Academic Hiring is an Uphill Battle

First Daffodils/Flickr/CC

The many university rankings, from U.S. News and onwards, can sometimes seem rather capricious: choose a personalized set of variables—student to teacher ratios, alumni giving rates, and so forth—and then apply a very precise yet seemingly arbitrary set of weights to these variables in order to get a ranking. If you have ever been struck by the arbitrariness of such rankings, you are not alone.

So is there a better way? At least when it comes to graduate department rankings, there is a more principled method. In a new paper, published in the new journal Science Advances and titled “Systematic inequality and hierarchy in faculty hiring networks,” co-authors Aaron Clauset, Dan Larremore, and I developed a new ranking methodology based on a simple idea: a school’s prestige (and rank) is determined by where its graduates go. If a school is good, then lots of other schools will want to hire its graduates. Essentially, these movements—from where you get your PhD to where you are employed as faculty—form a network of connections between schools. Our method orders the schools such that these movements from PhD to faculty position between a worse-ranked school and a better-ranked school are minimized; the more highly ranked a school is, the more likely it is that other schools (generally of lower rank) want to hire its graduates.

In this way, this method not only ranks schools by using the decisions of experts in each field—the people who make the hiring decisions in each department—but it sidesteps the massive effort of universities that try to boost their scores in more traditional rankings such as U.S. News by pouring resources into variables that don’t really matter to a school’s output and seem superficial. This system is much harder to game—if you really want to get your department a higher ranking, you need to convince other schools to hire your graduates, which means raising your quality—but it also accords well with our intuitive notions of prestige.

Employing a massive data collection process—information on about 19,000 North American faculty in the areas of computer science, business, and history were collected—we were able test this method on different disciplines. And the schools that are more highly ranked are indeed ones we intuitively view as more prestigious. For example, in computer science, Stanford, Berkeley, and MIT are the top three.

But beyond the ranking methodology itself, you can also see how stratified academia really is:

Across disciplines, we show that faculty hiring follows a common and steeply hierarchical structure that reflects profound social inequality among institutions. Furthermore, we show that (i) doctoral prestige alone better predicts ultimate placement than authoritative rankings from the U.S. News & World Report and the NRC, (ii) female graduates generally place worse than male graduates from the same institution, and (iii) increased institutional prestige leads to increased faculty production, better faculty placement, and a more influential position within a discipline.

For example, a quarter of departments end up generating about three-quarters of all faculty, and if you get a faculty job, you can expect to have one at a school that is more than twenty rungs lower on the prestige ranking. Furthermore, this drop in rank is steeper for women than men.

The structure of this network of academics even has implications for how ideas spread in the academy:

A strong core-periphery pattern has profound implications for the free exchange of ideas. Research interests, collaboration networks, and academic norms are often cemented during doctoral training . Thus, the centralized and highly connected positions of higher-prestige institutions enable substantial influence, via doctoral placement, over the research agendas, research communities, and departmental norms throughout a discipline . The close proximity of the core to the entire network implies that ideas originating in the high-prestige core, regardless of their merit, spread more easily throughout the discipline, whereas ideas originating from low-prestige institutions must filter through many more intermediaries.

Dan Larremore has created some amazing interactive visualizations of the dataset, which show just how stark the imbalance between the top and bottom schools really is. For example, below is the movement in the field of history, with the blue lines showing movement down the hierarchy, red upwards, and gray as no change:

Dan Larremore

The massive sea of blue demonstrates how often graduates end up getting faculty jobs at lower-ranked schools. The big band on the upper left is the lower 119 schools, while the rest of the circle is for only the top 25 schools. The size of these bands represents how much they export in terms of graduates, showing that not only do the top 25 provide the faculty to over three-quarters of all schools but that graduates of the lower 119 schools are nearly always stuck in this bottom tier (because its mainly gray).

There’s a lot in the paper and I’m really proud to have been part of the team. You can read the paper here. And if you want to play with the data or the code from the paper, you can do that too.

This Super-Intense Racing Simulator Costs as Much as a New Corvette

The Motion Pro II racing simulator. CXC Simulations

The Motion Pro II racing simulator.

CXC Simulations

Sporting up to three screens, the Motion Pro II starts at $55k and goes up to more than $80k. CXC Simulations

Sporting up to three screens, the Motion Pro II starts at $55k and goes up to more than $80k.

CXC Simulations

Made in the USA, the Motion Pro II even has carbon fiber components. CXC Simulations

Made in the USA, the Motion Pro II even has carbon fiber components.

CXC Simulations

The whole machine is hand-built with custom designed parts. CXC Simulations

The whole machine is hand-built with custom designed parts.

CXC Simulations

There are a variety of steering wheel options. CXC Simulations

There are a variety of steering wheel options.

CXC Simulations

It also has an add-on flight simulator package. CXC Simulations

It also has an add-on flight simulator package.

