I finally revamped the Net/Comm/DSP Seminar page, including the archives, introducing a brave new world of slightly less obfuscated storage formats. There are still a few little artifacts here and there, but it more or less works — now all I have to do it find speakers to fill up the slots.

I got back my teaching evaluations — by and large I scored pretty well, although I was hammered by many people for being underprepared for section or review. That’s to be expected though. I was often underprepared — for some reason it took me too long to get the knack of spending just the right amount of time. Of the few students who bothered to make comments, I got some kind words, some encouragement along the lines of “usually helpful… occasionally causes more confusion.” However, one person was very unhappy:

– he’s a sarcastic fuck –> it’s condescending
– he tries to go fast in discussion/review sessions, but screws up almost everytime, then wastes time trying to redeem himself

I have to admit, I’m a bit hurt by that. I’m pretty sure I know who wrote it, which is probably a bad thing, all in all. Even though you can’t please all the people all the time, you can still shoot for not displeasing all the people all the time, right?

My father sent me this article recently about the psychology of failure within graduate school. As a child of academics heading pretty much full-speed ahead into the world of academia, it was a good read. I tend to be my harshest critic, as those who know me do know. It’s frustrating to read things like:

Unfortunately, the hard facts show again and again that only a small percentage of doctoral students can achieve the success of becoming a tenure-track professor at a research institution.

I mean, we all know it’s true, but it’s one of those unpleasant things that if you let it get you down will no doubt scuttle your chances of making it.

The most important point that the article makes, albeit more tangentially than I would have hoped, is that there is a culture of desperation surrounding many graduate programs. In particular, students become more and more desperate for some sort of handle on “the job market,” as they progress through their program, and it causes all sorts of stress. People always ask me how long it’s going to take to me to graduate and what my plans are afterwards. My answer is always “I’ll see what things are like when I get there.” It’s a nice lie to myself and makes me look well-centered, but of course I’m just as scared shitless as everyone else that there will be no jobs for me when I get out.

I’m not planning on taking that barista course yet, but who knows? Maybe it will come to that. That or sit on the corner with a sign that says “will pontificate for money.”

I finally put up a draft of my research group’s website.

I have wasted about 4 hours of my life now just trying to get the camera-ready copy of my paper uploaded to the IEEE website. They have an autoconvert-to-PDF script which will take my LaTeX/DVI files and convert them in theory. In reality, it spews horrible errors. There’s almost no documentation on how to make your LaTeX compliant other than vague warnings about Type 3 fonts, and when I emailed them I was told that my fonts were bad and pointed to a website which had no information on it regarding what to do if you have “bad fonts.”

So I’m left to debug my code using their autoconverter to the tune of around 5 minutes per test. I’ve been here a few hours, and just missed the curtain of a play I was going to see with Deb. Just now I “exceeded the quota” of allowable revisions. I thought that was the end, but then scrapped the whole submission and started a fresh one so I’m back to debugging now.

The deadline is midnight tonight.

My wrath cannot be compassed at this time.

Update (9:30 PM): Problems solved — there were two offending lines in the file, of the form \psline[linestyle=dashed](-40,40)(40,-40). Those are commands for the pstricks package, a set of postscript macros. IEEE doesn’t like the [linestyle=dashed] property. Once I worked around that the IEEE program would make a PDF, but with all of the large symbols missing. For example: integrals, sums, square roots, large delimiters like parentheses, and so on were all absent. As it turns out, the problem is that the IEEE program doesn’t like the package amsmath, which has a lot of little features and special characters that make life a lot easier when typesetting math. Total time spent: 6+ hours.

The paper is done now, but I am still full of ire.

Eszter has a piece up at CT on complying with FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) with regards to blogging. Since I’m TA-ing the undergrad communications course next semester, students will no doubt find my homepage or google me and find this blog. The question is: to what extent can I blog about the class and my experience within it without violating FERPA? I don’t have the layered privacy features of livejournal, so I can’t hide my comments about quiz design, etc. behind a password-protected wall.

One of my friends told me he blogs anonymously to avoid these issues, but I’m not sure that lets you off the hook, since your identity could always be found out.

I’m left with the prospect of keeping entirely mum about teaching, which is less than pleasing to me. Though I’m sure generalities about the students are fine (“those Berkeley undergrads sure are smart, they catch me screwing up all the time”), complaints are probably bad (“sometimes office hours are really annoying, especially when it’s clear people haven’t been going to lecture”), and naturally warnings are right out (“this exam is going to be a killer”). What is one to do?

Clearly I must err on the side of caution, if anything. I doubt more than a few students will be bored enough to cruise over to this blog. Perhaps I should make use of it to provide course content, like Brad DeLong does. But engineering is not suited to the blogosphere methinks. I guess I’ll just have to play it by ear. A very careful ear.

After a riotous halloween party last night (100+ people over the night, lasting until 3:30) and scrubbing the house clean so that my feet no longer stick to the floor, I am really settling down to do my take-home midterm that’s due on Tuesday. We may only use our “own notes from the class, Gallager’s book, and Cover/Thomas.” It seems reasonable on the face of it, but this is a research seminar class where most of the students are doing research in the topics covered by the exam. If one were to literally follow the instructions, almost no research could be done while the exam was out, which seems pretty silly.

Then again, one of the professors for this class was also responsible for the take-home but fixed-time (3 hours) midterm my first semester here. It’s a clever way of circumventing university exam rules, but I really question its usefulness as a method for evaluating knowledge.

Via Open Access News, a good article on the ethics of publishing from the Yale Daily News. Peter Suber has the following addendum:

Here’s the missing half: if there aren’t OA journals in your field, or if your short-sighted promotion and tenure committee narrows your options, then you can publish in conventional journals and still provide OA to your work through self-archiving.

More appropriate for someone in my position is:

As students and young researchers, you may not yet enjoy ultimate control over the journals in which you publish. You may prefer to place your personal advancement over public access to your work — and while the entrenched hierarchy continues to reward this behavior, you’ll meet little opposition. But before you fire off that next manuscript to Cell, consider this: scientific journals exist to record and disseminate the research results, not to make publishers rich or restrict access to vital information.

Of course, I’m in a computer-savvy and web-savvy field, so it’s not so much of an issue. But there should be an ArXiV for other fields as well to help people disseminate faster.