Tense

I am in paper-writing mode, which means (among other trials and tribulations) I am wrestling with the issue of tense. Specifically, did I apply my methods in the past, or am I implementing them now? Did my results show something, or are they still showing them? Which tenses need to match (and when…)? Primarily, this is a matter of style, and there seems to be a consensus that the present tense is somehow indicative of more exciting, more relevant results. Start your paper ‘Here, we show for the first time…’ and you are right on the bleeding tip of the cutting edge. ‘Here, we showed for the first time…’, on the other hand, and you are already yesterday’s news.

Now, I’ll plead guilty to sprucing up my dry academic prose with liberal sprinklings of immediacy, probably more often than is strictly healthy. But this kind of perky presence can really grate if used to excess, and can lead one into tricky little linguistic culs de sac to boot. A special bugbear of mine, for instance, is the insistence of all TV and radio historians on relating long-past events exclusively in the present tense. “In 1066, William invades England. After a bloody battle, he is victorious…”, and suchlike. I assume they have all been told that it somehow brings history alive to talk in this way. It didn’t, it doesn’t, and it won’t. It just annoys me. (If you’ve never noticed this before, you will now, and I’m afraid I may have ruined your enjoyment of the otherwise wonderful Simon Schama, for which I apologise!)

To return to the matter in hand, the particular problem with writing, say, a description of your statistical methods in the present tense, is what happens when one thing leads to another? For example, suppose you fit(ted) a linear model to some data, but on inspection of the model output, decide to remove a non-signficant interaction in order to make interpretation easier. You could find yourself writing:

“We model y as a function of x1, x2, and their interaction. Because the interaction is not significant, we exclude it and re-run the model”, which doesn’t seem right to me – you have described a sequence of events, but only one point in time. But if you start with “We modelled y as a function of x1, x2, and their interaction…” you are then committed to the past tense throughout.

Similar choices have to be made in the results. Is y significantly related to x; or was it? I tend to prefer the present in this case, because to use the past tense implies that the results were somehow contingent on something specific I did on the single occasion I ran the models for the paper, rather than being a constant property of the data (analysed according to my protocol).

But consistency is the key. And with a large pool of co-authors, and sufficient iterations of a manuscript through multiple drafts, tenses do tend to drift. So you can be performing an experiment which produced certain results, and other logical slips.

None of this really matters, perhaps. But if you want reading your paper to be a pleasant experience (as well as a necessary one, naturally) for your peers, then maybe it is worth plotting the timeline of your sentences to make sure no wormholes have appeared.

(For more on scientific writing, by the way, Tine Janssens has collected a load of good links in her latest interesting post, so rather than replicate them here, I’d encourage you to read them there.)

To AV or to AV not?

We go to the polls in the UK tomorrow, in a national referendum to decide whether we should change the voting system we use in parliamentary elections. The choice is between our current system, First Past the Post (FPTP), and the Alternative Vote (AV) system. There’s a good, non-partisan explanation of the alternatives here, but briefly, under FPTP each voter gets a single choice, and the candidate with the most votes wins – even if they receive rather a low percentage of all votes cast. Under AV, voters can rank candidates according to preference, and second preferences are counted until one candidate has at least 50% of votes. Proponents of AV system argue that it will result in fewer ‘wasted’ votes – so I could vote, say Green, but have Labour as a second preference to indicate that I would rather they got in than the Conservatives. Opponents balk at the idea that someone can win the first round (i.e., get the most votes), but not get elected. I can see pros and cons in both systems, but the debate has descended into pettiness and misinformation, particularly on the part of the ‘No’ (No to AV, that is) campaign.

In particular, the No campaign have used a range of sporting analogies to suggest that it would be ridiculous in a race for someone to cross the line in first position, yet not be declared the winner. My gut feeling was that this is actually unlikely to happen very often in practice, but I hadn’t seen any data from countries which use AV, to back this up.

The Yes campaign have, however, used Australia as an example of a country which has used AV for years, without any general trend for less stable governments (coalitions, hung parliaments, etc.) than we’ve had in the UK under FPTP. But what I wanted to know was, how often does a candidate finish second or lower based on first preferences, and end up getting elected?

Turns out, there’s a ton of data easily available to look at this. I found information on the 1998 federal election which stated that “99 of the 148 electorates in the House of Representatives required the distribution of preferences. In 7 of these seats… the candidate who led on primary votes lost after the distribution of preferences.” So, in only 5% of cases did the caricature of the No campaign, i.e. a ‘loser’ winning, actually happen.

