Learning Curves

When Will We Ever Use This?

2012-01-21T07:08:00.002-05:00

Our group's idea for our art project was to build a giant kaleidoscope.

At the hardware store we bought a cardboard tube (normally used as a concrete form). We also needed the three mirrors. We needed mirrors to form an equilateral triangle that would fit into the tube.

I used the law of cosines to figure out what size to have the mirror cut.

Learning New Things

2012-01-18T13:30:00.002-05:00

I've taken a course at the university every semester since the spring of 2008. Up to this point, everything that I've taken has been something in which I could earn an A (and have) through sufficient effort on my part.

This semester I'm taking a freshman-level class… in the School of Art!

Unlike upper-division courses in computer science and graduate level classes in the College of Business Administration, just about everyone in art class is a traditional aged undergraduate (and most of the freshmen). You just don't go back to school to study art. Art is what you study the first time around before you back to school for something sounds more serious. (Unemployed brother-in-law? Majored in art history.) One of the undergraduates in this class looks very familiar, but I checked the roster on Blackboard, and I do not recognize the names of any former students.

First project in art class is a very, very, very open-ended group project. Traditional undergraduates were not all that eager to join the group with the crazy middle-aged lady. But then all the other groupless people coalesced, and my new group-mates have made a discovery.

For our open-ended project we're building some crazy stuff. More of our supplies come from the hardware store than from the art-supply store. And, unlike many freshmen, I have a car. And a parking permit for the lot just outside of the art building. I also have a house full of crap, so we have access to any of my portable stuff. Cordless drill? No problem. Dolly? Have two. Sewing machine? Yep. Dremel tool? Got one of those.

Grown-ups tend to own more things than freshmen do.

The Cat's Hobbies

2012-01-15T12:10:00.002-05:00

Sleeping in the cat bed.

Sleeping on top of the cat tower.

Sleeping on my lap.

"Helping" me knit by trying to eat the yarn as I am knitting with it.

Meowing at me to keep her company.

Sneezing. Is it amusing or gross that after the cat sneezes she licks her nose?

Half-Remembered Things

2012-01-13T17:31:00.002-05:00

Can you help me remember what I was reading about? I feel that I read this either in a Douglas Hofstadter book or in the Wikipedia.

It's about word-like systems (I hesitate to call them languages) that are, in a sense, compression schemes.

So, for example, you start with an English sentence, and it's a certain length. You can then "translate" it into another system where the "words" are more meaningful, so you need fewer words/characters to represent the idea. And then, at the extreme, there is a "language" where any idea could be represented as a single word -- but where all the words are unpronounceable things like j5n;o.

Any idea what this is or keywords I should use to search for it? Or do I need to find a reference librarian?

Affiliated

2012-01-13T10:53:00.001-05:00

Today I checked the university online directory to see what my status was listed as. Last time I checked, it just said "staff." Now it goes into far more detail:

Internet sez: MOAR CATZ!!!

2012-01-12T09:11:00.003-05:00

We shall see how long this lasts. My eyes are red and itchy. The cat is sneezing. We'll see who is more allergic to whom.

Worst case, the cat will go back to where it came from. It came from a family with three other cats, all of which were beating it up to the point where it was banished to be an outside-only cat. It was living in a basket (with a heating pad) on their (non-enclosed) porch.

Cat is currently roughly nine years old. It has an appointment at the vet in about two weeks.

New Semester

2012-01-11T11:22:00.003-05:00

At least it has stopped thunderstorming.

Welcome to the new semester. I'm told that the classrooms in this new building are not ready yet. Good luck to anyone teaching MWF classes. Or TR for that matter, as I can't imagine that a lot of progress will be made today.

Since I'm not teaching this semester, the only real difference in my life is that now that everyone is back on campus, it is easier to find somewhere serving coffee but harder to park.

Complaints on Facebook

2012-01-10T21:01:00.004-05:00

Friend of a former student:: As an explanation of why he isn't that impressed with a Republican candidate vying for the nomination: "His Chinese isn't that great."
Law professor who I went to college with:: Commenting on the differences between the kitchen in her previous $1M+ house and her current $1M+ house: "Most days I don't have any use for the prep sink or the three extra counters."
Former colleague in the math department:: Complaining about having to teach tomorrow and why he hasn't done any work in over a month: "We got 5 weeks off for winter break this year."

Wednesday Omens

2012-01-04T15:35:00.003-05:00

I am full of excuses. Last week I wasn't blogging because I was obsessively making a quilt. As in, I cut out and pieced a queen-sized quilt top in under a week. Last week I also bought all manner of awesome things. Last week was great. But then the week ended, and I started returning things because I realized they were not so awesome. At mid-week? This week is not so great.

So on to the omens:

This morning it was stupid cold here.

This morning was my appointment for getting my car fixed from this incident. Called to make this appointment back in June. When I got there this morning, they had no record of my appointment or of the paperwork that my insurance company faxed over yesterday. As of nearly 4pm they have not called, which either means that they are ignoring my car or else they have figured things out.

Fortunately this morning I got to the office before my officemate, so I got to sit at the desk. Officemate sat with his laptop on his lap for a while before hunting down an unoccupied classroom.

It is roughly half a mile from here to the nearest coffee. By the time I get the coffee back to my office, it is cold.

Nothing that I am doing today particularly needs me to be in the office. Today's theme is "spam." I have resumed my efforts to recruit undergraduate summer interns. Do you know any undergraduates who are interested in science, engineering, high performance computing, web development, data analysis from more of a business standpoint than a science standpoint, science writing/PR, tech support, or anything similar? Send them my way. And like our Facebook page.

At home I can adjust the lights and the thermostat. (I'm planning on putting masking tape on the ambient light sensor in my office, but I'm not tall enough to reach it.) At home there is a nearby supply of coffee. At home I don't have to share my desk. At home I don't have to worry about how to get to/from work with my car in the shop. At home I can spam people in my search for interns. But work is supposed to happen in the office (even though no one is here except for a battalion of electricians who are trying to get the engineering teaching labs in this building ready for classes to start on the 11th).

You might ask about my other office? Why don't I work there? Well, aside from the transportation issue of my car being in the shop (I live 2 miles from the university; my other office is in another county), I am told today the other office is being sprayed in hopes of solving the fire ant problem.

Holiday Greeting

2011-12-25T12:13:00.001-05:00

A Moving Holiday Experience

2011-12-21T09:43:00.003-05:00

The good news is that I am moving out of my office on campus that is kept in the low 60s all year round (even during the heat of summer) as part of the University's energy saving plan.

The less than good news is that this is the layout of my new office:

I have been told that I should get together with my officemate and work out a schedule of when each of us is using the office, as it is really meant to be a one-person office. Furthermore, the University has moved away from normal furniture that is made up of stand-alone parts that can be moved by applying sufficient force to instead using only built-in furniture. You might be seeing a lot less of me on campus. Or maybe you will have to track me down in one of the coffeeshops on- or near campus.

And, channelling my inner undergraduate, I must complain that my new office is so far on the far edge of campus that I may have to start driving to the gym on campus. As a reference point, the gym is right across the street from a big cluster of dorms, and my office is at the far edge of the academic part of campus.

Currently I am waiting to see when my boxes of stuff will be moving to my new office. Today is Day 3 of the move, and they are two days behind. They moved five offices on Monday and eleven yesterday. Today they plan to move 25 offices. At this point, my interest in my boxes is dominated by the fact that I packed my printer's power cable in one of the boxes, and I think that I want to set up that printer at home instead of at work. (It is my printer, so I can do what I want with it. Colleague: "How did you get a printer in your office!?" Me: "I went to Amazon.com, ordered one, charged it to my credit card, and had it delivered here." Colleague: "How did you get reimbursed?" Me: "I didn't." Related: "How did you get the good whiteboard markers!?")

While this move chugs along, I am driving every day to my other, non-campus office, which is in another county. This strategy will work today and tomorrow. However, on Friday I will need to find somewhere to go because it is a regular work day for University staff, and this facility is closed (and I don't want to charge one of my precious vacation days for a day where I have nothing to do other than work).

Thank Goodness for that Liberal Arts Education

2011-12-20T13:54:00.002-05:00

Recently I've been working on a paper with a deadline in early January. It's part of an interdisciplinary collaboration.

This paper includes phrases such as: "the interface and the predicate share responsibility" and "the traditional taxonomies of digital epistemology unwisely subjugate and oftentimes irrationally edit data." We cite Henri Bergson.

How many drinks for each use of "epistemology"?

Fortunately, due to my secret past as an English major, I can keep up with this non-scientific collaboration, and I can write hundreds of words about big ideas while using a suitable collection of jargon.

I'm kind of digging the digital humanities. We should be able to get a lot of papers out of this project.

Wrapping up the Semester

2011-12-10T14:20:00.002-05:00

Stu writes: Mrs. Hirta, I just checked my grades in [the registrar's system] and noticed that my grade is the same as the preliminary grade I was given. I was wondering when my extra credit would be put in to the system and wanted to make sure I check with you before grades are made final.

Stu will be shocked to hear that after I evaluated the extra-credit submission that I didn't find it to be worth enough credit to improve the course grade. They had a month to work on this project, and based on the questions that Stu asked a few days before it was due, it is pretty clear that Stu did not put much time into this project. This was not some sort of pro forma fudge factor; this was an optional major project.

Welcome to college, Stu.

You Knew This Day Would Come

2011-11-30T13:29:00.003-05:00

Yesterday was the last day of classes. Tomorrow is the first day of exams. Grades are due at the registrar's office by noon on the 13th.

Stu writes:

Dr. Hirta, I am wondering when you are going to have our final grades up? I have [a really quite reasonable and generous grade] for my preliminary grade and I talked to [the TA] and she said that our grades should go up once our participation things are in. I would just like to know what my final grade is since these grades will count toward our GPA. Thank you so much!

I reply:

Hi Stu, Assuming that you completed the participation in co-curriculars, that will be your grade in the course.

Once I get the optional extra-credit from the students who choose to complete it and get those graded, I'll put all the grades officially in the [registrar's official] system. Since it's sometimes a problem to update grades once they're in the system, I'm waiting until I have all the information before I put in the official grades.

Stu responds:

Okay. Could you explain the extra credit to me? I looked it up and was confused about what it was that you wanted. Also, is there any way that I can get a break down of points that make up my grade?

This extra-credit assignment? Was assigned during the last week of October. Also, it is a major, in-depth, open-ended assignment. Which is why it's extra credit and not regular credit. And why it was assigned a month ago. And why I told the students that for this assignment I was expecting completed work at the level of quality that would appear in the New York Times. Let's all wish Stu good luck with the end of the semester and with earning grades that reflect Stu's mastery of course objectives.

New Adventures in the Academic Switcheroo

2011-11-29T14:31:00.003-05:00

Email 1:

I co-lead the [big project]. One of my responsibilities is putting together speakers for our monthly symposium. In looking through recent reports of talks, I saw your talk at the [international collaboration conference] this past August. I wonder if you'd consider reprising a considerably shortened version (20 minutes) of that talk for our January symposium event.

My response:

Thanks so much for the invitation.

My talk from this summer was a half-day hands-on session teaching [two pieces of software]. For your symposium I could do a brief intro to one of the tools. Which do you think would be more interesting for your audience?

Email 2:

That would be great, thanks so much. Maybe a better option would be to [talk about some hardware], the types of tools that can be used on it, how you see the [hardware] complementing other [hardware], what its unique capabilities are. ... I think it's more interesting to focus on what you have seen to be particularly compelling
uses for [the hardware].

