While I have the blog open, let me throw in a quick two cents to support the Boycott Elsevier movement. As most working scientists know, Elsevier is a publishing company that controls many important journals, and uses their position to charge amazingly exorbitant prices to university libraries — and then makes the published papers very hard to access for anyone not at one of the universities. In physics their journals include Nuclear Physics, Physics Letters, and other biggies. It’s exactly the opposite of what should be the model, in which scientific papers are shared freely and openly.

So now an official boycott has been organized, and is gaining steam — if you’re a working scientist, feel free to add your signature. Many bloggers have chimed in, e.g. Cosma Shalizi and Scott Aaronson. Almost all scientists want their papers to be widely accessible — given all the readily available alternatives to Elsevier (including the new Physical Review X), all we need to do is self-organize a bit and we can make it happen.

Zachary Ernst, a philosopher at the University of Missouri, has written up an aggravating tale of sexism in academia. (Via New APPS. I initially mistakenly said Ernst was at the University of Wisconsin, which is where he went to grad school — fixed by commenters.) A woman philosopher in his department — who happened to be his wife — was denied tenure. It’s always hard to discern the influence of sexism in individual cases, but he was able to directly compare what his wife was forced to go through to his own experience in the same process. I have no way of judging the merits of the tenure case (and the opportunity for bias in this kind of report is clear, and clearly acknowledged), but the differences in standards seem to be pretty clear.

But I wanted to highlight this bit, because it makes a different point that I have touched on before. [Update: in the comments, Andrew Melnyk (who I gather was the department chair being quoted) offers a different recollection of this conversation.]

While I was still an assistant professor, I had published in several different areas – I had papers in ethics, action theory, game theory, logic, and philosophy of science. The chair of my department was unhappy about this, and he told me so. He said, quite explicitly, that it would be very difficult for me to get tenure with such research breadth. This may sound unbelievable to someone outside of academia, but his reasoning was quite sound. Tenure decisions were made largely based on whether the faculty member had developed a reputation in the field. And it is easier to do that if you repeatedly publish in the same narrow subset of the academic literature. Spreading myself around too much, I was told, might result in my having failed to achieve a reputation. At the time I had this conversation, I had two distinct feelings. On the one hand, I felt that this was totally absurd – how can the ability to publish in several distinct areas be considered a liability? But on the other hand, I had to admit that he was right, and that this was good advice.

The reality is that everyone likes breadth and interdisciplinarity in theory, but the resistance in practice is considerable. A university is a bureaucracy, and a bureaucracy is made of slots, into which people are fit. We know what slots we like, and are suspicious when people or ideas don’t fit into the slots. Note that Ernst wasn’t exactly straying way off the reservation, dabbling in aeronautical engineering or Medieval prosody; he was doing technical work in philosophy, just in more than one different area. To an outsider it might be hard to discern any difference at all, but within a department this is taken as a lack of seriousness.

One could certainly imagine an unapologetic defense of narrow interdisciplinary categories for their own sake; research proceeds fastest when attention is focused on depth rather than breadth, something like that. But this defense is very rarely explicitly articulated; the department chair in the above quote was just more candid than usual. (And he wasn’t trying to defend the state of affairs, just making sure it was understood.)

For those of us who do think interdisciplinary work is useful, it’s hard to know exactly how to change things. The problem is structural; universities are divided into departments, each with their own carefully-guarded boundaries, and strict sub-categorizations within the department itself. (Everyone loves biophysics, but people who actually try to do biophysics within either biology departments or physics departments inevitably encounter stumbling blocks.) Some specific institutions can be populated by individuals who respect boundary-crossing and even encourage it, and of course there will always be ornery researchers who do it despite any obstacles that are thrown their way. But it would be nice to have more reliable and institutional ways of encouraging good work for its own sake, rather than only because it fulfills a narrow ideal of what work counts as valuable. From the comments at New APPS, here’s news of an interesting attempt along these lines at USC. It would be good to see other universities consider similar strategies.

We all know that certain areas of academia exhibit a profound gender imbalance — philosophy, it turns out, is nearly as bad as physics. Interestingly, one often sees major conferences organized in which the ratio of men to women on the invited speakers list is substantially higher than one would expect even on the basis of gender-blind selection. I have nothing profound to say about this interesting phenomenon, except to quote in full this lovely comment by “Modalist” concerning the 2011 Oxford Graduate Conference (in philosophy).

