Category Archives: Blogosphere

Big Data, Blogosphere, Internet

Retour sur 20 ans de numérique et d’Internet

1 Comment

Ce mois-ci, je vais être éditeur d’une série d’articles sur le thème des données, qui seront publiés sur variances.eu, le blog d’ENSAE Alumni. Pour le premier article, Philippe Tassi propose un retour sur 20 ans de numérique et d’Internet.

Depuis le bouleversement apporté, à la fin du XIXème siècle et varile début du XXème, par l’accès du grand public à l’électricité, aucune autre révolution de même nature n’a eu lieu jusqu’à la mise à disposition commerciale d’Internet, au milieu des années 90, et donc l’entrée de nos civilisations dans le monde numérique.

D’abord, des faits : même si certaines données chiffrées actuelles seront rapidement caduques, elles décrivent aisément la vitesse de diffusion d’internet à la fois en termes d’accession et d’usage. A l’automne 1997, moins de 1 % des foyers vivant sur le territoire français sont connectés à Internet. Cette proportion passe à 4,7 % en 1999, 27,4 % en 2003, 35,5 % en 2005. Dix ans plus tard, en septembre-octobre 2015, 85 % des ménages y ont accès. Et au-delà de l’accès au réseau, sa pratique est devenue massive : 45 millions de français se connectent à Internet au moins une fois par mois, tout écran.

Internet ne s’est pas construit en un jour

La conception d’Internet n’est pas récente. Il a fallu du temps entre l’apparition du socle technologique – Ray Tomlinson, décédé en mars 2016, a inventé l’e-mail en 1971 – et la mise en œuvre de services adaptés au public. Par comparaison, on a su transporter du son via les ondes hertziennes dès les années 1890, alors que la radio, en tant que média, n’existera qu’à partir de 1922-1923. Le transfert d’une image mobile par ces mêmes ondes date des années 30, le média télévision étant officiellement créé en France en 1949.

Internet n’échappe pas à cette règle. Son point de départ est la crise des missiles de Cuba, en octobre 1962, en pleine guerre froide entre Etats-Unis et URSS. Elle révèle au président Kennedy la faiblesse d’un système centralisé. En 1964 apparaît l’idée de réseau décentralisé, moins vulnérable. Une première ébauche est conçue en 1969, dénommé Arpanet (Advanced Research Projects Agency) ; elle relie les universités de Stanford, UCLA, Santa Barbara et Utah. Le courrier électronique existe dès 1971. Les bases techniques des protocoles TCP et TCP/IP datent des années 70. Dans cette même décennie naissent Microsoft (1975) et Apple (1976). En 1983, Arpanet est scindé en Milnet, intégré au réseau militaire américain, et un nouvel Arpanet universitaire, renommé Internet en 1986. 1990 voit l’émergence du protocole http et du langage html, du concept de www. Les créations des futurs acteurs majeurs se multiplient : Yahoo! et Amazon en 1994, Google en 1998, FaceBook en 2004, Twitter en 2006. Fin des années 2000, les voies menant au monde digital se sont diversifiées : à l’historique micro-ordinateur se sont ajoutés les nouveaux écrans : smartphone depuis 2007, tablette depuis 2010, favorisant la mobilité. L’individu devient ATAWAD : Any Time, Any Where, Any Device. En 2015, le ménage français moyen dispose de 6,4 écrans.

[à suivre..]

Blogosphere, Economics, Internet

Histoire et analyse de la blogosphère économique francophone

4 Comments

Ce billet est cosigné avec Thomas Renault, aka @captaineco_fr

Les blogs économiques prennent aujourd’hui une place centrale dans le débat et l’analyse économique, comme le notait Alex Tabarrok. Mais si la blogosphère économique francophone est encore relativement modeste, elle n’en est pas moins active, et pourrait connaître le même succès que les blogs anglophones dans les années à venir.

La genèse de la blogosphère économie

Au début de l’année 2005, Bernard Salanié – alors professeur à l’Université de Columbia (New York) – publiait le premier billet de son blog « L’économie sans tabou », dans la continuité d’un ouvrage éponyme publié l’année précédente. A la même époque, Alexandre Delaigue et Stéphane Ménia – tous deux anciens étudiants de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan et respectivement enseignants en école militaire et au secondaire – lançaient un blog “éconoclaste“, avec une vocation de vulgarisation assez proche de celle de Stephen Dubner et Steven Levitt, les auteurs du best-seller Freakonomics.

Ce mouvement en France faisait écho à celui qui se développait aux Etats-Unis, où des économistes de renom comme Bradford DeLong, (« Grasping Reality »), Tyler Cowen (« Marginal Revolution ») ou encore Gary Becker et Richard Posner (« The Becker-Posner blog ») commençaient à bloguer. Pour reprendre les propos de Gary Becker, prix Nobel d’économie, la blogosphère avait alors le pouvoir de remplacer le marché dans l’optimisation du processus de partage de connaissance entre les individus.

Blogging is a major new social, political, and economic phenomenon. It is a fresh and striking exemplification of Friedrich Hayek’s thesis that knowledge is widely distributed among people and that the challenge to society is to create mechanisms for pooling that knowledge. The powerful mechanism that was the focus of Hayek’s work, as as of economists generally, is the price system (the market). The newest mechanism is the « blogosphere »

Continue reading Histoire et analyse de la blogosphère économique francophone →

Blogosphere, Twitter

Et si je tweetais en anglais pour une mauvaise raison

9 Comments

Sur Twitter, assez naturellement, j’ai tendance à tweeter en anglais. J’ai toujours eu l’impression qu’en anglais, la limite des 140 caractères était moins contraignante. Qu’en anglais, la même chose pouvait être dite de manière plus concise.

Histoire de vérifier cette vague intuition, je suis allé chercher des livres sur Gutenberg. Le plus simple est de récupérer un livre en français, au format texte (txt), de compter le nombre de symboles, et de trouver le même livre en anglais. La fonction, à partir d’un code de livre, ressemble à ça

> cpte=function(no){
+     url0=paste(
+         "http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/",
+         no,"/pg",no,".txt",sep="")
+     download.file(url0,destfile="u.txt")
+     s=scan("u.txt",what="character")
+     sum(nchar(s))
+ }

Par exemple, pour David Copperfield, de Dickens, le  code pour la version originale, en anglais, est

> gb=766

et en français, il faut récupérer 2 fichiers

> fr_a=17868
> fr_b=17869

Aussi,

> g=cpte(gb)
essai de l'URL 'http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/766/pg766.txt'
Content type 'text/plain; charset=utf-8' length 1992535 bytes (1.9 MB)
=================================================
downloaded 1.9 MB

Read 288181 items
> f=cpte(fr_a)+cpte(fr_b)
essai de l'URL 'http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/17868/pg17868.txt'
Content type 'text/plain; charset=utf-8' length 1161492 bytes (1.1 MB)
=================================================
downloaded 1.1 MB

Read 191311 items
essai de l'URL 'http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/17869/pg17869.txt'
Content type 'text/plain; charset=utf-8' length 1135661 bytes (1.1 MB)
=================================================
downloaded 1.1 MB

Read 186515 items

le ratio du nombre de caractère en anglais, et en français, est de l’ordre de 90%. Autrement dit, la version anglaise contient 10% de caractères en moins que la version française,

> g/f
[1] 0.9090498

Si on regarde une pièce de théâtre, comme Othello, la version anglaise est 25% plus courte que la version française.