I Love The Ticket System

2011-11-21T15:15:00.002-05:00

Management Dude: How come your team hasn't done X, Y, and Z?

Me: Thanks so much for looking into this for us. We've been working on X, Y, and Z on our laptops but have not been able to do anything on [the machine you're talking about] because the current version of [essential library] is [older than dirt], and [all modern software] requires [a version from this century]. We put in a help ticket [a long time ago] with [people who you supervise]. It's ticket number 1234. Thanks again for checking on the progress of ticket 1234. Once this ticket is resolved, we're eager to make fast progress on this project.

The Conference Draws to a Close

2011-11-17T19:05:00.001-05:00

More swag today: a balloon, a wooden spoon, and a t-shirt that is way too big for me.

Skipped out of afternoon sessions to do some more shopping. Planning on going to the reception tonight, I think.

Flying home tomorrow.

Conference Swag Collected

2011-11-16T18:45:00.002-05:00

Totebags, chapstick, corkscrew, umbrella, flashlight, USB light, water bottle, Japanese playing cards.

Unrelated: Is it worth standing around awkwardly at some Red Hat reception tonight in order to get free food and drinks?

Things I Don't Believe

2011-11-14T08:32:00.003-05:00

I'm at the airport right now, waiting for my flight to Seattle (via Denver).

The TSA decided that everyone was going through the millimeter wave machine today. I was driven to opt out based on the TSA agent telling everyone that the waves bounce off our clothes. Really, could that possibly be true? If the waves stay on the outside of everyone's clothes, how could this machine be any better than just looking at people and the outsides of their clothes?

Fortunately the government is not good enough with databases to keep track of the fact that I frequently do whatever is within my rights to slow down the line at security, such as having my allergy pills visually screened. Not to mention that my summer job has sent me traveling with large amounts of cash and several cell phones in my carry-on bag.

Unfortunately, I am not rich enough to fly Net Jets.

Transparency of Grading

2011-11-10T12:58:00.003-05:00

Dear Freshman, please do not complain about your grade. I will name-drop the letter A in my email to your class. I will mention that at least half of the class received a grade of A for the semester. Even though you know that I am not like the other people who teach your other classes, and even though you might realize that I am an unreliable narrator, I hope that you do believe that I have -- that this class has -- more than a passing acquaintance with the letter A.

Dear Freshman, did I mention that we have extra credit? Did I mention it enough that it is due in nearly a month and you can redeem yourself up to one whole letter grade through extra credit? Do you feel that you have power over this part of your life, that you have control over your GPA, that you have a sense of agency in this situation. It is true. Please come talk to me about this extra credit, and I would be happy to change your arbitrary A- to an arbitrary A.

Dear Freshman, I think that you think that grades are very important. A lot of people around here think that grades are very important. Certainly the registrar's office thinks that grades are very important and spends a lot of time obsessing about them. As we are doing the course evaluations online next week, I will not ask you to think about how much you have actually learned this semester in your courses of various grading schemes. I will not ask you if you have undertaken academic actions so that you can learn something or that so you can earn a grade.

Dear Freshman, you may think that I'm crazy -- there is currently no ruling one way or the other on this score, so I am just as sane as the sanest of all of you -- but you need to know that there is a limit to the amount of crap that I will put up with. Maybe you don't realize that because you have taken your crap and turned it into a grade that you value. However, I realize that you have spent 12 weeks during a phase of your life in which your brain still has a great deal of plasticity and have spent this time chasing grades instead of understanding. I consider your A to be a consolation prize.

Lie To Me If You Have To

2011-11-09T13:16:00.002-05:00

I have a very, very, very large stack of grading to do for my once-a-week seminar class. Today is the last day of class, in which 8/17 of the students will be giving presentations (9/17 went last time). Course grades are based on the presentation (25%), pre-presentation written work of a proposal and bibliography (25%), participation (25%), and group work (25%).

After today I have no opportunity to see the students as a group in person ever again. I have not graded the on-paper work (bibliographies).

I told the students that I'd post preliminary course grades by tomorrow (once I've evaluated today's crop of presentations).

It would be OK if I posted cumulative course grades on Blackboard without any indication of how the four components contributed to the grade if I emailed the students (1) telling them that anyone who wants to know more detail can come and talk to me and (2) giving general feedback on the work as a whole ("While overall the bibliographies were excellent, the most common mistake was…")? Right?

Please?

Plus this is a seminar course with a fairly generous extra-credit bribe worth up to a whole letter grade.

New Adventures in Good Design on the Internet

2011-11-07T08:28:00.001-05:00

Am I Evil or Lazy? You Decide.

2011-11-01T09:15:00.003-04:00

From: Rudbeckia Hirta rudbeckiahirta@gmail.com
Subject: Re: Party?
Date: October 31, 2011 10:20:16 AM EDT
To: Nandini Hirta nandini_mathew@[].com
Cc: Hirta, Albert wojtek.hirta@[].com

Hi Nandini,

Good to hear from you. Too bad there is not a Trader Joe's in Schenectady or this would be really easy!

Usually when we throw a party, we get a case of wine, some crackers and cheese, hummus, etc., some fruit, and some desserts.

I'm not sure what my schedule will be like for the spring. That's our high season for conferences and workshops. Let me know what you have in mind.

-Becky

On Oct 28, 2011, at 10:33 AM, Nandini Hirta wrote:

Hi Becky,
I hope you are doing really well! A few months ago your mom mentioned to Albert that she would like a celebration for her 70th birthday. I talked to her about it the last time she was here and it sounds like she would like a party of about 30 people. I think the 4 of us will go up to Niskayuna for it.

So I was wondering if you would like to help plan. I would love to work with you on this! I think we can be creative to make it really special.

Would love to hear your thoughts!
Nandini

Technology that I Love

2011-10-28T10:15:00.002-04:00

I'm currently writing a paper with Sweave, which is a mash-up between R and LaTeX.

Love, love, love, love, love it.

If I take the dataset on which the paper is based and update it with new data, when I click Typeset, magic happens. All of the analyses are re-done. All of the figures and tables are re-generated. All of the relevant numbers in the text are updated. It's awesome.

This was particularly useful yesterday. One of my bosses said that I should use nine months worth of logs when analyzing the system. Upon seeing a draft of the paper, the other boss said that we should use a full year worth of logs. All I had to do was switch out the spreadsheet of log data and recompile. And everything was updated to use the other data.

Were I still teaching calculus, I'd use this as the next generation of my grade report software. Not only could I provide the students with their grades, but I could generate graphs on the fly showing how their performance has changed over the course of the semester. Maybe I'll see if I can give a talk in the math department's teaching seminar about this.

The Math Department Never Gave Out Things Like This

2011-10-25T15:56:00.000-04:00

This Semester I'm Only Teaching an Honors Seminar

2011-10-24T08:33:00.002-04:00

You will have to guess what Stu wrote to me. Here is my response.

Dear Stu,

As our class is a seminar and not an online class, it is impossible to keep up through email; the emails that I send out are supplementary reminders of important dates and written clarifications about the assignments. Furthermore, you have not been keeping up: In addition to missing out on class discussions, you have not turned in the writing assignment (as described on our course syllabus) that was due on October 5. All assignments are described on the syllabus, and I gave further details in class.

Our course is an honors seminar. Because of this fact, I have chosen to run the class in a way that allows students a great amount of freedom. This means both the freedom to learn a lot through exploring ideas in unconventional ways as well as the freedom to make choices that lead to a lesser educational experience. One of my goals for this course is to give students the tools for acquiring an excellent education at [our university]; one step in this process is learning to be responsible for one's own learning and how to make good decisions about one's classwork.

Typically in a college course when a student must be absent, the student will consult with a classmate to get notes on what was missed. However, when a student knows in advance that multiple classes must be missed, it is the student's responsibilty to work out arrangements with the instructor ahead of time. It should go without saying that your absences have negatively affected your participation grade. If you can have your ROTC commanding officer get in touch with me (in writing) stating that you had mandatory ROTC commitments on those particular dates, covering the time period for our class, and that there was no other way for you to meet your ROTC obligations aside from missing our class, I can reduce the grade penalty.

If you would like to stop by my office to touch base on your current work on the project, let me know what would be a good time for you. [Information about my availability] Let me know if you would like to make an appointment.

Sincerely,
Dr. Hirta

In a Spirit of Giving

2011-10-13T13:04:00.003-04:00

Yesterday the car dealer called to tell me that the car that I ordered back in May will be ready this afternoon. Since my afternoon was already all booked up, I'm going to pick it up tomorrow.

But, due to poor planning -- or maybe a disbelief that it was ever actually coming -- I had neglected to find a place to put it. Currently my undriveable car is sitting, immobile, in my driveway. It has two flat tires, serious transmission issues, and might not start. (That may be a real problem, as I need to get the odometer reading for the paperwork, and that will require at least a bit of electricity going to the instrument panel.)

The plan for after work today is to mail the title to Rhode Island where the Car Talk contractor deals with cars that people like me are too lazy to sell and gives a cut to public radio. Allegedly the car should be out of the way within a week of the title reaching Rhode Island. Until then the new car will be parked on the street, I guess.

Since I can't itemize deductions, I don't get anything out of this -- other than the car leaving my property and my new car being able to claim a space in the driveway. And, of course, a feeling of extra irritation at the pledge drive scheduled for next week.

Today in Business Class

2011-10-12T11:14:00.004-04:00

Today Business Dude came to give a guest lecture to my OR class. He's not really an OR guy. He's VP of a company that you've heard of and was around all day to talk to a variety of business classes.

He started out by saying that he wanted the session to be interactive and that he was going to ask us questions. After about five minutes into his talk (and only one question to the class), he was in the standard mode of showing PPT slides and lecturing. To be fair, his PPTs did not suck as much as some.

So midway through I asked a question. He was talking about how important it is to recognize when you've made a mistake in business and to go back and fix it. So, of course, I ask about the recent NetFlix debacle. His take: Probably the right decision for NetFlix as a company, but a total PR fail.

Business Dude remained in lecture mode after answering my question. My latest theory is that it is nearly impossible to do something interactive in a room where an image glows on a screen in the front of the room.

At the end two more people asked questions: One woman asked how his company avoids complacency and burnout if the average person has been there for 21 years and there has never been a layoff in the past 12 years in his division. And a guy who didn't really have a question but who just wanted to hear himself talk.

The Plague Upon the Undergraduates

2011-10-11T08:30:00.002-04:00

Since I am teaching a class this semester, I am once again dealing with a student who has succumbed to one of the rites of passage of this university: mononucleosis.

I have reminded Stu about the existence of offices on campus that offer support to students with problems -- and that these students will even help honors students with mono, not just marginal students who missed two weeks of class because they were in jail.

For me the tricky part is figuring out how to fit this into my already nebulous and poorly-documented grading system, which heavily weights "participation." This is the sort of class where we all sit around in a circle and I cajole them to talk even though to them it is naptime (late afternoon).

The As for everyone strategy is seeming more and more appealing. Especially since I am writing this right now to procrastinate grading the pile of grading that sits on my desk.

Doing My Part to Ensure that People in the Building Trades Spend Time at My House

2011-10-08T20:08:00.002-04:00

Haven't seen my kitchen contractor in a while. He'll be by tomorrow or Monday.

Python Class: Week 1

2011-10-07T21:17:00.004-04:00

Last night was the first session of my Python class for the community. We had 14 people show up.

Despite the somewhat rustic location (underfunded community center) and lack of projector* it went quite well. I over-prepare for workshops, so I had handouts with every bit of code already typed up on them, so I didn't need a board or a projector.

