ArchaeoBlog

Think I posted about this when it first came to light: How Social Scientists, and the Rest of Us, Got Seduced By a Good Story

Again, I do not excuse those who resort to cheating. But as the consumer of these publications, we should be worried, because this system essentially selects for bad data handling. The more you manipulate your data (and there are lots of ways to massage your data so that it shows what you’d like, even without knowing you’re doing it), the more likely you are to come up with a publishable result. Peer review acts as something of a check on this, of course. But your peers don’t know if, for example, you decided to report only the one time your experiment worked, instead of the seven times it didn’t.

It would be much better if we rewarded replication: if journals were filled not only with papers describing novel effects, but also with papers by researchers who replicated someone else’s novel effects. But replicating an effect that someone else has found has nowhere near the prestige–or the publication value–of something entirely new. Which means, of course, that it’s relatively easy to make up numbers and be sure that no one else will try to check.

I had glanced at that article, but didn’t read through the whole thing. I highlighted that one bit because I think that the Internet might make a good use for this sort of thing, not just replication but also negative results because those sorts of things rarely get published. A further problem is funding: if you’re just re-doing someone else’s work to check it, it is often difficult to find any funding for it (though not impossible).

Peer reviewers do need to be more diligent when “checking the math” but as this story indicates, falsified data — in this case made up out of whole cloth — could be checked and rechecked mathematically and it wouldn’t have made a difference.

I like how he was very clever about it, doing the background research and making up data that seemed to fit expected results. I, errrm, actually did something similar back in grad school for an assignment: I had to re-do an analysis of edge wear on lithics through experimentation and was crushed at the end of the quarter, so I sat in the library for three hours and made up data. I knew what the results should be so I produced data accordingly, complete with a couple of “outliers”. Heh.

*ahem* Not that I’m proud of that, you know. . . .

Thesis Hatement: Getting a literature Ph.D. will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor.

A graduate career is just like this, only worse, because “A Little Fable” lasts three sentences and is made up, while graduate school lasts at least six years and will ruin your life in a very real way. But, as in the fable, this ruin is predestined, and completely unrelated to how “right” you do things.

Other well-meaning academics have already attempted to warn you, the best-known screed in this subgenre being William Pannapacker’s “Graduate School in the Humanities? Just Don’t Go.”* But this convinced no one. It certainly didn’t convince me! Why? Because Pannapacker is a tenured professor. He pulled it off, so why can’t you? After all, someone has to get these jobs.

Via Althouse.

Lots of very negative — but largely accurate, I’m afraid — stuff in there. I latched onto this line:
This was not the case when today’s associate professors were hired in the boom of the late 1990s.

There was a boom?

My overall opinion hasn’t actually changed much despite my own experience — which has resulted in some negatives — and lots of stories and articles like this one: I don’t and won’t tell anyone to Just Say No. But you really have to know what you’re doing and why. I don’t think that “your academic self will be the culmination of your entire self” is necessarily the case, although for those who eventually do go the academic route successfully, this is kind of an a priori condition. You just have to be aware that if you don’t get into a academic position — and even if you do, not all of them are sustainable — you still have to work for a living and that means having some marketable skills. Mine was programming, data analysis and management.

It’s fine if, for example like me, you just wanted that PhD, or wanted to really dig into a subject in such depth for true personal fulfillment. People do a lot of stuff for personal fulfillment, from restoring a classic car to playing the piano, but you still have to make a living.

UPDATE: This is a good comment:

Maybe there’s a difference between pursuing such a degree because you think it will solve issues of identity or provide a safe income.

That’s not why I did it. I had questions. I love learning. I poured myself deeply into wells of knowledge and wisdom. It wasn’t easy, but I look back on the last five years of PhD work with a sense of celebration, delight.

Aaron Swartz Was Right

The suicide of the Internet wunderkind Aaron Swartz has given rise to a great deal of discussion, much of it centered on whether the penalty sought against him by the prosecutor was proportional to his “crime.”

The consensus so far has been that Swartz did something wrong by accessing and releasing millions of academic papers from the JSTOR archive. But perhaps it is time to ask whether Swartz did in fact act wrongly. We might entertain the possibility that Swartz’s act of civil disobedience was an attempt to help rectify a harm that began long ago. Perhaps he was not only justified in his actions but morally impelled to act as he did. Moreover, we too might be morally impelled to take action.

