The Physics Mafia

In 2002, the South African government re-calibrated funding per student in universities. Instead of all science students attracting the same government subsidy, science students were divided into 3 categories: subjects that were expensive to teach (Physics, Chemistry, life sciences), subjects with less intensive lab requirements (Mathematics) and subjects that are really cheap to teach (Computer Science).

Computer Science extra cheap to teach – cheaper than pure maths? Did you hear that right?

A moment's reflection will show that this is idiotic. Computer science at its most theoretical is pure maths. At its most applied, it is a kind of engineering (which is in the higher category, along with mathematical sciences – not the highest category, with physics etc.).

Despite numerous protests, this idiocy has persisted.

What's going on: is the SA government run by idiots?

It seems not (entirely): this information comes from the universities which are run by idiots; the government has only been stupid in believing them.

What these rankings represent is not what these subjects should cost to teach, but what they have historically cost.

Physics has been expensive for some time because it attracts low student numbers, has a relatively high fraction of senior academics (hence with more expensive salaries) and most physics departments have a generous complement of lab staff. Computer Science, on the other hand, is a relatively new discipline, without many senior academics and without lab staff.

The lack of lab staff is the most serious differentiator, and feeds back to the other major difference in numbers of senior academics. For a typical Physics first year class, the lecturer just shows up for lectures. Lab staff take care of pracs, and tutors take care of tutorials. Since the fundamentals are largely settled (most Physics developed in the last 200 years is considered advanced, and is not seen in big classes), the same lab exercises can be recycled every year, and lab equipment can last decades. Lab staff do not need specialist skills in demand in industry, and can be trained up off the street. This means that running large classes (e.g., Physics for engineers) is not particularly onerous. Up the scale, Physics is not particularly popular as a major, so level 2 and above classes are small, and lecturing small classes of keen students is a whole lot less effort than handling big classes of students of wide variations in ability and motivation. And of course running labs is a whole lot easier even in this scenario with trained lab staff. The result? Physics academics have a fair amount of free time to write papers and build their CVs.

In Computer Science, the situation is reversed. The subject (despite the odd downturn in demand) has been more popular than Physics for decades, resulting in much larger classes at level 2 and above. On the other hand, most Computer Science departments in South Africa have no lab staff. Their technical staff capacity is usually sufficient to maintain the servers, networks and lab computers, but not to set up and manage exercises. This puts a major additional burden on academics – at all levels from introductory to advanced classes. A moment's reflection would reveal that failing to employ support staff is a false economy: if someone with a PhD and 20 years' experience is doing work that a technician could do, you are in effect paying a technician the salary of a person with a PhD and 20 years' experience. From the point of view of academics, building a research track record is significantly more difficult than in Physics. There is very little time to spare while running courses. Only by attracting research students do you stand much chance of producing significant output. But it's much easier to attract research students if you already have interesting outputs.

So why is this happening? Physics has a cosy position in South Africa. Even in the best funded higher education systems, Physics departments have been closed because they are not attracting students (in the UK, 20 Physics departments have closed over the last decade). Yet in South Africa, universities persist in the 19th century view that Physics is the only real science (captured in Rutherford's claim that "All science is either physics or stamp collecting"). The reason? Physics academics have been very good at putting their case that they are brilliant researchers. No doubt some of them are. But I wonder how well they would do if their lab staff were removed from their undergrad classes. Perhaps we could try the experiment with just one big first year class.

So should Computer Science be cheaper than Physics, even taking all this into account? It's hard to see why. You can teach a perfectly good undergrad Physics curriculum with 20-year-old equipment and lab staff without higher degrees. Computer Science by contrast does not have settled fundamentals, and computers go obsolete fast: few industry users keep a computer longer than 3 years. Worse, the skills needed to set up and maintain computer labs are in heavy demand in industry: look for job ads with keywords like "network administrator" or "server administrator". Add in the job descriptions for the sort of lab staff taken for granted in Physics, and you have a real problem: you need skilled programmers – also a hot commodity in industry.

Should we care?

Aside from the fact that the South African government has made ICT a central component of its economic development plan, there is the general question of how best to spend limited resources. Physics could be run at an acceptable level if a lot less pleasant for academics on a significantly lower budget. Making Physics academics spend more time in undergrad labs would be an imposition on their time but there is an oversupply of Physics academics worldwide, so they would not have much option to protest. On the other hand, freeing up Computer Science academics to do more research could have a very significant effect because there is another variable not yet discussed: Computer Science research is on the whole a lot cheaper than Physics research, because many of the big breakthrough areas in Physics require extremely exotic, expensive equipment. On the other hand, one of the great success stories in Computer Science has been collapsing cost of computing, opening up an increasing range of low-cost research opportunities.

In summary: by pretending the Computer Science is very cheap to teach while Physics is expensive, South African universities are shooting themselves in the foot. It would be much cheaper to set South Africa up as a world-class centre of Computer Science research, than a world-class centre of Physics research. What's more, they could attract major government funding – instead of the current fiasco, where the government is sinking major resources into the CSIR's Meraka institute without much to show for it ... funding which should have gone to the universities.

