tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15695021830193706202012-01-28T12:47:44.192-05:00Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.comBlogger381100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-88264800537295917802008-03-02T06:36:00.002-05:002008-03-02T07:20:12.400-05:00

Between the end of classes last week and a paper deadline next week, I haven't done much outside of work lately. Last weekend though, I treated myself to a favorite spectator event: a master class in music. In a master class, music students perform for a master (usually renown) musician, who works with the student to improve the performance. The audience gets to watch the whole exchange, which

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-23329435007734631902008-02-02T07:50:00.000-05:002008-02-03T08:45:43.968-05:00

Earlier this week, I was passing my hour-long car commute in the usual ways: flipping radio stations (all were enamored of Journey this week, challenging the usual Fleetwood Mac dominance), rehearsing my morning lecture, running down the to-do list, and mentally composing emails to send as soon as I got into my office. It was a day full of one-liner emails, the sort that I sometimes imagine

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-78218045186302817532008-01-27T06:14:00.000-05:002008-01-27T06:56:11.522-05:00

A number of separate incidents left me thinking a lot about work/life balance these last couple of weeks: research deadlines near the start of term had me working a lot on weekends, bouts of sleeplessness had me up at my desk before 5am for several days running, multiple students came by to talk about academic career issues, and I heard yet another discussion on the oft-heard wisdom that older

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-33160665812852609742008-01-07T20:25:00.000-05:002008-01-08T06:56:33.046-05:00

Quote: "The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity." -- Bill Gates, Harvard University Commencement 2007I came across Gates' address a couple of days ago and highly recommend it. It's forceful, and this line pulled the main punch. Gates argues that many people are concerned about global issues such as economic inequity, but the problems are so complex that we

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-37976263063271537782007-12-31T16:23:00.000-05:002008-01-05T21:50:59.809-05:00

December 2007 took us to India again. We hadn't expected to return quite so soon, but one of our closest friends was getting married in Bangalore. The wedding ended up postponed, but we grabbed the opportunity for some new adventures anyway. We spent much of the time in the south-western state of Kerala, prompted in part by an invitation to visit a grad school friend of mine (Venkatesh) who

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-58401113704184937072007-11-04T06:03:00.000-05:002007-11-04T07:00:42.106-05:00

Blustery weather yesterday after a hectic week propelled me to do something I haven't done in years: read a book start to finish in a single day. I picked up Louann Brizendine's "The Female Brain" some weeks ago, intending to save it for travel reading. My fried brain was drawn to the subject yesterday, however, rewarding me with an eye-opening, unsettling, and thought-provoking

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-12761235736763393492007-10-22T22:33:00.000-05:002007-10-23T05:54:16.883-05:00

We're in Montreal for a long weekend. Montreal is a lovely mix ofEuropean and North American city life, full of cafes, ethnicrestaurants, mixed languages, and wanderlust-inspiring parks. Okay,more European than North American (though we could get the American League Baseball Championships on tv to see how the Red Sox/Indians series wound up). We get up here every few years andalways have a

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-24322145527265439542007-10-17T06:24:00.000-05:002007-10-17T06:41:51.102-05:00

While paying a stack of bills this morning, I noticed a new online payment option for one of our annual bills. With all the sabbatical travel we did last year, online bill pay and tracking was a lifesaver: I put monthly reminders into my calendar to login and pay our credit cards, billed the utilities directly, and didn't worry at all about missing payments while on the road. I had the

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-32210644911013184972007-09-30T20:32:00.000-05:002007-09-30T20:57:37.553-05:00

Ask a Rhode Islander for directions, and the response will likely include the phrase "where X used to be". In my 7 years living here, I've been told to make turns at landmarks like "where Joe's barber shop used to be" and "where the little place with the really good fried clams used to be". One day, Shriram and I came across a sign on a major street reading "former bus stop" and figured it was

