Letting Go

The publisher emailed me last week to ask whether it isn’t time to just give up and admit the book is never going to get written. It’s not that I have done no work. I’ve done tons of work multiple times for nearly 10 years. I’ve generated hundreds of pages of text, hundreds of regression analyses, and more than 10,000 graphs. Four years ago I dug down, worked hard, and sent off a partial MS saying “I don’t know if this is a book. If it isn’t, just tell me so and I’ll let it go.” I was encouraged to go on but asked a question that led me to another round of analysis and a whole new set of findings and a totally different understanding of the main story. Two years ago there was another crisis: the publisher said  it has to be finished by September or we’ll pull the plug. I dug down, did another revision of another partial MS and sent it off, again saying, I don’t know if this is a book. Maybe we should just give up. Nearly a year ago we had a “book meeting.” The basic response was: This isn’t a book. There is too much information, we don’t want all those details.  It was pretty frustrating to hear that four years after I’d said that. I said I’d think about whether I could reshape things to pull the main narrative out. There is a narrative in there, but it is  hard to see how it hangs together into a single simple story. And I’ve done this so many times, I just don’t think I can do it again. I’m tired of it.

I think it’s time to pull the plug, to salvage the fragments of what I’ve done and put them out in other ways. But it is hard to do. It is hard to decide that I’ve wasted so much of my time for the past 10 years working on a project that will never see the light of day. I can’t make myself send the email. I have to sit with this for a while.

Lessons learned.

For the publisher: don’t give a contract for a book to someone who has never written a book unless there is already a set of articles to build on or a good draft manuscript and outline.  I’ve got (or used to have) a good track record as an article writer, but I have no track record as a book writer. My one book is a collection of articles and that was delivered five years late. Books and articles are different kinds of products and being good at writing one of them does not make you good at writing the other.

For the writer: don’t accept a contract for a book unless you know you can deliver it. It’s been clear for at least 8 years that I had no clear conception of what “the book” would be, and trying to write a book without a clear conception of the product is a recipe for disaster.

And another lesson. Academic work has to be shared and communicated to be meaningful.

 

Staff Relations

I’ve gotten involved with a committee on “staff climate” issues at my university. I’d thought this would be mostly about how rude faculty and students are to staff. And this is a real issue. Staff are often treated as part of the furniture (i.e. ignored as people) or as the targets of abuse by faculty or students who want something done and don’t  care about what else the person has to do.

But I’ve also learned that a huge issue is the relation between department staff and central administration staff. Department staff have many different kinds of paperwork to do, do some of them only rarely, and make mistakes. Central administrators are seen as failing to recognize their own inconsistency in how they want things done and as being unhelpful, hostile and even abusive toward department staff. I chatted with a friend about this and learned that he (as a dean) says these issues are endemic, but at his institution they pay central administrative staff well to fix mistakes made by department staff. There is an underlying structural cause of this conflict: faculty and students want decentralized staff who are available to meet our needs in a personalized way, and department staff typically prefer jobs that involve a lot of variety and human interaction.

Another staff issue at our place is frozen [low] salaries and limited career paths.

What about your school? Do you know how the staff feel about their working conditions? And specifically department vs central administration — do you know how that works at your school? Are the relations good or bad? Do you recognize structural/organizational features that help or hurt the situation?

Article Equivalents

I went to a reception yesterday for outstanding women of color at the university. This was a lovely event except that we all had to stand for an hour of awards presentations and keynote. The award winners had all done jaw-dropping amounts of service. The keynoter was a Native American professor whose first career was in journalism. She used the occasion to criticize the academy for failing to give adequate credit for service. She said that diversity is not just a matter of getting darker skins in the place, it is a matter of getting people from different communities who have different priorities. She was arguing that diversifying the institution must include giving greater weight to service in the tenure process, making the “three legs” of the academic stool (teaching, research, service) more evenly balanced. For her and for most women of color, she said, what you do is not just about yourself but about what you contribute to your community. I was reminded of other things I’ve been reading/hearing that confirm the difference between the individualism of White professionals and the family and community focus of other groups. Few communities of color need another article in a peer reviewed journal, she said. Then she said something like: “Each board or committee or community project or group of students mentored is another article or book chapter you don’t have time to write.” There really is a finite amount of time and if you are doing a lot of service you have less time to do research and write. You cannot really diversify the institution unless you change the reward structure to acknowledge the importance of service.

