The Unbearable Lightness of Meetings

I was stuck in hours of committee meetings today, sometimes offering information but mostly sitting there wondering if chewing my own leg off would help me escape.  I have little patience for committees at the best of times but today presented two textbook examples of Why I Would Have Been Better Doing My Research.

Meeting 1: A research group meeting (less than half membership in attendance) on business/administrative matters rather than sciencey stuff.  My agenda item, that involved passing on information from another committee about performance indicators, was continually interrupted by irrelevant comments from our logorrhoeic research group leader.  The meeting was scheduled for one hour but ran over time so much I had no time for lunch before going into ...

Meeting 2: A high-level meeting (most of the senior members notably absent) that the chair had decided to schedule in her building (a maze of interconnecting corridors, funny-smelling carpets, and non-sequential room numbering) instead of in the usual meeting room (located in the building normally considered to be departmental HQ).  We spent two hours, plus 10 mins extra time, achieving 15 mins work.  I am new to this committee and still not sure if it serves any useful purpose.  Today's meeting - my second - did nothing to persuade me of its usefulness.

What made me think about my wasted committee-time today is the poor attendance.  The most research-active members tend to be the ones who frequently skip meetings.  There are lots of wonderfully plausible excuses - I was away giving a talk / hosting international collaborators / meeting the Dalai Lama, etc. - but the real reason is inevitably I had better things to do.

So had I!

Right now, I have (to be done asap):

• 2 sets of data to analyse
  
• 2 papers to write with said data
  
• 2 papers to revise (pending feedback)
  
• 1 experiment to finish designing
• 1 grant application to write
  
• 1 grant application to review
• 1 paper to read for journal club
  
• 1 student to select to interview for a PhD position
  

To say nothing of (to be done in next week):

• 6 essays to mark
• 2 student projects to finish designing
  
• 1 ethics application (for student project) to chase up

So why am I wasting my time sitting in pointless committees?  Could it be because I'm an early-career researcher and hence don't have the cojones to stop turning up in case there are consequences for career progression?

Or would anyone notice, never mind care?

Mac-child

I just got a new Macbook - the shiny aluminium one - and have wasted spent a couple of days setting it up and getting to know its layout, functions, quirks, etc.  It's loooovely.

When it was delivered to my office, three passing colleagues wandered in to ooh and aah over it.  The last time I saw this happen, someone had brought in their new baby.  Human baby, I hasten to add, not gadget baby, car baby, or other infant substitute that makes admirers wide-eyed and squeaky.

...which leads me to my thought of the day: is my laptop my substitute child??  I carry it everywhere, spend hours every day interacting with it, miss it if I go away without it for a few days, and fully expect other people to share my high opinion of its looks and capabilities.  And my cats are jealous of it.

Oh dear.

At least Macbooks are cheaper than children.

Discrimination by UK Research Councils

How are UK Research Councils still allowed to discriminate against people on the basis of the country they received their university education?

Specifically, the research councils offer funding for people undergoing PhD study.  These awards are usually quite competitive but are the main basis for student funding in many fields, particularly in funding students of junior career staff who are not yet able to attract large multi-year grants that include postgraduate training.  The scholarship will pay the fees, research expenses and stipend of anyone registered for a PhD in a UK university, if - and only if - that person has been resident in the UK for the last three years prior to starting the studentship.

So, eligible candidates are:

• UK or EU citizens who do their undergraduate degree in the UK and move straight to a PhD 
• UK or EU citizens who work in the UK for three years before starting a PhD

Ineligible candidates are:

• UK or EU citizens who do their undergraduate degree in another country (unless they spend three subsequent years hanging around the UK)
• UK or EU citizens who do their undergraduate degree in the UK but then spend time studying, working or travelling in another country
• UK or EU citizens who do a Master's degree (MSc, MRes, etc.) in the UK that takes less than 3 years
• Anyone who's a non-EU citizen

In short, the net effect is that the vast majority of RCUK PhD funding goes to UK citizens who have just finished a degree in a UK university.  British funding for British students, in other words, regardless of this whole open-EU concept and the equation of degree standards across the EU under the Bologna process.  It's highly unusual, in psychology at least, for an RCUK scholarship to go to an EU candidate (where RCUK will pay fees but the stipend has to come from some other source), let alone an international candidate (where the stipend and the difference between EU and international fees - several thousand pounds per year - has to be sourced elsewhere).

