Master's Degree, then PhD

Being asked today to provide a biography of three of my colleagues and myself (for inclusion in a paper), it sure hits me how the master's degree and PhD degree are written in many different ways.

Looking it up, I concluded the following...

For the master's degree, one can write correctly both (and only) MS and M.S. (Magister Scientiae) if one likes Latin and abbreviations. Or, one can stick to just writing master's degree (which I adopt as a standard from now on).

For the PhD degree, one can write correctly both Ph.D. and PhD (Philosophiae Doctor), but unfortunately is obliged to use a Latin abbreviation. (It's not that I do not like Latin, but rather that I'm fond of clarity.) To the best of my knowledge, there is no internationally accepted way to write a PhD title in full. (Hope someone invents it by the time I obtain one, but I doubt it. Please tell me in reply to this post if you know one.)

The real line dividing cultures

I like to share with you a not so new but by no means outdated article, entitled The real line dividing cultures (click to read), as published September 18th, 2005, in the International Harold Tribune.

Author Henry Fountain gives a well-argumented overview of the differences among cultures, analyzing the way in which they queue. As it often goes, the term European doesn't identify one type of people (here, queuers), but brings about a whole bunch of types...

Europeans, Rasulo added, "have very different attitudes about how they wait for things." At the Disneyland in Paris, while British visitors are orderly, French and Italians "never saw a line they couldn't be in front of."

Also remarkable is the idea that American queues are in a way self-limiting (in queueing terms: people balk at entering) whereas Asian queues just tend to grow and grow.

Zhou said there was a tendency among Asians and others in more collective cultures to compare their situation with those around them.

This may make it more likely that they will remain in a line even if it is excessively long.

Zhou said this finding was rooted in a somewhat paradoxical observation: that it is the people behind a person in line, rather than in front, that determine the person's behavior.

"The likelihood of people giving up and leaving the queue is lower when they see more people behind them," Zhou said. "You feel like you are in a better position than the others behind you."

By contrast, she said, Americans and others in more individualistic societies make fewer "social comparisons" of this sort. They do not necessarily feel better that more people are behind them, and dislike having too many people in front of them. Lines in these cultures tend to be self-limiting.

In a place like Hong Kong, however, the lines may just grow and grow. "The longer the line, people think the service is more worthwhile to get," Zhou said.

Spending some time in Asia (once Beijing once Singapore), I remember to have observed this difference too. (More precisely, I admired the peace and calm Asian people in a queue display.)

This being a queueing research blog, I do not balk at mentioning that this suggests to call infinite-sized queues Asian, and finite-sized ones (with balking or reneging) American. Which leaves the term European queues for, err, a mix of queue jumpers (French and Italian) and decent customers (British), that is, some sort of priority queue? But this way of putting it is probably to laden to ever be adopted.

Some more about this (and also some discussion) can be found here.

Web of Science, Don't Lead Us Astray

Check out the Web of Science homepage, and behold. A clear and stark interface, perfectly fit for its purpose: serving science. The upper half op the page looks as follows.



There's the nice and simple logo, some link to information for new users, and a very limited number of buttons (search options) —as should, in order to be user-friendly.
Yep, it shows that people spent time tailoring the interface down to the functional and elegant minimum they present us here. Mere utopia, when we browse from top to bottom. That is, until we arrive at the Quick search box.



What does Quick search mean? In a time where the majority of search box entries is tunneled through Google, we expect to get mostly the same as we get in Google: any result that contains the word we entered. We expect a bunch of hits, that might not be sorted in the most relevant order, but do indeed share this one feature: they contain the word we entered. This is what we expect, regardless of our opinion on Google, because search boxes in the noughties simply work this way, and this modus operandi has become second nature to the modal (web page) visitor.

And so I did: I entered my name, clicked the SEARCH button and beheld. This is what I was told.

What bad news! I am indeed searching for myself as an author, and although I'm quite sure I managed to get some articles published during my three years of research, my search finds no records. My oh my, did I then not publish after all?

I return to the home page and suddenly, it dawns on me: I was indeed warned. I should have known better, of course, since the little box at the home page,

warned me all the way. If you are looking for an author, use general search. And so I did, and found the deed done.

But that doesn't solve their problem. Two questions.

• Why does WOS provide a Quick Search box, that doesn't comply with any human intuition, and dwells on its very home page?
  
• What purpose does the Quick Search function serve?

I'm not really sure about the answer to the first question, but it makes me wonder.

• Does WOS try to make their interface look user-friendly, without providing the functionality? That would be really cheap.
  
• Or, alternatively, are they not aware that web intuition these days dictates that Quick Search always provides more, and never less results then a General Search (for the same keyword)? That would surprise me.
  
• Or are they just too lazy to adapt their interface to meet nowadays standards? That would be cheap again.

As for the second question, I'm not sure about the answer either. The welcome text in the search box states "Enter a Topic", so you'd figure that this Quick Search is intended to browse through topics. But the search hint on the WOS home page persistently counters this intuition, as it states: Looking for a topic [...]? Use General Search.

This leaves me puzzled, I assure you. Dozens of people, mostly scientists, are consulting WOS every day. Dozens of scientists, publishing on a variety of subjects that combine common sense and advanced science, are making the same useless loop as the one I describe here, this very moment.

Maybe there is some kind of humor in this, but I can't seem to grab it. Can anyone explain?

Academia, You Know Too Much

This article discusses on what I'd call the knowledge paradox: the more we know, the less important (and often the less true) our new findings are.
(Unfortunately it is written in my mother tongue Dutch instead of our world tongue English. Reference on top of first page. Click on images to see readable version.)

I'm not sure about the opinion of the author of this article —is there a way out of this paradox?— but I do think that any modern scientist should be aware of this.

There were times when all science was basic, and known only to the happy few. This basic knowledge has turned into school book wisdom for ages now.
Scientists nowadays are more concerned with non-basic, advanced problems —and they should, given these weird quantum effects and DNA inside us, and relativity all over the universe. A modern scientist is to solve very difficult problems, in the best possible way. This implies (rather serious) mistakes, all over —shit happens, when you're solving a billion pieces jigsaw puzzle.
Other pitfalls lure, however. In a worst case scenario, the scientist is still tackling the same old problem (that might be insolvable, or, worse, non-existing), and keeps himself busy complicating his theory of it. That is perhaps the largest (and most common) threat to scientific quality work nowadays.




PS These are pictures of sheets that I discovered hanging on the bulletin board of the ELIS Department of our university —thanks guys for sharing this.

Publish Nor Perish

Publish or perish. I'm sure most researchers among us are familiar with this phrase, that refers to the pressure to publish work constantly in order to further or sustain one's career in academia.

And it's mostly true: we do need to disseminate results in written form. Applying it to my own case: what else would enable me to work further upon work of Italians (F. Callegati), Brazilians (R.C. Almeida), Hungarians (L. Lakatos),... without necessitating travel.

Extremely rare are those who glare with ideas across centuries without publishing. In academia I don't know any, actually. In general history...well there's such people as Sokrates, and Jesus, to name a few. They seem to go with a different adage: publish nor perish.