What about the other "expensive" subjects? Physics and Chemistry are lumped together as Physical Sciences which is in itself a major inaccuracy: Chemistry (along with life sciences) has major expenses of lab consumables, justifying a higher price tag. Whether this makes high-consumable lab subjects inherently more expensive than Computer Science, where lab infrastructure is in effect a consumable remains questionable – but they at least do have a case for being more expensive than Physics or pure maths. On the other hand, these subjects also have an army of lab staff. I remember a biologist at the University of the Witwatersrand some years ago complaining how consequent on funding cuts, they no longer had a person to call on to wash their cars after a field trip. So tough. I wish I had their problems.

Why this apparent trade between Computer Science and Physics? Wouldn't everyone score if Computer Science was moved up the scale? Governments have a notorious inability to scale up university funding to changed circumstances. If a relatively popular subject attracted a higher notch in the funding formula and the overall funding didn't increase, the extra funding for that subject would have to come from other areas of the university. The obvious target would be a subject that has low student numbers and is expensive to teach ... like Physics. (To be fair, I suspect other lab subjects would also have to be cut a bit because Physics wouldn't be big enough on its own.)

By allowing physicists to get away with this unbalanced funding model, they are doing not only Computer Scientists a disservice, but also society as a whole; the differences in research costs feed directly to differences in the ability to make an industrial and societal impact. In Physics, doing something at the level of inventing the transistor requires a massively funded research lab with Nobel laureate-level scientists. The Computer Science equivalent of inventing the world-wide-web requires a commodity PC with a free operating system.

The solution? Universities should be brave and back their Computer Science departments to deliver. If a few other departments would have to pull in their belts as a consequence, they would survive. It's not as if they have anywhere else to go.

Here are a few other related articles in this series:

• SA government's CS research strategy


• Free software and CS funding in SA

iPhone = iFlop?

Within days of the iPhone's launch, some clown published an article claiming "Apple's iPhone missed a 1 million unit sales target and rivals are rejoicing". I haven't seen this "target" anywhere else and judging from the fact that most AT&T stores and a high fraction of Apple's retail outlets are reporting stock shortages, it is extremely unlikely that Apple missed an internal target.

Then there are the articles that iPhone will not be adopted by business, mainly because it does not fit the "standard" of Microsoft Exchange.

Wake up, people.

Microsoft is not a standards organization, it's a monopoly.

Any organization which ties its infrastructure to a monopoly when there are open standards available (which are technically superior in most respects) has to be run by morons.

Until they lost their dominance, it used to be said that "No one was ever fired for buying IBM". This wasn't always because they had the best technology (they didn't) but because they had a strong commitment to looking after their customers. If you are a huge customer, you may get that from Microsoft. Good luck otherwise.

Another "biggie" is the absence of a "real" (what they mean here is "toy") keyboard. I can't see myself that typing on a tiny keyboard with real keys is going to be a whole lot faster than Apple's touch screen if it works as advertised. As some have pointed out, learning to type reasonably fast on these small keyboards takes time; already some have claimed to be reasonably quick on the touch keyboard. This looks to me like jumping to a conclusion before the facts are in.

I can just imagine these analysts poised over their keyboards for the first reports of functionality to dribble out, so they could finish their headline "iPhone will not be adopted by business because ...".

In any case, why is this such a big deal? What we have is a simplified portable computer with cell phone functionality, WiFi, calendar, web access (with a few features left out), photo viewing and music. The last two clearly indicate a focus on personal use. The market for personal cell phones is huge, as is the market for music players. Putting these two together alone would be pretty big – as several have tried before. The only real question is whether Apple has a compelling enough product to sell. The initial sales are promising – but the real test will be in how sustainable they are.

So, hype and counter-hype aside – it's still early days, and any prediction of how hot iPhone will be long-term is premature. My feeling is that it will be pretty big but there are too many unknowns to be sure: that's what you get with a breakthrough product.

That leads me to the other common thread: is it a breakthrough product?

Just as with the iPod, there are plenty of other options out there that on paper have the same feature list – even add some missing details. (Like toy slide-out keyboards.) Just as with the iPod, the real difference will be how it all hangs together. Apple can fix some of the obvious annoyances (I was really surprised that there is no copy and paste); the competition can't make a solution cobbled together out of mismatched parts suddenly become cleanly integrated. The difference reminds me of a question I ask about cars: how is it that European car makers can build cars that are made all of a piece, whereas US cars are made all of pieces?

A real big difference I haven't seen much positive comment on is the way pricing splits the handset from the phone plan. This is supposedly a negative. At first sight, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that (aside from non-obvious workarounds) you have to sign up for 2 years of Cingular, yet the handset is sold separately. My guess is that this arrangement is an artifact of Apple's 2-year US exclusivity deal with AT&T, and they would rather maintain this separation for when the deal runs out. To me, this is a positive: it puts real pressure on Cingular to up their act, to keep future iPhone buyers. If they become the major source of complaint, Apple will have no reason to stick with them after 2 years: if iPhone is a huge success, other networks will have little cause to resist adding in the extras Apple needs from them.

