may be
the only reward you get."  And still they came.  Mostly they had a good
time, I think, and some of them have jobs!

Nick

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf
Of Owen Densmore
Sent: Saturday, December 18, 2010 10:42 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group; SFx Discuss
Subject: [FRIAM] Fwd: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic | The
Economist

In reference to an earlier conversation:
        http://www.economist.com/node/17723223?story_id=17723223 

I doubt they got it all right, but food for thought.

If I had a wish for the new year, it would be to have Dave West's 1-credit
course curriculum succeed, starting at the Complex.

    -- Owen



============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives,
unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org


============================================================
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[Owen Densmore]

Nicely said.

I suppose I would like best a very agile educational system, one that went beyond the typical university system.  I'd like, for example, to see SFX become accredited, and to use something like Dave West's approach: "blitz" 1-credit courses that allow folks to be cutting edge without waiting for the universities to teach these courses.

Not just way out stuff either.  I have not seen a good overview of computing and/or networking given in a university.  Why?  Because it doesn't fit into the semester/quarter system.  The reason to give the brief courses is to allow students range over a large landscape, finding their way to their desired area of expertise.

I certainly don't want our universities to stop their rather slow but none the less useful plodding along.  But I would like to see new alternatives spring up.  I could see courses based on TED for example.  And naturally our sfx project approach. My son Tim for example, simply could not find good accreditation for his deep dive into networking.  Understanding backbone routing is a very sophisticated field, way beyond reading a manual.  You really have to understand graph theory as well as class-based transport.

I guess its no surprise that education in this light-speed world of ours is always lagging behind.

A last example came from my work with MIT on RFID within my Epsilon project at Sun.  Epsilon wanted to answer the question "what is the least computational device and how would it be used".  Our answer came in parallel with the RFID work: a tiny chip which returns a large integer when flashed with the right frequency.  MIT started a project to tame the chaos in the RFID industry and succeeded very well.  The great difficulty we ran into was that no one discipline covered all the bases.

The eventual direction was to use a DNS-like system where the integer "owned" by an RFID chip would be translated into a "domain" like org.sfcomplex.xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx .. identifying an entity managed by sfx.  Great for hugely distributed systems.  The hardest problem we ran into was semantics.  We found philosophers, linguists and others had to be brought into the work.  And a system like Knowledge Reef would be very useful in terms of turning the xxx into Leather Shoe, Size 42 eur measurement.  Yet no team member had the slightest knowledge of the Semantic Web .. and it was at MIT, where that work was being done!

No existing academic framework could handle the problem.  Certainly no one department could.  Thus the fragmentation/fractal approach of tiny courses has appeal: many small areas of expertise integrated into a whole.  A lot like ABM

    -- Owen

On Dec 18, 2010, at 1:10 PM, Edward Angel wrote:

Too many different issues are getting mixed together in this discussion.

I think the article is terrible. Wrong in many place and throughout not really understanding the issues.

As Nick just pointed out, the changes in academia are at the heart of the "problem." That of course is assuming you believe there is a problem.

Should we be all that concerned (as individuals) if more people want to be physicists than there are jobs? Who is responsible for young adults making decisions as to what careers they want to pursue? The evidence as to the likelihood of getting an academic position is out there and most of our college students can read and search the internet.

Should it surprise us that half the people who enter a PhD program don't finish? It's not supposed to be easy and you have to make a research contribution.

Aside from areas like physics where there is seems to be no way to absorb all the PhDs, many fields are suffering from a lack of PhDs as the baby boomers retire. (Another odd claim in the article about the 70's seems counter to fact. The universities were full of graduate students then avoiding the draft, many of whom started before the lottery).

But here what is more of the real problem. All universities are driven by outside money to a far greater extent than 20 or 40 years ago and there is a lot of money out there that faculty compete for. An untenured faculty member is expected to be supporting multiple students to have a chance at tenure. Combine this with the observation that many more universities have large graduate programs than years ago and you have every incentive to admit and eventually grant degrees to all the students you need to get your research done (most faculty feel it would be unfair to not give a degree to a student whom you have supported doing your research for many years). If it weren't for the large number of high quality foreign graduate students we get, the overall quality of US PhDs would be going down.

The second issue that I find troubling is that a PhD is now considered an entry level degree in areas other than academia. Forty years ago almost no students planning to work in industry wanted a PhD and most companies hired MS grads and PhD for entirely different jobs (Owen: note that at the time Xerox was one such company). Although I don't defend that separation and agree with Owen's observations, it is still a problem that students who, for example, would make fine engineers with a BS or MS but lack the talents to be good researchers feel they need PhDs to get a good job.

