What to Ask When You're Applying to Grad School

MIT had EECS visit days last March, when I first wrote a draft of this.  It was another year of meeting enthusiastic young'uns eager to publish papers and win Turing Awards, which can make one feel even older and crankier.

Since it's application season again, I thought it was time to dig this up. In computer science, prospective graduate students go on a whirlwind set of visit days, where they tour departments, talk to potential advisors, and chat with grad students. It's a heady experience -- famous professors try to woo you to their school. It seems to me prospective PhD students never ask the right questions, and thus don't get good answers to help them make a decision.  Which is unfortunate, because they are making a decision about the next six years of their lives! Where you go can greatly affect your happiness. So if you're applying to graduate school in computer science, you might find this post useful.

Here are some things to think about before you actually start chatting with students and visiting prospective schools:

Think about your goals.  Are you interested in pure academia, or would you like to do some work in industry as well?  What kinds of things do you want to learn, and what skills do you want to acquire? What might you do afterwards?

Figure out your learning style.  Do you prefer a lot of contact, or would you rather be left alone? Do you learn best by taking classes, or by digging into a problem immediately? Different research groups have different personalities and research styles.

Think about what advising style works for you.  It's hard to get a feel for this, but different professors have very different advising strategies. Some like to engage with industry and work on open source software. Some like to publish a lot, while others prefer to work on fewer big pieces of work. One thing that varies the most is the amount of contact you'll have.  Another complication is that some professors actually change advising styles as they progress through their careers; think about students who might know best what the advisor's style is currently, and what it will be over the next few years.

Ask the same questions to many graduate students, and particularly graduate students with different properties.  Everyone is biased! Find out about different experiences. For example, you should talk to students who plan on staying in academia and ones who intend to go to industry.

Formulate specific questions.  There is a natural tendency to gloss over the hard bits of grad school, so try to be probing and ask about specific things students can't fudge. As an example, "When was the last time you did X?" instead of "Do you do X in your group?"

Once you've done a little thinking, you'll be in a much better position to ask good questions and interpret the answers.  Here are some concrete questions you can use depending on your goals.  Be diplomatic; but don't be afraid to do some investigating:

If you definitely want to stay in academia, ask:

• How many students has this professor graduated? How many stayed in academia?  

• How many dropped out before finishing? What did they do after they left?

• Does your advisor introduce you to people at conferences?  Who have you met?

• Has anyone transferred out of the group recently?  Where did they go, and why? (Also try to talk to them.)

If you work best when people leave you alone/you work best when someone checks up on you a lot, ask:

• How often do you meet with your advisor? How variable is this?  

• When was the last time you just walked into their office without an appointment? How often do you?

• How often are they actually in their office? What hours during the day?

• How quickly do they respond to your emails? Do they email you often?

• Which sections of your last paper did your advisor write, and which did you write? Did your advisor read the whole thing? Did they edit your text?

• Did your advisor write code for your project? How much?

If you are not sure what to work on, and would appreciate guidance in picking a research problem, ask:

• Did your advisor give you specific problems to work on your first year?

• Have you ever felt lost, like you didn't know what to work on? How did you overcome it?

• Can you walk me through a typical research meeting with your advisor?

• What's the longest someone has taken to finish a PhD in your group?  How often does that happen?

If it's important to you to be in a positive, social environment, ask:

• What do you think about this paper, X?  (You're looking to see if they trash it out of hand).

• Do you do practice talks? How many? What's it like to do a practice talk in front of your group?  

• When was the last time your group socialized together outside of lab? How often does it happen?

• When was the last time your advisor said something positive and affirming about your work? What was it?

• Do you acknowledge birthdays in your group, or frequently talk about vacations and things outside of research?

If you really want to work with other people, ask:

• How do students in your group manage their code?  Do you use version control?  

• Are there centralized resources available to the group (like documentation), or does everyone do their own thing?  

• When was the last time you shared code (latex templates included)?

• How many of the last few papers from the group had multiple students publishing together?

If you really want to work on your own stuff, ask:

• How long were you here before you published a first author paper?

• Do students work on (and own) different projects, or do they all collaborate on a few big projects?

• Does this professor work mostly on a few specific topics, or do his/her students work on lots of different things? 

