03/06: Youn

[jmausolf]

Comment below with questions or thoughts about the reading for this week's workshop.

Please make your comments by Thursday 11:59 PM, and upvote at least five of your peers' comments on Friday prior to the workshop. You need to use 'thumbs-up' for your reactions to count towards 'top comments,' but you can use other emojis on top of the thumbs up.

[liu431]

Thank you for this exciting talk. In your paper, you used the authors' first affiliation as the geographical locations. Did you consider the cases when the authors chose to work closely with each other while producing the paper, such as spending some time visiting at co-author's institution while on sabbatical?

[tonofshell]

I wonder if this relationship between geographical distance and learning is in part due to differences of culture, not just the difficulty of communicating over great distances. One example that comes to mind, is that people from different cultures can use the same language in drastically different ways, whether by using different vocabulary or, in the case of speaking, by sounding differently due to an accent. Differences in cultural norms might also exacerbate difficulties in scheduling meetings or other team communication that already exist due to time-zone differences. I would think that these differences in culture would affect learning and also be correlated with geographical distance. Have you looked at any factors that might begin to measure and control for cultural differences of team members in your analysis (e.g. birthplace, age, race, current location, first language)?

[zeyuxu1997]

Thank you for your presentation. Your finding is surprising because it's widely believed that improving communication technology has reduced the impact of physical distance on various things. I'm curious about whether the collaboration is just between scholars of the same field or including interdisciplinary collaboration. And if that's the latter, did you find a difference on the impact of physical distance on acquiring know-how between those 2 kinds of collaboration?

[hesongrun]

Thank you for the presentation. It is really interesting to see the impact of geographical distance on acquiring knowledge in scientific collaboration. I am curious about how you can measure the knowledge acquired in scientific collaboration? Thanks.

[lyl010]

Thanks for your presentation! It is really interesting that your work shows that knowledge is local and this is maybe we still need to come to campus for study instead of taking online courses.

I am interested in how 'learning rate' is constructed as it is related to the calculation of learning premium(if I missed it in the article, please forgive me...).

Another thing I am pretty interested in is whether the local know-how learning will drive the knowledge in an organization to converge to a local satisfactory point where everyone knows each other's stuff, and does this mean we are increasingly picky about outside knowledge that seems unfamiliar to our prior experience? How about if we measure the distance in knowledge space if we could? Will the conclusion change? Thank you a lot!

[nwrim]

Welcome to our workshop! Delighted to meet a scholar who studied in my favorite city. I think this paper (and the forthcoming talk) is very interesting - I always love a paper that succeeds in quantifies something that we think is obvious, but is really not. I have a few questions:

1. The geological location might be a very direct way to measure distance, but might be a somewhat naive way to measure distance in collaboration. For example, after Asiana canceled their direct route between Chicago and Incheon, it suddenly became harder for me to visit my country, but Chicago and Incheon stayed where they are. Another example could be that the geological distance between Madrid and Algiers is smaller than the geological distance between Madrid and Berlin, but I am quite certain that there will be more collaboration from the university/lab in the latter connection than the former connection. Do you think geological distance might be robust enough even if we account for this kind of discrepancy?

2. Scholars in some research areas almost never publish single-author papers. I think this is especially true if the research in that field centers around a lab culture - you usually need input and effort of multiple people in these fields (yes, I am thinking about the CERN paper with 5000+ authors!). In these cases, I think it will make more sense if we evaluate the learning in a lab point of view, rather than an individual scholar's point of view. For example, after a psychology lab works with a genetic lab, multiple people in psychology lab who were in that co-work learns something about genetics, and publish a paper in genetics without the help of genetics group. I think this is indeed collaborative learning, but will not be apparent in your dataset of focal scholars. Upon reading the paper, I thought this might be a factor in finding less learning in STEM fields and larger team size papers. Why did you choose single-author papers as a crucial definition of focal scholars? Do you think what I asked here introduces some sort of barrier in generability? If so, how could we account for this?

Thank you again for your talk! I look forward to meeting you and talking to you.

[rkcatipon]

Thank you for sharing your work with us! I was wondering if there might be a trade-off between the advantages of learning through local collaboration and the disadvantages of concentrating academic capital in one area?

I think about this often in the case of areas like Silicon Valley and Boston where academic density is also associated with an increase in economic opportunity. Ideally, academic and economic access would be equal across geographic regions and with the internet, video chatting, and other connecting technologies, some would say access is growing. But I think your work does a great job to highlight the reality of academic work, in that, remote collaboration doesn't foster the same level of learning and production.

[Yilun0221]

Thanks for the presentation! My question is, why did you choose only the co-authored papers as the criterion for judging academic cooperation? I think that other academic activities of exchange and cooperation can also be used to study this topic, such as academic seminars among schools, countries, and so on.

