Anna Koop

…we have this Making Light post quoting this article.

Doing the academic integrity survey (here, go do it if you’re a UofA student) was interesting. Every now and then I’m surprised by my own naiveté. I was expecting there to be more shades of grey, but almost all of the suggested things I think of as really dreadful cheating (falsifying research data, claiming someone else’s work as your own, copying without citing).

Anyway, the article mentioned above is about a professional custom paper mill. Apparently there’s quite a bit of money to be had, writing assignments for desperate/illiterate/lazy students. I could never have afforded school that way. And, you know, I’m actually here to learn.

There’s a lot of blaming going on in the comments: it’s the ghostwriters’ fault—no, it’s the professors’ fault—no, the administrators’—no, the system—no, the cheaters alone. It does seem like something is broken, and I don’t know that there’s any one person to blame for the whole problem.

One interesting point. It’s bugged me for quite a while that a university degree is considered prerequisite in inappropriate jobs. Obviously it’s relevant for some positions. But I have seen retail manager postings wanting university degrees. Surely four years of retail experience would be more useful? Or some other people-related interaction? Volunteer work? On-the-job training?

It simultaneously over-values and under-values the degree. It means the piece of paper is more important than the education. It means the piece of paper is more important than related experience.

I wish everyone could get a university education. But I don’t think everyone HAS to. I want there to be a place for practical trades learning, for broad academic grounding, for entry-level jobs with growth potential, for specialization of all kinds. These are different. They serve different needs and different kinds of learning. Smooshing everything into “Require a 4 yr bachelor’s degree” is not helpful.

I love academia, I love being a student, I love research, I love teaching, and I absolutely adore learning. At times this seems completely at odds with the perceived role of universities.

Finely crafted sentences and reams on the implications of every preposition are fun and all, but I think this week is going to about getting the draft in shape, from beginning to end.

Easier to edit than write from scratch, so it’s high time I got an editable draft together. Then others can help me figure out which parts need the Type-A-perfectionism applied.

(NaNo count 15,650. 11k behind NaNo and almost 40k behind original plan. See? A complete draft is in order.)

I’ve spent hours today going over three sentences. The final result?

“The mind tries to predict and control sensorimotor signals.” 9 word sentence, 1,315 words to get there.

“Knowledge is about patterns within sensorimotor data.” 7 word sentence, 1,006 words to get there.

“Predictions about specified behaviours create conceptual knowledge.” 7 word sentence again, 1,527 words to get there.

That’s 0.6% word retention, for those keeping score at home. Every word in each sentence has been looked up, pondered, substituted out and back, and exhaustively analyzed for appropriate connotation and denotation.

And they’re still subject to revision.

I love my work.

From blog posts to presentations to dissertations—why should people bother with you? Be quick and clear about your point.

I recently gave a talk in the Psych department on my research. Overall it went well, but I lost the thread (and a few people) partway through the talk. What was the problem? Not having a succinct summary of my contributions is a big issue. It’s coming, but oh-so-slowly. The other problem was that, although I had a clear outline, I forgot to keep referring back to what my contribution was. Why I was telling this particular group about this smattering of things?

The outline was:
        Introduce the grand question (How do we connect sensorimotor data and conceptual knowledge?)
        Go over some historic attempts at answering this.
        Explain our take (Knowledge is about experience).
        Go through pros and cons of our approach.
        Existing results.
        Future plans.

Around the end of the historic attempts, I forgot to keep referring back to the grand question. I did it a few more times, but not consistently or clearly. As Rich and Leah both commented, I didn’t make it clear that “Knowledge is about experience” was our approach. And I really wasn’t clear about the pros and cons. It’s a nice outline and would have been infinitely stronger if I had kept coming back to our shtick. Succinctly.

Another issue might have been trying to pack too much into a one-hour talk, but that’s a post for a different day.
-=-

Various ways of phrasing this point:
Get to the point clearly and quickly.
Tell people why they should care.
What are you actually doing? State it clearly and refer back to it.

Rob DesJardins’s point—that the research question is like the chorus of the song, and the sections of your talk/proposal are the verses. Keep coming back to the chorus.

Quotes from Rich—
        List your points and make them small enough to hang on to: “Weird thing, weird thing, weird thing”         and then explanation of how those weird things contrast existing things. What they mean.
        “Be firm about your approach.”
        “Be more explicitly comparative.”

TA duties this past week meant I got off to a slow start on my epic thesis goal. However, today I caught up, clocking in at 6,689. I’m aiming to double that, but I’m thinking using NaNoWriMo guidelines as the minimum won’t hurt.

Tomorrow I try to sort out the TA thing once and for all. Vain hope. But other than that commitment, I’m going to sequester myself until the blasted proposal draft is done. No extra meetings or classes or fascinating lectures. It better be done soon.

One of the toughest things about the thesis I’m writing has been word selection. I am constantly battling jargon and reaching for clarity, trying to find the right mix. Sometimes jargon is good—when the concept you’re trying to explain has a label, it’s clear that it’s a thing rather than a random collection of ideas. And the label gives the reader something to hook on to, a clue to the contribution of the work.
        On the other hand, every bit of jargon is another potential barrier to understanding. “Okay, I have to remember that X means this concept here.” Or “Y . . . now what was that again, something important?”. So it matters, keeping to intuitive language.

        Then throw in the “that does not mean what you think it means” dilemma, combined with discipline- and lab-specific nuance, and it’s enough to make you swear off research.

        My current conundrum: “cognition” vs “mind”. I’m most tempted to talk about cognition, but I have a suspicion that mind is more accessible. Neither are consistently defined, both have baggage, both are in the layperson’s dictionary (but cognition is more likely to need looking up).
        
        “Cognition is the act of making sense of sensorimotor data.”
        Rich’s version: “The mind is an information processor.” Though I am not *quite* comfortable with that. It is lovely and concise (and absolutely loaded with philosophical baggage).
        Potential Anna-twist: “The mind is at the centre of a signal exchange between an agent and an environment.” The problem there—mind, signal, agent and environment are all potential jargon, albeit intuitive jargon.

        I’ll get back to you when I decide.

        Edit: “The mind sends and receives signals, and tries to make sense of them.”
        Edit2: “The mind is that bit of [me/an intelligent agent] that sends and receives signals, trying to influence and [make sense of/understand] them.”

        I have a tendency to pack too much into things.

If someone accuses you of acting Xist, and your reaction is “I can’t be Xist! Some of my best friends are X!” perhaps you should consider: “Someone found that Xist? Some of my best friends are X! Have I unintentionally hurt them?”

Just sayin’

I’ve done NaNoWriMo a few years now, and so November is always going to be the writing month for me. Word-count goals, community spirit (Edmonton has a fantastic local chapter for NaNoWriMo), and word wars do wonders for just getting it done.

This year will be a little different. I haven’t completed my 50k words in the last two years, but I have at least started each month with the intention of doing a novel. After my recent writing-revelation, that novels aren’t all that I care about, I’m content to skip the story this year. Someday I will come back to it. But for now, I’m going to stick with the spirit and not the letter, and pose some ridiculous non-fiction goal.

        100,000k of thesis words or bust. Excuse me while I download word-count wallpaper.