Saturday 28 September 2013

Ubiquitous capture and the ideas file

Ubiquitous capture is a great term from Getting Things Done. Like the best ideas from GTD, it is simple, obvious in retrospect, but changes everything. Ubiquitous capture means: When you think of something, you should write it down, right away, in some place where you will check it later.

This is especially good for keeping track of ideas for new research projects. I tend to find ideas for new projects while I'm walking to work, when I'm sitting in a talk, or when I'm working intensely for a paper deadline. Hardly ever can I work on them right away, but I know that I will need them later. So, whenever I have an idea for a new project, I stop whatever I'm doing and write in down in my ideas list. If I have to stop in the street or pause a one-on-one meeting to pull out my phone, well, a benefit of being an academic is that you get to be eccentric.

I keep my ideas list in Evernote, but it doesn't matter what you use, as long as all your ideas are on one list.

Later, usually many months later, a student will ask me for suggestions for an undergraduate, master's, or PhD project. I go back to my ideas list and look. I also tag each idea "ug", "msc", or "phd", if I think it would work well for one of those degrees.

I also look back through the list periodically to pull out ones that are especially exciting. Every idea is exciting when you first have it; the ones that are still exciting a week later are the ones to keep.

Of course I use a similar system for blog ideas.

Saturday 17 August 2013

Academic ranks in the US and UK

The US and the UK both have a series of ranks for academics, but the names of the job titles are somewhat different.

American universities hire "professors" to do teaching and research. In your first job, you get the title of "assistant professor," which indicates that you are an independent scholar expected to teach undergraduate and graduate courses and lead an independent research program. After a few years, if you are doing well, you can be promoted to "associate professor." (Second prize is you're fired.) Later on, if you are sufficiently eminent, you can finally be promoted to "Professor" (informally referred to as "full professor"). Students don't usually understand academic ranks, as they have better things to do than to learn these games, and so will generically refer to the "professor" of their course. Professors are addressed with a special title before their name, for example, Prof. Smith.

British universities, on the other hand, hire "academic staff" to do teaching and research. In your first job, you get the title of "lecturer", which indicates that you are an independent scholar expected to teach undergraduate and postgraduate courses and lead an independent research programme. After a few years, if you are doing well, you can be promoted to "Reader". Later on, if you are sufficiently eminent, you can finally be promoted to "Professor". You'll have to ask someone else to explain what a "Senior Lecturer" is. Students don't usually understand academic ranks, as they have better things to do than to learn these games, and so will generically refer to the "lecturer" of their course. Academics are addressed with a special title before their name, but this varies according to rank. Lecturers and readers are formally referred to as Dr Smith. Only upon receiving the highest rank of professor are they referred to as Prof Smith.

I have to say that I have a soft spot for the British titles. The American job titles don't make much sense, as assistant professors aren't really anyone's assistants, and associate professors are not required to associate with all that many people. Especially in computer science. The British titles are better overall, except for the fact that "Reader" is a bit silly. Really, now, you ought to have read about your subject *before* you lecture in it, shouldn't you?

Of course this is all just silly plumage. But we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that titles are symbols. What does it symbolize in the US that lecturing is the main mode of instruction in the University, but "lecturer" is typically a title reserved for lower-status, teaching-only staff? What does it symbolize in the UK that academic staff of a higher rank go so far as to have a different form of address?

Wednesday 14 August 2013

Kitten

Imagine that, by some puckish magic, overnight you gained all the strength and skill of a professional acrobat. Yesterday, you'd trip walking down the street; today, you can skip across a tightrope. All your friends are bewildered at your transformation. You're bewildered, too, most of all because you no longer know your body, how fast you can run, how much you can lift, how high you can jump.

This is what it is to be a kitten. Every day our kitten performs all kinds of preposterous stunts---leaping over the other cat in mid stride, using a wooden drying rack as a jungle gym---simply because she doesn't know that she can't.

