2 new faculty posts at Liverpool, UK

Having just send the ad to various mailing lists, it should also appear at the blog...

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THE UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL -- DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
LECTURESHIPS IN ECONOMICS AND COMPUTATION (2 POSTS)

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The Department was ranked in the top 10 UK Computer Science departments in RAE2008, and building on this success, we seek to significantly expand current research around existing strengths at the intersection of economics/game theory and computer science. You will join Professor Paul Goldberg, Dr Piotr Krysta, Dr Martin Gairing and Dr Rahul Savani in our research group on Economics and Computation. The group carries out research in the computational foundations of economics and game theory and enjoys close collaborative links with other strong research groups in the Department. You will be expected to contribute to our MSc in Computation and Game Theory.

You should have a PhD in Computer Science or related discipline and an excellent track record of research at the intersection of computer science and economics/e-commerce/game theory.

Relevant topics of interest include (but are not restricted to):

• algorithmic game theory;
• e-commerce;
• mechanism design and auction theory;
• complexity and computation of solution concepts;
• optimisation problems in economics;
• computational social choice.

salary in range GBP 36,715 - GBP 41,323 pa; Job Ref: A-570581; Closing Date: 30 April 2010

Further details

online applications/job description

For informal discussions please contact Prof Paul Goldberg, Head of Group (mailto:goldberg@liverpool.ac.uk).

For full details, or to request an application pack, visit here
e-mail jobs@liv.ac.uk
tel +44 151 794 2210 (24 hr answerphone).

Dagstuhl 10101

I am at Dagstuhl seminar 10101 (schedule) on computational social choice; it ends tomorrow. Much of the chatter in the evenings has been about the AAAI conference, due to author feedback to reviews being made available a couple of days ago; to a lesser extent ACM-EC accepted papers, also announced a couple of days ago. I will not try to do a complete overview; let me try a more vignette-like approach.

A nice talk by Jérome Lang was in the context of conducting a collection of yes/no votes where there is preferential dependencies between attributes, meaning that a voter's support for one issue may depend on the outcome of the vote on one or more of the other issues. The example used was voting to build a swimming pool and voting to build a tennis court, where some voters would like one or the other, but not both (too expensive). Each voter is represented by a preference relation on the 4 possible outcomes (for n yes/no issues, he uses a more concise representation, "CB-nets"). The question is, how hard is it for the "chair" (who chooses which order the issues are voted on) to control the outcome. Commonly NP-hard, which is taken to be good news, although it is noted that it raises the question of easier manipulation in typical or average cases. That issue is analogous to the hardness of a voter choosing a strategic vote (a ranking of the candidates that is not his true ranking) so as to get a better outcome. While that is NP-hard for some voting schemes, it may often be easy in practical settings. Indeed, Edith Hemaspaandra's talk was about polynomial-time manipulability when there is single-peaked preferences over the candidates.

The rump session (not covered in the above schedule) was 11 talks each of 5 minutes, really aimed at stating problems where no results have been obtained. I gave an introduction to the "chairman's paradox" (to ask about related computational issues) -- it was identified by Farquharson in 1969 and goes as follows. Say you have a committee of 3 voters {1,2,3} who have to choose one of 3 outcomes {A,B,C}. Let voter 1 be the "chair" and voters 2 and 3 be the ordinary members. The special role of the chair is that if all 3 outcomes get one vote each, then the one supported by the chair is the winner. The paradox is that if the voters' preference lists are generated at random, and your solution concept is pure Nash equilibrium, then the chair gets what he wants less often than the other members. For example, consider the (Condorcet cycle) preferences where 1 has preferences ABC (in descending order), 2 has preferences BCA and 3 has preferences CAB. Then, voter 2 will vote for C since that results in C rather than A winning (2 and 3 supporting C). Voters 1 and 3 continue to support A and C respectively, having no incentive to switch. That is the only pure Nash equilibrium that results from iterative removal of weakly dominated strategies, and notice that 1 (the chair) gets his worst outcome C. I will note that the last time I had to chair a committee of this nature, I felt disadvantaged, although not quite for this reason. The session contained an interesting talk by Kóczy on a method for ranking economics journals (someone has to do it I suppose; see this article on the ranking obsession factor). Finally I should surely mention Felix Brandt's entertaining talk on the "kicker theorem".

