The disposable Ph.D

The Economist recently carried an article about how and why Ph.D degrees were losing their sheen. In summary, its argument was basically this:

• Designed to be a programme for preparing candidates for an academic career, there is now an oversupply of Ph.D holders, with the US itself handing 64,000 doctorates every year.
• Given the low stipends/scholarships that bright Ph.D candidates are given, they have become "cheap, highly motivated and disposable labour" that is driving most of the research today, and are being taken for a ride with promises of a better future for the present struggles. The so-called "postdocs" are also victims of this infrastructure, the post itself being a result of an attempt to fix the demand-supply mismatch.
• Does having a Ph.D add value to your career? The Economist says its definitely better than a bachelor's degree, but not much value-addition over a master's - in fact you may be disadvantaged. The Ph.D skills of deep analysis, research are not what today's fast moving markets are looking for. The more qualified a candidate is, the more likely he is to be dissatisfied and de-motivated with the work at hand.

Now, here's what I think on the Economist's viewpoint:

• The demand-supply mismatch argument does not hold in India, since there is a large shortfall of qualified, well-versed academic staff today, while the number of Ph.Ds joining the pool is very small. For example, India produces just about a 100 Ph.Ds in Computer Science today. With globalization, the Indian educational institutions have to achieve higher benchmarks to maintain relevance. This explains the sprouting of new higher educational institutions like the new IITs,IIITs, IISER, and others trying to match them. These have to be manned by qualified faculty. So, we need to have more students pursuing Phds.
• Yet, we don't see too many people pursuing doctorates in India. Why? One, there is no monetary benefit for the long struggle. But that will always be the cost of pursuing anything different, hence that will never deter the really committed. Secondly, there is government apathy of which the zillions of pages have already been written. More importantly, we are not contextualizing and localizing the problems we are solving. We are solving problems defined and relevant to the West, hence neither the potential candidates nor the Indian society at large feels any affinity to the kind of problems tackled as part of the candidate's thesis. So, even the demand exists, the supply doesn't inspire enough confidence in the society. This chain of thought naturally leads to preference for the West by many wannabe candidates.
• Of course, the PhD syllabus needs to reformed. In a fast moving and dynamic world, the course needs to be more flexible. There could be intermediate exit points in the course, for instance.
  
• This seems to be part of the conservative agenda (of which the Economist is the vanguard), that wants to spend lesser and lesser on free and open education, and make the work force pay for job oriented skills. Of course, societies don't run only on markets and there should always be a place for intellectual and artistic pursuits that don't necessarily yield the market any pay-off. Society must always support such endeavours.
  

What Ph.D candidates need to do to weather this storm:

• Information is now ubiquitous, it is not a premium; hence, the days of the informed teacher being highly regarded are gone. However, with the deluge of data, the ability to analyze information, think deeply and synthesize ideas are needed more than ever. Hence Ph.D candidates have to focus more on developing their faculties in this direction. This is anyway part of their brief, but being satisfied with low-hanging fruits like being an authority of a subject will not work in future.
• They must not become super-specialists, limiting their thinking to some restricted domains of thought. After all, it is a doctorate of philosophy, and the spirit of philosophy is to think openly with no restrictions. Creativity depends a lot on cross pollination of ideas from many disciplines.
• There has to be an irreverence to authority and a commitment to be fiercely independent.
  

"Many scientists are scientists because they are afraid of life"

This quote by John Backus, the creator of FORTRAN and the Backus-Naur form inspires this post. This is what Backus had to say in his later years about science and life:

"Many scientists are scientists because they are afraid of life. It's wonderful to be creative in science be use you can do it without clashing with people and suffering the pain of relationships and making your way through the world. It's sort of this aseptic world where you can do exciting things with your faculties, and not encounter any pain. The pain in solving problems is small potatoes compared with the pain you encounter in living.
Introspection is not a scientific activity, it is not repeatable, there are no good theories about how to repeat it, what you expect to find. It's strange that by looking into yourself you really get an appreciation of the mystery of the universe. You don't by trying to find the laws of physics."

Wise words from an old hand, and they ring true. The central idea of any modern science is abstraction, the process of drawing out the essential features that describe and system, while leaving out those which are irrelevant to the goal. Through this abstraction a system is simplified, and the abstraction becomes the basis for a lot of creativity. For eg. Newton abstracted mechanical motion to precisely three laws and this spawned the modern industrial revolution and all its inventions. We now know that Newton's laws cannot explain all phenomena, neither can relativity. The uncertainty principle is a partial acceptance of the fact that everything cannot be explained through abstraction and reason. It's a messy dynamic world out there, at the level of sub atomic particles, where our clean abstractions of matter and energy, wave and particle, force and particle break down. Even our intellect is based on this kind of learning through discrimination, categorisation, and abstraction.

But abstraction is beautiful, which is why the greatest of scientists cherish these abstractions, and adjectives like 'beautiful', 'elegant', 'simple' are applied to great works of science. It is then easy to mistake the abstraction for the 'perfect' and the real for the 'impure'. In essence, one is being afraid, running away from reality - the justification of perfection is only an alibi. This belief in the 'perfection' of abstraction can become fanatical, with disastrous consequences - especially in the social sciences. And so the communist and social Darwinian ideas brought disaster to millions, as the processes of globalisation driven by a fanatical belief in the infallibility of the markets are homogenising an inherently diverse human society.

Can Eucalyptus be the "Lucene" of cloud computing?

Eucalyptus is an open source cloud platform which can be used to create private clouds. It came out of a research project at the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The good thing about it is that it has an open and modular architecture, which means it is perfect for experimenting with different kinds of innovations in cloud computing platform development.

Sounds like Lucene, the open source text search engine that with its extensible design became a vehicle for a lot of innovation in search - leading to innovations like Solr, Nutch, Hadoop, HDFS, etc.Whenever a platform is made open, and its design made modular, extensible - it becomes the hotbed of innovation. That happened with Unix, Linux, and is now happening with Android. Will Eucalyptus take cloud computing there?

PS: Cross-posted from my Peepaal blog post