We'll see how many people come back for Week 2. Anastasia was not able to join us.

Meanwhile, I will non sequitorly mention that many of the "I am the 99%" people come across badly and remind me of contestants on Top Model who blame everyone else for their poor performance. I find it challenging to muster sympathy for someone who finds themselves indebted and unemployed after dropping out of an expensive private college midway through a degree program that provides no marketable skills. It's not a big secret that we live in a time when learning as a leisure activity is reserved for the deMedicis. I studied art and literature in college, but I didn't major in them (and I've managed to pick up some marketable skills in the meantime).

[overly snarky sign redacted]

My class last night included several unemployed and underemployed people who were learning a new skill instead of making signs to share their tales of woe.

*I have my own pico-projector, but there wasn't a good place to put it to project an image that would be visible with the amount of ambient light in the room.

More Snark and Egotism

2011-10-06T12:18:00.003-04:00

I spend most of the OR class with my laptop open, doing my real job and only half-listening to the lecture. I do the homework. I have not read the books or the slides.

I scored a 95 on the exam. Highest score was 98. Mean was an 80.

Grading was generous based on the trivial number of points I lost for some very stupid mistakes.

Hey, possible future employers: I might be just as obnoxious and egotistical as someone with a degree in business, but I am far smarter and likely more competent. Plus I have leadership skills, work well in groups, and can talk quite knowledgeably about things that I know nothing about.

The only downside of hiring me is that since I don't really need the money, I won't stick around if the job is boring.

Spam Meets Real Life

2011-10-04T16:46:00.003-04:00

Today I got the following email expressing interest in my Python for Artists class:

From: Anastasia Petrova dragoneyesluvr92@hotmail.com Subject: Introduction to Programming Workshop Date: October 4, 2011 4:01:27 PM CDT Hello my name is Anastasia could I get the necessary information for this? Thanks!

Maybe Anastasia really does want to learn some computer programming? But I must say that this looks an awful lot like the email that gets shunted aside before it reaches my inbox.

Evaluation of Teaching of a More Specific Kind

2011-10-03T20:07:00.002-04:00

As you may or may not recall, I have taken a course at the university every semester since the spring of 2008. In fact, this is how I got the job that I have now; my current boss was my professor. Learning new things is good.

This semester I'm taking a graduate-level operations research class that could not possibly go any slower. It has taken us nearly half a semester to do less than a math department would cover in about a week and a half. To undergraduates.

Today we had the first exam. The professor started class over an hour early so that we would have 2.5 hours for the exam. I finished in under 90 minutes -- even after checking my work.

First let me say a few things about this class:

Out of every class that I have taken at this university, this professor is one of the best lecturers that I have seen. Even handicapping herself with the publishers awful PowerPoints, she still delivers clear, dynamic, interesting lectures. The only reason that I use the textbook is to locate the homework problems. Her lectures are so masterful that I obtain full comprehension of the material from half-listening to them while I do my Real Job on my laptop.

It is not the professor's fault that the class goes stupid-slow. This is a department-controlled course for the first-year graduate students in operations research.

Had you given me one of those professor-rating bubble sheets with the 5-point lickert scale before today, I would have given her straight 5s (assuming 5 is the good end of the scale).

And then I saw the exam.

It was an OK exam but not a wonderful exam.

First off, it was typed in Microsoft Word with no regard at all for typesetting the equations. So you would see things like 5x1 + 6x2 instead of 5x₁ + 6x₂. Which, while not a big deal, makes the math harder to read. Also, there was no reasonable alignment of equations in systems of equations.

And then there were many, many problems in which the set-up of the problem was given on the bottom 1.5 inches of the page and all the questions about the situation were on the next page. I hate having to flip back and forth. A few well-placed pagebreaks would have fixed that.

But the worst were the sloppily written "choose the best answer" multiple choice questions and true-false questions. I know that I'm going to get a bunch of those wrong from reading them like a mathematician. The one that bugs me the most was something of the form "You need this to interpret that." You need it for a full, meaningful, useful interpretation, but you can say a little bit without it. You could argue it either way.

Any bets on how long it will take for the exam to be graded?

Evaluating Good Teaching

2011-09-27T18:36:00.002-04:00

I got caught up in a bit of a discussion about evaluating teaching via an email list that I'm on. I tend to avoid sharing my truly innovative ideas with people who might take them the wrong way.

Allow me to tell you about my proposal for evaluating teaching effectiveness in calculus.

Prepare list of learning objectives for the course.

Teach calculus to the "treatment" groups (different instructors). Keep track of how much time the students spend in and out of class working on learning calculus. Give them an exam at the end of the course. Keep track of how well they do in the next course in the calculus sequence. At some point in the future give them another exam covering calculus.

Give the list to the control group. This group should be as closely matched as possible to the treatment groups (same SAT scores, demographics, majors, etc.). Tell them that 14 weeks from now they will take an exam in calculus and that the results will go on their transcripts. Leave them alone. Keep track of how much time they spend learning calculus, their scores on the exam, how well they do in the next course in the calculus sequence, and their scores on some future calculus exam.

Anyone whose students consistently do worse than the control group on all the various measures should not get tenure.

More Recent Happenings

2011-09-26T21:21:00.004-04:00

My class is still dull and lifeless. They refuse to talk or discuss. In order to force them to read, I am making them do lame freshman things like email me the day before the reading is due with one thing that they found interesting or surprising, one thing they found confusing or didn't agree with, and one issue that is worthy of further discussion. Clearly I am out of practice at teaching.

I teach one class with 18 people in it. I can't really say too much about them here as individuals. Can I say that I am hoping that a couple is forming out of one of the groups that works together on the collaborative activities?

I am off coffee. My life is dull and empty. When do the happiness receptors grow back?

My new glasses arrived. Well, the frames arrived a while ago, and then it took a while to get lenses at the eye doctor's office. Don't like the line placement on the bifocals, so I'm making them re-make the lenses (at no cost to me). This is the sort of service that I get for paying Real Money at a local business.

Don't mock the glasses. I had to choose from six options that fit me. You can mock the hair because I have not been able to muster the energy to wash it since Saturday.

The reason that I own so many pairs of shoes is because that is one of the few categories of apparel and accessories that actually come in my size (7.5). Strictly speaking this is not exactly true, but I have found good strategies to compensate for my stupidly narrow feet (AA width with AAAA heels). Perhaps this is why I have come to favor shoes with laces and buckles. Also, I have gained a bunch of weight lately, so I now wear a 2 in most normal clothes.

Maybe I am drinking, like, a mug of wine right now. Perhaps I am trying to compensate for my lack of happiness receptors?

And maybe I am feeling guilty for drinking a mug of wine at 7 calories per gram of alcohol because I kind of miss wearing a size 00?

I am working on a crazy project at work. It is the awesome super perfect storm of crazy. All of the boring science nerd computer scientists seem to have opinions about this project that range through various shades of negativity and dismissiveness with a shade of confusion mixed in. I totally love this project. More as we get closer to publishing something.

Somewhat relatedly: Some people in the PR machine at NSF also love this project (hint: it is not physics or computational chemistry). They have directed a few computational scientists to help me out on it. The computational scientists don't really get the project, which is annoying. Also, they are being super-dismissive towards me, which was just super-extra-annoying. Normally I don't use a signature block in my emails, but when I wrote back to them I created one so that I could be sure to identify myself as "S. Rudbeckia Hirta, Ph.D." They may have more experience in specific types of programming, but the real challenge here is mathematical -- and fairly algebraic, at that. Our method of parallelism is really, really easy, too: It's serial code that needs to do a bunch of independent runs. My colleague has a script that can launch all of these in the background in a clever way while pinning each of them to a processor.

Without saying too much more about this project, many parts of it remind me of the types of questions that were raised when considering problems when I worked for the Federal Government. There are no exact parallels, but some of the ways I learned to think about a problem and what questions to ask have come in handy. I suspect that the computational scientists who have been sent to help do not have this sort of experience.

I had a party this past weekend. It was OK. And I have a lot of leftover wine.

Because Sometimes I am a Bitch

2011-09-21T17:11:00.002-04:00

Boss introduced me to the new intern. New Intern is a male undergraduate.

Boss was good about the intro: He made sure to emphasize to New Intern that he would be working for Dr. Hirta. Quite frequently I find myself wearing more eye make-up than everyone else on the technical staff of the computer science department combined. Students who don't already know who I am but who have seen me around the building sometimes need to be explicitly told that (1) I work for the CS department and not the female-heavy social science department that we share a building with and (2) I have a technical background and am not a secretary.

Today I had to break out the line that I sometimes need to use when talking to male undergraduates about technical matters: "I've been programming computers since before you were born." And now that I've gotten old, this line also applies to a large fraction of the graduate students as well.

My Days with Young People

2011-09-19T16:33:00.002-04:00

Today I talked to high school students. Dressed (reasonably) normal. Gave my off-the-cuff talk on omg, computers are so cool. This is another benefit of being opposed to wordy slides: If you just throw some random science images at the screen, you can say whatever you think of at the time.

So my talk today was to a group of all girl high school students. I still don't know what I think of all of this special effort for girls stuff. I gave the same talk that I would have given to any group of nerdy high school students. All of this "special for [some group]" stuff sort of irks me because in my experience the special version is sort of dumbed down.

Still flailing with my freshmen. I can not figure out how to get them to care enough about the material for them to talk in class. It doesn't help that class is from 3:35 - 4:25 in the afternoon. Yet, if I could figure out how to make them have strong opinions, I think that they would talk more. I have guest speakers coming this week, so I have another week in which to sort this out and make the material more engaging for them.

Things Going On

2011-09-18T20:27:00.004-04:00

At least my trip to Florida was reasonably uneventful. Workshop/talk went well. Also got a decent photo for the NSF. Every time we give a workshop/talk we try to document it in a variety of ways so that we can put together something that's less dry than an all-text report.

Other events this week: Tore half the front bumper off my car when I hit a pile of shingles in my driveway, roofer issues (rain), roofer issues (plumbing calamity with my outside spigot becoming a geyser), got pulled over by a cop.

Special note: Was not hassled by cops during my most-likely-to-be-caught-up-by-racial-profiling adventure of the week.

Giving a talk tomorrow to high school girls at the Science Academy. Must. Not. Wear. "I'm too pretty to do math" T-shirt.

Have now reserved hotel for Big November Conference and have directed department admin to charge the registration fee to the department budget number. Have not yet booked hotels. Trying to decide how stupid it would be to make a clandestine visit to a dear friend on my way home from the conference. Leaning towards "no" as that adds roughly $400 to the price of the ticket. Apparently he and I live in the pair of cities that are maximally expensive to travel between.

I kind of want to make some documentary films.

More on my freshmen later.

If You Need Me Next Week

2011-09-09T09:40:00.002-04:00

This slide has plenty of words on it, I think.

I thought that my travel schedule had calmed down. Apparently I am going to Florida during hurricane season! If you blink, you might miss my visit, though, as I arrive in Tallahassee on Monday evening and leave Tuesday afternoon right after my talk.

In other travel news, I have gotten travel permission and booked a hotel for the Big Conference in November but have not yet registered, bought plane tickets, or done anything else that involves spending actual money.

Back to the Faculty?

2011-09-08T14:26:00.002-04:00

In the past few days I've been alerted -- twice -- of opportunities to be faculty again.

Tenure-track job opening up in the math/cs/stats department at a nearby small liberal arts college. I would probably be very good at that job. They have seven faculty in the math/cs/stats department. Four have their Ph.D. from the institution where I currently work, two from other institutions, and one lists a highest degree as an "ABD" which is annoying way of saying "masters degree."