Edith Elkind's talk on plurality voting with abstentions was related to the above in using pure Nash equilibrium as the solution concept with a bunch of voters and alternatives (not just 3). An interesting open problem she raised is: Suppose you have sets of voters and alternatives, and for each voter/alternative pair there's a numerical utility of that outcome to that voter. Assume that in the event of a tie, the voter's utility is the average (furthermore, let's assume that all numbers and averages are distinct). Suppose voters cast their votes in some prescribed order, and consider the solution concept of subgame perfect equilibrium. What is the complexity of computing their votes? (On a less formal note, Aviv Zohar told me about a "taxicab game" he had played rather poorly, in which a sequence of (say) 10 people board a minibus with 11 seats, and you aim to end up next to the vacant seat, or failing that, maybe some seats/neighbours are better than others. OK, it needs to be specified more precisely.)

Here is another recent blog post on computational social choice, just to prove I have been paying attention.

inaugural lecture

The illustration is from one of my slides - it is intended to give an idea of how to make a hard instance of 2D-SPERNER. I must thank my colleagues in the EcCo research group for the talks they gave in the morning, also Troels Bjerre Sorensen, David Manlove, Kousha Etessami and Bernhard von Stengel for visiting and giving very nice talks in the afternoon, as well as other visitors and everyone who attended the talks.

Writing references

At Cambridge, Mary Beard blogged recently about the reference-writing burden. Here's a quote:

evaluating students, ex-students and colleagues is an important part of my job; I'm not complaining about being asked to do it (so no need to feel remotely guilty about asking me) -- I'm complaining about the cumbersome, inefficient and sometimes downright obstructive infrastructure.

Regarding academic references (for students applying for postgraduate study), Beard notes that some departments

To save themselves money and to maximise your irritation, many departments now have feeble, barely secure systems where you hand the reference back to the student in an envelope, signed across the seal and then covered with sellotape.

From recent experience, having produced a bunch of references for students applying for MSc study, I can reveal that Cambridge is by far the worst offender in this respect. At York and Edinburgh, they email you a URL, you go there, and upload the reference in PDF. At Oxford, it's bit worse, they email you a URL, username and password, you login and have to provide details of your contact info, affiliation and next of kin (I exaggerate slightly) which gets checked by "inspector" software, then you finally get to upload a PDF. At Cambridge, the student has to come by your office with a reference form in triplicate (you don't often get to use that word these days) and you have to print and sign three copies of the reference (one for each reference form) then you go through all the amateur cloak-and-dagger stuff with the signature and sellotape.

The point is, I guess, that Cambridge (and to some extent Oxford) are the only universities that can afford to be so obstructive to potential customers. The trouble is, they are mainly wasting the time of the referees, not just the students, and referees are ethically obliged to cooperate with whatever stupid system is being used. But I will complain to them about their system, and report here on any response I receive.

Forthcoming inaugural lecture

My inaugural lecture (on Computational Game Theory) is on the 2nd of March; I'm currently working on the slides. Here is a schedule of a one-day mini-workshop we are having on topics in computational game theory, to take place alongside the lecture. Here is an electronic invitation that anyone reading this is most welcome to. Here is a link to the university's web site on the current series of inaugural lectures, includes a registration facility for anyone who wants to attend.

mainly about cuts

I went to a university staff meeting today where our Vice-chancellor began with a presentation on funding cuts, and after he was done, I asked him which way we should all vote in the next election. It's the kind of question you ask when you've just finished marking 40 exam scripts. His response touched on the fact that the USA, Japan, Germany and France all are spending more rather than less on higher education, as part of their fiscal stimulus packages. I knew about the USA, but it's great to hear that all these other places also regard universities as part of the solution and not the problem. (added a day later): This beautifully-written article in the Guardian is a must-read for anyone who is interested in this topic!

The VC also noted that the funding formula is now allocating more weight to research that received the highest RAE rating (4*) than it previously did. It is starting to look like it is wrong to refer to "3* and 4* research" in the same breath; in reality we should all be chasing after 4* research, and disregard anything less.

Back to exam marking - no-one likes doing it, but it's nice when someone gets everything more or less correct, and you think, hey, I really got through to this guy.

On Facebook, Ulle Endriss called attention to this web site about the closure of the Group of Logic, Language and Computation at Kings College London. I would guess that the people being laid off would not get so much sympathy in the wider community, at a time when unemployment is still rising in the USA, and is still very high over here. It's a reminder that universities are not in the public sector, and are all in thrall to fiscal constraints.