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-14328504638274803842007-09-29T08:27:00.000-05:002007-09-29T07:25:09.588-05:00

One day in grad school (early 1990s), several of us were talking about the lack of women on the dept faculty. When a male student asked why this was important, one woman remarked that she "wanted someone who looks like me" as a mentor. I pondered that remark for years, not concurring with it but lacking a compelling alternative. Mid-postdoc, I wanted a mentor who talked like me: someone for

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-13681335265687019622007-09-23T06:04:00.000-05:002007-09-23T06:29:52.531-05:00

Last weekend, I had an incredibly productive burst of disorganization (so much so that it took a week to get organized enough to post about it). Quite simply, I ignored my two courses and played with a new research idea all weekend. It was simultaneously invigorating and frustrating. Frustrating in that even after two days, I couldn't point to any "solved" piece of the puzzle (the "cross it

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-49266460689594181092007-09-14T04:05:00.000-05:002007-09-14T04:42:00.851-05:00

Every new academic year brings a "new year's resolution" from many faculty: the intent to get "more organized". Even highly prolific colleagues have been quoted as wishing they were more organized, and one of the career mentoring programs I've been to had a nice session centered around the topic. Blogs and books abound to the extent that you could guarantee you got nothing done just by trying

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-48325498611895781182007-08-12T06:35:00.000-05:002007-08-12T05:36:07.894-05:00

I recently finished reading Peter Kramer's Against Depression. Kramer is the psychiatrist who wrote Listening to Prozac some years ago. In talks on the Prozac book, he frequently got questions about the tension between treating depression and the suppression of artistic temperament ("what if we gave van Gogh Prozac", for example). Against Depression is his discussion of society's view of

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-22401941755090510622007-08-11T10:11:00.000-05:002007-08-11T09:11:54.164-05:00

I had intended this post for the last Scientiae Carnival (topic: balance), but got tied up in work for a computer science curriculum workshop I ran at the end of July and never finished the post. That delay is, however, related to what I had planned to write about balance.I began blogging this spring in response to perceived lack of balance in my professional career. Lack-of-balance is easier

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-74570287464831581752007-07-22T08:24:00.000-05:002007-07-22T08:27:40.757-05:00

This morning, I gave into temptation and searched for a summary of howthe Harry Potter series ends (no spoilers here). I haven't followedthe books, though I have seen the movies. I didn't feel temptation toread the last book, but I still wanted to know what happened to thecharacters. Funnily enough, having read a paragraph-length summary ofthe ending, I now feel tempted to get the book and

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-406600361065612632007-07-17T08:09:00.000-05:002007-07-17T07:05:30.298-05:00

CRA, the main advocacy group for Computer Science research, recently cited a report on how companies decide where to locate R&D efforts. This is a hot topic in CS circles as perceptions of international outsourcing are at least partly responsible for the dramatic drop in student enrollments in recent years. [Note to students and parents: the perception is overhyped: more IT-related jobs are

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-44107764446626431272007-07-04T05:54:00.000-05:002007-07-05T12:21:04.575-05:00

Tuesday's New York Times ran an article (subscription req'd) on people who are denied access to health-related info (for themselves or family members) due to medical personnel not knowing how to interpret HIPAA regulations. HIPAA is one of the key pieces of US legislation governing privacy of medical information. Medical personnel apparently deny access in many cases that HIPAA would allow

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-78990400626481208922007-07-03T04:29:00.000-05:002007-07-03T04:59:16.602-05:00

Yesterday morning I was stuck on a research problem, so I went out for a run. Athletes often remark about how participating in sport taught them important lessons about time management and perseverance in other aspects of their lives. After pushing myself through a temptation to reduce the run to a walk, I ditched thinking about the research problem and turned to the question of athletic

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-83198885851103472982007-07-01T09:00:00.001-05:002007-07-01T10:01:11.630-05:00