If you want to have a reasonable work/life balance, ask:

• Which professor's students would you expect to see in the lab on a Saturday night?

• What is the process for taking vacation? How much did you take last year? (Not counting conferences!)

• How late do students usually stay in lab when there isn't a deadline?

• How often did you TA?

I didn't touch on issues like funding, because it seems to me this isn't a problem in most computer science programs. And of course there are a lot of caveats to all of this; take each student's opinion with a grain of salt. But try to notice patterns! Sometimes the most highly-ranked graduate program or most rockstar advisor isn't the one where you, specifically, will be most successful. Getting a PhD is pretty amazing when you are happy and productive in your environment. Best of luck!

Thanks to Ted Benson, Jon Gjengset, Elena Glassman, Adam Marcus, and Jean Yang for reading drafts of this.

Learning to Code

First off, I'm not one of those people who thinks EVERYONE MUST LEARN TO CODE.  That said, if you don't know anything about programming, it can help to learn a little so you don't feel like everyone is speaking a language you don't understand.

I wrote up a little page on how to start if you know absolutely nothing.  TL;DR: work through this book.

Unintended Consequences

Paul Graham recently decided to change the way comments work on Hacker News, a popular and influential link aggregator website used by programmers and other techies.  Getting to the "top of Hacker News" is a big accomplishment in tech circles; I even hear people in my lab talking about it.

The change means that by default, comments are not shown on the website, and instead multiple users with a high enough karma must endorse a comment before it becomes visible.  Users seem to receive karma by posting and commenting things that get upvoted (I don't know the details).

I believe the users of Hacker News are mostly male.  I hypothesize that users with karma greater than the endorsement threshold skews even more male; I wonder if the percentage of women in that group is even over 1%.  If my hypothesis is correct, an interesting consequence of this policy change is that a woman's comment cannot appear on Hacker News without a man endorsing the comment.

How does that sit with you?  

I haven't even stated any opinions yet; I just pointed out a result if my hypothesis is true.  You might think that statement is fine; I find it troubling because it means that it's possible some users' voices and opinions won't get heard on a site that is influential and important, perhaps because the majority finds them controversial.  It also just feels wrong.

Sometimes criteria that appear to be based on "merit" have troubling consequences.  We should encourage people and companies to think deeply about unintended, potentially troubling consequences of their actions.

Disclaimer: My PhD advisor also runs Hacker News.

Lowest Common Denominator

This post probably won't say anything that hasn't been said before, but I was thinking about Whatsapp and their success.  A lot of people I talk to here at MIT find the whole thing insane and really don't understand how on earth this could happen.

Most people understand international SMS (and even SMS within some countries) is expensive.  But I've heard so many people ask "Why not Gchat?  Why not Facebook Messenger?  Doesn't almost everyone already have one of those accounts anyway?"

When it comes to group communication, you have to look at the lowest common denominator.  If you have 5 friends who all want to communicate and one of them is on an old Nokia, it doesn't matter if the majority of you have iPhones -- you install Whatsapp because it has an iOS and J2ME client.  It's the only thing that will work across all the phones in your group.  Once you're using it for that, if it doesn't suck, you'll use it for everything else.

Even if 99% of the world were on Facebook, if anyone wanted to talk to that 1%, they would have to use something besides Facebook Messenger.  Or leave them out, of course.  One person I talked to said in the above situation he'd obviously just drop the Nokia user as a friend :).  But for most of us, that's not how small group communication works.

I think this effect, combined with a decent chat experience, is what made Whatsapp grow so fast.  Think about that next time you consider only doing an iOS or Android app.

Who Really Owns Your Phone?

I was working on some text about interoperability on the web, and found myself getting up in arms about how far we've strayed from the initial ideals of the internet.  The web was founded on principles of open, democratic access.  Any computer could put up a website; given an internet service provider, any user could connect to it.

There has been a trend towards closed platforms controlled by a single company, the most popular being Apple's App Store.  These walled gardens offer many benefits -- users can (usually) trust the applications they install, there's one place to go to look for apps, and developers have a centralized place to focus on promotion.  Overall app stores greatly simplify the mobile app experience.