I think it worth emphasizing that the most important thing for everyone involved in the GCC is to ensure, by all means possible, that they bend over backwards so as to make sure that there is never any possibility that some Anonymous Internet Person might conceivably be offended at the suggestion that conference organizers anywhere—let alone conference organizers at an institution such as Oxford, whose commitment to gender equity and rejection of male privilege in education runs as far back as the High Middle Ages I’m sorry, I mean 1974—should risk feeling any twinge of private or, Heaven forfend, public embarrassment in the face of some no doubt imagined tendency to repeatedly organize conferences that feature only men on the program. We are, it is worth remembering, only in the second decade of the twenty first century. Mary Wollstonecraft is not yet cold in her grave. Surely Philosophy as an enterprise—nay, an endeavor; a vocation; the love of wisdom itself; a noble calling that grabs one by the testicles early in life and refuses to let go; perhaps indeed the last best hope of rationality and clarity of argument on this benighted Earth—can only suffer terribly if small, unfunded websites populated by aggressive viragos and their emasculated enablers insist on making a habit of pointing out the unfortunate yet, I am sure, entirely accidental Male Pattern Allness occasionally visible at conferences within the field. I should also like to remind the organizers of this “campaign” that a policy such as I have recommended—characterized as it is by polite deference, an unwillingness to make any person feel in any way even slightly out-of-sorts or unpleasantly compelled to recognize their so-called “privilege” on an otherwise perfectly pleasant sort of afternoon in the Junior Common Room, combined with a constant willingness to apologetically back down at the slightest suggestion that umbrage has been taken, or the first appearance of a convoluted description of an imaginary yet technically possible state of affairs wherein the observed outcome might not have been sexist in any way, shape, or form—has been shown by repeated historical experience to be without question the most effective means of effectuating change, especially the kind of modest, incremental and above all comfortably distant, blame-free social change that I am sure we all agree would be the best outcome in this case. Now if you’ll excuse me, my cocoa is getting cold and I do not want to have to ask my wife to heat it up again.

Via the always interesting New APPS.

Among the various difficulties that women experience when they embark on a scientific career, a big one is how to balance the challenges of work with raising a family. (In principle men could face the same challenges; in practice the burden usually falls on women. Individual cases will vary.) Science is extremely competitive, and it’s generally not a 9-to-5 job. The years when you might be at your scientifically most productive can be precisely those years when you want to have kids. I’m not familiar myself, but I understand that raising kids actually takes up some of your time.

So it’s great to see the National Science Foundation trying to do something to help. The White House just announced a major new initiative aimed at giving parents new flexibility in their careers. As explained in this press release, the general focus is flexibility, which is a great idea anyway: letting grant recipients defer for a year, and cutting down on the demands for investigators to travel to NSF headquarters when applying or renewing. (Via New APPS.)

These are tiny steps, and there are many other hurdles women face in academia other than the timing of their grants. But every little bit helps, and it’s certainly good to know that someone upstairs is paying attention.

A National Academy of Sciences panel, chaired by Helen Quinn, has released a new report that seeks to identify “the key scientific practices, concepts and ideas that all students should learn by the time they complete high school.” An ambitious undertaking, but a sensible one. At the very least, efforts like this serve to focus attention on what’s important across a wide variety of K-12 curricula, and at best it could help prod schools (or states, really) across the country into teaching more coherent and useful science to kids. Here’s the web page for the report, a summary (pdf), and the report itself (pdf, free after you register).

So what are the core ideas of science? They are all listed in the summary report, and divided into three categories. The first category is “Scientific and Engineering Practices,” and includes such laudable concepts as ” Analyzing and interpreting data.” The second category is “Crosscutting Concepts That Have Common Application Across Fields,” by which they mean things like “Scale, proportion, and quantity” or ” Stability and change.” It’s great that the organizational scheme emphasizes ideas that stretch across disciplinary boundaries, but there is definitely a danger that the resulting items come off as a bit vague. The secret to success here will be how they can be implemented, with concrete examples.

