Academia

The Seven Deadly Sins of Academia

Together with Åsa over at Ting och Tankar we developed a list of the seven deadly sins of academia. These are the things that kill science and harm those who work in academia. Our list includes:

1. Falsifying: Research is developed and builds on the past. A small error, left unchecked, can create misinformation and harmful practices. They are also incredibly embarrassing if they are caught out.

An infamous example of falsifying data is the fantastic Piltdown man. In 1912 amateur archeologist Charles Dawson found a skull at Piltdown and claimed it was the missing link between ape and man; he called it Eoanthropus Dawsoni. It was not until 1953 that it was proved that the skull and the jawbone was a mix of man and orangutan which had been chemically treated to appear old. Check out Six Notable Archaeological Forgeries in History at Socyberty.

2. Plagiarism: Plagiarism is the attempt to pass of someone else’s ideas as your own. Not bright, not smart and incredibly embarrassing. This is a popular subject in academia and I regularly lecture to students about the topic.

There are so many interesting examples of plagiarism. An interesting one is the case of the former German defense minister Baron Karl-Theodor von und zu Guttenberg who was forced to resign from politics when it was discovered that his PhD thesis was basically one big copy paste job. It wasn’t just plagiarism it was blatantly so. He even copied the introduction to his dissertation from an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. His excuses were many “…over 80 diskettes, and 4 computers, and 2 kids…” but that’s the point – a dissertation is hard work. Passing off someone else’s ideas as your own is not.

3. Sabotage: Sabotage: this is particularly nasty. Instead of attempting to do your own work you focus on destroying others. On the low end of the scale is not to inform others of work that you know they would need (just not nice). On the high end is physically disrupting their work by destroying files, data or planting false evidence in their data.

In a particularly nasty example of the latter a cancer researcher “… began noticing problems with her research materials: switched labels on petri dishes, errant antibodies dumped into her western blots, and several instances of ethanol in her cell culture media.” The police were contacted and hidden cameras were installed in the lab. The results were quick “Within less than 24 hours of being put in, one camera captured Bhrigu acting suspiciously. Under questioning, he confessed, saying that he was trying to slow the student down.” Read the full story: Lab sabotage deemed research misconduct (with exclusive surveillance video) at Nature News Blog.

4. Exaggeration: The actual work of science is not suitable material for a thriller. Scientists spend a great deal of their time reading, thinking and writing. Hardly the stuff blockbuster movies are made of. To make matters worse, science is rarely (if ever) about the big breakthroughs. It’s a collective, incremental process of small, small baby steps. There may therefore be a temptation to overstate the importance of one’s own impact.

An article by Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz in Annals of Internal Medicine (5 May 2009) looks at press releases from academic medical centres made public in 2005. “On a careful look at these results, exaggeration was found to be more common in releases about animal studies than human studies. Out of the 200 releases, 195 included quotes from the scientific investigators: 26% of them were judged to overstate research importance.” British Lung Foundation.
5. Procrastination: This is the art of putting something off. It’s a deadly sin since it is the killer in academia. There can be no PhD student unfamiliar with its effects. It’s so important that there is even a patron saint (Saint Expeditus) to ward of procrastination (you can’t make this stuff up!)

The good thing about procrastination is that we are in good company.

Dr. Samuel Johnson, who wrote the first English language dictionary, is a credible candidate. As his friend Hester Piozzi remembered, he did almost all of his composition last minute, including a famous essay about procrastination for The Rambler, which he finished while the errand boy waited outside to bring it to press. Or consider Richard Sheridan, a politician and playwright, who did Dr. Johnson one better; he finished writing the final act for his play The School for Scandal while it was being performed on opening night, bringing down lines piecemeal to the actors. And then there is Leonardo Da Vinci. Who among us is called out as a distractible, doodling scatterbrain by a pope? An exasperated Leo X exclaimed, “This man will never accomplish anything! He thinks of the end before the beginning.” (The Greatest Procrastinator in History Still Alive: Puts Off Death in Psychology Today)

What’s worse than procrastination? Apparently Perendination: To put off until the day after tomorrow.