(This in turn reminded me of a brief conversation I had years ago with a couple of very prominent woman sociologists. People had exchanged information on the order of “I’m dealing with children now, you know how that is,” and grunts of acknowledgment. Then one woman said, “I was talking about this to X [prominent male sociologist] and he said that each child he had cost him an article.” Eye rolling, exasperated sighs. One article, right. We wish. “Five or six articles at least,” muttered one woman.)

To clarify: I don’t think institutions can or should reward time spent in child-rearing, although they should accommodate it. But institutions can and probably should better reward time spent in community service. How to do this is a hard issue.

Reading Tables

Reviewing articles makes me realize that people (including people who appear to be otherwise quite sophisticated in their methods) don’t know how to read tables for error and instability.  Obviously, I just found a zinger. Details suppressed in the interest of the integrity of the peer review process. But if the author had really looked carefully at the tables instead of just coming up with stories to explain the coefficients, s/he should have realized something was amiss.

When you are comparing different model specifications on the same data, don’t just look at what is significant, and don’t just look at the variables you are interested in. Pay attention to whether the coefficient on each variable is relatively stable across models or fluctuates with the addition or subtraction of other variables.  The coefficients on the same variables on the same sample normally stay pretty similar as other variables come and go from alternate specifications.  If the coefficients are relatively stable (roughly the same magnitude, roughly the same standard error) in different models, this is good. They may go in and out of statistical significance depending on what else is in the model, but if the effect size stays about the same and the standard error stays about the same, that’s stable, that’s good.

If they are not stable, you need to know why before you mail the article off to the journal. In the worst case, unstable coefficients change between significantly positive and significantly negative, or between close to zero and large in either the positive or negative direction.  But also pay attention if they keep the same sign but get a lot bigger or smaller.

What if coefficients are not stable? If the coefficient of variable X changes when you add other variables, one of three things is true: (1) the other variables correlate with X and overlap or interact with it in explaining the dependent variable, or (2) the sample is different in the two models, or (3) you made a mistake in running the models or copying the tables.

Some correlations or interactions among independent variables are substantively meaningful or otherwise unproblematic. It is normal for the coefficients of each of a set of correlated variables like income and education to be smaller when they are together in a model. Sometimes the whole point of an article is that a coefficient goes to zero or changes from zero to significant when something else is controlled. Similarly, sometimes the point is that some factor is salient only for a subset of the sample.

But before you hang your whole theory or interpretation on a fluctuating coefficient, you want to make sure it isn’t just a mistake. Make sure there are no typos in the code that produced the results. Make sure the table is copied properly. Check the sample sizes to be sure cases were not dropped for some unexpected reason. And especially check for specification error: explicitly test whether coefficients bounce with minor changes in model specification. Very often, you will see that the explanatory power of a model does not change at all when you add more variables, even though the coefficients change. This is a symptom that your sample is too small to make the distinctions you are trying to make. This is especially likely in fields where samples are necessarily relatively small, as is often true in research on organizations or political units or annual time series. Do your variables of interest have strong bivariate effects without controls? If not, exactly which control variables are needed in the model for the variable to have a significant effect? At what point do you stop adding explained variance and just change coefficients? In particular, watch out for pairs of correlated variables like income and education that take opposite signs in models with lots of other independent variables: this is frequently an artifact.

The problem of ignoring coefficient fluctuations is especially likely when the coefficients for “control variables” are suppressed. I have reviewed quite a few articles in which coefficients on control variables fluctuate quite suspiciously with nary a mention from the author, and am never happy when control variable coefficients are omitted entirely. (If they are going to be suppressed in the interest of space and readability from the main table, I still want to see them in an appendix as a reviewer, even if they appendix will end up on a web site instead of in print.)

