Áhugi fjölmiðla á vísindum er yfirborðskenndur

Eitthvað er til í þessu hjá Stefáni um gagnrýnisleysi fjölmiðlafólks en ég held að það séu nægir vísindalegir álitsgjafar, það sé enginn skortur á þeim. Vandinn liggur frekar í því að fjölmiðlafólk er ekki eða sjaldnast menntað í raunvísindum og lítill áhugi er fyrir vandaðri umræðu um vísindi, eðli þeirra og takmarkanir.  Hvert er hlutfall frétta af dægurstirnum, íþróttum og munaðarvörum á móti umræðu um vísindi og fræði? Talsvert hátt og stjórnast vissulega af því sem að fólk vill lesa. Snýst þetta kannski að einhverju leyti um ábyrgð fjölmiðla, þmt opinbera. Er ekki lag að endurvekja nýjustu tækni og vísindi!  Svipaðir þættir eru hjá flestum norrænu sjónvarpsstöðunum. Umræða um vísindi er heldur ekki eingöngu um vísindi, heldur líka um fjármögnun, uppbyggingu og aðra samhangandi þætti. Þetta eru þá pólitískar spurningar um vísindi.

ritstj. 

Vilhallir ÍE í umfjöllun

Iceland Should Fund Centres of Excellence

In a previous post, I promised to elaborate on one of my favourite hobby horses, namely differentiation in the type of funding that is presently available here in Iceland. I have already discussed the Canada Research Chairs programme, and argued that Iceland could do with a similar measure for strategic brain gain. This post is devoted to the funding of centres of excellence, and the importance that these centres have for research in other countries.

So far, Icelandic research funding is essentially based on one measure: the funding of research projects of tiny to medium size. (The so-called excellence grants do not really provide enough money to finance a largish project.) There is, however, no funding I am aware of that allows a sustained research effort to build international visibility in a whole area of research over a 5-10 year time frame.  I am talking about funding a group of researchers who have an excellent track record in research, who work in related areas, and who joined forces to create a critical mass of research activity that is likely to attract international attention, outstanding PhD students and postdoctoral researchers, and top-class visitors from abroad. In other countries, this type of research effort is usually supported via the establishment of centres of excellence.

Rather than discussing this funding measure in the abstract, let me present a concrete example of a funding agency whose mission is to select and fund centres of excellence, namely the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF). DNRF makes large-scale investment in basic research by establishing and funding centres of excellence. This programme started in 1991 and has committed itself to support Danish research by investing 3.8 billion DKK in the funding of such centres.  Each centre of excellence is funded for a period of 5-10 years at a rate of about 6 million DKK per year.

As you can easily imagine, the availablity of this type of funding makes it possible to create an outstanding environment for research. I was lucky enough to work in Aalborg at the heyday of BRICS, and I can tell you that it was highly enjoyable to be in an environment where one could hire postdocs and PhD students, fund long- or short-term visitors, organize thematic workshops and be able to support the speakers, and basically to be able to do whatever one's research called for without having to worry about every penny one spent---within reasonable limits of course

I understand that the OECD suggested that Iceland establish centres of excellence. So, why is this not done?  Wouldn't it be appropriate to add this item high on our "to lobby for" agenda? What do you say?

 

The Importance of Being Mobile

A comment on a blog post reads:

....the musical chairs that us academics play in our careers serves to disseminate our knowledge.

I agree that mobility is important in the career of most academics. Indeed, most of us have studied and worked at several institutions.

I was reminded of this comment yesterday, when I was asked to fill in a EU questionnaire on the mobility of researchers. One of the multiple-choice questions on the form read: "How often should a researcher move at different stages in her/his career?" (I was asked to answer this question since I claimed that mobility is important in the career of a researcher.) For instance, how often should one move over a four-year period at the early stages of one's career? I assumed that this question was referring to the first four years after one's PhD, and my answer off the top of my head was 1-2 times. (What I really meant was twice, but I thought 3-5 times was too much; the rationale being that one should be mobile at that crucial time in one's career, but that being overly mobile might cause too much overhead---especially if this involves changing countries. Later I looked back at my movements in the period 1991-1994 and realized that I actually moved 5 times myself.)

What is your opinion? Is mobility important at all stages of one's career? And how often should a researcher be mobile during the first four years of one's career?

Advice for (Prospective) Graduate Students

A topic that is being increasingly covered in TCS blogs is that of giving advice to (prospective) graduate students and beginning researchers. (See, for instance, here, here or here.) This is a welcome development, and a very good way of using the medium for the benefit of an important component of our research community. (After all, young researchers are the future of research, aren't they?) In fact, I have no problem in admitting that I enjoy reading those blog posts or anything similar myself. I feel that I am still learning on the job every day, and that those pieces of advice remind me of things that I should keep in mind, but that I tend (consciously or unconsciously) to "forget". After all,

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t. (Erica Jong)

The latest few words of advice on research for graduate students I read have been penned down by Fan Chung. She addresses mostly combinatorialists, but what she says applies equally well to (theoretical computer) scientists at large. I like the fact that she stresses the collaborative nature of the research enterprise, and that she embraces one of my favourite hobby horses, viz. the Hardy-Littlewood rule: authors are alphabetically ordered and everyone gets an equal share of credit. She adds:

The one who has worked the most has learned the most and is therefore in the best position to write more papers on the topic.

(I had never thought in these terms myself, but yes that's true.) She also writes:

If you have any bad feeling about sharing the work or the credit, don't collaborate. In mathematics, it is quite okay to do your research independently. (Unlike other areas, you are not obliged to include the person who fund your research.) If the collaboration already has started, the Hardy-Littlewood rule says that it stays a joint work even if the contribution is not of the same proportion. You have a choice of not to collaborate the next time. (If you have many ideas, one paper doesn't matter. If you don't have many ideas, then it really doesn't matter.) You might miss the opportunity for collaboration which can enhance your research and enrich your life. Such opportunity is actually not so easy to cultivate but worth all the efforts involved.

I could not agree more. I will add Fan Chung's advice to the list of links I suggest to all my students and colleagues. Maybe you'd like to do so too.

A Couple of Thoughts on the Results of the Rannis Applications

As you probably all know already, the results of the latest round of grant applications are out.  The Rannis news item on the web states the following figures:

Á fundi stjórnar Rannsóknasjóðs miðvikudaginn 16. janúar 2008 var úthlutað tæplega 300 milljónum króna til nýrra rannsóknaverkefna á árinu 2008. Þrjár tegundir styrkja voru í boði: Öndvegisstyrkir, Rannsóknastöðustyrkir og Verkefnastyrkir. Alls bárust 17 umsóknir um Öndvegisstyrki og voru 4 þeirra styrktar; 20 umsóknir bárust um Rannsóknastöðustyrki og voru 7 þeirra styrktar; 204 umsóknir bárust um Verkefnastyrki og voru 60 þeirra styrktar. Alls barst því 241 umsókn og var 71 styrkt, eða rétt innan við þriðjungur.

In the scientific area to which my research belongs (Engineering, Science and Technology), Rannis selected 12 new projects for funding and awarded 48421K ISK to those projects. In 2007, 11 projects were funded in that subject area for a total of 34120K ISK. So there has been a welcome increase in the available funding. I do not think that I am stating anything particularly controversial, however, by going on record as saying that the amount of financing is still way below par. When I told one my most prolific Dutch co-workers how much money I got in this round, his reaction was "Can you support one PhD student with that amount of money?" He did not know that the money was supposed to support one PhD student and one MSc student, and that no travel money was involved

To put things into perspective, let me point out that  about 48000K ISK is less than BRICS, a single centre of excellence of the Danish National Research Foundation, received each year from 1994 till about 2006. By way of comparison, you may also see what the Academy of Finland (one of the funding sources in that country) awards each year: 

The Academy annually makes funding decisions worth around 260 million euros. Each year Academy-funded projects account for a total of some 3,000 person years.

So, I am very happy to see an increase in the available funding (kudos to whoever made this possible!), but I think that these are initial baby-steps, and much more remains to be done. If you can lobby on behalf of the scientific community, please do! (And don't forget the other worthy causes you should lobby for that have already been mentioned on this blog )

I believe that we also need to differentiate the types of funding (not just project-based funding) as it is done elsewhere, but this will be the topic for another post. For the moment, let me close by congratulating the contributors to this blog for having received a few grants from Rannis in 2008. Well done, guys!

 

A Plagiarism Scandal

Via Not Even Wrong, I learned about a plagiarism scandal involving "more than 60 arXiv preprints, more than thirty of which were refereed and published in at least 18 different physics journals". Some of journals involved are supposedly prestigious ones. The blog post and the comments make for unresting reading, and may be of interest to the readers of this blog.

I guess that most of us have had to deal with cases of plagiarism in our teaching; I myself had to deal with one just last term. However, as a journal editor or referee, I have not yet met any case of major plagiarism. (Cases of multiple submissions of essentially the same results, yes, but outright plagiarism, no.) What about you?

A Free Journal-Ranking Tool

The latest issue of Nature features a news item reporting on a freely-available tool that can be used to generate citation statistics for papers, journals and countries. The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database. This platform takes its name from the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator, developed by SCImago, a Spanish data-mining and visualization group. This indicator is based on Google PageRank. This tool is a competitor to Thomson's Web of Science, and covers more journals (15,000 in lieu of 9,000) and 20-45% more records than the Web of Science.

The availability of this tool, as well as of Google Scholar of course, puts Thomson under some pressure. I think that this is welcome pressure. To see why, you might wish to read this editorial. Basically, the "impact factor" is one of the Gods of modern-day academia, together with "leadership" and a few other criteria not necessarily related to scholarship. It has "a strong influence on the scientific community, affecting decisions on where to publish, whom to promote or hire, the success of grant applications, and salary bonuses. " However, as claimed in the editorial, "members of the community seem to have little understanding of how impact factors are determined, and, to our knowledge, no one has independently audited the underlying data to validate their reliability." This is obviously undesirable.