> fr=18179
> gb=1793
> g=cpte(gb)
essai de l'URL 'http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1793/pg1793.txt'
Content type 'text/plain; charset=utf-8' length 188634 bytes (184 KB)
=================================================
downloaded 184 KB

Read 24951 items
> f=cpte(fr)
essai de l'URL 'http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/18179/pg18179.txt'
Content type 'text/plain; charset=utf-8' length 239158 bytes (233 KB)
=================================================
downloaded 233 KB

Read 36157 items
> g/f
[1] 0.746805

Plus généralement pour les pièces de théâtre de Shakespeare, on valide mon intuition : les versions en anglais sont toujours plus courtes que les versions en français,

Pour faire ce graphique, on peut utiliser la trentaine de livres que j’ai regardé, à l’aide du fichier

> download.file(
+ "http://freakonometrics.free.fr/livre.RData",
+ "livre.RData")
essai de l'URL 'http://freakonometrics.free.fr/livre.RData'
Content type 'text/plain' length 1095 bytes
=================================================
downloaded 1095 bytes

> load("livre.RData")

La base ressemble à ça

> base
           nom        FR      UK language   ratio
1  3 Mousquet.    1110255 1156011       FR 104.12
2  Dorian Grey     398653  404799       UK 101.54
3  Pierre-Jean     248299  228838       FR  92.16
4      Odyssée     691648  651044       GR 118.17
5       Iliade     550924  514953       GR  74.45
6  Jules César     157726  105685       UK  67.00
7      Macbeth     160571   96276       UK  59.95
8      Othello     189984  141881       UK  74.68
9       Hamlet     275629  145380       UK  52.74
10   Com. Mép.     115583   97704       UK  84.53
11  Ant.-Cléo.     185806  130857       UK  70.42
12   Rom.-Jul.     195273  126323       UK  64.69
13    Roi Lear     196185  124483       UK  63.45
14  Sganarelle      50408   63387       FR 125.74
15 OliverTwist     778914  770784       UK  98.95
16  D.Copperf.    1808770 1644262       UK  90.90
17    Assomoir     585237  565444       FR  96.61
18   T. Raquin     351525  353837       FR 100.65
19    20000 L.     745559  518932       FR  69.60
20    80 Jours     367388  329073       FR  89.57
21  5 Semaines     491510  483289       FR  98.32
22 CentreTerre     362617  370584       FR 102.19
23          93     585073  637499       FR 108.96
24  Notre Dame     885048  928256       FR 104.88
25   Jane Eyre     922233  919521       UK  99.70
26    Possédés    1241293 1293319       RU 104.19
27 Guerre-Paix    2409360 2739725       RU 113.71
28     Corbeau      27884   21886       UK  78.48
29  Mme Bovary     585237  565444       FR  96.61

Si on visualise tous les titres, et pas seulement les pièces de Shakespeare, on obtient

Autrement dit, la différence n’est pas aussi significative qu’elle y paraissait. Plus troublant, si on regarde les livres écrit en anglais (en rouge ci-dessous) on observe effectivement que la version française est plus longue. Par contre, pour les livres écrits en français (en bleu), la version anglaise est sensiblement de la même taille…

A suivre donc…

Academe, Blogosphere, Internet, Twitter

Quand les chercheurs cherchent leur voie (voix) sur Twitter

10 Comments

Il y a plusieurs semaines (mois?), avec @3wen et @pareto35, on nous avait demandé d’écrire un petit article sur Twitter, et sur l’usage de Twitter dans le monde de la recherche, pour la Newsletter du CREM (Centre de Recherche en Économie et Management, de l’Université de Rennes 1, et de l’Université de Caen). On avait envoyé l’article, et je n’y avais plus pensé. Or cet après-midi, @alisag1728 publiait “25 Interesting Observations About How Academics Use Twitter” qui éclairait le débat, et qui m’a refait pensé à cet article. Comme les discussions semblent à nouveau d’actualité, j’en profite donc pour mettre en ligne la note qu’on avait écrite… Tous les commentaires sont les bienvenus (en gardant en mémoire que l’article était écrit à destination de chercheurs qui entendent peut être parler de Twitter, à l’occasion, mais qui ne voient pas – a priori – pourquoi y être présent).
Continue reading Quand les chercheurs cherchent leur voie (voix) sur Twitter →

Academe, Blogosphere

Dear reader, who are you?

131 Comments

While working on an updated (not to say revised) version of Blogging in Academia, a Personal Experience, I noticed that I now have a better understanding of me as a blogger (this academic alter-ego, to use Vanessa Paz Dennen’s words), the role of blogs within academia, and the community of academic-bloggers. But tonight, in the train, I was asking myself about the readers. I mean You. I know from the stats of my blog that a few thousand people will read this post, that you are 32% American, 21% French, 6% Brazilian and 3% Swedish. That it is quite unlikely that you use a Linux computer. But I don’t know much more…

Since I have always claimed that my blog was a place to experiment, I wanted to try one! Dear reader, if you have 10 seconds, can you please post a comment, with your age, your gender, and your background (I’d like to know if you’re a student, a colleague, an economist, a mathematician, a biologist, a journalist, an astronaut, a lion tamer, an actuary, a modeler, a model, a robot… ). If you want to spend more time explaining how you ended up on my blog, I’d be glad to know… But at least, your age, your gender, and your ‘academic background’ (since I have some sort of academic blog), that would be great! If you come frequently on my blog, you should start to know me, and I thought it would be great if I could know more about you…

Blogosphere

Πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει

10 Comments

J’essaye continuellement de me convaincre qu’Aristote avait raison lorsqu’il affirmait que tous les hommes désiraient naturellement savoir. C’est cette motivation qui fait que j’aime toujours enseigner, et partager des choses que j’ai pu apprendre, sur mon blog. Ces dernières semaines, j’ai été amené à plusieurs reprises à repenser mon activité de blogger, après qu’un ami qui suivait la blogosphère depuis plusieurs années me disait qu’il allait se lancer (sur son propre blog) et m’interrogeait sur ma pratique, qu’un autre qui bloguait sous un pseudo allait tenter de bloguer aussi sous son vrai nom, ou après quelques discussions sur Twitter sur une tentative de définition du terme “blogs scientifiques“. Ayant promis de revenir un peu sur ma conception des blogs académiques et scientifiques, j’ai lu tout ce qui me passait sous la main, afin de réfléchir encore un peu sur ma pratique, et sur ma position vis à vis de la vulgarisation. Comme toujours, c’est un peu brouillon, mais c’est le principe de mon blog.

Lorsque j’ai migré mon blog sur la plateforme d’hypotheses.org, j’aimais l’idée d’avoir un carnet de recherche ouvert. Car mon blog n’est rien d’autre que cela. Et mon blog est à l’image de mes cahiers, dans lequel je note des idées que je peux avoir dans le métro en allant chercher ma fille chez sa gardienne, des preuves que je dois faire en cours, des idées de visualisation glanées dans des exposés, ou dans des articles, etc. Il n’a aucune autre prétention. Ou au contraire, ce blog a une prétention incroyable: celui de redonner la possibilité, à tous ceux qui le souhaitent, de s’approprier des outils et des techniques d’ordinaire laissés aux mains des “experts”. Comme disait Gustave Flaubert, dans Bouvard et Pécuchet, “la science est un monopole aux mains des riches. Elle exclut le peuple…“. J’espère que ce blog aidera a réparer cela.

