In the last year of so of grad school, several of my fellow students at a similar stage in the program started doing “paper swaps” before a big deadline. This was an awesome idea brought to us by @jennthom. Each person who was submitting a paper agreed to review at least one other paper, in exchange for feedback on their own paper. This brilliant plan had many benefits: it encouraged each of us to finish things a *little* bit earlier than we would have otherwise, we got to learn more about what our colleagues were working on, and of course we both received feedback on our own papers and got to practice giving feedback to others. The main drawback was that it created more work at an already busy time.

An added benefit not obvious at first was that when it came time to write rebuttals to reviews for submitted papers, we had a group of people who were familiar enough with the papers in question that we could read each others’ reviews and make suggestions for the rebuttals. The great thing about this group of people was that it seemed like nobody was overly sensitive about sharing their reviews — and I think that this was a great learning too for all of us.

I have two questions based on this reflection about paper swaps and sharing reviews, and I’d love feedback if anybody happens to notice this post and wants to share:

1. How do I get something like this started at a new institution? I think what we did in grad school worked because we were a fairly small group who both trusted each other to be helpful, and were in serious need of feedback. I certainly learned a LOT from the experience, and think it would be super valuable for other students to participate in something similar. But how do I convince people the extra work is worth it, and that there is nothing to fear from sharing reviews? To that end, I am perfectly willing to share my own reviews on both accepted and rejected papers, which brings me to my next question…

2. Is it appropriate to share publicly, like on the Internets, reviews for one’s own papers? Would it just be too confusing for people if there were multiple versions of a paper, or even papers that never ended up being published, available on an author’s website along with the accepted papers (even if there were a separate page for them or something)? Would anyone even be interested in seeing these things? Also, do reviewers expect that what they write will be held in confidence? Personally, I always write reviews (and everything else for that matter) as if I am writing for an unknown, public audience — it is so easy to share these things, you never know who might see them. And I don’t want to say anything in a review that I would be unwilling to say to someone in person. I just have no idea how others feel about this.

I have to admit, I don’t really “get” Q&A sites. Who are these people that ask questions like, “what is $16 and $8.50 american become in canadian?“, “why do people believe biggie is better than tupac?” and “My turtle has broken his hand? Please Help!!!?” — all from the front page of Yahoo answers. Why do people seem to believe they will get informative, useful answers from random folks on the Internet? Do very many people receive satisfactory answers this way? I know that when Yahoo! Answers appear my search results, they are never helpful for me.

One might argue that Facebook users are already asking and answering questions, via the status updates and comments that are already supported. So what’s the point of “Facebook Questions”? I think there are two:

- By choosing to post a question in “Facebook Questions” rather than as a status update, users are essentially adding metadata to what otherwise would be a status update post, informing Facebook that the contents of this post are a question or an answer. If the question had been asked as a normal status update post, it would be very hard for Facebook to automatically determine whether a status update was in fact a question or an answer. Marking something as a question or an answer makes the information that much more useable for data mining and search.

- Because posts to “Facebook Questions” are public by default (unlike status update posts which can be protected), Facebook has invented a way to circumvent privacy controls for a certain class of posts, allowing them to build up a corpus that could generate more ad revenue, and might even be data others would pay to use.

The question I have, then, is this. It seems pretty clear why Facebook would want people to use “Facebook Questions”. But why would Facebook’s users choose to post their questions to a bunch of strangers this way, rather than doing what they are already doing — posing questions to their friends via their status updates? I guess “if you build it they will come” has pretty much been true for Facebook so far… but it is hard for me to imagine what would motivate people to change their behavior in this way. What’s in it for them?

The moment we found out Asher was missing, I put together a flyer and started sending it around via the Internets. This included emailing a copy of the flyer to the kennel, with the request that they start posting it in the surrounding area immediately.

The kennel’s interactions with us have been, shall we way, less than truthful throughout all this. For example, when asked why they didn’t tell us the dog was missing until after three days had gone by, employees told my parents “we didn’t want to ruin your vacation” rather than saying something more believably self-interested like “we were hoping we would find him and never have to tell you that we lost him”. They also called around to animal shelters after Asher disappeared claiming he belonged to one of their employees rather than giving my sister’s name and number, so they didn’t have to tell people this whole situation is their fault. The kennel employees are clearly concerned about the reputation of the business.

So, I was surprised and puzzled to discover, when I arrived in WI, that the kennel actually had sent employees out to post the flyer we’d emailed to them. I came across a few pet stores and vet offices that were already displaying our “lost dog” flyers, and thought, why would they have done this? Isn’t it just publicizing their mistake??