6. Territoriality: Attempting to exclude research or a researcher by drawing boundaries around your own research discipline. This is a form of dogmatic attack against the work of someone you dislike. You do not belong here, you do not belong in our discipline, and your ideas are less valid since your undergrad degree comes from the wrong field.

Strangely enough the most common form of attack is to find an obscure theoretician within the field, often some great thinker to whom everyone refers (but few bother to read) and attempt to hit the invader over the head with.

A typical situation is to engage the opponent in a discussion on an obscure (and often irrelevant for the main discussion) point in the works of the great. The goal is to either get the invader to accept the speaker’s mastery of the subject – or even better an admission of ignorance! Ah the joy when the speaker can smile knowingly in shock and horror to signify that your discipline lacks all value.

I have written about this here.

7. Techno-Adoration: Whether it’s the Large Hadron Collider, a better hydrophone or a new laptop scientists love toys. They are necessary but can easily become an end to themselves. In the pursuit of science it is easy to image that we will get better results just as soon as we get a better machine. As science often requires expensive investments into special purpose tools it is not unusual for the pursuit of science to become the pursuit of the next new shiny toy.

My absolute favorite science toy must be the specially modified radio controlled helicopter designed to collect whale snot on petri dishes. Mind you, this toy helped Dr. Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse win an IG Noble Prize in 2010.

 

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Is Spock a Professor of ethics at Oxford?

Podcasts are the best thing since sliced bread. So why is it that so few actually know what they are or how to use them? Strange. Or is it just difficult to break ingrained behavior? But this is not about trying to persuade those who don’t get it but I just want to push the amazing series of podcast being sent now on the BBC Arts & Ideas show.

With a focus on the theme of Change the show presents lectures and a following q&a session from people like Landscape architect Charles Jencks, Neuro-scientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore (listening to her now), Psychotherapist Susie Orbach & Economist Aditya Chakrabortty.

All these were great but the lecture that really blew me away was by Professor Julian Savulescu who spoke about the duty of change and the case for human enhancement and genetic selection. What I liked was the way in which he, like some philosophers seem to do, took a logical thinking to its consequences. Most of the time we find it difficult to accept a logical chain of thought. Well ok, I do… I get to the beginning where I can lay out the foundations. A is true, B is true… (and so on) but when drawing out the consequences I often shy away from the obvious as I am steered by an irrational emotion. What a philosopher can do is to dare to think the unthinkable.

With his bold logic, I suspect that Julian Savulescu may actually be Spock.

 

 

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From Words to Wordfeud: notes on a lecture

There is a strange idea that we are living in the information age and that this age is something bright, shiny and new. Now I don’t mean that we are not in the information age but my concern is the idea that information is something new and exciting.

From Words to Wordfeud & What it Means

View more presentations from Mathias Klang

When talking economics it may be true that we have been in the information age since the 1960s or 70s but this is not what people seem to mean when they use the term as an everyday concept.

“The idea is linked to the concept of a digital age or digital revolution, and carries the ramifications of a shift from traditional industry that the industrial revolution brought through industrialization, to an economy based on the manipulation of information, i.e., an information society.” Wikipedia

We have always been immersed in information. Information about which mushrooms are edible can be life or death knowledge but for most of us today its just trivia. However, we do not raise ourselves by trivializing their vital knowledge.

The lecture opened with a discussion of language and writing. Despite our interest and focus on writing it is relevant to remember that writing is “only” 6000 years old (Wikipedia). Which means we spent 190 000 years without writing. This means that we have evolved in speechless and oral environments. On that topic, check out the Gutenberg Parenthesis lecture by Thomas Pettitt where he explains:

… the way in which he uses the term the Gutenberg Parenthesis: the idea that oral culture was in a way interrupted by Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press and the roughly 500 years of print dominance; a dominance now being challenged in many ways by digital culture and the orality it embraces.

And in the same way as we have, through evolution, an interest in finding energy rich foods (high fat, high sugar) we have evolved to view stored information as scarce, important and valuable. Therefore, on an evolutionary scale, things like the Gutenberg press, telegraphs, telephones, fax machines, computers and the Internet are all recent history.

Therefore recent changes like the book and the Internet are still impacting the ways in which we act and react socially. Technology is both an agent and effect of change.

This was followed by an introduction to social media and a discussion to why it is seen as social. The argument here is that we now have an infrastructure to allow us to enact basic communication rights established 300 years ago. With the platforms available to us theoretical rights become inevitable practice. The technology is also challenging many of our legal, ethical, social, economic, political (etc) norms.

One aspect of social media is pretty obvious: Now that we have an endless supply of valuable and important information – we mainly focus on trivial stuff. Facts are a given. The comparison I make is that since we have evolved in information scarce environments we seem to be instinctively drawn to energy rich information. Entertainment and trivia is the fatty and sugary, calorie rich, version of information – the question is what do we do when we are moving towards information obesity?

I offered an example from my schooldays where the focus was on fact knowing. Questions like what is the capital of Burkina Faso (which when I went to school was called Upper Volta)? But is this useful knowledge when everyone has access to the source of information? Schools have been successful since they offered the promise of jobs once the students were done. Now the jobs are not guaranteed anymore and we have come to realize that the factory vision of schools were probably never successful.

On this theme I highly recommend the brilliant (and funny) Ted Talk by Ken Robinson called Do schools kill creativity?

He argues that we have no idea about what the future will bring and yet we are attempting to educate children to meet that future. One thing we should take home is that creating specialists is less than useful when we have no idea if that specialty is useful in the future. Another argument for the so-called “useless” humanities!

I closed with four problems. (1) are we all stupid? Actually this should be that we are unaware of what is happening around us and this is happening to our detriment. Problem (2): we don’t know what we don’t know. This is important because earlier we may have relied on teachers and librarians to tell us what we should know. But this is not going to happen with the gatekeepers online as they have no interest in social enlightenment. Problem (3): There is a difference between who I want to be and who I am… Since online gatekeepers are interested in keeping us happy through personalization they will feed us with what we want (information obesity) rather than with what we may need. Problem (4): the gatekeepers are aware of this! Their advantage lies in our ignorance and/or interest in their abilities. There have always been gatekeepers but we usually knew their motives (good or evil)

An important role for educators is to enlighten us of the gatekeeper’s desires and motives of gatekeepers. I ended up with a depressing note: You don’t have to be unconscious to be without consciousness.

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Because we can: comments from a lecture

The weekend and FSCONS is now over. This year my presentation was the last talk of the final session. It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it?

My presentation was on the topic of privacy and raised the question of whether it is possible to maintain ones privacy in the world of extreme technology dependencies and broad social technology adoption. The answer is, dependably & depressingly, negative.

The talk was entitled Off the Grid: is anonymity possible? And focused on different forms of surveillance that are in the hands of uncommon players today. This is not big brother society, this is not little brother society. What we have is a society were privacy is lost because our contacts inform their contacts of interesting details from our lives. These details are able to be spread further by my contacts contacts. Potentially reaching the ends of the Internet. Whether or not this happens does not depend on anything I control but the interestingness of the information.

To illustrate this I displayed this tweet:

Translation: Thing that can happen at #fscons: @Klang67 proclaims himself queen. A bit unclear over what.

This is a form of surveillance through acquaintances and therefore I have chosen to follow the French wording (surveillance is French for viewing from above) and called this connaivellance for the fascinating word connaissance or acquaintance. I find the French word more interesting than the English as its root connai is the word for knowledge. Therefore, the French connaissance (acquaintance) is someone who has knowledge of you. How very apt.

The next form of surveillance is the self-surveillance of the social media age where we tell the world of ourselves. Or as a professor I met earlier in the week protested, with absolute conviction: “Twitter? That’s only people telling each other what they had for breakfast!”

Another thing I find fascinating with social media is the way it shapes our communication. One part of this is the way in we move towards the extremes. Few people online drink coffee, read books, or listen to lectures… We all seem to read fantastic/terrible books, drink great or awful coffee and lectures are either inspiring or snooze fests. All this with a shower of smileys too.

Both this autoveillance (which I have written more about here) and this connaivellance filled much of my lecture. As the law fails to protect, and our acquaintances and ourselves enthusiastically push information the last lines of defense must be the attitudes and interests of the social media creators. What my lecture showed was that protecting us is not in their interest. Therefore we stand unprotected. The slides from my presentation:

Off the Grid: Is anonymity possible?

This morning I came across a further example of surveillance which needs to be added to the list. The story comes from a Forbes article by Dave Pell, entitled Privacy Ends at Burger King. The short version of the story is that a man who heard a married couple argue at Burger King began live tweeting the event and added pictures and even video clips. He began his broadcasting with the tweet “I am listening to a marriage disintegrate at a table next to me in this restaurant. Aaron Sorkin couldn’t write this any better.”

Pell’s analysis:

In that Burger King, Andy Boyle thought he was listening to the disintegration of a couple’s marriage. He was really hearing the crumbling of his own ethics and self-restraint. We can’t stand by and let an alliance between technology and poor judgement disintegrate all decency, and turn every human exchange into another tawdry and destructive episode on a never-ending social media highlight reel.

This example provided an interesting additional example to my discussion on surveillance. For me, this example shows an additional reason why any attempts to control social media (legally, socially or technically) will fail. The desire of people to communicate the interestingness in their (and others) lives makes control a difficult affair.

FSCONS continued late into the night.

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What are you writing for #AcBoWriMo

Following the good example of Emily and the Lime presenting what we are writing for AcBoWriMo.

My project is to write a book about Online Identity (this is a very crappy working title). Since finishing my PhD (effects of technology on regulation of Democracy) I have had several ideas for longer works. All of these ideas have crashed and burned due to lack of time and other good excuses. So when I came across AcBoWriMo at the same time I had yet another idea for a book it was time to jump in with both feet.

The idea of the book is the way’s in which technological change are forcing changing attitudes to the concept of identity. In particular I will look at the ways in which regulation and protection of elements of identity are being affected by these changes. The fundamental idea is that we have previously agreed upon loosely defined and understood ideas of identity and their protection but these ideas and protections are being challenged (blown away almost) by the ways in which we use technology. The book will show the ways in which regulation fails and attempt to describe why this failure occurs. This is not really as clear as it should be but I am right now not focusing on defining the overarching idea of the whole book but building it from the bottom up with each chapter exploring different (though naturally related) changes.

For me the project began with a mindmap – (ugly version below) – and will in 18 working days reach 36 000 words in November and somewhere between 80 ooo – 100 000 words by mid January. For me AcBoWriMo is a welcome kick up the backside in forcing the launch of the writing project (no more excuses) and a pleasurable way in working alongside others – is this a form of misery loves company?

So what are you writing?

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The Martini Method

Writing can be hard, boring, lonely work. We need all the help we can get. I just came across the Martini Method (via Academic Productivity) and feel instantaneously its my kind of carrot and whip!

What I call the Martini Method is named after an anecdote I once read about the novelist Anthony Burgess (of Clockwork Orange fame). Burgess was a very productive writer, which is attributed to a system where he would force himself to write a 1000 words a day, 365 days a year. When he had completed his word count, he would relax with a dry martini, and enjoy the rest of the day with an easy conscience, and normally in bar. A friend of mine’s version of the Martini Method was to come into the office everyday, and not allow herself to leave until her word target had been reached. Most days she left before 5pm, though on occasion she would stay as late as 6 or 7. She would also set herself mini Martinis, such as allowing herself an ice cream in the summer once she had hit half her daily word count. Though we started at the same time, she finished her PhD a lot earlier than me!

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Guilting at its best #AcBoWriMo

The basic idea of AcBoWriMo is brilliant, even if it is a sort of academic weight watchers. You publicly declare a goal and then you keep showing your progress to your peers. If it works it is, in part, due to the social pressure and guilt associated with failure. There is obviously a lot more to it than this (read more here) but the basic steps are:

  1. Decide upon a target word count.
  2. Declare your participation and target word count (or productivity goal) publicly.
  3. Draft a strategy.
  4. Discuss what you’re doing.
  5. Don’t slack off.
  6. Declare your final word count – and be honest!

The event has already begun and will continue for all of November. But even though I am late to the game and I cannot begin before Monday the 7th. So this leaves (not counting Saturdays & Sundays) 18 days. Taking the weekend’s off may seem a bit lazy but this is only a half truth as I have planned events and conferences in November.

The goal is too push the limit of what is possible. The enthusiastic inspiration for the event Charlotte Frost has set the ambitious  goal for herself

I’d like this to be a good rough draft of my book but some of it might end up in the journal articles I’ve got on the go too.

