On creating a "companion web site" for talks

My last research talk, I tried an experiment during the talk. I created a "companion web site" for the talk, which is an online handout including slides, code, links to papers, and a bullet-point abstract. Here's my first try at an online handout.

The inspiration was Tufte's quixotic diatribe against Powerpoint, which recommends written handouts instead of slides. The web site is an attempt to adapt his idea to an all-open all-Internet all-the-time age. Seeing as I have no intention of printing out several hundred paper copies of a handout and carrying them thousands of miles to a research meeting, and that most people have laptops anyway.

Why the handout? Lectures are limited because speech is linear. If we are conversing, when I haven't understood what you have said, I can ask you to go back. When you lecture, I cannot do that. If I stop a moment to think more deeply about something that you have said, I run the risk of missing your next point.

The handout is designed to help with this. By giving you a written summary, and also my slides, you can "go back" and re-read a point that you may have missed. A second role for the online handout is to help you find more details after the talk, to find exactly which papers, which code, and so on, I was referring to.

If the handout really helps, then it raises an even more interesting question. Why the slides?
Tufte argues vehemently against slides as a replacement for written text. Slides have low resolution, which encourages poor statistical graphics, and encourages hiding details which are vital to assessing an argument in science and engineering. Also, most arguments do not fit into bullet points, because bullet points can convey only linear relationships and nesting. The narrative that you are trying to convey in your talk is likely to be more complex.

In research conferences, we already have a handout for each of our talks, the research paper. So maybe we be presenting scientific talks with no slides at all? If not, why not? Sometimes at a conference, I'll skim the paper during the talk if I am starting to get confused. Sometimes that helps. But papers are information dense, with long sentences full of qualifying statements designed to forestall potential reviewer criticisms. It can be hard to read dense text while also remaining aware about what the speaker is currently saying. Sometimes I think this a blind spot of Tufte's, that he leans too heavily on information density as a measure of the quality of a display.

We can think of the sequence [ slides, audio of talk, online handout, paper ] as attempting to convey the same information at different levels of density. This allows the reader/viewer to choose the appropriate level. But slides and audio are both low density. Do we really need two low density ways of conveying the information?

Another way of asking the question is: What are slides good for, when they are good? Tufte does seem to accept that good slides are possible. He admits that perhaps the top 10% of presenters aren't harmed by Powerpoint's cognitive style, as their own presenting style is strongly enough developed that they impose it on the software, affordances be damned.

In the past couple of years, I've been experimenting with different slide designs. I may even starting to understand what principles I am aiming at in my slide designs. But I think that's a topic for another day.

A Suggestion for Scotland

This will be a big year for the United Kingdom. In September, Scotland will hold a referendum to decide whether to remain in the UK or to become an independent country. For several years, support for independence has remained steady at around 33%, but some polls have shown that support for independence may be increasing. For my American friends, I personally think that this op-ed is a good primer.

As a foreigner, I cannot vote in the referendum, and rightly so. But I would like to humbly propose a third option for Scotland, just as a suggestion. A middle ground between the risks of complete independence, and the current reality of being yoked to Westminster.

I suggest that come September, Scotland should secede from the United Kingdom and join the United States as the 51st state.

This would be welcomed all throughout the US, I guarantee it. Americans love Scotland. We really, really love Scotland, even if we can’t find it on a map. There are more people of Scottish ancestry in America than there are in Scotland. We have Scottish festivals all over the country, with kilts, bagpipes, Highland dance — the whole works, except only for haggis (which is actually illegal to import) and Irn Bru (that stuff’s minging). My point is, Americans really, really like Scotland. Maybe the EU would dither about accepting an independent Scotland, but the US would accept Scotland in a New York minute.

Polls show that Scots are concerned about their economic future. Joining the US would be great for Scotland’s economy. By joining into a single trading area with the United States, it would be easier for American tourists to come to Scotland, and for Scottish haggis to come to the US (I love that stuff). Also, you need to consider the film industry. We spent $70 million making a movie about the last time Scotland won independence. Don’t think we won’t do it again. We put a Scot into outer space. Heck, we even made up a Scottish smurf! The fact is, over the past 50 years, Hollywood has done more for Scotland than London has. Join with us, and we can do more, together.

Now, some might argue that my suggestion is impractical. After all, Scotland is a long way from the US. (Americans: you might need a map for this part.)  But with modern telecommunications, there’s no reason this should be an issue. In fact, Washington, DC, is actually 1000 miles closer to Edinburgh than it is to Honolulu.