The other option would be as a grant-funded research assistant professor in the EECS department here. The Powers That Be have done some annoying things, administratively, so my boss is thinking of "firing" me as staff and rehiring me as fake-faculty.

I've been raised to believe that the tenure-track job is the holy grail and much better than having a grant-funded position on someone else's grant under an uncertain funding environment. But I think that option #2 sounds more interesting.

Thinking Again about Group Work

2011-09-07T21:38:00.002-04:00

Sorry about the very lame sparse posting. I blame poor time management on everyone's parts -- including the people who invite me to meetings so dull that they are unworthy of blogging.

Did I mention that I am taking a graduate-level operations research class this semester? So far class has met six times. We have covered: Why linear programming is an important tool in business (prof talked about when Real Businesses have had problems that have been solved by linear programming), how to solve linear programming problems with two variables by graphing in the plane, and how to solve linear programming problems with an Excel plug-in. Nothing yet about the nuts-and-bolts of the method of solution; just "put it into Excel and click here." All this in just six class periods! The math department teaches this to freshmen faster and in more depth. I totally went to graduate school in the wrong field.

So today we spent the last 15 minutes of class working in groups on a linear programming problem isomorphic to the ones we'd seen in class and easier than some of them from the homework. It was one of these, "You are making product A and product B, which have contributions of profit of X_A and X_B. It takes two machines to make these products. Machine 1 takes t1_A to make product A and t1_B to make product B. Machine 2 takes t2_A to make product A and t2_B to make product B. How many of each product should you make?" The sort of thing that the math department would expect freshmen to be able to do. And we had to work in groups.

I have figured out why working in groups in classes bugs me so much. There is no good reason for me to work with other people on this problem. I can solve it faster myself than dealing with my groupmates being wrong and confused. More generally, this problem does not require any specialized skills beyond what we have been taught in class, and all of us in class are assumed to have roughly the same skill level relating to the course material. Also, this was a small problem; there was not more work than one person had time for.

In contrast, I work in groups at work all the time and no one tells me that I should be working in groups. If I need to do something using TAU to profile some code, I will work with someone who knows about TAU. If I need to work on gathering a lot of information, I'll work with someone else who also needs the information, and we'll split up the list of people to contact. We work in groups at work because that is the best way to get the work done.

And Here I Thought I'd Have Something to Say

2011-08-30T14:30:00.004-04:00

Unfortunately, when interesting things happen, so many interesting things are happening that I don't have time to blog about any of them. And there really is no need to blog about things that are not interesting.

The class that I am teaching is awesome. It is pretty much a mash-up of things that I am very interested in, which is the ideal thing to teach about. The only thing that it's missing is knitting/sewing. We're talking about neuroscience, color, Albers, perception, bad PPT slides, cool things with data, R, Tufte, and anything else that catches my fancy.

In a similar vein, I am collaborating with an artist and making computer art! It is awesome! He comes up with ideas, and I write Python scripts that carry them out. Not only is it hilarious and fun, but I'm also learning Python in the best way possible: I have a reason to figure out how to do specific things. I should know plenty of Python by the time I teach Python for Artists in October.

We're supposed to be running events that get under-represented groups involved with computing. My first draft of my poster advertising Python for Artists took its visual cues from The Matrix. Then I thought that it might not appeal to the right groups. But my next two drafts seemed a bit too sarcastic: One had a pink unicorn and the other had Computer Engineer Barbie. What to try next? Flowers? Pride and Prejudice?

Bought some crazy-cheap glasses frames on the Internet. Just ordered plain frames because I'm getting new bifocals, and it's worth it to me to have them measured correctly and in person. They are hilarious glasses because my eyes are too close together, so I have to wear children's glasses. I wear a lens width of about 40mm. Go ahead, look at your glasses and look at the numbers printed on them. See the number to the left of the square? If it's bigger than 40, your glasses are too big for me. Go check your children's glasses. Those are probably closer to my size. Want to see my new frames? Go to Zenni Optical and search for 485521. (I can't figure out how to link.)

It is 87 degrees outside, and I am wearing jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, and a fleece because my office is freezing. Even after I complained to the Chancellor's office. Even though I have opened the windows. This might have involved my bringing my Torx TR 30 screwdriver in to the office. Based on the number of open windows in this building, I am not the only cold person with a 100-piece screwdriver-bit set.

The business class that I am taking is going crazy-slow. If math taught as slowly as business or biology, it would take several years to get through the calculus sequence. More on this later.

Other hilarious things going on, too. More on these at some other point, too.

More Secrets of Teaching Nerdy Freshmen

2011-08-20T09:09:00.004-04:00

For part of my class, I am encouraging the freshmen to work with a dataset.

I am going to suggest the xkcd color survey results as one that they might want to use.

Python for Artists

2011-08-19T07:29:00.002-04:00

Considering the number of things that I have taught that I haven't known much about, this is not as stupid a plan as you might think. It's not like I'm going to be teaching sheaf cohomology for combinatorists; Python for artists sets a much lower bar.

Advice is welcome.

Here's the basic outline that I was thinking:

Session 1:

In time before class starts help people get Python installed on their computers. Overall introduction. Here are some examples of things that you might do with Python, ranging from things that you are likely to do to things that you are unlikely to do, including:

Automating things like doing a find-and-replace over lots of files, renaming a lot of files in one fell swoop, etc.
Pulling a lot of information from the Twitter public timeline, scraping stuff off web pages.
Doing stuff with your own web page (I don't know what, though).
Nifty things with graphics.
Hooking in to Google's cool tools (I don't know which ones) and writing things for Android (is this even true?)

I would also talk -- in English -- about the typical grammar constructs of computer programs, like if-then and looping, as well as alluding to the "nouns" of Python (mostly the idea of variables, objects; not bringing up dictionaries at this point). We'd then read some Python code and translate it into English. We'd end with them running some scripts that I provide and making small (directed) changes in them. Finish making sure that everyone has Python on their computers.

Session 2:

More information about the interpreter, the fundamentals of the language, details of Python syntax. More examples of existing code to modify and examples of very small things to write from scratch (possibly copy-and-pasting from the other examples). Examples should be tied to practical things as much as possible. This is vague because I don't yet know enough about what should be here.

Session 3:

Similar to session 2, but more in-depth and more complicated examples. Attendees will be working more independently.

Session 4:

Lab project. I've found some "learn Python" lab assignments that are pretty cool -- and released under Creative Commons licenses. I'd pick (and possibly modify) one of these and introduce the assignment and distribute the skeleton code. The attendees would fill in the missing parts.

Session 5:

Finish the lab

Tales from the First Week of School

2011-08-18T20:21:00.002-04:00

Freshmen part 2: I met with my honors class yesterday! Some of them do not appreciate me yet. They will learn. As they are almost all from the South, they did not know what to do with an under-air conditioned room. (The a/c in the classroom was at 1/3 capacity because of an electrical issue.) I taught them that if it is hot when the first person arrives, then that person is in charge of closing the blinds on the sunny side of the room. Who says that you don't learn anything practical in seminar classes?

Yesterday I also went to the Operations Research class that I am taking. Nearly ten percent of the students in the class admit to having PhDs. I am thinking of renting the Kindle version of the textbook, as that seems to be the best option for me in terms of both convenience and economy.

Went back to the gym. Ack. I have gotten so fat and so weak.

Working on plans to teach a course "Python for artists" (not for credit). Current major stumbling block: I do not know Python.

Met with my boss today. Good news on the merit pay front! Even though I am far less well trained in computer science than I am in mathematics, the computer science department has far more resources to show their appreciation of me than the mathematics department ever did.

Yet Another Unusual Vehicle Parked on the Street on My Block

2011-08-17T22:11:00.002-04:00

Previously: hearse limo and camper.

The Other Office Drama

2011-08-17T12:05:00.002-04:00

Yesterday we had a series of last-minute meetings with no published agenda due to high drama.

In other office drama news:

Apparently the president of this university had to call up his college buddy, the president of another large state university that I will not mention by name but that you can already guess if you've been reading the tech news in this field.

So you see, Other University was in this long term relationship with a Vendor. And they seemed really committed. Other University had even bought a new place, and they were planning on moving in together. Vendor had stuff at Other University's current apartment, and it seemed really serious. And Vendor is really hot and from a good family and seemed like a good catch for Other University.

And then all of a sudden, Vendor dumped Other University by text message! And came over and took back her stuff and gave back the deposit that Other University had put down on the wedding. And it was over.

So then Other University started leaning on my university's vendor. And our vendor was really sympathetic and was trying to comfort Other University. At which point the president of our university called up the president of the Other University and was like, "Back off, man."

Somewhat relatedly, you can take any of these political squabbles and replace the phrase "most petaflops" with "biggest dick" without really changing the main idea.

What Freshmen Worry About

2011-08-15T11:50:00.003-04:00

So we have all survived Freshman Book Club. Willfully ignoring the advice of the Teaching Well Engagement Enterprise, I did not jump directly in to big issues of race, class, gender, money, and ethics. Instead, the first question for our discussion was, "What is a question that you have about academics here?"

Every single student wanted to know whether the work is harder in college than it was in high school.

I explained that (at least at the freshman level) that it's not so much harder but that the courses go faster and you are responsible for figuring out what you need to do in order to learn things.

Of course, this was a biased sample, as about a third of the group decided not to show up for Freshman Book Club. Unclear how savvy of a move that is: even though Freshman Book Club does not count in your GPA, it does show up on your transcript. The semester hasn't even officially started, and they have already failed a (fake) course!

Freshman Book Club

2011-08-14T19:16:00.004-04:00

Freshman Book Club meets tomorrow, as a pre-semester kick-off to give the freshmen somewhere to be a eight-freakin'-thirty in the morning, perhaps so that they consider opting out of binge drinking tonight. They will attend a talk by the author of the book, and then after the talk they fan out to the four winds for the small group discussions. I am a small-group discussion leader.

As a discussion leader, my responsibilities are:

Send the group an email.
Evaluate their book reports according to a provided rubric.
Lead a 50-minute discussion about the book.
Fill out a small amount of paperwork.

The organizers of Freshman Book Club are driving me mad. In order to "help" me carry out these many difficult tasks, they have contacted me in a great number of ways with a very large amount of information. They have sent many, many emails. They have sent guidelines and handbooks. They have sent me a link to the Freshman Book Club Blog. They have added me to their BlackBoard site. And, in addition, they wanted me to attend a three-hour training on how to carry out these tasks.

The training was apparently run by the Teaching Well Engagement Enterprise (TWEE). This group seems to believe that no one on campus (aside from them) knows enough about teaching to evaluate papers based on a rubric and to run a 50-minute discussion. Furthermore, they seem to think that the best way to teach people how to run a 50-minute discussion is with a three-hour march through PowerPoint slides. I am mostly guessing on that last part; I did not actually view the video (on yet another site!) of the training and only looked at the slides that were posted on the web. Maybe they did not use slides for the full three hours.

I am getting quite fed up with the endless barrage of information from TWEE. I do not need reminders about every resource that they have created to help me to run a 50-minute discussion about a book that is not at all subtle in its approach to controversial themes and ethical dilemmas. Plus, in the worst case, I can pull out some of the best all-purpose discussion questions: Who in the book reminds you the most of yourself? (This question is great because people love to talk about themselves.) If you could give a piece of advice to one person in the book, who would you give advice to and what would you suggest? (People also like to tell other people that they're doing it wrong and what they should do instead.) How would you turn this book into a movie? (Movies are always better than books! And we could talk about which celebrities we would cast.)