CXC Simulations

When one thinks of racing games, most think of console games, like the off-road arcade-style action of Forza Horizon 2 or the realistic simulation in Gran Turismo. More serious players use iRacing, a favorite of pros like Dale Earnhardt, Jr., where users can tack on real wheels, pedals, and seats.

But for the truly hardcore—and deep-pocketed—racing enthusiasts, there’s something even better: the Motion Pro II from CXC Simulations.

Built on top of iRacing’s platform, the Motion Pro II includes racing essentials like a seat, pedals, steering wheel. To make you feel like you’re on the track instead of your basement, you get three 55-inch HD screens, a built-in surround sound system, and a motion system that tosses seat and driver around to simulate the G forces actually driving on a track provides. If it sounds like they’re nearly selling you an entire car (minus the ability to, you know, go places), you’re not wrong—and there’s a price tag to match.

The system starts at an eye-obliterating $54,000, about what you’d pay for a brand new 2015 Chevrolet Corvette. Which can, you know, go places. And like the Corvette, the Motion Pro II gets more expensive when you start adding options. Go for the higher-quality dashboard, swankier steering wheel and shifter options, and screens that provide a 180-degree field of view, and you could spend north of $80,000. Which is more than what you’d pay for an Audi A8. At least the system provides virtual versions of hundreds of racetracks (including the Le Mans course from 1979) and over 1,000 cars to choose from, including options for F1, NASCAR, IndyCar, and WRC.

Sure, it seems absurd to spend that much money on a video game (and we’re being generous here), but CXC says the product is aimed both at wealthy amateurs who might be looking to build the ultimate man-cave and professional drivers who want to spend time in a simulator ahead of races. In other words, people with money to burn in the pursuit of fun.

It might be pricey, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t measure out a corner of the office to make sure one would fit someday.

IFTTT’s New Apps Offer a Button for Triggering Other Apps

IFTTT’s new Do apps let you trigger actions yourself. IFTTT

Perhaps you’re one of the many thousands of people who’ve automated some small part of their digital existence with IFTTT. Maybe you’ve instructed it to post your Instagram shots to Twitter, or to text message you whenever someone in your city puts an acoustic guitar for sale on Craigslist.

Until now, these “recipes” have been dependent on something else happening. If this, then that. But with its new trio of apps, IFTTT wants to let you start taking action yourself.

The apps, available today for iPhone and Android, fall under the collective banner “Do.” They work just like IFTTT’s recipes, except you’re triggering the action. The main one is the Do Button. It’s just that: a big virtual button, meant to streamline the daily digital tasks that might take several taps otherwise. With a single press, you can have it email your friend a random GIF, log that you had a cup of coffee, set your Nest to your preferred temperature, or do just about anything else that currently falls in the domain of IFTTT’s 170-some channels. It’s like an Easy Button for the various apps and services that are on the IFTTT platform.

A list of suggested recipes for Do Camera. IFTTT

If IFTTT has always been about tying your favorite apps and services together in the background, Do is a bid to let you do more with those apps and services in the foreground. And as we move beyond apps in general to other modes of lightweight engagement, these sorts of programmable shortcuts could offer hints of the future of interaction at large.

Creative Control, With You at the Wheel

As co-founder Linden Tibbets explains it, the point of IFTTT is to let people tweak digital stuff just as easily as they do physical stuff. Inevitably, when he’s talking about the company, Tibbets will cite a few of the small ways we modify, adapt, and repurpose our real-world surroundings. Think about how we tuck a pencil behind our ear, or move the furniture in the room to keep the sun out of our eyes. In a sense, Tibbets says, these are instances of people “programming” their physical environment. “That same behavior is almost completely missing from the digital world,” he says.

So you can think of IFTTT a little bit like programming for way beginners. If that’s the case, then Do is sort of a pre-made app-building kit. The Do Button gives you a single input and lets you tie any action to it you can think up. In some cases, the functionality will simply be streamlining something that takes several more taps inside another app—say, reporting to the Jawbone Up app that you’re in a good mood. But it could also be something more customized, like a one-tap shortcut to ask your coworkers on Slack if they want coffee when you’re making a run.

The other two apps apply the same “Do” framework to different types of input. First there’s Do Note—essentially a programmable notepad. You can use it to send an email reminder to yourself with a single tap, or to add something directly to a specific notebook in Evernote. You can also treat it as a sort of command line. You can type “purple” and have your Hue bulb turn that color, for instance. One IFTTT employee uses it to quickly pay his roommate via Square Cash. The third app is Do Camera, which automatically emails photos to a certain person, say, or files them to a Tumblr with a particular tag, or whatever else. As with the original IFTTT service (which as of today is being renamed simply “If”), it’s up to you to figure out your own killer app for the tools.

