Embedded in Academia

Category: Academia

  • Economics of University Teaching

    Today I wanted to ask a simple, specific question: How does my salary relate to the amount of teaching that I do? Let’s take a look: I’m paid $105,000 per year, so with benefits I probably cost $150,000. Sabbaticals increase my cost by about 13%. An in-state student will pay $6500 in tuition for 26 credit hours of…

  • Book Review: The Shadow Scholar

    Paying a professional to write an essay is probably one of the safest ways for a student to cheat, assuming the paid-for essay is not itself plagiarized. The premise of Shadow Scholar is that plenty of students are willing to pay for this kind of service and Tomar was happy to provide it—culminating in a…

  • What’s Operating Systems Research About?

    The other day at lunch I tried to explain to Suresh what operating systems research is all about, which got me thinking about this subject. As a quick glace at the OSDI 2012 program will confirm, the obvious answer “it’s about building operating systems” no longer applies, if it ever did. In fact, the trend away from…

  • The Citation Telephone Game

    My kids often come home from school spouting crazy “facts” they’ve learned from classmates. It seems fundamentally human to repeat stories and, in the repeating, alter them—often unintentionally. Researchers do the same thing, and just this morning I was irritated to read an entirely inaccurate citation of one of my own papers. No doubt others…

  • Scooping and New Publication Models

    If I come up with a great new research idea, sit on it for a couple of years, and then someone else publishes it before I do, then I got scooped. This is unfortunate but as long as the ideas were developed independently, nobody has done anything wrong. Of course, in the real world, establishing…

  • The PhD Grind, and Why Research Isn’t Like Sex

    Phil Guo’s short online book, The PhD Grind, is the best description of the modern PhD experience in CS that I know of. People working on, or thinking about working on, a PhD in CS should read it. In this post I just want to comment on a few things. Phil vividly describes the sinking feeling that…

  • PLDI in Beijing

    [nggallery id=53] PLDI 2012 was in Beijing earlier this week. Unfortunately I had only one full day to be a tourist; it would have been nice to bail out of the conference for another half day to see more stuff but that didn’t end up happening. My student Yang Chen went to college in Beijing and…

  • Academic Bug-Finding Projects in the Long Run

    A number of computer science researchers, including me, have made careers out of creating tools that automate, at least partially, the process of finding bugs in computer programs. Recent work like this can be found in almost any good systemsy conference proceedings such as SOSP, OSDI, ASPLOS, ICSE, or PLDI. Examples go back many years,…

  • Udacity Visit

    Yesterday I took a day trip to Palo Alto to visit Udacity where I’m getting ready to teach a course on software testing. The goal was to become familiar with the recording setup, hash out any infrastructure issues, and try to refine my course content–which right now is just a collection of rough notes. Originally I had…

  • The Photography Contest

    This is an old story, but perhaps worth repeating. My students have heard it too many times and I tell it to myself even more often. Since I have no idea what the original source is, I’ll just paraphrase: A local camera store announces that it’s holding a photography contest. This guy submits a panoramic…