[ShuyanHuang]

Thank you for presenting. I am wondering if your results can be further analyzed by studying how "new" is the field of study to the scholars in collaboration. I think geographical distance may play different roles depending on how familiar are the co-authors to the topic. And possibly this relationship can be studied by defining a distance measure on FOS and measuring the novelty of a new FOS for a scholar by the distance with his former works.

[bakerwho]

Hello and thanks for presenting. My question is more of research idea that is crystallizing after reading your work, and I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Especially in the context of your other work on urban science, I wonder what the importance of close geographical interactions imply for collaborative growth and innovation in different cities.

Cities have historically been confluences of people with different backgrounds and skillsets, and this complementarity as well as crowding have been credited with the rapid growth and innovation that cities usually breed. I'm wondering if it would be interesting to consider the in-group and out-group geographical mobility in different cities, and to compare the kinds of technological, scientific, innovative, and artistic outputs from these cities. Perhaps the density of internal (roads, commuter rails) and external (frequency of domestic and international flights?) transport infrastructures could be proxies for these variables? What might this tell us about the productivity of cross-geographical collaborations? How might we separate these effects from the sheer momentum of the city itself?

[luxin-tian]

This is an interesting paper about knowledge acquisition and production in the context of the geographical distribution of human capital factors. I wonder if it is possible that the formation of collaboration itself is, conversely, potentially affected by the capability of knowledge acquisition? How would you address this problem, if any? (I am sorry if I missed any information of the paper. )

[tianyueniu]

Thank you for presenting the inspiring paper! I found it interesting that the effects of distance seem to be smallest in subjects such as history and medicine. Intuitively, I would have thought that these are the areas that need more discussions & learning through sharing. Given the results, do you think using paper publications as a measure for shared learning has affected the subjects differently?

[RuoyunTan]

Thank you for sharing your paper with us. In your paper, you mentioned that one important issue in your research is how to distinguish knowledge acquisition through collaboration from one's own natural tendency to explore new ideas; even so, you assumed that authors acquire know-how from each other in each collaboration (pg. 2). Could you further explain why this assumption will not influence the result of your research? Are there ways to make sure that this is a valid assumption?

[dongchengecon]

Thanks a lot for the presentation! In the paper, you conclude that local collaboration is associated with a relatively large learning premium and give several policy suggestions. For example, you mention that economic development policies should be more focused on building upon local existing know-how. The intuition behind is to move resources to the marginally more productive places. Building on your estimation, I am wondering if you could build a connection network, do some counterfactual analysis and see if scholar reallocation is taken into account, how the individual behaviors would adjust accordingly?

[YanjieZhou]

Thanks very much for your presentation! I think as for geological distance, we have many ways to measure it considering the different points of view we hold to interpret it. Communication technology, which you regard as an important factor for changes of distance, as far as I am concerned, should be more interpreted as an information channel whose function of transmitting information, unfortunately, seems to be ignored by this paper.

[Panyw97]

Thank you for sharing this research! It's so interesting to quantitatively measure knowledge space. I am wondering how you can get the geographical data of the authors? Is it based on the address of the universities or institutions they belong to?

[timqzhang]

Thank you for your research, and I'm quite impressed by it as it involves the geographical data to explore the fancy topic of learning "know-how". The first question is similar to question above, which is that how to quantify the learning abilities or percentage. Is it through survey, test on the participants or according to some theoretical/empirical inference? The second question concerns the social relations between two scholars, which may include the discussions on how and why co-authors initiate their collaborations, whether the social network around scholars may influence their engagement into their collaboration, etc.

[WMhYang]

Interesting topic! Thank you very much for sharing! In fact I consider the basic assumption - If something new appeared in the collabrative and the latter single-authored paper, the know-how comes from collabration - a little bit dubious because it might be the case that the scholar already knows the know-how but his or her research interests do not lie in the field before collabration. What do you think of it? In addition, this paper gives us several facts that geological proximity may affect the learning rates and suggests that face-to-face interaction is important. This question might be a little personal but from your experience, what benefits you the most when you communicate face-to-face with your co-authors rather than via the internet? Thank you very much.

[linghui-wu]

Thank you for the interesting work. It reminds me that due to the coronavirus, schools in China resort to online platforms for teaching. The fact that people complaining about the low-efficiency of online courses might be explained by your paper. Since it is mentioned in the paper that the effect of geographic distance varies across disciplines, I wonder how would it make a difference in interdisciplinary collaborations. Look forward to your presentation!

[bazirou]

Thanks for your presentation!

