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Offline someone commented that more than half of the Ph.D. students are foreigners and that the Ph.D. is serving as a funding source. True. But that’s somewhat of a cynical view if you ask me. In any case, you are a young student, and despite reading my blog, you still want to do a Ph.D. Maybe…
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Nice post on Critical Mass today about a researcher who sold his services as co-author on eBay and actually got 50 bids and many phone calls. It would appear that many people, from industry to students, are willing to pay so they can produce high quality scientific content with their names on…
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Tonight, I really feel like the world is changing. The typical problem scientists and scholars in general have is that we need to be able to predict paradigms changes, or at least study them. But how can you know that things are changing while you are in it? Can humans study humans? Well, I’m not…
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People who are happy with whatever operating system they are offered probably find it much easier to change job. When you are a linux addict, it means that you have to secretly install Linux and then reverse-engineer the network configuration so that you can, well, print. This time I installed…
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Job prospects for new Ph.D.s are good?
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Overproduction of Ph.D. a myth?
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I stumbled on a channel setup by Seb called Topic Exchange: Channel ‘invisible_adjunct’. I was an avid reader of the invisible adjunct. For those that don’t know, the invisible adjunct was one of the many Ph.D. holders who have a decent publication record and are in every way competent…
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This time, I found stats for Philosophy Ph.D.s. It would appear that the ratio of candidates to job advertize is shrinking quite a bit. I got this from Leiter Reports. In the same blog, we find evidence that 9 out 10 Philosophy Ph.D.s get a cool middle-class job, assuming they went to…
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According to Owen, or maybe, according to what I understand from his email, overproduction of Ph.D.s is a myth. Schools can’t get decent Ph.D. holders. True. Maybe. Owen has evidence: CRA Stats. More precisely, according to this table, 60% of CS Ph.D. holders go to a Ph.D. granting university (on…
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Does academic research matter? I’m not a very good historian, but I seem to recall that rresearch as we know it arose out of the German model. It proved invaluable at least in the Second World War. Or did it? Of course, Tim Berners-Lee owe to academic research some of the ideas that lead to the…
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Universities survive because they are political beasts. Most (canadian) universities would have to close down if the government killed its support. By itself, this only means that I expect universities not to gain any funding in the coming years… However, one can worry about a few…