Tuesday 23 July 2013

Proposal Writing and the "Fuck Yeah" Factor

I have almost recovered from submitting a grant proposal last week. When I was revising it, I realized that there's actually an easy way to tell how good one of your proposals is.

Nobody's going to believe your sales pitch unless you do. So, when you finish reading the introduction, do you get excited? Do you feel like pumping your fist and shouting "fuck yeah!" If so, then your proposal has the "fuck yeah" factor.

It's possible to get a proposal funded without the "fuck yeah" factor, e.g., maybe the competition is weak for that particular call, or maybe for once you draw a set of sympathetic reviewers. But why risk it?

Tuesday 25 June 2013

And can you teach me how to talk real slow?

A switch flipped in my head at the beginning of my lectures last spring. At that point I had lectured something like 5 full university courses and maybe something like 50 research seminars. I was an experienced speaker.

But I was fast.

You'llnoticethisifyouaskmeaboutsomethingresearchrelatedthatI'llstarttogetexcitedandtalkfaster. In my personal life, I'm much more laid back, but at work, I talk fast. It is what it is, I suppose, but it's not the best attribute for an effective lecturer.

And then last term something happened. I walked into class and started speaking twice as slow as I ordinarily did. I liked it. I felt that I still had the amount of energy that I should have, just... slower. I don't know what I did, so I couldn't tell you how to do it if you wanted to, but now I can turn on the slow mode whenever I want.

Actually, I just thought of a theory about what I might have been doing. In every sentence when you're speaking, there are few key words that you emphasize. When you get to those---and you should try to anticipate those words before you say them---exaggerate your emphasis and focus on slowing those words down. Then the other words in the sentence, and the length of your pauses, will follow. That might be how I learned to switch, maybe. Let me know if you try this and it works for you.

Another nice thing about speaking slower is that it gives me more time to plan my sentences. This reduces the number of times that I get halfway through the sentence, think of a better way to say the sentence, and start the whole thing over from the beginning---a bad habit of mine.

It's nice to know that you always have more to learn. This change sure messed up my lecture plans for that term---everything took longer than I expected---but overall a positive change, I think.

Sunday 5 May 2013

Future Work

It seems customary for computer science research papers to list directions for future work at the end. This custom is immensely strange. If your idea for future work is really good, the last thing you want to do is tell everyone about it. Literally the last thing: right after you've done the research and written it up! On other hand, if the idea for future work is bad, why do you want other people to see it?

My belief is that the "future work" discussions are not in fact lists of future work. In fact, it is perhaps safest if beginning students ignore these sections altogether. But they do serve a purpose, or rather, one of several:

1 Delimit the scope of current work. You have to stop somewhere, so listing an obvious idea for future work is a way of saying, "Yes, we know that this is an obvious extension, but we didn't have time for it, and its not as interesting as the stuff we did do." These are the research ideas that you want to stay far away from; if they were that interesting, the authors would have written that paper instead.

2 Stake an early claim. You've written a good, coherent paper, but there's another idea that's an obvious but still exciting follow on from what you did. It's a bad idea to put too much in one paper, so you mention the follow on to acknowledge that it's obvious, in case somebody else gets to the follow on first.

As an aside, if someone else does the follow on, don't feel bad. They'll be citing your paper prominently, which is very good both for your career, but more important intellectually: the point of you doing the work was for other people to use it. 

3 Convince readers that the work is useful. If you've built machinery (whether code or a proof technique) that you want other people to use, you might give some potential directions to encourage people to build on your work.

Saturday 27 April 2013

Jokes in lectures

I enjoy using humour when I lecture. Lectures aren't built for people's natural attention spans, and even after long experience, it is almost impossible for a person to focus on a lecture for 50 minutes straight. Humour provides a break for the audience, but more than that, the best jokes are *memorable*, making a hook that the lecture material can hang off of in the students' minds. Perhaps most grandiosely, humour requires empathy; you can't tell a funny joke to your students unless you understand what they find funny, which means that however briefly you were able to see things from their perspective. This is perhaps why humorous lecturers are popular.