Also pay attention to the number of cases in each model, to be sure you are not losing cases unexpectedly to missing data or other anomaly. If patterns of missing data are not a problem, the coefficients will stay pretty stable despite sample size fluctuations. But if a coefficient changes markedly when the sample size changes, that’s another sign of trouble.

facts

Originally posted at Scatterplot. I just stumbled across the matter of Jared Diamond’s New Yorker article last year telling the story of vengeance fights in Papua New Guinea based on stories told to him by his driver.  As Diamond told the story, the driver Daniel Wemp and other real people whom he named by name and attributed to a specific tribal group — bragged about murdering and raping people in an ongoing vengeance war. The short version of what appears to be true (the case is still in process) is that Daniel Wemp told Diamond the stories when they were driving around in 1999-2002, but  Diamond did not take notes on them at the time but rather reconstructed them from memory and a follow up interview in 2006, and got the facts all wrong about who did what to whom and when and why and what tribes were involved, as described in meticulous detail byRhonda Roland Shearer at stinkyjournalism.org. The original article was pulled from electronic archives last year. The driver and purported murderer, Daniel Wemp, and one of his purported victims, Henep Isum (who was not, in fact, paralyzed by Wemp or anyone else), filed suit April 20 in New York for libel and defamation of character, asking for $10 million in damages.

Going and Stopping

Almost everyone agrees — and this is supported by my own many years of observation of colleagues — that the  most productive scholars have regular schedules of writing a few hours every day.  We binge writers can be intensely productive when we are working and can get a lot done in a short time, but over the long haul we are simply less productive than the “write every day” people.  A big reason for this is that if you have been away from the writing for more than two days, you forget what you were doing and have to invest a lot of time in start up and remembering where you were. The turtle beats the hare every time. I have known this for years and “write every day” is the advice I give students, even though I have never successfully followed that advice for an extended period.

Today I figured out the other half of the problem. It isn’t just a problem with self-discipline.  I actually have quite a bit of self-discipline in some areas. The problem is that when I am working, I become extremely focused and I don’t stop. I’m on sabbatical now and finally got time to overcome angst and distractions and re-engaged my work. I became so focused I lost track of time, forgot to eat, and even stayed up all night. No deadline, I just could not let go of the work. This always happens when I really engage my work: even if I have outside obligations, I do the bare minimum and return repeatedly to the work whenever I can.  I sleep too little and exercise too little. After a while, other things pile up:  unpaid bills, undone laundry, unwritten letters of condolence and letters of reference and article reviews, unprepared lectures,  undone shopping, unplanned vacations, neglected family. Even when I’m not actually working, my mind is on my work and I’m just not attending to anything else. At some point the “rest of life” explodes and demands attention and yanks my focus away from work.  And the cycle starts anew. When I’m aware of more than one thing that it is important to do, I lack focus, I’m easily distracted, and I experience anxiety and tension from being pulled in different directions.

So there’s the crux of the problem. To be a “write every day” person you also have to be able to take care of ordinary business every day, too. You have to be able to shift your attention and focus from one thing to another, to compartmentalize not only your life, but your brain and attention. I find it easier, for example, to do “mindless” activities like exercise or laundry when I’m focused on work than to do other intellectual work like prepare classes or write reviews, because they do not compete for mental attention. I wonder if people may actually differ in their innate ability to shift focus, or whether this is a skill that can be developed.

I still plan to keep trying to develop the “write every day” habit.  But now I know that for it to be sustainable given my lack of a personal life assistant, I also have to have a “do some urgent tasks every day” habit, too.

how do you take & organize reading notes?

I’d appreciate your dropping comments if you have thoughts, suggestions or links relevant to good strategies for taking and organizing your “literature” notes.  I’m working with my advisees on this, and I have to say that my own procedures have been ad hoc and often unsatisfactory.  I have the index card  files from my notes taken in the 1970s that are useless now.   I (as many) have tended to do ad hoc literature reviews for particular papers, but find that I have failed to keep or organize good notes that I can return to for a subsequent project, so I either rely on the lit review from the past proposal/paper I wrote, or have to start over.  I often will remember something I’ve read but not be able to remember the citation or enough information to find it again.  I have zillions of poorly-organized photocopies made in the 1980s and zillions of poorly-organized PDFs saved since the mid-1990s.  So I thought I’d put this out to the scatterbrains to see if you have good suggestions, ideas.  We’re talking meta-suggestions for how to think about the problem, as well as tools or techniques.  It’s how to get the work done now for this project plus how to be able to access the work again three years or ten years from now.

blog commenting, blinding articles

I’m in California helping my mother, who is much better than she was in March, but still mostly housebound, on oxygen, and weak. She’s easily frustrated and demanding, which is both understandable and tiring. One upshot is that I’ve been blog commenting all day. I do get periods of free time, but as I never know when I’m going to be interrupted, it is hard to crawl into the writing I’m way-overdue on. So far I’m 0 for 0 in my goal of working at least two hours a day, although I have gotten some reviews done.

