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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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Gaining Confidence in Confidence Intervals
Many computer scientists, including myself, end up doing research that needs to be evaluated experimentally, and yet most of us have had little training in statistics or the design of experiments. We end up teaching ourselves this material as we go, which often works pretty well. On the other hand, sometimes the issues are surprisingly…
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Spiral Jetty
Smithson’s Spiral Jetty is often totally submerged, or else high and dry as it was when I last saw it. Today a favorable lake level as well as warm weather and a feeling of having spent maybe one too many days around the house motivated us to take a day trip. The hazy air and calm water…
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A Few Thoughts on Scratch
Over the last year or so my older son, who is about to turn eight, has spent maybe one morning a month creating a video game using Scratch. This doesn’t seem like a lot of time to spend learning to program, but I’ve been trying to avoid pushing. Our usual mode of operation is that…
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Fastest FizzBuzz
The always-entertaining FizzBuzz problem came up again on Hacker News today, and for no other reason than I just got out from under a nasty deadline, I looked around on the net for interesting solutions, for which this Rosetta Code page is a gold mine. The Windows batch file and BSD make versions are hilarious,…
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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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Around Hanksville Utah
Last weekend Sarah had a work trip so the boys and I spent a few days in the desert. The area around Hanksville–a tiny town right in the middle of Utah’s southeast quadrant that got electricity only in 1960–contains a lot of stuff I hadn’t seen yet, so we operated out of a motel there.…