  • Définir le terme “vulgarisation“

Comme le notait Marcel Thouin, “selon la définition usuelle, qui est peut-être illusoire, la vulgarisation scientifique consiste à rendre la connaissance scientifique accessible“. Il ne s’agit pourtant pas d’open-access, mais plus précisément, selon  Marcel Thouin (rappelant la définition du dictionnaire) la vulgarisation consiste à “adapter un ensemble de connaissances scientifiques et techniques de manière à les rendre accessibles à un lecteur non spécialiste” (on retrouvera des propos similaire chez Henri Canonge). Mais le terme “lecteur non spécialiste” est vague. Pablo Jensen parle lui du “citoyen” mais sans forcément poser de définition claire des termes (pour sa défense, l’article mentionné est un article de vulgarisation). Patrice Cohen-Seat (cité par Roger Clausse et repris dans la thèse de Baudouin Jurdant) disait que vulgariser, c’est “transposer à l’usage de tous ce qui a été conçu et élaboré dans le langage de quelques uns“. Cela dit, Maurice Mashaal par exemple donne un sens plus large au terme “vulgariser“, en autorisant “tous” à être assez restreint. Selon lui, “les chercheurs ne vulgarisent pas uniquement en direction du grand public. Tout d’abord, ils sont généralement curieux et aiment savoir ce qui se passe dans d’autres spécialités que la leur“. On voit alors une catégorie un peu distincte, entre le “grand public” et les lecteurs spécialistes, éventuellement dans d’autres spécialités que la personne qui transmet le message. Cette classification est retenue très clairement dans le rapport Kunth, qui retient trois formes de communication scientifique:

  • la diffusion de l’information scientifique spécialisée (qui se fait dans les conférences spécialisées, les séminaires, et le publication académique pointues, traditionnelle)
  • la diffusion scientifique interdisciplinaire
  • la vulgarisation scientifique (diffusion de la culture scientifique et technique, s’adressant au grand public ou aux jeunes).

Avec cette classification, je ne classerais pas mon blog dans la catégorie des blogs de vulgarisation. J’aime l’idée de cette catégorie un peu intermédiaire. Cela dit, dans Communicating Science, Professional, Popular, Literary, Nicholas Russell rappelle que Nature et Science sont depuis toujours des revues de vulgarisation. On peut donc vulgariser tout en visant un public qui n’est pas forcément “tout le monde“, et qui autorise l’utilisation d’un jargon technique. Autrement dit, la seconde catégorie serait de la vulgarisation. Il va donc falloir creuser un peu plus pour comprendre si j’ai un blog de vulgarisation, ou pas.

  • Un espace entre la recherche et l’enseignement

J’ai toujours revendiqué le fait d’être à la fois un chercheur et un enseignant, un “savant” et un “pédagogue” pour reprendre les termes de Dider Moreau (justement pour caractériser la vulgarisation). Et mon blog est précisément un espace entre la recherche et l’enseignement. Mais ce n’est ni l’un, ni l’autre. Et quelque part, l’activité de vulgarisation se situe aussi dans cet espace. Pour reprendre un point noté par Baudouin Jurdant, “la relation pédagogique instaurée par la vulgarisation se distingue en outre de celle en jeu dans l’enseignement par le fait qu’elle se développe dans un espace social ouvert, non marqué, abstrait. En bénéficiant de lieux institutionnellement marqués, clos par rapport à l’espace de la chose publique, et concrets, l’enseignement assure une certaine signifiance à l’économie de sa relation pédagogique. La vulgarisation au contraire, est un propos public. Son espace est celui de la société toute entière, abstrait puisqu’il est ouvert à tous et par là, impénétrable“. Daniel Jacobi, Bernard Schiele et Marie-France Cyr parlent d’ailleurs d'”éducation non-formelle” pour définir l’activité de vulgarisation. Mais le blog s’inscrit aussi dans cet dimension, avec un espace ouvert, et un discours plus informel.

Mais il ne s’agit pas non plus de recherche. Comme l’écrivaient Renaud Dulong et Werner Ackermann, “le scientifique et le vulgarisateur ne répondent pas en fait aux mêmes interrogations et le discours de vulgarisation ne peut donc être uniquement (que) le reflet appauvri des concepts élaborés par le scientifique.” Mais mon blog ne cherche pas à simplifier. Il n’y a aucun enrobage, au contraire. Il s’agit d’enlever l’enrobage des articles académiques, en expliquant peut être davantage des pistes qui n’aboutissent pas, des conjectures, en n’essayant pas d’impressionner la galerie. Une autre différence est que le langage utilisé dans un blog est beaucoup plus vulgaire que celui utilisé dans un article scientifique. Cela dit, comme le rappelle Florine Vital-Durant, en 1632, lorsque Galilée publie ses dialogues (dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo), il les publie en italien, et pas en latin. L’idée d’écrire de la science dans un langage plus ordinaire, plus quotidien, sans pour autant faire de la vulgarisation ne date pas d’hier !

  • Quelle différence entre un blog académique et la vulgarisation ?

Même si certains me reprochent l’utilisation du terme blog académique, je continue à revendiquer ce terme. Car mon statut d’académique, ou d’enseignant et de chercheur me donne une légitimité que n’a pas un vulgarisateur. D’ailleurs, dans carrière scientifique, morale scientifique et vulgarisation, Luc Boltanski et Pascale Maldidier remettraient presque en cause l’idée de journalistes faisant de la vulgarisation, lorsqu’ils notent que “la vulgarisation, devrait perdre toute légitimité lorsqu’elle est l’activité spécifique d’un groupe totalement extérieur à la cité savante“. Et on retrouve cette idée chez Daniel Jacobi, Bernard Schiele et Marie-France Cyr lorsqu’ils parlent des “usurpateurs“. En fait, Luc Boltanski et Pascale Maldidier vont même plus loin, lorsqu’ils affirment que “le monde des vulgarisateurs ne peut pas être considéré comme un univers autonome possédant un principe de légitimité propre et qu’il ne peut être saisi indépendamment du monde savant défini et dominé par l’institution universitaire. Il s’ensuit que les attitudes des vulgarisateurs et que les représentations qu’ils ont de leur propre pratique sont déterminées par la position marginale qu’ils occupent dans ce champ hiérarchisé et qu’elles se définissent essentiellement par rapport à la définition sociale de la vulgarisation comme activité illégitime qu’engendré, selon les mécanismes précédemment décrits, la communauté scientifique“. Mon blog est un blog de science tenu par un scientifique reconnu par ses pairs, et on retrouve ici la distinction que faisait Tom Roud sur son blog, commentant l’annonce de l’arrivée de blogs scientifiques hébergés par Le Monde.

Bref, je continue de croire que mon blog n’est pas un blog de vulgarisation, et que les blogs académiques, n’en déplaisent à certains, ont une réelle légitimité. Je revendique l’idée d’avoir un carnet de recherche ouvert à tous, comme le souhaitait hypotheses.org. Si un jour je fais un billet sur les modèles causaux, ce ne sera  pas par soucis de vulgariser un sujet pour un lectorat (qui me semble infiniment lointain), mais juste pour moi. Au lieu de noter dans un cahier, je posterais sur mon blog. Avec des illustrations, des codes, des données (bref, des choses qui tiennent mal dans un cahier peut être).

  • Rendre public, ou viser un public ?