Finally, a definition: meritocracy: government by people with a powerful sense of entitlement.

New MSc course

We have started advertising our new MSc degree course in Computation and Game Theory. (I am hoping it will not confused with computer games; the summary below should help.) Here are details on the department's web site. Here is the link on the university's web site for applying to join the course.

The following is a 100-word summary that should appear in findamasters:

Success stories of the Internet giants like Google have generated great interest in new techniques for e-commerce. New career opportunities are emerging that exploit the rapidly expanding research area in the intersection of economics and computer science. These arise both in research and commercial development. The MSc in Computation and Game Theory program aims at providing students with a broad understanding of current issues and gaining specialist qualification in this field. The program covers a number of foundational theoretical areas, including cutting edge modules such as algorithmic mechanism design, and covering modern applications such as Google's sponsored search auctions.

This is of course the general topic of the Economics and Computation Research Group.

Piotr Krysta is the main contact for details.

Tories to review HEFCE's plans on impact

Following on from my earlier post, the latest email in the series is entitled REF campaign update - some good news. Apart from the title of this post, also - see below - scientists are being invited to submit feedback on this to the Science and Technology Select Committee.

REF campaign update:

I wanted to write to you to update you with some good news, showing that our lobbying and the publicity we have generated over the ‘impact’ campaign is having an effect. Please see below:

Tories call for REF to be shelved:

David Willetts announced last week that if elected, the Tories would shelve HEFCE’s plans on impact until the completion of a two year review. The shadow minister for higher education, David Willetts, said he would delay proposals that would force 25% of future research to be assessed on 'economic impacts' by two years in order to listen to the concerns of the academic community. The news comes just a week after a UCU poll of top professors revealed that over a third (35%) would consider pursuing their academic career abroad if the plans were introduced. Read more here: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=409991&c=2 This is a measure of the pressure we are building up on political parties and HEFCE and a testament to your support, so thank you again.

Calling all scientists! – Science and Technology Committee calls inquiry on funding and ‘impact’

Following UCU lobbying, the Science and Technology Select Committee has announced an inquiry into Science funding and one aspect the committee will be particularly interested in is the proposals for ‘impact’. The Committee is interested in “what evidence there is on the feasibility or effectiveness of estimating the economic impact of research, both from a historical perspective (for QR funding) and looking to the future (for Research Council grants)”. If you are a researcher in the sciences, this is your chance to speak directly to the politicians by making an individual or group submission.

How to send a submission:

• Focus on the feasibility of an impact measure in your field – can you measure impact over the short term? What would it do to pure science and basic research?
• Keep your submission to a maximum of 3000 words and put it in Word format (no later than 2003) and number your paragraphs
• The deadline for submissions is 27 January so time is short.
• Don’t leave it to others! With the disappearance of a committee that specifically represents universities it’s harder than ever for the academic voice to be heard. Volume of responses will be important. If you have something to say, now’s the time to say it!

Please send your submissions by e-mail to scitechcom@parliament.uk and marked "Research funding cuts" and please send a copy to us too at jwhite@ucu.org.uk. An additional paper copy should be sent to: The Clerk, Science and Technology Committee House of Commons, 7 Millbank, London SW1P 3JA.

You can read full details of the Inquiry’s remit here: http://www.parliament.uk/parliamentary_committees/science_technology.cfm

Best wishes

Jonathan

Jonathan White

Deputy Head of Campaigns

UCU

Surds and the pursuit of happiness

My son Arthur mentioned that he had learned about surds in maths, so we asked him what one was. The definition I vaguely recalled from my school days was that a surd is an irrational number, but of course that's not the whole story, since it would seem that not every irrational number is a surd. Arthur did not know an exact definition, and it would seem that no-one else has tried very hard to pin it down precisely. Higher GCSE Mathematics for Edexcel by Alan Smith, p492, states:

Some quantities in mathematics can only be written exactly using a square root symbol.

For example, if x²=5, then the exact value of x is √5 (or -√5).

Quantities like these, written using roots, are called surds.

Based on discussions and exercises on the following pages, it appears that a number like 1+√2 is a "surd expression" rather than just a surd, but neither was it ruled out as being a legitimate surd. The book gave no hint about whether, for example, the cube (as opposed to square) root of 2 is a surd.

Other sources are similarly imprecise. Wikipedia indicates that a surd in an N-th root (presumably, an N-th root of a positive integer, where N is also a positive integer). It says here that

An unresolved root, especially one using the radical symbol, is often referred to as a surd.

