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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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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…