Re: Teaching physics to biology students

Timo Nieminen <uqtniemi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sat, 18 Mar 2006, Ken Muldrew wrote:

Timo Nieminen <uqtniemi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Fri, 17 Mar 2006, Ken Muldrew wrote:

mmeron@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

I'm sure you're familiar with the Golden Rule, i.e. "he who has the
gold, makes the rules". Those who fund your research are in position
to dictate conditions and in the long run the temptation to do so is
to great to resist.

Yeah, if only they didn't use the metric of paper counting to evaluate
the success of their "initiatives" (My god, what progress we're making
in the fight on cancer!).

There are moves away from paper-counting. We're told it's coming in 2
ways: some journals will be "Tier 1", supposedly the top 20% of them, and
papers therein will count as worth 5 times as much. This appears a bit
crude, but it's a start.

I dont' think so. In fact, I *strongly* disagree.

Ah, but consider what it replaces: counting number of papers.

We just had a power failure and I lost the reply that I was working on
(I'll never recapture the eloquence of that powerful missive; this
poor and hastily scratched bit of dross will have to do in its place).

This may be a difference between medicine and physics (or maybe not, I
really can't say). In medicine we have a cohort of senior people who
are genuinely more interested in serving as elder statesmen (so to
speak) than in continuing to do research. They are like another tier
in the undergrad/grad/post-doc/asst., assoc., full prof cascade. Their
interests are generally more broad than those of an active researcher
(who is by necessity something of a specialist) and their knowledge of
not only the literature, but also of the abilities and talents of many
of the players in several fields, is first rate. I think these people
would genuinely find satisfaction from performing the hard work of
evaluating the work of active researchers. Naturally they would bring
some of their old prejudices to the task, but consider the
alternative: counting number of papers. ;-)

It reminds me of
zero-tolerance policies (any zero-tolerance policies really, you can
pick your favorite). This business of subtracting intelligence from
the process...it's just so ridiculous.

But it's got to be doable by beancounters!

Ah, here's where I haven't made my point. It can *not* be done by any
but those who are skilled in the art. Beancounters have no place in
any reasonable scheme of evaluating scientific productivity.

Of course the intelligence
needs to be subtracted from the process. The alternative would be to hire
people who could think - but would managers tolerate underlings who can
_think_?

I'm dreaming, of course, but I'm dreaming of managers who can _think_
as well. Perhaps the extent of my delusions can inform your homage to
spirits page, if nothing else. ;-)

Right now there are lots of
smart people spending huge amounts of their time trying to come up
with targeted funding intiatives, and evaluating grant applications
for quality. What a terrible waste! There is not a chance in hell that
they can predict the future well enough to decide who should get
funded (among the reasonable applications; obviously there are dogs
among the pile). What they can do, and do well, is evaluate what
people have done in the past. It isn't easy; one has to spend a lot of
time and effort to place someone's work into the context of their
field and judge the impact. But it can be done (and it has nothing to
do with paper counting). So why don't we do that? Instead of convening
panels of scientists to rank grant applications, get them instead to
rank the impact of the applicant's recent work, and dole out funding
on that basis (of course you can still ask for a proposal, budget,
timeline, etc., it's just that you base your decision on something
that might be relevant to the reasons for providing money in the first
place).

The easiest way to get funded is to promise to do more of the same. It's
hard to get real innovation funded - why, you'd be doing something that
deviates from your past experience, and results won't be guaranteed. How
terribly risky!

In fact, the senior people in medicine who manage to get continuous
funding have an even better scam (here in Canada, health grants are
2-3 times larger than basic science grants, but the success rate is
only around 25%, so one is by no means ever "in" the system on the
basis of past success). They hold back publication of 1-2 years of
work and write their grant proposals based on work that's already done
(with pilot data that is oh-so-convincing (it damn well better be!))
-- this is easier to do if you have 10-12 students and post-docs
churning out data. So successful grants aren't just for more of the
same, they're for work that's guaranteed to be successful (for the
very good reason that it's already been done...and was a success).
Innovation is treated with utter contempt.

Allow me to provide a personal anecdote (not so much in support of my
thesis, but certainly in support of my bad attitude). The Canadian
Institutes of Health Research was running a special competition for
"high risk, high reward" proposals. I put in a grant proposing to look
for evidence of communication between cells using light signals (not
as crazy as it sounds; all cells give off a low level of
chemiluminescent light, and there are situations where neural and
muscular electrical signals to excitable cells could cause unwanted
cross-talk, and natural selection tends to use whatever comes to hand,
and a bunch of other reasons that aren't overly compelling, but are
suggestive (at least). I proposed to do a very conservative
differential experiment (very briefly: isolate two populations of
cells except for an optical link, perturb one population then look for
alterations in gene expression in the other (then use filters to
narrow the bandwidth and eventually try to induce similar changes by
providing an artificial light signal)). The terms of reference were
very clear that no pilot data was required, that the project should be
basically unfundable in a normal competition due to the speculative
nature of the hypotheses, that success should cause a significant
change in at least one field, etc., etc. Man, did I get slaughtered! I
finished dead last in the competition with the most sarcastic,
scathing review (oddly, my other review was excellent, but I still
finished dead last, so the committee was onside with the slasher). The
grants that were funded were basically those that just missed the
cutoff in the regular competition. Blech...

Some portion of the government-provided research funding should go into
speculative research, even heretical research, with little expectation of
success.

When you run for king of the world, you've got my vote!

Doesn't look like there's much chance of that at the moment over
here - there's a trend towards having to justify research as "having
tangible benefits". Ah well, at least "pure" research still attracts
military funding, something that the quantum computing/information people
are probably grateful for.

Well we certainly don't want any crap like general relativity. GPS is
nice, and all, but these "tangible benefits" are not something we want
to wait 75 years for.

AFAIK, it's based on efforts in the UK to evaluate research quality. The
optimistic think it's a way for the govt to reward productive and useful
research; the pessimistic think it's a way to cut funding for universities
and research in general. There might be a bigger emphasis on research
performance vs teaching performance - some departments/schools that focus
on professional training (eg education, therapies etc) fear this. "If you
can get students, just charge them higher fees" will be the official
answer.

My model for research funding comes from the post-war MRC (medical
research council) of the UK. There was no hint of objectivity (other
than the assumption that people who had served their science with
honor and integrity all their lives would continue to act with honor
and integrity and without malice in forming subjective opinions in
fields where they were expert). There really is no need to force
people to defend their decisions in language understandable to
outsiders as long as you hold them accountable for the results of
their decisions down the line. This "objectivity" business seems
seriously misplaced to me.

I saw a recent job ad inspired by fear of this kind of thing. "We want
physicists who publish in the highest impact journals" (with 2 positions
available) translates as "we are peeing ourselves in fear".

Sheesh!

1.5 weeks before closing date, I hear they had 177 applicants. I expect
they ended up with approx 200.

When I was a post-doc (mid 90's) every job I applied for had over 300
applicants (but they never insisted on publications in the highest
impact journals, as far as I remember. Then again, maybe that's why I
had so few interviews...

.

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