Apropos of bits of work, here’s a question about articles for review. Say there is a pretty well-known data set that is identified with exactly one research team, such that anybody who has read the literature will recognize the authors, or at least the PI, from the data. It does not matter whether you use “identifying reference withheld” or third person references, the author, or at least the author’s research team, will be identified. How much trouble should the author go to in attempting to present the appearance of conforming to the norm of not identifying the author, i.e. in using the third person in describing the research procedures? (Identifying reference withheld would seem absurd in this situation, especially as the withheld citations would be central to any literature review.)

My view as a reviewer: if the author of an article in my area is a senior person, I know who it is. But under the cloak of the anonymous reviewer, I am willing to say critical things about my friends. And good things about people whose work I don’t recognize (and thus know must be junior). I have been told by editors that this is common; people will not say bad work is good just because their friends wrote it. It is the anonymity of the reviewer that is central to the integrity of the process. So I don’t think trying to pretend anonymity is worth the trouble. In fact, I loathe “identifying reference withheld”!! If you are going to anonymize, do it with third person references.

What do you think about an author who does not even go through the motions of third person references to disguise authorship, in a case where disguise would be futile anyway. Is that bad form? Or understandable, let it go? Should editors police this kind of thing? Do they?

tailor your application?

I’m putting this out as a separate question to avoid hijacking the ask a scatterbrain thread about cvs.  I advise students to try to tailor their cover letter and cv to any job they really want, to make it sound like they know something about that specific department, especially if that job is at a non-PhD department, and have said that I think mailing mass-produced materials to dozens of jobs you don’t really want is probably a waste of effort.   But I base this opinion on relatively little data.   So that’s my question, to folks on either side of the hiring process in non-PhD departments.   In hiring, do you attend to whether the materials are tailored to  your department versus being obviously generic?  On the job-getting end, did you tailor your application materials?  Also, on both ends, how often was there a personal connection through the advisor that facilitated the job-getting, rather than the paper application package?

about names

There are some issues to consider about naming yourself in print, and a lot of these are not obvious at first. I’ve been talking with some of my students about this, because several are thinking about changing their names for a variety of reasons, including marriage and language.

If you are thinking about changing your name, you may as well think about what’s at stake in the options. And even if your name is staying the same, you still have some choice in exactly how you write it for publication. What matters in a publication name?

i know they love me but

I have received journal review requests from three different journals within the past 18 hours! In February I turned down four because I had not gotten done the previous four I said yes to before Christmas.  Seems like somebody out there is not doing their share, or I am on everyone’s A list.  Just saying.

advice for new assistant professors

As I’m in an advice-giving mood, I thought I’d post here something I wrote quite a few years ago.  This began as a lunch conversation with a departing grad student (who is now a dean) who asked me if I had any advice for her as she took her first job as an assistant professor.  I wrote it down later and it evolved over a few years.   I’ve gotten feedback from quite a few people that this was helpful, and some of you will doubtless recognize it.

1) Don’t take anything personally, especially not at first. People will probably treat you as insignificant, not because they think ill of you, but because they are socially inept. Most of us are comfortable with the people we already know, and are not good at being friendly to new people. The old timers ought to go out of their way to be friendly and inclusive to someone new (you) but they probably will not, and you should just chalk it up to poor social skills and nothing else.

