too much education

UPDATE: I’ve found a few spelling and other errors and have corrected them.  Doubtless others exist but I have corrected enough of them to warrant announcing the corrections.

I’ve just started reading “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” (amazon, The Atlantic review).  The book is about an Adjunct professor and how the proliferation of adjunct professors harms students, the professors and the system.

The extra adjunct profs are needed because of an artificial demand for college degrees for jobs that don’t particularly need them.  They aren’t “real professors” and their work typically won’t help them become real professors either.  They are an artificial supply created to handle this artificial demand with no one but the university profiting from the arrangement.

Hereabouts, In the Herald there is an article about “people who are highly educated but economically inactive”.  I foolishly thought the article would be about highly educated housewives.  Korea is still a land where married women choose to stay at home.

No, it is about people unwilling to look for work they didn’t train for:

Presumably, many of those economically inactive people have given up the idea of actively seeking employment when jobs available to them are considered to be beneath them. They are often referred to as “discouraged” workers.

Decent jobs are not easily created at a time when colleges and universities are sending out an increasing number of graduates each year. When such jobs are not available, discouraged graduates simply give up, rendering the high level of education they have received useless.

Many Koreans overeducate themselves out of the job market, with more than 80 percent of high school graduates being admitted to colleges or universities each year. The ratio soared from 33.2 percent in 1990 to 83 percent in 2009 ― a phenomenon often referred to as “inflation in education.” 

If you read the original Herald article, there is a strange paragraph about how companies – out of the goodness of their hearts- should create jobs for these university graduates – simply because they should and apparently have the money.

Anyway, Professor X (the anonymous author of Basement) describes the expectations the university has for his students – they should be able to find work with the training he gives but also be prepared and with the skills needed to advance to graduate degrees in their fields.   The business of the US government is business and the business of professors is apparently to make more professors.

Which brings us to three articles from Nature on PhDs.

In Rethinking PhDs, Allison McCook writes:

“Most of them are not going to make it.” That was the thought that ran through Animesh Ray’s mind 15 years ago, as he watched excellent PhD students — including some at his own institution, the University of Rochester in New York — struggle to find faculty positions in academia, the only jobs they had ever been trained for. Some were destined for perpetual postdoctoral fellowships; others would leave science altogether.

Within a few years, the associate professor was in a position to do something about it. A stint in a start-up company in California had convinced him that many PhD graduates were poor at working in teams and managing shifting goals, the type of skills that industrial employers demand. So he started to develop a programme that would give students at Keck Graduate Institute (KGI) in Claremont, California, these skills. “I was determined not to have to keep watching scientists struggle to find the jobs they were trained to do.”

In The PhD Factory, David Cyranoski and others write about the rising popularity of doctorates:

Scientists who attain a PhD are rightly proud — they have gained entry to an academic elite. But it is not as elite as it once was. The number of science doctorates earned each year grew by nearly 40% between 1998 and 2008, to some 34,000, in countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The growth shows no sign of slowing: most countries are building up their higher-education systems because they see educated workers as a key to economic growth (see ‘The rise of doctorates’). But in much of the world, science PhD graduates may never get a chance to take full advantage of their qualifications.

Japan’s case may relate well to Korea’s:

In the 1990s, the government set a policy to triple the number of postdocs to 10,000, and stepped up PhD recruitment to meet that goal. The policy was meant to bring Japan’s science capacity up to match that of the West — but is now much criticized because, although it quickly succeeded, it gave little thought to where all those postdocs were going to end up.

Academia doesn’t want them: the number of 18-year-olds entering higher education has been dropping, so universities don’t need the staff. Neither does Japanese industry, which has traditionally preferred young, fresh bachelor’s graduates who can be trained on the job. 

Mark Taylor in Reform the PhD System or Close It Down continues the call for change:

The system of PhD education in the United States and many other countries is broken and unsustainable, and needs to be reconceived. In many fields, it creates only a cruel fantasy of future employment that promotes the self-interest of faculty members at the expense of students. The reality is that there are very few jobs for people who might have spent up to 12 years on their degrees.

Most doctoral-education programmes conform to a model defined in European universities during the Middle Ages, in which education is a process of cloning that trains students to do what their mentors do. The clones now vastly outnumber their mentors. The academic job market collapsed in the 1970s, yet universities have not adjusted their admissions policies, because they need graduate students to work in laboratories and as teaching assistants.

Teaching assistants.  They would be similar to adjunct professors, right?

