Failing Students
I sometimes want to fail more people in my classes. This is not because I am evil (although some people here seem to think so), but because I want the people who graduate from our computer science...
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30 Pies Thrown at Me (Literally)
This is what happens at CMU when you post on your blog that you want to fail more students.
View ArticleShould You Go to Grad School?
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a provocative article that strongly recommends not going to graduate school in the humanities. The last paragraph is particularly striking:It's hard to tell young...
View ArticleThe Amazing Computer Science Diet
Ingredients:A weight tracking site like FitDay. People enter some information about themselves, what they eat every day, and how much they weight. The site lets them track the number of calories they...
View ArticleIs This Science?
One of the most common questions computer science professors used to ask about my research went something like this: "What you're doing is very clever, and I see how it's useful, but how is it...
View ArticleOne Expensive Flea Market
To all those out there providing services for high usage websites or companies: please stop trying to rip us off. With all the insane haggling you have to go through when running website, you'd think...
View ArticleHow the Intertubes Can Help Fix Corrupt Governments
(Fine, it's been a month since I last posted -- sue me, I've been busy.)Ok, so the Guatemalan president is being accused of ordering the assassination of a well respected businessman, his daughter, and...
View ArticleQuestion of the Day
If you had $100 million, how would you use it to improve a university? I'd like a solution with maximal impact.
View ArticleLaptop at the Beach
Why is it ok to read a book on the beach, but if you pull out your laptop everybody thinks you’re the biggest dork on earth? When I’m at the beach I just want to use my laptop (with its fancy display...
View ArticleHollywood-Style Lectures
Teaching is hard, and teaching well is REALLY hard. If you’ve never done it before, you have no idea how many hours of preparation each lecture takes. The trick to counter that is to teach the same...
View ArticleExistential Questions and Utopian Salaries
I know this is impossible, but wouldn’t it be great if everybody was paid a salary proportional to how much they actually helped humanity? In my book, then, stock traders or hedge fund analysts would...
View ArticleEmail FAQs
1. Why has the frequency of your blog posts decreased?I'm currently too busy to come up with anything intelligent to say :(2. Will you review this paper for me?See #1 above. I love you though.3. Why...
View ArticleChoosing a New Department Head
Our computer science department is currently in the process of choosing a new department head. Since we're academics, no decision can be simple so the faculty has come up with a complex procedure that...
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Serious Damage to Health
So apparently this was run as an ad for Johnny Walker in Central America. I should ask them to pay me! (The other page had my name on it.) The best is what it says at the bottom: "Causes serious damage...
View ArticleAdvice On Grad School Applications
Research statements, recommendation letters, GREs. 'Tis the season again for grad school applications. To save all the kiddies from embarrassment and rejection (which typically implies you'll just end...
View ArticleBored: Need Some Scandalous Gossip
Many people have emailed asking why I haven't posted on this blog for a while. Well, here's why: I've been busy working on a bunch of things including a super duper secret project. I have a big mouth,...
View ArticleGive Me Back My Name
Dear Person Who Took My Name on Twitter and Linked to a Porn Site,Yes, I know, I was stupid. I should have taken @LuisvonAhn years ago when I first signed up. But you have to understand, I didn't know...
View ArticleStartups and CMU
Is Carnegie Mellon a good university to go to if you plan on working for or building a startup? That's the question I was recently asked by somebody from the Quora team. I'm frequently asked similar...
View ArticleAmerica's Next Top Nerd
I want to make a computer science reality TV show. Like in most reality shows, the participants would compete to win a prize, but since they would be CS nerds, we won't aim for something as crazy as...
View ArticleOutsourcing My Research Group
A PhD student at Carnegie Mellon costs approximately $80,000 per year. (Research programmers and post-docs cost about the same.) Given that PhD students have to take classes for the first couple of...
View ArticleResearch versus Teaching
My previous post stirred some people's emotions. Reading the comments, it seems part of that came from the tension between teaching and research in modern American universities. In most countries, the...
View ArticleWork and the Internet
For context about why I care, here is a slight paraphrasing from grant proposal I recently wrote:For the last eight years, I have been working to develop an area of computer science called "human...
View ArticleIrresponsible Push
Inspired by a popular internet company whose name I won't reveal here (you know who you are), the GWAP Web site team has started following a software engineering technique that I'm calling...
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