I have a very nice (and legit) lesson planned for tomorrow's session of Freshman Book Club. However, I'm very unlikely to volunteer to help out next year.

Home!

2011-08-12T21:43:00.001-04:00

Back from the exhausting conference.

I like photographs so much better with crazy colors.

And I have no idea how to "Save As…" in Lion. Apparently both "Save a Version" and "Export" will overwrite your original file.

In Which I Use the Language of Media to Describe a Social Situation

2011-08-08T08:21:00.003-04:00

Nice guy had decided that The Little Red-Haired Girl liked him, so he set out to win her over. However, most of his encounters with women are something like, this, so he didn't just ask her out.

Instead he cooked up a plan: He invited me and some math department people to hang out at the nerd bar on Saturday night so that he could tell her that a bunch of friends were already planning on hanging out and maybe she could join us all in just hanging out. The Topologist vehemently declined, citing this as being like the set-up for a bad sit-com plot.

So Saturday I show up at the bar with one of the other people who was talked into this scheme, and the Little Red-Haired Girl isn't there. It seems that she committed some sort of perceived slight against Nice Guy on Friday*, and now she is dead to him. He explained that when he likes someone he is totally and completely devoted to them, and he would never, ever commit such a slight against someone that he is interested in. Therefore, she can not be interested in him.

Upon further discussion, it appears that Nice Guy has the following standards for women who he asks out:

Most be hot.
Must be marriage material (which he decides within five minutes of meeting someone).
Must be as devoted to him as he is to her.

We suggested that he might end up happier overall if he relaxed his standards a bit. Maybe go out and meet some women who don't measure up to those standards. As he has never had a girlfriend, we suggested that he might do better with a different approach.

And then yesterday he posted this to facebook:

And now, I am wondering, Rashomon-style, how the third person there interprets how the conversation went.

*She said she would stop by his office. And then she didn't.

My Crystal Ball

2011-08-06T09:45:00.006-04:00

The university is trying very hard to convince the freshmen not to choose one of our most popular courses of study on campus, namely the one-year program in sports spectatorship with a concentration in beer. As part of this, they are running a mini-class, Freshman Book Club, to get the students in an academic frame of mind.

As I can not help but get involve with meddling and because I am especially drawn to meddling in the academic lives of clueless freshmen, I signed right up for this. It is open to all faculty and staff, and they of course took me because they have a shortage of people willing to do it.

The students were assigned to read a book. Yesterday they had to electronically submit a "creative response" to the book. Next week they are going to see a talk by the author, followed by a one-hour discussion in small groups. I am a small group leader. As part of being a group leader, I get to grade their creative responses to the book. These vary quite significantly in quality.

I can already tell you that the eight (of roughly 30) students who didn't turn it in are probably going to struggle with adjusting to this campus. The ones who came up with very lame half-ass attempts are going to be pretty typical students. The few who actually did presentable work are going to need some advising on how to stay out of the most soul-crushing of the gen-ed courses on campus.

And because I treat the students better than you think that I do (yesterday I was at Starbucks and someone who took my class in 2005 thanked me for all I did for her when she was in my class), I sent out a nice note to the non-completers of the assignment:

Dear Student,

Welcome to [this university]! I hope that you are as excited as I am for the start of the fall semester!

You should have been receiving emails with reminders about the [freshman book club] creative assignment. I am looking forward to reading these and to meeting everyone in our discussion group.

When I checked on Blackboard, your assignment did not appear in the submissions folder. These assignments were due yesterday. If you are having trouble with this assignment or with the online submission, the [freshman experience] team is ready to help you. Should you have any questions, please refer to the [freshman experience] FAQ on Blackboard. If you cannot find an answer there, feel free to email the [freshman experience] team directly at [their email address].

As [freshman book club] is a required, Satisfactory/No-Credit online course for all first-year students and will appear as the first thing on your transcript, please take the time now to ensure that you get off to a great start at [this university]. We do understand that some students take some time to get settled in at [this university] and to become comfortable with the online systems that we use here, so do not panic if you are having trouble. The [freshman experience] team is very eager to help you get your freshman year started right, and they can steer you in the right direction so that you can submit this assignment.

Sincerely,

Dr. Hirta

And I am such a nice person, that I will not tell the freshmen that the world would be a better place if PowerPoint did not have any tools for adding text to slides. I did, however, tell this to the Good Intern in our group. The Powers That Be made him give a very short talk on his research this summer, and he showed me his draft slides. I told him to print what he had to use as notes, delete all the words on the slides (and delete the words-only slides), to make the important graph fill up the whole slide, and spend most of his time talking about the cool science that went into the creation of the important graph.

I can already predict that Freshman Book Club is likely to be highly entertaining.

Other Recent Adventures

2011-08-06T06:37:00.003-04:00

Subtitle: What happened in Cambridge (and Boston) but doesn't have anything to do with CUDA.

For those of you keeping track at home, last week I was in Cambridge (after the toe incident and before the CUDA fruforall). Tomorrow I leave for the Disaster Workshop in California.

Tried very hard not to meddle at my old job. Mostly succeeded. Typical exception: large groups of people were milling around aimlessly instead of sitting down so that an event could start. I told them to go sit down.

Went bra shopping at yet another of the Boston-area bra specialty stores. Despite calling them twice before I went, when I got there, they did not have my size. Their justification: Most women wear a different size than they think they wear, so it doesn't matter if they don't have the size that you think you wear, as you probably wear a different size anyway. And so I am apparently sentenced to a lifetime of pretending that it is an ironic hipster affectation when I wear $8 bras with My Little Pony on them.

Met more interesting people. In the past it was Nobel laureates. Last year in Cambridge I also met an astronaut and a zillionaire. This year I met someone very highly placed in the intelligence community.

Got some unsolicited job offers. I'm pretty sure that none are worth taking.

My email conversation with my conference-friend (from the previous trip) came to an abrupt end while I was in Boston. I am wondering if I said or did something to reveal what a poorly socialized mathematician I really am. What bothers me most about this is that if I did say or do something stupid, I would like the chance to apologize.

Gave a talk that was apparently well-received. My secret: no slides with words on them.

Tomorrow I depart for the next trip. My Kindle is loaded up with nerdy books, and I am ready to hide from the most disastrous parts of this poorly organized workshop.

More Workshop Fun

2011-08-05T06:13:00.002-04:00

This just in: At 1:30am an email arrived saying that the CUDA materials that have been sent were the wrong ones.

Meanwhile, the main organizer of this workshop is dealing with a family tragedy while doing important workshop organization tasks like putting links to all of our facebook pages on the workshop wiki and making a mix for us all to listen to during the free time in the evenings.

Because even the most clueless mathematician can tell that this workshop is a recipe for disaster, I emailed the organizers of the CUDA session yet again with a plea for some more specific instructions. Because I was not there in person to bat my overly-made-up eyelashes while wearing a skirt*, in this email I also was sure to mention that all I know about CUDA is that it started out as something for video games. (I did not say anything about the elves or about my fear of texture memory.) Let's hope that I end up off the hook.

*A magical combination in my line of work. Especially if one is carrying a box! On Tuesday some dude who I did not recognize badged me in to the building -- even though it was a fairly small box. Shockingly, no one asked me to fix the photocopier.

New Adventures in Computing

2011-08-04T16:14:00.004-04:00

If you may recall, I am a big faker when it comes to giving talks in the field of computing. I end up volunteered to give a talk, and then I spend a lot of time prepping. A lot of time. I am almost always able to prep things well enough that my talks go really well. I figure things out to the point where I am even able to answer questions.

It is true: my mental model of computers does not include anything sophisticated like level 3 caches or how one's arrays are arranged in memory. In fact, I imagine the computer as filled with malicious little passive-aggressive elves that will follow the directions that you give to them (up to a point). In my model, the computer that I work with has a modest number of reasonably friendly elves that are a bit moody and unpredictable. The other computer here is like an elf metropolis -- an elf Gotham City. The elves are very anti-social and hate to talk to each other. You can't get anything done if you need your elves to work together. My model of computing is firmly elf-based.

I've been in the midst of giving five talks in five weeks. I talked about data analysis to grad students, a programming model to whoever wanted to show up to a half-day tutorial at a conference, using a certain framework with high performance computing to a group in Cambridge, MA, an overview of what we do in my office to a group of senior citizens, and next week I am giving a half-day tutorial on a few pieces of software. No two talks the same! So I have been very busy fighting with elves. (OK, so I did have to venture into the world of caches, as the elves will fight if you have them trying to access shared variables that are stored in the same cache-line. And fighting elves are not doing work for you, so your program runs more slowly.)

So this brings me to the crazy part of this week. For those who are not up on trends in computing, you should read "CUDA" as "a fairly complicated and difficult way to write computer programs." And it is completely incompatible with the "elf" model of computing.

Tuesday:
: Someone from the workshop tells me and the other instructors that we will help out at the CUDA workshop on Wednesday, August 10. Have I mentioned that all I know about CUDA is that it is not an elf-based model of computing and that most people find it unpleasant? And that it has something to do with XBox.
Wednesday:
: Crickets.
Thursday:
: Today we got some sort of archive full of mysterious files that are apparently in CUDA. I don't know how to unarchive files on Unix, so I downloaded them to my Mac, double-clicked on them to unarchive them, and then was going to sftp them to where they needed to be. But then I realized that I have no idea where I should be running these files. We have been asked to look over them and say whether they do anything "unexpected." As I have expected them to completely befuddle me, we seem to be right on track. Does CUDA even run on my laptop? NO IDEA.
Friday:
: We will have a 3pm conference call to straighten everything out. I'm sure that I can get up to speed on CUDA over the phone. Did anyone ask if I was even planning on being at work at 3pm on Friday afternoon before leaving on travel? Oh wait, that is 3pm central time. Some of us leave work at 4pm on the east coast.
Saturday:
: Do you think that I'm spending Saturday figuring out CUDA when I have been on travel more than I have been home lately? Ha!
Sunday:
: Travelling all day, due to horrible connection times from plane to plane, from plane to shuttle, and an infinity long shuttle ride because this workshop is in the middle of fucking nowhere.
Monday:
: Workshop begins!
Tuesday:
: More workshopping.
Wednesday:
: CUDA!

This should be great.

Excuses

2011-07-26T14:00:00.002-04:00

Does this blog accept hospital bracelets as excuses for not posting?

Oh, and if you are looking for me tomorrow through Sunday, check at MIT. Friday afternoon (from 2pm - 5pm) I have a inflexible commitment in 32-123, but aside from that I do have some free time. Due to the air conditioning situation (or lack thereof), you will probably find me somewhere in the student center or in a classroom on the main campus during the day on Thursday.

Just as long as plans do not involve my walking very far, as I happen to be injured. The x-ray showed nothing broken. I am dealing with the ill-defined realm of "soft tissue injury." This morning I tripped over the ladder that is in my hallway and giving access to my attic. Why was attic access suddenly so important? Sunday night I learned (the hard way) that my roof leaks. Or maybe you would call it the easy way, as it sure was easy to notice that it was raining inside.

My plans may also include a trip to do some shopping at a specialty store on Thursday morning if I can first get them to confirm over the phone that they carry anything in my size. Want to take bets? My guess is that they will lie and say that they do have something and then when I get to the store will reveal that what they mean is that they could order something and then have it altered to fit. Perhaps it is not worth schlepping my injured self to Copley Place to deal with salespeople. I might be better off seeing if I can find something at the local Justice; they might have some options with sparkly unicorns.