The third category is the nitty-gritty, “Core Ideas in Four Disciplinary Areas,” namely “Physical Sciences,” “Life Sciences,” “Earth and Space Sciences,” and “Engineering, Technology, and the Applications of Science.” (Math is not within the report’s purview.) And here are the actual core ideas proposed for the physical sciences: (more…)

Like many physicists, I spend a reasonable portion of the summer months traveling, delivering talks at conferences and workshops, and taking the opportunity to meet with colleagues and gain first-hand experience of the range of research being done in my field. For me, this began a couple of hours after my classes ended for the semester (congratulations to my General Relativity class, all of whom did very well at the end of the day), when I headed off to California to hang out with Sean for a few days and to give the Caltech physics colloquium.

I always enjoy visiting Caltech, and I find colloquia particularly fun talks to deliver, since they provide the opportunity to explain what’s going on at the frontiers of the field to physicists who spend most of their time working in their own, different areas. But this talk was particularly exciting to give, because of the location. I hadn’t realized, but the Caltech physics colloquia take place in a rather old lecture hall (201 E. Bridge) in which I was told Richard Feynman delivered his renowned lectures on physics. This part of Caltech is about to undergo a round of renovations, which meant that this was probably my last chance to speak in the same place that Feynman did – a wonderful experience. With most academic travel, the main payback from a trip like this is the chance to develop some new ideas with one’s collaborators. This time was no exception, and Sean, a student of his and I started discussions about a new dark matter idea that I’ll attempt to blog about here should it come to anything.

After a week back in Philadelphia, I was on a plane once more, this time for a short hop to my old stomping grounds in Cleveland, to take part in a workshop on gravity being held at Case Western Reserve University. The last decade or so have seen a resurgence of efforts to seek a sensible way in which General Relativity (GR) might be modified, either in ways that might yield new physics of the early universe, or in a manner that might explain phenomena at late times. The main original impetus for this work has been the possibility that the phenomenon of cosmic acceleration might be signaling a modification of gravity on the largest scales. However, among many researchers the current thrust is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the ways in which gravity may differ from GR, and at what scales one might expect any allowed modifications to appear.

It is, in fact, an extremely tricky proposition to modify GR, with almost any idea one might think of running into trouble either with established tests of the theory within the solar system, or with serious theoretical inconsistencies such as the appearance of particles with negative energies, known as ghosts. Many of the more interesting ideas involve models arising from extra dimensions, which have led not only to interesting modified gravity models, but also to new ideas about field theories in four dimensions, that I will discuss in another post soon. The gravity workshop focused on many of these new ideas, and, as often happens at small intense meetings, I left with lots of new ideas about my own work.

In June, I left for a lightning trip to Brazil, to speak at the very first meeting of the whole of the Brazilian Physical Society. This conference was held in the beautiful location of Iguassu Falls. Although I was, unfortunately, too ill from a flu I had caught to be able to travel to the falls themselves, I was lucky enough to see them from the air a couple of times. I will clearly have to go back! The meeting had several thousand people, and it was clear that Brazilian physics is undergoing a period of rapid expansion, something it is heartening to see given the pressures science is facing in many other parts of the world. One of the highlights was an event launching the new South American branch of the International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP). The ICTP, in Trieste, Italy, was founded in 1964 by Abdus Salam, with the goal of providing educating scientists from developing countries. Their new branch, in Sao Paulo, will be directed by Nathan Berkovitz and should extend the great work of the original. It’ll be interested to see how this endeavor develops – I wish them all the best.

I’d intended three days in Brazil, but ended up there for an extra twenty-four hours because the airport at Iguassa Falls was closed for a day by particulates from the Chilean volcano. I get delayed many times every year and find myself cursing airlines (I’d missed an important meeting in Cambridge a few weeks earlier thanks to USAir), but it’s hard to be furious at a volcano. The people at the Brazilian Physical society were wonderfully helpful and I’d like to thank them as publically as I can for taking such good care of us, dealing with our hotel rooms, and getting us rebooked on new flights.

Now I’m back to work, taking a few weeks without travel and trying to get new projects up and running, while finishing writing up a few papers before the new semester creeps up on me.