I can understand that some Scots might be concerned about this proposal. After all, Washington DC has been pretty dysfunctional lately. Some might ask: Are these really the people you want to join your political future with? First, it’s important to point out that the US Congress makes up only 0.000017% of the population. Most Americans are more sensible. Second, and most important, this is why we need your help. It’s true that there are a lot of perfectly nice people in the US whose political views are batshit crazy. But it’s also true that the country is deeply divided. The crazy people are really only about 49.8% of the population. Even though Scotland’s population is small, in a politically polarised country, it’s enough to tip the balance. Think about it: The US State of Scotland would probably receive 9 electoral votes. The US presidential election of 2000 was decided by only 5. Just think about the good that Scotland could have done for the entire world.

Clearly, this is one of the most difficult and important political issues in Scotland’s history. Honest people of good intentions will come to different opinions. But I hope that I’ve convinced you that this third option is one that’s worthy of serious consideration.

GTD Made Simple: Why I think the Internet needs one more blog post about "Getting Things Done"

I'm naturally disorganised, but I have so much stuff to do that out of necessity I get organized. (Then more stuff comes and I get disorganised again.) The way I get organized is by attempting to follow a system called GTD. GTD comes from a book by David Allen called Getting Things Done. The book is an unusual read, a mix of management-speak, Zen-speak, and tips for organizing your filing cabinet. But for all that, it's a good book.

GTD has become popular with many different types of people. It is especially popular with tech people on the Internet. It's a bit of a geek cult, which is strange. Why are computer programmers singing praises for a management consultant? Indeed, why are university professors?

Lots of people on the Internet have been writing about GTD. It can be hard to get started. For one, the book itself, the writing isn't always succinct. Also, cleaning up your to do list and blogging about it is a good way to procrastinate. So, there are lots of blog posts out there about GTD. Lots.

I have been trying to figure out a way to explain GTD that makes clear how simple it is.

Look, you need a to do list. It will clear your head so that you can concentrate on your work. That's it. That's GTD.

But you've tried this already. It helped for a little bit, but then it stopped helping. This is where GTD gets interesting. It's based on an extraordinarily perceptive understanding of why to do lists stop working. They can stop working because:

1. You haven't written everything down. To do lists become way better when they contain literally everything that you have to do in life. If they don't, then deep down in your mind, you will always know that you've got stuff to do that isn't written down, so you spend mental focus trying to remember those things. It's like if you tried to keep a calendar but only wrote down half of your appointments in it.
2. Your list is too vague. If you write down something like "Dentist" on your to do list, every time you see it, you need a little mental energy to work out what that meant and plan what you need to do about it. But after you've done that planning, you don't do anything about it, because you were just scanning your to do list and right now you need to do something else instead. This makes you anxious. And if you read "Dentist" without taking that effort, then you still feel anxious because it reminds you that there's something you need to do and you're not sure what it is.
3. Your list is too long. When you're not sure what to do, you need to be able to scan your list quickly to decide what to do next.
4. You can't find items right when you need them. If you're about to drive past the hardware store, you need to be able to stop in the parking lot and quickly find the list of stuff that you'd been meaning to buy.
5. You can't write down items right when you think of them. When you notice you're running low on toilet paper, you're not usually in the grocery store at the time. But you still want to record this right then, so you don't have to remember it until you're walking past the shop the next day.
6. Your list doesn't keep up with your life. Gradually you get more and more things to do that just don't make it on to your list.
7. You don't compare your list to your bigger goals. Urgent things aren't always important, and it's easy to let days slip by you. You need to think about what's most important in your career and your life, and your to do list needs to contain actions that help make the important things happen.

GTD is a system for keeping lists that is designed to avoid these problems. GTD doesn't care where you keep your lists or how you store them --- this is why geeks love GTD, so that they can keep arguing about what software is best. But you don't need software. Paper works fine. What you need are principles to guide you.

The main principles of GTD are:

• Record everything. Everything that you need to do.
• Record everywhere. No matter where you are, you need a way to write things down so that they will end up on your list.
• Organize by context. You want multiple to do lists, organized so that when you scan a list, it contains only things that you could do right then, if you decided to. You might have a list of people you need to call, a list of things to do at a computer, a list of things to do at home, etc.
• Specific measurable actions. This the caveat to "record everything". If it goes on your list, it needs to be something specific, that you could do right away, finish, and tick off. Instead of writing "Dentist", you should write, "Email Morag to ask for dentist recommendations". When you read an item on your list, you don't want to think "Oh, what was that?" --- you want to think "Ah, I can do that!"
• Small specific projects. A project is anything that takes multiple specific actions to accomplish, even if it's only 2 or 3.
• Plan naturally. For any project, work out what you need to do on the sheet of paper, and add to your list the actions that you can do right away. Actions that you need to do later down the line, they don't go on your list.
• Review weekly. Check your calendar and your notes to see if there's anything that you need to do that you haven't written down yet. Think about your longer term projects and goals and make sure your lists have actions that help with them.

