Richard Hamming’s famous talk titled “You and Your Research” is widely available on the web (click here for pdf version and html version). It’s also quite long. Below are some highlights from the talk. If you are serious about become a great scholar, check out the ideas below. Note that Hamming was a scientist, so he is addressing fellow scientists. But his remarks apply to anyone with high intellectual aspirations.

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[From editor's introduction:] This talk centered on Hamming’s observations and research on the question “Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?” From his more than forty years of experience, thirty of which were at Bell Laboratories, he has made a number of direct observations, asked very pointed questions of scientists about what, how, and why they did things, studied the lives of great scientists and great contributions, and has done introspection and studied theories of creativity. The talk is about what he has learned in terms of the properties of the individual scientists, their abilities, traits, working habits, attitudes, and philosophy.

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The title of my talk is, “You and Your Research.” It is not about managing research, it is about how you individually do your research. I could give a talk on the other subject – but it’s not, it’s about you. I’m not talking about ordinary run-of-the-mill research; I’m talking about great research. And for the sake of describing great research I’ll occasionally say Nobel-Prize type of work. It doesn’t have to gain the Nobel Prize, but I mean those kinds of things which we perceive are significant things. Relativity, if you want, Shannon’s information theory, any number of outstanding theories — that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. Continued…

If you were going to die in a few months and had to compress your best thoughts about life and what makes it worth living into a single lecture, what would you say? Here’s computer scientist Randy Pausch’s answer once he learned that pancreatic cancer had sealed his fate:

This lecture made such an impression that it was turned into a book by the same title, The Last Lecture. It was a runaway international best-seller.

A few weeks back SuperScholar featured a piece by Baylor neuroscientist Matthew Stanford on how students can keep their brains healthy. One is to limit electronic media. The New York Times has an interesting piece on this. Multitasking with electronic media can certainly be fun — often a lot more fun than reading a book or doing homework – but it also activates the reward centers in your brain that put a premium on instant gratification and can deaden our ability to maintain sustained attention on a single task, whose completion may not yield any immediate rewards. The whole article is worth reading, but here’s an interesting study cited. It compares television to electronic gaming and finds the latter more disruptive of sleep and school learning:

Some neuroscientists have … begun to understand what happens to the brains of young people who are constantly online and in touch.

In an experiment at the German Sport University in Cologne in 2007, boys from 12 to 14 spent an hour each night playing video games after they finished homework.

On alternate nights, the boys spent an hour watching an exciting movie, like “Harry Potter” or “Star Trek,” rather than playing video games. That allowed the researchers to compare the effect of video games and TV.

The researchers looked at how the use of these media affected the boys’ brainwave patterns while sleeping and their ability to remember their homework in the subsequent days. They found that playing video games led to markedly lower sleep quality than watching TV, and also led to a “significant decline” in the boys’ ability to remember vocabulary words. The findings were published in the journal Pediatrics.

Markus Dworak, a researcher who led the study and is now a neuroscientist at Harvard, said it was not clear whether the boys’ learning suffered because sleep was disrupted or, as he speculates, also because the intensity of the game experience overrode the brain’s recording of the vocabulary.

“When you look at vocabulary and look at huge stimulus after that, your brain has to decide which information to store,” he said. “Your brain might favor the emotionally stimulating information over the vocabulary.”

Just as health care needs reform and overhaul, so does the college and university system. Inertia being what it is, don’t expect far-reaching educational reform too soon, but the sense that our educational paradigms are outdated may be gaining ground.

Simon Jenkins, earlier this month, wrote a piece in the Guardian on the sheer waste of time and human capital in contemporary education. He focused on the UK, but his comments hold generally.

According to Jenkins,

There is no evidence that students need long holidays to endure the strains of university teaching, nor that they or their teachers benefit from inordinate amounts of effort put into research. There is no evidence that higher fees have deterred poorer students, despite categorical assertions from one and all to this effect. Come to that, there is no evidence that a large university sector benefits the economy as an “investment”. It is chiefly a consumption good. Given that most degrees are non-vocational, universities are probably as wasteful of valuable labour as military conscription.

