Category: Social Stream

The Postdoctoral Experience (Revisited)

Bookmarked The Postdoctoral Experience Revisited (2014) (The National Academies Press)
The Postdoctoral Experience Revisited builds on the 2000 report Enhancing the Postdoctoral Experience for Scientists and Engineers. That ground-breaking report assessed the postdoctoral experience and provided principles, action points, and recommendations to enhance that experience. Since the publication of the 2000 report, the postdoctoral landscape has changed considerably. The percentage of PhDs who pursue postdoctoral training is growing steadily and spreading from the biomedical and physical sciences to engineering and the social sciences. The average length of time spent in postdoctoral positions seems to be increasing. The Postdoctoral Experience Revisited reexamines postdoctoral programs in the United States, focusing on how postdocs are being guided and managed, how institutional practices have changed, and what happens to postdocs after they complete their programs. This book explores important changes that have occurred in postdoctoral practices and the research ecosystem and assesses how well current practices meet the needs of these fledgling scientists and engineers and of the research enterprise. The Postdoctoral Experience Revisited takes a fresh look at current postdoctoral fellows - how many there are, where they are working, in what fields, and for how many years. This book makes recommendations to improve aspects of programs - postdoctoral period of service, title and role, career development, compensation and benefits, and mentoring. Current data on demographics, career aspirations, and career outcomes for postdocs are limited. This report makes the case for better data collection by research institution and data sharing. A larger goal of this study is not only to propose ways to make the postdoctoral system better for the postdoctoral researchers themselves but also to better understand the role that postdoctoral training plays in the research enterprise. It is also to ask whether there are alternative ways to satisfy some of the research and career development needs of postdoctoral researchers that are now being met with several years of advanced training. Postdoctoral researchers are the future of the research enterprise. The discussion and recommendations of The Postdoctoral Experience Revisited will stimulate action toward clarifying the role of postdoctoral researchers and improving their status and experience.

The National Academy of Sciences has published a (free) book: The Postdoctoral Experience (Revisited) discussing where we’re at and some ideas for a way forward.

Most might agree that our educational system is far less than ideal, but few pay attention to significant problems at the highest levels of academia which are holding back a great deal of our national “innovation machinery”. The National Academy of Sciences has published a (free) book: The Postdoctoral Experience (Revisited) discussing where we’re at and some ideas for a way forward. There are some interesting ideas here, but we’ve still got a long way to go.

Book cover of The Postdoctoral Experience Revisited (2014)
The Postdoctoral Experience Revisited (2014) | National Academies Press

Introduction to Lie Groups and Lie Algebras (Part 2) | UCLA Extension

Dr. Mike Miller, who had previously announced a two quarter sequence of classes on Lie Groups at UCLA, has just opened up registration for the second course in the series. His courses are always clear, entertaining, and invigorating, and I highly recommend them to anyone who is interested in math, science, or engineering.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.

Galileo Galilee (1564–1642) in Il saggiatore (The assayer)

Prior to the first part of the course, I’d written some thoughts about the timbre and tempo of his lecture style and philosophy and commend those interested to take a peek. I also mentioned some additional resources for the course there as well.  For those who missed the first portion, I’m happy to help fill you in and share some of my notes if necessary. The recommended minimum prerequisites for this class are linear algebra and some calculus.

Introduction to Lie Groups and Lie Algebras (Part 2)

Math X 450.7 / 3.00 units / Reg. # 251580W
Professor: Michael Miller, Ph.D.
Start Date: January 13, 2015
Location: UCLA, 5137 Math Sciences Building
Tuesday, 7-10pm
January 13 – March 24
11 meetings total
Class will not meet on one Tuesday to be annouced.

Register here: https://www.uclaextension.edu/Pages/Course.aspx?reg=251580

Course Description

A Lie group is a differentiable manifold that is also a group for which the product and inverse maps are differentiable. A Lie algebra is a vector space endowed with a binary operation that is bilinear, alternating, and satisfies the so-called Jacobi identity. This course is the second in a 2-quarter sequence that offers an introductory survey of Lie groups, their associated Lie algebras, and their representations. Its focus is split between continuing last quarter’s study of matrix Lie groups and their representations and reconciling this theory with that for the more general manifold setting. Topics to be discussed include the Weyl group, complete reducibility, semisimple Lie algebras, root systems, and Cartan subalgebras. This is an advanced course, requiring a solid understanding of linear algebra, basic analysis, and, ideally, the material from the previous quarter.Internet access required to retrieve course materials.