Turns out, we seem to have unintentionally created an incentive for the kennel to help us get the word out about Asher. The flyer we put together identifies the kennel by name, and indicates that they are responsible for losing the dog. They don’t want bad publicity, so it was in their interest to post as many copies as possible of an *altered* version of the flyer—a version that didn’t include their name or implicate them in any way. They basically want to hide the fact that they screwed up, and the best way to do that is to beat us to the flyering with the message THEY wanted to convey.

Unfortunately for them, attention to detail is something my family is pretty good at. It didn’t take us long to notice that some of the flyers posted in places we stopped while *we* were out flyering were in a different font, and the layout wasn’t quite the same, and the text had been altered to remove the name of the kennel. Wherever we saw one of their flyers, we replaced it with one of ours—the original version that implicates the kennel.

So what’s the lesson to be learned here about aligning incentives? Unfortunately, I’m not sure I can articulate one, nor can I claim to have had any idea beforehand that these unintended consequences would arise. It is really hard to see the world through another’s eyes so completely that you can predict what will motivate them to do stuff… I would have guessed the kennel would just have refused to put up the flyers entirely.

And, we still haven’t found Asher… but we received a call late Friday night that someone had seen him a few minutes before, not more than a couple miles from the kennel. So he’s definitely still out there… hopefully we’ll find him today!

The distinction between expert and newbie riders important because there’s a hidden process to boarding an Amtrak train at Union Station, or at least, to boarding the train I ride frequently. Tickets on this train don’t come with seat assignments—it’s general admission, kindof like Southwest Airlines used to be before they started giving people numbers for standing in line. This train tends to be full, but not completely booked to capacity, so it is possible for some people, but not everyone, to end up with their own seat. This is a highly desirable outcome, especially if you plan to get any work done en route. It can be quite distracting and unpleasant to be stuck with someone next to you for the entire 4.5 hour trip who talks (loudly) on their phone, or smells funny, or snores.

If you spend a lot of time in this train station, like I have, you start to notice certain things. For example, the expert riders pay close attention to the boarding doorway starting about 45-50 minutes before the train is scheduled to depart. The Amtrak equivalent of the “gate attendant” won’t call for boarding for another 20 minutes, but the expert riders know that their best chance of winding up sitting alone is to be at the very front of the line when it starts to form. It tends to happen pretty quickly, and in a self-organizing kind of way. One second there’s no line, and the next everyone is moving toward the doorway.

Getting on early ensures that you have time before the car starts to fill up to spread your stuff out and look *really* busy, and cranky, before the seat next to you is one of the few empties remaining. If you’re lucky, asking you to make room will be just uncomfortable enough for people that they’ll choose somewhere else to sit—and there will be enough “somewhere else’s” for everyone such that the empty seat next to you stays empty. I always feel guilty behaving so impolitely. But, after a couple of trips where I couldn’t get anything done due to an annoying seat-mate, I’ve accepted that it is SO worth it to be rude.

What was interesting about my most recent experience at the train station was that most people in the waiting area didn’t seem to know about this hidden boarding procedure, and as a result, the ~10 of us who seemed to be the expert riders were in line for quite a while before anybody else noticed. Any other day, this would have been enough to signal to others that they should line up too. But the holiday visitors and students with piles of luggage were oblivious. Or they didn’t know about the relationship between getting on the train early, and ending up with a seat to yourself. Either way, this is all pretty fascinating for someone who spends their day job thinking about how explicit and implicit information conveyed via a social media interface might or might not shape user behavior. When do these signals (or cues, or affordances, or whatever you want to call them) work, and when don’t they?

It’s an SVG image, so if you’re having problems viewing it try using a more recent browser version. It works for me in both the latest Safari and Firefox. See both the 2008 and 2009 wordles, big.

“It’s partly a coping mechanism,” Dr. Ratanawongsa said. “We tell ourselves that we can do everything but not at the same time, so we are going to put off the thing that defines us as a person — time with children, running a marathon, painting, playing music — in order to get trained because being a doctor is also rewarding.”

That delayed gratification works well initially because residents believe it is only temporary. “A lot of what matters to residents at this time is the sense that they are learning to care for patients well and growing as doctors. They feel that what they are doing is going to be worth it.”

But when the imbalance persists for longer than initially expected, professional growth is not enough to sustain most young doctors. “The ones who are happier,” Dr. Ratanawongsa observed, “are the ones who have held on to one or two things and have said, ‘I’m not just another resident. I play the guitar, I run races, or I go home to family.’ They don’t do these things to the same extent as they did before residency, but they do them enough to maintain a sense of self.”

