Author: jlolds

Native Angeleno, professor of Neuroscience and Public Policy at George Mason University

Defending doctoral education as a viable career choice

The Nation’s William Deresiewicz has a stinging indictment of doctoral education as a career choice here.

His key point, as I see it, is that the opportunities for newly minted PhD’s are limited in the US by both the lack of mandatory retirement for tenured professors and the use of adjuncts to replace any retirements that do happen to take place.

I would say indeed he is correct factually about the above, however, the distinction between the humanities and hard sciences is somewhat blurred in his analysis, and to some extent this biases his argument.

Far more important, from my standpoint are the following:

First, there are many non-academic careers for which a PhD is not the albatross (think NY city taxi driver who reveals that he has a doctorate in political science–urban legend?) many folks would have us believe. This is especially true for all sorts of policy positions in government and NGO’s, but also very much the case for entire sectors of the global economy such has high-technology, energy and biomedical sciences that lie outside of academia.

Second, I would argue, at least in the sciences, the very best will always thrive in academia on the basis of their intellectual productivity, and for many doctoral students (as with many high performance athletes) the opportunity to make it to the elite levels is the motivational driver, immaterial of the chances for eventual success.

What I detect most in Deresiewicz’s piece is a passionate call for economic justice (perfect for a magazine like The Nation). This is admirable, but at some level irrelevant. The desire of creative human beings to create, whether in the humanities, social sciences or in the hard science disciplines, is something orthogonal to compensation levels.

Next steps at Krasnow

Having just been reappointed to my third term as Director, a short blog post to acknowledge and thank the faculty, students and staff of the Institute for their confidence in my leadership. And to also thank the current leadership of the University for the same.

I look forward to continuing to work with all of our stake holders going forward to 2016 realizing of course, that there are always unforeseen circumstances and changes for which I pledge to put the interests of the Institute and the University first.

The Smart Phone and Privacy

The Wall Street Journal has been all over the recent Smart Phone controversy–and if you have a subscription, be sure to take a look at the lead story in the Reviews section of today’s paper. In the meantime, our colleagues at MIT and the Santa Fe Institute have gotten well-deserved kudos for their recent academic studies of smart phone-generated data sets as predictive tools for human behavior, emotion and attitudes. Although, as has been pointed out–much of the recent work with smart phones was pioneered in traffic analysis work from the intelligence community in the last century.

On the other hand, smart phones are rather unique devices in that they can harvest vast quantities of data about ourselves in more-or-less real time and to a first approximation we assume they are under our own control–which they may not be.

And that’s the nub: as with Facebook, it’s unclear which parts of our smart phone are actually under our control and which parts are not, particularly with regards to personal information that many folks may consider private.

I was struck recently while getting my new Iphone 4 in the Apple Store how aggressively the “find my iphone” capability was pushed at me by the Apple employee handling my purchase. And later, after reading today’s Wall Street Journal piece, as I experimented with turning off location services, I couldn’t help notice the warning that: if I were to shut off location services, then I would no longer be able to find my iphone.

Of course, the above stands to reason. But I can’t help but assume that Apple is using the harvested data from location services as creatively as Professor Pentland at MIT.

Fukuyama on Social Sciences

The article is here.

Money quote:

The aspiration of social science to replicate the predictability and formality of certain natural sciences is, in the end, a hopeless endeavor. Human societies, as Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper and others understood, are far too complex to model at an aggregate level. Contemporary macroeconomics, despite dealing with social phenomena that are inherently quantified, is today in crisis due to its utter failure to anticipate the recent financial crisis.

The Biosphere

I’m hard at work on a paper that concerns the Biosphere, a term originally introduced by an Austrain geologist, Eduard Suess during the late 19th century. Suess used the term apparently to represent everything in Nature that was organic (from a chemical standpoint). The biosphere was also a very important concept for the eminent Russian scientist, Vladimir I. Vernadsky during the early 20th century.

I still find the term very useful from a scientific standpoint, although it’s use has somewhat declined here in the early years of the 21st century. From my standpoint, the biosphere is a complex adaptive system, and a very important one at that, since we are at the moment (until human space travel becomes a bit more advanced) utterly dependent upon it for our existence.

Tale of Two Capitals

Or should I say two capitols! The people’s house in Berlin was just as cloud covered 48 hrs ago when I took this picture as ours is today.

It’s good to be back. But it was a productive trip.

My first transatlantic crossing (757) in a narrow body jet since I was a kid taking DC-8’s and Boeing 707’s across. I guess they are really worried about the load factor.

PS…no compensation from Siemens for accidental product placement.

Off to Berlin again…

Returning to the venue of the 2009 Decade of the Mind meeting. This trip will be exclusively geared towards facilitating formal collaborative relationships between the Krasnow Institute and several European research institutions.

This will be my first trip without my mac air–just taking the Ipad and we’ll see how I get by.

The art of compromise

Well, I have to admit, I’m relieved that Congress and the President came to some sort of agreement last night. Shutting down the Federal Government would have been just incredibly disruptive to science, particularly the important biomedical research being conducted by our colleagues on the Bethesda campus of the National Institutes of Health.

Which brings me back to the subject of compromise. It would be interesting to design a brain imaging experiment which studied compromise. Just outside the boundaries of neuroeconomics, this would be a social neuroscience experiment with political science overtones…..the underlying question is whether there are subtle individual differences between those prone to “split the difference” and the “take no prisoners” folks.

On further search: see the work of Drew Western, who apparently was on the team that imaged partisan Democratic and Republican party members with regards to the 2004 presidential campaign and is the author of a book, The Political Brain.