Category: Academia

  • Externally Relevant Open Problems in Computer Science

    Most academic fields have some externally relevant problems: problems whose solutions are interesting or useful to people who are totally ignorant of, and uninterested in, the field itself. For example, even if I don’t want to know anything about virology, I would still find a cure for the common cold to be an excellent thing.…

  • What I Want From a Bibliography System

    As a professor I spend a fair amount of time wrangling with references. Because it’s free and reasonably simple, I use BibTeX: an add-on tool for LaTeX that automates the construction of a bibliography by pulling references out of a separate text file, assigning them numbers (or other identifiers), and formatting the entries appropriately. BibTeX…

  • Publishing for Impact

    Choices made in the process of doing research can lead to a 5-10x difference in number of publications for exactly the same underlying work. For example, do I publish my idea in a workshop, then a conference, and then a journal? On the other hand I can just do the conference version. Do I take…

  • How Much and What to Read?

    Grad students often aren’t quite sure how much of their work time should be spent reading, and may also have trouble figuring out what to read during that time. (In principle this problem also applies to professors, but it’s not much of an issue in practice since we have almost no time for discretionary reading.)…

  • Peer Review Poker

    Peer review is a bureaucratic, consensus-based approach to making decisions. Thus, it is not inherently entertaining and authors like myself need to amuse ourselves as best we can. One of the games I like to play is peer review poker, where certain combinations of review scores are more desirable than others. Straight: Review scores form…

  • Guidelines for Teaching Assistants

    I’ve been teaching university-level courses for the last nine years, usually with the support of teaching assistants (TAs): students who get paid to do things like grading, office hours, fielding email questions, making and debugging assignments, proctoring exams, and perhaps even giving a lecture when I’m sick or traveling. At the start of each semester…

  • Life With BibTeX

    For a while I’ve had a blog post about BibTeX on the back burner, but now I don’t need to write it because Dan Wallach has done so. It’s a great post, but for emphasis I’ll repeat a handful of points that I tell students (and would like to tell authors of some papers I…

  • Quality Not Quantity?

    The perverse incentives for academics to maximize publication and citation counts, as opposed to maximizing the quality and impact of the underlying research, are well-known. Stan Trimble’s recent letter to Nature suggests a partial solution: academic institutions should limit the number of publications that are part of a tenure or promotion case. This is simple…

  • Outgunned

    Several years ago I published my favorite kind of paper: it took a problem that was hard to solve by hand, and solved it using 20% cleverness and 80% brute force. The details don’t matter here, but the solution had scalability problems. Therefore, the next iteration of the work (done primarily by a very smart…

  • Cryptocontributions, Blogs, and How Science Works

    Most people — including many scientists — understand the process of science to be repeated application of the scientific method. In this model, a hypothesis is formulated, experiments are conducted to test the hypothesis, data is analyzed, and the results usually lead to a new hypothesis. This adequately captures the “99% perspiration” aspect of doing…