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.
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.
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...
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 ...
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...
Coffee versus beer
If you ask yourself, “Should I have one more beer?,” well, if you had to stop yourself and ask, you probably shouldn’t.
My new favourite pages on Wikipedia
I have several new favourite pages on Wikipedia:
The first rule of academic politics
“Don’t talk about academic politics”? Ha! I wish. Academic politics is nothing but talking. I guess that’s true for most all kinds of politics, really.
How I Make Coffee
Pourover is a trendy and delicious way of making coffee. It is possible to make excellent coffee this way. This video by Matt Perger has a great technique for the Hario V60, which the one that I have been playing with since receiving it ...
A simple trick to encourage lecture participation
It’s the time of year when teaching is very much on my mind. In an essay about his teaching style, Michael Scott says something about encouraging student participation that stuck with me: