I believe that what I’m trying to achieve with some of my more critical posts about the Ph.D. track is to provide “a candid acknowledgement of the sacrifices and conflicts that came with the field.”

An older article in Salon has interesting quotes on this theme…

Academia is a world that is not set up to nurture a marriage or a personal life in general.

or

Male professors are expected to be married to their scholarship but not to their wives in the same full-on, participatory way. Women academics are asked to be polygamous and then are punished as a result.

Update: Buddhamouse think I’m too critical. Her comment can be summarized as follow: getting a Ph.D. can be fun work, and then, you can go search for work outside academia. (Oh! And “just say no to postdocs”.)

Antioxidant Values in Fruits And Vegetables (ORAC units per 100 grams):

Fruits:

Prunes — 5570
Raisins — 2830
Blueberries — 2400
Blackberries — 2036
Strawberries — 1540
Raspberries — 1220
Plums — 949
Oranges — 750
Red grapes — 739
Cherries — 670
Kiwi fruit — 602
Grapefruit, pink — 483

Vegetables:

Kale — 11770
Spinach — 11260
Brussels sprout — 1980
Alfalfa sprouts — 1930
Broccoli Flowers — 1890
Beets — 1840
Red bell pepper — 1710
Onion — 1450
Corn — 1400
Eggplant — 1390

In relation to a previous post of mine about open source Business Intelligence where I wrote “So, maybe someone out there should start a support company for Open Source Business Intelligence?”, Krishnaswamy Ram pointed out to Pentaho which seems to be exactly what I had imagined a smart businessman could do.

The Pentaho BI Project provides enterprise-class reporting, analysis, dashboard, data mining and workflow capabilities that help organizations operate more efficiently and effectively. The software offers flexible deployment options that enable use as embeddable components, customized BI application solutions, and as a complete out-of-the-box, integrated BI platform.

For researchers who actually want to be read, there are several good eprints servers including arxiv.org (which I don’t use, but many physicists seem to like it) and cogprints (great for AI-related stuff). Of course, you can simply post your papers on your web site and let Google find them (my favorite solution).

On this topic, Suresh cites Cosmic Variance:

Most people these days post to the arxiv before they even send their paper to a journal, and some have stopped submitting to journals altogether. (I wish they all would, it would cut down on that annoying refereeing we all have to do.) And nobody actually reads the journals they serve exclusively as ways to verify that your work has passed peer review.

I think we are slowly getting at the point paper-based publications are going to be completly unecessary. Right now, people still ask me for page numbers when I say I published a given paper. I was even asked for photocopies of the journal issue. These people will soon die and we will be finally free to let the trees in the forest.

Should you encourage your M.Sc. students to go for a Ph.D.? If you want to get more grant money, publish more papers and be generally viewed as a more “important” researcher, than you should definitively push all your talented M.Sc. students to go for a Ph.D.

Yet, Yuhong does differently:

I never encourage my master students to get Ph.D., though some have the talent. I know that a Ph.D. does not gain a lot more happiness in one’s life. I even find that normal people enjoy better life than researchers. So why impose research to my students?

Myself? I remember the first time a student came in my office to inquire about an academic career. She was a bright first-year student. The type that went to the best high school, got the best grades, had probably been involved in several extracurricular activities, in short, the perfect student. She was the best student in my class. Maybe she is reading this and will recognize herself. She also wanted to have a family. My answer to her? Make a choice: either a family or an academic career. She left my office pretty disappointed. I could never figure out whether she was disappointed at me or at life.

Is it true you can’t be a great scientist and also a family person? Of course not. Some people become astronauts, get a Ph.D., and get a gold medal at the Olympics. Such people exists. However, is it a reasonable plan? For a young lady, I don’t think so. I don’t think you can have 2-3 kids, raise them well, feed them well, spend quality time with them, and at the same time, pursue a solid academic career. There are counterexamples, but…

What we need to do is to:

• Stop sending more and more people to the Ph.D. track. Make sure those who get on the Ph.D. track have fair expectations; make sure they are not betting their lifes on what this Ph.D. can bring to them.
• When reviewing a colleague, clearly separate work done with students from work done by the researcher. It is easy: just check the names on the papers.
• We should value academic simplicity: fewer papers, fewer students, less money, more quality of life, and happier professors.

Further reading: The 2003-2004 Taulbee survey shows that the number of new Ph.D. in Computer Science is sharply on the rise (17% from the year before) whereas the number of undergraduates is about to take a significant drop since the number of new students has significantly gone down (60%).