Tooling like a madman is not at all like riding a bike — you do forget over time. And much to my dismay, tooling on my research does not take the same form as tooling on the Mystery Hunt. I have one crucial ingredient : coffee. Now add a dash of techno, one chalkboard (whiteboard will do in a pinch), and garnish with some zest of fresh madness. A dish best served cold, to harden one’s resolve.
Tag Archives: academia
open course ware
MIT’s Open Course Ware project is designed to bring some of the excellent teaching materials developed by MIT to the world free of charge. I just noticed that they have hired some people to translate the sites into Spanish and Portuguese.
I actually use OCW sometimes to look up things in lecture notes. It seems like the structure is too restrictive to cover some classes, however. I guess the lecture notes/problem sets/midterm paradigm is dominant at MIT that OCW can have wide coverage if not universal coverage. If only Berkeley’s educational IT support was so organized. Some might argue that it’s a functioning chaos. I find it inefficient and wasteful.
bridging the divide
The first annual UNIDO-UC Berkeley conference on technology and development is going to be held on campus here. UNIDO is the United Nations International Development Organization — not as well known as UNICEF or some others, but a biggie. I had gone to an early planning meeting for this conference but didn’t apply to be on the coordinating committee due to time constraints. But I got the email for the conference today, and the reduced rate for students is $75 for the whole conference, or $25 a day. For this you must also specify what sessions you will attend.
This is a conference being sponsored by the university. The justification for such a fee is that “otherwise students will just come for the free food.” I understand their concern, but clearly this conference is an example of preaching to the choir — those who are already active in development research will fork over the money because they hope it will help their work, and those who merely think they might be interested will be turned off by the high fees and will stay in their offices. I am certainly in the latter group. I have no confidence that the projects will in any way speak to issues in which I am interested or will give me ideas for my own projects.
My rage is a bit incoherent at the moment, but I guess I’m just angry that my university claims to be sponsoring a conference and then attempts to exclude students who may be interested in this educational opportunity on financial grounds. They have some big-name companies as donors — some of that money could be used to subsidize student registration fees. This conference does not fairly serve the pedagogical mission of the university, and it is unclear that it helps reach out to the research community. If I were being less charitable, I would say that the organizers are seeking to funnel the United Nation’s money into their own research projects or projects of their choosing. But I think I give them more credit than that. I think.
freedom of information
The entire editorial board of the Elsevier-published Journal of Algorithms resigned to protest price gouging by the publisher. The overblown cost of journal publications is a real problem, especially given the recent budget crunches at universities. There has been a lot of consolidation in the academic publishing business, and publishers force libraries to buy packages of journals, fobbing off several lower-tier journals for each well-regarded one. The American Library Association has identified the reform of scholarly communication as a major issue facing libraries today, and other library groups have issued stronger broadsides against commercial academic publishers. Things are especially bad in the sciences, which has sparked the formation of the Public Library of Science, which has a new biology journal and plans for other disciplines as well.
Right now, one sixth of the entire U.C. library budget is spent on Elsevier’s “Science Direct Online.” In 2003… Elsevier wanted a 37% increase in the fee paid for Science Direct Online, phased in over the next 5 years… the way Elsevier has these journals “bundled” the library would have to cut 40% of the journals before it realizes a penny of savings. So, the librarians may get tough and drop Science Direct Online altogether.
The above is from a rant by John Baez, but it drives the point home. The reputation of a journal is made by its editorial board and reviewers. Why should they work for a pittance on a journal, only to have the publisher turn around and sell it back to them for a huge profit? I doubt that the value added in printing and running a batch script to convert .ps to .pdf is that much.
But the news is good — hopefully others will follow and the dissemination of information will be helped, not hindered, by new technologies.
a new home
I finally got off my ass and made a new homepage of sorts, super-barebones. I decided waiting until I had a publication was going to take forever. Of course, if I keep futzing with this html stuff, I’ll never get any research done. And there’s some problem with Safari’s CSS support — nothing looks quite right — I could spend days trying to fix it.
I saw the final four episodes of Cowboy Bebop last night. Each episode is hit-or-miss — he tries to juggle so many genres at once that my internal association machinery sometimes fries itself. Too many tropes spoil the broth, as they say. But overall I recommend it — much better than serial adventures: lain in which I found it too difficult at times to suspend my disbelief in the face of intense obfuscation, and miles beyond Witch Hunter Robin, which was like My So-Called Craft-Using Witch-Hunter Life.
The other occupation of the week outside of rehearsals was reading grad school applications — at Berkeley they have student reviewers in addition to faculty reviewers for each candidate. I find most of the “objective” criteria a little bogus — GRE scores and GPA tell you something about a person, but the real insight you get into a person is through their letters of recommendation and through their personal statement.
I never got to read my letters of recommendation, but I sure hope they were better than some of the ones I read. To start off, professors should only write a letter for a candidate that they would feel comfortable endorsing — to do otherwise would be disingenuous. My assumption is that all of the letters I would read are from people who think the candidate is a good student. However, some of these letters were a mere 3 paragraphs long, and not even full paragraphs at that. Because I’m a student, I don’t view these short letters as a case of “read between the lines” and assume that the candidate is bad. On the contrary, I conclude that the professor was just too busy to write up a decent letter, and I wish I could castigate them for doing a disservice to the student.
An important aspect of graduate school is that going there is not (often) expected of you — it was for me, but I doubt I’m the norm. The goal of a personal statement should not be to prove to the reviewer that you are a good student per se, but rather to describe why you want to go to graduate school. Presenting a laundry list of your achievements and concluding that you would make an excellent grad student says very little about yourself. Investigating the reasons why you think you would enjoy research is better, and a little critical analysis of your experiences to date is even better.
I’m glad I have very little influence in the process of admissions — I get the impression my views are nonstandard, and I’m sure people have tailored their applications to what the status quo expects.
text
I live, surrounded by text. When I’m not reading a book, I’m reading a paper. When I’m not reading a paper, I’m reading the web. I swim, nay drown, in a sea of text, with little hope of respite or solace of shore. My existence is circumscribed by glyphs, punctuated by symbols, and death I think is no parenthesis. And what do I have to show for it? Deteriorating eyesight, collapsing memory, and back problems from hauling the text around. I wonder what it is to exist in a world devoid of these strange markings, obscure and oft inscrutable.
“The white of the paper is an artifice that’s replaced the translucency of parchment and the ochre surface of clay tablets; both the ochre and the translucency and the whiteness may posess more reality than the signs that mar them.” – Jean Genet
Deep thoughts for a not-deep evening.
An Ergodic Walk 