Based on the usage of the word in that web page (which also explains its origin) it looks like it's supposed to be a (real-valued) positive integer root of a positive integer.

This web page states the most restrictive definition: "A surd is a square root which cannot be reduced to a whole number." Presumably they mean: a square root of a positive integer, and not a number like √(9/4) = 3/2. Wiktionary says: "An irrational number, especially one expressed using the √ symbol." (which would appear to allow 1+√2).

With a view to inducting my sons into the family trade, I thought that it would be a worthwhile mathematical exercise to discuss what should be the right definition. (The definition itself will not be interesting mathematically, but the pursuit of one is of great value; by analogy, the chap who coined the phrase "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" clearly figured out that pursuit of happiness, rather than happiness itself, was the point.) It's a topic that touches on all sorts of issues, such as which if any, of the alternative definitions are equivalent, and why. More fundamentally, it addresses the issue of what constitutes a genuine mathematical definition, as opposed to some general guidelines on usage. Finally, the alternative definitions will have various different merits, such as being a set of numbers that is closed under addition. In the event the discussions did not get very far, but looks like a good one to have in high school math lessons.

(added later: Mark Jerrum pointed out this link on mathematical terminology; in the case of surds, it contains more historical detail than wikipedia's page.)

UCU takes the gloves off?

This post follows on from two previous posts quoting email updates on the UCUs campaign against the proposed ways that UK academic research will be measured in the REF. Again I quote the entire thing below - it has some useful links and it is noteworthy in highlighting the risk of a renewed brain drain if the proposals go ahead.

One thing you learn from the study of bargaining and negotiation from a computational perspective, is that to make the case for a particular price, you need to appeal to the marketplace. In selling a house, it is no good to say to a buyer "you should pay me more because my house is worth more than your offer". You must say "you should pay me more because some other potential buyer would pay me more". Likewise, I believe that if a researcher is threatened with financial and reputational penalties if he refuses to bend to the Government's agenda, he is possibly mistaken to focus on explaining that pure research is valuable. Rather he should say "There are other buyers out there for the services I prefer to sell".

Dear colleagues,

UCU poll shows one third of professors considering leaving the country if impact pushed through:

I am just emailing to update you on recent progress in UCU’s campaign against HEFCE’s ‘impact’ proposals. The REF campaign hit the press in a big way today as three of the broadsheets feature a UCU poll showing that more than one third of professors would consider pursuing their academic careers abroad if HEFCE’s impact proposals are pushed through. One in five professors polled also said they knew someone already considering leaving. You can read more about the poll in a double page spread in the Independent:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/nobel-laureates-dont-put-money-before-science-1860138.html

You can also read it in the Times and the Telegraph:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article6978437.ece

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/6943360/Warning-over-academic-brain-drain.html

The revelation that the impact agenda could trigger a brain drain in UK academia should give pause to the funding council and the government, providing yet more evidence of the danger posed by these proposals.

But are they listening? Peter Mandelson’s recent HEFCE grant letter, besides announcing swingeing cuts to the unit of resource, appeared to pre-empt the results of the REF consultation, committing the government firmly to the impact agenda. Lord Mandelson wrote to HEFCE: "On research, securing greater economic and social impact will be important over the next year. I want you to continue to develop proposals for the Research Excellence Framework, following the consultation that ended on 16 December. These should provide significant incentives to enhance the economic and social impact of research."

The press attention to our poll shows that the enormous opposition to the impact proposals is finding public expression. Our task now is to turn this into pressure at a political level.

The foundation of this campaign has been the support shown by you and your colleagues in signing the 18,000 strong petition. If we are to raise the pressure on the government we will need your support again and will shortly be writing to tell you how you can help us put pressure on your MP. Watch this space.

Thank you again for your support,

Best wishes

Jonathan White

Deputy Head of Campaigns, UCU

contributing to Wikipedia

What Wikipedia really needs, it occurred to me recently, is an article about the complexity class PPP. Not everyone will agree with that assessment; some people reckon that what Wikipedia really needs is to get rid of its liberal bias. For myself, I gave up waiting for the article on PPP to appear, made a account at Wikipedia, negotiated the rather unconventional syntax you use to edit articles, and wrote the above-linked-to page (that is, the first one, not the second one). Then I added links from the articles on PPAD and PPP (disambiguation). Then I wrote an article about the complexity class PPA, which as the whole world needs to know, is another denizen of the terra incognita that lies between PPAD and FNP. And if you think there's anything wrong with any of those articles, don't come hassling me about it, go and edit the pages yourself! It's not like they belong to me.

