Big pants, no shoes?

So, I have this professor this semester. Let's call him Professor P(x). I must say, he is extremely refreshing after some of the ordeals I've been through since I've been back to school. I'd consider him to be the epitomy of eccentricity -- a true genius in every sense of the word. Our class is an 80 minute class. In a recent class, he started by spending about 20 minutes regrouping his thoughts after several meetings he had earlier in the day. He then began teaching. Every 30 seconds, he'd face the blackboard, yank his pants up (which I was very thankful for), and turn around to continue teaching. He periodically hops up on the desk in the room, kicks off his shoes (literally), sits with his legs crossed on the desk, and starts talking as if we were at a campfire. (All together now! "Kum-bah-ya...") Sometimes he gets bored with the material he's teaching, and starts sharing stories of his past experiences while at Harvard, sharing class notes with Bill Gates. (Poor P(x) continued his education, while Mr. Gates dropped out and earned the big bucks.) But, somehow, through all of this, he manages to teach the material, and gets several laughs out of everyone through the process. I'm not sure if this is the best approach for everyone, but I've been learning a lot from him. After considering all of my graduate classes I've been through, this is one that is going to really stick out in my head for years to come.

As I continue down this path, with the goal of becoming a professor myself, one skill that they don't teach professors is how to teach! Many institutions hire you with NO teaching experience. Can you believe it?!?!? I find this to be insane! Every professor has gained their position without any formal training in pedagogic skills. And, frankly, it shows with many professors. I think many of them can teach, but they simply lack interest. They are there for research purposes, and consider teaching to be an inconvenience -- something that gets in the way of their real goals in research. (After all, it's the research that pays the university bills, not teaching. Teaching is overhead.) Other professors that I've encountered over the past 15 years lack skills to properly impart knowledge to students and inspire learning. Believe me, I'm not saying I have it figured out either. I'll be the first to admit that I don't! But, I'm trying my best to learn from professors who do it right, as well as learn from their mistakes. I've had no formal training myself, other than a few teaching seminars here and there that I've attended out of my own will. The main rule I apply is to teach a class the way I would want to be taught. (Now, I have to try to put myself back in the mindset of an undergraduate, and that's not easy.) However, that philosophy is not right for everyone either. So... regardless, I have a lot to learn still. Don't we all?

Thinking about where I'm at right now, the minority of professors with excellent pedagogic skills outweigh the majority in my head. These are the ones that leave you wanting more. P(x) is actually doing that for me. I haven't had a class like this in years.

P(x) is a unique professor, probably the most unique I've ever had. I'm learning the class subject, as well as observing his teaching methodologies. He's showing me I have more things to learn, for sure. I'm far from getting everything right, and unfortunately, I can't really apply his methods. (For starters, most students would run if I started kicking off my shoes every class.) I teach a class of over 100 students. P(x)'s class size is 8 students. You use completely different teaching methods with a class size of 8 vs. 100 students. Furthermore, advanced graduate courses use completely different teaching methods than introductory undergraduate courses (like I'm teaching.) And regardless, as a PhD student, my primary responsibilities revolve around my own research and dissertation work, which is just beginning. Oh, the question constantly begs every morning; "How do I juggle all of this work today? What should I do first? How do I handle these student issues? I really need something sweet. I know I didn't explain call-by-reference as clearly as I could have. Where's the pizza? I could be making 10x the amount of money I'm making now. Again, why am I doing this? Where's the wine?" and so on. So, I can't really put the time into it that I want to. But, it's enjoyable regardless. Yup, I have much to learn.

Hmm..

Well, I guess this makes me a real geek now. :-) Anyways, I moved my blog from my account at the university computers to here. I wanted more freedom to write things that really reflected my current state of mind, so, I finally did it -- I'm an official blogger. I've been fighting the urge for a couple years now, but it was inevitable. I only reposted stuff that others have found interesting.

Grand Challenges in Comp. Sci.

Jan. 26, 2005 -- Here's a real interesting article that appeared in yesterday's edition of InfoWorld. (You can get the actual conference report here.)Essentially, some computer scientists from Britain outline 7 "grand challenges" in the field of IT that will be faced over the next one to two decades. This is VERY interesting, and if you are wondering what areas of research in Computer Science to get into over the next 3-5 years, you should seriously read this document.

