This is the truth

The education pyramid. I think I saw that somewhere else too.

funny cause it's true

Athletes of the World, Unite!

Bowling for big bucks:
Amateur athletics is wonderful, entertaining and disgustingly exploitative

By Allen R. Sanderson
November 24, 2008

With political polling and voting now behind us, as we head to malls and moms this holiday season, how about a quick survey to name the most exploited workers in the American economy? Typical knee-jerk candidates might be Wal-Mart employees, agricultural laborers, immigrants (legal or otherwise) and maybe even the U.S. taxpayer. But I have a fifth candidate.

If one wants to know who really is being exploited—defined as contributing the most revenue to his employer compared with what he is being paid for his efforts—we have to go no further than our living rooms. For there, starting with the appropriately dubbed Congressional Bowl in our nation's capital Dec. 20 and ending in Miami on Jan. 8 with the Bowl Championship Series championship game, is the vast array—34 in all—of college football bowl games.

NB, academia is run the same way itself - compare graduate student stipends and associate professor salaries to the rise in endowments over the last few years. Break the machine!

Students Unite!

You have only your student loans to lose: America's Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor's Degree

[..] Today, amazingly, a majority of the students whom colleges admit are grossly underprepared. Only 23 percent of the 1.3 million high-school graduates of 2007 who took the ACT examination were ready for college-level work in the core subjects of English, math, reading, and science.

Perhaps more surprising, even those high-school students who are fully qualified to attend college are increasingly unlikely to derive enough benefit to justify the often six-figure cost and four to six years (or more) it takes to graduate. Research suggests that more than 40 percent of freshmen at four-year institutions do not graduate in six years. Colleges trumpet the statistic that, over their lifetimes, college graduates earn more than nongraduates, but that's terribly misleading. You could lock the collegebound in a closet for four years, and they'd still go on to earn more than the pool of non-collegebound — they're brighter, more motivated, and have better family connections.

Previously: Are Too Many People Going to College?

(yes)

Denied again

2008 Ig Nobels

For some reason, the first thousand names in the Boston phone book come to mind

Interesting musings on the academic insult "I've never heard of you."

FWIW, I think that many of the comments are funny or true or funny and true, although there is a "back in the day whipersnappers respected their elders," which I kinda doubt. Did nickels have pictures of bees on them? Did you get five bees for a quarter?

The basic gist of all of this, is that in the university research program administration business, where much of the effort is very front-loaded, respect and recognition feel hard to come by. To which I say, the punishment fits the crime. Namely, stop worrying if other people think you're smart.

Is it just me

or do social scientists have a little more license with their paper titles than, cough, physical sciences?

Science Conferences

Biocurious: Anatomy of a seminar*

They don’t all go like this, but the vast majority of seminars I attend seem to follow this general outline.

1. Introduction of Esteemed Speaker by Local Professor with the largest overlap in research interests. Enumeration of every award Esteemed Speaker has ever garnered is standard issue, and if Local Professor and Esteemed Speaker know each other, humorous story from “well, not THAT long ago” is recounted, though chances are you probably had to be there (unless it involves breaking obscenely expensive equipment, in which case everyone has a good laugh).

[more]

By all means, click through, but I will say that the short talks (which are what I give/gave) which follow the plenary speakers aren't that much different. Basically, the quickie-version. Hopefully, you won't repeat the previous speakers, but they'll have been similar enough that you can hit the ground running. Wham, bam, thank-you ma'am. My advice is to use non-serifed (helevtia et al) fonts for legibility, tell a story, and use the whole thing for a poster which you run in parallel (posters are easy to get at OSA conferences).

*for those keeping score at home, I'm an idiot.

How to grade papers

A Guide to Grading.

Journal of Negative Results

I'm curious about the future of "open-source journals." You don't need to drive by the swank Dupont Circle office of the OSA or AAAS to suspect they may have become about more about a leadership that was to the manor born than producing quality scientific publications. But it helps.

I am pessimistic, and believe that the optimism about these publications will disappear when the new boss is found to passing resemble the old one. There is a need to allocate money and so many of the problems (cronyism, falsification of data, hype, etc.) with are symptomatic and not causes.

Still, it's good to have a debate [=> @Nature]. And there's plenty of room for crazy ideas: The Journal of Negative Results. I'm curious about how the reviewing criteria will work out. Anyway, here's a quote I stuck on the front of my dissertation:

We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn’t any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work. . .
- Richard P. Feynman - Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1965.

Pretty much.

The Ivory Tower

Via Greg Mankiw, The Ivory Trade [from The Economist]:

AMERICA is the home of the efficient-market hypothesis, which says financial markets have become so keenly contested that it is impossible for investors to keep beating them. Yet the very universities that peddle this theory so confidently also gleefully undermine it by doing precisely that: over one year and over ten, their endowment funds beat the S&P 500 and hammer most other institutional investors, including pension funds.

The final figures for the most recent fiscal year will be out next week. But according to preliminary numbers from the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) and TIAA-CREF, a financial-services group, university endowments made an average return of 10.7% in the year to June 30th 2006, net of fees and expenses.

The biggest endowments are big investors: between them, Harvard and Yale have some $50 billion, around one-seventh of the total. They tend to do better than their smaller peers and pretty much everyone else. Indeed, these eggheads even beat the quants. Endowments larger than $1 billion returned 15.2% on average last year, more than the main hedge-fund index (see chart). The best-performing endowment in 2005-06, which belonged to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gained a handsome 23%. That put it a whisker ahead of Yale's (22.9%), run for more than 20 years by David Swensen.

[...]

According to one former Harvard official, its endowment fund has done so well because it has avoided taking advice from the economics faculty.

Ha ha, but seriously, 10 years isn't a long enough period to really evaulate their above-market performance claims. There are mutual funds which show 15-20% for 10 years, but they eventually crash and burn. Hence the popularity of no-load index funds for long-term investments. Basically, Return = Dividends + Risk. Also, never underestimate the power of compounding interest over a long period of time.

Second, Harvard + Yale = $50 billion, and both private schools I went to have huge endowments. Hence I can't picture myself giving either one a lot of money. There are more important things to do.

Third, this is The Economist. They are always wrong.