I used to do regular round-up posts collecting links to my Forbes stuff on ScienceBlogs, but I got out of the habit here. It’s probably a worthwhile enterprise, though, so I’ll try to re-start it, beginning with a giant backlog-clearing post collecting stuff from January, February, and March of 2018:

• We Need More Scientists As Public Intellectuals: An argument that it’s not actually ridiculous to put Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson in the “public intellectual” conversation.
• The Physics of a Crazy Finnish Sled: A little video analysis to determine the speed of my kids on a ride at Lapland Lake.
• Why Vacations Are Essential For Physics: Some of the greatest breakthroughs in quantum physics were made by physicists taking time away from the office.
• How Does Mass Affect Luge?: Another look at the physics of a Winter Olympic sport.
• What We Do and Don’t Understand about the Physics of the Winter Olympics: The classical physics of bodies in motion is well understood, the slipperiness of ice not so much.
• Why Do Interpretations of Quantum Physics Matter?: A defense of the importance of studying the foundations of the theory.
• Why Do We Think Quantum Mechanics Is Weird?: Some thoughts on the emergence of classical rules from the quantum ones that govern everything in the universe.
• The Weirdest Thing About Quantum Physics: The phenomenon that most confounds our classical intuition.
• What Quantum Computing Is Really Good For Right Now: A look at a recent experiment in quantum simulation.
• The Quantum Physics of Vampires: A very silly attempt to invent a quantum process that would explain vampires being destroyed by sunlight but not artificial light.
• What Do We Picture When We Want Pictures of Physics: Some snide commentary on stock photos tagged “physics.”

So, yeah, that’s a bunch of stuff. I’ll try to get back to doing these round-ups monthly, so we don’t have quite so large a links dump next time…

I’ve been asked to speak to the orientation for new faculty on a few occasions, to offer advice to new hires most of whom are making the move to full faculty members for the first time. The last time or two, my first bit of advice has been “Treat all advice with caution, including this advice.”

The example I give to illustrate this is in the context of teaching. I didn’t have a lot of prior experience when I showed up at Union, so I went around and asked each of the senior faculty for tips. One guy, whose approach I generally like, said that he made an effort to “break the fourth wall” and move out away from the chalkboard into the center of the classroom, to create more of a feeling of discussion than a formal lecture.

I gave this a shot, but realized after a few classes that this was not a technique that would ever work for me. The guy who offered that advice is short, well under six feet tall, while I’m 6’6″ (just under 2m for those using SI units) and usually around 280 pounds (127kg). When he walked out into the middle of the room to get closer to students, it seemed friendly and approachable but when I did the same thing, it was terrifying. I loom over the classroom tables in a way that he doesn’t, and students were cowering when I’d come too close.

So I backed off, literally, and make a point to stay near the board, or the open space in the middle of the room. As a matter of philosophy, I like the idea of that approach, but it’s just never going to work for me.

I was thinking of this because of this advice to graduate students that came across my social-media feeds yesterday. For the most part, this is good, but it runs into the usual pitfall of advice posts, namely that the phrasing is a little too absolute for my tastes– as I said up above, I think all advice needs to be treated with caution, because different things will work for different people.

I particularly noticed this on the point “There is no need for all-nighters, now or ever,” which immediately made me say “Well…” I agree that all-nighters shouldn’t be a regular or expected feature of graduate school (or a post-doc, or a faculty position), but I wouldn’t categorically rule them out. There may be times when there are good reasons why an experiment needs to run long and late, and if that happens, well, you do what you have to do.

Rather than any specific rule about time management or personal organization, or any of that, I’d suggest keeping one general principle in mind: in grad school or otherwise, you should always know why you’re doing the thing that you’re doing, and try to make sure that the reason is a good one. If you’re pulling an all-nighter because the data collection takes six hours and there’s less noise in the middle of the night, well, then you pull an all-nighter (and get some sleep during those noisy daylight hours). If you’re pulling an all-nighter because your boss demands that you work long hours (or you think that your boss demands unreasonable hours), then that may well be a toxic situation that you should get out of.

Grad school is by its very nature a learning process, so there’s going to be an element of figuring out what works for you and what you need to do to be most effective. By all means ask your co-workers for tips and advice, and give their suggestions an honest effort. But if you try what they suggest and it doesn’t work– if you’re miserable, or less productive than you know you could be– stop, and do something else instead. And know why you’re stopping, in the form of a coherent argument why this works better than that for you.