Then I contributed fifty quid to Wikipedia, after repeatedly seeing all those fundraising appeals from its founder Jimmy Wales.

Then I added most of the content on the current version of the page on the Research Excellence Framework (REF). Like the fundraising appeals, the REF is a bit hard to ignore, at least for UK academics. If you don't know what it is, consider yourself fortunate. If you want to know, follow the above link, it's as good a starting-point as any, in my unbiased opinion.

Happy new year, by the way.

"Stand up for Research" again

OK, a slightly incremental update to my previous post... the UCU petition is continuing to pick up more and more support, see this copy of an email I got today.

Stand up for Research - Last push for 20,000

Dear colleagues,

Thank you for signing UCU’s ‘Stand up for Research’ statement. The response to this campaign has been overwhelming, with more than 16,500 academics signing up.

As a result of the petition’s growth, the campaign is winning more press attention. Clive James used his ‘A Point of View’ column on Radio 4 to attack the proposals. You can read this here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/views/a_point_of_view/

Also, read Sally Hunt’s comment in the Times Higher Magazine here:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=409381&c=1

BUT we still need more.

We have less than one week now to push as close to 20,000 as possible. Please take a moment to help us to get there. Forward this email to all your colleagues with a last request to sign up. We will be submitting this petition to HEFCE as part of our response to their consultation and every signature will count.

Colleagues can sign the statement here: http://www.ucu.org.uk/standupforresearch

Thanks again for all your help,

Jonathan


Jonathan White
Deputy Head of Campaigns
UCU
Carlow Street
London
NW1 7LH

Meanwhile, Universities UK are proving to be a bunch of spineless yes-men; in this article their president is quoted saying about the pre-budget statement: "However, the sector is already absorbing considerable efficiency savings and the announcement that by 2012-2013, £600 million will be cut from higher education and science and research budgets will be extremely challenging for universities." (translates as: we won't lift a finger to fight back.)

Let me conclude this post with some more links etc: This image was sent to me by Greg Kochanski. This article on science budget cuts is enough to turn me into a Tory. An enthusiastic endorsement of Educators for Reform - read the blurb on the web site - great stuff.

"Stand up for Research" petition update

Here's an email I received this morning - sign the petition if you have not yet done so! (I posted earlier about this topic here and here; and this page is a collection of links in support of the campaign, in addition to links that make the general case for curiosity-driven research.)

Dear colleague,

I wanted to update you on the progress of the “Stand up for Research” campaign.

More than 12,500 academics have now signed, making this the biggest ever such petition UCU has run. The signatories represent all disciplines, applied as well as pure research and come from every kind of university, defying the way in which the proposals trade research communities off against one another.

You can also read more about the campaign in the forthcoming edition of UC magazine, in which Professor Philip Moriarty from Nottingham University argues that “The imposition of impact criteria in peer review and in the REF is nothing less than an assault on core academic principles and the ethos of university research. It will also, perhaps counter-intuitively, be immensely damaging to the long-term socio-economic impact of academia.”

We now have only THREE WEEKS left to make this statement impossible to ignore.

Please help us do this by forwarding the link to the page to someone you know and asking them to sign it: http://www.ucu.org.uk/standupforresearch

Yours sincerely

Jonathan White

Journal special issues for conferences - why bother?

Question: why do we bother with special issues of journals for conferences?

In an effort to appear scholarly, I googled a bit and found this article ("If Special Issues of Journals Are Not So Special, Why Has Their Use Proliferated?" by Richard T. Mowday in the Journal of Management Inquiry). That article considers special issues devoted to specific research subfields, rather than conferences, so is not very relevant to my question. (Various arguments for and against are dismissed as invalid, but they don't include the ones I mention below.) The topic arises in this blog post (Lance Fortnow, "Are conferences worth fixing?") but the topic is merely touched on in some of the comments.

My general understanding is that your conference paper is supposed to acquire a seal of approval from being invited to the special issue. The other motivation is that the journal paper should appear more rapidly than usual, but this does not always happen in my experience, and the delay of having to coordinate one's paper with half a dozen others is partly to blame. So we return to the "prestige" motivation. The trouble is, that the journal hosting the special issue, is not necessarily the one you would have submitted the paper to, in the absence of a special issue. Some people decline the invitation to the special issue (and submit to a different journal), and that seems to severely undermine this purpose of a special issue.