Recommended Textbook

Hall, Brian. Lie Groups, Lie Algebras, & Representations (Springer, 2004) ISBN: 9781441923134

 

A photograph of Sophus Lie's very full and bushy beard.
“I wouldn’t lie to you. This is Sophus’s beard.”

 

Inquire in the Margine

If the Page satisfie not, inquire in the Margine:

John Selden (1584-1654), English jurist and a scholar
in Illustrations (1612), a commentary on Poly-Olbion, a poem by Michael Drayton
in the margin next to ‘A table to the chiefest passages, in the Illustrations, which, worthiest of observation, are not directed unto by the course of the volume.’

 

Photo courtesy of Sjoerd Levelt
Photo courtesy of Sjoerd Levelt

 

Reply to What is the Bibliotheca Fictiva?

Replied to What is the Bibliotheca Fictiva? by Isabelle Kargon (The Sheridan Libraries Blog)

From antiquity to current times, there have always been writers devising literary forgeries of all kinds, either copying an existing book from the classical period or simply creating a fake original edition to trick collectors and scholars into purchasing a book that would be difficult to compare to any other. Some forgers do it for financial gain, some for ideological reasons, and some probably because of an impish instinct to prove that they can fool respectable scholars into believing an item is genuine.

There are some famous examples of forgeries, like The Donation of Constantine, a document supposedly written by Emperor Constantine (285-337 AD) and granting to Pope Sylvester I large territories of the Western Roman Empire as a token of gratitude for having converted him. Actually, the document was a forgery from the eighth century. This was not revealed before the 15th century, when Lorenzo Valla published the Discourse on the Forgery of the Alleged Donation of Constantine, in which he revealed numerous anachronisms. The Catholic Churchsuppressed this work for many years before conceding, centuries later, that the Donation was a fake.

Pope Sylvester receiving imperial power from Emperor Constantine.

The Johns Hopkins University recently acquired one of the most comprehensive collections of literary forgeries: the Arthur and Janet Freeman Collection of Literary and Historical Forgery, also called the Bibliotheca Fictiva. Arthur Freeman is an antiquarian book dealer. He and his wife Janet Ing Freeman are scholars who wrote a book, reviewed here, about John Payne Collier, a nineteenth-century scholar and literary forger who published a number of fake documents on Shakespeare. Their collection includes 1,200 items covering many centuries, and they wanted it to belong to a research library, which is how these astonishing books are currently being made accessible for consultation in the Sheridan Libraries Special Collections. You will be able to discover works by Joannes Annius de Viterbo, by Thomas James Wise, and many others. Enjoy!

Any intention of acquiring the new text Bibliotheca Fictiva by Freedman as well? http://www.quaritch.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/09/Bibliotheca-Fictiva.pdf

I’m not seeing it available on Amazon yet…

Information Theory is the New Central Discipline

Replied to Information Theory is the new central discipline. by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (facebook.com)

INFORMATION THEORY is the new central discipline. This graph was from 20y ago in the seminal book Cover and Thomas, as the field was starting to be defined. Now Information Theory has been expanded to swallow even more fields.

Born in, of all disciplines, Electrical Engineering, the field has progressively infiltrating probability theory, computer science, statistical physics, data science, gambling theory, ruin problems, complexity, even how one deals with knowledge, epistemology. It defines noise/signal, order/disorder, etc. It studies cellular automata. You can use it in theology (FREE WILL & algorithmic complexity). As I said, it is the MOTHER discipline.

I am certain much of Medicine will naturally grow to be a subset of it, both operationally, and in studying how the human body works: the latter is an information machine. Same with linguistics. Same with political “science”, same with… everything.

I am saying this because I figured out what the long 5th volume of the INCERTO will be. Cannot say now with any precision but it has to do with a variant of entropy as the core natural generator of Antifragility.