Summarized, they are as follows:

1. In Vivo-in Silico (iViS): the virtual worm, weed and bug -- They outline the necessity of developing computer systems that behave and simulate living organisms. Their argument is that this would allow us to better understand and comprehend living organisms in ways we have yet to observe.
2. Science for global ubiquitous computing -- (Read #4. This should have been included in that section.) Realizing that computers are becoming pervasive and ubiquitous is continuing to open numerous areas of research.
3. Memories for life -- The claim is that the number of people digitizing their life is growing exponentially. (e.g. Photos, video, important documents, etc..) This is creating information overload. New areas of research are opening up to allow this enormous amount of data to be easily managed, that will tap into areas such as security, privacy, databases, information retrieval, AI, machine learning, HCI, etc..
4. Development of a global, scalable ubiquitous computing infrastructure -- Do any type of current research into ubicomp, and you'll clearly see the need for commonality in this field. The number of computers all around us is exploding. The potential areas of research is again, security, privacy, context awareness, self-configuration, seamless communication, numerous human factors (this stuff must be invisible to us, otherwise we're not going to use it), etc.
5. Better understanding of the brain and the mind -- This has more of a philosophical background of interest. We all should realize the most powerful computing machinery on the face of this earth is your brain! Some view the brain as being analogous to computing machinery and the mind as virtual software. Our brain does so much that we barely understand. Perhaps better understand of how our mind works can open opportunities in CSI.
6. Dependable systems evolution -- To me, this should have been the number one focus of the conference. Without better methodologies that allow more dependable systems, while still saving on time and money, none of the above will be able to happen. Regardless, they outline the development of a verifying compiler that can prove the correctness of the
   program before being run.
7. Journeys in non-classical computation -- It's time to go well beyond much of the traditional theory of computation as has been research and open doors to new paradigms. Classical computing, which most would agree is the Turing Machine model, is not an adequate model of reality for all notions of computing. Take quantum computing as an example...

Very cool.

Grad School -- The Board Game!

Check out the comic this out...

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=515

I wasn't sure whether to laugh or not... as this is a little too much truth for my humorous side. In our department, we call the PhD qualifying exams (or quals) "analytical exams" (or analytics, or, as I like to say, "anals"). Don't ask me why they just don't call them quals. Anyways, the chances of passing all of your exams the first time are roughly 1/36, so that's pretty accurate. Let's see, what else? Hmmm... yes, I certainly take part in all opportunities for free food around the campus. I can understand what happens when a department loses funding. It sucks. I can relate to what happens when you generate bad data, or worse yet, you have good data, but you can't reproduce it, which is still bad data. (Been there.) Generally, choosing a research topic is not so different than drawing a card from the Chance deck. This is funny! If you're a PhD student, you must visit the site http://www.phdcomics.com. I assure you that you will be able to relate to most of these clips.

Another one of those days...