Read the entire article and see whether you agree. Science and engineering curricula, if rigorous and laboratory-work intensive, seem to constitute an exception to Jenkins’ dismal view of academic time-wasting. But his cost-benefit analysis of western education seems largely to hit the mark.

Although card-carrying secular humanists are few, secular humanism has been enormously influential in American culture and, particularly, in American education. For this reason, SuperScholar decided to cover the recent conference on secular humanism in Los Angeles (granted, we’re a bit late reporting on it).

The Council for Secular Humanism, publisher of Free Inquiry magazine, celebrated its 30th anniversary by hosting a conference titled Setting the Agenda: Secular Humanism’s Next Thirty Years, A Free Inquiry Subscriber’s Conference at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, on 7-10 October 2010. The aim of the conference was clear from the title.

At the conference, three watchwords characterized the proposed agenda: Act, Combat, and Promote. “Act to end the stigmata attached to being nonreligious, Combat religion’s privileges and its influence on public policy, and Promote science-based skepticism and critical thinking.” Plenary sessions included the following: Continued…

Tenure, a lifetime faculty appointment at a college or university, is still a fixture of higher education, but it is increasingly coming under pressure. Many still think it’s the way to go — that it provides a just reward for exceptional scholarship, that it ensures academic freedom by preventing faculty from being fired for espousing unpopular positions, and that ensures university governance by the people who should govern the university, namely, the professors who make it great.

Others, however, think that it contradicts free market principles, it encourages slacking once tenure is achieved, and that it promotes a pernicious self-selectivity, in which faculty, to achieve tenure, must toe the line and and show themselves to be politically correct if they are to get tenure in the first place. Some go so far as to argue that tenure is a welfare program for college and university professors.

Why should someone prefer a school without tenure to one with it. Riley reports the case of

In the midst of such debate, Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering has burst on the scene. Begun just over a decade ago, it has a large endowment for its size, has quickly shot up in the national rankings of engineering schools, and has no tenure. But that hasn’t stopped prospective faculty from apply to the school — over 100 for each faculty position, as Naomi Schaefer Riley reports in an article titled “How to Succeed in Teaching Without Lifetime Tenure.”

Mark Somerville left a tenure-track position in the physics department at Vassar to teach at Olin. “It was not a hard decision to make,” he says. Mr. Somerville says he has found that the lack of tenure has changed his teaching and research interests for the better.

“When one is on the tenure track,” he says, “the clock is ticking. There is a certain day on which you will have to produce a stack of papers.” He’s no longer worried about publishing a certain amount by a particular date. Instead, he’s free to pursue research he finds interesting—something Mr. Somerville says has been “liberating.”

Is tenure going the way of the dodo? It’s too soon to tell. Institutional inertia being what it is, expect it to be here for a long time. And yet, also expect innovative institutions, like Franklin W. Olin, to come up with attractive alternatives to tenure.

A college presidency may not earn you as much as a top college football coaching career, but it’s not bad. Thirty college presidents earn $1,000,000 or more:

SOURCE

Drug usage is a big issue on many campuses. It’s also a big topic of discussion. Some favor tougher laws and enforcement. Here’s an interesting video in which Judge Jim Gray takes the other side:

In the U.S. tuitions have tended to rise 5 to 7 percent a year. There’s a big uproar in the U.K. right now over rising tuitions, which are going up by 300 percent! The present tuition cap in the U.K. is 3,000 pounds (US$4,800). It’s going up to 9,000 pounds (US$14,500). Here’s one student reaction:

“We are taking to the streets in unprecedented numbers to tell politicians that enough is enough,” National Union of Students President Aaron Porter said in a statement before the demonstration.

“We will not tolerate the previous generation passing on its debts to the next, nor will we pick up the bill to access a college and university education that was funded for them,” he said.

SOURCE

Here’s a YouTube clip from Cognitive Media, a UK-based group, that seems intent on reforming U.S. education:

Lots of accusations of what’s wrong, some gestures at needed changes, but no coherent program for actually implementing far-reaching reform. We’ll be watching to see if this goes anywhere.