“The leading institutions speak to the best candidates; the rest to anyone they think they can get. “There’s no point in talking to someone who’s going to end up at Harvard,” says a professor at a British university.”

Its OK. This is just about jobs for academic economists. The rest of us are far too sensible. If you have any doubt, watch the ‘Inside Job’.

“A very simple explanation is: In corporate, they have money”

Many big companies also pay for corporate learning services to administer and track internal programs like sexual harassment training. That has already led some academic-focused start-ups to rethink their audiences.

“A very simple explanation is: In corporate, they have money,” said Josh Coates, the chief executive of Instructure, an ed tech company that has broadened its strategy.

In 2011, Instructure began marketing a learning management system, called Canvas, to universities and school districts. Last year, the company expanded its business into employee-training platforms for corporations. Mr. Coates said he expected that Instructure would eventually derive much of its revenue from companies, which pay higher fees than schools.

“If they can make an employee 2 percent better by paying $50 for corporate training, they are going to do that in a heartbeat,” Mr. Coates said. “A school can’t do that kind of calculation. It’s not an obvious return on investment.”

NYT

Female organs revealed as weapons in sexual arms race [link]

Isn’t  biology just wonderful?

Interview with Louise Richardson, in the Guardian. She says some interesting things.

“I think the vice-chancellor or president of any university learns very quickly that if you say ‘March!’ people ask ‘Why?’ and I think that’s part of why it makes them wonderful places to be, full of dynamic, critical people,” 

Richardson, who is Irish, took her first degree at Trinity in Dublin, but has spent most of her career in the US in first rate institutions, institutions which function very differently from most UK research intensive universities. Her quote does not reflect the direction of travel for most UK universities, and it will be interesting to examine how such factors will act over time as a magnet for the best staff. Reminds me of Larry Lessig’s comments:

The best example of this, I am sure many of you know are familiar with this, is the tyranny of counting in the British educational system for academics, where everything is a function of how many pages you produce that get published by journals. So your whole scholarship is around this metric which is about counting something which is relatively easy to count. All of us have the sense that this can’t be right. That can’t be the way to think about what is contributing to good scholarship.

I would like to be more optimistic or confident on this point, but people considering an academic career in the UK need to understand that corporatism has come at the expense of any community of scholars — and that many of these scholars have students’ interests at heart more than their corporate bosses. I hope we see some genuine competition between institutions in this respect. (Some similar words come from the Nobel Laureate, Brian Schmidt, who has taken over at the ANU, in Canberra). One of the biggest losers in this creeping pseudo-corporatism, have been undergraduate students.

Richardson, also makes some points about how — in comparison with Harvard at least — little attention it paid to selecting students via the the Ucas system.

“Harvard has a very sophisticated admissions process for identifying talent. Under the Ucas system students write 500 words describing themselves. In the American system they write essay after essay about themselves, and there are whole ranges of things they can submit. The process is very different. “I accept all the advantages of the Ucas system, the ease of going through it, reducing the real disincentives in applying to a university that requires half a dozen essays and so on. But we don’t get enough information to make the kind of sophisticated decisions one would like.

I have little first hand experience of medical student selection, but I wonder if there are parallels with the dismal methods used in postgraduate medicine, whereby any sense of judgment is drowned by pseudoscience HR considerations; and a lack of insight, because all information is being compressed to comply with tick boxes. For medical school, we need to think ‘ecology’ and take risks: we are not producing widgets. If you are serious about broadening access — in a meaningful way — you will need to invest more.

And, not surprisingly:

And, strangely, the fact there are no fees in Scotland has not meant that there’s a higher proportion of deprived kids attending university than in England,” she says.

There is a phrase (or a mixture of phrases) that I think Jacob Browowski used. Twentieth century physics was one of the crowning cultural achievements of humanity and much of it was made by the sons of illiterate cobblers. Great strides in the ascent of man are often made by ‘outliers’, and such people do not tend to cluster in any particular social strata. If universities exist to nurture talent rather than act as a system to rank people or as certification factories, they have to find it as well.

“Learn that we respond to your lecture very individually, and that we pick our lectures often for the individuality of the professor rather than the subject. Condemning or celebrating the lecture isn’t, in the end, as useful as understanding what we need. So please ask us. Because we’ve had enough of sitting silently in the dark, listening to all of you talk”. –

A lecture from the lectured. Worth a read in full. Via Audrey Watters.