Am I right that special issues are supposed to be prestigious? I realise that any answer is to some extent, a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Full professorship in Economics/Game Theory and Computation

Note, this is the first of three positions we will be advertising (see below), in an aim to build an internationally leading research group in this area. An official advert with details on how to apply, will appear on Nov 12th at the URL given below.

THE UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL -- DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

CHAIR IN COMPUTER SCIENCE -- ECONOMICS AND COMPUTATION

Salary negotiable

The Department of Computer Science was ranked in the top 10 UK Computer Science departments in RAE2008, and building on this success, seeks to significantly expand current research around existing strengths at the intersection of economics/game theory and computer science.  To this end, we invite applications for a full Professorship to be attached to the newly established Economics & Computation Research Group.

Led by Professor Paul Goldberg, the Group carries out research in the computational foundations of economics/game theory and economic theory in computer science. In addition to Prof Goldberg, the group currently has three other faculty members: Dr Martin Gairing, Dr Piotr Krysta, and Dr Rahul Savani.

Current areas of research activity in the group include:

* algorithmic game theory;

* mechanism design and auction theory;

* complexity of solution concepts, algorithms for solution concepts;

* optimisation problems in economics;

* computational social choice.

We welcome applications from candidates in these areas, as well as more application-oriented areas, such as recommender systems, and related areas, such as computational finance and computational economics.

Two further faculty positions have been approved for this group, and will be advertised after the professorial appointment. It is expected that the successful candidate will be actively involved with these appointments.

The successful candidate will have an excellent track record of research leadership at the intersection of computer science and economics/game theory, and will join a dynamic, world-class Department.

Informal enquiries may be directed to the head of group:

       Professor Paul W. Goldberg

       mailto:P.W.Goldberg@liverpool.ac.uk

       phone: +44 151 795 4259

** Job Ref: A-570583

** CLOSING DATE FOR APPLICATIONS: 8 January 2010 **

Further details and an application pack will be available from the following URL after 12 November:

       http://www.liv.ac.uk/working/job_vacancies/

** AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER

EPSRC's Schlimmbesserung

I was recently circulated a letter from EPSRC (UK's main scientific research funding body) announcing that, in order to "alleviate pressure involved in our peer review process" they would

• no longer accept uninvited resubmissions of proposals


• constrain "repeatedly unsuccessful applicants" to submit only one application over a 12-month period

In the letter there is a definition of "repeatedly unsuccessful applicant" which does not bear repeating here.

I have figured out what is wrong with this policy: far from relieving pressure on peer review, it has the opposite effect. Note first that the research proposals that now end up getting prohibited were always easy to criticize, while the proposals that survive this cull are the ones where you have to think hard about how they rate in competition with each other. That does not in itself explain why it becomes harder to review a proposal --- the reason why it gets harder, is that a reviewer now has a much heavier responsibility to "get it right": if a proposal fails, someone's research agenda has just been closed down permanently (they can't resubmit) and in the worst case, they get personally blacklisted, just for good measure.

Based on some brief web searches, it seems that Schlimmbesserung is a variant of a more standard German word Verschlimmbesserung, meaning an improvement that makes things worse. (The claim is that English-speaking fans of long German words usually prefer "Schlimmbesserung". This page is informative.)

Stereotyping universities

God, I hate being stereotyped. I don't think I'm absent-minded, nor do I wear a mortar-board. When Peter Mandelson says that universities should not be "islands or ivory towers" (see here) he is of course insinuating that universities are just that, out of touch with the real world, and so on. Well, it's a salutary reminder of what it must be like to belong to a social or racial group that gets itself stereotyped on a more frequent basis. Mandelson's remark forms part of a dismal-looking package of proposed reforms to the higher education system that purport to enhance the "customer experience"... not much in the way of concrete proposals, which is probably just as well, it's mainly a vague attempt to get universities perceived as just another industry. Mind you, if that's where he's coming from, can someone point out to him that we are, at least, a net exporter? Bloody politicians - they're all the same, got nothing better to do than spend half their time spouting off whatever cheap populist slogans it takes to get elected (not that we can accuse Mandelson of getting elected), and the other half making fabulous sums of money on after-dinner speeches and consulting contracts. All right, back to marking my COMP209 class test...

question about random sequences

OK, a respite from my last two posts about the Research Excellence Framework. The following question occurred to me, I make no promise that it is interesting.