But of course, they have their downsides.  Namely, they are sucking away our freedom and rights to run whatever code we want on our devices.  Developers are subject to arbitrary rejections -- Omar said that a friend's app was recently rejected for being too "avant garde", whatever that means -- which keeps them out of the primary distribution channel, and not available to users at all.

So, just avoid the app store, right?  Not so easy.  The debate over HTML5 websites vs. native apps on mobile is an excellent example of this. HTML5 offers platform independence, ease of updating code, and freedom from app store censorship. Native means the app will be faster, work offline, and have more access to phone hardware.  Which app is going to be more pleasant for the user?

What really frightens me, and makes me feel incredibly hypocritical for writing this on a MacBook Air, is the thought that Apple might make this the dominant model for desktop apps, too.  They are already sort of trying with the App Store on OSX.  I definitely don't want an Apple approval process coming between my laptop and what code I can run.  To be fair, it's a bit worrisome that Google is trying to move to a world where I don't have any access to my hardware except through a (Google-controlled) web browser.

Downloading, compiling, and running arbitrary code is not just for hackers.  The ability to do this is vital for encouraging competition and giving users choice.

Similarly on the web, there's a movement to closed sites that hold our data hostage.  And even though they might offer ways to download our data in a lump, they don't offer easy connections to share and move data between services.  The worst is when they arbitrarily decide to treat services differently and promote or debilitate one over another; see the Instagram/Twitter fiasco.  More and more user creation is moving behind these walls, making it inaccessible to third party applications.  This stifles innovation -- we have to wait for a single company to decide to build and push out features, instead of farming out this work to the wide world of developers, and seeing what sticks.

Unfortunately I don't have any answers, just questions:

What kind of technology can we build that encourages and promotes interoperability in this new world? 

How do we solve the issues of safety and curation if we don't use app store walled gardens?  

What kind of understanding do users have about their choices, and how do we encourage them to make ones that are in their best long term interests?

actually not so transient

I was going back and looking at old posts, because I vaguely remember writing something mean about something that might come back to haunt me today and I was trying to find it to belatedly hide it.  Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised at what I used to write.  Sure, the pictures are all broken and I was clearly very wrong about some things, but I am not totally embarrassed about what I wrote in 2007.  Some of it wasn't so bad.

At times I used this thing like Instagram, but well, now there's Instagram, so I probably won't do that anymore.  I can't believe I started writing here in 2006, over six years ago!  Little did I know visiting MIT in March 2007 that I'd be spending the next five years here (p.s. I just did a linking thing that I hate, using each word for an example of the phrase, but look at little 2007 neha visiting MIT!).  Actually at that point in time I was fairly sure I'd be back in SF real fast.

It's funny, I'm having some of the same dilemmas today that I had five years ago, like the question of where I want to live the rest of my life.  I lived in New York for a few months AGAIN and wasn't totally taken with it... I might just have to give up on having a life there.

Also, I think I was like half libertarian back then.  Defending chain stores?  Yikes.

Most of my sharing has spread to other services, but a lot of it just doesn't happen anymore (unless you happen to find me when I'm particularly up in arms about some issue [sorry Brian]).  No place has taken over as the comfortable place to rant.  I would like to start writing essays on contained topics.  Fear of being wrong or regretting what I write has kept me from doing it for years -- but looking back on this blog makes me feel a little bit better.  I was particularly moved by my friend's article on doing academic inquiry in public (spell check is telling me enquiry is wrong even though being an enquirer is a thing?  WTH english language).  Not writing means you aren't part of the conversation.

I'm still working out where I will write research stuff and where I will write personal stuff, but for now, I will just put everything here.  One of my New Years resolutions is to write a couple of sentences about every article I read, so I started a little tumblr here:  Neha's Grumbles.  It was initially called "Neha's Tidbits" or something but then I realized everything was negative so beware.  Anyway it's amazing how much less crap you read when you are forcing yourself to write about it.

Oh and re: TV go watch Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, and Homeland.  I also really like Nashville but that might just be because I'm starting to enjoy (tolerate?) country music.  Damn you Taylor Swift.

Records

I got a turntable for Christmas!  I don't know much about vinyl but I'm excited to explore.  So far I've just been buying used records from record stores and craigslist.  I have to admit, I don't completely understand the appeal -- I know a lot of music snobs will say that it sounds better, but I find that hard to believe given the quality of my DAC and lossless digital files.  Is it just nostalgia?  Novelty?  Mastering?  Maybe the art and concreteness of being able to hold your music.