How you organise a set of lists, and supporting files, to meet these principles, that's what the book is about. It may not always seem so from the surface, but the book is full of clever little tricks. That's another reason why the book can be deceptive: It's easy to admire the tricks but not understand the system. But if you really understand the principles, then the practice becomes much more clear.

Why you should scrunch your face when you think

An important skill in any type of creative work is to observe and reflect on your own habits of thought and discover a way of working that suits them. A simple example is the old advice to notice the time of day when you have the most energy, and reserve that time for the most creative aspects of your work. But there are many more examples of this, if you look for them. It helps to be a bit self absorbed.

One habit that I've just recently reflected on is that sometimes I close my eyes and scrunch my face into an "I'm thinking hard" face when I'm trying to think hard. In some sense this is an affectation. But I like to think that the goal is more noble, to harness the cognitive dissonance that would result if I make the scrunchy face without thinking hard. To escape this dissonance, the only option for my subconscious is to actually start thinking hard. It feels like this helps, at least sometimes, but I haven't kept careful records. And at least everyone else can see how hard I'm thinking.

My Top Conference Attendance Tip

One of my PhD students is on his way to his first academic conference. Conferences are one of my favourite parts of research: I've met so many interesting people and started so many fun collaborations that way.

Just today I saw this great advice from Michael Ernst about attending conferences. His advice is so good, that I've only got one thing to add.

Here's my tip. When a big group students from the same institution go to the same conference, they'll often hang out together all the time: at meals, coffee breaks, etc. This isn't a great strategy on their part, but you can exploit this. Once you make friends with one person in the group, now you can go with your new friend to lunch with everyone else in the group. Voila, now you have a network!

This is a general principle of networking (horrible name, but incredibly important if done honestly and well): Cool people will help you to meet other cool people. And once you've been around long enough, you can return the favour!

Viva la voce

One of my favourite aspects of academia in the UK is the final oral examination for the PhD --- formally called a viva voce, which everyone seems to call a viva (VEYE-vah). The viva is an oral examination that typically consists of the student and two examiners, one from within the University (the internal examiner), and one from outwith the university (the external examiner).

Both examiners read the thesis carefully, and ask the student detailed questions. The traditional way to do this is that all three have a paper copy of the thesis, and the examiners go through the thesis page by page with their questions. Some questions are high level ("Why did you choose technique X rather than technique Y?") and some can be very detailed ("In your proof of Theorem 4.3 on page 176, I'm not sure that the third step is correct. What if the matrix A is non-singular?").

This discussion commonly takes 2-3 hours. Longer and shorter vivas are not unheard of, though if you ask me, a one-hour viva is a bit of a rip-off for the student, and a five-hour viva isn't kind, unless the length is caused by the student being exceptionally argumentative or loquacious.

At the end of the viva, the student is asked to wait outside, and the examiners decide whether the student should be awarded a PhD, and if so what corrections to the thesis are required. The most common outcome is a pass subject to minor corrections, which the student is allowed a few months to complete.

Essentially, in my experience a viva is a detailed technical discussion of the content of the thesis. Most students start out nervous, sometimes exceedingly so, but relax after a few questions as they realize that this is just a technical discussion of the sort that they have had many times before. That said, even if your research career is long, it is rare that a trusted colleague will provide you with several hours of detailed feedback on your work. To be part of a discussion like this, on either side of the table, is a privilege: most work is ignored, so any criticism is a compliment.

I am sure that the process is more tense if the examiners believe that the quality of the thesis is borderline --- fortunately, I haven't yet been asked to examine a thesis like that. If portions of your thesis have already been published in prestigious venues, and whether this is possible at all varies greatly across disciplines, then you can be fairly sure that your thesis is not near the borderline.

A colleague suggested to me once that a viva is like a negotiation. If your thesis represents a sufficient amount of research of acceptable quality (and if it was indeed you that wrote it), then you will pass. The negotiation is over which corrections will be required. Responsible examiners do not want to require additional experiments that will require months of work, if the thesis as submitted is of excellent quality. But they also don't want a thesis to be passed with gaping holes in its argumentation. The purpose of the discussion is to sort out which potential concerns are which, and your voice in this discussion matters --- you wrote the thesis, so you are the expert in the room.

