Fade to Uninterestingness

Its overly reductive headline notwithstanding, this article from yesterday’s New York Times basically sums up why I’m no longer so jazzed about a career in academia. I think the overarching theme emerging from these observations is less about a shift from liberal to conservative (or politically driven to “less explicitly political”), but rather from theoretical and big-picture-centric to relentlessly empirical and data-centric.

(Am I implying that the latter attitude obscures one’s ability to see the big picture and actually say something interesting? Well, not necessarily, but it does for me personally. Do I especially care that the former attitude runs the risk of being less rigorously scientific? No, I do not.)

Anyway, here (for me at least) are a few particular sources of despair:

At the same time, shrinking public resources overall and fewer tenure-track jobs in the humanities have pushed younger professors in those fields to concentrate more single-mindedly on their careers. Academia, once somewhat insulated from market pressures, is today treated like a business. This switch is a “major ideological and philosophical shift in how society views higher education,” Mr. Schuster and Mr. Finkelstein write in “The American Faculty.”

[…]

Ms. Goldrick-Rab has embraced such experiments. A graduate course she created — partly based on her research of community colleges — focused on “educational opportunity and inequality” at community colleges, with an “emphasis on the critical evaluation and assessment of current up-to-date research.” [Admirable, but sadly boring to me in the absence of “grand frameworks”: see below.]

Another Wisconsin professor, Erik Olin Wright, a 61-year-old sociologist and a Marxist theorist, described it this way: “There has been some shift away from grand frameworks to more focused empirical questions.” [Isn’t the grandness what makes higher education exciting? Isn’t it what teaches us that there’s more to life than making money? Isn’t it what helps us grow during these hopefully enriching years of our lives? Can we really be sustained by focused empirical questions alone?]

[…]

Wisconsin is part of the state’s university’s system, for example, but it receives only 18 percent of its total budget from the Legislature. The rest comes from donations, foundations, federal research grants and corporations. Mr. Wright and Mr. Olneck worry how constantly having a hand out — particularly to corporations — may affect attitudes and policies. Mr. Olneck mentioned the long list of labs and classrooms named after companies like Halliburton, Pillsbury and Ford Motor Company.

The market sensibility may account for what Mr. Olneck and others call an increasing careerism among junior faculty members.

Part of why I find the headline a little unsatisfying is because of my personal position on this issue. Unlike so much of what’s described in this article, I’m totally down with the trend away from polemics:

The authors are not talking about a political realignment. Democrats continue to overwhelmingly outnumber Republicans among faculty, young and old. But as educators have noted, the generation coming up appears less interested in ideological confrontations, summoning Barack Obama’s statement about the elections of 2000 and 2004: “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage.”

Another part of why I think the political theme here is confusing is the stuff about Allan Bloom:

Yet to some traditionalists, preoccupations like Mr. Olneck’s grated. The conservative philosopher Allan Bloom captured the bitter splits — better known as the culture wars — in his influential best seller “The Closing of the American Mind” in 1987. He detailed fights over the scarcity of women and people of color in the curriculum, the proliferation of pop-culture courses, doubts about the existence of any eternal truths and new theories that declared moral values to be merely an expression of power. These rancorous disputes often spilled into the nation’s political discourse.

Even though he resented and disagreed with many of the fruits of old-guard liberal academic thinking (“old-guard” as defined in this article, of course, i.e. the baby boomers), I can’t help but think that the part of Alan Bloom who was so concerned with the beauty of eternal truths would be unhappy about what Wright called above the “shift away from grand frameworks.” I mostly hated COTAM, but I think Bloom and I could agree about the impoverished-ness of a purely data-driven academe. We need facts and the frameworks to understand them.

The absence of that balance reminds me of an interesting point of agreement between mathematical physicists Henri Poincaré and E. A. Milne that I wrote a few years back. I’m worried that what they describe sounds awfully familiar:

…both writers quickly dismiss the criticism that the essence of the scientific enterprise is mere fact gathering. Poincaré does so with an oft-quoted analogy to building: “Cannot we be content with experiment alone? No, that is impossible; that would be a complete misunderstanding of the true character of science…Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.” Milne also subscribes to this viewpoint. He similarly denies the notion that science “adopt[s] the spirit of the collector, and glor[ies] most in the increase in the frontiers of our knowledge of facts, in the assemblage of fresh phenomena in a tendency to completion and exhaustiveness.” He later notes the “deleterious effect” of such an attitude, claiming “It gives rise to sneers such as that of H. G. Wells, when he pictured the large majority of scientific workers as each of them merely ‘adding one or two to that large stock of little papers with blunted conclusions of which the world is already too full.’”