The three articles do suggest ways to improve the system.  Most involve cross-disciplinary degrees and work on real-world problems.  “Provid(ing) clean water to a growing population” is a one example.  Cyranoski also suggested cross-ocean degrees (‘cross-ocean’ is my term) where students might study at an American and a British university with two advisors in two disciplines.  The fact that neither advisor was fully in charge would require the student to take more control of his work.

Rethinking PhDs and The PhD Factory are also available as PDFs at the links above.

I have worked at two universities in Korea.  The first was perhaps at the third tier and the current one is rising through the ranks rapidly (according to their own PR).  Both seem more like three- and four- year technical schools.  My students don’t learn biology, they learn bio-tech; I don’t think there is a computer science program but there is a computer game design major…  One student in a Police Administration program told me she was interested in continuing to a PhD in Pol Admin (and she seemed smart and capable enough) and the other students looked surprised.  I had thought this technical school focus was wrong.  I have nothing against such schools but felt, from the way my university worked, twenty-something years ago, that such College style training was improper for University.  Clearly, I need to rethink this.

—

Added later: Possibly related: Tom the Dancing Bug explores For Profit Universities.

Added later still: By 2014, there will be more administrators than instructors at some US colleges.

I want to agree with this guy, but…

Roar Sheppard (poor guy, his parents doomed him from the start) is a “New Humanity Culture leader” and director of the Overseas Seon Culture Life Museum.

In an article for the Korea Times, he writes about the earthquake in Japan and links it to other recent natural disasters.  Then:

I wanted to ask nature, what is the reason for abnormal conditions of the Earth to appear all of a sudden? This was the answer I received.

How can we say all of these are separate phenomena? The one organism, the Earth is showing the signs here and there. Human death and shortage of grains ― these are only the result. Take a look at the fundamentals that are giving rise to these.

What is the present condition of the Earth? When people and nature are uprooted from their homes like in Japan, swept away by extreme rains in Pakistan, how do you think the Earth feels which is the basis of all of these?

and

If you live on the Earth ― no ― if you are a being with a heart, when you stare at the Earth in this situation, you should wail. Are glaciers melting? Do you know what it will cause to the Earth? It means the immune system and basic circulation of the Earth is collapsing.

If your digestive system has a disorder even slightly, you can’t perform normal activity, can you? Even though the Earth has serious disorders in all of its organs, especially serious damage in essential organs, it is still circulating its blood here and there to send nutrition even now. That is nature.

I sorta agree that we need to take better care of the Earth, but even my so-common-it’s-cliched phrase bothers me.  Whatever happens to humans or living things, the Earth will be okay.  Well, as okay as any inanimate, non-responsive, non-thinking thing can be.  A big rock is okay, after all, even after you break it.  It is now in two pieces but the change doesn’t matters to the rock.

There are some useful lies out there.  Perhaps belief in Santa does make kids better behaved in December and the companies that make Christmas donations to charity might not if there were no Santa.

… I’ve decided to leave religion out of this argument as much as I can.  The author is director of a Buddhist organization so I have to bring it up but I guess I don’t need to connect it with useful lies.

Anyway, there are useful lies and metaphors can carry important ideas.  If we think of the Earth as a living thing that we need to better care for, perhaps we will behave better: we might, for example, work to reduce fossil-fuel use, fight acid rain and other forms of pollution, and be more careful of just how much we harvest out of the ocean.

So long as we keep in mind that we are only discussing a metaphor and not truly thinking of the Earth as sentient, I am satisfied.

However, Roar continues in the same vein and overworks the metaphor – if it is, indeed, a metaphor for him.  I do not believe it is.

However, it is not that the Earth will just watch humans do this forever, because the Earth also has to maintain its balance as a member of the universe.

The events happening now are nothing in fact. It’s already in the state where the balance has begun to crack, and the imbalance will only speed it up and the rate will get even faster.

Even though you know we are headed toward a cliff, we can say it’s a runaway car that cannot be stopped. Please understand the Earth’s situation where it has no choice but to take action.

I’ve questioned in the past whether I let Buddhism get away with such claims, as I do not offer such latitude in my consideration of Christian claims,  but this is far enough into the realm of science that reading it bugs me.  How much does it bug me?  Enough to break my nearly month-long silence on this blog, that’s how much!

Anyway, in addition to disliking Roar’s statements even as metaphor, I also dislike them if uncritically accepted.  I imagine an angry mob with pitchforks driving them into the ground while chanting, “Earthquake, huh?  Take that, jerk.”  After all, if we accept the Earth is actually deliberately quaking or that the previous quakes, and other entirely explainable-through-meteorology natural disasters were twitches of a waking beast and could deliberately quake again, we should obviously be ready to counter attack or try to blackmail the Earth into good behavior.

