The MDS Conjecture

I will begin with a couple of games you can play with the ternary [4,2]-Hamming code, in much the same way Peter Cameron describes here and in a previous post of mine for a different Hamming code.

Choose a number between 0 and 8 (inclusive). I will ask you four questions, you can answer ‘a’, ‘b’ or ‘c’ and you are allowed to lie at most once. Here are my questions:

1. Is your number (a) less than 3 (b) between 3 and 5 (c) more than 5?
2. Is your number (a) 0 mod 3 (b) 1 mod 3 (c) 2 mod 3?
3. Is your number in (a) {0,5,7} (b) {1,3,8} or (c) {2,4,6}?
4. Is your numberin (a) {0,4,8} (b) {1,5,6} or (c) {2,3,7}?

From these questions, I can easily determine your number.

Research only, hopefully

Last week, I gave my last lecture for the near future. As of December 1, I will be an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, which means I am on essentially a research only position for four years, and I can only use 0.05 of my time to teach; which more-or-less rules me out of teaching our undergraduate courses.

I was expecting to feel relief and joy upon finishing last week, but instead I felt a little sad. I taught a seond year introduction to pure mathematics which does all the cool stuff: from cardinality to the definition of the real numbers. The initial enrolment of the course was around the 50 mark, but it slowly settled to about 35. This year, the cohort was particularly strong, and it was quite a challenge sometimes to have an answer to every question they threw at me. Next year, the course will contain more linear algebra and so some of the cool stuff will have to go; ah well!

Now that I am officially “research only” for another four years, will it mean that I’m really “research only”? The amount of admin that comes up on a daily basis is the main difference I see now than when I started my first research position in 2004. These days, we only have a couple of admin staff to help us, and usually when asking for help, a form is returned which increases the amount of work. For example, to organise a visit of a researcher to UWA, I would like to ask our admin staff for help over searching and booking accommodation. However, I have to fill out a “visitor form” before anything can be done. Then when the visitor arrives, there are more forms to fill out: one for a campus card, another to arrange reimbursement of expenses. But this is nothing compared to the forms that follow a postgraduate student around.

In one of my PhD students’ first year, she needed to:

1. write a 16 page research proposal (that bounced back and had to be expanded)
   • this included filling out a coversheet
   • a list of tasks that must be completed by the end of first year
2. fill out an overseas travel request form for the Graduate Research School
3. write an application for a Graduate Research School Travel Award
4. … then later fill out a Graduate Research School Travel Report
5. fill out a travel approval form for the School of Mathematics and Statistics
6. write an Annual Report including the following
   • confirmation of candidature
   • annual progress report, including written report and a section filled in by the supervisor
7. fill out a sickness leave form, including
   • an application for leave form (Graduate Research School)
   • submitting doctor’s certificate to the School of Mathematics and Statistics

All of these items needed to be signed by me and either the Postgraduate Coordinator in our school or the Head of School, and often both! If there were any ethics/intellectual property concerns then there would be more paperwork.

Perhaps we should have used the following form (thanks Gordon!) on each occasion:

• academic time form

Congratulations all round…

The ARC Discovery and DECRA Awards were announced yesterday, and contained some good news for combinatorics in Perth.

John, Cheryl and Alice minor were awarded a 3-year Discovery Grant for about $115k per year, which is enough to get a Research Associate and also fund the associated travel and  visitors that are needed when you live in an isolated city.

Even better, Gabriel Verret, already scheduled to spend two years here on a previously-won grant got a DECRA fellowship, which means he’ll be with us for longer.  And Simon Smith (who I don’t personally know) was also awarded a DECRA, meaning that we’ll be hosting two incredibly promising young researchers for the next few years, in addition to those already starting in the next few months.

Also, my old friend, Graham Farr from Monash, scored a good 3-year individual ARC Discovery grant to work on graph colourings. Well done, Graham!