Via Althouse.

Most of the discussion thus far has revolved around prosecutorial overreach in their harassment of Swartz, but this article looks at his actions and philosophy. That is, was Swartz’s release of millions of JSTOR papers justifiable and was he correct that “we all have a right to these articles”?

My initial impression was that I disagreed with most of it. Yes, if we paid for a given research project — through grants of public monies — then we can expect to have access to the results in some form. But do we have a “right” to these specific journal articles? My gut reaction is no, we don’t; the researchers have chosen this route to disseminate their work, but there’s no reason they can’t do the same thing in another, publicly accessible, venue, such as online in a blog.
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What’s the Use of a PhD?

But this is not because I think that scholarship is wasteful, or academics are useless. The best part of my job is interviewing smart academics who tell me about all the stuff they’re expert in. I understand why professors love their jobs, and why graduate students want them (and, by extension, why those jobs are so hard to get.) And I applaud any effort by programs to deal with the disastrous financial, social and emotional reckoning often faced by students who have invested 10 years in a PhD and then find themselves without a tenure-track position.

Disclaimer issued, let me start by asking a question: what, exactly, does this alt-ac vision entail?

Interesting little article. Talks about “alt-ac” tracks, PhD’s designed for non-academic track people. She makes some good points about the job market:

From the outside, a humanities PhD does not seem likely to ever be a career-enhancing move, for the simple reason that a PhD is a lengthy apprenticeship designed to teach you the skills needed to do exactly one thing: be a professor. . . .The ponderous, jargon-filled style of academic articles, constantly multiplying out the caveats and contraditions to their very last implication, fills a real purpose in scholarly discourse. But no one else will wade through it. . . .Masterful command of a narrow(ish) scholarly area has zero economic value outside the academy. Nor does the ability to spend months or years working on a single problem, or small group of related problems. . . .Graduate students learn to teach, but they mostly learn to teach students at large research institutions, which is not necessarily great practice for teaching many other groups.

I found a lot of that out in my stint at a Large Bank. The higher-ups need actionable items, a concise summary of results and what can be done with them. And relaying quantitative and statistical information is tricky as well, to those who’ve mostly presented to other academics who want to endlessly explore the details of analyses. I’ll admit that that can be frustrating, but it can also open one’s eyes. If you exist in the bubble of academia, you just have no clue that other people aren’t that interested in discussing the endless caveats and limitations of your research, and — the most important thing — you have to learn to integrate those in some way into your results. Yes, people tend to want simple answers, but you must include cautions as well. I recall when we were developing a simple linear model to predict some aspect of said Bank’s monthly report to investors and some were trying to get the confidence limits lower and lower and lower, which gives a false sense of certainty. I managed to keep it reasonable, so as to avoid the trap of over-predicting; making your model so tight that the usual variation will almost certainly fall outside of your prediction sooner or later. We got a little award for it, too, although about 6 months later it failed miserably due to outside circumstances. But learning how to synthesize like that was enormously helpful to me.

I don’t look on that simplifying as necessarily a negative either. Even academics need that sort of simplification outside of their own areas of expertise. One doubts, for example, that many of them will spend hours and hours analyzing their own investments; rather, most I would assume want a financial adviser to tell them where to put their money most effectively.

Two other things related to the alt-ac job market:

Unfortunately, in many cases a PhD sends a negative rather than a positive signal. Some employers are suspicious of people they figure will be a smartypants pain in the ass with no real skills (I’m not endorsing this view, just reporting it). But a bigger problem is that employers know why people get a PhD in Comp Lit or Religious Studies: so they can be a professor. If you go on the job market with that degree, they know that it’s almost certainly because you failed to get a job as a professor.

. . .

If you want a meaningful alt-ac track, you need to somehow overcome this–to convince employers that a PhD is a general purpose degree. I think that this is a very tough row to hoe, an a transformation that will take place over decades if it happens at all.

