So, why haven’t universities been smart enough to centralize an even more valuable computational resource, their computer labs?

As any student of Software Carpentry will tell you, it is far more important to be able to program well than it is to have access to a really large high performance computing center. This means that the most important computational resource a university has is the classes that teach their students how to program, and the computer labs on which they rely.

At my university [2] all of the computer labs on campus are controlled by either individual departments or individual colleges. This means that if you want to teach a class in one of them you can’t request it as a room through the normal scheduling process, you have to ask the cognizant university fiefdom for permission. This wouldn’t be a huge issue, except that in my experience the answer is typically a resounding no. And it’s not a “no, where really sorry but the classroom is booked solid with our own classes,” it’s “no, that computer lab is ours, good luck” [3].

And this means that we end up wasting a lot of expensive university resources. For example, last year I taught in a computer lab “owned” by another college [4]. I taught in the second class slot of a four slot afternoon. In the slot before my class there was a class that used the room about four times during the semester (out of 48 class periods). There were no classes in the other two afternoon slots [5]. That means that classes were being taught in the lab only 27% of the time or 2% of the time if I hadn’t been granted an exception to use the lab [6].

Since computing skills are increasingly critical to many areas of science (and everything else for that matter) this territoriality with respect to computer labs means that they proliferate across campus. The departments/colleges of Computer Science, Engineering, Social Sciences, Natural Resources and Biology [7] all end up creating and maintaining their own computer labs, and those labs end up sitting empty (or being used by students to send email) most of the time. This is horrifyingly inefficient in an era where funds for higher education are increasingly hard to come by and where technology turns over at an ever increasing rate. Which [8] brings me to the title of this post. The solution to this problem is for universities to stop allowing computer labs to be controlled by individual colleges/departments in exactly the same way that most classrooms are not controlled by colleges/departments. Most universities have a central unit that schedules classrooms and classes are fit into the available spaces. There is of course a highly justified bias to putting classes in the buildings of the cognizant department, but large classes in particular may very well not be in the department’s building. It works this way because if it didn’t then the university would be wasting huge amounts of space having one or more lecture halls in every department, even if they were only needed a few hours a week. The same issue applies to computer labs, only they are also packed full of expensive electronics. So please universities, for the love of all that is good and right and simply fiscally sound in the world, start treating computer labs like what they are: really valuable and expensive classrooms.

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[1] Think of a single scientist who keeps 10 expensive computers, only uses them a total of 1-2 months per year, but when he does the 10 computers aren’t really enough so he has to wait a long time to finish the analysis.

[2] And I think the point I’m about to make is generally true; at least it has been at several other universities I’ve worked over the years.

[3] Or in some cases something more like “Frak you. You fraking biologists have no fraking right to teach anyone a fraking thing about fraking computers.” Needless to say, the individual in question wasn’t actually saying frak, but this is a family blog.

[4] As a result of a personal favor done for one administrator by another administrator.

[5] I know because I took advantage of this to hold my office hours in the computer lab following class.

[6] To be fair it should be noted that this and other computer labs are often used by students for doing homework (along with other less educationally oriented activities) when classes are not using the rooms, but in this case the classroom was a small part of a much larger lab and since I never witnessed the non-classroom portion of the lab being filled to capacity, the argument stands.

[7] etc., etc., etc.

[8] finally…

Dear Wiley,

I like a lot of things that you do, but a few months ago you quietly changed your RSS feeds in a way that is both disrespectful and frankly not good for your business. You started including only the last author’s name in the RSS feed. This is bad idea for three reasons:

1. It shows a complete lack of respect for (or understanding of) a number of scientific disciplines that do not have a strong last author tradition (including ecology; a field in which you publish a large proportion of the journals). If you do this for a paper from my field then most of the time you are publishing the name of the least significant contributor.
2. Even in disciplines (or labs) where there is a last author tradition, not including the name of the (often junior) person who did most of the work is just disrespectful. Yes, maybe you’ll attract more click-throughs with a more senior name, but the goal in scientific fields has always been to provide credit where credit is due and you are failing to honor that tradition.
3. Finally (and worst of all from your perspective), you are costing yourself readers. One of the considerations that I make when deciding to read a paper is based on who the authors are. At least in fields like mine I will rarely see a name associated with a paper that is meaningful to me since the last author may well be an undergraduate or a tech.

In case you think this is just one person’s opinion we took a quick informal poll a little while ago. Of 37 respondents 100% agree that if you are going to list a single author’s name with a paper it should be the first author.

So please, either switch back to using the first author’s name or, better yet, actually list the entire author line. Seeing someone’s name whose work we respect will encourage us to click-through to the paper regardless of where that name occurs in the author line.

Regards,

Ethan White (and the readers of Jabberwocky Ecology)

P.S. Also, we know that the RSS feed includes the abstract. We don’t need it in large, bold, capitalized letters at the top of every feed.

If this seems a bit harsh, whiny, etc., then keep this in mind. In the last month I had over 1000 new publications come through my feed reader and another 100 or so in email tables of contents. This is an incredible amount of material just to process, let alone read. If journals want readers to pay attention to their papers it is incumbent upon them to make it as easy as possible to sort through this deluge of information and allow their readership to quickly and easily identify papers of interest. Journals that don’t do this are hurting themselves as well as their readers.

Yeah, this doesn’t make any sense to me either, but apparently that’s how we’re using this phrase these days.

P.S. I was going to let this one go until Ecotone used the original post to question “the reality (or not) of macroecology as its own discipline.” There’s nothing wrong with creative titles (we enjoy them here at Jabberwocky), but when contrasted with EEB & Flow’s other posts from ESA it’s not surprising that Ecotone took this as being a passive agressive critique of the state of the field. My main concern is that EEB & Flow seems to conflate an important methodological approach with particular interpretations of ecological process resulting from an application of that approach. Just because I disagree with a particular paper using an experiment doesn’t lead me to have “an unsure feeling about this field.” I mean really.