Last month, Language Log had a post on how people learn to think like their professions. The article was written by a linguist, reporting on recent books by a doctor and a lawyer. According to the article, doctors and lawyers learn to think like their professions by comparing information obtained from patients/clients against the treatments and case law that they studied in school (I haven't

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-91916596396032945482007-06-13T08:28:00.000-05:002007-06-13T08:36:29.015-05:00

True confessions time. I've gotten oddly addicted to What Not to Wear (American version), a tv makeover show in which the victim of the week (usually female) has her wardrobe mocked and thrown away before getting fashion rules and being sent off to buy a new wardrobe, hair style and makeup routine (financed by the sponsors). I'd have expected to hate a show like this -- too much focus on

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-68818843317171975662007-06-12T12:03:00.000-05:002007-06-12T12:33:00.270-05:00

On a visit to Williamsburg, Virginia last weekend, I got in a bike ride on the Colonial Parkway, which extends from Jamestown to Yorktown via Williamsburg. The parkway is a scenic road with a surface of stone embedded in something like concrete. Speed limit is 45 mph and the car rattles quite a bit along the surface. On a bike, it's a whole body vibrating experience better than that of riding

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-77208149179102594052007-06-08T05:29:00.000-05:002007-06-08T06:00:27.792-05:00

I got a letter on our mortgage company's letterhead requesting insurance information on our condominium building. The letter instructs us to either fax the info (policy number and period, coverage amount, etc) or to log into a website using a PIN included in the letter. Something about the letter failed my smell test when it arrived a few days ago. Last night, I looked more closely.The

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-10897110400075449402007-06-07T04:40:00.000-05:002007-06-07T05:27:18.182-05:00

Catching up on some old Economist issues, I came across an article "Of bytes and briefs" from the May 19th issue. The article was about how electronic communications have raised new questions regarding information discovery in the legal system (such as what must be turned over in a request to produce documents) . The time required to comb e-data for proper disclosure is apparently becoming

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-87741317162926489732007-06-07T04:31:00.000-05:002007-06-07T04:39:53.369-05:00

A truly dreadful user-interface experience yesterday called for posting, but Shriram got to it first and included my angle so I'll just include a link to his post instead. Admittedly, I've been reading about usability a lot lately so I'm more conscious of such issues, but this application really is an affront to software design (and being used for a software engineering conference, no less!).

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-8515677088679609622007-06-02T07:17:00.000-05:002007-06-02T08:07:45.679-05:00

In the recent story about the airline passenger with a serious TB strain, the passenger got back into the US despite a border alert to detain him at entry. The border agent who processed him knew of the alert, but let him through because the agent decided he didn't look sick.In my quest to understand human decision making about security, I've been reading a book on Human Judgment and Social

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-85760406979625215032007-05-31T06:38:00.000-05:002007-06-02T15:06:41.607-05:00

Just this morning, I stumbled across the scientiae carnival of women bloggers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Their current topic (the subject line) took over my thoughts like a mid-afternoon sugar craving. Sabbatical has helped me understand my deepest career hunger: to interact regularly with a small network of friends with common professional interests. I

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-60537705806492104682007-05-29T06:18:00.000-05:002007-05-29T06:22:50.297-05:00

My sister responded to my first computational doping post with a link to a NYTimes article (subscription reqd) from a couple of weeks ago about an amputee with prosthetic legs who wants to compete in Olympic track. The jury is still out on whether he will be allowed to compete, with one of the major questions being whether his prosthetics give him an unfair competitive advantage.This got me

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-89818537262757960132007-05-28T07:00:00.000-05:002007-05-29T06:23:41.388-05:00

As a fan of road cycling, I've been following the Floyd Landis trial and recent doping revelations (mostly via velonews). The whole affair feels a bit like a witch-hunt at a wizarding convention, in that doping sounds sufficiently commom back in the late 90s that lots of riders probably could make confessions. The question remains whether they will be burned at the stake fueled by collective