I am an environmentalist but I can only see improvement in our situation coming through better education, but nightmarish threats of the Earth itself fighting against us don’t help.

My mother may see the start of the next millennium!

Scientific American has an article online with the title Walking Speed Predicts Life Expectancy of Older Adults. I seem to be unable to post a link – here it is to be copied and pasted: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=walking-speed-survival

From the Article:

A new analysis of walking speed studies shows that—down to the tenth of a meter per second—an older person’s pace, along with their age and gender, can predict their life expectancy just as well as the complex battery of other health indicators.

So instead of a doctor assessing a patient’s blood pressure, body mass index, chronic conditions, hospitalization and smokinghistory and use of mobility aids to estimate survival, a lab assistant could simply time the patient walking a few meters and predict just as accurately the person’s likelihood of living five or 10 more years—as well as a median life expectancy.

My mother has always been a fast walker and this is heartening news for a son who lives too far away.

To heck with the customer.

The Joongang has an article about eating octopus and the amount of cadmium in octopus heads.

First, it should be clear and obvious that fish and other predators, like octopi, will carry more harmful chemicals than herbivores will.  This is true for chemicals that don’t dissolve in water and accumulate in fatty tissue.  DDT is the most famous of these chemicals, but many pesticides and other compounds also have the same characteristics.   A small fish or shrimp contains a small amount of whatever poison.  A larger fish eats ten small fish and now has ten times the poison.  An octopus eats ten of these larger fish and now has one hundred times the poison of the original small fish.  Eating predators is a risky business.

So, the title of the article, “Can octopus heads be hazardous to your health?”, is quickly and easily answered.

The response from restaurateurs and fishermen is more interesting:

The government says two is the maximum, because of heavy cadmium levels found in local and imported octopuses. But that has infuriated restaurateurs and fishermen in South Jeolla, who say the government’s warning has cost them a bundle in lost sales.

…

A group of 30 fishermen from Muan in South Jeolla met Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon on Oct. 8 and threatened to sue the city government if it didn’t offer an official apology and compensation for business losses.

And how did the mayor of Seoul react?

Mayor Oh apologized for causing losses but explained, “The intent of the research was to inform people of the health risks of eating internal organs of octopus heads, and it didn’t mean people shouldn’t eat octopus.”

Oh promised he will come up with measures to encourage people to eat octopus to minimize fishermen’s losses.

…

To mend fences with the fishermen, the city government named Oct. 20 as “Seoul Nakji Day” (nakji is Korean for octopus) and served nakji bibimbap, rice mixed with vegetables and stir-fried octopus, for yesterday’s lunch menu at the Seoul City Hall cafeteria for 1,800 civil servants. But the cafeteria removed the internal organs from the octopus heads.

The last point is informative and also interesting.  You might ask what internal organs are in octopus heads, aside from brains?  Well, the ‘head’ is the internal organ sack -the body- of the octopus and holds most of what we have in our chest and stomach.

From Pharyngula:

Right away, you should notice one major peculiarity: the gut runs through the middle of it, separating the brain into a supra- and sub-esophogeal ganglion.

The guts run right through the brain.  Among these internal organs are ones with a higher fat percentage than the body in general; removing these greatly decreases the harmful chemical load one takes in by eating the animal.

So, eat octopus if you want but keep a suspicious mind about those fisherman who only want you to eat it without concern for what lies inside.

A recurring message this year

That message is that the most important factor in a child’s education is the teacher.  Having a good teacher is far more important than a high-tech classroom, for example.

The LA Times gets specific and names names.  Some teachers have egg on their face.  One of the examples given is for ‘John Smith’ which sounds like a pseudonym, but apparently is not.

From my new blog-crush, Marginal Revolution:

After a single year with teachers who ranked in the top 10% in effectiveness, students scored an average of 17 percentile points higher in English and 25 points higher in math than students whose teachers ranked in the bottom 10%. Students often backslid significantly in the classrooms of ineffective teachers, and thousands of students in the study had two or more ineffective teachers in a row…

I don’t blame the unions for being up in arms and I feel for the teachers, for some of them this is going to be a shock and an embarrassment. We cannot simultaneously claim, however, that teachers are vitally important for the future of our children and also that their effectiveness should not be measured.  As systems like this become more common students will benefit enormously and so will teachers.

The innocence of vaccine concerns here.

I follow science and pseudo-science news and am concerned by the increase these days of pseudo-science.

I recently saw an article title, “Inoculation fever for young children rising” and feared that the anti-vaxxer crazies had gotten a foothold in Korea (second link is to an anti-anti-vaxxer website).