The point behind this philosophy is that when you tell a joke in class, you want to tell it for good reason. If your only goal is to give the class a bit of a rest---perhaps the weakest reason, but still fine---then there's no need to tell the joke in the first 10 minutes. Whereas if you're using humour to provide a hook for new material, then that's exactly where you would put it.

Perhaps the first rule of lecture comedy is: Your mileage will vary. It's hard to predict how a class will react to a particular joke. For example, more than once, I have walked into a room of teenagers and said, "Right, so today class, we're going to do PCP." (The Post Correspondence Problem, of course.) One time the class immediately broke out laughing, and another time they sat in bemused (I think) silence. Do not be discouraged by the silence.

For this reason, make your jokes offhand. Make them an aside to your lecture rather than a detour. Then, if they don't work, you simply go on with your lecture as normal and you don't look (so) bad.

The ideal joke is one that makes a serious point. An example is the classic pair of sentences that illustrate syntactic ambiguity: Time flies like an arrow / Fruit flies like a banana. This example has the additional merit of being part of the folklore of the field. Stories like this acculturate students to an intellectual area, which is part of the reason they spend the money on University rather than taking a correspondence course.

All of this said, you have to be natural. Humour is subtle enough that if you force yourself to tell jokes you don't believe in, they won't work. Your lecture style needs to arise naturally from your personality, so what works for me might not work for you. That said, it's not as if you're doing stand up: the standards are much lower for lectures, so even a mildly amusing attempt might get a positive (and perhaps relieved!) response from your students.

Wednesday 20 March 2013

The cure for boring meetings

I have recently discovered the best thing to do during long (>1 hr) boring meetings. Obviously you want to avoid these, but sometimes you can't. The common solution is to pull out your laptop and start sending email. For me this works for about an hour, after which I start to suffer from "email fatigue", the gooey minded state that results from sending too many emails too quickly. What to do then?

The answer: Cat photos. Whenever someone says something that is breathtaking in its shortsighted preoccupation with pointless minutiae—I'm not saying that this happened in my meeting, of course—don't check your email. Check your cat photos. Whenever the discussion comes back to the same old argument that people have been hashing out for years—again, this did not happen—cat photos. Never fails.

In time, you may come to like these meetings because of the unconscious association with cute photos. If that happens, you may want to lay off this strategy for a while.

If you have trouble finding cat photos on the Internet, just let me know and I'll be happy to send you some.

(Response that I got from a certain someone: "Not pictures of your girlfriend?" My answer: "Well, you were in some of them.")

Saturday 23 February 2013

Coffee versus beer

If you ask yourself, "Should I have one more beer?," well, if you had to stop yourself and ask, you probably shouldn't.

If you ask yourself, "Do I need another cup of coffee?," well, if you had to stop and ask, you probably need it.

Saturday 9 February 2013

My new favourite pages on Wikipedia

I have several new favourite pages on Wikipedia:

  • A list of films that most frequently use the word "fuck". Apparently there are people who count these things. Unsurprisingly, the winner is a documentary about the use of the word "fuck".
  • List of lists of lists. There many pages on Wikipedia that are lists of lists, e.g., every country has a list of lakes in that country. So there is a page that lists all of the "Lists of lakes in Country X". But this page is only one of the many lists of lists on Wikipedia. This list of all such pages is the Lists of Lists of Lists. [h/t: Daniel Renshaw]

Previously, my favourite page on Wikipedia hd been a description of the seven different forms of lightsaber combat. (Apparently, Samuel L Jackson's character had developed a form to himself. That's how he was able to beat the Emperor.) Sadly this page has since been deleted from Wikipedia, and it is impossible to retrieve deleted pages. There is a page on this topic on Wookiepedia, but it contains a scary level of detail that in my opinion renders it much less readable than the old Wikipedia page.