Any advice on where to buy records and what to get would be greatly appreciated!  I think it would be fun to build out a jazz collection on vinyl.

2012 Predictions

Cause, why not?

Here are some ruminations on what might happen this year.

Silicon Valley continues to be surprised the other half of the population exists.

More and more "surprising" success stories (like that of Pinterest or Fab.com) will surface.  There's so much room for growth in areas involving fashion and lifestyle design.  The shopping process for clothes, makeup, personal care products, shoes, jewelry, and home decor is still so flawed.  People who are interested in those areas currently don't have the buying experience that someone who wants, say, a camera would have, and the thought process of the consumer when purchasing those items is usually more irrational -- a random post on a small blog or a picture in a magazine can lead to desire and products selling out.

The explosion of curation and information management applications.

Things are getting crazy.  It's too easy to constantly spend time dipping into the firehose of information coming from friends, email, facebook, blogs, twitter, and other sources online.  We're already seeing the growing popularity of private information management tools like Evernote and Instapaper, and what will come next are even more sophisticated tools to enable a user to quickly skim through a deluge of information, saving the bits and pieces that seem relevant, and then providing contextual results on whatever device when it's relevant.

And editors and curators will become even more important.  We'll start to place a growing proportion of trust in the most popular voices, simply because there's too much to deal with and we need help filtering.

Local businesses will wise up.

Local businesses will start spending smarter to advertise online.  The good businesses will only offer deals when it makes sense to them -- during down times or to get rid of surplus inventory.  Only low quality businesses that have trouble getting customers will continue to offer blanket deals like we see now.  We will also see a lot more dynamic pricing.

Several major security breaches.

In terms of security, things are going to get worse before they get better.  Web application security is still full of holes.  I predict more major companies will experience data loss, and more rogue groups will cause trouble -- and I don't just mean groups like Anonymous defacing company websites, I mean malicious hackers (who might be nationally supported) disrupting food supply chains, utilities, or other major services that aren't properly protected.  

Fall!

It's a new school year!  Remember the first day of school?  Nothing beats that feeling of new notebooks and overwhelmed freshmen.  It's times like this that I love the east coast, and Cambridge in particular.  This is the center of the world for education and you can feel everyone getting ready for the new semester.  In the past I've limited the amount of non-research things I did, but I decided this semester I would take classes in anything I found interesting, regardless of how it connects to my work.  So far I've tried out six classes (about five too many):

6.893, Philosophy and Theoretical Computer Science, taught by Scott Aaronson.  I am *really* excited about this class!  I tried taking philosophy classes in undergrad and got really turned off, but I like the idea of approaching it from TCS.  In theory we rarely get to ask what this stuff really *means* and what its implications are to what can be done or known in the world, and I like the idea of indulging in that.  It's 3 hours a week of interesting reading and discussion, and it looks like Scott is going to record lectures, so you can listen in!

9.29, Introduction to Computational Neuroscience and 6.804 Computational Cognitive Science, taught by Michale Fee and Josh Tenenbaum, respectively.  People who study brains and AI here at MIT are starting to ask the big questions again -- there's a new Intelligence Initiative, bringing together people from neuroscience, cognitive science, computer science, economics, and biology to get at how intelligence works.  So interesting!  My background in physics and statistics is pretty terrible, so I don't think I'm going to take these classes for credit, though it's nice to learn a new vocabulary and see how other fields operate.

9.S915, What is Intelligence?  Are you seeing a theme here?  This course meets once a week and does a huge survey over all the areas mentioned above -- I'm skeptical about how valuable it will be, in the first class we spent two hours going over statistical learning theory really, really fast.  I still have no idea how to make a good learning algorithm.

6.853, Topics in Algorithmic Game Theory, taught by Costis.  I miss math soooo much, and I find game theory pretty fascinating -- in fact I wrote my NSF planned research essay on game theory, but then proceeded to do something completely different.  I'd like to think about applying game theory to security! There's a pretty cool systems security class being taught this semester too, but I think I might have picked up a lot of what's being taught in my past research.

