1. For those interested in maximum likelihood estimation techniques, Vincent Granville discusses the method of steepest ascent in relation to Google's search algorithm.
2. The Economist: "Only a few fast-developing countries, such as Brazil and China, now seem short of PhDs."
3. U.S. Council of Graduate Schools: The Ph.D. Completion Project
4. Yesterday it was announced that Irish property prices fell back to 2002 levels in 2010, according to reports from MyHome.ie and Sherry Fitzgerald; so it is interesting to read this SSISI paper (2007) by P.J. Drudy which "argues that Ireland’s housing problems stem in part from a particular philosophical orientation which supports the 'commodification' of housing".
5. The (U.K.) Royal Statistical Society "Get Stats" Campaign: 'giving everyone the skills and confidence to use numbers well'.
6. Researchers at Harvard have found a way of using the iPhone to measure people’s moods and have found a correlation between daydreaming and unhappiness.
7. The new Happiness Index to gauge Britain's national mood.
8. The regional impacts of Northern Irish HEIs.
9. Tom McKenzie and Dirk Sliwka: Universities as Stakeholders in their Students' Careers: On the Benefits of Graduate Taxes to Finance Higher Education.
10. CNN Money: Should companies offer sabbaticals?
11. Damien Mulley: "Failure" and Enterprise Culture in Ireland.
Showing posts with label PhD Degrees. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PhD Degrees. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Links of Interest: 29th September
1. President Barack Obama chose Austan Goolsbee to succeed Christina Romer as the head of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers. Here, the Wall Street Journal do a profile of Goolsbee.
2. The Guardian: a "nudge unit" set up by David Cameron in the Cabinet Office is working on how to use behavioural economics and market signals to persuade citizens to behave in a more socially integrated way.
3. The Daily Telegraph on Rory Sutherland's quiet behavioural economics revolution in the advertising industry.
4. Greatest Good: "a unique firm formed with the goal of applying rigorous, cutting-edge data analysis and economic methods to the most salient problems of business and philanthropy." Founding partners include Steven Levitt, Gary Becker, Daniel Kahneman and John List. Affiliates include David Laibson, Emily Oster, Steven Pinker and Richard Thaler.
5. The U.S. National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. They have a separate mandate to the Congressional Budget Office. "The Commission is charged with identifying policies to improve the fiscal situation in the medium term and to achieve fiscal sustainability over the long run."
6. A fascinating read for any Ph.D. student in Economics, or Ph.D. economist: 'Market Structure in the Production of Economics Ph.D.s'. Frank A. Scott, Jr. and Jeffrey D. Anstine; Southern Economic Journal Vol. 64, No. 1 (Jul., 1997), pp. 307-320.
7. The (Irish) Department of Education and Skills Inventory of Data Sources: "This document contains a matrix of educational data sources which are available from the Department of Education and Science and the agencies under its aegis."
8. University Attendance Scanners: "Northern Arizona University has installed electronic devices that record student attendance in an effort to boost freshmen grades and lift lagging graduation rates. But some students say the monitoring makes them feel less independent." (Southern California Public Radio).
9. "The Production and Deployment of an On-line Video Learning Bank in a Skills Training Environment" - Gerald Cannon, Mary Kelly, Colette Lyng, Mary McGrath; AISHE-J: The All Ireland Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, Vol 1, No 1 (2009).
10. For economics undergraduates: the Irish Taxation Institute Fantasy Budget Competition. Who needs fantasy football?
2. The Guardian: a "nudge unit" set up by David Cameron in the Cabinet Office is working on how to use behavioural economics and market signals to persuade citizens to behave in a more socially integrated way.
3. The Daily Telegraph on Rory Sutherland's quiet behavioural economics revolution in the advertising industry.
4. Greatest Good: "a unique firm formed with the goal of applying rigorous, cutting-edge data analysis and economic methods to the most salient problems of business and philanthropy." Founding partners include Steven Levitt, Gary Becker, Daniel Kahneman and John List. Affiliates include David Laibson, Emily Oster, Steven Pinker and Richard Thaler.
5. The U.S. National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. They have a separate mandate to the Congressional Budget Office. "The Commission is charged with identifying policies to improve the fiscal situation in the medium term and to achieve fiscal sustainability over the long run."
