-
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…
-
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…
-
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.…
-
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…
-
The Children of the Sky
Basically anything Vernor Vinge writes will get reviewed here; he’s one of my favorite SF authors and certainly the best CSF (computer science fiction) writer working today. His latest book, The Children of the Sky, is a direct sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep and a cousin to A Deepness in the Sky. A…
-
Fall
Pano taken from near the alpine loop road behind Mt Timpanogos, Oct 16 2011. Here’s a high-res version suitable for printing (36 MB).
-
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…
-
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…
-
Chimney Canyon
The San Rafael Swell is a large uplifted area in southeast Utah that has eroded into numerous badlands and canyon systems. The Swell is not particularly well-known outside of Utah because it contains no visitor centers, motels, restaurants, or any other services — it’s the kind of place you enter with maps, plenty of water,…
-
Draft Paper about Better Fuzzing
The other day I posted about a simple, low-effort way to improve the bug-finding performance of a random tester. We now have a draft paper about this topic, it’s joint work between my group at Utah and Alex Groce’s group at Oregon State. The key claim is: … for realistic systems, randomly excluding some features…