Bloguer permet d’être public (et éventuellement, d’avoir un lectorat régulier, ou pas) sans jamais rencontrer son public. Et pour moi qui suis un vieil ours, c’est idéal. Contrairement aux vulgarisateurs qui ont besoin d’un public, mon blog n’en a pas besoin. Lorsque je l’ai lancé, il existait avec 4 lecteurs, et il continuera d’exister même si la moitié ne me lit plus ! Peu importe, ce n’est pas sa finalité. Cela dit, la semaine passée, j’étais en Europe, j’ai fait plusieurs exposés, et plusieurs fois, j’ai entendu le “je suis un fidèle lecteur de votre blog”. Et c’est toujours une réflexion qui me surprend. J’ai toujours l’impression d’être un obscur professeur de statistique, ou d’économétrie, qui emploie tellement de jargon que personne ne devrait suivre (c’est en tous cas assez contradictoire avec certains propos tenus par des journalistes scientifiques, sur la vulgarisation). D’ailleurs, mardi dernier, j’ai vécu une aventure amusante. J’ai été contacté par un étudiant qui cherchait des données pour construire un modèle (en l’occurrence des informations climatiques, par département – en France – et sur plusieurs années). J’ai posé la question sur Twitter. En quelques secondes, le message a été relayé intensivement, et au bout de quelques minutes, j’avais des suggestions de trois sites. Comme me le disait ma femme, ce n’est pas la magie de Twitter, c’est que j’ai un réseau incroyable de followers actifs. Au delà des discours nauséabonds des CM qui expliquent que 6000 followers c’est fabuleux pour se faire connaître et assurer une notoriété en ligne, avoir 6000 followers, c’est surtout génial pour trouver de l’aide sur à peu près n’importe quel sujet. Au risque de paraître schizophrène, ami lecteur, je dois confesser que je ne blogue pas pour toi. Mais je te suis reconnaissant d’avoir accepté de m’intégrer dans une communauté aussi active, disponible et curieuse. Merci.

Blogosphere

Somewehere else, part 124

1 Comment

Some writings worth reading,

“Many of the new jobs today are in health care and education, where specialized training and study are required. Across the economy, a college degree is often demanded where a high school degree used to suffice. It’s now common for a fire chief to be expected to have a master’s degree, and to perform a broader variety of business-related tasks that were virtually unheard-of in earlier generations. All of these developments mean a disadvantage for people who don’t like formal education, even if they are otherwise very talented. It’s no surprise that current unemployment has been concentrated among those with lower education levels. There is also a special problem for some young men, namely those with especially restless temperaments. They aren’t always well-suited to the new class of service jobs, like greeting customers or taking care of the aged, which require much discipline or sometimes even a subordination of will.“

see also “Clear Off the Table” http://darkhorseanalytics.com/blog/clear-off-the-table/ …

  • nice dataviz on the front page of the NYT via @junkcharts … in January 1854

  • “There’s no way you’re going to get a quote from us…” (on Banksy’s book)

et un peu de lecture en français,

Did I miss something interesting?

Academe, Blogosphere

Journalisme Scientifique

15 Comments

Il y a quelques jours, Passeur de Sciences a annoncé que le site du Monde.fr allait abriter plusieurs nouveaux blogs de science. Mon voisin @tomroud a parfaitement résumé la situation en 140 caractères, “plus de blogs sur les sciences sur le monde.fr http://passeurdesciences.blog.lemonde.fr/…. Mais toujours pas (vraiment) de blogs de scientifiques” (il ajoutait quelques minutes plus tard “il semble donc que l’avenir du blog sur les sciences soit le journalisme scientifique. Pas sûr que ce soit un progrès…“), et @marc_rr a poursuivi la discussion sur son blog – tout se passe comme si – avec un long débat passionnant. N’ayant pas l’habitude de poster des commentaires, je vais plutôt mettre un billet sur mon blog, car je plussoie à la vision de @tomroud !

Je suis en train de finaliser depuis quelques jours un article sur les blogs académiques, et à plusieurs reprises, je me suis interrogé sur la distinction entre l’activité de bloggeur académique, et l’activité de journaliste scientifique. Et le débat des derniers jours (je devrais dire des derniers heures) m’a beaucoup éclairé. Je pourrais faire beaucoup de reproches à @passeursciences (et je l’avais déjà fait une fois, dans Martingale et Journalisme Scientifique, suite à la publication d’un article qui, en quelques lignes, avait balayé le travail de centaines de scientifiques, dont deux chercheurs qui auraient un prix Nobel quelques mois plus tard pour ces travaux, justement). Et beaucoup de compliments (j’adore la chronique “Improbablologie“, même si j’ai pris l’habitude de la lire en la version originale sur http://www.improbable.com/, car j’adore l’humour de @marcabrahams). Et dans un commentaire sur le blog de @marc_rr, j’ai eu l’impression que le débat se simplifiait, et que la distinction entre scientifiques et journaliste devenait plus claire,

“Les chercheurs-blogueurs : vous allez sans doute me trouver sévère mais si je dis que j’ai du mal à trouver des chercheurs qui bloguent a/ très régulièrement (au moins une ou deux fois par semaine) b/ en français et sans fautes c/ avec un excellent niveau de vulgarisation (donc sans s’adresser en jargon aux happy few) et d/ sur l’actualité, c’est parce que cela correspond à la réalité. Mais c’est aussi sans doute parce que mes critères sont trop élevés ou trop journalistiques” (a continuer…)

Le problème du jargon scientifique est un vieux problème, qui semble atrocement gêner les journalistes, car ils semblent ne pas le maîtriser. Mais je me suis toujours énervé contre cette tentative de nivellement par le bas (ce qui fait que je prend le clavier aujourd’hui). Cette distanciation forcée enlève beaucoup, et fait rapidement perdre toute crédibilité. Dans son Histoire de la Lecture, Alberto Manguel citait un poète gaulois, Ausone, qui écrivait

Tu as acheté des livres et rempli des rayons, ô amoureux des Muses.
Cela signifie-t-il que tu es désormais savant ?
Si tu achètes aujourd’hui des instruments à cordes, plectre et lyre :
Crois-tu que demain le royaume de la musique t’appartiendra ?

Effectivement, je pense qu’un passionné d’astronomie ne se contente pas de lire Ciel et Espace, il va s’acheter un télescope, et essayer de voir les étoiles par lui même. Et celui qui s’intéresse aux mathématiques ira lire Choux Romanesco etc, avec tout le jargon qui va avec, et voudra aller plus loin. Lorsqu’on a vu les figures d’Esscher, avec les enfants, on a essayé de comprendre pourquoi ça marche ! Alors on a pris nos crayons, nos compas, et on s’est lancé. La science, ça se vit. Je pense que c’est la grande distinction entre les journalistes scientifiques et les bloggers académiques. Dans un vieux billet, sur l’importance du do-it-yourself, j’avais justement expliqué qu’il était important que les gens mettent les mains à la pâte. Je peux citer, par exemple, un autre billet (né d’une discussion avec @imparibus) à l’époque des élections présidentielles. J’avais mis en ligne des graphiques et des codes informatiques pour faire un peu de prévision. Au lieu d’attendre que quelqu’un d’autre le fasse. Dans quelques jours, je dois participer a une discussion (dite grand public) sur le big data. Et un de mes points est qu’il est important de comprendre ce qui se passe, comment fonctionnent les algorithmes qui, soit disant, nous gouvernent. L’affiche de la conférence (j’en reparlerais bientôt sur le blog) associe big data et big brother, et je pense que cette association est (partiellement) fausse : on pense à Big Brother si on se sent dépossédé, et je ne pense pas que ce soit le cas. A condition de comprendre ce qui peut se faire avec du big data, et ce qui reste de l’utopie… Il faut se lancer, et s’approprier le jargon, au contraire ! Je trouve cette démission face à la difficulté incroyable !