In the research world, people sometimes seem to be demanding a particular schedule of long work hours or whatever, but what matters is usually not clock-punching but results. Any advisor worth working for should be willing to compromise on your exact schedule, work style, etc., provided you’re making tangible progress. You might need to compromise a bit– unless you’re Julian Schwinger, they’re probably not going to let you work a night shift where you sleep all day and work all night, never overlapping with the rest of the people in the lab– but as long as you’ve got a coherent reason for doing things the way you do, and you’re moving forward, you should be able to find a set of practices that keeps you sane and your advisor happy.

If you can’t find that happy medium, find a different research group, because that’s not a place you want to be.

But again, treat this advice with caution. If it doesn’t work for you, well, find something else that does. It’s all part of the process of becoming a professional, and for that matter part of becoming an adult.

There’s a story at the Chronicle of Higher Education (which may slip behind a paywall in a day or two; blame them, not me) about a Justice Department investigation of colleges who share lists of early-decision students to make sure they’re not double-dipping. This clearly sounds a little shady, but you could also argue that it’s not nearly the top legal issue facing higher education these days, and the Justice Department really ought to have better things to do.

In the interest of provocation, though, I might throw out a different idea: I’ve wondered for a while whether college admissions, particularly in the elite private school sector, is an area where allowing a bit of collusion between institutions might actually be a good thing. Specifically, I think you might be able to reduce the ambient angst level a bit if institutions were allowed to share admissions information at a level that they’re currently not permitted to do.

I should note up front that while I work at an elite private college, I can not claim any special knowledge of the admissions process. My involvement in admissions activities is limited to participating in open house panels and lunches, and talking with and giving tours to students who express an interest in physics while visiting campus. I have never read application folders, nor participated in discussions of who gets in and who doesn’t.

Given that, a lot of this is guesswork, but I like to think it’s a reasonably educated guess. My impression from reading innumerable accounts of the process is that a huge fraction of the angst about college admissions, and a big driver of the arms race that “Dean Dad” describes comes from a particular set of good-but-not-outstanding students. These are kids who have the basic credentials needed to get into good colleges, but aren’t terribly distinctive.

Any given college gets many more applications from students in this group than they can possibly accept, which means that something has to be done to pick out which students get in and which ones don’t. This is where all the tricky decisions get made– the kids with perfect test scores and published research articles all get in everywhere, the great athletes, artists, and musicians get in everywhere, but the kids who have solid grades but undistinguished sports and music careers all end up in a big mush in the middle of the process. And that’s where you have the “holistic” arguments about how this student’s essay is marginally better than that one’s, or this one would check some geographic or demographic box, etc. That’s also where the test-prep and admissions counseling businesses make their money– polishing up the applications of good-but-not-outstanding students.

The result of this process is a little bit of a lottery sort of scenario– kids above a minimum threshold of ready-for-college but below some I-know-it-when-I-see-it line that marks “outstanding” have a decent chance of getting in somewhere, but whether they do is almost random. Except I suspect it’s not completely random– all of these colleges are mostly looking for the same kind of things, so I suspect acceptances get clustered. Whatever subliminal factors put one student over the “admit” line for one college is likely to put them over the line with most comparable schools. And, similarly, you’ll get some students who get denied everywhere through no particular fault of their own. You’ll get more students in each of those groups than you would expect from a truly random process. That’s great for the students who get the ego boost of lots of acceptances, but pretty awful for the kids who end up denied everywhere.

Why would collusion help with this? Because each accepted-everywhere student can, in the end, only attend one of the N schools that accept them, so N-1 of those schools would’ve been better off accepting one of the denied-everywhere kids instead. But, of course, they don’t have any way of knowing that, because colleges aren’t allowed to share that kind of information, so they’re all guessing blindly. Which is part of how you end up with accepted-everywhere and denied-everywhere students in the first place.

So, in a weird way, it might be to the benefit of both students and colleges if there were some collusion allowed– that is, if schools could share lists of good-but-not-outstanding students who applied to the same ten colleges, those colleges could agree to spread their admit decisions around a little more evenly. Maybe some of the accepted-everywhere students get admitted to eight of ten colleges instead, while some of the denied-everywhere students get accepted at two of ten instead. That kind of system would reduce the angst for everyone (including the admissions staff who have to make high-stakes hair-splitting decisions about students who are not significantly different from one another). And that angst is a big driver of a lot of the Bad Things about our current system– students and parents who are desperate to avoid falling into the denied-everywhere pool expending lots of resources to try to distinguish themselves, and forcing everyone else to keep up.