I tend to put this more on the students than the institution personally. You have to know why you’re getting that PhD. If you are dead-set on academia, you have to know that with absolute certainty; in most cases, those who are comfortable in academia will be okay. I think a lot of people have some idea of what academia is like, and figure getting a PhD will get them there by default. Not true. This is one area where maybe programs can start being a bit more honest about what you are getting into, besides just saying (like most really do, albeit informally) “The job market sucks”. But if you’re not going the academic route, you really need to sell yourself outside of it, and make employers really believe that you’re not in academia for a reason, whether that’s because you didn’t intend on it in the first place or because other life choices (marriage, kids, etc.) have made that route unproductive. But it’s your job to sell it and be comfortable with it, because otherwise they’ll give the job to someone who they think really wants to be there and isn’t just settling for it. And that usually means you honestly do want to be there.

Caveat: I won’t argue against getting a PhD if that’s really what you want to do. If the benefits you perceive from getting one, and they’re not all monetary, weigh favorably against the costs, then go for it. I did and I don’t regret it at all: I wanted to get a PhD and so I did. But I worked my way through grad school, decided fairly early on that I didn’t really care for the academic culture, and despite some difficulties, emerged relatively intact both financially and personally.

Anthropology/archaeology is similar to the humanities (comp lit and such), although archy tends to have something of an outside market in CRM to absorb some of the PhDs. Some programs are even tailoring their MA programs towards the CRM job market, and I think even students can tailor their own PhD work towards CRM as well and be rewarded for it, financially and otherwise. Anthropology generally is probably more similar to humanities degrees, although as we’ve seen, even they are starting to go the alt-ac route on their own. SO, definitely worth a read and worth considering.

UPDATE: A small bit to add. One thing I’d like to argue is that getting a PhD (or an MA for that matter) is, or can be, inherently of value, both personally and professionally. Like anything that requires hard work and dedication, just the doing of it and doing it well can be personally rewarding and a clear sign that one is willing to put in the effort for a larger cause. Plus, you know, if you get a deep sense of personal satisfaction from delving into the details of a particular subject because you love it, it may be worth the time and expense.

Anthropology Inc.

Over lunch the next day, I asked Ozkan what she had concluded from the visit. She noted all the things that Rebecca had never stated explicitly, but that were clearly what mattered most in her life. “She treats the kitchen as a holy place,” Ozkan said. That made three holy places in the house, if you count the two kitchens separately, and the Beatles shrine upstairs. Her deviance on the outside was, Ozkan said, a point well worth noting. “If you listen really carefully, you’ll find some things that don’t quite match the super-ideal framework of kosher,” she said. “And it’s always great to see that. It’s a way to see how people deal with practicalities and challenges in life, and how they choose to break that ideal image.” Listen to people talk about how they break the rules, in other words, and you’ll figure out what they consider the important rules in the first place.

Ozkan’s questions had hinted at product ideas that ReD’s client, a home-appliance maker, was considering. Would Rebecca contemplate buying an automated fridge that would advise her when she was running short on orange juice? And as Rebecca responded, her implicit consecration of her kitchen became evident. She seemed to care less about whether her kitchen remained well stocked or running smoothly than whether it remained her sacred space, controlled by her for her family, and not by, say, a talking robot. As with the vodka drinkers, the key elements were emotional ownership and connection.

Pretty long article, but worth a read. During my brief stint at a Large (now extinct) Bank, I remember being a bit confused when some guys in suits came onto the elevator talking about the latest “ethnography” they were having done. True enough, there were at least a couple of anthropologists working there doing mostly qualitative research usually, I think, on focus groups of potential or current customers, but at least on one occasion they did a study of a potential buyout to see how that company’s culture would mesh with their own.

But most of it is market research and they go into a couple of examples including Coca Cola attempting to seel tea in China (whatever that has to do with anything!). There was something similar I read years ago about Budweiser’s (Technically Anheuser-Busch, I suppose) attempts to sell beer in the UK which were being unsuccessful. Initially, they tried to just sell the same stuff they sold elsewhere, to not very good results. But they were contrasted with Foster’s which had done their homework and changed their products and marketing somewhat to suit the local “beer culture”. The finding I remember is that much consumption there was in the context of “session drinking”, where beer was less viewed as a refreshment and something to get drunk on and more as a lubricant for hanging out with friends for longer periods of time. Can’t remember off hand what they did differently, although I seem to recall them having to lower the alcohol content so people could drink for longer periods without getting hammered.