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-87098493826522475382007-05-22T20:59:00.000-05:002007-05-22T21:20:13.305-05:00

Mountains inspire, overwhelm, and center me. A train ride through the Canadian Rockies has long been on my "do before die" list. So when Shriram had to go to Banff (in the Canadian Rockies) for a conference, no question I was going along. Everyone I know who's been to Banff raves about its beauty, so I went with high expectations.And a dose of trepidation. Banff trip planning is respite with

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-2900521939945887442007-05-06T09:26:00.000-05:002007-05-06T09:27:42.491-05:00

This spring, I am interacting more with the non-academic online world. I started writing a blog, following and commenting on other blogs, and learning about spaces such as Second Life. Not surprisingly, these experiences have me considering online identity, though not entirely in the way I expected. For a couple of days at the start of my blogging experience, I had two blogs: one personal and

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-27179217066920118262007-04-18T09:29:00.000-05:002007-05-06T09:35:19.141-05:00

[I wrote this in the days immediately after the Virginia Tech shooting, but chose to sit with it a while before posting. I have backdated it to when I originally wrote it.]The first time I felt afraid of a student, I was a graduate studentassisting in a course taught by a professor in my department. Theprofessor called my lab and asked me to come to his office with thegradebook. There, I found

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-76573251714110239272007-04-16T15:56:00.000-05:002007-04-16T16:02:48.943-05:00

An incident this weekend got me thinking again about plagiarism. As a professor, I've always been strict on detected plagiarism incidents in my courses (failure in the course if our judicial process finds the accused guilty). As a pragmatist, I believe there must be a better way to think about and handle this issue though. I appreciate arguments, such as Jason Johnson's recent Washington Post

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-39420180053369132007-04-12T19:48:00.000-05:002007-04-13T07:04:30.500-05:00

I'll join the masses commenting on the last stanza of Kurt Vonnegut's Requiem this week. I haven't read much Vonnegut. Matter of fact, the work I most associate with him is the "wear sunscreen" commencement speech which was mistakenly attributed to him when it first went around.So why blog on it? The last stanza of Requiem, which his NY Times obituary quoted, just hit a nerve. I think a lot

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-18862731618268574442007-04-12T07:11:00.000-05:002007-04-15T19:30:44.880-05:00

A colleague pointed me to an essay entitled "The Death of Computing" over on the British Computer Society website (author: Neil McBride; dated: Jan 2007). The article offers several reasons for why CS enrollments will never return to their lofty heights of a few years ago. The main one (and the most compelling) is that the marketplace of students no longer finds CS necessary for creating

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-4708755277393672092007-04-10T05:39:00.000-05:002007-04-18T16:37:59.329-05:00

I do not travel comfortably without knowing how to stammer some basic phrases in the local language. Addressing this is usually easy: work the corresponding Pimsleur language course. For Portuguese, this process was surprisingly representative of the culture as a whole.Getting the course was the first challenge. The most readily available is Brazilian Portuguese, which differs noticeably from

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-67350532195666193432007-04-09T05:48:00.000-05:002007-04-16T04:39:21.627-05:00

Before I started this blog, I posted a travelogue of my first trip to Australia on my webspace. Just archiving it here for easier access.

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-16855399153177406732007-04-08T05:42:00.000-05:002007-04-11T05:48:04.574-05:00

Before I started this blog, I posted a travelogue of my first trip to India on my webspace. Just archiving it here for easier access.

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1569502183019370620.post-3156627565322659812007-04-07T05:38:00.000-05:002007-04-15T19:27:55.749-05:00

And now my sabbatical takes me into the blogsphere. I've traveled lots of neat places while on leave this year and written notes on them (more on that in another post). A blog will be a lot easier than emailing new urls to family and friends after each trip. More importantly, though, challenging myself to look for observations to report has been an invaluable part of my sabbatical. Starting

Kathi Fislerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11193961458230670045noreply@blogger.com0