Sometimes an examiner asks a question with an eye to a correction being required. Maybe you think, "yeah, that's a good point, I should add a paragraph on that" --- in this case, don't hesitate to say so. On the other hand, if providing a good answer to the examiner's question would require months of additional research, politely explain why, while also giving the best answer you can given what you do know. What you don't want to do is argue every point strongly, even when the examiners are clearly right... that is not good negotiation strategy.

A bit more about who attends the viva. The internal examiner is not the supervisor, in fact, they will not have been involved with the thesis research at all. It is not unusual for the internal examiner to be a bit of generalist with respect to the thesis topic, although when I have served as internal, I have usually been able to make out the thesis reasonably well. Presumably this is because the School of Informatics is large enough that there are many theses in machine learning and natural language processing that need to be examined.

The external examiner is chosen specifically for their expertise in the subject matter, and to serve as an external is generally seen as a minor indicator of prestige. A certain amount of deference is paid to the external in the culture of the process. Even so, I have the sense that part of the role of the internal is to be accountable to the University (for following correct procedures) and to the student and the supervisor (to make sure that the examination is fair to the student). I have read and heard horror stories of aggressive external examiners but never witnessed one; to the contrary, the examiners who I have witnessed have all gone out of their way to be kind to the student.

The role of the supervisor in the viva, I think that this may vary slightly across institutions. At Edinburgh, the supervisor is allowed to attend the viva, if the student permits, but not to participate in any way. In my experience as internal examiner, the supervisor has attended about half the time. One supervisor silently took notes to share with the student, which I think is quite a kind thing to do.

Finally, although the description is written for a US audience, British academia also fetaures the snake fight portion of your viva.

(Written in honour of my first PhD student graduating. Congratulations Yichuan!)

Early to rise, early to read research papers

Due to a recent bout of jet lag,¹ I have found myself this week waking up at 5am.
So I am experimenting with reading a paper first thing in the morning.

I am hoping that starting off the day with an intellectual task will help me to avoid
"administrator brain", which FSP describes in an excellent post.

So far (well, two days in) it has been really fun. It helps me to stay motivated, because after writing 50 emails in a day, your mind gets lost in minutiae, and you forget that you came to this job to learn, to help people, and to be creative.

Can't promise that I'll keep waking up at 5am, though.

---

1. 
   

   I have begin scheduling posts well in advance, so this bout will no longer be recent when you read this. ↩

Taste in research, and the paradox of deciding what not to work on

A large part of taste in research is deciding what not to work on. You might choose not to apply method X, even though you don't really understand it, because it has a reputation for being fiddly and difficult to get right. You might choose not to work on topic Y because you think that even though there's a lot of people writing papers about it, its goals are too ambitious to ever be met. This extends all the way to entire fields of research. I could name a few popular fields within computer science — with active research communities, large amounts of external research funding, leading researchers with fancy prestigious awards — that I suspect are being investigated in entirely the wrong way, and that I personally think are currently pointless.

I could name them. Will I? No.

Why not? To protect my career? If I am honest, probably in part yes. But what I tell myself is different. The real answer, I think, is that my opinion of these areas is poorly informed. Because I think these areas are uninteresting, I haven't studied them carefully, and so I don't know how they've attempted to address my naive objections. It would be arrogant and professionally irresponsible to publicly denigrate the hard work of many people without having even bothered to read it.

This leads to a paradox. It's impossible by definition for me to become better informed about these areas, unless I decide to actually start researching them. In order to be fully confident that an area is uninteresting, you need to study it — and that study itself is part of doing research! But you can't do careful reading on every research area that seems bogus at first impression, because then you would do nothing else. Instead, you have to take intellectual shortcuts, and do the best you can with limited time to think. Those research areas that smell a bit off, you ignore them until either they die out, or a major success forces you to reevaluate. Part of taste in research is deciding what to study, and what to ignore.

This is the paradox of taste in research. Your decision of what not to work on is, by definition, always ill-informed.

Mnemonic poetry and Guy Fawkes night

I walked home past several people setting off sparklers and fireworks in the meadows. In Edinburgh celebrations of Guy Fawkes night are not elaborate, but you can smell the gunpowder.