Quant à parler de happy-few, c’est tellement méprisant ! Au risque de choquer, il y a du monde qui veut des choses techniques, avec du jargon dedans ! Dans l’article mentionné au début, @passeursciences se félicitait d’avoir 20 millions de pages vues en un peu plus de décembre 2011 (et pas lues comme le dit l’article, malheureusement, on ne saura jamais trop ce que les gens font quand ils arrivent sur nos pages). Je l’en félicite. Personnellement, je suis loin derrière, car depuis décembre 2012 (j’ai fait ma migration assez tardivement) j’en totalise à peine 2 millions. Étant statisticien, je serais le premier à éviter de donner trop de poids à ces chiffres (surtout que je publie, à l’occasion, en anglais, ce qui peut faire augmenter le nombre de lecteurs, et beaucoup de mes articles sont resyndiqués sur des blogs comme , r-bloggers, architects.dzone ou statsblogs – parmi ceux que je connais – ce qui fait baisser le nombre de lecteurs), mais quand on regarde rapidement, ça veut dire que j’ai juste 5 fois moins de pages vues qu’un blog hébergé par le plus grand quotidien français !? En mettant des maths et des formules de codes dans presque tous mes billets ?! J’ai du mal a comprendre l’idée de happy-few, je suis désolé… Cela dit, j’espère que ceux qui viennent sont effectivement happy…

PS: sur le français sans faute, je suis malheureusement tout seul sur mon blog, et j’ai beaucoup de mal à me relire moi-même. Mais promis, un jour je me payerais le luxe d’avoir quelqu’un pour relire mes articles avant que je ne les mette en ligne ! Ah ah ah, on peut toujours rêver…

Blogosphere, Twitter

Academic Tweets

4 Comments

Almost four years ago, I did tweet, for the very first time of my life:

The goal was to mention a post on my blog (on optimal control). 15,000 tweets later, I wanted to get back on my experience on Twitter, trying to explain why I tweet, and why academics have some kind of legitimacy to be on Twitter (from my understanding of the goal of such a platform) and they should use it by having a Twitter account.

  • How Twitter works?

I guess I should explain what Twitter is, in case some readers do not know it. “Trying to explain Twitter to the non-user has become something like the tech world’s Arthurian challenge, a seemingly impossible task that no-one is able to fully complete” as explained in Theorizing Twitter: Narratives and Identity. But let me try. Rules on Twitter are simple,

  1. you need to create an account, on http://twitter.com/. You have 160 characters for a short bio, and you can use an avatar
  2. then you can starting tweeting, i.e. posting online messages with 140 characters
  3. you can also be passive, and simply follow some discussions… you can type something in the search window, and then you will see all the tweets containing that word (or that sentence), like why do people tweet. It is also possible to follow some hastags (following the symbol) such as , or some people (following the @ symbol) such as @freakonometrics (that’s me).
  4. if you like my tweets (posted under the name @freakonometrics), you can follow me, and I will appear in your so-called TL (or timeline). You will become my follower (of course, if I find your tweets interesting, I might follow you back).
  5. you can also include a picture (one, only). Since a link will be mentioned in your tweet (automatically generated by Twitter), you will have less than 140 characters to tweet.
  6. you can add html links, that will be shortern by Twitter.
  7. if you include a link on a video (say on http://vimeo.com/) or a song (say on https://soundcloud.com/), then, the object will appear directly in the tweet: followers will see the movie, not only the tweet with a link, see e.g.

Then, there are (almost official) codes

  1. you can retweet a tweet, which means forwarding another user’s tweet to all of your followers. RTs are not endorsement (neither are tweets actually)… You can use the retweet button, or use the old fashion RT (for re-tweet) or MT (for modified tweet) if you had to shorten a tweet. This is important to mention how you get some information in case you want to share it with you followers (it is called a mention, and it is like using a reference in a research paper). Another way of acknowledging the account who originally shared the content being tweeted is to HT the account (hat tip)
  2. you can reply to a tweet using the reply button. If you reply to one of my tweets, your tweet will start with @freakonometrics and only your followers also following me will see it in their tweet list. If you want to share the answer with everyone, the tweet should start with a dot, .@freakonometrics. It is also possible to send direct (private) messages… It is also possible to poke another account if you want to make sure that someone reads your tweet.
  3. it is possible to favorite a tweet, by clicking the yellow star next to the message. If a lot of the people I follow favorite a tweet, it will be more likely to appear in the discover window, even if I do not follow that account. It might also be interesting to favorite tweets since they can appear in some widgets you have on your blog. Keep in mind that some tweets are promoted, meaning that some company pay to have more exposure… promote and favorite are quite different…
  4. there are some strange customs, such as the #FF for follow Friday. On Friday, you can share usernames of your favorite twitterers, the accounts you find interesting. I am not a social person, so I do not use that, and I do not know how to react when someone #FF me (usually I simply favorite, which is a simple way to say thank you without tweeting a stupid “thanks“)
  5. because of the 140 character constraint, a lot of strange words can be used on Twitter, such as “OH” which most often means “overheard“… just go on google to find more…

and there are more unofficial codes (here, it will be rather subjective, so comments are opened if you want to criticize)

  1. when someone RT, MT or HT one of your tweets, it is common to favorite the tweet. Maybe common is not appropriate here : it is something people with a lot of followers did to me a few years ago, which helped me, somehow, to get more popular, and I also try to do it.
  2. do not steal tweets: you should always mention the account that originally shared the content. From an ethical point of view, that’s an obvious statement. But from a technical point of view, with the 140 character rule, it can be complex. I mean, if you want to add “HT @freakonometrics” you have only 120 characters left, so either you shorten the tweet, or you keep the tweet as it was and you tweet right after something like “previous tweet, HT @freakonometrics“
  3. it is possible to delete a Tweet. I do not know if there are rules here, because I’ve seen a lot of tweets with invalid urls, or big typos… I do delete some tweets. My rules are : (1) if I see a typo (or a problem with the url), I have the right to correct it, so I can write a new tweet, an delete the previous one; (2) if  a tweet arouses controversy (and if it was not the goal, say that with 140 characters, I got misunderstood), then I delete the tweet: I am not on Twitter to argue, only to share some contents (we’ll get back on that point later on).

See http://ryan.cordells.us/s13dh/, or An Introduction to Social Media for Scientists, for some advice on how to start  tweeting. So now that we’ve seen how Twitter works, how can we use it? As academics.

  • Are Academics on Twitter ?

Only « one in forty scholars are active on Twitter » as estimated in Priem et al. in 2011. And let’s face it honestly : academics are mainly skeptical about Twitter. For most of them, it’s for their kids, or perhaps for graduate students (if they have some ideas about what Twitter is). But not researchers. I follow (and am followed) by a lot of graduate students, PhD’s or postdocs, and a few more senior researchers. Most of those senior, prominent scientists, share extremely interesting information! I do not discuss the quality here, simply the fact that, indeed, not everyone is willing to go on Twitter. And be active.

But if not everyone is on Twitter, important people are. At least, in Economics. In January, I wanted to go to the conference of the American Economic Association, in Philadelphia, but I could not do it. That’s where the job market for PhD students in Economics took place. But it was extremely active on Twitter (you got updates following frequently the #ASSA2014 hashtag). From my perspective (maybe also the people I follow), it looked like everyone there was on Twitter during that (major) event.

  • Twitter as a Bookmark

I do spend a lot of time online, reading articles, for work, for fun, and sometimes, I’d like to keep tracks of those articles, or posts on blogs, or articles on http://arxiv.org/, etc. The first motivation to use Twitter is because I need bookmarks. With Twitter, those bookmarks are public. It does not mean that I endorse what I read, it should be understood as « I found that interesting, and I want to bookmark it, to find it, someday ». A few years ago, it was difficult to get back old tweets, like those I posted in 2010 or 2011, so I decided to start my Somewhere Else chronicle on this blog: I simply post all the tweets I wrote, to mention readings worth reading, outside my blog, somewhere else. Like that one:

It is clearly not perfect. I got a lot of tweets with questions following that tweet (but I did not answer them, I shared the graph, I did not create it). The point was « that seems to be interesting, and I’d be glad to find it if someday I want to spend more time on linguistic issues ».

