Michelle Dion - Latest Comments

Re: Things I have been thinking about

Michelle Dion — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:21:50 -0000

Excuse me while I learn to use my own website.... DOH!

Re: Things I have been thinking about

Michelle Dion — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:07:22 -0000

I am intrigued by the journal model you propose. It would certainly change the work flow of journals. It reminds me, a little, of how law schools handle the academic law market....centralized bidding/distribution of candidates.

About sessional teaching in Canada.... I think another thing is that, at least in the GTA area where there are multiple universities, people tend to adjunct/session at multiple places each term to make sufficient money but then they are literally running all over SW Ontario. There are also some structural things in how MA/PhDs here are often distinct unlike in the US, and many more students do an MA one place and PhD elsewhere. That's good for building networks, and potentially for expanding your understanding of the literature, but sometimes it also just has the affect of fragmenting your graduate education and/or requiring greater study at comp time b/c students don't take enough classes at their PhD institution and/or didn't take relevant classes during their MA. That slows them down. Then, the funding dries up abruptly in year 4, and if you are behind, you b/c a sessional and then you get further behind.

My sense is that few PhD students have the types of loans that we have in the US. And, even if they did, they have to be paid back quite quickly (no re-financing over 30 years at 1.5% interest). So, I think that also means, even if a student is 6 mos. away from finishing with no funding, they might not have the option of (or willingness for) borrowing student loan money to get done, and instead adjunct and add 2-3 years on their time to degree.

Oh, and then there is also this strange phenomenon where PhD students "worry" about getting teaching experience for the job market (and mistakenly, in my opinion, seek out additional teaching opportunities at the expense of their research). Meanwhile, departments do little to actually train good teachers (that is, departments don't run teaching seminars like we had at UNC).

Re: Things I have been thinking about

Chris Lawrence — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:43:23 -0000

Interesting thoughts... I'll skip the OPOSSEM stuff, since you're probably sick of hearing me talk about OPOSSEM at this point :)

On open access/journals/whatever: the central issue I see is that most academics want external validation of their judgments (appeal to authority, of sorts), hence why we see things like external letters for promotion and tenure, as well as the obsession with the rankings of journals and other metrics like cite counts. This seems rather silly at some level, since the paper I just sent out is of constant quality, yet will largely be judged based on the ranking of the journal it lands at, no matter how it really ranks in relation to everything else that journal has ever published. On the whole journal process thing, Laura McKenna had a nice post about it at The Atlantic a week or so ago that's worth reading if you haven't seen it.

It seems to me that the way things are going, you'd need something like what SAGE Open is doing (but about 80% cheaper). Here's a model: you upload your paper to the Great Cloud in the Sky and pay a fee of $25-50 USD, you get assigned a submission editor based on the topic, they invite 3-4 reviewers to comment, and the author gets the reviews back along with 4 choices: publish as-is with the reviews attached after the article; revise and resubmit with the same reviewers; revise and resubmit with a new reviewer pool (which you pay an additional fee for); or withdraw the paper. When the author (and this is the key point, not the submissions editor) decides a paper is ready to "publish" (even if the reviewers think it stinks) then it goes up for a virtual auction among the editors of the journals that are interested in articles in that area (either "dead tree," online-only, or both; the author can exclude certain journals from contention or maybe pay a small extra fee that goes to the journal to specify that they want a certain journal to consider it); each journal editor gets the right to a finite number of articles they can "buy" a year (for example, you might get 60 articles/year if you publish quarterly, and they pay the Great Cloud a small fee for each article they buy or maybe an annual fee... the economics can be worked out later), they can read the reviews before they buy, and after they buy they can work out with the author the copyright assignment, formatting, copy editing, and other stuff. The submission fee covers the costs of the submission editing process; the journals can either fund themselves (by selling subscriptions or banner ads), be subsidized by associations or organized sections or grants or something, rely on submitter fees (for example, I'd expect that the APSR or IO or World Politics would be able to rack up some cash from folks wanting to ensure their papers get a look from a major journal), or operate completely online at minimal cost except editors' time. Anyway that's totally long-winded and it wouldn't have to work exactly that way, but I think it resolves most of the major issues.

On the Canadian protectionism(?) thing, it seems to me as an external observer (who nonetheless applied for 4 Canadian jobs this year, which is about 3 more than I've applied for in the previous 8 combined) that at least some of the issue is that Canada is, to an even greater extent than the U.S., overproducing PhDs in fields, particularly theory, that really don't have much of a market either in Canada or elsewhere; probably the same issue applies to Canadian politics to some extent, although at least Canadian politics people with the right background should be able to market themselves as comparativists outside of Canada; there also seems to be a lot of interdisciplinary stuff that doesn't tend to place well even if students think it's sexy. Plus there may be less of a market for more teched-up people (since most Canadian departments can satisfy their methods teaching needs with 1 or 2 people at most, and there's not really the regional comprehensive or LAC market that needs people who can do methods + covering a most of a substantive field), so students don't get teched up, which means they aren't competitive outside of Canada for jobs that they could get otherwise.

Then again I also think the dynamics for a non-star PhD who can't go right into an R1 TT are a little different: being a sessional in Canada is a better job than being an adjunct in the US due to health care not being an issue in Canada (and surely pays better too), and the salary floors in Canada seem to be higher for the TT (even if the ceiling is lower), so spending 4-6 years as a sessional in hopes of landing a Canadian TT making $60-75k with guaranteed raises makes more economic sense than going straight into the US market but landing at an RC/LAC or even R2 where you'll make $40-50k* and get raises at a lower rate (if at all).

Wow that really rambled. Sorry :)

* Not accounting for exchange rates or the prospect of some arbitrage issues (for example, a Canadian with student loans who moved to the US in 2000 would be hurting now paying back at parity money that was borrowed at CAD=.7USD or so), although I suspect in most areas, particularly outside of Vancouver and Greater Toronto (and BosWash, Hawaii, Seattle, and California in the US), the nominal dollar has about the same purchasing power on both sides of the border.

Re: Using Mythbusters to teach intro stats concepts

michelledion — Thu, 06 May 2010 09:07:23 -0000

You're thinking of this episode. I thought that one would be good, too, for experimental design. At least it's much better than what I currently do: remind them of elementary school experiments with plants and different types of music (the treatment). :D

Re: Using Mythbusters to teach intro stats concepts

Chris Lawrence — Thu, 06 May 2010 01:45:27 -0000

I had the same thought a while back; there was an episode where Adam, Jamie, and Kari got thoroughly plastered testing some myth about alcohol that I don't quite remember. In addition to the humor factor of all three being loaded, it was a very nice experimental design. It's sitting on my TiVo now and has been for probably a year; I just need to get around to editing down the episode to cut out the rest.

If get organized this summer (fat chance!) I plan to track some of these others down too. Thanks!