University-Life on Alkahest

Management, leadership and information technology

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:34:53 +0000

A few years ago, I participated in a six month program to train leaders in information technology. I learned a fair amount, perhaps enough to be disillusioned, and ever since the program, I can’t help but look at organizations in terms of their leadership. Case in point, the grapevine of ex-employees from my former workplace says that three employee resignations were announced last week. One person only gave one week notice. By my rough count, that’s about 20 people leaving since January – or approximately 8-10% of the work force. Ouch!

Web 2.0 and trusting the users

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 13:31:47 +0000

The CTO Project makes an interesting observation that faculty are a bit like some corporations. They feel obligated to use Web 2.0 technologies in order to engage student interest and actually make some token effort to be up to date. But that they only want these technologies if they can exert complete control.

Trust me, I can relate. We’re currently contracting with a part of the government that wants to do something similar. They want to make use of the knowledge of a number of experts to produce an encyclopedia of a given technology. Of course, this has been dubbed the FOOpedia (where FOO is the technology).

FISA extension and telecom amnesty

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 04:10:27 +0000

Few people have been on top of the extension of FISA like Glenn Greenwald. As a quick overview for folks that haven’t been paying attention to the issue:

Late last year a real potential problem with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) (as written in the 70s and amended after Sept 11) was recognized. Namely, communication between two foreign entities that was routed through the US was subject to the law’s requirements for a court order. This was never the intent of the law and largely crept in due to the routing of Internet traffic through major US networking hubs
In addition to correcting this, the Whitehouse and the Republican congress pushed for a change to FISA that went beyond correcting the oversight and significantly extended the ability of the government to spy on citizens.
Congress couldn’t pass this permanently, but did pass a six month bill before the August recess, in large part because of scare tactics used by the FBI (releasing warnings of predicted attacks in DC)
Six months was up last week and the Whitehouse was pushing to: a) correct the known oversight, b) extend its ability to spy on US citizens without court order, and now they’ve added c) grant retro-active immunity to the telecommunications companies for illegally helping the government spy both before and after Sept 11th. And of course, if they don’t get all of this, we’ll die in our sleep, murdered by terrorists.
The Senate caved and gave the Whitehouse everything it asked for.
Surprisingly, the House didn’t and we’re now seeing extra pressure claiming that we’ll all die and it’ll be their fault. This is of course BS, but that’s the state of discourse in the country.

I don’t have much to add on the spying per se, but I will admit to being particularly offended and disturbed by the telecom immunity issue. Essentially, these companies started helping law enforcement to monitor calls, read emails, etc. well before September 11th. Their actions were not scared or patriotic, they were largely motivated by greed.

well that was nice

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 02:56:57 +0000

I’m up at the university yesterday, tying up some loose ends from my job there when I ran into the executive vice president. Essentially, this is the guy under the president who runs everything administrative for the campus. I used to see him every month or so as a part of my job responsibilities and we always got along reasonably well.

So, I’m talking to him and he tells me that whenever he sees someone who has left the university, he always tells them that he hopes they made the right decision… because they aren’t coming back (implying that he will prevent them from returning). He then goes on to say, but you are welcome back if you ever want to return and that this puts me in a very small group – three in twelve years.

notes from a transition

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 00:59:39 +0000

It’s been a bit strange changing jobs. My former responsibilities as the security officer for a university are so different from what I’m doing now. A few idle thoughts:

Life at the university, particularly for management, is entirely interrupt driven. Between the phone calls, urgent emails and meetings, I seldom had time to stop and think. Unfortunately, that meant that a lot of work was done at home. At the new place, work is nowhere near as disruptive. I’m in the office for eight hours and I get eight hours worth of work done. No meetings. No phone calls. Few emails – none urgent. The change has been a little jarring. The biggest advantage is that I’m not trying to actually do all of my work at the end of the day, so I’m leaving and getting home at a reasonable time.
The university structures its benefits to the advantage of the highest paid. Everyone has to pay for a share of their health insurance. The 403b, which is incredible, pays progressively more for people at the high end of the pay scale. IIRC, if you put in 3%, they put in ~8% for the first $50k of salary and then ~13% for anything above that – assuming that you are in the better paid category of staff. Hourly employees receive less contribution and have a 5 year vesting period. At the new place, they cap at 4% of your salary, so it’s nowhere near as much in retirement. However, they also pay full health and dental. The upshot is that everyone receives health benefits, regardless of income. Retirement benefits which are typically only used by people at the high end of the income scale are less generous. Overall, a far more equitable system.
I’m finding that I’m much more relaxed. I am responsible for the implementation of a decent sized project, but because it’s only one project, there is much less stress and I’m not working in the evenings. Which gives me time to find great things online. Like the following from Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s: “via ovicipitum dura est or “the way of the eggheads is hard.

fini

Sun, 12 Aug 2007 04:29:08 +0000

Done. Finished. That’s all she wrote. Yesterday was my last day at the university.

