Jay takes on the research funding debate:

I noticed a curious phenomenon at the NSF. They define R&D performance in a way that is completely baffling to me as an industrial scientist. Take a look at the first paragraph here. Performance is defined as money spent.

The truth is that funding bodies have no sensible way to determine how effective their funding is. Without any sensible metric, we are left with stupid things like counting papers or students. You could find worse metrics, but the tax payer is likely to be unimpressed. You don’t fund companies by the number of products they put on the market or the number of employees they have.

So yes, we should work harder to make a case for the usefulness of our research if we need lots of money. But this case cannot be made using a single metric like a patent. A patent in software engineering often makes little sense whereas it might make a lot of sense in mechanical engineering. Let the researchers give you their individual metrics. Let them tell their story as to why their work is important.

Things go sour when Jay looks at percentages…

Now Ernie thinks that basic research spending is too low. On the other side of the coin, I’m not sure how much public research spending is too much. The NSF calims that it only funds about 1/3 of all grant applications. At some point you reach the point of diminishing returns, where all the really good ideas are well funded, and you begin to fund a lot more junk.

There I disagree strongly. The long tail in science is important: you cannot guess where the important discoveries might come from and they might not be all from the same guy.

Low acceptance rates only make sense when the research overhead and scalability is high. For example, if you need half a million dollar in gear to even start the research, then you better give the funding to a couple of good places and let other researchers migrate there. But you must also take into account scalability: how many projects and subprojects can a professor run efficiently? Giving all the money to one person means that every dollar gets a very tiny fraction of this professor attention and at some point, the money will be wasted for sure.

For theoretical research, you have low scalability (you can’t do 15 projects at once) and low overhead (no need for expensive gear), so you should aim to fund everyone a little bit. For other fields, the opposite is true.

So, is 1/3 low or high? For theory work, it is too low, for some high overhead research, it might be just the right number.

Expert Opinion is commenting an AAAS report. The report takes the following view:

“(…) the nation’s number one producer of bachelor’s degrees in information technology and computer science (IT/CS) was not a major research university, but instead was Strayer University…”

Michael correctly observes that Strayer University doesn’t even care to pretend that they offer a Computer Science degree. What Strayer University does offer are IT programs.

Is Strayer University program any good? I chose to look at the Bachelor of Science in Computer Information Systems (BSCIS?). They offer lots of programming classes (Visual Basic, Java, C++, PL/SQL). Is this a good idea? Michael think not, but I observe that these are optional courses and I see nothing wrong with offering a bunch of programming classes as optional courses especially since you have other good choices including software engineering and operating systems.

Is this a good CS program? No. And they don’t even claim to offer a CS program. Overall, is this a good IT program? I cannot tell, but if I had to give my impression right now I’d say it has weaknesses and it doesn’t seem to follow ACM guidelines. It seems to be very focused on current Windows technology and generally doesn’t abstract out current technology enough.

And so, that’s the most important IT program in the USA? Is that it? It is a bit of a let down. How could this happen? On a hunch, I’ll say that the problem can be found in Micheal’s post:

Certainly, if we want to increase the number of women and minority members in the profession, we must attract them from the enormously larger traditional college student population.

Enormously larger? Michael, you are telling us that there are more full time 18 to 22 years old students than there are part time 18 to 65 years old students? Maybe in your school, but out there?

Quick: what is the largest academic institution in the UK?

Here’s a good hint.

That’s right. Mature students have been the fastest growing student population for decades. The traditional student population is not enormously larger, if it were, Strayer University’s IT program wouldn’t be the most popular.

It is not because you are a woman who decided to take care of your kids in your twenties, or a foreigner who just came to a new country in his twenties and had to work for survival, that you are dumb. If you manage to get a degree part time while taking care of the kids and keeping your full time job, you are most certainly not dumb. Non traditional students should not be looked down upon especially because there are many, many of those.

Disclaimer: I was a very traditional student, I completed my Ph.D. by the time I was 27.

Ok, after my previous post, I’ve got to balance things out, so there you go: we like Americans. No, really, we do. We just wish you’d behave like one of the richest country in the world should.

I can see it from here… I’m a nice, gentle Canadian citizen. I go work in the States for a few years and while I’m there, I’m tagged as a terrorist. Maybe because I said something nasty about someone on my blog. I end up in jail and I am labelled as an enemy combatant. Of course, there is no shrewd of evidence against me, but who needs to prove anything?

Ernie’s 3D Pancake reminds me of what could happen then:

Washington’s report to the Committee reaffirms the US position that the Guantanamo detainees are classed as “enemy combatants,” and therefore do not benefit from the POW status set out in the Geneva Conventions, the Committee member said.

That’s right. The US military can torture POWs. I’m sure the next time an American soldier is captured, the enemy will remember about this. Of course, American citizens don’t care about a few foreigners. Hey! They still have the death penalty!!!

Isn’t the USA a christian state… didn’t Jesus say something about offering the second cheek?

If you are an American citizen, explain to me how you can allow your government to openly torture people. Not that I’m expecting the USA to take the high road on anything these days, but openly torture POWs is a bit much for my taste.

Ernie’s 3D Pancakes gives us a nice, honest answer for the next time you give a theory talk:

Q: Are there any applications of your results?
A1: Um no, this is a theory talk, why would there be applications?

I once attended a talk by a solid mathematician who spent the last 4 years doing fancy combinatorics. It was as pure as it can be as far as research is concerned. Yet, he kept on talking about the fact that it had applications in Computer Science. Yet, at no point did he make these applications precise or even mention them in passing. It was annoying. Anything can have applications to anything… with enough beer.