A good thing, because otherwise I can never remember what night it is. The traditional rhyme

     Remember, remember, the fifth of November

is about the worst possible mnemonic that I could think of. It fits the meter just as well to say

     Remember, remember, the FOURTH of November

but you aren't meant to remember that one. Personally I prefer

     Remember, remember, the ninth of November,

because that happens also to be my birthday.

Much more sensible to base the rhyme on the part that's easiest to confuse.
Instead, how about:

Let the memory survive
      That the king was still alive
          On November five.

Now you won't forget.

Business Cards and Me

Just before I went to my first conference, I thought, "Hey, I guess I should be professional now!" and printed out business cards on the best card stock that I could find at Staples. Apparently, of the hundreds of people who attended NIPS that year, I was the only one who had done this. I handed out one card, received none, and assumed that everyone must just Google each other after the conference.

From an objective standpoint, from the perspective of maximizing the efficiency of scholarly communication, this is of course ridiculous. The only explanation that I can imagine is reverse snobbery, the same reason we would never wear a suit and tie to work. But at the time, I didn't worry about this. I just did what everyone else did.

I'm eleven years older now, and my memory is much worse. At the last conference I attended, I thought, "Hey, wouldn't it be great if next time, I could go home with a list of every new person that I met, perhaps on a durable but unobtrusive slip of paper?" I do worry about people giving me funny looks, but I can't very well pretend to myself that I am creative and iconoclastic if I always do what my friends do.

So if I meet you at NIPS this year, do not be surprised if you receive an unobtrusive slip of paper from me. I hope that you enjoy the word cloud on the back.

A Threat to the British Monarchy

I’d like to talk frankly about a real threat to the British monarchy.

First, monarchs like to emphasize continuity and tradition by reusing names from previous monarchs. This is understandable as, in a constitutional monarchy, continuity and tradition are the monarchy's main assets. Perhaps for this reason, a British king hasn’t taken on a previously unused name since George I in 1714.

However, this bumps up against a contradictory historical tendency, namely that British monarchs have had what might be described as a rich and varied history. British kings aren’t eager to remind people of their more colourful predecessors. Many names are therefore out of bounds.

The result is that the British monarchy is rapidly running out of names in the male line. For example:

• Henry — It is difficult to imagine the king who would want to be Henry IX, and even more difficult to imagine the woman who would want to marry him.

• Richard — Who wants to be the successor of the King in the Car Park? And there was the business with the Princes in the Tower.

• Edward — Although the abdication of Edward VIII might be viewed more romantically by modern eyes, the Nazi sympathies, not so much.

• John — The Magna Carta was written to protect people from him.

• James is right out.

Once you factor in this history, there are very few names left. Charles is still OK. Charles II granted the charter of the Royal Society; perhaps a future Charles III could also take an interest in science. William and George are unimpeachable. Albert is a possibility, although the famous Albert was only a consort, making the name a bit of a risk: the last prospective King Albert decided at the crucial moment to become a George instead.

This is shaping into a crisis. One can imagine a time, in the coming centuries, when the only choices left to British kings are Charles, George, and Cnut.

Principal Component Model of Coffee Shops

I spend a lot of time in coffee shops. I'm writing in Amsterdam, so let me clarify that I do mean coffee. I like coffee shops because: a) I like coffee, b) I find them relaxing, and c) and it is a way to be around people without the awkwardness of being obligated to talk to them.

It's very important to choose coffee shops wisely. Before I go on vacation, I always do careful research about where the best coffee shops are (again: for coffee). But "best" is complicated. You need to think about what aspects of the coffee shop experience are most important for your trip:

A) Quality of the coffee. The presence of single estate beans or fancy hipster brewing methods is a good sign, but it doesn't matter what equipment they have if they don't know how to use it.

B) Ambiance. How easy is it to relax? Or to concentrate? There's one place I used to go to often — closed now — awful coffee, but near me, and really cool decor.

C) Quality of food. Pastries only? Sandwiches? Hot food? How good?

D) Location, location, location.

E) Work friendly or people friendly? Some cafés you go to with a laptop, some you go with a group of friends. A book is usually always OK. Interestingly a tablet feels more to me like a book in terms of social acceptability than a laptop but maybe I'm biased.

I know one cafe where 24/7 there was always a row of six people staring at laptop screens. Nothing wrong with that, as long as you're bringing a laptop too.

F) Attractiveness of clientele. I never go to cafés specifically to pick people up, but it's always nice to be around people who seem interesting.

G) Staff. This is complicated because while nice banter will always make me smile, I am also happy to be left alone.

Happy to hear if there are important criteria that I am leaving out.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.")