After a long summer of trying to do one thing and not being very effective, I'm really excited to take classes, go to colloquia, and in general try lots of new things this semester.  It's funny how trying to force one project can be demotivating, devolving into a cycle of trying to work harder/getting less done.  One of my goals this year is to learn to work in a very minimal, effective way.  Last summer I remember being so sad when the days started getting colder, but this year I can't wait for fall.  It's seriously the best season ever (and we need something to brag about weather-wise on the east coast):

• trees exploding in color and crunchy leaves everywhere
• apple picking, apple pies, apple cider, and cinnamon in everything
• cozy sweaters and corduroy
• crisp mornings where you can see the steam on your coffee
• scarves
• the feeling of starting over you get with the new school year

It's funny, I'm actually starting to feel like I'm in the right place.  I've spent three years here unclear on what I was doing and worrying that I was missing the boat on other things -- being able to program and create products is a huge privilege and I worried I was wasting it.  I believe technology (in particular software and the internet) is the fastest, most powerful source of transformation we can harness, but the thought of spending my time on a local-mobile-game-coupon thing never seemed inspiring.  

So far I feel good about what I'm doing this semester.  It feels nice.

Edit:

• cider doughnuts
• boots
• new coats
• PUMPKINS (in all forms: pumpkin beer, pumpkin bread, pumpkin pie, pumpkin chai)

MemSQL

MemSQL Raises $2.1 Million, from Techcrunch: http://t.co/AlaVV0b

But just what is it about this young startup that has investors fired up? MemSQL is a scalable in-memory database that, according to co-founder and CEO Eric Frenkiel, is up to 30-times faster than relational databases on disk.

I'm a bit confused about this company -- it's nice to see people focusing on solving the scalability issue for those who choose to stick with SQL, but getting a 30x performance over disk-based solutions with an in-memory solution is laughable.  Was something lost in the interview?

TV Box Update

I was trying to decide if I should get a set top box or make my own home theater PC.  Here's the list of things I want to do, in decreasing priority order:

• browse and stream videos and music I've downloaded onto a computer on my TV
• browse and stream videos from a networked file share on my TV
• watch Netflix Instant and Hulu
• watch the occasional youtube video
• use a remote-like interface to do this, not a keyboard and mouse

I don't care about TV capture or DVR capabilities, and I don't really want to browse the internet much on my TV.   I have been evaluating all the options out there but not paying a lot of attention to little technical details like what inputs/outputs are available or how much processing power a box has.  Mostly just features.

I settled on getting a dedicated HTPC and running Boxee, and like an idiot, I tried to save money doing it.  I am going to describe my experience so you can avoid my pain.

The pros of a set top box, like Roku, Boxee, Popcorn Hour, WDTV, or Google TV are that they're fairly easy to set up, and they do what they're supposed to do pretty well.  If you just want to watch Netflix Instant on your TV instead of your laptop, I'd go with Roku.  If you are already a gamer, then the PS3 and Xbox come with a lot of nice features as well.

The biggest limitation is flexibility.  The streamers (like Roku) tout a variety of "apps" which basically means arcane forms of web content you probably don't want to waste your time on.  The major ones people care about are Netflix Instant, Hulu, and Amazon VOD.  These get you pretty far, but don't get you everything.  The streamers are not designed to play content off your local network (aka files you've ripped or bittorrented), and though some of them have hacked in ways to do so, I don't want to deal with that.  There are issues with codecs and installing software on your computer which contains the content which sound annoying.  Things like WDTV only play content off local drives, and do it well, but do nothing to solve the problem of moving internet-TV to your TV.

Unfortunately, I don't know what GoogleTV really does.  The features page doesn't say anything about local content.

Apple TV, obviously, locks you into Apple's world, and it's underpowered.  You can theoretically play any local content, but only if you go through the hassle of converting it (using something like Handbrake).  If you mostly live in Apple's world, this is absolutely the choice I'd recommend.  It's $99, Youtube and Netflix Instant work.  If you use iPhones and iPads there will be nice integration.  And who knows, maybe Apple will reach an agreement with Hulu in the future, since there is an app for Hulu Plus in the app store.  Don't hold your breath on Amazon VOD, but of course you have the iTunes store.