 

From an article about Harold Evans.

For Evans, however, thalidomide’s story remains one of British treachery, rather than the legacy of Nazi evil. It is, he believes, a lesson in how a government can “betray its duty”. He is also haunted by the memory of the implacable businessmen who ran Distillers.

“At the time these men who all sat around the board table were convinced that drugs could not cross the placental barrier. Every single face around that table was made of granite,” he said.

Our knowledge is always incomplete.

There is a book review of a biography of the Swiss mathematician Leonard Euler, ‘Leonard Euler: Mathematical Genius in the Enlightenment’ in the Economist. The article is titled ‘The Master of them all’, and quotes Pierre-Simon Laplace: ‘Read Euler, read Euler, he is the master of us all’. I only know a little of his achievements, but one bit to do with graph theory has always stuck in my mind when I think about medical education. Bear with me please, the metaphors are being stretched.

In basic statistics you quickly learn that numbers get very big when you think about permutations and combinations. All those factorial n! numbers. I liked the topic, because you can feel what is going on by simply going through the motions of counting — as long as your examples are not to big. After that, you need a formula.

Euler might be considered one of the earliest students of graph theory. From Wikipedia:

The city of Königsberg, Prussia was set on the Pregel River, and included two large islands that were connected to each other and the mainland by seven bridges. The problem is to decide whether it is possible to follow a path that crosses each bridge exactly once and returns to the starting point. It is not possible: there is no Eulerian circuit. This solution is considered to be the first theorem of graph theory, specifically of planar graph theory

Simple examples of what all this about are also in Wikipedia. If you have many nodes (vertices) and the lines between (edges), how many edges do you have? A simple example is shown below.

“10-simplex graph” by Koko90 – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.

There are lots of different sorts of structures, in terms of whether the edges are directional, whether circles are allowed etc, and also whether weightings are factored in. Most of this is beyond me. But for a subset of graphs, , you use formulas like n(n–1)/2 to describe the number of edges. The simple point is that as the number of nodes rises, the number of edges escalates faster than some of us might have imagined.

Now imagine, the nodes are people, like medical students, or staff who teach medical students. The edges represent communication between these individuals. Some communication is staff-staff, some student-student, and some staff-student. And the direction of flow can vary, some bilateral some more unilateral.

What has happened over time is that the number of nodes has increased. There are more students and more staff. The result is that when you double the nodes, the increased complexity is not merely double but rises in a polynomial way. This represents a major problem. For many medical schools even enumerating the number of staff who students are exposed to, is tricky. In my own unit, within a ten day attachment each one of 14 students might be exposed to a group of 15 teachers. If we keep the arithmetic simple, for each student, for 10 days, the number of combinations is 15!/10!5! The answer is over 3000 combinations. In reality there is structure to our timetabling, so the number is much smaller, but it remains large. And I have ignored the group effects of peer mixing or peer interaction.

Now think across the whole course, with ~ 300 students in each year, and a ‘teaching staff’, or staff to which students are exposed, of at least 300 [I have made this number up, but I suspect it is a conservative estimate].

Now some type of webs (because that it what they are) have a number of interesting properties. The web I am writing this on (as in the internet) was developed because information structures designed as webs have greater resilience than hierarchical command and control structures, that the military services traditionally liked (itself a type of ‘poor’ web). The internet grew out of work in the 1950s pointing out that if the Soviets attacked the US, a diffuse communication net, rather than one with  giant dominant node or a few directional edges, was more robust.

I think you can also view much research in this way. Nodes are individual scientists, and we think that by making links across the work of may other scientists real advance is more likely (you can think of the nodes are persons, or microfields of enquiry). It is this freedom that makes many of us believe that much central control is not efficient for the generation of new ideas or any novel combination of ideas.

There are however downsides. In complex structures, communication across all the nodes comes with a cost. Just think of email. Most days my university seems to email me telling me that certain services I never use are not going to be available for a period of time. And then they email me to say then are up and running again. In a more hierarchical structure, some of this wasteful communication can be avoided (but with a cost).

In many situations people do not like the potential openness of webs, rather they want to control any possible flow of information, so they like knowledge to reside in silos, with few links between them, so that only they can control the information flow between these silos (and with links being directional). I think of these administrative measures as ‘pinching’ the network producing control points. If you have enough of them, you no longer have a useful web in the way the WWW is, but a standard hierarchical command and control web structure.