A Bridge to the Post-App Future

For now, Do recipes will live in apps on your smartphone. But Tibbetts and company are already thinking about other places they could reside. “You can imagine it working as an app on another type of device—like a watch,” he says. It could also exist as a browser extension, say, or even inside other peoples’ apps. “It’s this concept of a programmable button,” Tibbets says. “Once people understand that concept, we should be able to take it in all sorts of directions.”

You can tap your Do buttons from the lock screen. IFTTT

You can already get a taste of this future with Do Button’s widget in iOS. With it, you can access your three personalized buttons from the swipe-down “today” panel on your lock screen. It’s a big step toward getting some personalized functionality onto your phone closer to the system level, keeping you from having to unlock your device and swipe to a particular app every time you want to get something done.

As we look to a future of simpler, more lightweight interaction, the “programmable button” could be a powerful concept. It doesn’t make apps obsolete—with Do, you’re still filing things to Evernote and messaging your coworkers via Slack, after all. But it does give each of us a bit of valuable room to say, “Here’s how this app could work best for me.”

In the Land of Uber, A Taxi Company Renames Itself After An App

Flywheel

It has come to this. In San Francisco, where Uber was born, the city’s self-described oldest and largest taxi company is renaming itself after a competing app. On Wednesday, Desoto Cab said it was rebranding—and repainting—its fleet of 300 cars as Flywheel Taxis.

As if you needed any more evidence that smartphones are changing the way things work, move, and even look in the real world.

Of course, Uber itself is Exhibit A for the ways ubiquitous mobile computing (and a strong appetite for conflict) can unsettle local economies. Uber is a pure function of smartphone technology—no mobile device, no app, no Uber. But there is an Uber, much to the dismay of companies like Desoto, which previously dominated the taxi trade. To catch up with the new app-defined reality of their industry, cab companies have joined forces with startups like Flywheel, which works specifically with licensed taxi drivers.

Spreading a new logo in the streets won’t make much difference, however, unless the company it represents can offer something different and better.

But playing catch-up is hard when the competition keeps racing ahead. While taxi companies were still trying to move beyond a business model that still largely depended on customers sticking out their hands on street corners, Uber was gathering billions of dollars in financing in a bid to become the 21st century’s definitive way to get around. In the process, Uber has become synonymous with the service it provides (“You don’t have to pick me up, I’ll just get an Uber”). Along with its technological might, Uber has a brand advantage that seems nearly impossible to surmount.

Still, if you’re going to try, you have to start somewhere. I don’t check which company’s cab I’m hailing from the curb. I get in whichever car stops. But as apps take the place of arm-waving, I need to know an app exists before I know to use it. Yes, Uber rose to prominence on word-of-mouth. But its success has crowded out rivals. Flywheel was founded the same year as Uber, but it has nowhere near the name recognition, nor the funding. Plastering the app’s name on the sides of the cars it summons raises the profile of Flywheel, which in turn helps Desoto, since that’s the app to which it’s decided to hitch its future.

More Than A Logo

Spreading a new logo in the streets won’t make much difference, however, unless the company it represents can offer something different and better. Flywheel and the traditional cab companies it works with have tried to sell themselves as a legit alternative to Uber’s pervasive defiance of regulators. But the moral high ground will always be a niche market. Meanwhile, despite the scandals that have tarnished its image, Uber is reportedly forecasting $2 billion in revenue this year, a figure all the more stunning because it apparently represents money the company keeps after paying out drivers.

Flywheel also says it will never enact surge pricing, Uber’s much-loathed practice of raising fare rates at times of peak demand. Uber says surge pricing is necessary to get more drivers out on the road. Better to charge more, the company believes, than leave passengers stranded. But higher prices also seem designed to drive demand down.

Predictable pricing is a nice promise, but even more important is a predictable ride. Fairly or not, San Francisco’s taxis have long had a reputation for not being available when needed, an image problem Uber has exploited since its early days. And popularity creates its own virtuous cycle: the more demand for rides on one app, the more drivers will want to drive for that platform—more supply to meet demand.

A spokeswoman for Flywheel says that San Francisco has plenty of cabs to go around, and that its drivers have the advantage as licensed taxis of being able to stop for hails from the street as well as the app. But if cab drivers want a real ranges of choices in how they find their fares, they have another option, too: they can always log into Uber.

Stalking a wily foe: Scientists figure out how C. difficile bacteria wreak havoc in gut

Sometimes, science means staying awake for two days straight. But losing sleep is a small sacrifice to make, if you want to learn more about tiny bacteria that sicken half a million Americans each year, kill more than 14,000 of them, and rack up $4.8 billion in health care costs.

That's what drove a team of University of Michigan scientists to work around the clock to study the bacterium called Clostridium difficile, or C. difficile, the bane of hospitals and nursing homes. Most patients develop it after taking antibiotics.

