Hello everyone, and welcome to another special edition of Kat’s Kable! This one is about education, research and about PhDs. As somebody who is going to start his PhD in a few months, this is something close to my heart. Our education system right now is far from ideal, and so is the research state. Here are some pieces that highlight important issues and talk about major trends in education and research.

• A Retirement ‘Hobby’ - I’ll start on a positive note. This is an article written by John H Borden, who talks about his long stint working in the industry after a rather satisfying academic career.

*I soon came to realize that a career in academia is a fine apprenticeship for industry. The ability to design and conduct experiments that generate definitive results, honed in the course of academic research, is crucially important, no matter where one is doing the science. In addition, many of the other skills I developed as an academic have proven useful in my new career, including acquiring and managing money, designing and managing projects, mentoring, hiring and firing, resolving conflicts, and writing with clarity and precision.

But, of course, I needed to adjust to some significant changes as well. I had to put aside the academic inclination to follow my curiosity. Instead, I took pride in the fact that my work enabled the company to say that its products were “scientifically proven,” and I found satisfaction in the fact that others in the company were relying on my results.*

• The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research

*That’s when it hit me: nobody did. That’s why it was a research problem. And being my research problem, it was up to me to solve. Once I faced that fact, I solved the problem in a couple of days. (It wasn’t really very hard; I just had to try a few things.) The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn’t know wasn’t merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.

I’d like to suggest that our Ph.D. programs often do students a disservice in two ways. First, I don’t think students are made to understand how hard it is to do research. […] Second, we don’t do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid – that is, if we don’t feel stupid it means we’re not really trying.*

• A Shot in the Arm - Why would a tenure-track professor find himself selling his plasma to make rent? A story about debt in the academic world. An absolutely chilling and scary story - why should this ever happen?

• PPE: the Oxford Degree That Runs Britain - Moving on to a different track, this is about the philosophy, politics and economics program that Oxford offers. Nearly every politician in the UK has this degree; it’s astonishing. It’s perfect - you read about political history, political thought, logic. You also need to churn out 16 essays a term, a skill that should serve one well when writing speeches at the ninth hour.

• Who’s Downloading Pirated Papers? - Let’s talk about access and the problems in research. SciHub is an illegally operating service that offers free copies of scientific papers that can otherwise only be accessed through a paywall. When each paper costs $35 to download, it isn’t surprising that authorities haven’t been able to take SciHub down. It isn’t used only in relatively poorer countries; it’s more convenient even in developed countries. Why should one pay for papers if the authors give it away for free? Ugh.

• Peer Review Post-Mortem: How A Flawed Aging Study Was Published In Nature - This is a long story about how a flawed study was published into Nature, one of the premier journals in the world. The fault is not entirely with the authors, surprisingly. This is a great read even if you aren’t into research etc.

• Towards the Discovery of Citation Cartels - This is intense. Researchers around the world agree to cite each others’ work. Currently, the number of citations are the primary benchmark to judge a researcher’s quality. Quantity is used to judge quality. What stops a clique of people increasing the number of citations in that group by just citing each others’ work?

• What Counts as Science? - ArXiv is an online repository of papers in many fields of science, primarily physics. It is where papers reside, regardless of whether they are published in peer-reviewed journals. Now that there are over a million papers on it, it vindicates the fact that most people call it revolutionary. Papers accessible instantly, with no worries of hitting paywalls. All versions of the paper are available, also.

Practically, arXiv has leveraged new technologies to create a boon for its community. What is less visible, though, is that it has had to answer a difficult philosophical question, one which resonates through the rest of the scientific community: What, exactly, is worth reading? What counts as science?

• High-Pressure Parenting - We invest far more time and money in raising our children than our parents did. Ryan Avent wonders whether we’re doing it in their best interests – or in ours.

*I didn’t have one (a reason), other than pride, and I wasn’t proud enough at the time to go to the trouble of applying to Ivy League schools. I wasn’t certain what I wanted to do when I grew up, and it seemed to me that to justify going someplace fancy one needed to want to do something that really required one to go to that someplace, whatever that something might be. *

• Live and Learn - Let’s end on an introspective note. Why do we need college at all?

*College is, essentially, a four-year intelligence test. Students have to demonstrate intellectual ability over time and across a range of subjects. If they’re sloppy or inflexible or obnoxious—no matter how smart they might be in the I.Q. sense—those negatives will get picked up in their grades. As an added service, college also sorts people according to aptitude. It separates the math types from the poetry types. At the end of the process, graduates get a score, the G.P.A., that professional schools and employers can trust as a measure of intellectual capacity and productive potential.

In performing this function, college also socializes. It takes people with disparate backgrounds and beliefs and brings them into line with mainstream norms of reason and taste. Independence of mind is tolerated in college, and even honored, but students have to master the accepted ways of doing things before they are permitted to deviate. Ideally, we want everyone to go to college, because college gets everyone on the same page. It’s a way of producing a society of like-minded grownups.*

Hope you enjoyed reading this! I found all these pieces incredibly useful and relevant.