The Boxee box sounds like the closest thing to what I'd want to use, but based on the CrunchGear and Engadget reviews,  it's still rough around the edges, and I'd have to have faith that they'd iron out the issues.  Also, I couldn't justify buying the box when I could get an actual fully powered machine which can do anything for a similar price and just run Boxee on that (oh, how naive I was).  In addition, I worry about Boxee cutting off content.  They have to reach agreements with Netflix and Hulu in order to show that content in their software, and because they control the box, I'm subject to that.  With my own system, I can just run a web browser and do it outside of the media software.  Agreements could be reached or cancelled on a whim.  They're unreliable.

There are downsides to getting an HTPC, and interestingly enough many of them are psychological.  There's a lot of choices to be made, and just having options causes me stress.  I have to evaluate all the specs and decide which features I want.  I have to evaluate, buy, and connect my own remote.  There's a lot of temptation to buy a TV tuner card and an antenna, set up Mythbuntu or other DVR software, and cut out my cable provider entirely, even though this is something I'm pretty sure would cause me a lot of headaches.  Probably the cheapest way to get an HTPC is to buy the parts and assemble it yourself, which gives a combinatorial explosion of choices.

So, I went the route that involved purchasing the least amount of stuff.  I found an abandoned case and parts around the lab, put them together, and installed Ubuntu, Boxee, Hulu Desktop, and Rhythmbox.  I haven't done the work to see if I can make Netflix Instant work (it might with Wine or Moonlight).  Boxee has this really cool feature where you can hook up twitter and facebook accounts, and it shows you a feed of all the videos your friends are sharing on those networks.  I really really like this, because usually when I'm browsing twitter or fb I'm on my phone or I don't feel like watching videos, so I miss a lot of content.  It also has a bookmarklet you can use in your browser to bookmark videos which get queued up in Boxee for when you're back in front of it later.

Lifehacker has great guides on how to set up an HTPC using hardware that costs < $250, with either Boxee or XBMC.  Lifehacker also has some guides on automatically getting shows (for XBMC, but it should work for Boxee) for what isn't available through the usual Boxee interface.

Ok, so I have managed to successfully create a box without spending any money. Instead I spent like a month of my time.  Go warped Indian value system.

This might save someone pain -- Google keywords here -- nvidia boxee can't play local video choppy video fullscreen full screen hulu flash ubuntu maverick osx remote desktop.  End keywords.

First off, I had an on-board video card.  Boxee was slow.  Really slow.  And I couldn't really watch videos full screen.  Hulu desktop and watching stuff in Chrome, however, was fine.  I have concluded that Boxee uses a shit ton of CPU for its fancy application graphics.

Also, flash was warped.  I downloaded Flash Square 10.2 (64bit) and copied that over to the appropriate Boxee directory.  That fixed flash, and I could watch Comedy Central.  I still can't watch ABC Family (what?  leave me alone.  there are some good shows) but Fancast works too, and now even Hulu if you follow these instructions to fake your user agent.  That keeps you in Boxee's world, but Hulu Desktop is quite nice too.  NBC seems ok but freezes a lot.

I also installed a new video card.  That involved adding a whole bunch of drivers, as well --

sudo apt-cache search nvidia

and see what's what.  I think I added jockey-gtk and nvidia-current

There were a bunch of tricky things where I couldn't play local .avi files unless I turned off weird things like Media->Advanced->Enable hardware assisted decoding when possible and set Render Method to Software.  Then I installed libvdpau1, and reverted those settings.  search for that too.

You have to restart to let the drivers take over hardware support, and let nvidia write an xorg.conf file.  Once I did that, Boxee got *much* snappier, probably because there was CPU left over for it to waste rendering its pretty buttons.

What is really nice is playing all my music through this server, and by extension, through my fancy speakers.  Boxee has a few android apps for a remote, which I haven't used too much, but I found that someone wrote a server for Rhythmbox so that you can use the android banshee remote app.  It is annoying, however, because you have to manually sync a db file of your music metadata to your phone in order to do more than play, pause, next, previous.  Anyway I don't even know why I'm using Rhythmbox.  I need a decent music app for Ubuntu.

