Seth Godin wrote a devastating post on the future of higher education. Unlike Godin, I fail to see an imminent crash of high education. But then, I failed to predict the recent financial market crash. However, as someone who spent most of his adult life on a campus, I have an idea of what students can hope to get out of higher education :

• Meet other smart people who come on campus to study or work (including professors). Emulation requires engaging relationships. Sometimes, you can get some of the same benefits by doing a job, but not always. Interestingly, online education almost entirely fails in this respect. However, you can reproduce some of this effect online, on your own.
• Degrees that are key to job-related certifications. Want to be come a (medical) doctor, a lawyer or an engineer? Universities hold the keys. Interestingly, though, all these valuable certifications are supported by legal means and non-academic organizations (such as the bar or an engineering corporation).
• University-bound financial support. Where are you going to get a (small) salary to work on proving a tough theorem, if not on a campus? Governments and donors are fond of funding universities.

Working from these benefits, how do you imagine higher education failing?

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Martin Lessard for pointing out Godin’s post to me.

I want to run a short crowdsourcing experiment: can the web give me better research directions? Or maybe good research directions for students, or readers of this blog? I am curious.

There are many smart people reading this blog. In at least one instance, a blog post, and the feedback it got, helped bona fide researchers write a research paper (see Deselaers et al., 2009). So? Can we take it to the next level?

What am I looking for exactly? I seek to study existing heuristics. Know any good engineer who has this clever approach to solving a problem? But he does not know why it works well? It might a problem for me! If it has to do with massive data, I’m generally happier still.

I have some constraints:

• My research must be publishable in bona fide research journals. Thus I won’t fix Windows 7.
• My research must derive from something I am uniquely qualified for. Setting me up to work on a cure for cancer would be a waste.
• I am not rich enough to keep a team of students busy maintaining servers.

I also have strengths:

• I have a little bit of funding. I can even get students working on some problems.
• I am competent at theoretical analysis.
• I love to write my own software.
• I can work for days, months or years on the same difficult problem. I have time! (and tenure!).

So tell me which research problem I should work on the next few months!

Why would you help? Because you think it is cool to push science forward?

Disclaimer: I have a little secret: I use some industry blogs to fish for research ideas. You can learn a lot from start-up ideas as a researcher.

David Donoho was among the first researchers to promote reproducible research through software publication (see Buckheit and Donoho, 1995). Fifteen years later, Donoho and his collaborators are even more insistent :

Scientific computation is emerging as absolutely central to the scientific method. Unfortunately, it’s error-prone and currently immature—traditional scientific publication is incapable of finding and rooting out errors in scientific computation—which must be recognized as a crisis. An important recent development and a necessary response to the crisis is reproducible computational research in which researchers publish the article along with the full computational environment that produces the results. (Donoho et al., 2009)

Their 2009 paper on reproducibility is insightful and well worth reading. I agree that sharing software is good for science, and  for scientists.

Unfortunately, I fear we might lose sight of why we must publish our software.

1. In theory, scientists should be constantly checking each other’s results. But that is not how science is done. You are rewarded for finding something new, not for checking someone’s results. So hardly anyone will ever download your code to check whether you cheated.
2. Reproducibility and repeatability are not the same thing. It is great that I can rerun your code. But it does not follow that your code and results are right or useful.

Share your source code to spread your ideas:

• Keep your packages simple. People need a few key pieces of code that they can integrate in their own software.
• Use popular languages. Remember that repeatability is not enough: people are likely to tear apart your software to reconstruct their own.
• Go beyond academia. Why assume academic researchers are the people who matter? Spreading your ideas among engineers is important as well.

The reproducibility that matters is getting people to use your ideas. Merely proving you are honest falls short of your potential!

Further reading: Open Sourcing your software hurt your competitiveness as a researcher?

Following a blog post by John D. Cook, I started reading Fred Brooks‘ latest book. Brooks is famous, among other things, for his earlier book, the Mythical Man-Month. The book is really a collection of essays, organized like blog posts. The rhythm is really engaging.

I had never read about design per se, except in Paul Graham‘s essays. For me, the core message of the book is that writing software, planning houses, writing books or poems, are very similar tasks. The metaheuristics are the same. The lessons you must learn are similar. You are trying to solve very large NP-hard problems where you can’t reliably divide the problem space. Systematic greedy algorithms may work, but they may also mislead you. You need some formalism, some rigor, but you also need experience, or instinct.

I’m currently a tenured professor with research grants and graduate students. Yesterday, I decided to list attributes of my job that I liked, in no particular order:

• I have the best computer gear money can buy;
• I spend most of my time thinking and writing;
• I have no immediate financial worries;
• I have a flexible schedule, I can work from my home, and I spend a lot of time with my family.

Comparatively, I didn’t like my job as a graduate student or a post-doctoral fellow even though I had most of these benefits… because I had limited and temporary income. My job as an entrepreneur had most of these attributes, but it was inherently unstable (which lead to some financial worries). My job at a government laboratory had most of these attributes as well, except that funding could be capricious.

What comes out of this analysis is that I value highly my financial well-being. As a dad with two sons, that’s hardly surprising. Also, I really enjoy working from home. Some days, I even go as far as hating my campus office: it has poor Internet connectivity, bad coffee, and so on. I’m much more prone to be distracted when I work on campus. Also, I cannot walk my son to school in the morning if I have to be at the office at 9am. So my campus office is more like a meeting place than a working place: I go there to meet with collaborators and students, not think and write.

Meanwhile, there are attributes that didn’t come up:

• Prestige: Though prestige has its uses—mostly in getting people to listen to you—I do not value it highly. I value what I produce, but not my current status. As an aside, I own a small house, a small car and my clothes are rarely brand-new.
• Academic freedom: People in academia always stress how much they like their freedom. It is true that I really enjoy choosing the object of my work. However, have you noticed how much professors look alike? They tend to have the same ideas and work in similar ways as a flock. Indeed, conformity is enforced even among academic researchers through funding decisions, publication decisions, peer reviews and so on. Hence, while I seek freedom in my work, I am not under the illusion that I have absolute freedom right now. In fact, I have lots of responsibilities and, often, most of my day is spent reviewing papers, marking assignments, answering questions, filling out forms, preparing talks, and so on. None of this is particularly exciting.
• Power over others: As a professor, I could apply for large grants and then run a large research team. Or I could try to move to management. Yet, I have no interest in having power over others. I always urge graduate students and post-doctoral fellows to find their own way. I propose ideas, examples or projects, but I rarely seek to run the show. For example, instead of telling graduate students what to do, I keep asking them what they are doing. I found this question particularly powerful : “Is this really the best use of your time right now?”