Academia

In the past I’ve often been listed as the nominal professor for various graduate students taking “reading courses,” which basically meant “I’m going to be doing my research, but there’s some university requirement that says I must be registered for a certain number of courses each term, so please sign my sheet.” But this term I have two students doing honest-to-goodness reading courses — trying to learn some specific material that isn’t being offered in any structured course offered at the moment.

And — it’s great! Anyone have their favorite suggestions/anti-suggestions for reading courses? The method I chose was the following: the student and I consult on a course of readings for the term. Every week, the student reads through the relevant material. Then once a week we meet, and I sit in my chair and take notes as the student gives an informal lecture, as if they were the professor and I was the student.

Obviously good for me, since I get to brush up on some things that I knew really well some time ago but haven’t thought about recently. And the students get to dig into something they really care about. But the somewhat-unanticipated bonus is that the students get fantastic practice in teaching and giving talks. Since it’s just one-on-one, we can stop at any moment for me to point something out or for them to ask a question. And I can expound upon my theories of chalkboard etiquette, such as the need to speak out loud every single symbol you write on the board. Over the course of a single hour, I can see the student’s presentation skills improve noticeably (from “good” to “even better”).

The world being what it is, it’s not possible for every course to be taught with just one student and one professor. But despite all the very real advances in technology and pedagogical theory, I still believe that the best teaching happens with two people sitting at opposite ends of a log (or equivalent), passing words and ideas back and forth. Everything else is just trying to recreate that magic.

Japan has had a long and distinguished tradition in modern physics. Just to pick one example, the amazing efforts of Shin’ichirō Tomonaga to understand quantum electrodynamics, anticipating the work of Schwinger and Feynman while remaining essentially isolated from the rest of the world during World War II. More recently, Japan has continued to do forefront experimental work, including the SuperKamiokande neutrino detector and the Belle particle physics experiment at KEK. Nevertheless, in my own areas of physics — theoretical particle physics and cosmology — Japan hasn’t had a relatively low institutional profile. There are great individual physicists, but not any one institution of theoretical physics that really rose to the level of other great international places — a place where scientists around the world would naturally think of to spend a sabbatical or send their students as postdocs.

That all changed rather dramatically in recent years, with the founding of the Institute for Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo. The IPMU was one of the World Premier International Research Centers that were founded in Japan in 2007, to foster excellence in research but especially to lower barriers between Japan and the rest of the world. The IPMU acted aggressively to hire scientists from outside Japan and host programs that would bring visitors from around the world. And the effort succeeded, with astonishing swiftness; I know that among people I talked to, IPMU was quickly recognized as an attractive place to go with top-notch scientists working there. You can see the results through one person’s eyes at the blog of Susanne Reffert, one of IPMU’s postdocs.

Now all of that success is in jeopardy. As detailed in this letter from Hitoshi Murayama, founding director of the IPMU, the new government in Japan “is actively trying to slash support for programs in science,” and the IPMU is one of the targets. New commissions (staffed by non-experts) have been tasked with reviewing a wide spectrum of programs, and recommending everything from 30% cuts to 50% cuts to outright termination. These cuts are extending throughout science, although new efforts like the World Premier centers are in particular danger.

Admittedly, we live in a time when budgets are tight, and nobody is going to completely escape the pain of the current global economic crisis. But this would be a very short-sighted move on the part of Japan, to undo the great strides they had made in connecting with the international effort in fundamental physics.

Fortunately, there’s something you can do! Hirosi Ooguri here at Caltech informs me that the Japanese Ministry of Education and Science is actually soliciting input from the worldwide scientific community. You can send an email to “nak-got [at] mext.go.jp”, with a subject line “No. 14, WPI.” That will reach people who matter, including Senior Vice Minister Masaharu Nakagawa and Vice Minister Hitoshi Goto.

It would mean a lot if the Japanese government understood how much the rest of the world appreciates the close connections with scientists in their country. Science is not a zero-sum game; when it’s succeeding somewhere, everyone benefits. Here’s hoping the IPMU makes it through this episode intact, and continues to flourish in the future.

A new study looks at the average LSAT scores of students with different undergraduate majors, sometimes grouping related fields together to gather a statistically significant sample. (Via.) And the best scores were attained by students studying: …

A Tip for Students Interested in Law SchoolRead More »

Gödel’s Lost Letter writes an interesting post suggesting that complexity classes — categories of computational problems related by the resources necessary to solve them — play a similar role in complexity theory as elementary particles in high-energy physics. (Via Chad.) All very fascinating stuff, no doubt. But along the way a much more important issue is raised: when there is a seminar, should we have donuts before, or after?

Back then, Yale computer science used the post-talk-food normal form. That is after the talk donuts were served to the audience and the speaker. Most places then and now use pre-talk-food normal form, but Yale was different. I always wondered why we were different, but it was Yale.

I have to say that Yale is right on this one, and yet almost everyone does it backwards. Some sort of refreshments — coffee, tea, stale cookies, donuts if you’re lucky — are generally served before a colloquium or seminar, to attract an audience and presumably put people in a good mood. The problem is: we haven’t heard the talk yet, so we can’t chat about that, and if the audience is big enough we might not even know which person is the speaker.

Whereas, if donuts or whatever are served after the talk, not only do you make it more awkward for grad students to scarf some food without sitting through the seminar, but you have offered a very natural topic of conversation — the substance of the actual talk everyone has just heard. And the resulting conversation will usually be better than the desultory Q&A that follows a typical talk. For one thing, it’s just more natural to stand around and chat while sipping coffee or munching a donut than while one person stands at the front of a room and everyone else sits in the crowd (many of whom are restless and ready to scat). For another, students who might be intimidated out of asking a question in front of the whole audience can screw up their courage in a more informal setting. And most importantly, the chances that the actual speaker will get something intellectually useful out of the whole experience are enormously larger if they get to interact with a bunch of people who have just heard their talk. (Not even to mention the abomination of the usual “lunch talk,” where the undernourished speaker seminars away in front of a collection of people happily chewing away at their meals.)

I’m sure a lot of influential people read this blog. Let’s put that power to good use. What do we have to do to change the traditions and make it standard that coffee is served after the talk instead of before?