I’m back from SIAM Data Mining 2005 held in Newport Beach, California. I’m now quite sick and I’m taking a few days off.

It was a reasonably interesting conference. Some of the talks were really insightful. However, I must say that the Santa Anna / Irvine area is not one of the most interesting I ever visited. I chose not to rent a car, so this was a bit boring. I did go walk on the beach, but I didn’t do anything exciting beside.

Also, what is the deal with holding conferences in hotels? People are stuck in two modes: attend a talk or go back to your room. There are no good areas where people can mingle or work.

Also, please don’t put the posters in a closed room off the side. The posters should be what people look at while sipping their coffee during the break.

My recent concerns about being overworked, about being under too much unnecessary pressure found some echo in Expert Opinion: The life of an academic. Here’s what he had to say:

We see competitive athletes risking their health with steroids as a relatively new phenomenon, but sacrificing one’s health has been de rigeur in academia for a long time. And we can’t even say, like a businessperson might, that there are financial rewards for this. And yet, the extraordinary has now become the expected (…)

To anyone involved in academia, this will ring true. We are very hard on ourselves. Don’t get me wrong. We have to be critical and I’m quite a critical fellow, but we have to be generous to each others as well. The work has to get done, committees have to be chaired, documents have to get written, good papers need to be published, good courses need to be given, but what are the thresholds? What is enough work and what isn’t?

I’m stressed out. I’ve been stressed out for a long time now. I can’t even recall last time I was laid back. Everybody is overworked, everybody complains, but this post is about me deciding to do something about it. Or, at least, trying to decide.

The last time I was relaxed dates back to the summer of 2002. Life was good: I was starting a new job as a researcher at the National Research Council of Canada, leaving a professorship at Acadia University, and I had just won the best paper award at CASCON. It wasn’t the summer of my dreams, but I recall being relaxed and laid back.

Then things went to hell. I got a job as the team leader of a research group, got into the funding application madness. Switch job, switch job again. All along my career is doing fine, I’m getting great jobs, teaching great courses, publishing fantastic papers at good places, meeting great people, establishing valuable collaborations. But the stress levels are not coming down.

Some things have been good. Lohan was my little 2004 miracle, my wife is still around and we still love each other very much. However, I realize that my job has been taking a toll on my well-being. I’ve not been particularly sick and I’m not going crazy. However, I woke up this morning feeling a lot of pressure on my shoulders. Not just symbolically speaking. My shoulders are tense and have been tense for a long time now. For the first time in a long while, I took the week-end off to be with my family. Actually, the cold hard truth is that I simply could not find the energy in me to work more. In short, I’m burning out, or it feels like it.

I feel like I’ve been sprinting for 2 years now. I achieved a hell of a lot in 2 years. I think I’ve met every single objective I had set for myself 2 years ago. And now what?

Where do I go from there?

Some things that are tough:

1. being actively involved at work, chairing committees, being a member of several committees;
2. being actively involved in several research projects;
3. being actively involved in several teaching programs (undegraduate, graduate);
4. travelling: I don’t do much of it, but it is taking its toll nonetheless.

I think I need to refocus. I need to settle on fewer research projects for a short while and start saying no to new projects since I’ve got more than enough underway. I need to start saying no to committee work (I did my share). I need to be less ambitious with respect to teaching: focus on one course, one program at a time and don’t try to push everything at once. Travelling: I need to consider boycotting any conference which requires airfare for some time.

Notice that almost every single decision in the paragraph above has a possibly negative impact on my career. The question I need to ask myself is whether I’m doing enough, not enough, or too much. I think I’m doing too much, but what would my peers think? What if my peers think I’m doing barely enough as it is? What then? Do I drop out of academia and find an easier job?

It seems that whenever you get a peer review, there are always hints that you could have done so much more. Fair enough. We can always do more. But when is it enough? How do we define “enough”?

I don’t know how useful this is, but I just learned about ConsultantCommons.org. Here’s what they say it is about…

ConsultantCommons.org provides an online collaboration space and community for non-profit technical assistance providers to collaboratively build and share knowledge. The goal of ConsultantCommons.org is to provide a resource for nonprofit technology assistance providers to share and develop consulting tools and resources. The system is designed so that consultants can find, contribute and collaborate on tools and information they use to maintain a consultancy and provide services to nonprofits.

I don’t know what a “non-profit technical assistance provider” is. Nevertheless, Zac Mutrux added one of my articles on my experience as a consultant to ConsultantCommons.org. He can do this because my blog is available under a CreativeCommons license. This is the first application of CreativeCommons to my work.

You do know that you can copy and paste the content of my blog and reuse it, right?

Is ConsultantCommons.org a useful service? Well, for real cheap, they are able to build a site packed full of content and do it without breaking any rule. More importantly, they can prove that they didn’t break any rule because the CreativeCommons is explicit and anyone can check that, indeed, the content of my site is available under such and such a license.

I was chatting with a colleague yesterday about online courses and content reuse (think learning objects). She was pointing out to be that the greatest difficulty remains the licensing. Reusing content is a pain because you might have some components of a course licensed for a specific course, and if you want to use them elsewhere, you’ve got to go hunt for a new license. Nobody wants to be a license hunter. Especially not if you are a university professor where this sort of grunt work is looked down upon as opposed to creating the content from scratch.