There are a lot questions that US should be looking at such as are we getting diminishing returns by supporting so many research programs. Doubling the number of PhDs in physics, engineering, computer science, or english will certainly not double the good research produced in these fields while doubling the number of BS and MS degrees might well double the innovation and development in the US. 

I spent a sabbatical in physics dept in London at the time Thatcher was trying to eliminate many of the physics departments in the UK. It was an interesting time. Because most faculty were convinced  (correctly I believe) that she was out to destroy the universities, a lot of the deeper questions got lost in tumult. For example, physics (math, english) departments in large universities tend to be service departments and produce a small number of graduates in their own area. Should the state support a system that requires all these faculties to have PhDs and therefore research programs?  I don't think there is a clear answer.

Ed

__________

Ed Angel

Chair, Board of Directors, Santa Fe Complex
Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel
  http://artslab.unm.edu

http://sfcomplex.org

On Dec 18, 2010, at 11:45 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:

Sorry, possibly not clear.

- My exposure to PhD's is primarily in industry, and not always in research.

- MANY extraordinary breakthroughs came via their work.  Current crypto by Whit Diffie, just down the hall from me at Sun is but one example.

- ALL of them were concerned with the academic/non-academic divide, and would love a richer exposure to more topics that Dave's ideas would nurture.  Indeed, Stanford had a very successful program with Sun from which I got some of my best researchers.  Most went on to startups or industrial research.

- Our solution was to develop programs within the company to rapidly explore, understand and evaluate new technologies with teams with a rich variety of backgrounds.  We would often do this with universities and/or other silicon valley labs.

My interest in the article is the general slowness of academia to change.  Many great counter examples like Media Lab at MIT, and the Stanford Forum above. And not to mention Sun and other companies working directly with universities and organizations like SFI.  But talk to Dave about his difficulty developing a simple, single, innocuous change in the system to motivate exploration and growth: the 1-credit curriculum.

One great example of this would be Tyler White and other's work at SFX.  They basically pulled themselves up by the bootstraps to develop fascinating advanced development projects.  This, at Sun, was often done by PhDs in the Sun Labs. And the time/effort would nicely fit into a set of 1-credit courses.

BTW: Sun themselves did not have PhD-itus.  I was welcome in the Labs even though I bailed from my PhD work after passing the quals, mainly due to the heady hippy era and anti-war work.  But I'd hate to work on elliptic curve cryptography without several PhD co-workers!

   -- Owen


On Dec 18, 2010, at 11:10 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

Owen,

I used to say to applicants, "I have no idea whether there is a job at the

end of this rainbow, but if you can live on meager salary we pay you, it is

a chance to do what university professors do for 4 or 5 years.  Make sure

you enjoy it while you are doing it, because the pleasure of doing it may be

the only reward you get."  And still they came.  Mostly they had a good

time, I think, and some of them have jobs!

Nick

-----Original Message-----

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf

Of Owen Densmore

Sent: Saturday, December 18, 2010 10:42 AM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group; SFx Discuss

Subject: [FRIAM] Fwd: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic | The

Economist

In reference to an earlier conversation:

http://www.economist.com/node/17723223?story_id=17723223

I doubt they got it all right, but food for thought.

If I had a wish for the new year, it would be to have Dave West's 1-credit

course curriculum succeed, starting at the Complex.

  -- Owen

============================================================

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives,

unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

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[Carl Tollander]

http://scienceblogs.com/catdynamics/2010/11/so_you_want_to_get_a_phd_in_th.php

On 12/18/10 11:10 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

> Owen,
>
> I used to say to applicants, "I have no idea whether there is a job at the
> end of this rainbow, but if you can live on meager salary we pay you, it is
> a chance to do what university professors do for 4 or 5 years.  Make sure
> you enjoy it while you are doing it, because the pleasure of doing it may be
> the only reward you get."  And still they came.  Mostly they had a good
> time, I think, and some of them have jobs!
>
> Nick
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf
> Of Owen Densmore
> Sent: Saturday, December 18, 2010 10:42 AM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group; SFx Discuss
> Subject: [FRIAM] Fwd: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic | The
> Economist
>
> In reference to an earlier conversation:
> http://www.economist.com/node/17723223?story_id=17723223
>
> I doubt they got it all right, but food for thought.
>
> If I had a wish for the new year, it would be to have Dave West's 1-credit
> course curriculum succeed, starting at the Complex.
>
>      -- Owen
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives,
> unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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