As most academics, I do read a lot. And one of our duties is to share information… This was mentioned in Priem and Costello (2010), « the professional impact of Twitter may be particularly pronounced for scholars given that sharing information is a central component of their work » (see also Letierce et al (2010)). They estimated that 30% tweets sent by academics contains a hyperlink to a peer-reviewed resource (usually a pdf file of a research paper). And it is not necessarily a paper published online 24 hours ago : it can also be a paper rediscovered accidentally, or a technical report written a few decades ago that has just been scanned. @coulmont went back on a « strange experience » (as he defined it) a few months ago, when I (re)discovered a post published on his blog almost one year before, tweeted it, and then a buzz started on that old post. At least, that’s what he told me, we’ll never know for sure if this was because of me, or not (I doubt it actually, there were a lot of good reasons to rediscover that post).

Traditionally, academic visibility is measured using citations, meaning that some work has been accepted by (so called) peers, in the scientific community. Academics need to write to have an impact. But a lot of time is spent on reading. This reading activity is missed by standard citation counts (unless you publish a review, for instance).  On Twitter, you can comment, even (briefly) discuss a publication, some tricks on computer codes, share graphical visualization, etc. It is not like posting an anonymous comment on some scientific blog (actually, several blogs do not have open comments any more). On Twitter, there is some kind of credibility, and not only from the academic resume : people know you and follow you. According to Scott Wagers, « good content is propagated rapidly, bad content is not ». Of course, it is not that simple. There is a time for tweeting, clearly. If you tweet when someone with a lot of followers, then things might grow exponentially fast, and within a few hours, a tweet can be RTd a dozen, a hundred, a thousand times (we’ll get back on the viral effect of Twitter at the end of this post).

  • Live-Tweet in Conferences

Another popular use among academics is to use Twitter for live-tweets, see e.g. How People are using Twitter during conference or the interesting “who is going to read 12,000 tweets?!“. But as mentioned on a lot of blogs, one should be careful about live-tweeting. As recalled in Live-tweeting at academic conferences, « with great power comes great responsibility ». Live tweeting is supposed to be fun, but stay polite, and respectful. And use quotation marks. Getting back on the so-called Twittergate (see An Idea is a Dangerous Thing to Quarantine #twittergate), Aaron Bady, used that interesting image, about Twitter within the academic community « I conjured up the image of an appropriate cantankerous old professor yelling at a bunch of punk tweeters to get off his lawn, like Clint Eastwood in Gran Twittarino ».

Now, to be honest, I have been involved in some live-tweet only once, while I was giving a talk, at the World Social Science Forum, a few months ago

But I usually do not live-tweet, I do not feel comfortable with it (I prefer to take notes in my book, even if I might also write a post on my blog later on, but I always ask the speaker if I can quote what he or she said). « Some worried that having someone tweet their insights before they publish might increase the likelihood that they will be scooped by a colleague — although others regarded that notion as slightly paranoid » as mentioned in the Academic Twitterazzi. « The debate over live tweeting at conferences is, in many ways, about control and access: who controls conference space, presentation content, or access to knowledge? » wrote Roopika Risam in Conference Live Tweets: Twitter Good or #Twittergate?.

Beyond those pseudo-ethical considerations, there is also a more practical reason: in mathematics, it is quite difficult to live-tweet. I mean, it is difficult to write equations in Twitter, and a graph without the formal model is usually useless. There might some interest when there are computation issues, to share a visualization for instance (there were interesting experiences in R conferences this summer, e.g. in Lyon).

  • Twitter to Meet People

It is also possible to start discussions on Twitter. But again, I am not a social guy, so I usually do not like that. I mean, if I share a link to an article, it is because I found it interesting. If someone wants me to go further, or to discuss it, why not…. but Twitter is not the place. I prefer my blog, where I do not have the 140 character constraint.

An important issue in Twitter is to speed up connections between scientists. There is nothing new here. Traditionally, scientists have always interacted with other scientists, in sort of one-to-one interactions, attending seminars, conferences, discussion with colleagues. Using the words of Priem et al (2013), « informal conversations have moved out of the faculty lounge to online social media platforms », such as Twitter. One of the interests is to join somehow a larger « virtual department » with colleagues that are not next door, but who might be far away and in other areas of research. One can even discuss with real people, outside academia. Since I have interests in risk modeling, finance, climate, computer science, mathematics, I can also discuss with people working on stock markets, in insurance companies, in data visualization startups, even journalists. The awesome point is that it becomes possible to interact with open minded researchers. As mentioned in Fox (2012) – slightly changing the title – « blogging [and micro blogging] changed how economics share ideas ».

The first step in the scientific process is to find ideas, new ideas or concepts to investigate, datasets to describe. Following interesting people on Twitter can be the first step. The final step is to communicate findings and to disseminate. The time when researchers were studying the table of contents of journals to find interesting articles is behind us. When disseminating on a blog, we can share codes, graphs, datasets, links to additional material. On Twitter, we have to deal with the 140 character constraint, which makes it hard. One idea can be to use a nice visualization, a graph, a map.

  • Personal versus Institutional Accounts

On Twitter, I mainly follow researchers, only a few institutional accounts. For instance, I like the @HarvardBiz to get updates about their blog, and recent articles. It’s like using RSS feed (except that I am not a big fan of RSS). I might also confess that I have been asked, a long time ago, to be the Twitter Manager of the @StatFr account, of the French Statistical Society. But I quickly faced two problems: it is very difficult to be active on two accounts at the same time, especially when they share the same goal (here, it was just tweeting links to interesting articles, related to statistics – as well as activities of the association). And it is difficult to get a clear guideline. I mean, on my Twitter account, I tweet whatever I like. After a few days experiencing the @StatFr account, I had to argue with the President of the Society because of a link I mentioned in one of my tweet, that was too controversial (but, from my point of view, was mentioning interesting statistical issues). So I have to confess I prefer to follow people, more than institutions or groups.

On the other hand, in all you can tweet, academics behind the nature chemistry Twitter account (@NatureChemistry) went back on 4 years of experience. Among lessons learnt, collectively, it was mentioned that with the 140 characters constraint, « clarity is a virtue », which is indeed of the the things you learn with Twitter. Furthermore, they mention that following important researchers in your scientific community on Twitter is interesting. Not only you can discover interesting information. With personal ccounts, you can also learn more personal information. For instance, it’s always a pleasure to get news and updates from Emiliano,

 

  • The Impact of Twitter in Standard Process of Academic Dissemination

For academics still skeptical about the use of Twitter, I should probably mention Shuai et al. (2012) which proved (following 4,600 papers) that papers mentioned on Twitter are more downloaded, and more cited (see also Eysenbach1 (2011)). Dissemination using Twitter can help to reach other researchers, in your area, but also journalists, people working in the industry or for governmental organization, even members of parliament… It is hard to follow the sequence, but here how it looks like

publication of an academic paper
(in a journal, or on arxiv)
↓
tweet mentioning the paper
↓
mention in a popular blog
↓
mention in a newspaper
↓
citations
(etc.)

Things can go viral easily with Twitter (again, we’ll get back on this point more specifically soon). But still. It is difficult to clearly understand what  happened (in the newspaper, the researchers are usually mentioned, as well as the blog sharing the information, but that’s all…)

  • Having Fun on Twitter

A few weeks ago, I saw a nice graph, on a blog

and I wanted to reproduce it. With a code as simply as possible. Sure, it’s a geek’s thing to try to write codes as short as possible. But that’s fun, really

 

It was not worst writing a post on my blog, and with a couple of tweets, I keep tracks of that interesting mathematical problem.

