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Producing Good Software From Academia
Writing and maintaining good software from academia isn’t easy. I’ve been thinking about this because last week my student Yang Chen defended his thesis. While I’m of course very happy for him, I’m also depressed since Yang’s departure will somewhat decimate the capacity of my group to rapidly produce good code. Yang looked over my…
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Do Not Just Run a Few More Reps
It’s frustrating when an experiment reveals an almost, but not quite, statistically significant effect. When this happens, the overwhelming temptation is to run a few more repetitions in order to see if the result creeps into significance. Intuitively, more data should provide more reliable experimental results. This is not necessarily the case. Let’s look at…
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Cheating at Research
My news feed this morning contained this article about an unpleasant local situation that has caused one person I know to lose her job (not because she was involved with the malfeasance, but as fallout from this lab shutting down). On the positive side (I’m going from the article and the investigating panel’s report here…
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MSCS
A masters of science degree in computer science can mean two very different things: The research MS where the student works closely with an advisor on a research project that culminates in a thesis and ideally a few papers. This kind of student is generally paid as a TA or RA and can be expected…
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Computer Science Culture Clash
It’s not uncommon for an empirical CS researcher to get a review saying something like “Sure, these results look good, but we need to reject the paper since the authors never proved anything about the worst case.” Similarly, when I interviewed for faculty jobs ten years ago, a moderately famous professor spent a while grilling…
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Procedural Decomposition
While teaching a CS class I spend quite a bit of time looking over the shoulders of students whose code doesn’t work. Sometimes they have a simple mistake and I’ll either point it out or ask a question that will lead them to the problem. However, other times the code is just generally not very…
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Minimum Pubs for a PhD in CS?
Some of the faculty in my department would prefer that we don’t award a PhD to any candidate who hasn’t published at least three good papers. I’m curious if this is common and if people generally have strong feelings either way about this kind of requirement? Some web searching turned up not much information: UConn…
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Writing Solid Code
After 10 short years as a university-level CS instructor, I’ve finally figured out the course I was born to teach. It’s called “Writing Solid Code” and covers the following topics: Testing—There are lots of books on software testing but few that emphasize the thing I need students to learn, which is simply how to break…
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University Economics and the End of Large Classes
I’ve been stalled on a draft of this piece for some time, but Amy Bruckman’s recent post provided the catalyst I needed to finish it up. She hypothesizes that “the future of universities is excelling at everything a MOOC is not.” Clearly universities can excel at activities that require students to be near each other and…
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Of Course It’s an Interview
Arvind Narayanan wrote a mostly very good piece about some things that surprised him while interviewing for faculty jobs. One of them, “it’s not an interview,” was a surprise to me as well, since it’s wrong. There’s no doubt variation among individuals, but here are a few things I try to find out during a faculty…