I think that, for good or for worse, impact-factor-based evaluation of our research output is here to stay. However, when making decisions based on impact factor, citations and what not, I hope that deans, employers, funding agencies and rectors will consult several different sources and compare the results that they get. Moreover, I do hope that good, old-fashioned evaluation of the quality of one's work will not disappear altogether to be replaced by purely quantitative indicators.

For the moment, let's play with our new toy. In case you are interested here are the rankings of countries in computer science: all subjects, computational theory and mathematics, TCS (but as a subcategory of mathematics), discrete mathematics and combinatorics, logic (as a subcategory of mathematics) and mathematics as a whole.
How is Iceland faring according to this ranking tool? Have a look, draw your own conclusions, and share them with the readers of this blog.

Icelandic Contribution to #1 Breakthrough of the Year According to Science Magazine

Thanks Luca for pointing out the Icelandic connection with the breakthrough of the year 2007 as presented in Science Magazine. Yngvi contributed to the solution of Checkers, a story that deservedly caught a lot of attention this year. We also have another reason to celebrate.

Icelandic scientists also contributed to the #1 breakthrough of the year, on the impact of Human genetic variation. This announcement should not come as a surprise as technological advances have led to identification of multiple genes and mutations that affect a range of phenotypes and/or diseases (Note that this result was predicted from the first principles of evolution and population genetics, but the details have remained elusive). The icelandic connection is that scientists at Decode genetics, and their collaborators here and abroad, have been part of this tidal wave of results (of which the web summary provided by Science magazine, provides just a glimpse). This announcement follows the 2005 Science magazine breakthrough of the year, which highlighted evolution in action, across the tree of life (from bacteria to humans).

In sum, we have scientists of high international caliber working here, and should be proud of them. Also, we must recognize the fact that great science does not emerge out of the blue.

Arnar 

Icelandic Contribution to #10 Breakthrough of the Year According to Science Magazine

Anders Claesson just alerted me to the fact that Solving Checkers has been listed by Science magazine in tenth position in the list of breakthroughs of the year 2007. See here.

My colleague Yngvi Björnsson from the School of Computer Science at Reykjavík University was a member of the team behind this breakthrough. Congratulations to Yngvi and his colleagues at Alberta.

An Excellent Example from Canada

 

I recently became  aware of the Canada Research Chairs programme. That programme has been running since the year 2000, and aims at establishing 2000 research professorships—the so-called Canada Research Chairs—in universities across Canada by 2008. The Canada Research Chairs Program invests $300 million a year to attract and retain some of the world's most accomplished and promising minds.

I encourage the readers of this blog to have a look at the web site for the programme. There is a lot of interesting material there, and I cannot help but think that Iceland would be well served by setting up a similar programme to attract the best possible scientists in all disciplines to this country. Now, this is something well worth lobbying for in the coming year, isn't it?

If you do not have time to look at the web site I linked to above, here is my executive summary of the  programme.

• Each eligible degree-granting institution in Canada receives an allocation of Chairs. For each Chair, a university nominates a researcher whose work complements its strategic research plan and who meets the program's high standards.

  Three members of a college of reviewers, composed of experts from around the world, assess each nomination and recommend whether to support it.

• Universities are allocated Chairs in proportion to the amount of research grant funding they have received from the three federal granting agencies: NSERC, CIHR, and SSHRC in the three years prior to the year of the allocation.

• There are two types of Canada Research Chair:

  Tier 1 Chairs, tenable for seven years and renewable, are for outstanding researchers acknowledged by their peers as world leaders in their fields. For each Tier 1 Chair, the university receives $200,000 annually for seven years.

  Tier 2 Chairs, tenable for five years and renewable once, are for exceptional emerging researchers, acknowledged by their peers as having the potential to lead in their field. For each Tier 2 Chair, the university receives $100,000 annually for five years.

• Chairholders are also eligible for infrastructure support from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) to help acquire state-of-the-art equipment essential to their work.

• If an institution's performance decreases relative to other institutions to the extent that the next recalculation of Chair allocations results in that institution's allocation being reduced, the Chairs Secretariat will reclaim, as appropriate, one or more of its unoccupied Chairs. Should all of the institution's Chairs be occupied, the secretariat will negotiate with the university on how best to reclaim the lost Chair(s).

Of course, the success of a programme like this one should be measured by the quality of the people who take up the chairs. You look them up here. A quick browse through the names of the Canada Research chairholders in Information Technology and Mathematics makes me pretty sure that you'll find lots of outstanding people in your area of interest. 

Wouldn't it be great if we could convince the Icelandic ministry for education to set up an Icelandic Research Chairs programme along the Canadian lines? Let's see what the new year will bring, but I do not hold my breath. I am already doing so waiting for the result of the Rannis grant applications .

I wish a happy and productive 2008 to all readers of this blog.