People on Twitter try also – sometimes – to have fun, following some hastags, such as, a few weeks ago, e.g.

(see also here for a collection of great tweets) or more recently #SixWordPeerReview,

  • Gaining Time to Discover Interesting Information

So, clearly, you can save time to discover interesting publications, simply by following interesting people. But, as you may imagine, the difficult point is to follow your TL. If you follow, say 400 people, each of them did tweet, on average 5 times in a given day (including RTs), that makes 2000 tweet to read, if you go on Twitter once a day. Much more if you go on Twitter once a week. To save some time, somehow, it is possible to use dedicated websites such as http://tweetedtimes.com/. Based on your TL and people you follow, it is possible get a subset of popular tweets and links shared those people you follow. I believe that a similar algorithm is used in the https://twitter.com/i/discover page (probably more based on tweets favored than RTd).

  • My Own Experience on Twitter

Now, to share a bit of my personal experience, I should probably mention that I do not have a cell phone, neither a tablet. So when I go on Twitter, it has to be on my laptop. It might be while cooking and preparing the lunch box for the kids, in the morning, just to get quickly the news from the night. It might also be in the office, when some code is running, and I have to wait. Most of the night it’s in the evening. Once the kids are asleep.

If I look at my tweets, you can see that I RT a lot of tweets (the old way), and a few Twitter accounts (even if I have the feeling that only tweets published more than two years ago appear here)

  • Going viral on Twitter

To conclude, I should warn everyone that Twitter is addictive. And it can be exhilarating and dangerous when things start going viral… For instance, a few days ago, I did post a simple map (without proper references, it was mentioned in another tweet since there were two references, one for each map), and then, in 24 hours, there were almost 1,000 RTs (not to mentioned tweets mentioning that tweets that were also RTd),

The interesting side is that it was a nice opportunity to understand how this viral process works, and @3wen published an interesting post on that experience.

  • Possible Conclusion (?)

Being on Twitter is an amazing experience. I met (at least virtually) a lot of people, that I would have never been interacting with if they were not on Twitter. David Monniaux, editor of the great blog http://david.monniaux.free.fr/dotclear/ used to be on Twitter (@monniaux), but – according to the legend I read on Twitter – being on Twitter was time consuming (David used to interact a lot), so he decided to quit. Thus, I am glad that I do have neither a smartphone, nor a tablet! Because I would spend hours on Twitter! With moderation, Twitter is a great tool. But to be honest, it’s a little bit crowded… it is a place to be, but it’s hard to have a discussion with other people, with the 140 characters. I really believe it’s not the place to ask questions, and start a discussion. This is why I also try to go on other microblogging plateforms to interact, more confidential… But I won’t mention them here, I’d like to keep it that way.

  • To Go Further

Twitter for academic and engagement
Using Twitter for Curated Academic Content
Beyond citations: scholars’ visibility on the social Web
Live-tweeting at academic conferences
An Introduction to Social Media for Scientists
How People are using Twitter during conference
Using Twitter During an Academic Conference
Presenting for Twitter at Conferences
An Idea is a Dangerous Thing to Quarantine #twittergate
My Norm is More Normal Than Yours: Academic Tweeting and Loose Fish
“But who is going to read 12,000 tweets?!” How researchers can collect and share relevant social media content at conferences
Don’t Have Time to Tweet-bollocks! Twitter can even save you time as a scientist.
The role of Twitter in the life cycle of a scientific publication, and the associated infographics
Can tweets predict citations? (metrics of social impact based on Twitter and correlation with traditional metrics of scientific impact)
All you can tweet
Twitter as tool for strengthen a scientific community
How and why scholars cite on Twitter
Prevalence and use of Twitter among scholars (on http://figshare.com/)
Twitter as a tool for conservation education and outreach: what scientific conferences can do to promote live tweeting
Understanding how Twitter is used to spread scientific messages

Academe, Blogosphere, Internet

Wasting Time (and Givin’ Up)

11 Comments

There was an interesting post, published a few days ago, entitled This Blog is a Waste of My Time. The funny thing is that I had exactly the same experience at the same time. Since 2013 ended, I wanted to update my resume. And I observed that I got zero publications in the past two years years. Zero. Nada. Nothing published in 2012 and nothing published in 2013. Of course, it is mainly a timing issue, since several papers are still in the loop, and I might end up with a few papers published in 2014 (at least one was accepted the first week of 2014). But still… When I decided to turn off my laptop yesterday evening at 2 a.m. (this morning actually) I started wondering also if blogging wasn’t a waste of time. Or if it was something else.

  • My Research is a Waste of My Time (and not only mine)

This will sound like a cliché, but academic do waste a lot of time when doing (or pretending doing) some research,

  1. wasting time applying for grants: do I have to be more specific here? By wasting time I mean working during a month (almost) to fill forms, and there then get a “your proposal is extremely interesting, you got positive feedback from the reviewers, unfortunately, there’s no funding from the government…“. We all had this experience. We’re wasting our time here… and the reviewers time, too.
  2. wasting time in committees: as mentioned above, I have to spend time in research committees, reading applications for grants, but also in faculty committed, discussing office allocation for instance. We got more postdocs, visitors, interns than available seats… and for some reasons, I am on the bargaining comity, trying to argue with my colleague that my postdoc staying for 6 weeks should be before his visitor staying for 2 weeks on the priority list. I do have to do this, but you have to admit that, somehow, you waste the time of four tenured professor (plus me, I am not tenured) on some bullshit here… I am also on the PhD comity, where we receive applications. In December, we did spend a lot of time on the application of one candidate, potentially interesting (like many hours, discussing and arguing), and we’re not even sure that if we agree to enroll him in the PhD program, the candidate will join. If he’s not coming, that will be a waste of time
  3. wasting time in the review process: it looks like I spent more time reading and writing reports on others papers than writing my own ! Ok, that might be an actual quote I got from one of my referees in a recent paper… I keep saying that I should start saying “no, I am too busy” when an editor ask me for a review. But I also keep saying that a lot of bullshit managed to get published. So I cannot stand aside and wait. I mean, I could: I’m French and we’re usually good for this kind of things. But I’d rather be involved in the process, advise the editor if the paper is not worth it, and help to improve the paper if it might be interesting. But again, I spend a lot of time in this process. I know what others are doing, but I keep delaying my own. You cannot find my name if you look for articles published in 2012 or 2013, but I am somewhere, as one of those anonymous referees thanked at the end of the article (who sometimes spent more time on the paper than the PhD supervisor who barely knows what the paper is about, but still has his – or her – name on it). There was an interesting post by Rob Hyndman entitled How to get your paper rejected quickly a few weeks ago. I still don’t know if I agree with everything, but I agree that “review­ers spend a great deal of time pro­vid­ing com­ments, and it is dis­re­spect­ful to ignore them” (I would say “might spend“, but I do not want to argue on that point today). A lot of time is wasted in the publication process.
  4. wasting time trying to get data: before Julie started her internship in September, I tried to get datasets to work on demographic problems. I started discussing (and filling) forms to get French datasets, and managed to get a smaller in Québec. The agenda was simple: we work on the small dataset, write the code, and then, once we’ll get the big dataset, we’ll just use the code that we tested on the small one. After 6 months, I still wonder if my form has been accepted, and if, someday, I will be able to get access to this dataset. I know that the dataset exists. I mean, I know that two datasets exist, and I just ask for a merge… but it looks like there might be ethical considerations, so it takes time.