Suppose you repeatedly roll a fair die and write down the sequence of numbers you get. I'm going to delete numbers from the sequence according to the following rule. Let X be the first number in the sequence. I delete the first block of consecutive X's (which will usually just be the single X of course), then I delete the second block of consecutive X's, but retain everything in between. Then I do the same thing to the rest of the sequence of dice rolls - it will start with some Y not equal to X, so I get rid of the first two blocks of consecutive Y's and continue.

For example, I would delete the bold-face elements of the following:

2,3,6,1,1,2,2,4,2,3,3,5,4,5,5,4,6,2,3,2,4,1,5,2,3,2,...

And the question is, is the sequence of undeleted numbers indistinguishable from a completely random sequence? Seems to work for 2-sided dice (coins).

Research Excellence Framework (part 2)

Continuing from my previous post; once again, foreigners who are not into schadenfreude should again read no further. Some new web links follow. First a couple of petitions:

• Stand up for Research - the UCU petition; sign this!


• another petition which is mainly on behalf of arts and humanities.

A new collection of web pages highlighting this topic: The Danger of Assessing Research By Economic Impact

The topic has led to a flurry of emails on the CPHC mailing list; opinions there are divided, there are some who don't mind the proposal, some who are defeatist and some who also object to it. Some discussion has addressed whether one should push for a broader definition of "impact" beyond economic impact, and also the general burden of assessment -- it is costly to have to stop what you're doing every 5 years and enter into an episode of acute navel-gazing, and the present Government does not propose to compensate us for that! Outside of CS, there is a stronger consensus against the proposed definition of "impact". Do not be defeatist - the REF is a version of (and probably largely plagiarized from) Australia's Research Quality Framework (RQF), a similar Gradgrind-like model which was cancelled in December 2007 due to a change in government. Notice that in the UK, prospects for a change in government are very strong -- let's see if history repeats itself!

And finally, let me quote from an article in the Guardian yesterday by Madeleine Bunting addresses the point that Market theory closed down public discourse about injustice. But we urgently need to describe what we should value. From the article:

But don't look to economists to get us out of this hollow mould of neoliberal economics and its bastard child, managerialism – the cost-benefit analysis and value-added gibberish that has made most people's working lives a mockery of everything they know to value.

Research Excellence Framework

Readers from outside the UK may wish to stop reading at this point, unless they are into schadenfreude. I recommend readers from the UK to sign this petition, which is sponsored by the Universities and College Union (UCU). It relates to the Research Excellence Framework (REF). The following text accompanies the petition; below I add some of my own comments.

The latest proposal by the higher education funding councils is for 25% of the new Research Excellence Framework (REF) to be assessed according to 'economic and social impact'. As academics, researchers and higher education professionals we believe that it is counterproductive to make funding for the best research conditional on its perceived economic and social benefits.

The REF proposals are founded on a lack of understanding of how knowledge advances. It is often difficult to predict which research will create the greatest practical impact. History shows us that in many instances it is curiosity-driven research that has led to major scientific and cultural advances. If implemented, these proposals risk undermining support for basic research across all disciplines and may well lead to an academic brain drain to countries such as the United States that continue to value fundamental research.

Universities must continue to be spaces in which the spirit of adventure thrives and where researchers enjoy academic freedom to push back the boundaries of knowledge in their disciplines.

We, therefore, call on the UK funding councils to withdraw the current REF proposals and to work with academics and researchers on creating a funding regime which supports and fosters basic research in our universities and colleges rather than discourages it.

It is not only the UCU which expressing grave concerns about the REF; universities and societies that represent academic disciplines are also similarly concerned, and I will give examples of these in later posts. For the moment, the REF seems to be doing the impossible, namely to make us feel nostalgic for the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). At least the RAE was exactly that, a research assessment exercise. It did not set out to distort the meanings of the words it uses such as "impact" and "excellence".

The REF -- in its proposed form -- discriminates against theoretical work and imposes an artificial incentive to do work that has short-term economic impact. And you know what? I've got nothing against economic impact. But if a certain kind of research is able to make money, that should be its own reward; government-funded money-making is ridiculous. And just don't call it "research excellence", it's not the same thing.

Some articles

Article in the Independent Against The Grain: 'I didn't become a scientist to help companies profit' by Philip Moriarty

See the comments that follow this article in the Guardian (the comments that get highly-recommended are correct)