The resilience of some webs can be a downside under some conditions. The advantage of of simple hierarchical structures is that change can be controlled or even imposed (to some degree at least). If you have a teaching staff of >300 and 1500 students, changing direction in a complete web is almost impossible. Resilience to attack comes with the downside of resistance to change. This has always seemed to me to be one of the reasons that the pace of change in medical education is so slow. We have a large n, and the number of links large. Change is difficult.

There are seem approaches that historically are useful. First, we don’t attempt to link every road with every road in any country. We have trunk routes, and then smaller roads: we prune the branches. We also know that if you want to produce change, you are often better floating free of any large web — exocytosis if you like — to produce the classic skunkworks project. Companies are aware that this if often a sensible strategy but Deans or professional administrators hate the idea, because they think they know best. For any sense of creation, the mere burden of all these ‘routine’ information flows, stifles time for thinking; let alone thinking about something  new. Remember Jim Watson’s comments about how his and Francis Crick’s pigeon holes were usually empty: they got no mail, when they were both in their most creative period.

Research — at least in good places — can almost institutionalise the skunkworks approach. This is simply because the goal of research, is research, although this statement appears to challenge many. There is no day job which has to be kept running. I once worked in a very large research institution in which multiple teams of researchers were trying to crack the very same problem, using different approaches.

For teaching, few similar opportunities exist. If you start a new course or even say a new medical school, you might be living the skunkworks for a short while, but eventually business as usual approaches will intervene. In medical education, more change — for good and bad it seems to me — has come from such new institutions. But eventually any successful skunkworks project will have to create its own trunk routes for information flow. And here is the fundamental problem: the structures we need to deliver teaching or research, are very different to the structures we need to generate novelty. For research we can sort of work within the system (or at least, some of us once could), because we once new how to finance great science. For teaching, in my experience things are much worse. Novelty is hard to finance, and the necessity for skunkworks less appreciated. My suspicion is therefore that much change will come from outwith the universities themselves.

‘The world that allowed Brenner and Crick, or Hubel and Wiesel no longer exists, because the institutions no longer believe in allowing people to make mistakes: you are not allowed to declare bankruptcy in a scientific career. And yet we know that most people — whether in tech — or academia, need to pivot after failure and bankruptcy.’

[direct link to this aside] 

This from GW Bowersock in the NYRB.

Yet by an astonishing coincidence two contemporary English authors who write often and well about ancient Rome, Mary Beard and Tom Holland, have simultaneously produced readable histories of Rome. It would be patronizing and wrong to speak of their work as popularization, but there can be little doubt that both writers are deservedly popular. Between them they have done more to promote classical studies than all the professors who try to reach thousands through the electronic programs currently known as massive open online courses (MOOCs).

I haven’t read the books under consideration, but will still comment. First, just a reminder that great academics have used books and film and electronics for a long time. Think of Galbraith’s ‘The age of uncertainty’ or Bronowski’s ‘The Ascent of Man’ (although whether academia has many such polymaths left is an interesting question). The OU has done a great job for many decades.

But I find the word ‘electronics’ jars. Perhaps it is just me, but I am reminded of Eli Noam’s groundbreaking essay in Science over 20 years ago, ‘Electronic and the Dim Future of the University (here is a free version)’. The ambiguity around ‘program’ is there too.

Time to move on. Otherwise, a terrific and rich article, on a topic on which I know little.

Two quotes from Audrey Watters‘ round up of 2015.

The variation in MOOCs doesn’t just come from adding version numbers to the end. Oh no. The University of Nottingham, for example, trademarked “NOOC” (short for “Nottingham Open Online Course”) this year.

And:

From The Wall Street Journal in June, “Daphne Koller on the Future of Online Education”:

“If you put an instructor to sleep 300 years ago and woke him up in a classroom today, he’ll say, ‘Oh, I know exactly where I am,’” says Daphne Koller, co-founder of the online-education company Coursera.

Of course, if you put a reader of The Wall Street Journal to sleep 3 years ago, during “The Year of the MOOC,” and woke him up and showed him an article quoting Daphne Koller today, he’ll say, “Oh, I know exactly where I am.”…

Well worth reading in full.