Category: Administration – Announcements

Now that I have the “new” computer working, I have to spend a couple of days on the mend myself:  I had surgery for a hernia on Wednesday.  My plan was to to a “live blog” on the efficiency of hospital operating procedures.  I guess I can tell you that general anesthesia works pretty well, since I have absolutely no memory between “Just slide onto the table here” and “How are you feeling?  Ready to go?”.  So give me a couple of days then I will be ready to take on the OR world again, with upcoming conferences in South Africa and New York.

If you see this, rather than the previous message “This blog is moving”, this means the blog has moved, and I should be active again!  Please let me (trick@cmu.edu) know of any problems.

It is time for us to return from our year in New Zealand.  If you want to see a few hundred pictures of our year, you can check out our New Zealand blog. We are now deep into shipping and packing.  In a fit of insanity, we decided to stop off at Disneyland for a few days on the way back.  So no posts for a few days.  But I am sure my loyal readers will be pushing the cause of Operations Research at every opportunity!

First, Happy Thanksgiving to any US readers. Since I am in New Zealand, my staying home on Thursday did not correspond to Thanksgiving but rather a beautiful day keeping me near the beach.

Second, I’ve moved all my blog reading over to Google Reader, which allows me to add a couple things to the sidebar. A new, improved blog roll is a more extensive list of OR blogs. Again, if I am missing some, please let me know. Also, I can now flag interesting things I see in either the OR blogs or in the other blogs I run across. Those postings are in the “Things I am Reading” box. Perhaps you will find something useful (or weird!) there.

This blog is now two years old. One year ago, I wrote

I’ve had 92 posts (93 counting this one) in that year, which seems like a reasonable number.I’ve had about 8000 visitors to the blog, which seems pretty good. Not up with the big boys (sites like BoingBoing) with millions of visitors, but ahead of lots of sites. The visitors have provided some commentary activity (69 comments, about half from me). I only have eight other blogs linking to me (ranking the blog 316,042 at Technorati) so I need to get the blogrolling thing going better.

It is amazing the amount of spam comments that are generated. My system has protection against such comments (Akismet) and it has caught 2,205 (!) spam comments.

My posting frequency is down a little bit with 83 posts (I’d like to get it up to a consistent twice per week) ; comments are up to 123, again half from me; 20 blogs point to me putting my Technorati ranking down to 415,686.   Average visitors per month has gone from 1000 to 2000.  The big increase: I received 38,000 (!) spam comments. Unbelievable!

The best thing: we are starting to see more blogs on OR. So check out the blogroll and spread the word!

I’ll be out of touch for a week or two as my family and I move to New Zealand for the year, with me visiting the University of Auckland. Of course, I have a blog for our New Zealand experience too!

It is great to hear from people out there interested in OR, but there are a couple types of email that I don’t like to get. I think lots of faculty have the same peeves. Jeffrey Ullman of Stanford (founder of much of database theory) has a nice page on this, which I will essentially copy here:

One class of email can be summarized as follows: “You don’t know me, but I have the following credentials and I would like you to arrange for me to be admitted to Stanford, in preference to someone with equally good or even better credentials.” I’m not sure why so many people think I, or any other faculty member — at Stanford or elsewhere — would decide to favor one unknown person over another. Sometimes their argument is that they want to work in my area. They seem to fantasize that there is some competition among areas at Stanford, and that I would push for the admission of someone just because they claimed to want to work in an area that I favored. However, it doesn’t work that way at Stanford, or any other American university that I know about.

Admittedly, there are some countries where PhD students are in effect hired by a faculty member and selected by them, but that’s not how it’s done here. At Stanford, a committee examines all applications and picks the ones with the most promise for study in Computer Science. The process is honest and objective. It is impossible to influence it through individual faculty, regardless of whether or not they are on the committee. In fact, I know of some faculty who will count it against you if you send this sort of email.

Whenever I get a “please treat me specially” letter, I respond with the following:

Thank you for your interest in Stanford. All admissions decisions are made by a committee of faculty and graduate students, and there is no point contacting individual faculty in the hope of bringing your case to their attention. Questions regarding admissions should be sent to admissions @ cs.stanford.edu You may also find out more about our department from URL http://www-cs.stanford.edu

Added Nov., 2003: A more recent variation is people asking for “summer internships.” Unfortunately, the same principle applies. You can’t get a student job at a university without being a student at that university. Faculty have a responsibility to serve the needs of the students at the school that pays their salary.

The second sort of email I get a lot of sounds like: “I really like your book on [fill in the blank], and I’m learning a lot. But I just have a doubt about the solution to Exercise 4.5.6. Could you please tell me the answer?” In a slight variant, it’s not a book exercise, but another problem whose solution they would like to see. I’m not that stupid. The chances are 98% that this is a homework assignment, and I’m not going to do your work for you. I therefore have developed a policy of responding to questions about material in my books only to bona-fide instructors. I rarely hear back when these email writers get the following stock response:

Thank you for your note. When I get these sorts of questions, I like to know first what school you are attending, what class you are taking, and who the instructor is (email if possible please). I suggest that first you discuss the problem with your local instructor. If they can't help you, then please ask them to get in touch with me.

Exactly. The doctoral web page for Carnegie Mellon’s doctoral program is http://www.tepper.cmu.edu/phd . All information on applying to the program is available there.