In a new paper in the journal Infection and Immunity, the researchers lay out for the first time exactly how C. difficile wreaks havoc on the guts of animals in a short time, and causes severe diarrhea and life-threatening disease in humans.

Despite the heavy toll the organism takes, no team had ever been able to measure C. difficile activity over time in this way. Their findings could help lead to better prevention and treatment of C. difficile infections.

A fast track to disease

The researchers started by introducing C. difficile spores into mice via their mouths -- similar to what might happen in a hospital environment where spores from past patients' infections abound. Then, they studied what happened after the spores entered the body, by taking gut samples at regular intervals and studying them under special conditions. The animals had all received antibiotics.

Through their hours-long surveillance, the researchers found that it took C. difficile only about 24 hours to go from hard spores to toxin-producing, diarrhea-inducing cells all the way at the other end of the digestive tract, in the large intestine.

The researchers also show that bile acids in the gut "woke up" the dormant bacteria spores, and that they grow into cells in the small intestine within 24 hours of exposure. Because antibiotics disrupted the gut's normal community of other bacteria -- called the gut microbiome -- C. difficile cells could continue to the large intestine and start their toxic effects on the cells that line the gut. When they tested the contents of the small intestine separately, they also showed this happens whether or not the animals have received antibiotics.

In the large intestine, they even saw how C. difficile cells formed spores again -- allowing them to survive the exit from the body in feces and go on to infect a new host.

"If we can understand the process that specific bacteria use to germinate and get established, we may be able to intervene more effectively," says Vincent Young, M.D., Ph.D., the senior author of the new study, a professor at the U-M Medical School and co-leader of the school's Host Microbiome Initiative. "We assume that antibiotics change the gut microbiome, but we haven't known how that allows C. difficile to gain a foothold and begin to ramp up growth."

First author Mark Koenigsknecht, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in Young's lab who is now continuing his research at the U-M College of Pharmacy, was one of the researchers who was up all night to get data for the experiment.

"We introduced 100 spores through the mouth, and within six hours we could find 1,000 cells in the intestinal tract," he notes. "We chose this strain of C. difficile because of its rapid ability to cause disease in animals, but we didn't think it would happen that quickly."

Tracking C. difficile's effect on the gut

The U-M team used a mouse model they developed, and a common antibiotic in the cephalosporin class. The strain of C. difficile used in the experiment originated with a patient years ago, but is available for purchase as a laboratory culture.

Working in facilities made possible by the Host Microbiome Initiative, they took samples at regular intervals from seven difficileerent areas of the digestive tracts of the mice. They then whisked the samples into special oxygen-free facilities, called anaerobic chambers, that allowed them to see the amount and forms of C. difficile present in each gut region.

With the help of Patrick Schloss, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology, the researchers used DNA analysis to see what the entire gut microbiome looked like in antibiotic-treated animals and those that hadn't been treated. The antibiotics really disrupted the community of bacteria in the small intestine, and C. difficile came to dominate in 36 hours.

They also examined the intestinal tract under a microscope. The toxin produced by C. difficile cells in their vegetative, or growing, state causes an effect on the cells that line the digestive tract, causing them to become "leaky," raising the alarm among nearby immune system cells, and leading to diarrhea. The cell changes were seen in the large intestine about 30 hours after spore introduction.

Next steps

Koenigsknecht notes that this is the first time researchers have seen in a living animal that toxin production, and production of new spores of C. difficile capable of surviving outside the body, occur at the same time. This indication that the two processes are linked, and that they are switched on by some factor in the body, is intriguing, he says.

Now, the effort to figure out what that signal is, whether different strains of C. difficile act differently, and who is most vulnerable to its effects, will continue.

Koenigsknecht has teamed with College of Pharmacy professors to test the use of a seven-foot-long tube that can be threaded down the human digestive tract and used to retrieve samples at different locations along the way. Originally developed for testing how drugs are broken down and used by the body, it could provide an entirely new window into the human microbiome.

"Now that we understand what C. difficile is doing, we can also go and ask more questions about how the machinery inside the cell is turning on," he says. "We have to know how to study it before we can cure it." Animal-based research is vital to this effort.

Young notes that there are many ways C. difficile could take over an antibiotic-decimated gut. "Does it prevent other bacteria from growing, or outcompete them by eating faster? Does it communicate with the cells of the gut lining? We're trying to figure out the interaction between the 'good bugs' and the 'bad bugs', and the lining of the gut." Young is an associate professor of infectious diseases and of microbiology and immunology.

In addition to Young, Schloss and Koenigsknecht, the study's authors are Casey Theriot, Ingrid Bergin and Cassie Schumacher. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health grants U19AI090871, K01GM109236 and 5R01GM099514. It used the U-M Metabolomics Core, funded by NIH grant U24 DK097153. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.