Finally, I’d claim that we can see the migration described in this article reflected in what I’ll call the Comic Wars. Don’t get me wrong, I love PHD, but I think the attitudes it usually reflects are symptomatic of the changes this NYT article is getting at. See, for example, this post from Natalia Cecire:

Piled Higher and Deeper appears to be the grad-student-centric web comic of choice. Unfortunately, PHD is all about engineers. The recent addition of a humanities grad student (Gerard, the medieval Scandinavian philosophy student) only drives home that the author of the comic knows almost nothing about the humanities, and considers disciplines legitimate only insofar as they are quantitative.

On the other hand, there is Dinosaur Comics, which is pure brilliance.

Although I would have said “scientists and engineers,” I’m totally with you, Natalia. In fact, one reason why I love xkcd is that it represents what to me is the ideal middle ground between and PHD and Dinosaur Comcis. That is (if I’m not stretching the analogy too much) between the idealistic, though ultimately perhaps a little naive previous model and the data-driven, capitalistic model that we seem now to be stuck with. To me, the old framework begs the question “Whither verification and quantification?”, the latter, “Whither significance and inspiration and playfulness?”

As xkcd so often reminds me (here and here, for instance), I need both, for wholeness’ sake. Let’s hope academia realizes that it does too.

You Don’t Mess With A.O.

A couple of friends and I have been engaged in a little conversation (and email follow-up) about the New York Times movie critics. It’s funny, I see very few movies, but I’m a voracious review reader, especially from the Times and The Onion (though not the latter so much lately because I get sucked into reading the whole thing, which, sadly–summer be damned–I just don’t have the time for). While I, like my friend, prefer A.O. Scott, I’ve really been digging Manohla Dargis lately. (Incidentally, I went to write out my “Dargis thesis” this morning and realized I already had.)

Anyway, this is just a brief PSA: You should check out A.O. Scott’s hilarious review of You Don’t Mess With the Zohan (aka “the finest post-Zionist action-hairdressing sex comedy [A.O. Scott has] ever seen”). But my sources tell me you shouldn’t actually go see it, his advice notwithstanding. I was beginning to think A.O. seemed a little vulnerable to the crazy sex comedies lately, but then he skewered The Love Guru, or (as The Onion cover called it this week, the “Latest Austin Powers Movie”).

If you want to watch something, I’d recommend the Zohan Movie Minutes (halfway down the review, at left). The conclusion:

“All in all, it offers a kind of … a utopian picture of what would happen if people stopped blowing each other up and started just concentrating on the things that really matter, which are money, sex, nice haircuts, and hummus.”

RIP HOFG

Well, in its 69-year history, the Baseball Hall of Fame Game has been rained out five times. My dad and I have now had tickets to two of those rain outs (including one back in the ’90s when I was a little boy). The “good” news: we won’t miss another. The bad news: that’s because this was going to be the last one. Ah well.

Despite the lack of baseball, my dad and I had a great little Father’s Day trip out east. We stayed at a camp on Great Sacandaga on Saturday (my mom’s side) and hung out at another on Goodyear Lake on Sunday with a bunch of relatives I haven’t seen in years (my dad’s side). Many clams and beers were consumed, stories told, etc. (For those of you without any roots in upstate New York, “a camp” is what we’d call “a cabin” in Wisconsin).

As for Cooperstown, I think the locals lack a certain perspective on why this game is being discontinued, but I’m sad to see it go nevertheless. I hope they go to a “Legends Game” format or something in the future–in my opinion, that might actually be more interesting than watching a bunch of minor leaguers play for the disinterested major leaguers sitting on the bench griping about having to make the trip for an exhibition game (then again, I never got the chance to see even that, so I can’t know for sure). Either that or make the game count, but that’s never going to happen, since it would mean ridiculous lost revenue (historic Doubleday Field holds like 10,000 people). Anyway, it’s always a good time when you get to go to Cooperstown, so I’m grateful for the trip, regardless. Plus, I’m going to four Brewers games in the next two weeks, so I should get my fill of live ball.

