Recently, I spent an hour sitting in a room with around 30 of my colleagues, where we spent the time writing a 100 word description of one of our research papers, sharing it with colleagues, and working together to improve the description. Next month, we will have another session like this, another 30 person hours of effort spent. Another university with which I am familiar employed a creative writing tutor to come in for the afternoon and facilitate a similar exercise.

Why were we doing this? Because one of the requirements of the Research Excellence Framework (REF)—the national assessment of university research quality—requires the submission of research papers to an evaluation panel, each accompanied by a 100 word summary. Even though the next REF isn’t likely to happen until 2021 at the earliest, we are committing a reasonable amount of effort and attention to this; not just to writing our 100 word summaries, but to various mock REF exercises, external evaluations, consulting with evaluators from previous rounds, reading exemplars from previously successful universities, etc. If every university is asking its staff to commit a few hours this year to this kind of activity, this mounts up to about 70 person-years of academic staff effort just this year across the country, not counting the REF officers etc. that the universities employ.

As I have noted elsewhere, I can’t imagine that the politicians and civil servants who devised this scheme had any idea that it would be acted on with this amount of diligence. I imagine that they think that come 2021, we will look at what we have been doing over the last few years, spend a hour or so writing the summaries, and that would be that. The idea that we are practicing for this four years in advance wouldn’t even have crossed their mind (despite the fact that, I’m sure, they are equally driven to do vast amounts of similar exercises—mock elections, draft manifestos, etc.).

Why do we do this? Why don’t we just stick to our core business and do good research, then when it comes to the REF just do the summaries etc. and be done with it? Largely, because of the importance of these results; they are fairly granular, last a long time, and the results are financially and reputationally important, therefore a minor screwup could result in bad consequences for a long time. Also, perhaps, because of the sense of needing to be doing something—we have absorbed some idea that managed is better than unmanaged. And also, because everyone else is doing it. If somehow we could all agree to hold back on this and be equally shoddy, we would be in the same position; but, we are in a “red queen” position where we all must run to be in the same place. Such are the structural inefficiencies of a competition-based system,

Antibiotic resistance is in the news again today. The focus for a solution is primarily an economic one. The economic benefit to pharma companies to discover antibiotics is minimal, because the market for new antibiotics should, rationally, be small; unlike new drugs in most areas of medicine, which will rapidly displace older drugs through a mixture of greater efficacy, fewer side-effects and canny marketing, there is a motivation for new antibiotics to be held back as a “drug of last resort”, and only used when existing antibiotics fail. This offers the most sensible way to avoid bacteria evolving to become resistant to the new antibiotics. As a result, the focus is on the creation of artificial market incentives to support pharma companies in the development of those antibiotics, despite the small market that they will have.

Here is an alternative suggestion. Instead of routinely using all currently available antibiotics, have a schedule where every few years, a subset of antibiotics is authorised for use. Then, after a few years, these are proscribed from use, and another subset used. The ides is that during the “fallow years” when a particular antibiotic is not being used, the bacteria will have no evolutionary pressure to maintain that resistance, and an energetic cost to keeping it, and so over time it would lose that resistance. The timescales would need to be worked out based on the timescale during which antibiotic resistance is gained/lost.

Critical to whether this would work is the question of whether antibiotic resistance would be lost by the bacteria on a short enough timescale. There is an informal discussion of this here, which suggests that is can be retained for a long time. But, it would be interesting to know if this has been verified experimentally.

Typically, a scientific conference works like this (certainly in the areas in which I have worked): authors submit papers with a strict page limit n, struggle to fit their exciting work into n pages, get reviews, then if the paper is accepted they have to address a pile of reviewers comments about the paper, and squeeze all of this into the same number of pages. Of course, reviewers rarely ask for things to be taken out: most comments are “clarify this”, “explain this in more detail”, “give the parameters/pseudocode for this”, “do some more experiments do whatever and include the results”. Of course, this is impossible, and so we end up taking out more of the stuff that made the paper comprehensible in the first place.

Suggestion: instead of having the same page limit for both phases, have a page limit of n+1 or n+2 for the final version; then, the authors can have a hope of address the reviewer’s comments properly. I’ve come across this idea discussed a couple of times, but I can’t remember it being used for real.

And whilst we’re on the subject, why do we care about strict page limits in an age where the ink is mostly bits anyway…but that is probably an argument for another day.

We are increasingly happy with the idea of collective intelligence—the idea that intelligence can emerge from the collective action of a number of individually unintelligent agents. A canonical example is the ant colony, which acts collectively in an intelligent fashion despite the individual components working according to simple rules. However, we are still somewhat wary of the idea of something made up of things that are in themselves intelligent being described as intelligent. It is as if we want to have a single source of intelligence to “blame” for the actions of the system.