Tag Archives: climate change

Climate change and research choices

written on July 3, 2014 and saved for publication until tenure

A friend who is making a career change asked me “If you could do anything else, what would would it be?”  That was two weeks ago.  I still haven’t responded.  It led to quite long conversations with my partner though, particularly with the idea of being able to make a radical change in my research life with impending, unprecedented job security.  Or an even bigger change in a different way if the tenure decision doesn’t go my way.  Or does!

As with most conversations these days, our conversation turned to climate change.  My partner brought up their dislike (but applicability to our current question) of the “going to war” metaphor.  For those clueless out there, people who actually think about climate change and actually worry about it and actually want to make changes to prevent (sigh, mitigate) it, accept climate change as an existential threat.  As existential as the threat of Hitler’s reign on Europe.  And they point hopefully to the fact that under that threat our factories and research laboratories switched full force, seemingly overnight, to building bombs and planes and tanks and developing ciphers and deciphers and new bombs and new planes and new tanks.  Yay!  That’s the part of the metaphor that turns off a pacifist.

But my partner’s point was:  if the world really did start acting like climate change is the existential threat that it is and people like you and I were recruited to join the war effort, what would you be recruited to do?  The follow up question was:  since you care about it, why don’t you start doing that now?

It’ll be interesting to see what I’m thinking about a year from now when I post this.

The negative impacts of random conference decisions

The NIPS experiment is making waves.  If you are unaware, for the last NIPS conference, the PC was broken into two independent halves A and B.  A random selection of the submissions were assigned to both committees.  The result: 57% of the papers that were accepted by committee A were rejected by committee B (and vice versa).

This is terrible for many reasons.  Some reasons that I have heard are the careerist issues (our jobs and promotion depend on accepted papers at top conferences) and the negative impacts on the Rate of Progression of Science.  I’d like to discuss two more reasons:

The random rejection model makes needless work

If the average number of times a paper is submitted to a conference before it is accepted is 2-3, then we as a community are doing 2-3 times more work when it comes to writing & publishing: formatting papers to the will of the conference, reviewing papers, serving on PCs, reassuring students, consoling ourselves over beer. Should we be spending our limited time & resources on this? I do understand that papers can improve between different submissions, but with higher quality, constructive reviews, resubmitting once would be much less a burden. And perhaps if people felt like the system wasn’t so random, we wouldn’t try rolling the dice so early and often.  And perhaps we would have time to do a more thorough job as reviewers.

The random rejection model likely negatively impacts underrepresented groups more

“Just resubmit your papers.”  I worry that this non-solution disproportionately and negatively impacts those in
underrepresented groups. It is known that those in underrepresented groups tend to suffer from more impostor syndrome; and it is known that those suffering from impostor syndrome tend to take rejections on face value (our work isn’t good enough) whereas those in dominant groups tend to blame the rejectors (they don’t know good work when they see it). We also (should) know that small things can have big effects.  One freshly minted professor emailed me:

I have personally experienced this during graduate school and I’m sure I and my students will experience this in future. A second or third year student puts in about one year worth of work with the hope that he/she will have his/her first top-tier (FOCS or ICML) conference paper soon. The rejections and bad reviews can essentially kill the confidence of that student. To some extent, this can also happen to the junior faculty.

One colleague worried about students dropping out of science altogether as a result of this.  On a personal note, I have definitely changed my publishing behavior to favor journals where, although the time lag can be great, comes with a discussion between author and reviewer via the editor. I have only had one ‘bad’ experience with trying to get something published in a journal. I would say that I’ve had a ‘bad’ experience with at least half of my conference submissions.  I have taken to rolling the dice once, if at all.

Add this together with our lack of double-blind reviews in TCS, we may be doubly hitting underrepresented populations, whose work is more likely to be dismissed by a dominant-group reviewer.

We should fix our conference system.  Or just trash it altogether.  I’d like to point out that the latter option would be better for the planet.

Bringing current events into the technical classroom

I spent last summer thinking about how to bring something related to the climate crisis into my fall undergraduate algorithms class.  In this class, I have converged on having 4-5 projects covering iterative, divide and conquer, dynamic programming, linear programming and heuristics.  These projects each have a practical component where an algorithm is implemented.  Linear programming seemed to be the tool that I could use to “solve” some problem in climate change.  It wasn’t until I stumbled upon this article by Robert Vanderbei suggesting an upper-level class project wherein students fit a curve to daily temperature recordings.  The suggested curve is the superposition of

  • a sinusoidal curve with a period of one year to model the change in seasons,
  • a sinusoidal curve with a period of 10.7 years to model the solar cycle, and
  • a linear term representing any drift in mean daily temperatures.

I adapted the suggested project to my class and had them fit such a curve, using GLPK, to 60 years of daily temperature recordings for Corvallis.

Corvallis_plot_min_max

I provided the students with the data and offered bonus credit for students who repeated the project for another location (downloading data from NOAA).  The students found the project challenging but seemed to appreciate the tangibility of the project, so I think I will likewise adapt other projects. The students could then interpret the coefficient of the linear term as the amount of warming in average daily temperatures.

A few interesting things came up.  For example, apparently two different versions of GLPK find two different “optimal” solutions to the same LP — with different values.  For more details, please see the project description.

Next year, I think I will have them choose their own location by default as I think it is a useful experience to clean data …

School pride in taking a stance on climate change

I can’t help but share my pride in my fellow faculty for taking a strong stance on climate change.  Our university is a leader in climate change research and is now moving toward being a similar leader in climate change policy.  Our faculty senate recently voted to call upon our Foundation (which manages our endowment) to

  1. immediately cease all new investment in any of the top 200 fossil fuel companies;
  2. use its expertise to ensure that within five years none of its assets include holdings in such companies; and
  3. release quarterly updates to the public detailing progress made toward complete divestment.

Of course this is still just the first step and we have to follow through with action from the Foundation.  Although their bottom line is maximum earnings, they have a new process for hearing such requests — a hopeful sign in my mind.

Compare this to the recent decision by (my unfortunate alma mater) Brown’s president to defend their continued investment in the 15 largest coal companies, using (weak) arguments similar to those used to counter divestment from South Africa during the apartheid regime (“We all agree racism is horrible, but this isn’t the right way to oppose it!”). This seems to be the story for climate change.  We all agree it is something to be avoided (or, sadly, simply ‘mitigated’), but we really aren’t doing anything about it.  There’s a lot of talk and little action.

Thankfully, I can be proud of the Brown students who are not giving up.