Geez... you ever have one of those days where things just don't seem to connect? This was one of those weeks for me. It seems pointless to write about it, but... I suppose I'm in one of those moods to vent, and I don't want to complain to anyone. But, in the event that perhaps someone else feels this way, looks like you must suffer through it. (Ahh -- it's wonderful to live in a free country! If you don't like what you're reading? Then don't!) I've never vented on this before, so... lets see how I feel after this comes out. Where do I start? See, I'm completely burnt-out. The winter break can not come soon enough. I guess the problem is that some people forget that I'm human. Well, hmmm... that's really not a problem. Who really cares what other people think of me. See, the problem occurs when the person that forgets my humanity is me. Sometimes, I put so much pressure on myself to do everything perfect, which, of course, is completely impossible. Why? Because I'm human -- subject to error, mistakes, failure, etc.. I suppose we all need to remind ourselves of that. The key to remember is that, as long as the empirical probability of making mistakes is far less than the empirical probability of success with your projects, homework, daily commitments, teaching, research, relationships, breathing, sleeping, eating pizza, (mmm... pizza) etc., then that day would be labeled as being a good day, right? But, what failure rate should I place on the meaning of success? Worse yet, what does it mean to be successful? By whose measures? Oh boy, I think I've been taking too many statistics classes! Going through this grueling process of getting a PhD does weird things to your head. I'm getting more analytical of everything. I'm now dreaming of my research and projects that I work on. I'm learning that getting a PhD can be one of the most grueling, intense, stressful, and disheartening tasks one can go through. There needs to be reward as well! There is only so much one can take. Awwww.... poor Brian! Will someone please get me a freakin violin? :-) Ok Brian, let's remind ourselves of what a close friend of mine told me. She summed up academia in one word -- JUDGMENT! It's all about JUDGMENT. You are constantly judged. They summarize a small limited part of your current life into one numerical value between 0.0 and 4.0. You are judged against your peers, against your own performance, and against other subjective standards that are set up as criterion on which to weigh your performance. If there was ever a time where I needed to be thick-skinned, solid in my commitment, and remember EXACTLY the purpose why I am here, it would be now. But, that goes contrary to the part I said earlier about not caring what other people think. I did a lot of work years ago to eliminate that need for approval from people. I swung a bit too far away for a while there, but now I think I've found a happy medium. See, I think it's important to, at least, always consider the counsel of those around you. You never know what you may learn in the process. However, just because someone tells you what to do or what they think, it doesn't mean you have to take it to heart. I've learned that as long as you know what you are doing is right inside you, that's all that matters. But, now I have to care about what other people think! The success/failure of my PhD completely depends on the judgment of those that are over me. Perhaps that is what I'm feeling this angst towards. I'm having to revert back to feeling like I need to kiss certain bottoms, occasionally play certain political games, and constantly be bowing toward every demand that is made of me. Maybe I'm rebelling a little against it. I've been told that I'm too much of an idealist at times, always thinking the best of people, and that I'm setting myself up to get burned. I think I've been better with my B.S. detection. But, anyways, getting back to seeking approval -- there needs to be a fine line. You need to achieve the best you can do, but... you need to do it for yourself, and that's it! If you know inside you that the performance you exerted on some project or research was truly the best you could muster up at the time, then.... I guess that's all you can do. (Funny... I can see my mom telling me these words way back when I was in grade school! I guess I was always a perfectionist with my academic work.) But, I know I could have done better under different circumstances. That's the part that irritates me and gets underneath my supposed thick-skin. I have so many different things going on at the same time, combined with feeling lousy (it seems like the entire campus is one big cold virus factory in Nov.-Dec.), I'm not getting sleep, etc., that I know I did my best under these circumstances. But... I couldn't believe I fell into that trap -- I started with the excuses! I started trying to explain the reason for my sub-par performance. Damn! That's probably the part that irritated me the most! There's no reason to explain! As long as you know you did your best, Brian, then that's it. The end. Nada. Finito. Done. No more. They don't want to hear my excuses. Being an instructor, I know I sometimes get tired of the excuses as well, and I fell into the trap. I suppose that's part of being human. And, on days that I would mark down as utter "failure" like today, I know, in the grand scheme of things, that I have had many more successes to balance out this one bad day. Why does human nature sometimes only dwell on the negative? I'm getting better at it. The mere fact that I can be more subjective and view failure in light of all of my successes is a good thing. (See? Statistics has been helpful!) Ugh.... I had a few friends that went through the PhD process in different disciplines warn me that I WILL experience times when I feel like quitting, and that I have to be solid in my commitment and always remember why I chose this path, regardless of the many obstacles that will come along. It seems like sometimes the department's intent is strictly to weed out those that can't make it through the research phase, so as not to waste their time. I hear it's the same everywhere at the PhD level. I'm used to breezing through Math/CSI classes as an undergrad. I also did well with my masters. But, something is just different right now, and I can't put my finger on it yet. This is all probably a combination of a lack of sleep and a lack of pizza. But anyways, once again, I go back to the fact that this is all about judgment. If "they" deem me to be a worthy student to take on under their guidance and advisement, then I'll be okay. But, every damn semester, I've had to constantly reface the challenge of trying to find an advisor that will take me on. Once again -- judgment. I know there are other PhD students in the program that are superior to me in some areas of Comp.Sci. However, I know I have my strengths as well. Yes, as I have even mentioned to my students (I sometimes need to remember my own advice), we're all different, unique beings with different strengths and weaknesses. To learn about a discipline that you are weak in is still learning something about yourself. But... sometimes it just seems that I'm learning a lot of that. Don't worry, I recognize that I'm being slightly pessimistic, and not looking at everything in respect to the entire picture. (Or, in stats, the entire sample space.) Once again, it's just the state of my being right now - I'm weary. A few nights of some restful night sleeps, and I'm sure things will be fine. Actually, I feel I must end this positively. I'm closer than I ever have been to deciding on a research direction, and I've come across an advisor that seems to be interested in me, and I really appreciate his attitude and style. That is something that I am very thankful for right now, since that has been bothering me for about a year now. I'm really hopeful it's going to work out. I won't know until the summer at the earliest...

Oh yeah, I know this isn't the most grueling, stressful job a person can have. I think being a parent is worse. But, I've always been told that parenting comes with many more rewards than stress. Well, maybe not all parents feel that way, but fortunately, my parents have said that... :-) I guess that's something else to be thankful for. Hey, what the heck is this, Thanksgiving? That was last week! I want to be miserable, and I can't even do that right.:-)