Of course, the logistics of this kind of thing would be really hard to work out, given that students don’t conveniently sort themselves into readily identifiable cohorts who all applied to the same set of schools. There’s also something about the concept that seems a little icky, from an equity standpoint, and if you listen closely you can hear the “drip…drip… drip…” of salivating lawyers. But then, medical schools do something similar for one of the apprenticeship stages of newly minted MD’s, so I suspect that there could be some way to make it all work.

Of course, from a strict equity standpoint, the best option might be to make things genuinely random– to set some “automatic admit” threshold and some “automatic reject” threshold, and then throw all the names that fall between those into a random number generator that picks some to admit and some to reject. Given the nature of probability, that would still get you a group of accepted-everywhere students and one of denied-everywhere students, but at least statistics would let you make the probability of landing in either of those really small.

Neither of these systems have a prayer of being implemented, though, for a whole host of reasons, so we’re probably stuck with something resembling the current hot mess. Which totally sucks in many respects, so if you’re a student or parent going through this process, you have my sympathy.

I get asked a lot for tips on writing productivity, which always seems weird to me because I don’t always feel like I get that much done. I can go for days at a time thinking that the only thing I accomplished in a given day was frittering away a bunch of time on social media. I have to make a conscious effort every now and then to step back and list the actual, concrete accomplishments I’ve managed in the last little while.

I don’t really have a good, concise set of advice for getting things done, because I tend to think there really isn’t any one way of getting things done. At a really basic level, the only good advice anyone can give on getting stuff written is “You need to want to write the thing more than you want to do whatever else you might be doing.”

“Want” is kind of a problematic word in that sentence, though, but I can’t really think of a better one that covers what I mean. It’s not just a matter of passion for the project or whatever– the “want to write the thing” can be driven by an external source. Deadlines are a wonderful tool for generating a want to write the thing, as are professional courtesy, and other forms of social obligation. The point is that when I sit down to work on a project and would rather be doing something else, I have a tendency to drift into doing something else instead, and I think that’s the general failure mode for most writers.

That’s not usually what people are looking for when it comes to advice, though. What people mostly want is a recommendation of a scheduling algorithm of some sort to organize their time. I think that in the future I’ll probably point people who want that toward this Robert Talbert post on “fixed schedule productivity,” which ends up being not all that much different than what I do. That is, I have a few very rigidly fixed time blocks in my schedule, and I do whatever I can to work around those.

The basic outline of my daily schedule is this: I get up at 5am, make and eat breakfast and walk Charlie the pupper. At about 6:30, Kate gets up, and Charlie and I help get the kids out of bed and downstairs for breakfast. Their school bus picks them up at about 7:30, and between 7:00 and 7:30 I get my stuff together and go to my local Starbucks.

From 7:30 until about 9:30 is my writing time– I do everything I can to hold that block out as time for my own projects, not class prep or grading or service work for the college. I’m not always successful at that– there’s a lot of email-sending during that time– but I try to keep the day job out of that block of time as much as I can manage.

I go to campus between 9:30 and 10:00, and typically stay there until sometime between 4:00 and 5:00, depending on details of my teaching schedule and other stuff. I pick the kids up at 5:00 most weeknights, and make dinner for them. Kate gets home around 6:00, and I walk Charlie the pupper sometime after that. Bedtime for the kids starts at about 7:30, and is usually done by 9.

The bulk of my day-job stuff– class prep, grading, service work– has to fit in that 10-4 block, which honestly gets kind of unpleasant at times. I spend a lot more time huddled in my office being antisocial than I would like to, but that’s what I need to do to get my stuff done. It also means that I tend to faceplant into bed once the kids are asleep; sometimes before that. There have been a number of days recently where I’ve gone upstairs when Kate got home, to nap for half an hour before walking the dog.

In terms of externally visible productivity– books, articles, blog posts– that writing time block at Starbucks is critical. That’s when most of the stuff people outside of Schenectady see gets produced. Which is why I fight hard to keep that block free of college work, even when there are critically important things that need to get done.

I saw a bit of pushback to Talbert’s post over the distribution of family responsibilities, which I found slightly amusing because the schedule above is driven almost entirely by the kids. I was never a “morning person” until SteelyKid started kindergarten and needed to be on a 7:30 am bus. If you had told me when I was 20 that I’d be waking up at 5am every morning in my 40’s, I would’ve laughed in your face. I’ve been doing this long enough now, though, that I actually kind of enjoy the early-morning hours when nobody else is awake.