Sometime before I left, I started thinking about what, if anything, I wanted to leave on my whiteboard. The obvious came to mind: “So long and thanks for all the fish. But that’s a little too obvious. My next thought was to crib a few lines from Jonathan Coulton:

I fear nothing

Anymore

See you all in hell

New job

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 01:17:10 +0000

Well, it’s official now. I’m leaving the university to go work for a private company – my last day will be August 10th which gives me all of a 4 day weekend before starting full time for the new place. FWIW, I’m definitely looking forward to the change. I’ve been in my current job for about 6.5 years and in the tradition of my family, that means that I’ve been doing the same thing a year and a half too long.

Fun with aphorisms

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 02:22:43 +0000

I was in a longish meeting today when it occurred to me that it is a military truism that “no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Moreover, as Walt Kelly’s Pogo noted, “we have met the enemy and he is us. This suggests that no plan survives first contact with its creators.

Most of my meetings bear this out.

Which is worse - the cheating or the commentary?

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 15:52:00 +0000

The Chronicle of Higher Education (and others) are reporting the largest cheating incident ever at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke. 34 students were caught having very similar answers on a take home exam. 33 were convicted of cheating, one of lying to the judicial board and four were exonerated.

Cheating by students always amazes me. Back when I started college, an old engineering professor explained to the class that the most benefit you were likely to receive from cheating was, maybe, an increase of one letter grade. However, if he caught you, and he was likely to catch you, you would receive an F and be suspended from school. He encouraged us to “do the math and understand that it wasn’t worth it. I think this may be the right approach. Rather than trying to drill an honor code into students, we need to do two things: 1) encourage them to think about it as a risk management exercise; and 2) have all students grade a set of 30 papers.

Duke LAX

Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:48:07 +0000

I never planned to comment on the Duke Lacrosse rape case, but one observation keeps running through my head and it’s probably best to get it out.

Back when I was in high school, I remember being told that, in a Shakespearean sense, tragedies were uplifting and comedies were depressing. That struck me as backwards for a while until I had watched/read more plays and understood that the tragedies, where the protagonist dies, often display the best elements of human character. There is nobility or love or honor in the characters as they face a universe that is, not hostile, but merely indifferent to the concerns of mankind. On the other hand, a comedy, where the main characters survive the play, often shows the pettiness of people: the bitterness, the backstabbing, the prejudice, the lying, etc.

Copyright infringement on campus

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 15:33:05 +0000

I can’t turn around anymore without hearing something new about how colleges and universities are public enemy number 1 with the copyright industry. In early February, the Recording Industry Association of America released a top 25 list of the schools to which they have sent notices of alleged copyright infringement. Right after that, they started announced that they would start suing students and that they were going to send “pre-subpoena and “settlement notices to campuses.

A subversive proposal

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 20:45:31 +0000

A few years ago, I was an assistant research professor in a department whose college was undergoing its accreditation process. This happened, I believe, every five years or so and was a generally grueling process. Faculty were asked to maintain student work and submit it, anonymously, to the accreditation committee. We were asked to keep track of a representative set of students considered to be good, middle and poor performers. Labs spaces were evaluated. The process for determining curriculum was examined, etc., etc.

The limits of education

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 03:57:05 +0000

There’s a saying about education (I would call it a joke, but it hits too close to home for that), the process of education is learning more and more about less and less until finally, you know absolutely everything about absolutely nothing. This is pretty close to the truth. For a period of time in the 90s, I was one of the world’s foremost expert on the subject of using artificial neural networks for image and video compression – talk about your niche subjects. If you read the titles of dissertations, they are all extremely specific. For the most part, PhDs are specialists and generalists are few and far between. In fact, I was once approached to interview at Sandia National Labs because I was one of the few PhDs they had a resume for who was a generalist (I turned down the interview since I had just started in my current position).

more like this please...

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 14:23:15 +0000

I mentioned several months ago how academic journals were mostly a scam perpetrate by the publishers on universities. One of the things that I briefly discussed was how the entire editorial staff of the journal Topology had announced their resignation. Well, 2006 wrapped up and the former editors of Topology have announced that they will create a new journal called the Journal of Topology (not very creative, but what do you want, they’re mathematicians, not writers).

Poindexter

Fri, 24 Nov 2006 17:55:40 +0000

It’s taken me a bit to write about Admiral Poindexter’s visit and the small group talk we had with him. Let me start by reminding folks that here’s a guy who was convicted of lying to congress. The conviction was later overturned on a technicality. He’s also very politically savvy. I once asked my father if he would ever pursue becoming a general in the army. He told me that he was hoping to make full colonel (he later retired as a lt. colonel), but that becoming a general required a literal act of congress and that you needed to become a politician. I would assume the same thing is the case with an admiral and doubly so in the case of Poindexter who managed to become the highest ranking geek in government. All of which is to say take my impressions with a grain of salt.