[Revised to explain that it is not *replacing* other disciplines, just infiltrating them as the point was initially misunderstood…]

Nassim Nicholas Taleb via Facebook

[My comments posted to the original Facebook post follow below.]

I’m coming to this post a bit late as I’m playing a bit of catch up, but agree with it wholeheartedly.

In particular, applications to molecular biology and medicine are really beginning to come to a heavy boil in just the past five years. This particular year is the progenitor of what appears to be the biggest renaissance for the application of information theory to the area of biology since Hubert Yockey, Henry Quastler, and Robert L. Platzman’s “Symposium on Information Theory in Biology at Gatlinburg, Tennessee” in 1956.

Upcoming/recent conferences/workshops on information theory in biology include:

At the beginning of September, Christoph Adami posted an awesome and very sound paper on arXiv entitled “Information-theoretic considerations concerning the origin of life”  which truly portends to turn the science of the origin of life on its head.

I’ll note in passing, for those interested, that Claude Shannon’s infamous master’s thesis at MIT (in which he applied Boolean Algebra to electric circuits allowing the digital revolution to occur) and his subsequent “The Theory of Mathematical Communication” were so revolutionary, nearly everyone forgets his MIT Ph.D. Thesis “An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics” which presaged the areas of cybernetics and the current applications of information theory to microbiology and are probably as seminal as Sir R.A Fisher’s applications of statistics to science in general and biology in particular.

For those commenting on the post who were interested in a layman’s introduction to information theory, I recommend John Robinson Pierce’s An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise (Dover has a very inexpensive edition.) After this, one should take a look at Claude Shannon’s original paper. (The MIT Press printing includes some excellent overview by Warren Weaver along with the paper itself.) The mathematics in the paper really aren’t too technical, and most of it should be comprehensible by most advanced high school students.

For those that don’t understand the concept of entropy, I HIGHLY recommend Arieh Ben-Naim’s book Entropy Demystified The Second Law Reduced to Plain Common Sense with Seven Simulated Games. He really does tear the concept down into its most basic form in a way I haven’t seen others come remotely close to and which even my mother can comprehend (with no mathematics at all).  (I recommend this presentation to even those with Ph.D.’s in physics because it is so truly fundamental.)

For the more advanced mathematicians, physicists, and engineers Arieh Ben-Naim does a truly spectacular job of extending ET Jaynes’ work on information theory and statistical mechanics and comes up with a more coherent mathematical theory to conjoin the entropy of physics/statistical mechanics with that of Shannon’s information theory in A Farewell to Entropy: Statistical Thermodynamics Based on Information.

For the advanced readers/researchers interested in more at the intersection of information theory and biology, I’ll also mention that I maintain a list of references, books, and journal articles in a Mendeley group entitled “ITBio: Information Theory, Microbiology, Evolution, and Complexity.”

Venn Diagram of how information theory relates to other fields.
Figure 1.1 [page 2] from
Thomas M. Cover and Joy Thomas’s textbook Elements of Information Theory, Second Edition
(John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006) [First Edition, 1991]
 

A Mathematical Symphony

…I hope that in addition there will be some readers who will simply take pleasure in a mathematical journey toward a high level of sophistication. There are many who would enjoy this trip, just as there are many who might enjoy listening to a symphony with a clear melodic line.

Robert B. Ash, mathematician
in A Primer of Abstract Mathematics (The Mathematical Association of America, 1998)

 

A Primer of Abstract Mathematics by Robert B. Ash
A Primer of Abstract Mathematics by Robert B. Ash

 

Introduction to Lie Groups and Lie Algebras | UCLA Extension

Exercise Your Brain

As many may know or have already heard, Dr. Mike Miller, a retired mathematician from RAND and long-time math professor at UCLA, is offering a course on Introduction to Lie Groups and Lie Algebras this fall through UCLA Extension.  Whether you’re a professional mathematician, engineer, physicist, physician, or even a hobbyist interested in mathematics you’ll be sure to get something interesting out of this course, not to mention the camaraderie of 20-30 other “regulars” with widely varying backgrounds (actors to surgeons and evolutionary theorists to engineers) who’ve been taking almost everything Mike has offered over the years (and yes, he’s THAT good — we’re sure you’ll be addicted too.)

“Beginners” Welcome!

Even if it’s been years since you last took Calculus or Linear Algebra, Mike (and the rest of the class) will help you get quickly back up to speed to delve into what is often otherwise a very deep subject.  If you’re interested in advanced physics, quantum mechanics, quantum information or string theory, this is one of the topics that is de rigueur for delving in deeply and being able to understand them better. The topic is also one near and dear to the hearts of those in robotics, graphics, 3-D modelling, gaming, and areas utilizing multi-dimensional rotations. And naturally, it’s simply a beautiful and elegant subject for those who have no need to apply it to anything, but who just want to meander their way through higher mathematics for the fun of it (this will comprise the largest majority of the class by the way.)

Whether you’ve been away from serious math for decades or use it every day or even if you’ve never gone past Calculus or Linear Algebra, this is bound to be the most entertaining thing you can do with your Tuesday nights in the fall.  If you’re not sure what you’re getting into (or are scared a bit by the course description), I highly encourage to come and join us for at least the first class before you pass up on the opportunity.  I’ll mention that the greater majority of new students to Mike’s classes join the ever-growing group of regulars who take almost everything he teaches subsequently. (For the reticent, I’ll mention that one of the first courses I took from Mike was Algebraic Topology which generally requires a few semesters of Abstract Algebra and a semester of Topology as prerequisites.  I’d taken neither of these prerequisites, but due to Mike’s excellent lecture style and desire to make everything comprehensible, I was able to do exceedingly well in the course.) I’m happy to chat with those who may be reticent. Also keep in mind that you can register to take the class for a grade, pass/fail, or even no grade at all to suit your needs/lifestyle.

My classes have the full spectrum of students from the most serious to the hobbyist to those who are in it for the entertainment and  ‘just enjoy watching it all go by.’

Mike Miller, Ph.D.

As a group, some of us have a collection of a few dozen texts in the area which we’re happy to loan out as well.  In addition to the one recommended text (Mike always gives such comprehensive notes that any text for his classes is purely supplemental at best), several of us have also found some good similar texts:

Given the breadth and diversity of the backgrounds of students in the class, I’m sure Mike will spend some reasonable time at the beginning [or later in the class, as necessary] doing a quick overview of some linear algebra and calculus related topics that will be needed later in the quarter(s).

Further information on the class and a link to register can be found below. If you know of others who might be interested in this, please feel free to forward it along – the more the merrier.

I hope to see you all soon.

Introduction to Lie Groups and Lie Algebras

MATH X 450.6  /  3.00 units /  Reg. # 249254W
Professor: Michael Miller, Ph.D.
Start Date: 9/30/2014
Location UCLA: 5137 Math Sciences Building
Tuesday, 7-10pm
September 30 – December 16, 2014
11 meetings total (no mtg 11/11)
Register here: https://www.uclaextension.edu/Pages/Course.aspx?reg=249254

Course Description

A Lie group is a differentiable manifold that is also a group for which the product and inverse maps are differentiable. A Lie algebra is a vector space endowed with a binary operation that is bilinear, alternating, and satisfies the so-called Jacobi identity. This course, the first in a 2-quarter sequence, is an introductory survey of Lie groups, their associated Lie algebras, and their representations. This first quarter will focus on the special case of matrix Lie groups–including general linear, special linear, orthogonal, unitary, and symplectic. The second quarter will generalize the theory developed to the case of arbitrary Lie groups. Topics to be discussed include compactness and connectedness, homomorphisms and isomorphisms, exponential mappings, the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula, covering groups, and the Weyl group. This is an advanced course, requiring a solid understanding of linear algebra and basic analysis.

Recommended Textbook

Hall, Brian. Lie Groups, Lie Algebras, & Representations (Springer, 2004) ISBN: 9781441923134

 

Portrait of Sophus Lie (1842-1899)
Sophus Lie (1842-1899)

If I had a dollar for every time someone invited me to a Lie Algebra class, I’d be a…