6. A fascinating read for any Ph.D. student in Economics, or Ph.D. economist: 'Market Structure in the Production of Economics Ph.D.s'. Frank A. Scott, Jr. and Jeffrey D. Anstine; Southern Economic Journal Vol. 64, No. 1 (Jul., 1997), pp. 307-320.
7. The (Irish) Department of Education and Skills Inventory of Data Sources: "This document contains a matrix of educational data sources which are available from the Department of Education and Science and the agencies under its aegis."
8. University Attendance Scanners: "Northern Arizona University has installed electronic devices that record student attendance in an effort to boost freshmen grades and lift lagging graduation rates. But some students say the monitoring makes them feel less independent." (Southern California Public Radio).
9. "The Production and Deployment of an On-line Video Learning Bank in a Skills Training Environment" - Gerald Cannon, Mary Kelly, Colette Lyng, Mary McGrath; AISHE-J: The All Ireland Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, Vol 1, No 1 (2009).
10. For economics undergraduates: the Irish Taxation Institute Fantasy Budget Competition. Who needs fantasy football?
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
The Simpsons on Grad School
I posted before about the Simpsons clip: "Bart, Don't Make Fun of Grad. Students, They Just Made a Terrible Life Choice". Thanks to Svetlana Batrakova for pointing out that there is a YouTube compilation of "comments made by The Simpsons about PhDs and grad students". See below!
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Best Practice Guidelines for PhD Programmes
The Irish Universities Quality Board in Ireland issued this document last year. It spells out best practice guidelines for PhD programmes. It is worth looking at. From my purely on-the-ground perspective as someone involved in supervising students, the committee structure is certainly an improvement on the standard one-to-one structure, particularly where a student wants a primary supervisor with particular topic expertise but also wants a supervisor who can advise on other technical aspects. For example, a committee structure makes it possible for a student with a clear behavioural economics thesis to have a co-supervisor specialising in GIS and other examples like that. Similarly, the emphasis on encouraging PhD students to present work, attempt to publish and so on is all useful.
Having said that, I am still left with a feeling that what ultimately determines PhD success is a combination of the intelligence of the candidate, their intrinsic motivation, the extent to which their supervisor is working on a good area, the social norms existing in the research group and department and other things that are just hard to define in terms of these guidelines. Perhaps an emphasis on adherence to guidelines and monitoring of them may be harmless in terms of helping those who are having a bad experience with their supervisors and spotting "rogue" departments, without hindering groups who simply have found their own formula for gelling their research group together and producing good researchers.
Yet I do wonder sometimes what we might be communicating to students by getting them to regularly write down whether they have met a series of milestones such as transferrable skills training and so on. There is some risk that the message will be that following the instructions is what doing a PhD is about. Similarly, the idea that transferrable skills, such as communicating to policymakers, can be taught in a linear fashion is something that needs to be looked at. Particularly for social scientists, developing a policy orientation is as much a matter of deep level personal development as it is a skill. Some of the training can aid this (e.g. I certainly encourage people to take a presentation class) but at some stage the residual term that lies outside these production functions needs to kick in, with elements such as belief, intrinsic motivation, creativity and so on being given the seriousness they merit. These things are harder to measure and harder to develop "guidelines" for but should not be ignored when thinking about policy in this areas.
Having said that, I am still left with a feeling that what ultimately determines PhD success is a combination of the intelligence of the candidate, their intrinsic motivation, the extent to which their supervisor is working on a good area, the social norms existing in the research group and department and other things that are just hard to define in terms of these guidelines. Perhaps an emphasis on adherence to guidelines and monitoring of them may be harmless in terms of helping those who are having a bad experience with their supervisors and spotting "rogue" departments, without hindering groups who simply have found their own formula for gelling their research group together and producing good researchers.
Yet I do wonder sometimes what we might be communicating to students by getting them to regularly write down whether they have met a series of milestones such as transferrable skills training and so on. There is some risk that the message will be that following the instructions is what doing a PhD is about. Similarly, the idea that transferrable skills, such as communicating to policymakers, can be taught in a linear fashion is something that needs to be looked at. Particularly for social scientists, developing a policy orientation is as much a matter of deep level personal development as it is a skill. Some of the training can aid this (e.g. I certainly encourage people to take a presentation class) but at some stage the residual term that lies outside these production functions needs to kick in, with elements such as belief, intrinsic motivation, creativity and so on being given the seriousness they merit. These things are harder to measure and harder to develop "guidelines" for but should not be ignored when thinking about policy in this areas.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)