Right now, I'm trying to recruit a candidate for a PhD project that will be funded by our faculty.  Most of the faculty funding comes from RCUK sources and thus is subject to all the above conditions, although some scholarships are available with fewer strings attached.  Most of the interest has come from EU countries and there are a couple of excellent candidates that stand head and shoulders above UK applicants, but I am having to fight tooth and nail to be allowed to consider these outstanding candidates.  Yes, our faculty likes to meddle in matters that are far outside their expertise.

 

It used to be worse.  Until a few years ago, being resident in the UK for the purposes of full-time education didn't count as "proper" residency.  It took a French student bringing RCUK to the European Court of Justice in order to get the discriminatory exception removed.  In my opinion, RCUK are still imposing discriminatory rules: anyone who receives their undergraduate degree outside the UK is ineligible for full PhD funding unless they spend three subsequent years living in the UK, whereas anyone who does their undergraduate degree in the UK is immediately eligible for full funding.

Will it take another case in front the European Court of Justice to sort this out?  Or will RCUK realise that maintaining a culturally homogenous postgraduate population in the UK is in nobody's best interest?

Now I'm a man

An intriguing post led me to try out the Gender Analyzer for myself - a piece of AI (still in beta) that claims it can judge whether a blog was written by a man or a woman.  It was trained on 2000 blogs, no less, and decided that:

We think http://notjustacademic.blogspot.com/ is written by a man (84%).

Nope.  I just checked: still female.

However, I'm in illustrious company.  Female Science Professor is also thought to be male (72%), as is self-declared woman KH of post doc ergo propter doc (80%), Sciencewoman (80%), and See Jane Compute (74%).  At least it got Ben Goldacre of Bad Science right (79%).  

At 84%, I'm a bigger man than them all, it seems.  Maybe I should start submitting journal papers for masked review instead of under my clearly girly given name.

Bright-but-lazy or weak-but-interested?

I had an interesting discussion over the weekend when work cropped up during conversation at the end of a meal out.

Which kind of undergrad do you prefer: a bright but lazy student or a weak but interested student?

Ooh, tough call.

In theory, a lazy student means less work for me. If s/he never shows up to project meetings but still hands in work on deadline then I've just saved myself contact time that I can spend on research. Also in theory, having a student that is actually interested in research is great. And rather rare.

Of four academics sitting around the table, three opted for the weak-but-interested student on the grounds that it's difficult not to care about someone who's making a genuine effort. I was on the fence ... but only because I've had experience with individual students who were enthusiastic but draining in their desire to seek my opinion on every little detail.

One final-year student I had a couple of years ago made my heart sink every time she knocked on my door because I knew I was going to spend the next half hour re-explaining things I had gone through the previous week. My suggestions of how she might try to work more independently had no effect: she simply wasn't capable. Even some textbooks were beyond her intellectual grasp, never mind empirical research papers. By the end of the academic year, she graduated with a 2.2 degree. How such a weak student managed to attain an honours degree is something I'll come back to another day.

Weak students tend to be less independent than bright students, so if you couple weak academic ability with strong interest you often end up with clingy students who need a lot of hand-holding. I empathise with their desire to grasp a particular theory, and their frustration when they cannot, but eventually I run out of empathy if a student takes and takes without giving anything back. As unrewarding as lazy students are to teach, as least they don't consume every spare minute.

So, sitting at the restaurant table, I demurred. Until someone invents a time machine, I think I'm probably leaning towards bright-but-lazy.

Wearing a mask of social science

In the UK, research funding for psychology projects can come from a number of sources.  There are several charities, trusts and other venerable bodies with the funds to give large and small grants to research projects as they see fit.  If you don't mind the bureaucratically-heavy application procedure, the European Union offers research awards.  But there are also the prestigious national government-funded research councils and this is where things get tricky.

Research with a medical bent (cognitive neuroscience with clinical applications, for example) can go to the Medical Research Council (MRC).  Computational angles (cognitive modelling, in particular) can seek funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).  Psychological research that is significantly informed by fields such as linguistics or philosophy can be funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).  Everything else remotely psychology-based - from investigations of how children learn syntax to whether people reason differently about past and future events to which bits of the brain are involved in face perception (none of these projects mine, before you ask) - is expected to go to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

Why?  I am not a social scientist.

The ESRC website is full of media-friendly snippets like "What is Social Science" and "How Social Science Affects Our Lives".  One section, "What Social Scientists Do", even lists four representative examples of social scientists (Anthropologist, Economist, International Relations Expert, Sociologist) before stating that:

What distinguishes social scientists in particular is that the drive is underlined by a social conscience - seldom is it research for its own academic sake.