I had a look at the 2010 election too. The definitive data are available to download here, for someone to do a thorough job of this – if, for example, they were employed on a campaign in favour of AV, say. I have neither time nor inclination to do a proper job, so I relied on the ABC report of the election results.

Looking through each of the 150 seats, I counted 139 (93%) in which the candidate who lead on first preferences, ended up winning the seat. Of those 11 seats where the first preference winner lost on the second preference count, 10 were won by the candidate who came second on first preference. The remaining seat was won by the originally third-placed candidate. Excluding this 11th seat, the candidate who ended up winning was on average about 3.1% behind after the first round (range 0.1-9.5%); including all 11 seats, this changes to 3.7 (0.1-14.5).

So, in general, Australia offers little evidence that candidates who don’t come first based on first preferences will often end up winning seats, except in a (very) few pretty close-run races. Of course, AV may change voter (and campaigning) behaviour in all kinds of ways, some of which may not be desirable. But to base a campaign on such a straw man as ‘losers’ winning, is pretty disingenuous.

In the end, It looks like I will end up making my decision on this issue based on my distaste for a misleading and negative campaign, rather than through any great enthusiasm engendered by a campaign for positive change.

Slacking

On Friday I have the day off, thanks to the wedding of a fantastically privileged prince to, as Tim Dowling nicely put it (and appropriately for this blog),

…Future princess, common Kate;
As common as the common skate,
Which is to say, quite rare these days…

Add this to the rather more proletarian May Day holiday on Monday, and last weekend’s Easter break (Good Friday? Yes, and good Monday too ta very much) and that makes 11 workdays in three weeks.

Which led me to wonder, how many other academic scientists will do as I have done, and take off every minute offered? I’ve been thinking a bit recently about the culture of ridiculous working hours in science, triggered by Rachel Bowden’s Nature Jobs blog a couple of weeks back. More particularly, I’ve been working myself into a state of some annoyance about what I perceive to be a bit of macho posturing, of bragging about the hours one works.

The biologist Edward O. Wilson – whose work and writing on biodiversity I respect and admire very much – has been quoted (I can’t find the source) as saying that a good scientist should expect to work 80 hours a week. 40 for research, 40 for admin, teaching, etc. This figure seems to be bandied around almost as something to aspire to, and I suppose that during your PhD, there is something kind of rights-of-passage about really putting in the hours, in the manner of junior hospital doctors. But, perhaps because I gave up trying to maintain anything like that pace a while ago (still more so since the birth of my son), it aggravates me that anyone thinks that, for a normal person, an 80 hour working week could possibly be sustained over a period of years, decades even.

Let’s do the maths (as Mark insists to Jeremy in an episode of Peep Show, the ‘s’ on the end there is non-negotiable).

There are 168 hours in the week, so 88 after your 80 hours of work.

Let’s assume you sleep for 7 hours a night – personally I’d prefer more, but 7 sounds reasonable. So, you now have 39 waking hours left.

Some of that will be filled with the business of staying alive. Let’s say 2 hours a day for preparing and eating food. More will be taken up with remaining vaguely hygienic in body and home – does an average of an hour a day for washing self and clothes, cleaning the house, doing any essential DIY tasks that arise, tidying the garden, buying groceries, etc., sound about right?

OK. You have 18 hours left. You’ll spend some of those commuting to work and back – an hour a day, if you’re lucky, which – assuming you spread your 80 hours over 6 days, brings you down to 12 hours.

12 hours a week, every week, to do everything else. To socialise, chat to family and friends on the phone, play with your kids (assuming you ever found the time to perform the various tasks necessary to produce any), exercise, watch TV, whatever.

It’s worth laying these sums out in black and white because I know that people do feel pressured into working stupid hours (as a matter of course, I mean, not just for the occasional mad week before a deadline, which we all do). My message is that there are two ways to survive such a punishing schedule.

First, you could live to work. If you have no interest in food as anything other than fuel; if you are prepared to forego hobbies, exercise, a social life of any real meaning; then I suppose you could just about cram it in.

Second – and this I suspect is the route taken by most senior academics who are proud of their long hours at the desk – you can perform an accounting trick. You acquire a spouse who is prepared to do all of the work of making life run smoothly, and you simply appropriate their 40 hours. 80 hours work between a couple? (With sole credit to the partner in paid employment, of course.) Easy enough. But it’s not a path that many of us particularly want to follow.

So, I’ll be enjoying my bank holiday weekends. And working damn hard – during office hours – when I get back.