Related to the "fuck" list, I also like the study Delete Expletives?, which is a British study of people's attitudes towards obscenity, particularly on television. One of the excellent features of this study is a ranked list of swear words in British English, based on a survey of over 1000 respondents.

Friday 25 January 2013

The first rule of academic politics

"Don't talk about academic politics"? Ha! I wish. Academic politics is nothing but talking. I guess that's true for most all kinds of politics, really.

The First Rule of Academic Politics is: No matter what happens, you have to live with these people afterwards.

Another, perhaps dated, way to say this is that an academic department is like an episode of "Survivor", except that instead of voting people off of the island, you vote them ON. To stay.

Saturday 19 January 2013

How I Make Coffee

Pourover is a trendy and delicious way of making coffee. It is possible to make excellent coffee this way. This video by Matt Perger has a great technique for the Hario V60, which the one that I have been playing with since receiving it for my birthday.

Here's a summary of the video. You will probably need to watch the vide for this to make sense:

12g coffee
200g water
brewing time 2:20 total

  1. Add 50g water. Stir. Let bloom.
  2. At 0:30, add 50g water in outward spiral. Make sure no grounds are above water line
  3. At 1:00, add remaining 100g water in spiral pattern, again washing the grounds down the edges.
  4. Around 1:30 or so reseat dripper to even out bed of grounds

How do you know it's 50g of water? Place your mug on top of a digital scale before pouring.

What kind of kettle do you pour the water from? Unfortunately, this really does matter. It's important that the grounds be completely saturated with water, and that you pour the water slowly. Otherwise, you will create channels through the grounds through which most of the water will pass, causing part of the grounds to be overextracted and bitter. I am told that the Hario kettle is excellent, because it has a narrow swan neck which allows the water to poured slowly and precisely. But it also costs 50 pounds! It is difficult to find a similar kettle that is reasonably priced, but I have just gotten this Tiamo kettle and so far, so good.

[h/t: Artisan Roast]

Saturday 12 January 2013

A simple trick to encourage lecture participation

It's the time of year when teaching is very much on my mind. In an essay about his teaching styleMichael Scott says something about encouraging student participation that stuck with me:
I’ve found that the very first class period sets the tone for the whole semester. If I don’t get students to participate on day one, they probably won’t participate at all, and the course ends up dreadfully dull. My first lecture in any class thus begins with a brainstorming exercise, in which I get as many different students as possible to voice a suggestion or opinion. 
Last year I tried something like this in my undergraduate machine learning class. I don't want to go into details in case I use it again, but it wasn't a brainstorming exercise (I couldn't think of one), but a simple quiz question that introduced part of the material. I had the students vote on the correct answer---and everyone voted wrong, because it was of course a trick question.

To my delight, I found that year's class asked many more questions than the one before, even though it was significantly larger. This may be due to random variation, or to the fact that I was better at teaching the course the second time, but it's enough that I'll keep trying it.

Tuesday 8 January 2013

About to graduate with your PhD? One more tip.


A rite of passage for US PhD students is the title page of their dissertation. The way that faculty indicate their approval of the final dissertation is by signing the title page, and students are required to leave space on the title page for this purpose. It's up to the student to run around to all their committee members (mine had 5) and get them to sign. Holding the final title page, with all the signatures, this bland sheet of acid-free paper that signifies that your hard work has come to something... it's a heady feeling.

Often people go to a bookbinder to get bound copies made as gifts for their parents and PhD supervisors. I had a copy bound for myself as well (boy was that a mistake). So here's my tip: Keep a photocopy of your signed title page. Then, when you get your thesis bound, you can include the signed title page with all the bound copies. This looks much nicer than a title page with blank signature lines, which gives the faint impression that you're trying to pull something over on someone.

Congratulations!