I hardly know where to begin dismantling that statement.  I have quite an active social conscience, thank you very much, which is manifest in my private life to anyone who knows me. My work life, however, is not underlined by this conscience, except for my decision to refuse to cite research that uses animal subjects in what I consider to be unacceptable and unnecessary testing techniques.  (This is based on my own informed judgement, which is apparently more conservative than many ethical boards.)

My biggest issue is with the last clause in the statement: what is wrong with "research for its own academic sake"?  I might expect to see this kind of anti-intellectualism in tabloid opinion columns or point-scoring political debates but I am shocked to encounter it from a body with national responsibility for funding research. Blue sky research - or research that asks big questions of how and why things are the way they are without concern for the immediate application of the results - is central to the spirit of scientific enquiry.  To step up on my soapbox for a moment, the freedom to conduct blue sky research is an important part of the continuing development of a civilisation.

I am proud to be in the "seldom" subgroup that does research for its own academic sake.  My idealistic research motive - the reason I do what I do - is to push the boundaries of the science of the mind.  We, as a species, have a better understanding of the physical functioning of space/time than we do of the brains that allow us to reach this understanding.  We know more about what makes the universe tick than what makes us aware of the answering tock in our own minds.

The ESRC does not appear to feel bound by its own self-description as it regularly funds research projects that are definitely empirical psychology "for its own academic sake".  It is an unwritten rule amongst the academic psychology community in the UK that the "social science" remit of the ESRC is not to be taken seriously and that, since grant applications are usually reviewed within our own community of psychological scientists, blue sky projects will be funded if they represent good science.

But still... to the media, general public, anyone outside the field that encounters an ESRC-funded research project, there is a deliberately-fostered expectation that the research has immediate applications.  An ESRC-funded researcher is always prone to be asked "what's the point?", "who benefits?", "what use is that?"  Do physicists get asked those questions?  Do CERN researchers have to defend (continuously) the validity of their research programmes?  I can't think of an immediate application of the finding that the Higgs boson is not just a theoretical construct, but I'll defend to the death the importance of seeking evidence of its existence.

I am not a social scientist, but I'll continue to wear the mask in public in order to get funding for my work.  Then go back to my secret identity as a scientist.

Lazy reviewers and their effect on my blood pressure

Today, I responded to a second round of reviews on a paper I'd written.  

Reviewers vary.... some are helpful, insightful, and even help to produce a better standard of work than would have been possible without their comments.  I think I have received one review like this in my admittedly short publishing career.  Other reviewers are insane, or at least produce rude, spiteful, obstructive "reviews" that contain more ad hominem remarks than comments relating to the actual work.  Most reviewers lie somewhere in between these two extremes; thankfully closer to the helpful than sociopathetic end of the spectrum..

For the paper I dealt with today, I had a reviewer from a different category: the lazy "I can't be bothered reading your manuscript in full so I thrash it with sweeping statements" reviewer.  This individual's first review can be summed up as saying our conclusions are flawed because:

1. Results in [related but fundamentally different paradigm] mean there is no way to rule out [alternative theory]
   
2. Results could be explained by [jargon term I've never heard of, by reference that doesn't exist in any number of alternative spellings and years]
   
3. Findings [for condition A] could be due to [explanation that does not fit for condition B]

These are the kind of reviews that make me grind my teeth as I read.  I have no problem replying to specific criticisms, but the vague, careless nature of these points made them almost unanswerable.  However, answer them we did, though because the journal imposes a tight word limit on the article we put most of our discussion in a detailed response letter rather than the manuscript.

Then arrived more reviews, where this individual (now the only one who isn't content to see the article published) had a single comment:

1. The authors haven't addressed any of my concerns.

So... my question is this: why are such people repeatedly invited to review?  If someone can't state their concerns about an article clearly enough to enable an answer, why are their comments given any weight?  If a reviewer doesn't even read authors' responses to their criticisms, why is their vote allowed to obstruct a paper for the second time?

I have spent far longer working on this paper than it really deserves as it's only a moderately-interesting-topic in a moderately-good-journal (yes, I did think of submitting it elsewhere but I wasn't expecting these multiple rounds of reviews).  The experience has made me add two more items to my list of When I'm an Action Editor:

"I will not allow the comments of a lazy reviewer to be the lone voice of obstruction"

"I will blacklist lazy reviewers and not ask for their comments unless every other reviewer in the field has already said no"