IDE Tools for Reading Research Papers?
It’s been over six months I made the jump from quantum computing theory professor at the University of Washington to software engineer at Google. When I hear from my friends back in quantum computing, the second question they ask is, “what’s it like?” (the first question is whether Google wants to build a quantum computer.) There are lots of answers to this question, but what I think is really interesting is not how I feel about the ins and outs of this new career, but what I found the most surprising about the similarities between my new jobs and my old job. And, for me, hands down, the most surprising similarity is between reading papers and reading other peoples code.
Reading a a paper in a new subject area was definitely one of the favorite parts of my old job (and a central skill to being a good researcher.) You’d start out, often, with only a small clue about the subject of the paper. Often you were led to the paper by a search that hit a few keywords, and an abstract that seemed interesting. But after a few pages it often becomes clear that there are all sorts of terms and ideas that you just haven’t seen before. And so you often have to spend some time doing some reading of other papers that contain the terms you don’t understand and see if they help. Mostly they don’t, but sometimes they do and then you can backtrack and figure out some of what the first paper said. This sort of jumping around, at least for me, occurred quite a bit as I’d try to parse a paper, interspread with periods of logical thought and pen and paper verification of calculations.
Reading other peoples code is very similar. At first you start looking at some class, say, and you have some vague idea what it does. Documentation and implicit documentation through naming gives you some idea of what is going on, but quickly you often see the code start calling code that you don’t know how it works or what it exactly does, and so you have to go track down that other class, and then figure it out, and then backtrack. Of course this is often interspread with bits of following the logic of the code. Today, with modern IDE tools, this sort of jumping back and forth becomes a quick habit and makes the process of figuring out someone else’s code significantly easier.
Which got me thinking. Why aren’t there modern tools for reading research documents that provide some of the functionality that is found in IDEs such as Eclipse? Certainly some authors are gracious enough to compile their LaTeX such that their citation data is a link, but this is a long way from having PDFs where you can click on citations in the text and then you get immediately transported to the other paper, maybe even to the particular location in the paper that is relevant. I think the technical challenge here is providing hooks between the documents: how do I make a citation that is more than just citing the full paper (wouldn’t it be nice if you specified the set of ranges of relevant lines in the paper?) There are certainly very cool tools out there now for storing and parsing your scientific papers, but while the implicit linking between these papers is complex, most of this complexity is buried in the [12] citation pater. But maybe solutions for this are already out there? Thoughts?
The Wolf That Cried Education Bubble
“Foster, You’re Dead!” is a Philip K. Dick short story published in 1955 describing the struggle of a young boy, Mike Foster, whose father refuses to purchase his family a bomb shelter. The story describes a classically Dickian society: paranoia over nuclear war so consumes everyone that the purchase of a bomb shelter and participation in a financial plan to provide protection from nuclear war are basic actions that every member of the society is assumed to have to participate in. Mike’s father, who refuses to participate in this hyper-consumeristic cross with the military industrial complex is labeled an “anti-P” and, without giving away too much, the story provides a strikingly empathetic description of Mike and his father’s struggles around their ostracized state. The story is in Second Variety (The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Vol. 3)
One day I saw a newspaper headline reporting that the President suggested that if Americans had to buy their bomb shelters, rather than being provided with them by the government, they’d take better care of them, an idea which made me furious. Logically, each of us should own a submarine, a jet fighter, and so forth.
Which is what got me thinking about tuition.
You see, in a former, quantized life, the rhythms of my life were centered squarely on the academic world. And if you’re in the world of academia in the United States, you most certainly know that college tuition prices have risen over the last few decades at a rate greatly exceeding that of inflation. These rising tuition costs have led to an increasing indebtedness are the part of students, causing some not very famous people and some very famous people to speculate that there is a higher education bubble. Since I made those impetuous comments about there being a higher education bubble, however, I’ve had time to dig around and see what actual data I could find on the subject.
Enter the treasure trove of reports from the delta cost project (for those who want to investigate the bias of this report note it is in part sponsored by the Lumina foundation who has a mission to increase higher education in the United States, along with an interesting enough story behind its founding to set off all you tin hat conspiracy theorists. That’s right you Sn-hatters…set off for somewhere else to post your canned responses!) First off the full reports are a data lovers delight: there’s some good stuff here!
But what I found most interesting, highlighted particularly in the 2009 report, was a question I’ve often wondered about: cost shifting. While it is true that tuition costs are rising, this does not, of course, mean that universities themselves have spending increasing at the same rates. For example at the in the sate of Washington, tuition hikes have been directly tied not to spending costs, per se, but to a declining state revenue. So are spending costs increasing? Page 34 of the report has a great graphic of spending per degree across different kinds of higher education institution:
This shows pretty strikingly that spending has actually remained fairly constant….except at private research institutions. And even more remarkably is the question of how much tuition costs are the result of increased spending:
The primary cause of tuition increases in public institutions is not increased spending, but rather cost shifting to replace losses in state appropriations and other revenues. In public research institutions, 92 percent of revenues from tuition increases since 2002 have resulted from shifts in costs. In other public institutions, costs are declining even as prices are increasing. Private institutions are both raising tuition and increasing spending. Only about 30 percent of revenues from tuition increases in the private research universities can be attributed to cost shifts, though in private master’s and bachelor’s institutions, about 85 percent of tuition are from cost shifts rather than spending increases
Which brings me back to good old Philip K. Dick. Let me get this straight: spending per degree has been basically flat…except among the private institutions. Tuition costs, which everyone is yelling about, have been entirely due to shifting funding at public institutions, while private institutions have increased tuition and spending. So yeah, I do believe Dick had every right to pissed off at his president asking him to shoulder the costs of bomb shelters because people would “take better care of them” if they owned them themselves. As do we have a right to be pissed off at the reckless abandonment of higher education by our state governments, which has led to the regressive burden of tuition increases. Except by the private institutions. Who, if anyone, will once again be responsible for riding the boom that is the bubble of expanded public leverage (and yes I know the private institutions here are mostly “nonprofits”, but having gone to both public and private research universities of some caliber, you can bet your horse I’ve seen which can lay claim to being more egalitarian.)
Now if only I could figure out how to turn this into a short story….
A New Start
“Nothing endures but change” – Heraclitus