So who wants to come help me hang drywall after the insurance guy and the roof guy do their things? The only drywall that is more fun that ceiling drywall is ceiling drywall on 10' ceilings! It will be great fun! Let's hope that I don't fall off a ladder or smother myself with drywall dust.

Things That Have Me a Bit On Edge

2011-07-22T22:01:00.003-04:00

My intern sent me a form to fill out about her so that she can re-apply for some scholarship that she has. She also helpfully sent me a copy of the form that she filled out about me, describing the work she did this summer. It's one of those standard "rate on a scale of 1 to 5" forms, and there was a box for each number. She put ******* in the five box, consistently, and wrote glowing comments. Do I return the favor? Is the copy of the form that she sent me have the same ratings/comments as the form that she turned in to her scholarship? Does it matter what I say, as I have to send the .docx to her so that she can then submit my ratings of her to the scholarship office? Am I being far too cynical?

Well, it has happened. I have gotten older. It used to be that when I went to conferences that there was a non-zero chance that guys in their 40s would hit on me. No longer the case. On the plus side, one particular guy in his 30s was not hitting on me. By which I mean the flirtiest guy from my workplace--who used to flirt with me to such an extent that even I noticed it, and I am very oblivious. (It's not that I minded especially, just that it was sort of awkward, and I don't do awkward very well at all.) I have, however, made a new friend who is in his 50s and does seem rather cool.

In the next three weeks I am giving three very different talks in three different cities to three very different audiences. I have not written any of the talks.

Lion.

At a Conference

2011-07-17T18:23:00.001-04:00

Guess which western state I'm in. Hint: It's not Idaho.

One More Annoying Post About Social Networking and Names

2011-07-17T06:48:00.003-04:00

I've been using the automated suggestion list to add people. The problem that I have found -- which wasn't a problem until now -- is that when you take the collection of people that I know together with the collection of people that they know (and so on), you end up with a lot of people with names like Anne Li. Can I always tell if it's the right Anne Li from the picture? No.

I now appreciate the Chinese parents who decide that their children should have really uncommon western given names.

Is this problem better or worse in China? Is there a wider variety of given names in China than there is in the United States? Or are the users of Renren looking at their friend suggestions and wondering if this is the Li Xiao Tian that they know or someone else?

What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?

2011-07-15T19:14:00.002-04:00

Found in with a pile of stuff of mine from elementary school.

Slide Talk

2011-07-13T10:40:00.003-04:00

Once again, I am holding to my very strongly held beliefs about talks.

I am giving a four-hour tutorial. I currently have 14 slides, including the two shown below. One of my slides is my name/institution/contact information. There are no sentences or bullet points on any of my slides. In fact, the wordiest slide is an intentionally confusing diagram that is labeled with many instances of "16 GB RAM" and "6 cores" -- to demonstrate the complexity of a particular system. Aside from that, there are roughly zero words on my slides.

And now back to work on proof-reading and perfecting my 16-page handout.

People Who You Might Know

2011-07-11T12:18:00.001-04:00

Is everyone getting suggestions of famous people mixed in with the people that they know? Or is Google's algorithm compensating for the fact that I know a lot of people who went to Harvard and who are now involved with the Silicon Valley tech scene?

Settings that Social Networks Might Have

2011-07-10T16:22:00.004-04:00

I am interested in what you are doing and would like to share what I am doing with you.

I know who you are, but you don't know or care who I am. However, I would like to know what you are up to. (The setting for collecting celebrity news and companies' loyalty discounts.)

Apparently you find me interesting. Here, look at something/nothing/everything.

I don't mind you using my profile on the social networking site to find my phone number, but I have zero interest in what you had for breakfast.

You are the math nerds who I know, so I want to tell you about math; you are the knitting nerds I know, so I want to tell you about yarn. Other people can hunt this information down if they want to.

You are the math nerds who I know, so I want to tell you about math; you are the knitting nerds I know, so I want to tell you about yarn. Other people would run in horror from sheaf cohomology or from knowing how much I paid for that yarn. This must be kept from them. (Unless you take a screen shot and betray my wishes.)

The Very Special Constituents. The People You Should Not Be Talking To.

I have a question. I have an announcement. I want to spam this out to invade on my friends' experience with the site.

I am stalking you. I want to be informed about everything that you do.

I think that this is cool. You can subscribe to this content if you think it's cool, too.

Sometimes I think that you have neat things to say. I want to see some of it, sometimes.

Please leave me alone. You are dead to me on this site. I do not exist for you.

What other modes have you seen or wished for?

My House is Like the Saddest Night Club

2011-07-09T19:08:00.003-04:00

Recently I have purchased over $200 worth of electronic dance music on iTunes. As The Topologist is off mathematizing at some sort of multi-week conference that encourages the building of new collaborations by having mathematicians hang out at a resort and go hiking, I am spending my weekends home alone with the music playing a bit too loud and working on my summer plans of perfecting my signature cocktail. As I am poorly situated in my time zone, it does not get dark here until far too late, so I am drinking and dancing alone without the benefit of darkness.

The only thing that could make it sadder would be if I spent Saturday night dealing with figuring out how to classify the 499 people that Google+ is suggesting should be in my circles. Making this harder, Google+ keeps egging me on to connect with people who I should not be talking to, especially when drinking. Instead I will be working on making slides explaining memory locality and performance trade-offs in cache-coherent, non-uniform memory access architectures. (While working on my signature cocktail.)

I am all about giving the talks these days. I am giving a talk every week from now until the start of the semester. Catch me at the online school for grad students, the disappointing conference, Cambridge, MA, the senior center (don't ask), or the Kumbaya Computing Resort Workshop. No two talks on the same topic! And then the semester starts, and I will be teaching freshmen. Fortunately, I have learned that the cocktail party strategy of asking people to talk about themselves can also be applied to the seminar-discussion class, so I should be able to hold my own with the freshmen. Plus I have figured out that the ideal book to assign in one of these courses is the one where the author has the strongest point of view, not where the author makes the most sophisticated, information-filled arguments. Strong point of view is a much better catalyst for discussion. Maybe we need a field trip, too?

And on top of all of this talking to other people, I have a crapload of work to do at work. Even more to do now that my intern quit. (My intern quit!) I know that I am a bad boss, but I've never had a minion quit before! I make lots of excuses for being a bad boss, just like freshmen make excuses for being bad at math. However, I know my problem is the same as theirs: I am lazy. Being the responsible person who is in charge is a lot of work.

I am going to make myself another drink now and then get back to work while bopping around to dance music.

If you'd like to contribute to my efforts to develop my signature cocktail, I will reveal that I am leaning towards something gin-based (because gin is yummy), but that vodka is still in the running, due to my slavic heritage. Tonight I have been drinking negronis (gin + sweet vermouth + campari), but I also have a fondness for many gin-based drinks that I've been sampling this week. If you'd like to buy me a drink, my travel schedule may bring me somewhere near you.

And my very sad night club needs more European dance music. Definitely we have a north american bias in the current rotation. Asian music (including south Asian) is also welcomed. Really, anything except anglo-american is good.

Oh Noes, I'm Going to Miss My High School Reunion!

2011-07-07T13:20:00.002-04:00

About an hour ago one of my high school classmates realized that it has been 20 years since we've graduated. So she created a Facebook event. My class is having a potluck picnic in a park next weekend.

If you're going to be in Niskayuna, NY next weekend, you should stop by ~~the dump~~ Blatnick Park on Saturday afternoon and pretend to be me.

Lies My Computer Told Me

2011-07-03T16:56:00.001-04:00

What Do You Think That I Do With My Day?

2011-06-28T13:02:00.002-04:00

Them: You had really great turn-out at your event! We're having an event next week. Can you get people to come to our event?

Me: When I held my event, I spent about a month ahead of time cold-calling every organization in the region that might have someone interested, spamming every campus PR person I could get in touch with, telling everyone I met, and putting up flyers.

New Adventures in Operator Error

2011-06-27T15:16:00.003-04:00

I've been sent off-site to attend MATLAB training. Many of our users do all sorts of crazy things with MATLAB, and so it was determined that I should know something something about MATLAB.

Based on the questions that my MATLAB classmates are asking, I now suspect a reason why so much bad MATLAB code is hitting out system. No one should let these people anywhere near a pointer.

More Fun with Statistics

2011-06-26T21:42:00.003-04:00

My county appears to be one of the divorce hotspots of my state.

In 2009, there were 2348 marriages and 2067 divorces in this county.

Yep, it's definitely the gays in New York who are threatening marriages around here.

You Never Know What Sorts of Vehicles You'll See Parked on My Block

2011-06-24T20:28:00.002-04:00

Spider!

2011-06-24T18:09:00.001-04:00

During the days in which the car was not being driven, this spider built an awesome web.

A Tale of Three Cars

2011-06-22T09:04:00.005-04:00

Oldest Car: Since the end of April it has been having serious issues. You know how when someone who doesn't know how to drive stick shift very well changes gears badly, the car sort of lurches? This car does this on its own (automatic) every time you shift gears up. (It also does this a few seconds after you switch from park to reverse, even if the car is sitting still. I should get a video of the car having a spasm while not in motion.) Over $1000 worth of work has gone into fixing it, with at best limited success. The transmission shop has given up. It is 10 years old with nearly 100,000 miles on it. (Do you want it?)
The "Middle Car": Thunderstorm last night.

The glass place says they might be able to fix it on Friday. I have no regrets about the $500 worth of work that went into this car a few weeks ago, as none of those dollars went to anything glass related.
The New Car: Despite the fact that I handed over $2000 on the 21st of May, this car is nowhere to be seen. Last spotted in Sweden.

Real Life Lessons Learned in Computing

2011-06-18T07:16:00.002-04:00

Adding more people to the decision making process does not necessary make your decisions happen any faster. Especially if they need to communicate a lot.

Having only one person in the entire organization who must personally approve the creation of each and every account might be a problem.

If a group is given a large task to do, and if one person is taking longer than the others for their part, unless specifically directed to work on something else, everyone else is just going to sit around and play FarmVille while they wait for the one person to finish.

Tales from the Conference Call

2011-06-16T18:17:00.002-04:00

Today we had a multi-site conference call with hundreds of people called in. Fortunately, someone set it up so that few of the callers could actually talk at the meeting; most only listened.

Substantial time was spent discussing how best to subscribe people to mailing lists against their will. When someone starts using a supercomputer, do you sign them up for the list that tells you when the system is scheduled to be down (but put an unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email)? Or do you make people log on to the portal and set up their profile and do their own subscriptions? And what about RSS?

And how should this relate to the user forums? And should we give out prizes to the people who are most helpful in the user forums? The user forums are not meant for questions like, "Which compiler flags should I use to get best performance on this system?" Rather, the users only should ask vague and open-ended questions on the forums. Do we give away t-shirts or iPads for the best answers?

Last but not least, how best to use social networking to enhance this experience? While the parts of the project that no one takes seriously has long made use of social networking, can serious computing also use this technology?

And so I present SupercomputerVille, which I would not talk about on a hundred-person telecon but I would tell you about.

You start with as empty supercomputer. You then earn XP by scheduling jobs on your supercomputer and tending to them as they run. As you progress through the game, you can pester the other supercomputer operators to see if they have an install script for GlobusOnline that works on your supercomputer or you can save up to buy an archival storage system that you can share with the neighboring supercomputers. At the most advanced levels of the game, you can take part in ridiculous telecons with the other supercomputers.