In Ubuntu, I enabled remote desktop and turned off the password to login.  I use ChickenVNC on my mac laptop to VNC into display :0 and control the mouse and keyboard.  All of this took a lot of futzing, and I don't even remember all the details.  But now I actually feel comfortable killing my Comcast cable.

updates

I have been horribly delinquent on this blog but in order to push some of the other posts down I am doing this random list of thoughts:

1. MySQL is way faster when you take out the MySQL part.  And you can use it both ways.  So all you NoSQL people let it go.
2. I completed my master's thesis at the beginning of September (a system called Dixie), and submitted a paper to Eurosys which probably won't get in, but that's ok!
3. Despite that, I am not quitting grad school, so everyone stop asking me when I'm leaving.
4. I have seen the following artists recently:  Sinden, Rusko, Crystal Castles, Holy Fuck (twice), Caribou, the Drums, Sleigh Bells, LCD Soundsystem (twice), Four Tet (twice),  Miike Snow, El Ten Eleven, !!!, Die Antwoord, Deadmau5, and Connector (friends' band).
5. After months of auditioning, I bought a pair of kickass new speakers, a new amplifier and a DAC which probably deserves its own post.  I am officially an audiophile.  My soundsystem is amazing and I love it.
6. I just got back from a week long trip to SF and it was fantastic.  I stayed with Niniane which was awesome (slumber party!) and realized that I could live there again.  There are so many things I love and hate about San Francisco.  Hard decisions in my future!
7. I'm going to India for three weeks in November.  New Delhi for most of the time, Goa, and then either Rajasthan or Mumbai.  Advice on SIM cards and internet connectivity would be greatly appreciated!
8. I am trying to figure out what new computers to buy.  I want a very lightweight laptop, and am thinking one of the new Macbook Airs pending reviews.  But then I also want some kind of home server/media center, and I'm not sure if I should buy one of those little boxes or get a massively powerful linux server or what.

finally learning how to cook indian food

So I made one of my favorites, baingan bharta. Or as I like to call it, bangin' berta.

Onions, garlic, jalapeno, and tomatoes. The base for any indian sabji.

roasted eggplant.  I baked it in the toaster oven for 45 minutes at 450 degrees.  I think it could've gone a little longer.

the mush

done! By the way, this is the first time i have EVER COOKED INDIAN FOOD by myself.  I only had to call my parents from the grocery store and beforehand to get the recipe :).  Not bad.

Edit:  Here's the requested recipe.

1.  Bake 1 large or 2 medium sized eggplants in the oven at 450 for 45 minutes to an hour.  Poke holes in them first to vent, and line the tray with aluminum foil because they will leak a lot.  My dad wanted me to roast them over an open stove flame for 30 minutes but I used the toaster oven which was way easier.  When it's done remove the skin and mush/chop it all up.

2.  Chop up 2 onions (I did 1.5), 2 tomatoes, 3 cloves of garlic, and 1 jalapeno pepper

3.  Add a few tablespoons of oil to a pot, brown the onions.  At the halfway point add the garlic and continue browning.

4.  Add the tomatoes and jalapeno, stir and cook for a few minutes

5.  Add (this is really rough) salt to taste (half a teaspoon?), half a teaspoon of tumeric, and however much red pepper you want

6.  Add the eggplant.  Cook for a little while longer, stirring frequently.  Add some garam masala at the end and garnish with cilantro if you have it.  Done!  Serve with naan, roti, pitas, or rice.

fat robot

I am going to rename this blog "crazy shit my family says"

Megan: my friend has an android next to their name

  ODES THAT MEAN THEY ARE GCHATTING FROM THE NEXUS

 me: or an android like yours

 Megan: DO I GET AN ANDROID

  WHEN I AM GHATTING FROM THERE

9:47 PM me: yes

 Megan: OMG

  OMG

 me: oh dear.

 Megan: I DO

 me: well try it now

 Megan: why didn't you tell me

  ok

  i signed in

  but i'm also online on my comp

  which does it choose

  HAVE YOU SEEN AN ANDROID NEXT TO ME

 me: sign off your comp

  no.

9:48 PM Megan: it won't sign me in

  for some reason

  something is wrong :(

 me: well fix it.

 Megan: omg i want an android

  next to my name

  he is so CUTE

  do you see any

 me: no.

9:49 PM oh, any?

  yes

 Megan: oh

 me: i see 2

  currently.