Sorry for my continued absence on CSC. I’m still having a strange but very busy and rewarding summer, the details of which I’ll share when the time seems right.

Missing, Presumed Fed

It may appear that I’ve pulled a succession of Lig Lury, Jr.’s these last two weeks’ worth of evenings. However, this editor hasn’t been out grabbing food every night. I’ve actually just been trying to recover and catch up a bit from the semester, to get moving on summer research, and to take care of some business I’ve been putting off for a long time. More to come on that final front soon, I expect.

In other news…

This editor, I just discovered, is awesome. You should read his blog, especially in light of the sad track record of Sunday Judgment recently. All the magnificently nerdy copy-editor talk notwithstanding (my favorite line, regarding Myanmar v. Burma: “In any event, the State Department does not hold sway over our house style.”), perhaps the most compelling reason to check out McIntyre’s blog is here.

And this is so cool I won’t even bother with an introduction, though I’ll mention that I was sad it didn’t get mentioned here. Friends of mine and I have been talking about taking a “spontaneously generated adventure” one of these days; let me know if you want to join in.

code thing

void Material::updateCommod(Commodity newType)
{
if (newType == myType) {
throw MatException(
“Attempted to change Material’s Commodity type to its current type”); }
myType = newType;
}

void Material::changeCommod(Commodity newCommod)
{
if (newCommod == myType)
throw MatException(“Tried to change Commodity type to the current type.”);

myType = newCommod;
}

Toy Story — Or — A Radiation Therapy Treatment Planning Code From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed

A few days ago, I handed in my last paper of the semester, a report on my development of TOLSTOY: Treatment Optimization with Linear Scoring TOY. I figure we need more codes named after famous writers (see, for example, CAFCA).

TOLSTOY’s not going to answer any pressing research questions. It’s a toy code for performing radiation therapy treatment planning calculations, a task I know laughably little about (especially considering I was once on track to become a medical physicist). But that’s kinda the point. I think to really teach the concepts involved in doing any sort of complex calculation, you have to radically simplify the task. When we’re not willing to do that, we risk spending so much curricular time laying theoretical foundations that we never help students see the forest for the trees.

I’ve always been especially bothered by this phenomenon, which David Ollis (whose work I’ve always admired) and some other folks at NC State describe here:

“Virtually all writing guides emphasize the importance of defining at the outset the direction and nature of the story to be told. Paradoxically, engineering curricula almost universally neglect this time-honored advice. Instead, most sentence the new student to math, physics, chemistry, humanities, and social sciences. Thus, one to two years pass by before any engineering courses of substance and example are offered. The student is launched upon a journey without clear definition of the voyage or description of the port of arrival. One result is found in the too-often heard remark, ‘I didn’t see what engineering was all about until my final semester, when it all came together in the design project.'”

Thankfully, engineering educators increasingly seem willing to let first- and second-year students get their hands dirty with projects that try to strike a balance between authenticity and accessibility. That’s what I was going for with TOLSTOY–a tool that a student could play with to learn something about treatment planning without having to understand every detail of radiation transport and optimization.

One of my favorite David Foster Wallace essay titles involves the CAFCA code’s namesake. The essays is called “Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed,” and I kinda feel like those last eight words should get tacked on to pretty much everything I write. But it should also serve as a guide for how we design teaching tools in the computational sciences. Without a kind of pedagogical Occam’s razor to shave away as many of the befuddling details as possible, we don’t have much hope of actually teaching anything at all.

Anyway, here’s the paper. Sorry about some of the formatting; RefWorks wasn’t kind to the citations, for some reason, and in my rush to finish my semester I didn’t catch all the errors. By the way, the image above plots the dose distribution from a five-x-ray-beam treatment plan for –ridiculously–a spherical tumor in a cubical patient with no sensitive tissues to try to spare. It’s a totally trivial example, but I thought it looked really cool.