So, in summary, talk of iPhone as being a flop is typical FUD from ignorant business columnists. There's no way the initial roll-out can be anything but a huge success. As to the longer term, we don't have the data. My bet is that it will do well, and exceed Apple's 10-million target in the first year easily.

Green values

I've just set up a Google group to discuss green values.

Conservative politicians keep going on about "values" which they don't in practical terms seem to care about. They aren't the only ones with values.

Check it out. Feel free to discuss here or there.

Green Values Brisbane

Visit this group

Computer Science in South Africa

In 2002, the South African government announced two things: a change in the university funding model which cut funding per computer science student by 40%, putting it below pure maths, let alone comparable subjects like physics or electrical engineering.

Around the same time, the government announced that it wanted to found an “ICT university”.

Clearly, the government thought the universities were doing a lousy job: it cut the funding in an area so important, the president thought there should be a dedicated university in the area.

Let’s look at publications and citations for the top 4 universities in the country, according to the Times Higher Education Supplement international ranking (available through Top Universities), from best down: Cape Town, Witwatersrand (Wits), Kwazulu Natal (merged from Natal and Durban-Westville) and Pretoria.

The following are all searches on the combined indexes, Science Citation Index Expanded, 1900-present; Social Sciences Citation Index, 1956-present; Arts & Humanities Citation Index, 1975-present (all searches done on 30 May 2007).

As you can see, all of the results show some level of research activity with some citations – but nothing brilliant (click on the pictures for larger versions).


Cape Town: 59 publications, 139 citations, 2.36 citations per item.


Wits: 46 publications, 58 citations, 1.26 citations per item.


Natal (includes Kwazulu Natal): 86 publications, 238 citations, 2.77 citations per item.


Pretoria: 84 publications, 151 citations, 1.80 citations per item.

The Natal results are skewed by the fact that there was a period when computer science was combined with geology, so these results aren’t an accurate basis for comparison and I will not consider these further. The others though present a consistent picture. The higher ranked universities have a higher publication count per academic (Pretoria has a much higher head count that Wits and Cape Town), but the general numbers are in approximately the same ballpark. The Wits figures should be considered in the light of the university having badly fumbled the ball on the management of the subject. The School of Computer Science there in recent years has collapsed from 12 academics to only 5, and recruiting is a shambles.

In any case, the government clearly didn’t think all this was so great. The ICT university idea however was replaced by creating a research institute, the Meraka Institute. Meraka has a few new people but is mostly comprised of the CSIR’s ICT division, Mikomtek, which has been rolled into Meraka.

Why, you may wonder, did the CSIR get this funding boost, rather than placing Meraka in a university? Clearly, if the universities are no good, the CSIR, and in particular, Mikomtek, must be a whole lot better. So let’s look at their numbers.


Mikomtek: 6 publications, 2 citations, 0.33 citations per item.


Meraka: 2 publications, 0 citations, 0.00 citations per item.

Now here is an interesting challenge for the reader: explain why the combination of Mikomtek and Meraka is so much better than any university in South Africa, to the extent that the CSIR has been made the sole custodian of this new bucket of money. Of course Meraka is in its infancy and could do better in future. It has after all only been going since May 2005. However, in 2 years, I would have thought that a well-funded institute would have recruited high fliers who would have published more than 2 papers that have made it into the top research indexes.

Perhaps the CSIR’s outputs are in other areas than publications. They generate a large number of press releases, for sure – and those are not listed in things like the science citation index. But that obviously counts for a lot in winning political support.

What about impacts on the economy which can’t be measured by publications?

The universities named here (and of course there are others) have produced thousands of computer science graduates between them. An organization which is not degree-granting like the CSIR has to do a lot to match that scale of contribution. One would expect many publications (oops) and other measurable impacts, such as commercial spin-outs.

For the latter point, let’s consider the case of commercializing the Internet.

In the 1990s, when the technology wasn’t commonplace, many small startups sprang up, touting the concept to business. The CSIR jumped in rather late and despite its massive government subsidy, it wasn’t able to compete. The top service provider in South Africa today, The Internet Solution, was one of those small startups, and was started by Wits computer science graduates.

Commercializing the internet is but one example; I believe it is up to the CSIR to make a case, rather than for me to tear them down, because the case for better funding for the universities is so clear. Universities produce graduates; the CSIR consumes resources. They need to demonstrate that they do so to useful effect.

Disclaimer: I applied for a position at Meraka in June 2006, and am still waiting for a definite response. I applied for a Wits position too, and am awaiting the promised feedback (no word for almost 3 months), so you can see that I am trying to curry favour. For the record, here is my publication record by the same measure: 19 publications, only 1 citation – fair, not great. Not quite 3 times the entire output of Mikomtek plus Meraka combined. (My actual output is significantly higher than this – but to compare like with like, I am using the same measure throughout.) Then again, if I google on my name, I only get 28,500 hits; Meraka gets 160,000 [counted 14 June 2007] – those press releases really work. I should try that.