Neither Michael or I was eligible to apply in this round, as we already have the maximum permitted number (two) of simultaneously held grants but, at least in my case, they both expire at the end of next year, so the coming “writing season” will be critical.

Apart from getting more people, and building a bigger and more vibrant group, research grants are critical to us in our constant battle with the Faculty, which spends a large proportion of its time devising criteria for various things that, either through incompetence or malice, are so wildly inapplicable to Mathematics teaching and research that we seem to face permanent existential threats. Constant, high levels of external research funding is our primary defence!

Vale Dan Hughes

It has been a sad week for the finite geometry community with the additional recent news that Dan Hughes passed away yesterday. Dan was an enormous influence on the subject, the people, and the drive of our mathematical community; and his sudden passing is a shock to all of us. For more on Dan’s extraordinary contribution, read the preface of the proceedings of a conference dedicated to Dan’s career here.

More “pay to publish” fun

Will a “pay to publish” outfit just take any nonsense and put it online for a few hundred dollars? (See my post Academic Spam for some background.)

Well, at least in one case, someone has tested it and found that they will….

Firstly we need some nonsensical vaguely math-like content.  Fortunately someone has written a program to generate random nonsensical “mathy” papers – here’s an example  (mathgen-735479847) that’s “authored” by me and John.  The program can be found at  http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/mathgen if you want a “paper” yourself.

Then they submitted it to one of the self-styled “journals” that regularly spam my mailbox, and probably yours… and for the rest of the story I’ll just point you to the original.

(Thanks to Michael for pointing this out to me.)

 

Vale Marialuisa de Resmini

I just heard the news (via Franco Mazzocca) that finite geometer Marialuisa de Resmini passed away last Friday. I only met her a few times, but she struck me as a strong and resolute lady who cared for the development of young mathematicians. I think it was in Irsee 2006, she was the chair of the session I was speaking in, and she said to me “I liked your talk because you weren’t screaming at us”. Marialuisa’s research results were mainly in the theory of projective planes and block designs, and according to Mathscinet, collaborated most with Dieter Jungnickel, Jennifer Key, and Antonello Cossidente; thus showing her breadth.

ERA 2012 – what does it mean?

It seems that the results of the 2012 ERA research assessment exercise are about to be released, which is causing some people around the University more than a little nervous anticipation.

If you recall, this is an exercise where the fields of research within each Australian university are evaluated, essentially according to various  criteria involving total research output, the numbers of papers in prestigious journals and the numbers in low-ranked journals, all weighted in some opaque fashion. Nobody actually knows what the results will be used for, which accounts for a fair proportion of the nervousness.

So what will the results mean?

Unfortunately, I fear that our old friend, Goodhart’s Law, to which so much university evaluation falls prey has swung into operation so forcefully that the ERA 2012 results will be almost uninterpretable. The original ERA was simply intended to give the government and indeed the universities some measure of the quality of the research that they are funding and producing respectively. Research from each university was allocated to “discipline codes” (Pure Maths, Applied Maths, Stats etc) and each discipline evaluated accordingly. Of course, as soon as the results were released the media, aided and abetted by the universities, compile these into “league tables” allowing universities to brag about how many of their disciplines scored 5 or what proportion of their disciplines were above average or whatever statistic painted them in the best possible light.

And wherever there are “league tables”, manipulation and game-playing take over, and completely dominate whatever erstwhile valuable purpose motivated the collection of the data.

I’m slightly ashamed to recall that after ERA 2010, I was sufficiently pleased that Pure Maths at UWA scored a 5 (in fact, I blogged about it), that I let my normal (hopefully healthy) scepticism about any “ranking” temporarily subside.  However, my scepticism is now back in full, to the extent that I don’t think the ERA 2012 results will be at all meaningful — but I had to say this before the results were announced, because if I say it afterwards, then I would be accused of sour grapes in the event that Pure Maths no longer gets a 5 (which I don’t think it will.)

So, how can this seemingly-simple process of evaluating the research from each discipline be so easily gamed?