Admiral John Poindexter to speak at Duke University

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 04:06:24 +0000

In case you are looking for something interesting to do next week, go to Love Auditorium at Duke University on November 15th at 5pm. Admiral John Poindexter will be giving a talk: “ A Vision for Countering Terrorism Through Information and Privacy Protection Technologies for the 21st Century. It should be an interesting and thought provoking discussion of where Poindexter draws the line between security and privacy.

I’ll be meeting with Poindexter and a small group at 3pm – quite the birthday present.

the high cost of academic journals

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 02:52:56 +0000

Publishers of academic journals have a sweet deal going. The content is written by researchers. The publisher hires a few academics to edit the journal. The editors then identify reviewers in the academic community. The reviewers cull the wheat from the chaff and make suggestions to help turn the later into the former. For the papers that are finally selected, the researchers/authors sign over the copyright to the publisher, so they now own the intellectual property. The publisher solicits ads and then prints the whole thing. Once printed, the publisher sells the journal to everyone involved and their schools.

Women faculty at Harvard

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 13:31:45 +0000

The Chronicle of Higher Education today notes a report from Harvard regarding the number of women being offered tenure track faculty positions and the number accepting. In 2005-2006, women were offered 39% of the tenure track faculty positions. Unfortunately, only 20% of those accepting positions were female. This compares to 2004-2005 when 40% of those accepting tenure track faculty positions were female.

There are two conclusions you can draw from this:

Piled higher and deeper

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 02:14:09 +0000

Last week a friend pointed me to a comic that accurately described my life for four and a half years. Piled Higher and Deeper is a PhD comic strip. After reading just a few, I couldn’t help but think, “how did I miss this for all these years? It turns out that the comic started publishing just before I graduated and by the time it became (relatively) popular I was out of grad school. Anyway, a few of my favorite strips from the archives so far:

Dr. Strange-Opinions: or how I stopped thinking and learned to attack the straw

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 01:53:03 +0000

You can bet that any article written by a conservative that starts with “Liberals don’t value a college education? will be full of crap. The only relevant question is “what kind of crap will it be full of? In the September 22nd issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Chronicle Review, Anthony P. Carnevale writes an opinion piece titled “ Discounting Education’s Value. The first couple of paragraphs give you a flavor of his arguments:

Dropping SAT Scores

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 01:43:04 +0000

Matt Yglesias sees the recent Washington Post article describing the fall in SAT scores after the most recent test changes and asks what’s the big deal. On the face of it, Matt makes some good points. Scores are only down 7 points (5 in reading and 2 in math) and for any given student, that really isn’t a big deal. The Washington Post article, while suggesting that there may be some underlying causes (e.g. the test changes or students not learning enough) also notes that it could be a one year blip.

It's official - the government does consider evolutionary biology to be a science

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 12:08:38 +0000

Last week there was a minor uproar in the academic world when the government presented the list of majors that qualified for money under the National Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent (SMART) Grant program. The problem was that evolutionary biology was left off of the list. The feds claim that this was an oversight and on Friday added evolutionary biology back to the list of qualifying majors.

So, even I am not so paranoid as to think that this was a conspiracy to keep students from studying evolution. But at the same time, I am not so dumb as to think this was accidental. The list of majors comes straight from the Classification of Instructional Programs codes. In the biology section, there are ten biology related programs. Of those ten, only one was missing – evolutionary biology.

The social life of the a Duke undergraduate (as seen in the press)

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 03:17:15 +0000

The Dallas Morning News recently published an editorial by Thomas Hibbs entitled “ College Kids Get Brain, No Soul. In the editorial, Hibbs references the exceedingly disturbing article in Rolling Stone called “ Sex & Scandal at Duke.

The Rolling Stone article discusses the social scene at Duke where “work hard, play hard has always been a motto. According to the article, in recent years, the “work hard portion has morphed into an obsessive desire to please faculty, working to produce high quality papers which will be accepted by professors in order to get good grades, graduate with honors and get a good job. The “play hard portion of the motto has turned into an obsession with alcohol and casual sex, bleeding back into “working hard to maintain the perfect body, social connections, etc.

Update on the Ohio University plagiarism

Fri, 25 Aug 2006 01:20:12 +0000

In reference to my previous comments on the plagiarism scandal in the school of engineering at Ohio Universtity, yesterday the university announced a set of “ comprehensive strategies to address academic honesty. Among the steps being taken is to examine 55 theses for signs of plagiarism. From these, they have found 35 incidents that will require a hearing. Punishments handed out could include the revocation of the former student’s degree. Furthermore, the two professors whom have been implicated have been relieved of their advising duties.

Plagiarism in engineering

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 12:03:18 +0000

There’s an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (sorry, the link is behind the subscription firewall), about a mechanical engineering graduate student at Ohio University. After being invited to stay on after his masters and persue a Ph.D., he started having difficulty with his advisor. To help resolve his difficulties, he went to speak with the university ombudsman who advised him to examine disertations in the university library so that he might see where he was going wrong and what his advisor might want.