Kids are very definitely a grenade lobbed into the middle of this, though, particularly in cold and flu season. Kate and I are lucky enough to both be in positions where we have a bit of flexibility, so even when the kids are sick, we can make things mostly work– I can sneak out to Starbucks for a shortened writing time block while Kate gets ready for work, then come home to stay with a sick kid, for example. I can do a lot of my stuff at home if I have to (though I’m much less productive there, thanks to continual interruptions from Charlie the pupper and whichever kid is home). The kids have even gotten old enough now that when they have to be home from school on a day when I’m teaching, I can bring them to campus and park them in a chair off on the side without too much worry that they’ll disrupt things. SteelyKid is pushing up on the age when I can leave her home alone for an hour or two to go teach a class.

There’s a lot of stuff given up to make this work: I watch basically no TV any more, despite there being a huge range of stuff out now that sounds great (I suspect that I’d be all over Stranger Things, for example, but I’ve never watched a minute of it because I know I can’t afford the time). I don’t read a whole lot, either– maybe half an hour to an hour at bedtime, depending on how tired I am. I’ve woken myself up by dropping the phone I use as an e-book reader on my face more times than I care to remember.

I also suspect there’s some professional cost to this. I don’t socialize with people on campus nearly as much as I used to, and that’s not a great thing in a small college community. I also suspect that some of my colleagues look askance at the priority I give family time– leaving “early” almost every day and staying home when the kids are sick. I’m lucky enough to already have tenure, so I don’t have to care about that very much, on a professional level at least.

If you’re looking for advice on how I organize my time to get things done, though, that’s what I’ve got. Which is, like I said, not that different from what Talbert said: Decide what’s most important, block out time for that, and work like crazy during the remaining hours to get your stuff done.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been spinning my metaphorical wheels trying to draft a blog post about the current mess at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, where they’re eliminating a number of “liberal arts” majors. This is a story that’s generated some panic in higher ed circles, though not as much as I might’ve expected. It’s also something with a very direct connection to some discussions that are taking place locally.

And that last bit is why I haven’t actually written anything about it, because my thinking on the Stevens Point situation gets so wrapped up in my thoughts about my day job that anything I might write comes out as a thousand-word subtweet at best. So I’ll just point to the “Dean Dad” piece on the matter, which is as balanced a take as you’ll find anywhere.

Of course, there’s no small irony in the fact that I shy away from this kind of thing more now than I did back in the early 2000’s, when I didn’t have tenure. I was a lot more willing to pick fights back then, and made some much more specific comments about campus issues than I’d be willing to do now.

There are a bunch of reasons for that. Part of it is just a function of getting older, and having more time-consuming responsibilities (mostly the kids, also book writing) that reduce my willingness to spend time and mental energy picking fights on the Internet. Another piece is a holdover from my time as department chair, when I felt it was important to be more circumspect about stuff, lest it somehow be taken as an official position. Once that habit of caution gets established, it’s hard to shake.

Mostly, though, is a matter of nerd fame and polarization. Back in the early 2000’s, hardly anybody knew what a blog was, let alone that I wrote one. When Dave Munger and I hit the front page of one of of the big aggregators with the “Blogger SAT Challenge” in the early days of ScienceBlogs, I think there was only one person on campus who noticed. These days, if I write a post about academia, I get comments on it not only from people I work with, but from colleagues at other institutions, including people I’ve never met. My platform has gotten bigger, and as a result, I feel a need to be a little more careful about what I say from it.

There’s also been a change in the general atmosphere that’s part and parcel of the polarization afflicting everything in politics and media, which raises the stakes for everything. People on the Internet and in academia are less willing than ever to accept anything less than total agreement with their positions, and even relatively minor deviations draw extreme responses, and sometimes blow up into massive shitstorms.

That’s a big problem for me, because I’m rarely in total agreement with anything. Or total disagreement, for that matter– I’m not that quick to write off people or groups as wholly irredeemable, either. I’m a squishy moderate at heart, and even when I agree more with one side than the other, there are almost always areas where I find fault with “my side,” or see a valid point on the other.

That necessarily means that almost anything I write on a contentious issue is almost guaranteed to be found wanting by people at both political poles. And the way things work on the modern Internet, that’s a damn minefield, particularly now that I have enough reach to actually get noticed. So I end up feeling that expressing any unfiltered opinion is a high-risk proposition, unless I ring it round with so many caveats and qualifiers that nobody will comment on it at all (in which case, it’s a frustrating waste of time to type it up).

The ironic end result of all this is that I’m actually more gun-shy now than I was in the days when I had no real job security. Which isn’t a particularly healthy state of affairs, but I don’t really see a good way out of it at the moment…