[bjcliang-uchi]

Thanks for the presentation. I am wondering how you develop from "cooperation" to "knowledge diffusion." That is, is it the share of knowledge, or the share of academic/ data resources/ potentially, power, in certain situations?

[harryx113]

Thank you for coming to our workshop. I'm interested in knowing your opinion on the effect of domain expertise on studying communication? As many of my colleagues have pointed out, there can be drastic differences between different fields. Is it necessary to be careful with these differences?

[ChivLiu]

Thank you for the interesting paper! I am not very familiar with this topic and the concept of learning. However, the graphical presentation of the collaboration stats inspired me. Figure 2 was the most informative one, but the discussion about the figure seems limited. I perhaps understand some reasons behind the figure, but the paper offered me not enough confirmation of my wonders. Since local collaboration is still statistically considered as the major trend, is there a prediction that how this trend could shift for different areas of study when the world has been changing so fast nowadays?

[hihowme]

Thanks a lot for your presentation!

[goldengua]

Thanks for your presentation! I was wondering how geographical distance might interact with the nature of collaboration and displinary requirements. On the one hand, disciplines based on experiments might require two labs to work closely in tech details and collarators should participate throughout the experiments. This could result in more in-depth collarabotion. On the other hand, some disciplines such as history and comparative literature might rely less on equipements and could benefit more from idea exchanges through remote communication. I think it might be interesting to investigate these confounding variables related to the disciplinary nature and collaration style.

[wanitchayap]

Thank you for your paper! I have a similar question to @tonofshell. In your appendix, you mention that "[b]eyond a distance of 1100 m, the learning rates for local and non-local collaboration started to converge". Since 700 m is around 10 mins walk as you specified, beyond 1100 m would be only around 15 mins walk. I think this can be interpreted as your definition of local collaboration = collaboration within the same institution. In this case, how can you tease out the confounder of being in the same institution from geological proximity?

PS. I am so excited that we finally have a female speaker this quarter! We NEED to address the gender dynamic issues in the program. More than half of our cohort is female. However, we have 0 female faculty, only 1 female preceptor, and only 1 female speaker a quarter :(

[lulululugagaga]

Thanks for your presentation! I'm also thinking about the geographical factor when we extend our learning environment to online settings. Do you have any ideas on this field?

[YuxinNg]

Thank you for the paper! : ) Long long ago, when people try to collaborate non-locally, they might need to fly to each other or communicate by mail. Then people needed to call each other. And nowadays people can use multiple ways to communicate with non-local partner (email, video call, possibly Holography in the future). Do you think the improvement of technology will affect probability of people's learning through collaboration? Or maybe even one day, the geographic factor will not be very critical? Thanks!

[romanticmonkey]

Thank you for your presentation! It’s interesting to see that geographical differences can bring so much influence on subsequent collaborative learning. I wonder if you have looked at the psychological underpinnings of such an effect. Does body language or a physical collaborative space trigger the creative part of our brain? Furthermore, if limited to geographically close collaborations, what actions of the team can boost their collaborative learning efforts? When we are already face-to-face, what can we do to further improve our collaborative learning?

[KenChenCompEcon]

Thanks for presenting the work! I am wondering if there are sensitivity tests on different distance measures, apart from the geological distance which was employed in this paper? And are there any other exogenous factors that influence the migration of knowledge modules?

[sunying2018]

Thanks for your presentation! I am wondering if the geographical distance can be extended to wider meaning not limits to the pure geographical distance. In terms of spatial econometrics, as we know, there is another type of spatial weighting matrix which can use socio-economic factors, if there is a similar weighting matrix considering the collaborative knowledge?

[ydeng117]

Thanks for the presentation. Do you think your findings can be generalized to a large population other than just scholars? In China, the recent COVID 19 had confined Chinese students at home, and many schools started to use the internet to teach lessons. Do you think the geographical distance will handicap teachers from teaching and students from learning?

[yutianlai]

Thanks for your presentation! Can you explain the process of obtaining geographical data more elaborately?

[JuneZzj]

Thank you for presenting. You studied the proximation in geography may contribute to a more efficient way of learning. Do you think it also applies to other industries say manufacturing industry. Do firms aggregated locally may also share the benefits of learning collaboratively. Thank you.

[ShanglunLi]

Thank you for providing such an interesting paper to read! I have a question that how did you get the geographical data of the authors in the data set?

[sanittawan]

Thank you for sharing your research with us! It is definitely an interesting question. I am wondering if you and your co-author thought about extending the project to examine interdisciplinary collaboration, i.e., say scholars from computer science coauthoring with academics from sociology. It seems that there has been an increasing number of cross-disciplinary work, but some scholars think that does not seem to be enough and raise questions about the factors preventing such a collaboration.

