One of the the best things I have found about working in academic research is what I like to think of as the Fellowship of Fellowships. The Fellowship being the community of us aspiring scientists and the Fellowships being the grants we apply for from various funding agencies. Not being an American citizen, there are just so many fellowships I can apply for. The same is also true for most of my post-doc friends, we are all hoping to get the same limited set of awards. A situation fraught with the possibility of conflict, one would think, but astoundingly enough not so.
I have been (unsuccessfully as yet) on the fellowship go-around for about eight months now. First, in my Ph.D. lab. Three of us applied for the same fellowship, a really prestigious one, and the three of us actually managed to not only consult amicably about the various bureaucracies of the application process, but we also managed to wish each other well. None of us got it, as it turned out, but it was such a pleasant experience when it had the potential to be not so at all. Same again, now in my new lab, I am applying for fellowships, and so are so many people around me. To the same agencies too, and I still hop around and discuss the process with these people who are ostensibly my competitors. I haven't felt like I was in an envious conflict as yet. It may happen, but I sincerely doubt it.
It may just be that I am amazingly lucky in my friends (which is true, shout out to you all, you know who you are). I would also like to believe it is because there are still people in the research world who are good and true and worth it. And there are, one just needs to be reminded sometimes. This reminder came at just the right time for me, right about when my insecure cynicism was about to swamp all god feelings.
So, today I am warm and fuzzy about the research world :) let's see how long it lasts! At least i will have a written reminder out there that can drag me back from the depths of self-pity and raging helplessness which seems like the dominant emotions of large swathes of post-doc-hood.
Sunday, February 04, 2007
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2 comments:
Let me ilustrate you, because in the end, science is nothing but a game. I remember learning about games theory in Ethology class a looooong time ago. Here is goes (from Wikipedia, of course):
TIT-FOR-TAT
This strategy is dependent on four conditions that has allowed it to become the most prevalent strategy for the Prisoner's Dilemma:
1. Unless provoked, the agent will always cooperate
2. If provoked, the agent will retaliate
3. The agent is quick to forgive
4. The agent must have a good chance of competing against the opponent more than once.
In the last condition, the definition of "good chance" depends on the payoff matrix of the prisoner's dilemma. The important thing is that the competition continues long enough for repeated punishment and forgiveness to generate a long-term payoff higher than the possible loss from cooperating initially.
A fifth condition applies to make the competition meaningful: if an agent knows that the next play will be the last, it should naturally defect for a higher score. Similarly if it knows that the next two plays will be the last, it should defect twice, and so on. Therefore the number of competitions must not be known in advance to the agents.
Against a variety of alternative strategies tit for tat was the most effective, winning in several annual automated tournaments against (generally far more complex) strategies created by teams of computer scientists, economists, and psychologists. Game theorists informally believed the strategy to be optimal (although no proof was presented).
It is important to know that tit for tat still is the most effective strategy if you compare the average performance of each competing team. The team which recently won over a pure tit for tat team only outperformed it with some of their algorithms because they submitted multiple algorithms which would recognize each other and assume a master and slave relationship (one algorithm would "sacrifice" itself and obtain a very poor result in order for the other algorithm to be able to outperform Tit for Tat on an individual basis, but not as a pair or group).
wow, something to think about!!!
i really never thouight of it that way...
hey cobble, how's things?
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