Triple Take

In case you haven’t heard, there was an unassisted triple play in the Cleveland-Toronto game last night. These have always been really, really exciting to me; I remember watching highlights of one when I was a seven-ish-year-old baseball nut living in Bradenton, FL (where the Pirates spring train, incidentally). I have the nagging sense that someone on the Reds turned it, and that it happened in a dome, but I haven’t done the research to confirm either fact.

To give you some sense of how rare these things are, note that this was only the 14th such play in major league history. If I manage to track down some good video, I’ll pass it along.

OK, I’ve been doing runs on TOLSTOY (more on this most recent project of mine soon) all morning and am ready to put myself into exile until the associated paper is finished. Catch you on the flip side.

Thanks to my friend Matt, by the way, for calling me last night with the news. I happened to be in a bar watching the Brewer game with his parents and fiancé at the time, but I never caught the highlight. Soon.

Update: Matt just sent me a little info that I thought I’d pass along:”You were right, the Unassisted TP has only happened one way, every time. It was usually catch, bag, and tag… but a few were catch, tag, and bag. Interesting stuff. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unassisted_triple_play

Incidentally, I think we need a commonly accepted word that allows you to credit someone with doing some research but that also connotes a bit of flimsiness to that research because, in fact, it just involved finding the right Wikipedia article. How about wi-search? My only problem with this choice is that I’m worried about possible confusion with Nintendo-Wii-related words (e.g., Wiimote). Any thoughts?

Another update: I just did a little wi-search of my own and figured out why I remember that unassisted TP of yore so vividly–it came at the expense of my Pirates: “September 20Philadelphia Phillies second baseman Mickey Morandini completes the first unassisted triple play in the National League in 65 years against the Pittsburgh Pirates. In the bottom of the sixth inning, Morandini snares Jeff King‘s line drive, steps on second to double off Andy Van Slyke, and finally tags Barry Bonds out before he can return to first. It is the ninth unassisted triple play since 1901, but only the second to be pulled off by a second baseman.”

And since I’m on a role:

I was just shattered to discover that my mind apparently created what I always thought was a sweet fact about two of those same Pirates. I had in my head that Barry Bonds, Bobby Bonilla, and Andy Van Slyke comprised the starting National League outfield as Pirates in at least one All-Star Game. However, if my wi-search is to be believed (1 2 3), it looks like the intersection of their respective all-star season sets is {1993}. However, by that year Bonilla and Bonds had moved on to the Mets and Giants, respectively. It also turns out that Van Slyke sat out the game with an injury. So much for that special memory from my childhood.

OK, back to TOLSTOY.

Cleaning House

I’m trying to clean up my del.icio.us tags a bit. Here are a couple links I’ve been meaning to pass along:

CO2 Saver — I’m in firm agreement with those who believe guilt isn’t going to get us anywhere in solving environmental problems. I think the truth of the matter is that we start to make a difference when we stop feeling guilty and start trying to do what we can (thanks, Natalie and Casey). Here’s one thing I think we can all do: install this small power management utility. Of course, we all probably could have handled this task on our own, but the CO2 Saver application does the work automatically. I just installed it and will keep you posted about whether it turns out to be a pain. It seems pretty unintrusive.

In Shift to Digital, More Repeat Mammograms — A few years back, I wrote a paper on the migration to digital mammography, and when I saw this article I thought it was interesting to see how things are panning out. As you might expect, the transition from film to digital has been a little rocky, but the experts still seem to think it’s gonna be worth it in the long run. Anyway, I’ve been thinking a fair bit about my radiation sciences days lately (partly because I’m trying to finish up my TOLSToy treatment planning code so my semester can be over), so I felt compelled to pass this along.

Pangramaday — I noticed today that my friend Ryan is taking a week off from his daily pangram-composing discipline. What better time to check out his site and get caught up? I’ve always admired Ryan’s verbal dexterity and have been enjoying this fun, easy read. I thought last Monday’s entry was especially graceful.

Poor Union South

Hehe, those of you familiar with the UW-Madison campus may find this amusing:

“For 37 years, Union South has turned a cold shoulder to the campus. And the feeling, unfortunately, has been mutual. Unloved and underutilized, Union South’s quirky design, and uninviting Soviet-style architecture will give way to a new South Campus Union that planners expect will be a “people magnet” that will invigorate the area.
Read more: http://www.news.wisc.edu/15204