You Never Know When Something Will Come in Handy

2011-06-16T09:34:00.001-04:00

In response to my recent break-in and my plans to get a Kensington lock for my iMac, my father emailed me to offer me the Mac lock that he's keeping in his closet.

Fork You!

2011-06-15T22:30:00.004-04:00

Such confusion at work yesterday! They had plastic forks that look like metal! (It is hard to see with this picture that I took with the crappy iSight in my computer. As my real camera was stolen, we must rely on the cameras built into other devices.*)

But in real life this plastic fork really does look like metal. Total trompe l'oeil win.

*I tried very hard to make a joke about using this as an excuse to never run for congress, but none of them were funny. The real reason that I would never run for congress is that my political ideas are even crazier than those of my elected representatives.

Yet Another List Post

2011-06-15T21:14:00.002-04:00

I daydream about having a skilled handyman on retainer. One who would answer my calls and deal with the large number of small problems that I have with my house. There is no good solution to this problem. Unless you would like to deal with the badly designed section of guttering, build a new side stoop, build new back steps, fix the broken window and door from the break-in, firm up the other basement windows to be unbreakinable, and figure out what the hell to do about the impending trouble with the kitchen floor. I am willing to pay cash money to have these problems solved with as little input from me as possible.

Too bad these problems can not be solved by moving. Unfortunately, most home-buyers are too broke to fix problems with a house, so if I tried to sell the house, I would still have to fix these things. If I could get someone to call me back about fixing things, then I would have things fixed.

I'm spending the summer learning just enough about technical stuff so that I can teach them. If I stay in my current job then I can adapt and recycle these repeatedly.

Today I learned how to use a particular piece of software to teach online. Since I'd never used the software before, I scheduled Session #0 to be "Test your connection." This means that I got to figure out what the hell I was doing without also having to teach content.

I've given up my fight with the University about my freezing cold office. They insist that keeping my office at 68 degrees saves energy when it is over 90 degrees outside. How can I argue with that logic? The solution: Unlike real estate, one can move out of a crappy office and not have to worry about fixing the problems. Today I learned that this fall I am moving to an office in The New Building. Until then the University can save energy by keeping my vacant office at 68 degrees 24/7 all summer while every day I drive 45 minutes each way to my other office. Go green! Just think how much energy I'll save once my new car arrives; it has a much more powerful engine than the 4-cylinder subcompact I drive now. (See how I solved the mystery problem with my car? I bought a new car for over $30,000. Cash money. Secret message to handymen: Please call me back so I can pay you cash money to solve my house problems.)

What if the climate in the new building sucks? Can I move again? Somewhere with a window that opens?

Still can't figure out what to do about my intern. Intern has been mopey lately. I really want intern to be successful, but there is only so much that I can do. Especially since I channeled my inner teacher and wrote up a numbered, sequential task list much like I would write up the steps for an in-depth assignment. Intern ignores my list. These steps are small and concrete objectives. They're not like "Write the foo function." They're like "Go to [web address] and find the documentation for bar(). What is the function prototype of bar()? Do you think that the same prototype would be a good choice for foo()? Why or why not?"

The intern project is a really nice projects for an undergrad. It's a bit more ill-posed than a well-structured homework assignment but very much at the lower division undergraduate level. The complication is not in the programming, it's in being able to deal with having to make decisions about the design. Command-line flags? Or a configuration file? You decide. We were spoiled last year. Last year's intern was given a particular task and instead of working on it told us that the problem was part of a more general category of problems and then decided to write software to approach the larger problem instead of the particular case we assigned.

Is it too late for me to learn from this how to be a better manager? With my old summer job, the structure was so different that it's hard to take much of what I learned there and apply it to managing my intern. I really don't want to have to micro-manage my intern; I think it's important for her to learn how to work independently. Good jobs tend to have open-ended components to them. I think that my lacking-key-skills former minion got his job when the reference-checker called me and asked what his greatest technical strength was, and I said, "He figures out what problems need to be solved and then solves them without bothering me." The reference-checker was much more excited about former-minion after hearing that.

Or should I bring back my inner teacher (outer teacher) entirely? I'll be back in the classroom this fall teaching freshmen. I lurve teaching honors freshmen. Should I go back to teaching? And managing teaching? At the moment I am doubting my management skills more than I am doubting my computer skills. Yesterday someone sent me an email in computer jargon (cat /dev/originalmessage | sed 's/tomorrow/Thursday/g'), and I had to do a fair amount of googling to figure out what the hell the email was saying. People think I know more than I do.

Goofing Off For Fun and Profit

2011-06-14T13:55:00.002-04:00

This week's task at work? I am in charge of establishing our Twitter and Facebook presences. (Follow us! Like us!) At this rate, maybe be the end of the summer I'll be blogging for a living.

Workplace Compare and Contrast

2011-06-12T13:26:00.002-04:00

Summer Job 2007-2010 vs. Real Job

Summer job would have given all of the groups inappropriate names. On purpose.

Summer job management violated any number of rules about workplaces. Staff followed the lead.

Summer job gave me impossible tasks which I completed deftly for little praise. Regular job gives me fairly straight-forward tasks and wants to give me a raise.

Summer job was stupid hot all the freaking time (no a/c, over 90F). Regular job has air conditioning; one of my offices never gets up to 70 due to the University's attempts to save energy. (The warmest they can make it is 69.4.)

I Never Said I Wasn't Petty

2011-06-12T13:01:00.002-04:00

An acquaintance/friend-of-a-friend, Peter Pan, keeps asking me favors. He asks me so many favors that they have become predictable. Also, he never offers anything in return nor does he explain why he can't do these things himself. I am sure that he is going to need something specific later this week; I can predict what he will need and when and where. Currently I have plans to be about 30 miles away from the place and time he will need the favor. I have not mentioned this to him, as I resent the implication that I am always ready to help out on a moment's notice (and he has not yet asked if I am available to do this favor). Especially since I don't believe that there is any good reason why he can't do these things himself.

Someone at work claims to be an expert on [technology] (in addition to everything else) and loudly and emphatically intrudes on every conversation on [technology] that is held within earshot. We have just discovered that we need a whole lot of [technology] done quickly next week. My suggestion is to delegate all of this [technology] to our self-described expert. If my colleague really is an expert on [technology], then we solve our problem. If not, well, whatever.

I find myself living my life's adaptation of the Casey Anthony story. But, as I don't have children, I was cleaning the remains of a dead tree out of my car. It is the Topologist's fault that the tree died, and he left it in the car for a few days, and then we dumped the tree a few miles from where it grew. He then fled to Berkeley after disposing of the tree, but there were leaves and bark all over the back of the car. This morning when I was trying to clean up the rest of the evidence, I also threw away his stupid road atlas from 2003.

Tales From Computing

2011-06-08T18:30:00.002-04:00

Today was more training from the vender whose hardware is infested with Sinister, Grating Imps. Trainer was making an analogy about log files that were not helpful and commented, "It's like when your wife complains that the bank statement just says ATM, ATM, ATM with no details." I turned to my coworker and asked her, "Does your wife ever complain about that?" And she said no, and I said, "I don't have that problem with my wife, either."

When I give a tutorial do I say, "When you don't read the specification in the API, it's like when your husband won't ask for directions and you end up wasting hours driving around in circles instead of getting where you're going"? No, I do not.

Vender only sent XL t-shirts. Our team is XS, S, M, L, and XXXL.

I got an email about the mandatory fun being planned at a multi-day computing workshop being held in August. In order to force the computer geeks to socialize, we are being broken up into groups named after animals, diseases, and colors. Why mock them for having both a "pink group" and a "fluorescent pink" group when you can ask, "What the hell were they thinking!?" about having a herpes group? I am sort of hoping that this plan goes ahead as proposed and that I get assigned to lead the "cougar" group. (Not making up any of the group names! I can forward you the well-meaning but socially tone-deaf document that lays out all these plans in excruciating detail.)

In Other News, I Now Have Two Nephews

2011-06-08T08:00:00.000-04:00

Nikhil and Jayan.

Did I Mention that I Love My Standing Desk?

2011-06-07T17:32:00.002-04:00

With all the drama that's been going on, I think that I forgot to mention this. Late on the Friday afternoon before Memorial Day I finally disassembled my entire cubicle and put it back together with the computer desk at standing height and facing towards the door.

Awe. Some.

Should have done this months ago. I get so much more done now, and I'm happier about doing it, too.

I Was the Bad Intern, Too

2011-06-06T14:49:00.002-04:00

OK, I will admit that the day that Admiral McConnell was coming to our office to hear us each talk about our summer research that I took the day off to drive to West Virginia to see The Breeders in concert. And I took off every minute of vacation time that I was entitled to and frequently headed down to Virginia Beach for extended weekends. Whether you are measuring by number of theorems proved, number of lines of code, or any other metric, I was not an especially productive intern.

But I didn't expect people to tell me that I was wonderful. And I didn't complain that other interns got better desks than I did. And if someone said something like, "I see that you're having trouble writing the foo function. Talk to Jane about how she wrote bar, and we can talk about how you can adapt that," I would not both (1) not talk to Jane and (2) continue to ignore foo. I know that my intern is frustrated, but the tasks that have been assigned are at the sophomore level, and intern is a super-senior cs major. I suppose that it is better for my intern to discover this now before applying for real jobs.

On the plus side, even though I was a really bad intern, I seem to have grown up to be a reasonable adult.

Good News, Bad News

2011-05-30T07:47:00.002-04:00

My house was broken into yesterday afternoon.

Most of the stuff was recovered (the kids dropped the bag in the woods).

My local police lab uses iron filings as a fingerprint powder.

When they dusted the stolen-recovered laptops for prints, the powder affixed itself to the MagSafe connector.

Currently on my list of things to do: Get accurate reports to police and insurance company, discuss future changes to insurance with insurance company, replace broken basement window, harden all basement windows, deal with damaged back door, add latch to basement door, replace broken motion-sensor lights in backyard (even though theft occurred in broad daylight), consider getting double-key deadbolts (need key to unlock from inside, too). Oh, and nap, as I did not sleep well last night.

In other good news: Apple's obsessive creepy logging via iTunes means that your iPod's serial number is stored on your hard drive. So far the only thing that hasn't been recovered in my $180 iPod nano (free with rebate).

Names and Strategy

2011-05-26T15:38:00.003-04:00

I work for a joint project that is joint among other joint projects and that is part of a consortium of projects that includes a certain amount of collaboration and joint projects. Basically it is an administrative maze.

The consortium is having a phoenix-like moment (The consortium is dead! Long live the consortium!). Confusingly, my project was actually part of the new consortium, even though we came into existence two years before the new consortium. But we have no formal role in running it. Even though we are a joint project with a group that is involved.

In any event, I have discovered -- quite by accident because being out of the loop is apparently a required part of my job -- that my job title no longer exists in the new consortium. Two thirds of my title is under a new version of my old title, and one third of my old title (which actually makes up the largest fraction of my time) is now under a completely different department.

My plan is to use this Kafka-esque bureaucracy to my advantage and to figure out how to get the most interesting and rewarding parts of my job to remain my responsibility while taking the parts that are less exciting and getting them assigned to someone else.

My Secret Plan

2011-05-24T14:04:00.002-04:00

My "office" is an 8'-by-8' cubicle.

The #1 most annoying thing about the cubicle is that it is set up so that my back is to the opening. Due to the way that the cubicle panels are assembled, there is really no other choice. Because of the position of the opening, the wall with the "door" is too short to support the desk.

The desk is legless; it mounts to the cubicle panels much like you would mount a shelf to tracks screwed into the wall. There are brackets screwed to the bottom of the desk slab, and those brackets fit into slots at the borders of the cube panels.