[HaowenShang]

Thanks for your presentation! In the paper you used the data of the publication records and knowledge portfolios of scholars who published a co-authored paper and subsequently published a single-authored paper to evaluate the impact of geographical distance on acquiring know-how through scientific collaboration and find that scholars who collaborate locally can learn more from others than non-locally. I am wondering whether the results can be generalized to other datasets such as the grades for students in real class v.s online class. Do you evaluated other datasets instead of paper publications? 


[vinsonyz]

Thank you for your presentation! This is really an interesting topic. I am very interested in the application of the geographical distance on economics research?

[SiyuanPengMike]

Thanks a lot for your inspiring paper. It's quite interesting to know the relationship between geographical distance and scientific collaboration. I'm wondering that if you have done a sensitivity test on the geographical distance. Will the change from Euclidean distance to Arc distance influence your result?

[SoyBison]

I noticed that one of your figures (pasted below) shows that the relative effect size of locality doesn't change much over the course of a subject's career, which doesn't really fit my intuition of the late-in-career academic. Do you have any intuition for why the effect size of locality on learning doesn't change much over the career?

[dhruvalb]

Thank you for sharing your work! When considering people gaining know-how through collaboration, do you there is an effect of people's knowledge of collaborating through different means? For instance, there are differences in how one can effectively collaborates when using technology versus a brainstorm session in person but people may not be adapting effectively? What aspects of proximity ease knowledge transfer? From your findings, would you recommend any tips on how technology can be improved or use effectively to bridge the gap, when meeting in person is not feasible?

[chiayunc]

Thank you for the wonderful paper. I have two questions pertaining to the relationship you found between share of learning and geological distance between authors. The first is that we see the impact of distance is not uniform across all distances. It drops much more significantly in the smaller distances than large distances. The second is that we can see in the discipline history, distance is not impacted as other disciplines. What do you think could be the reasons that bring about these trends? Thank you very much.

[di-Tong]

I'm also interested in the possible alternative explanation of culture instead of mere geographic distance. Do you find any evidence about whether each geographical location is marked with distinct working culture? Besides, within each geographical location, does learning varies in different small clusters defined by cultural similarity?

[chun-hu]

Thanks for the presentation! I'm thinking that there might be other criteria for judging academic cooperation such as academic conferences, lab collaboration, and exchange scholarship, and co-authored papers are not the only form. How can we measure these other criteria?

[PAHADRIANUS]

Thank you for joining in us and sharing your wonderful research. Your paper explores a very interesting aspect of academic professions against the background of today's increasingly convenient communication methods and reached conclusions that, frankly speaking, appear quite counter-intuitive to me. I was quite assured that the ever improving modern communication would at least greatly mitigate, if not completely eliminate, the negative premium of scholarly collaboration across great geographical distance. Your paper found quite the contrary and supplied concrete evidence. I have three questions: (1) how do you quantify the know-how of scientific discoveries? I might be mistaken but I think using the numbers of publications directly is not a good idea as they vary greatly in quality and depth, and subsequently practical uses. (2) do you think the impact could differ due to different sub-fields of science? For example, more natural science focuses subjects do require great proximity for efficient collaboration whereas social science projects have less reliance. This paper itself was a collaboration between Northwestern and U of Hong Kong? (3) lastly, could there be some specific mechanisms behind the impact to explain such differences across the fields?

[Anqi-Zhou]

Thanks for the presentation and interesting paper! Could you please explain more details about the quantitative measure of knowledge space? How do you come up with these criteria? Do you think there might be other criteria?

[nt546]

Thanks for presenting your research! In the three-paper sequence, did you observe any significant effect of the time duration between the publication of the second and third papers?

[policyglot]

In the 17th century, Newton in the UK and Leibniz in Germany independently developed the foundations of calculus at the same time. Suppose the apple that (allegedly) fell on Newton's idea gave him not just one, but two fruitful ideas- gravity AND the internet. So if Newton and Leibniz were to collaborate on calculus over email and Skype, how would we say the 'know-how acquisition' played out? How would we measure the ways in which online collaboration has brought together modern-day scholars who discover that they've been independently working on very similar research?

Also, I agree with @wanitchayap, I'm glad we finally have at least one female scholar on our workshops panel.

[MegicLF]

Thank you for the presentation! After reading the paper, I wonder if there would have any significant difference in the impact of geographic distance for different academic fields, such as Chemistry (which needs a lot of experiments) and Philosophy. Also, I wonder if you take into account the cases that scholars completed their co-authored paper when visiting the universities where their co-authors were because at this time the geological distance should be nearly zero.

[yongfeilu]

Thank you very much for the presentation! It's really impressive to see how geographic distance can make a difference in academic collaboration. My question is under what circumstances will such collaboration be impaired even with the help of communication technology.