Since I know nothing very useful about the job market outside academia, I solicited suggestions for specific pointers and helpful websites. A bushel of useful advice and thought-provoking comments resulted.

My original idea was to summarize what I thought was the best advice, and turn it into a single post. This idea has been undermined by (1) me not knowing which advice is best, and (2) a wide variety of occasionally-contradictory advice, presumably all applicable in different circumstances.

So instead here I’m just going to link to some of the most promising-looking resources that were mentioned. I encourage you to read the comments on the original post to get more ideas, and chime in here to keep the conversation going.

Collections of Online Resources

• The Alternative Scientist (blog)
• Non-Academic Career Information — a fantastic compendium from Prodigal Academic
• PhDs.org: Career Resources
• Beyond Physics: From the University to the Work Market (Facebook group)

Discussion Forums

• APS Forum on Graduate Student Affairs — Non-Traditional Careers
• Leaving Academe Forum — Chronicle of Higher Education
• Science Careers Forum — AAAS
• Versatile Ph.D.

Specific Kinds of Jobs

• Mathematics in Industry — SIAM
• Non-Academic Astronomers Network — AAS
• Policy Fellowships for Scientists and Engineers — a comprehensive list from Sheril Kirshenbaum
• What Is Data Science? — Mike Loukides
• How to Get a Job in Physics — Graduate course at LSU by Jorge Pullin
• Alternative Careers for Scientists — Bitesize Bio
• Careers in Science Policy — Heather Rieff

Personal Stories/Advice

• Project for Non-Academic Science — Guest-blog accounts collected by Chad Orzel
• Academia vs. Industry (Math) — Mark Chu-Carroll

Books

• Alternative Careers in Science — Cynthia Robbins-Roth
• Put Your Science to Work — Peter Fiske
• So What Are You Going to Do With That? — Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius

Job Ads/Finders

• Government Jobs Finder
• Science JobSeeker — AAAS
• Nature Jobs
• New Scientist Jobs
• The Scientist Careers

While the previous post bemoans the lack of simple world-changing ways to make the career path for aspiring academics more pleasant (other than bushels of money falling from the sky, of which I would approve), there is one feasible thing that everyone agrees would be good: better career counseling for Ph.D. students, both on the realistic prospects for advancement within academia, and concerning opportunities outside.

I always try to be honest with my own students about the prospects for ultimately landing a faculty job. But like most faculty members, I’m not that much help when it comes to outside opportunities, having spent practically all my life within academia. I’m happy to give advice, but you’d be crazy to take it, since I have no idea what I am talking about.

But that’s a correctable state of affairs. So: I’m hereby soliciting good, specific career advice and/or resources for students who are on the track to get a Ph.D. (or already have one) and are interested in pursuing non-academic jobs. This might be particular jobs that are Ph.D.-friendly, or websites with good information, or relevant fellowships or employment agencies, or just pointers to other resources. (For example: do you know the difference between a CV and a resume?) The more specific the better, and including useful links is best of all. General griping and expressions of bitterness should be kept in the previous thread; let’s try to be productive. And there’s no reason to limit it to physics, all fields are welcome. Advice that is useful for only a tiny number of people, but extremely useful for them, is certainly sought. We’re looking for things that have a nontrivial chance of actually helping some specific person at a future date.

Most of all it would be great to have input from people who actually got a Ph.D. and then went on to do something else. But it’s the internet, everyone can chime in.

I will take what look like the most helpful suggestions and collate them into a separate post. Spread the word, let’s get as much input from different sectors as we can.

Jessica at Bioephemera posts a provocative quote about the way we train and employ young people who are seeking careers in academia:

They’re doing exactly what we always complain our brightest students don’t do: eschewing the easy bucks of Wall Street, consulting or corporate law to pursue their ideals and be of service to society. Academia may once have been a cushy gig, but now we’re talking about highly talented young people who are willing to spend their 20s living on subsistence wages when they could be getting rich (and their friends are getting rich), simply because they believe in knowledge, ideas, inquiry; in teaching, in following their passion. To leave more than half of them holding the bag at the end of it all, over 30 and having to scrounge for a new career, is a human tragedy.

– William Deresiewicz, The Nation

The author goes on to bemoan this “colossal waste of human capital” — all those talented young people spending time getting Ph.D.’s, then not eventually landing faculty jobs, when they could be going right into productive careers in some other field.

I’m sincerely unsure what to think about the occasional complaints one hears along these lines. On the one hand, I firmly believe that the grad school/postdoc/junior faculty years should be enjoyable ones, not days of peril and gloom living under a cloud of uncertainty. If there were a way to make the journey easier, I would be all for it. I can think of small ways to do so, and am certainly in favor of such incremental improvements.

But on the other hand, I really can’t think of any sensible major improvements, for a simple reason: there are many people who would like to be academics, and few available jobs. Short of multiplying the number of college professorships by a factor of three or so, I’m not sure how to address the primary cause of this anxiety — the difficulty in getting jobs. If you knew you were going to land a tenured spot at a good place, it would be much easier to bear the indignities of grad-student/postdoc level salaries for a few years. Deresiewicz says, “If we don’t make things better for the people entering academia, no one’s going to want to do it anymore.” But if that were true, why are there so many “highly talented young people who are willing to spend their 20s living on subsistence wages when they could be getting rich”? These seem to be contradictory worries.

Obviously one thing to do would be to dramatically cut down on the number of people who get into graduate school. But that just moves the bottleneck around, it doesn’t change its overall size. And I don’t want to be the one who says to a somewhat-promising-but-not-superstar-quality grad school applicant, “Sorry, I’d enjoy working with you, but we’ve decided not to admit you because in our judgement your chances of eventually getting a faculty job aren’t quite as good as some of our other applicants. So you see, it’s for your own good.” Generally the people who advocate this kind of strategy are the ones who have already been admitted to grad school. (If you’re waiting for Deresiewicz’s solution, here it is: “The answer is to hire more professors.” Well, okay then.)

Again, I honestly don’t know what should be done. I would love to improve the lifestyle and general well-being of students and postdocs in any feasible way. Not sure what that way would be.

[Note: this post was published prematurely, then deleted, and is now back.]

Michael Nielsen gave a great talk at TEDxWaterloo about the idea of “open science”:

There’s a great deal of buzz about “openness” in certain sectors of the science community; largely this has passed physics and astronomy by, because we’re already pretty darn open. It’s hard to image something more open than arxiv, where everyone puts their papers up for free even before they’re published in a journal.

But Michael’s talking about something much more ambitious: opening the process of creating science, not just publishing it. For experimentalists this would be difficult, for obvious reasons. (You think people who sweat to build an experiment are going to invite the public in to take a whirl?) For theory it is also hard, but the reasons are more subtle.

The point is that credit in science is given out on the basis of getting your name on published papers. In the arxiv era, the papers don’t necessarily have to appear in a traditional journal — but that’s a topic for another day. The model is set in stone: you have an idea, you work out its consequences to the point where it’s publishable, and you write a paper. Without that last step, you’re not going to get any credit. (Very occasionally you will see references to “unpublished work” or “private communication,” but it’s rare and not really for big-ticket ideas.)

So if I had an idea, I would either work it out myself or start working with students or collaborators. I certainly would not go around publicizing an undeveloped idea; I wouldn’t get any credit for it, and someone else could take it and develop it themselves. I might give seminars in which I mention the idea, but that’s only recommended once it’s to the point where a paper is on the horizon.

Michael and others want to overthrow that model. Their shining example is this blog post by Tim Gowers. Gowers is a mathematician who proposed attacking an open math problem right there on his blog, by asking for comments from the crowd. If they succeeded, they could publish a paper under a collective pseudonym. He next chose a problem — developing a combinatorial approach to the Hales-Jewett theorem — and, several hundred comments later, announced that they had succeeded. Here’s the paper. Buoyed by this success, people have set up a Polymath Wiki to expedite tackling other problems in this way.

Could this work for theoretical physics? I don’t see why not. But note that Michael spends a lot of his time in the talk pointing out the obvious — crowdsourcing doesn’t always work. I could easily imagine ways in which such a project could fail; too much noise and not enough signal, everyone with good ideas deciding they would rather work on them by themselves rather than sharing openly, etc.

Might be worth a shot, though. I’m thinking of suggesting some ideas here on this blog and seeing whether we get any useful input. Let me sleep on it.