Before you throw in the academic towel

17 02 2020

Throw-in-Towel-_-roboriginal-copy-e1491323619551A modified excerpt from The Effective Scientist:

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Many academic scientists end up asking themselves at some point why they should even bother.

The rewards of a career in academic science are trifling, and at times downright insulting. Universities and many other research organisations are notoriously badly run, flipping uncomfortably and with frustrating frequency between incompetence and overbearing corporatisation. Even if they were once scientists themselves, your administrators and managers will fail catastrophically to provide you with clear guidance regarding their capricious expectations.

You will be underpaid. You will work too much. You will have to fight for every scrap of recognition and freedom.

The majority of the students you teach will never even thank you for your efforts. You will also spend your life begging for money to do your research, and in these days of tenuous employment security, you will most likely spend much of your time practically begging to renew your own salary.

If your chosen scientific discipline has even a modicum of direct application, you will nearly always be frustrated by the lack of engagement with and recognition by business, politics, and society in general. 

Not only will you be largely overlooked, you will more than likely be attacked by those who happen to disagree (ideologically) with your data. As a result, frustration and even depression are not uncommon states of being for many scientists who choose to engage (as they should) with the general public.

But I offer you this thought before you throw in the proverbial towel. Despite the bullshit of the daily grind, there is nothing quite as comforting as being aware that science is the only human endeavour that regularly attempts to reduce subjectivity. In the face of all posturing, manipulation, deceit, ulterior motives, and fanatical beliefs that go on every day around us, science remains the bedrock of society, and so despite most human beings being ignorant of its importance, or actively pursuing its demise, all human beings have benefitted from science. Read the rest of this entry »


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Science + music = productivity

17 05 2018

da2a4c4015f37dcd15015a2bfcef2a2dA take on a small section of my recent book, The Effective Scientist, about the importance of music in science.

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I don’t know any scientists who don’t love music, and I will go out on a limb by stating that most of us probably combine our science activities with music during the quieter times in front of the computer.

One tool that can effectively mask distractions when writing or coding, especially noisy ones, is music. I consider my earphones to be an essential tool of the science trade, for they allow me to ‘tune out’ as I ‘tune in’ to my favourite mood music.

However, a little caution is required here. If the music is set to loud to mask the ambient noises that you are presently finding annoying, you might discover that your capacity to concentrate is reduced. The style of music is also important. When I am writing actual text, anything that could induce the slightest foot tapping or head banging tends to send me off into space; I prefer something light and instrumental in these circumstances, like Vivaldi, Mozart, or Miles Davis.

On the contrary, if I am merely transcribing data, coding, analysing, or creating display items, then I tend to go more for heavy metal or electronica to set an intense pace. While this is absolutely a personal choice, you might do well inevitably to find some combination of music styles that works best for you.

I’m going to use this occasion though to list my top-10 metal/hard-core tracks that I find particularly good for coding. Somehow for me, heavy metal and coding go together like Vegemite and toast (but the combination doesn’t work for writing papers, although at this very moment I’m listen to some of the tracks listed below). This list is also a little window into my own frustration with the Anthropocene and the political inertia about limiting the damage we humans are doing to our own life-support system.

In no particular order, here are my top-10 heavy-metal/coding/angst/frustration tunes (listen to the lyrics — they help): Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : science, science writing

Lomborg: a detailed citation analysis

24 04 2015

There’s been quite a bit of palaver recently about the invasion of Lomborg’s ‘Consensus’ Centre to the University of Western Australia, including inter alia that there was no competitive process for the award of $4 million of taxpayer money from the Commonwealth Government, that Lomborg is a charlatan with a not-terribly-well-hidden anti-climate change agenda, and that he his not an academic and possesses no credibility, so he should have no right to be given an academic appointment at one of Australia’s leading research universities.

On that last point, there’s been much confusion among non-academics about what it means to have no credible academic track record. In my previous post, I reproduced a letter from the Head of UWA’s School of Animal Biology, Professor Sarah Dunlop where she stated that Lomborg had a laughably low h-index of only 3. The Australian, in all their brilliant capacity to report the unvarnished truth, claimed that a certain Professor Ian Hall of Griffith University had instead determined that Lomborg’s h-index was 21 based on Harzing’s Publish or Perish software tool. As I show below, if Professor Hall did indeed conclude this, it shows he knows next to nothing about citation indices.

What is a ‘h-index’ and why does it matter? Below I provide an explainer as well as some rigorous analysis of Lomborg’s track record.

Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : climate change