I do have some form in the writing productivity stakes. When I was finishing my PhD I could churn out a fairly decent 1,500 words a day. That said, I did sacrifice a few things (including personal hygiene), and I think it only right to stay on top of such matters now I’m in a department. (You’ll find I’ve set out a few guidelines in a blog post on AcBoWriMo, as well as suggested the use of a Twitter hashtag, and invited everyone to publicly declare their participation – thus shaming them into definite action).

Since I cannot resist a challenge… I would love to do this but I need to be (a bit) realistic as I am starting a bit late. So my goal is the modest (?) 36 000 words – which works out to 2000 words a day. Which means that, if all goes well I shall have a first draft of my book by December. It’s going to be a push! It’s going to be hell! It’s going to be great!

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a NO handicap

Are you an over or under committer? I really did not need to read Matt Swanson’s Engineering – Over/Under: I’m a Serial Over Committer to know that I am an over committer.

My co-workers have recognized – but not taken advantage of – the fact that I have a NO handicap. Put basically this is an inability to say NO when people start talking about their projects, ideas or desire to hear me lecture. So I have always been like this and no matter how much extra work it places on me – I keep agreeing to more stuff.

In part this is out of flattery: You really want ME to talk, be a part of a project, write an article… But it’s also out of pure enthusiasm. When someone talks about an idea they have I immediately get into gear and starting thinking and sharing my thoughts. I quite regularly talk myself into volunteering work without even realizing it myself. I am that stupid. The problem is that the are too many projects. Some of them end up as dead ends – or even worse – as corpses along the road of my ever present guilty conscience.

There was more than a pang of recognition & amusement in the line Matt wrote:

“But you never finish anything!” is a meme that co-workers jokingly needle me with.

But fundamentally I disagree with it. The problem is not that things don’t get finished – its more that the ratio of finished/unfinished is extremely unbalanced. Of course there are 100s of projects I have never finished. If you ask my guilty conscience there are millions – I am basically an unfinished project that will never be completed.

The trick is, for me, to look at the problem in a different light. It’s not about what I do not finish but about looking about the number, impact and success of the projects I do finish. When I look at these I can smile and think: Not too shabby. At least until the phone rings and someone asks if I could…

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Stallman lecture in Göteborg

Next week its finally time for the annual FSCONS conference. This year is the fifth year running and it keeps getting better all the time. This year brings an additional bonus as  Richard Stallmanwill give  a presentation at Runan in Gothenburg the day before the conference begins “for real”

About the talk: Activities directed at including” more people in the use of digital technology are predicated on the assumption that such inclusion is invariably a good thing. It appears so, when judged solely by immediate practical convenience. However, if we also judge in terms of human rights, whether digital inclusion is good or bad depends on what kind of digital world we are to be included in. If we wish to work towards digital inclusion as a goal, it behooves us to make sure it is the good kind.

 

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Soon time for FSCONS 2011

It’s soon time for my favorite annual Free Culture event. This time, it’s the 5th FSCONS conference will be between 11th and 13th of November. As usual it is held in Gothenburg, Sweden.

FSCONS is the Nordic countries’ largest gathering for free culture, free software and a free society. The conference is organised yearly with 250-300 participants primarily from northern Europe. The main organiser is the Society for Free Culture and Software.

This years keynote speakers will be Richard Stallman & Christina Haralanova.

This year’s track are Building Together — Manufacturing Solidarity, Development for Embedded Systems, Development in Free Software Communities, Free Desktop Environments, Free Software in Politics, Human Rights and Digital Freedoms, Social Events, The Future of Money, Universal Design — Aiming for Accessibility.

Since I am not a coder I am especially looking forward to attending Book scanning, proofreading, and advanced reuse & Bitcoin: decentralised currency & Policy issues around Free Software & Privacy or welfare – pick one: Cryptocurrencies, taxation, and the legibility of culture & WikiLeaks, Whistleblowing and the Mainstream Audience & Internet and Civil Rights In LATAM & many more. Not to mention the great discussions and beer drinking nights.

Oh, and I will be giving the presentation Off the grid: Is anonymity possible?

Registration here.

Posted on by mklang