OTOH, I, along with the author, wonder if this is really such a big deal:

The value the firm brings to clients comes partly from anthropology, practiced in a way that may or may not please those still in academia. But the value is also just an effect of putting an impressive ethnographic sheen on the work of many smart, right-brained individuals in a sector that overvalues quantitative research. Much of what I encountered while shadowing ReD’s consultants seemed like the type of insight that any observant interviewer might have produced, with or without an anthropology degree or a working knowledge of Heidegger.

They also note that Apple, a hugely successful company, has never used such things.

Of course, the academics are in a kerfuffle:

[B]efore we parted ways, she made clear that there was at least one argument within anthropology that she was tired of hearing about: “Just don’t make this another story about the clash between practicing anthropologists and academics.”

The politics of anthropologists in academia tends to the Marxist left, even more so than the politics of academics in general. And to many of them, the defection of young scholars to the corporate world looks like a betrayal at best, and a devil’s bargain at worst. I told Singh that academic anthropologists had already shared some harsh words for their applied-anthropology brothers and sisters. “Well, they’re endangered,” she said of the academics, a little snootily. “We’re doing work that’s needed. We’re dealing with human issues.”

I suppose it’s somewhat analogous to CRM archaeology. I’ve been making the argument for a while now that CRM is where it’s at as far as archaeology goes for much the same reason: That’s archaeology in the “real world” where decisions have to made with regard to protecting actual sites and dealing with the actual people who make up the many and varied stakeholders. And it’s not like the “ethics” espoused by academic anthropologists and their IRBs are the be-all and end-all of ethical behavior either.

Anyway, read it yourselves and come to your own conclusions.

Will the study of archaeology soon become a thing of the past?

Combining insights from natural and social sciences, archaeology offers an exceptionally powerful way of understanding many of the most inscrutable aspects of our past – think of the difficulty of interpreting Stonehenge, for example, and what has now been achieved by this kind of sophisticated analysis. Archaeologists have plenty to tell us about the impact of climate change and fuel use, or the rise and decline of complex societies: they give us access, in other words, to a vast store of human experience, which is of direct relevance to some of the greatest challenges we now face.

Despite the value and interest of what they do, archaeology departments up and down the country are now facing difficulty. The reason? Undergraduate demand has fallen, and there is no other way for them to pay their bills.

I’m not familiar with the way the universities work over there, and I’m not sure we’re facing the same problems here. We probably have an overcapacity of students majoring in anthro/archy, part of the wider trend of College For Everybody. OTOH, with costs rising, high unemployment, and lots of student loan defaulting, our universities may soon be ripe for a reckoning as well.

The most recent edition of the Journal of Near Eastern Studies (Vol. 71, No. 2, October 2012) is now out, with the current Table of Contents and article previews available.  Articles and reviews are also available to purchase as downloads.

Martin over at ScienceBlogs links to this editorial in Antiquity:

The new lecturers are drawn in principle from the cohort of doctoral students, implying that the PhD is intended to provide an apprenticeship. Accordingly it has been streamlined: instead of spending twenty years on an enormous topic, the student spends three years on something more manageable, a course or programme likely to provide a useful experience and destined for expeditious completion. Strangely however, the required output remains the same: a book-length treatise. Articles are not encouraged as they hold up the delivery of the ill-digested lump. This is odd on two counts: first, students are made to write a book before they have written an article, and second, the articles, not the book, are what their prospective employer actually requires. Given this prescription, the newly appointed lecturer is expected to hit the ground running, with four peer-reviewed and citable articles in the knapsack, not one unpublished, unobtainable tome.

He quoted the bit on fieldwork, but that part struck me instead, primarily because a colleague of mine in public health (her PhD is really in nursing, but we worked together in global health) did her degree sans dissertation: they can do either the dissertation or publish four articles. People tend to pay far more attention to published articles than a dissertation and I think this might be worthwhile discussing in archaeology. OTOH, compared to the medical profession, archaeology has way fewer journals to choose from and even fewer that would be considered in the top couple of tiers. So, I dunno if it would work that well here.