Today I brought in my cordless drill, a set of drill bits, a pry bar, a hex key set, and a screwdriver. By the end of the week I plan to rearrange the cubicle panels to make the "door" wall a bit longer, make new holes in the bottom of the desk to move its hanging brackets so that it will attach to my newly-reconstructed wall, and move all the rest of the furniture as well.

Tomorrow I will need to bring needle-nose pliers (to remove the last of the plastic bits that hold the panels together), an extension cord (so my computer can have electricity on the newly moved desk), and a set of those "slide everything as if it had wheels" things so that I can remove my filing cabinet to the hallway.

I'm seeking out VESA mount hardware that will allow me to mount my monitor to the cubicle walls as well.

New Adventures in Futility

2011-05-20T11:38:00.002-04:00

I really need to learn to ignore everything that the allergy shot nurses say about fractions.

Allergy shots come in four dilutions. The "red" vials have the full-strength vaccine. Green is 1:10 dilution; blue is 1:100; gold is 1:1000. You start out receiving 0.05cc of the gold (weakest) solution, and they step up your dose until you reach 0.5cc. At that point you move up to the next stronger dilution--but you go back down 0.05cc. So while the vaccine is ten times stronger, you receive one-tenth as much.

It has happened twice now: When I moved up from gold to blue and then again when I moved up from blue to green, the nurse has warned me that since I have moved up to the next stronger dilution that I should be extra-vigilant about a reaction because she alleges that I am receiving a much larger dose.

My claim is that one needn't be too concerned about the first dose from the new vial. Going from blue to green is nothing compared with going from one shot to the next in the red series.

Today I Gave a Training, And It Didn't Suck

2011-05-19T19:39:00.004-04:00

It was a four-hour training. I had 18 slides, including the one with the name and password for the wireless network and the one with my name and email address. Most of the slides had between zero and ten words on them.

Instead of using bullet points to describe the different architectures, I just gave a general sense of the complicated one vs. the simpler one.

I did a bunch of examples in real time. I made a handout with my script. The code snippets were in the handout. When I get a chance, I'm going to put all the code that I ran onto the web page.

The hands-on part sort of fell apart. It was a risk that I was willing to take. It's very hard to do hands-on work in rooms with crappy wireless networks that keep dropping people's connections. Also, the archival storage space creates draconian security issues that trickle down to student accounts for demos. Windows users navigating draconian security on a dodgy wireless connection? Nothing but fail. I am trying to figure out work-arounds. My options are all limited. Bonus fun: DNS insanity and batch scheduling hijinks.

Yes, the past five days have been nothing but prep-work for this workshop. I really hope to be able to recycle this material!

Now I can get back to work focusing on managing my minion. The trick of dealing with a minion is assigning a project that is actually worth having someone work on but where the minion can't fuck up too much. Unlike my summer job minions from the past four summers (where the unofficial motto is "we'll give you enough rope to hang yourself"), I am going to micro-manage my minion this summer because so far she has not proved herself worthy of being trusted with rope. Every Friday before she leaves for the week she needs to send me an email about which parts of the project she worked on, what she accomplished, what she struggled with, and what she plans to work on the next week. We have regularly scheduled meetings to discuss her progress. I emailed her a list of very concrete steps for working on this phase of the project. Alarmingly, she emails me asking questions that are answered by the first link in a Google search. Let's hope that I have enough time to manage her to completing her project successfully as I plan for the rest of the multi-hour workshops that I will be presenting this summer.

Minions

2011-05-16T21:28:00.002-04:00

The minions arrived today.

The first challenge was keeping them busy until the IT guy showed up and we could issue them laptops. It's pretty easy to keep a college student entertained when they have access to the entire Internet.

My minion doesn't yet realize the scope of the problem that we have given her. She claims to be an expert in the technology that she'll be focusing on for this project (it is the "concentration" of her major). We shall see how this unfolds.

I realize that minions are always the neediest during week 1. Unfortunately, I am in the midst of designing a four-hour workshop that I will be delivering on Thursday. And I have not yet written all the code that I need for the demos for the workshop. Also unfortunately: The minions do not know enough about this language to write the code. Small bright spot: Bored minions will be dragged to the workshop to learn the language.

If my minion can understand the project that I have for her, things could go really well. If she's successful at it, she should be able to use it as a talking point in job interviews; it's really a perfect fit for her major-concentration. Also a good omen: She suggested that I should dye my hair purple. (In response to my coworker's surprise that my recent blondness has been replaced by dark red.)

Hu's on First?

2011-05-13T13:21:00.002-04:00

Amusement of the day: Someone sent a quickly-drafted email to the all-staff list, causing much confusion about a task that is being handled by Dr. You.

Hungry Birds

2011-05-10T11:37:00.000-04:00

Robins on my porch!

Division of Labor

2011-05-10T11:29:00.003-04:00

I'm at a multi-day workshop run jointly by mathematicians and people from a kinder, gentler discipline. My claim is that the non-mathematicians are in charge of the food and the mathematicians are in charge of the beverages.

Food:: Fruit, whole grains, vegetarian options, gluten-free options, options, options, options.
Beverages:: Coffee. No decaf.

Just Another Day in My Neighborhood

2011-05-08T09:01:00.001-04:00

My hippie neighbors have parked this on the street in front of my house.

The Two Party System

2011-05-07T09:09:00.003-04:00

In reverse chronological order:

10pm - 1am: Drank vodka from a red plastic cup. Was adored by my fan club (former students). Saw TAs who used to work for me. Talked to an undergrad who used to be one of our interns but who is now going to be CTO for a crazy start-up in Chattanooga, TN. Mocked him for joining a start-up in a place where his friends have deluded themselves about being the next tech epicenter. Discussed the new, quieter Sun Chips bag. Did not get hit on by any of the usual suspects.
6pm - 10pm: Talked to a historian about the history of riots. Met someone whose research on discourse is being used as a model for introducing discussions of race and class on campus. Ate food from the new Liberian restaurant in the "real and authentic" part of town. Drank wine with the provost.

Yes, folks, the semester has ended.

More Fun with Grant Paperwork

2011-05-07T08:58:00.002-04:00

After hearing via the administrative grapevine about the assorted goings-on relating to this crazy grant project that I'm on, my less impractical boss offered the suggestion, "You shouldn't work with these people again."

Apparently I am co-PI on the project. This could end up being hilarious.

This new project has a PI and three co-PIs. Lead PI is a professor at the university (male), one of the co-PIs is a professor at the university (male), another co-PI is someone from the same group I'm in and whose job title is similar to mine (male), and the last one is me. Some staff person who works with sponsored research threw a fit about me being a co-PI. She sent a snippy email, "I don't think Becky can be a co-PI because she doesn't have a Ph.D." Um, look at the paperwork: (1) my freaking biosketch shows that I have a Ph.D. and (2) I'm almost certain that the guy whose job is very similar to mine does not have a Ph.D. Also: (3) The lead PI on the project that I'm on only has a bachelor's degree (but with the title "Research Associate Professor"). There are many good reasons for me not to be a co-PI on this project, but lack of educational paperwork is not one of them.

Some administron nearly broke the entire grant, which I found to be very awesome. He needs to approve grants before they are sent on to NSF. He insists that he needs to receive the final proposal at least one business day before the grant is due. This crazy project went in at the last minute. Totally would have supported his decision to not approve things that he hasn't had a chance to read.

New Adventures in Walking to the Pharmacy

2011-05-06T07:01:00.004-04:00

Last night we walked to the pharmacy to pick up a refill of my prescription. I also did my part to drive up the cost of health care for everyone by dropping off two new prescriptions for medications that I am unlikely to use even a single dose of before they expire. When I was at the doctor's office about two weeks ago, he wrote me four prescriptions. I've finally decided to fill two of them: the one for the asthma "emergency" inhaler and the one for the Epi-Pen. Even though it has been many years since I've had any sort of allergic emergency. Thus, the taxpayers are chipping in for over $200 of medication that I'm unlikely to use. Decided against filling either of the non-emergency medications that I am unlikely to use.

Pharmacy adventure! It always is. We walked to the pharmacy the back way. The back way includes cutting the park where we used to quip, "Didn't someone get shot here?" But it's been over two years since anyone has been shot in the park, so that the joke in getting old. The string of freaky weather that we have had since February has washed out the bridge across the stream, so the new adventure of walking through the park involves navigating the remains of the bridge.

As I was doing both a pick-up and a drop-off at the pharmacy, I had a double-dose of the usual pharmacy shenanigans. Every time I go to the pharmacy, at least one of the following happens: Either the pharmacy is refusing to dispence narcotics to someone who alleges to have an legitimate prescription for them or a poor person throws a fit about Medicaid not covering a prescription. Yesterday the couple ahead of me in the drop-off line both were arguing about their narcotic prescriptions. And when I went to pay for my other prescription, the poor family ahead of me in line was complaining about Medicaid's lack of coverage.

I will say that I lack sympathy for many of the pharmacy-arguers. Helpful tip: If you really do have chronic pain that is managed by long-term use of many doses of narcotics, it is probably worth driving to fill your prescriptions in a nicer part of town. Also helpful tip: If you are going to refuse to pick up your child's prescription because Medicaid won't cover it and then you purchase cosmetics that cost more than the retail price of the drug, the pharmacy clerk ringing up your purchase probably will roll her eyes.

Since I am crazy, I have no problem with going out in public dressed like a lunatic. Or like an 8-year-old who dressed herself. I was wearing a purple, plaid, flannel skirt that I made myself (funky shaped hemline), and then I was also wearing an oversized fleece (cold outside), and my floral Liberty-print sun hat. The Topologist's fashion sense is a cross between mathematician and Appalachian thru-hiker (the Unabomber is a bit of a fashion icon for mathematicians). On the walk home a real Famous Blogger asked to take our picture with her cell phone. We agreed.

Sorry for the Lapse

2011-05-05T13:33:00.003-04:00

I've been meaning to post something, but I've been trying to find something positive to say. Most of the things that have crossed my path lately have been negative. And while there are many, many things that I am not good at that are a part of my job, I do try to minimize the effects of my incompetence. It's a decent short-term strategy, as I have not been fucking up, but it has long term issues as I'm not learning as many new things as I normally could. Other people who I work with appear to have chosen the path by which they can learn from their mistakes. At least I hope that they are learning something.

In a related, but not exactly the same issue, I am dealing with Future Professor. Oh my, I worry for his students. I can tolerate the incoherent emails in which words are randomly written in all capitals as if they were acronyms ("If you not a US citizens permanent resident send copy your VISA to our offices.... We recommend the LINUX distributions..."), but some of his suggestions are crazy. (A note on the writing: Future Professor was born in and grew up in the US.) This evening we are running a "intro to ~~LINUX~~ Linux" course for people who have never used Linux before. For most of this audience, being able to use =AVERAGE() in Microsoft Excel is considered being "really good with computers." I sent him my outline of things to teach, which is mostly ls and cd and the like. His follow-up question: "Should we teach them how to use screen?"

I am thinking of buying a nice car! What should I get? It should be comfy and pleasant to drive and not too big. Currently considering: BMW (but overwhelmed by the zillions of models), Acura, and Volvo. Open to suggestions. Ideally looking for a lease turn-in.

Finally got our full complement of undergraduates who can afford to live on $15/hour (full time, 40 hours/week for 10-12 weeks).

Almost every project that I am working on is at the "wait for people to get back to me" stage. Thinking of taking the day off tomorrow.

Wednesday omen: Yesterday I bought over a liter of liquor.