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Avoidable Failures of Peer Review
This piece is about a specific kind of peer review failure where a paper is rejected despite there being sufficient evidence to warrant acceptance. In other words, all the facts are available but the wrong decision gets made anyway. In my experience this is extremely common at selective computer science conferences. The idea here is…
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Wanted: Epitaphs for Hot Topics
Any given research community always has a few hot topics that attract an inordinate number of paper submissions. Sometimes these are flashes in the pan, other times they mature into full-fledged areas having their own workshops and such — but most often they endure for a few years, result in a pile of PhDs, and…
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NSF Data Management Plans
As of a year ago, all grant proposals submitted to NSF must be accompanied by a data management plan. Basically, the PIs must explain: how sensitive data (for example, data that contains personal information about experimental subjects) will be managed how data resulting from the research will be archived and how access to it will…
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Perverse Incentives in Academia
A perverse incentive is one that has unintended consequences. The world is full of these and the Wikipedia article has some great examples. Academia seems particularly prone to perverse incentives. Incentive Intended Effect Actual Effect Researchers rewarded for increased number of publications. Improve research productivity. Avalanche of crappy, incremental papers. Researchers rewarded for increased number…
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Black Friday on Wednesday
Until now, my department hasn’t done any kind of formal, department-wide evaluation of our graduate students and their progress. A number of people, including me, have argued for some time that we should be doing something like CMU’s Black Friday. This semester Suresh, our current DGS, has made this happen; the meeting was today. Overall…
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Putting Oneself Through College
A lot has been written lately about the rising costs of higher education. Is it still possible to put oneself through college without working full time? It’s certainly not easy. For example, the Utah minimum wage is $7.25/hour. If a student works 20 hours per week for 50 weeks, the resulting $7,250 doesn’t even cover…
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Open Access Fees
The “open access fee” is a charming little aspect of academic publishing where I have the option to pay, for example, $3000 to the IEEE, and then they’ll poke a hole in their paywall so that anyone can download a paper without paying. The fee is per paper. Here’s a list of some publishers’ fees.…
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Making the Sentence Structure of Paragraphs Apparent
This post is about a tiny thing that makes a big difference in practice because I spend so much time writing. Usually, people compose paragraphs as monolithic blocks of text. For several years now, I’ve written paragraphs like this: Integer overflow bugs in C and C++ programs are difficult to track down and may lead…
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Career Advice I’ve Received
Following up on my previous post, here is a list of some professional advice I received as an assistant professor: Wear nicer shoes. Stop being flighty. Work on the same thing for about 20 years in order to become famous as “the person who does that.” Be at least gold medallion or equivalent on some…
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Advice for Assistant Professors
Today FCS posted some great advice for new professors, reminding me that I had a collection of notes on this topic: Follow Patterson’s advice. Across your research projects, make sure there is potential for both short-term and long-term payoff. Understand your institution’s retention, promotion, and tenure policies. More importantly, understand what is being left unsaid…