No, the Korean article is about where people are choosing to get their children inoculated.  It seems people are going to private clinics rather than public health centres.  Both places use the same vaccine and the only difference is the price -free at the public location.

Indeed, there are no concerns about the safety of the vaccines themselves (the first link):

A mother of a 21-month-old daughter said, “Over the last six months, I spent more than 300,000 won (252 dollars) on vaccinations,” adding, “I went only to private hospitals since I didn’t have much knowledge of vaccinations.”One expert says, however, “Vaccinations cause no harm. If the chance of getting a disease is low, however, children don’t necessarily need to be inoculated against the disease.”

The North American vaccines =  autism people, by contrast, are all about the dangers of the vaccines (from the second link).

These are some of the ingredients antivaxxers claim are in vaccines:

• anti-freeze(ethylene glycol): NO. There is no anti-freeze in vaccines. There is a compound in vaccines, however, with an awfully long name that starts with polyethylene glycol p blahblahblah. This is what confused them. But as the error has been pointed out to them, time and time again, they persist in wilfully misleading the public with the scary ANTI-FREEZE!
• aborted fetal tissue: No. Vaccines do not contain aborted fetal tissue. A long, long time ago (the 1960’s) some cell lines were cultured from aborted fetuses. That much is true. What is not true, and once again has been pointed out to the antivax liars, TIME AND TIME AGAIN, is that vaccines do not (in fact, cannot) contain human tissue in any way, shape or form! Ask any blood donor recipient or transplant patient about that.
• Thimerosol(mercury): this toxic substance, harmful in any amount, causes autism and a host of other disorders (according to antivaxxers). The truth is, however, a lot more encouraging. Mercury is not in all vaccines, and if present, is in minute traces of the less toxic variety. You get more mercury from a single can of tuna than in all vaccines combined. Relax. And still eat tuna.

UPDATED TWO MINUTES LATER: Tall guy writes has a webcomic describing some of the history of the anti vaccine movement (one page below – total comic is 15 ‘pages’ -one scrollable webpage).

becoming or staying slim

When I visit my hometown, I see giant people climb out of giant cars (or SUVS, mostly).  Here, in Busan, but also in Korea generally, I see slim people and the younger they are – to young adulthood – the taller they are.

While I don’t have any news about how or why the generation entering the workforce is the tallest I’ve seen in Korea (I figure it is the increased amount of protein in their diets), I just read an interesting post about land-use in cities correlated to obesity.  The results aren’t startling, but until a test or two are done, it isn’t really known.

In “Walking and Obesity: the City Life and the Country Life“, Sci reports on a journal article that tracked 10,000 people in and around Atlanta, Georgia.

The people living in areas with maximally diverse land-use (residential, commercial and etc) were most likely to be slim, while those in single-use areas (think suburban residential) were more likely to be obese.

1) The more the land use is mixed where you are, the less of a probability you have of being obese. This is presumably related to walking more, but the correlation was only effective for African-American females.

2) The more you walk, the less probability you have of being obese.

3) The more time you spend in a car, the MORE probability you have of being obese.

Sounds pretty simple, don’t it? But this isn’t the easiest thing. Many people HAVE to drive to work, and often do not have enough leisure time outside of it to make up the car time with other physical activity. In addition, many people will walk more when they have somewhere to go, and suburban residential neighborhoods don’t really go in for that kind of thing. But it DOES provide some interesting data for people looking to plan new residential communities. If you make things more walkable (especially work and necessities), maybe people will walk more, and maybe that will translate to smaller probabilities of obesity and improvements in health. Maybe those people planning those overly picturesque walkable communities are on to something.

As I understand it, in suburban places where it is safe to walk, there is little nearby to walk to.  I don’t know if the neighborhood I grew up in on Muskoka Road 14 could be called suburban, but if we wanted to go to the convenience store, we had to drive.

And yet, we were fairly serious walkers.  Some studies show that families that eat together are closest, that sharing meal time means having good discussion time.  I don’t know, but walking to Finch’s gravelpit and to Sharp’s Creek was what I remember most about being together as a family (we also had nearly every dinner together).  Did I complain about how boring it was, I wonder?  Certainly, there was usually nothing on the TV, on the two channels we received.

Hmm, more stream-of-semi-consciousness.  Perhaps that’s what separates this blog from Gangwon Notes.

Anyway, everything is walking distance in Korea.  I now have a car and use it nearly everyday, but I really don’t need to.  A lot of the time, not driving is more convenient – no parking problems.

I guess it’s time to leave the car at home.  Well, tomorrow; it’s bedtime now.