I didn’t get any silly review this year, but the year is young, I’m sure I’ll get a crappy review like this by the end of the year.

Suresh posts an actual paper review: (I assume he got it for one of his papers or it was shared with him)


-- Comments to the author(s):
The paper is technically poor and also the results.
The authors did not refer appropriately the past work.

-- Summary:
The paper does not describe the problems and the
solutions synthetically and the technical options are
badly explained. The authors must follow common rules
for writing articles in the domain.


This is an example of a clearly unacceptable review. The reviewer lacks any kind of generosity. Here’s how you review a paper: unless you can tell, in precise terms, what is wrong, then you must assume that it is right. That’s the generosity principle.

Let’s look at what the review says piece by piece:

The paper is technically poor and also the results.

What does this mean? What is technically poor? Why are the results poor? If you know, tell us, if you don’t know why it is poor, we don’t want to hear about your opinion.

The paper is not clearly written.

Give an example or two. If the paper is not clear, then you should be able to quote a few parts that are clearly obscur and explain why they are obscur.

The authors did not refer appropriately the past work.

Like what? What are the missing references? Or do you mean the author didn’t cite your work?

No technical or engineering contribution.

Are you saying the paper had no abstract explaining the contribution of the paper? If so, say it, if not, explain why it is not a worthy contribution.

Please, we must keep turning papers down. We must keep failing students. But we must do it generously. Reject people and papers in a way that they can improve themselves and their papers. Be specific about what is wrong. Suggest changes.

Now, you’ve been warned. If I get a crappy review like this in the future, I’ll post it here and explain why it is unacceptable.

Ernie enters our research funding debate. He answers my claim that research funding must be justified, not only among peers, but also to the general public.

Recall that I say that you must be able to explain how receiving funding will help society. Among other things, I complain that training graduate students is often seen as a sufficient output. The implicit claim is that these graduate students are badly needed by industry, even if it is blatantly false:

Once there was a time when graduating with a Ph.D. in the hard sciences meant a one-way ticket to a successful career that offered intellectual satisfaction and prestige. A graduate education—requiring diligence, patience, and lots of commitment—was well worth the hard work. But it is a seller’s market no more. Students graduating with hard-earned doctoral degrees in the hard sciences these days are faced with a thinning supply of research grants and jobs. Yet the number of students getting accepted into, and graduating from, advanced programs remains fixed. Despite the harsh realities of the job market, research universities are contributing to the Ph.D. job crisis by neglecting to adjust the number of students being trained and failing to alter their curricula to make Ph.D.s better prepared for today’s economy.

I insist that public justification for the funding is needed because, the peers are bias [looking for more graduate students when society doesn’t need more] and can’t decide which fields are more desserving [because few “peers” are truly multidisciplinary]. Ernie tells me that…

…this avoids the real issue, which is that federal funding for all fundamental research is on the decline. (…) What’s less arguable is that this decrease in funding, if not reversed, will do serious long-term damage to American scientific research.

Daniel might be okay with that. (He is, after all, Canadian.) I find it deeply troubling.

So, somehow, fundamental research is now exempt from justifying itself and must receive public funding even if it doesn’t benefit society? Where did this rule come from?

Was there always public funding? No. What happened? Among other things, Germany showed that publicly funded universities and research could greatly contribute to society.

That’s why we have public funding for research. And if research is no longer judged useful for society, then it stands to reason that it should be cut.

So, is a ben laden detector something worth funding? Well, if you live in a country where a sizeable majority thinks so, it seems you have few options: you work to change their mind, accept it and build ben laden detectors or you leave. That’s it.

Don’t stand tall and complain that your research fund is being cut claiming that you shouldn’t have to justify the value of your work. Sorry, you do have to justify it. You do have to convince your countrymen that you do useful work. And if you don’t do useful work, then don’t expect generous funding.

[Disclaimer: I consider I do mostly semi-fundamental research and I do have some research funding, at least enough to help one or two graduate students. Finally, as Ernie points out, I’m Canadian and our government is not yet looking for ben laden-focused research.]

Wow. According to Marshall, the New York Times reported last year that blogging can be an effective way to get a job:

“It’s a trend on the rise right now,” Mr. Gartenberg [industry analyst at JupiterResearch] said, “especially for employers, who get a much better sense of a person this way. Resumes and interviews are a very scripted process; read someone’s Web log and you get a good sense of that person’s thinking and perspectives.”

I actually believe this. If you are a small or distributed company, this might be a very effective way to find interesting potential recruits.

I don’t think universities are yet desperate enough to hire professors based on Ph.D. students blogs. But for many less “formal” jobs, this seems like a great way to go.

I must be honest: I hired people based on their web sites, and I’ve recommended to students that they setup a web site as a way to increase their employability.

Now, what about me? I’m rather nasty on this blog sometimes, so I probably decrease my employability. What do you think? Do I increase or decrease the probability that I’ll get a sudden job offer by running this blog?