I do waste a lot of time in the process of making research, and I do not mention here procrastination. Actually, I believe that procrastination is extremely important, and is not a waste of time… But I will get back, someday, on that point in another post.

  • My Teaching Related Duties are a Waste of My Time

I will not claim that teaching is a waste of time. I am still extremely pretentious, and I believe that by the end of my courses, my students could actually learn something… But the problem is more on associated duties. One might think of writing the exams (and sketches of solutions) or grading (since I do not have T.A.s to help). It takes time. A lot of time actually. But I won’t consider it as wasted. Two shorts stories to explain what I mean (that occurred in the Autumn session)

  1. in September, I gave a course, and there were 4 tests scheduled. A few hours before the first one, I got an email from a student, asking me to reschedule it because he could not be there. He asked me to postpone his examen a few days after. I said no, essentially because we signed an agreement on the first day, and the student knew by that time that he will not be able to be there for the exam. And never told me before. I decided to stand on this principle. The thing is the student invoked religious matters, and I understood it will start to be stinky soon. But I had principles. I got some moral support from my colleagues, and from my Dean, but everyone was telling me that I was in charge in this battle (“we support you, but you’re on your own“) since we have our academic independence. I did ask for legal backup from the Professors Union (three times) and no feedback. Then, I heard that a letter had been sent to the rector by a lawyer, and within 10 minutes, I gave the student everything he asked. If he asked me to take the test on a Sunday, I would have said yes… Just because lawyers basic rule is to waste others time, or money. So I gave up. I did not want to waste my time on that battle, on my own. The funny (?) side of this story is that so did the student: I agreed to postpone the test at the end of the session, he came for the second test (but never show up in my class) and got a little bit more than 30%. I did not get further news from him, and he did not take the other tests. But I did waste quite some time, and some bad nights and insomnia, too.
  2. in December, I was grading some homework I gave to my students (practical, on databases) and I saw on two forums that a pair of students was asking for help. Actually, it was not help but could you please do this for me ? They did mention the number of their database (each group had a different database, and the person who posted the question in those forums was located in Montréal). This was fraud, or at least fraud attempt. So I gave them 0% – on that specific homework. Students confessed that they did ask for help on the forum (but never asked me anything)… and I gave up. I mean, I decided to grade their work, and I did fill a form for fraud, sent to the faculty, so that it will be someone else’s problem. I did not want to spend time arguing that those students clearly should not get the exam (one of them had only 20% at the final written exam – the other one 36%) : if they want to learn something, taking the course in the Winter session was clearly an opportunity to learn something… But they din’t get it, and I gave up.

I clearly waste time on a lot of things. But when I look back at the past four or five years, I might feel ashamed not to have more prestigious (somehow) publications, lectures notes without typos everywhere, but at least, the blog is something I am still proud of, sort of. And when I end up working, tired, around 2 a.m., I have the feeling that something is wrong, and that a lot of time has been wasted. And I have to confess that I think I should give up on something… But I don’t think it will be on my blogging activity.

Academe, Blogosphere, Twitter

Research, and honesty

Some great thoughts about research… via Twitter

Wait… that one was actually a true story

Academe, Blogosphere, Internet

Panel on academic blogging

4 Comments

This Monday, I joint a panel discussion in Montréal on “Minor forms of academic communication: revamping the relationship between science and society?“, at the World Social Science Forum. The Forum was organized by the ISSC, i.e. the UNESCO. Yes, Monday was Thanksgiving in Canada. I have to admit that I was not used to celebrate Thanksgiving, in Europe, but since I have in North America, I try to enjoy it. As you can learn on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving, at Thanksgiving, you’re supposed to be “Spending Time with Family“. I find it odd that the UNESCO organizes a three day conference on that week-end (the conference started on Sunday actually). It looks like you’re not supposed to have a family life when you’re an academic….

Anyway, that was interesting to join that panel, since I had the opportunity to have interesting discussions with the other members of the panel. I was glad to meet Loïc Le Pape, the editor of a great blog on religion and politics, http://politicsofreligion.hypotheses.org/. It was interesting to see that, even if we do blog on very different topics, with very different styles, we both – as academic bloggers – share the same feelings, the same joy and the same fear about blogging. I also enjoyed meeting – finally – the legendary André Gunthert (see http://andre.gunthert.fr/). You probably know André from his blog http://culturevisuelle.org/icones/. The text of his talk on now online there, and I did really appreciate it (anyone interested by academic blogging should probably read it). I was also glad to discuss about Boulet‘s incredible post on his blog entitled “notre Toyota était fantastique“ (we both love Boulet’s work, and more generally graphical novels, what we call bande dessinée in French, the nineth art actually). Boulet is a comic book writer, publishing on a blog for years, and I have to admit that I prefer reading the published books than the blog (his Notes are the paper version of the blog). But last week, I saw something on his blog that I will never be able to read in a book

It is still a cartoon, probably more an autobiographical graphic novel, but those animations are great. For the first time, I really see the interest of blogging in graphical novels. Please, have a look at “notre Toyota était fantastique“, it is really something you should experience… And I was glad to share André’s point of view, since this is exactly his expertise (as a researcher). I hope that we’ll find some time to discuss more about data visualization, since I believe I have a lot to learn from him.

It was also great to finally meet Marin Dacos, one of the founder of http://hypotheses.org/, which is the platform hosting now my blog. Hearing some macro-vision about academic blogging was interesting, and complementary compared with blogger’s experiences I’ve been reading those past days to prepare my talk. I was also glad to discuss legal aspects related to blogging, since one of the interest of being hosted by an academic platform is to have some kind of backup and support. One of the issue I should still work on is about adding mentions when I use a picture on my blog. I am aware that it is not fair to avoid citations related to pictures, when I upload them on my blog. A few months back, I decided to add mentions, explaining where each pictures were borrowed from. Then, since the owner of the rights of some pictures was checking on the internet using robots (or simply Google), within a week, I got an email asking me to remove those pictures, since it was illegal. The email was not friendly at all. So I did remove the pictures, and all the citations and mentions. So, if some authors of pictures want me to remove a picture from my blog, or want me to add a mention below, I’d be glad to do so ! Please, just send me an email.

And finally, another interesting experience related to this panel was that, for the first time, I discovered what live tweeting was. So far, it was only a legend, that I could read from here and there (see e.g. http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/…). I had already experience the one tweet to mention a talk, like

but here, I guess for the first time, I experienced live teet,

I found that awesome ! I mean, at first, I find that odd to see me mentioned so many time on consecutive posts on twitter. But it is great to see what people in the room got from my talk (I have to admit that it was not live for me since I do not have a smartphone – not even a phone actually – I did discovered that later, in the evening, when I got back home, after some beers with André and Loïc). I did really enjoy what Ewen did on his blog a few month ago, with a detailed summary of the R conference he went to (see http://editerna.free.fr/wp/?p=56). Here, it is the tweet version. And I found it great… I don’t know why it is the first time I see this (I don’t know if it is something you see more in social science than in mathematics, or just due to the fact that I did not attend much conference since I have three kids), but I loved that… Thanks again Ravi.

Blogosphere

May the 4th (be with you)

1 Comment

Today is a special day, for all us who did grow up with Star Wars,

And on the internet, one can easily found serious posts, related to Star Wars, for instance, a series of posts on quantifying Stars Wars, with part I, http://theskepticalstatistician.blogspot.ca/…, part II, http://theskepticalstatistician.blogspot.ca/…  and http://theskepticalstatistician.blogspot.ca/…, and finally part III, http://theskepticalstatistician.blogspot.ca/…, for statisticians. One can also read a nice post on Star Wars economics, http://legalinsurrection.com/…