Residents who don’t find this balance are at risk of burnout, clinical depression or, more commonly, subtle forms of stress. “These residents may feel that even if they can give excellent care most of the time, there are times when they snap at a patient or don’t order a test fast enough because they are so burnt out.”

here’s a link to the paper referred to in the article (i think)

i’ve been using this service called RescueTime for the past several weeks as a way to track my hours for different projects i am working on, and as an indicator of my productivity in general. basically, you install a little app on your computer, and it sends data about what applications are active to the RescueTime server. you can log in and see reports of how much time you are spending looking at which apps and web pages (for $8/mo. you can get reports broken down by window title, not just application).

i have been happy to learn that i don’t “waste” as much time as i might have thought. but this past week isn’t a very accurate indication of my normal work habits. i went from notes and graphs to a 10-page ACM-format paper in a week:

(click for animated gif showing May 26 – June 1)

it’s nice to see that i’ve still “got it”, i guess. but that was not a fun week.

i highly recommend RescueTime, if like me you want to be more meta about how you spend your time, and like looking at data.

Sheldon & Lyubomirsky (2006). How to increase and sustain positive emotion: The effects of expressing gratitude and visualizing best possible selves. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 1(2): 73–82

Murray, Holmes & Griffin (1996). The Self-Fulfilling Nature of Positive Illusions in Romantic Relationships: Love Is Not Blind, but Prescient. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 7 I, No. 6, 1155-1180

Lyubomirsky, King & Diener (2005). The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success? Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 131, No. 6, 803– 855

now, take a look at this video in which advice in the same vein as those research findings is dished out on CNN (by someone who is apparently neither a research psychologist or therapist):

the first time i watched it, i got a pretty good laugh out of it. the perky pessimism with which Chatzky says “just fake it” is pretty awesome, and the exchange at the end with the CNN guy is hilarious. the best part, though, is where Chatzky says, “your boss thinks that you’re interviewing, because why else would you be smiling?” uhhh, ok….

but the underlying message, which i think is supposed to be self-empowering, actually ends up being pretty depressing. it’s more like, “so you’re stuck in your miserable job; you have no choice but to stay so you can keep collecting a paycheck. but if you pretend to like it maybe it won’t suck as much!” sounds hard to believe, doesn’t it?

the article begins…

I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else. (emphasis added)

i know exactly how she felt, and i doubt it is the same kind of “feeling stupid” the author of the article later describes…

What makes it difficult is that research is immersion in the unknown. We just don’t know what we’re doing. We can’t be sure whether we’re asking the right question or doing the right experiment until we get the answer or the result. (emphasis added)

i’m just not convinced that these two examples of “feeling stupid” reflect the same kind of experience.

while i appreciate the supportive and simultaneously challenging message the article conveys—that uncomfortable ambiguity is a necessary and unavoidable part of trying to figure out answers to questions that have never been asked before—i believe that conflating these different kinds of “feeling stupid” might actually make it harder, not easier, to talk about how stupid one feels at times.

the author provides a couple examples of other kinds of “feeling stupid”…

I’m not talking about ‘relative stupidity’, in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don’t. I’m also not talking about bright people who might be working in areas that don’t match their talents.

in other words, someone who is lazy and irresponsible might (rightfully?) feel stupid, as might someone out of their depth in the wrong field.

but “feeling stupid” could just as easily stem from inexperience, or challenging the status quo, or being different or marginalized in some way. in grad school, there are many different opportunities to feel stupid, and students (and their advisors) usually aren’t comfortable talking about any of them. i think it is important to talk about it, despite the discomfort and personal risk, so we can all learn from each other and not feel so insecure and isolated.

and, for the record, i wouldn’t equate “immersion in the unknown” with “feeling stupid”. ‘stupidity’ has some very negative connotations, and is usually used to describe the qualities of a person, not a situation. but, that’s just me.

so, in lieu of my own ‘words of wisdom’, here are two links from the NY Times that have me thinking about the job search again today:

Humanities Ph.D.’s Are Anticipating Hard Times – NYTimes.com

“This is a year of no jobs,” said Catherine Stimpson, the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University. Ph.D.s are stacked up, she said, “like planes hovering over La Guardia.”

Why Is Her Paycheck Smaller? – Interactive Graphic – NYTimes.com

Nearly every occupation has the gap — the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between the size of the paycheck brought home by a woman and the larger one earned by a man doing the same job. Economists cite a few reasons: discrimination as well as personal choices within occupations are two major factors, and part of the gap can be attributed to men having more years of experience and logging more hours.