Also, I once gave this relatively pure talk where I solve a neat problem which might have some applications, but I solve it in a crazy way just to make a point about how far one can go. At the end of the talk, I’m asked (by a student) what are the applications of my work. Duh! The talk is the application itself.

Anyhow, the lesson here is that some things are really about theory and you should not apologize that it has no known application. Not everything is meant to be applicable. And that’s ok. [Except if you ask a million dollars to do it.]

Google is great. I used to live in a remote area by a lake. Well, Google now gives me a high resolution satellite photo of the spot!

Thanks to Downes, I found this paper on how business value qualifications (as in “university degree”) over experience.

Employers regard qualifications as a signal of potential for future learning and skills acquisition, not as a signal of immediate competence. Overall, employers drew a strong distinction between qualifications and experience, and favoured and valued the latter more in regard to many of their business decisions. The higher the level of enterprise change and innovation, the lower the level of value and use made of qualifications by employers.

This is bad news for universities at many level. First of all, for employers, qualifications are not a sign of competence: this makes sense since, in many cases, universities don’t, can’t and won’t train students in practical skills. This reminds me of the claim some make that many CS students can’t program even if their life depends on it. It may explain why many graduates are having a hard time finding a decent job even when the industry complains about shortages. Second of all, the more innovative and fast paced a company is, the less likely it is to value qualifications. Again, this makes sense: a degree is important for a public sector job or for a large, well-established company, because they have more of a long term thinking, but less so for a start-up or small company who needs competence now. However, most jobs these days are created by small companies. This means that recent graduates face a job market where jobs are created exactly where people don’t value their degrees. The net result is that the market value of a degree is not rising (my claim). Again, bad news all around for universities.

Anyone got good news for universities?

Thanks to Downes, I found this beautiful post on why asking for a NDA is like screaming that you are clueless. This comes back to the unnecessary lack of openess I complain about. For every guy willing to implement an idea, you have a thousand ideas out there if not more. Ideas are simply not that valuable.

What was Microsoft idea? You think it was to create DOS and sell it to IBM’s customer. No way! This only came onto them. Take any successful venture, look at the idea behind it and you’ll notice that it was either wrong or not that brilliant.

Good idea are not important, good people are. An idea without the brain holding it is nothing.

This is why we have universities and not merely libraries, btw.

Moving things up on the skill ladder, going to higher level skills and discarding lower level skills where “higher” means “more abstract”, doesn’t necessarily lead to a better education, but to a worse one. You should not discard lower level skills, you should value them: they are our foundation. If you can’t use a broom, don’t use a computer.

Here are a few things you may hear on your campus about CS education:

• Since this is not a community college, we should not teach more than one OOP language.

  Yes, of course. But even community colleges probably choose either Java or C++ or C# or (gasp!) VB. I have no problem with a school teaching only rudimentary Java as long as the students really know Java. I don’t mean knowing the syntax well or the API well… I mean, being able to do non trivial programming in it. And just generally being fluent with programming: if things go wrong, know how to debug them even when a debugger can’t be used; understand how to do research on newsgroups to help you out; know how to file a proper bug report.

  Either we are saying that a student who knows Java can pick up C++ on his own easily, or else there is something fundamental different about C++. You can’t get around it: it is one or the other. So, can the students who graduate from your program learn C++ easily on their own? If not, you failed to teach them about modern class-based OO. Can they recognize the STL data structures and understand their characteristics immediately, or are they stuck trying to reinvent the wheel?

  In short, teaching only one language is fine, as long as you do it because picking up other languages will be easy for your students, not because programming in various languages is not important.

• Now that we are using Java, there is no obvious excuse why we have tons of students who cannot program well… before, I thought I knew why!

  Part of the answer is what you value and what society values.

  University professors, generally, don’t know how to write industrial-strength software. They don’t know because they never had to do it and were never involved in real projects. So, they cannot teach it. Period. Note to self: I just made a lot ennemies.

  They have the same problem in the humanities or in business. Several managers can’t write 10 lines of English or French without filling it up with childish sentences. We don’t know about it because these people never really write anything beyond a note. Why should it matter? All they need to do is sign paperwork and attend meetings.

  So, if CS graduates are just supposed to attend meetings and sign papers, then why should they know how to program or how to write in English for that matter?

  The next logical step is… why do you need a degree at all? Oh… you need the degree for the resume… but why do you need the education that comes with the degree?

  We are back at what society values… If all that matters is to direct and manage, then fine, but I don’t think this is a safe road. It will certainly lead to a commercialization of university degrees.

  Of course, the really good students already know programming by the time they get to university, or at least, they can pick it up on their own. Others will never learn programming because it is too hard. But most students won’t learn about data structures and algorithms on their own so a university degree can really take the best students to a higher level. What to do about the students who can’t pick up programming (and in some places, it seems like very sizeable fraction)? Please don’t water down the education for their sake. Help them the best you can and then, let them sink.

Harold reminds us that sharing knowledge is not part of everyone’s culture:

One interesting observation I made this week is that not everyone is as open to sharing their thoughts and opinions in a public way as my fellow bloggers are. Coming from a community of practice that shares ideas and uses sharing mechanisms like Creative Commons, public Furl and Bloglines archives, you sometimes take for granted that everyone has this outlook. I came across some strong opinions that knowledge is power and it must be kept to oneself or a small circle of people.

I keep being surprised at how such a large fraction of people around me want to hoard knowledge as if it was food. It is wrong on many levels. Your knowledge is more valuable when you share it. We are not competing for knowledge because knowledge is not scarce. In a global economy, if you don’t share your knowledge, someone else will, you will simply be put out of the loop. You have to think yourself as an information node. Information nodes where data comes in but not out are broken and of little value.