2) Help integrate yourself. Even if you are normally more productive writing at home, work in the office a lot during the first year. Make a point of loitering in the hall when it is near lunch time, so people will notice you and think of asking you along to lunch.

one last asa gripe

I’ve just learned that I messed up.  I was supposed to choose WHICH roundtable session to forward those incoming papers to .  According to Kendra at ASA, I should have known this because last October I received an email that says “second priority organizers are responsible for forwarding unused acceptable papers to the appropriate roundtable organizer.”  Apparently just clicking reject did not automatically forward the paper (unlike the first round process), and apparently submitters don’t get to choose their roundtable back up, their second choice session organizer is supposed to make this choice for them.  Bad word bad word bad word.  I sent a complaint pointing out that this system makes no sense, as it is the paper submitter who ought to choose which roundtable session to go to, and that important instructions should be posted on the organizer web site, not hidden in old email messages four months removed from when and where they would be needed.  I also alerted Kendra at ASA to this problem so she can hopefully find the lost papers and put them in the right place.  Warning to everyone whose paper got “rejected” rather than forwarded to a roundtable: this is probably what happened.   It appears that Kendra at ASA is watching for orphan papers that need to be forwarded to roundtables, so I think she is the person to talk to if you got messed with in this way.  If you are mad, please curse your session organizer for inability to decipher a cryptic and counter-intuitive system, not an indifference to your career.

how to be a good advisee

As I suggested in response to the thread about picking an advisor, it is a mistake to view an advisor as a commodity for which you comparison shop, as you might select a new dress.  Rather, it is a two-sided process of building a long-term relationship.  Your own behavior and characteristics are just as important as the advisor’s, and it isn’t just a matter of finding the right person, it is a matter of acting in ways that make both of you feel good about your interactions.  So it is important to consider what makes the experience good for the advisor, not just what makes it good for the student.  In the long run, former advisees are friends and junior colleagues and part of your professional network.  Having former students who do well in the profession make you look good.  But there can be plenty of immediate rewards in the advising experience itself.  This varies somewhat depending on personalities, of course, and others may have other opinions.  But here are the things I think about when I reflect on advisees I have appreciated and advisees who have been less satisfactory.

i’m too old for this

Bleg.  It is 6:30 a.m.  I just finished a grant proposal due today.  To bed for a while.

tenure letters

It’s that time of year. People are considering job changes and everyone who moves from one tenured job to another needs external letters. In this game, the request for letters comes only after the department has made a hiring decision: the letters are for the an extra-departmental review at the college level. I am being asked for letters on a few weeks notice, just as I had to ask other people for them when I did my bit as chair. I am looking at several requests as I write this. Some of these are from obscure branch campuses I’ve never heard of that are asking for detailed analytic evaluations of the contributions and national influence of the candidates, for God’s sake.  Others are for extremely senior people who hardly need me to buttress their claim to fame. I have three choices: spend significant time working up a good detailed letter being sure to explain why everybody is a star, write a superficial positive letter that is at risk of being coded as reserved (i.e. negative), especially for the non-stars, or decline to write and definitely be coded as negative, again, especially for the non-stars. This is idiocy. It is bad enough that we have to do this for promotion to tenure, but does anybody believe that the external letters provide one iota of information that could not be obtained from reading the cv and the person’s publications? The department wants to know whether the person is a lunatic, but that they find out from gossip or phone calls. I don’t mind altruism and doing things for the collective good and the welfare of other scholars, but I do resent wasting my time for the benefit of bureaucratic nonsense. Not only are they asking me to read their watch for them, they are asking me to write several pages of well-crafted prose about what it says and do it for free.

graphs on the web

I recently asked for advice about the best format for posting a lot of graphs on a web site so they could be either read on line or downloaded and printed.  In case this information is more generally useful, I’m summarizing what I learned here. 

graphs on web: technical question

I want to post information that consists of ~200  graphs on my web site in a format that will be accessible to the most people.  I don’t want to spend a ton of time doing this and would prefer to have the files as small as possible.  I am generating the graphs in Stata, which can produce files in these formats: wmf, pdf, png, tif; I can also have software that can translate into these formats: jpg, gif, bmp.   The .wmf graphs I produced are mostly 8-10 kb each, but there is another set that are 70-100kb each.  What format do you suggest I put them into?  If you want to give feedback about legibility etc issues based on more detailed knowledge of what is in them, please let me know and we can communicate privately.

interview clothes

Pardon my making an executive decision here, but it seems that the “what to wear to an interview” thread that got started in the comments on a prior post should get its own line. Here is the original question: One grad student told me that her adviser said not to wear black at a jobtalk,