 Megan: there is an option to show mobile indicator to friends

  perhaps that is it

9:51 PM me: well?

  did you do it?

 Megan: no

  phone is unhappy

 me: no android for you.

  there is an android on the back of my nexus

  waving a flag

 Megan: i know

  i have one too

  he is fat

 me: with a FLAG?

 Megan: ok now i'm on

  NOW I"M ON

  WHAT DOES IT SAY

 me: and a qcode

  you are a fat robot.

9:52 PM Megan: I AM

  I AM

  !!!!!!!!!!!!

  !!!!!!!!

  AM I REALLY

  don't lie

 me: yes.

 Megan: sawweeeeeeeeeeeet

 me: how do i take a screen shot on a mac?

 Megan: i dunno

  oh man

  this is awesome

  how come i'm not a fat robot on my screen

kind of disturbed

My dad:

my car
2 messages

---

Neha Narula	Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 2:55 PM
To: anarulamd
is on its way!!! also, i lost my MIT id a few weeks ago and had to get another one, and i just found the old one.  do you want it? neha

---

arun narula	Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 2:58 PM
To: Neha Narula
YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS [Quoted text hidden] -- Arun Narula

three words to describe 2009: an analysis

I was looking at Richard Wiseman's* blog, and noticed these two posts where he asked male and female commenters to post three words that describe 2009 for them.  I'm sure he's going to do some kind of analysis on it eventually, but because I am supposed to be writing a paper, I couldn't resist downloading the posts and checking out the differences.  I haven't run my grep-awk-uniq-count magic on it yet, but it's interesting that right off the bat the women-post mentions "stress" 26 times while the man-post mentions it 7 times.

Men's post:  If you are male, read this!

Women's post: If you are female, read this!

*Note: It is not really clear to me who this guy is.


Edit:  I calculated word frequencies.  I made a half-assed attempt to get rid of non-applicable text in the page.  This is probably inaccurate but gives a general gist.


Women:

15 love
13 stressful
11 sad
11 hope
11 fun
10 stress
10 new
10 busy
9 change
8 growth
8 frustrating
8 friends
7 challenging
6 work
6 sex
6 life
6 fast
6 family

Men:

31 change

18 love

15 hope

11 work

11 fun

8 happy

7 science

6 unemployed

6 stress

6 friends

6 death

5 travel

5 success

5 struggle

5 obama

5 climate

5 busy

4 words

4 twitter

Edit 2: I should so be working instead of mucking around with this.

Edit 3: Comments were broken on my blog? Thanks niniane for telling me!  Should be all fixed.  Comment away.

Edit 4:  Dude.  At least I called tolower() in my half-assed attempt to clean things up.  The original author's generated word clouds.

procrastination

I am supposed to be working on my master's thesis proposal. So of course instead, I am reading twitter (among other completely wasteful things), and in addition to seeing rumors that Google might buy Yelp, I saw that Groupon was valued at 250 million dollars.

Um, holy crap.  This company is a year old!  And apparently they are making money hand over fist!  This is brilliant in so many ways.  First, it plays off people's irrational desire to buy something just because it's a deal.  Then, it works on our instinct to grab something because it's expiring soon.  Finally, it takes advantage of our laziness, because what percentage of people actually go redeem the thing they pre-bought?  And does Groupon get to keep that money if they don't go redeem the coupon?  Cause I have a page sitting on my desk that's supposed to get me a year long pass to the Brattle ($30 for a $104 value!) which has been sitting here for over a month.  And will definitely be sitting here for at least another 3 weeks.  If I were them I would play like the airplanes and oversell a deal a little in anticipation that some people will never go redeem it.

Brilliant.

music i've been listening to over and over

This Matt and Kim song

This Fischerspooner song

It is really weirdly 67 degrees in Cambridge right now. 2 days ago it was in the 30s.

Edit: Embedded objects disappeared? Replaced with Grooveshark links.

organizing background research

I've been fuddling around with Zotero and a basic .bib file, but I think I found something more awesome:  Mendeley.  I found it looking for a PDF annotator, and it looks fantastic!  I'll update later after I've used it a while.  It even syncs with Zotero and can watch a folder for new PDFs.

the importance of urban design

Today I was walking down Vassar St. and Mass Ave and I was struck for the zillionth time how ugly the MIT campus is. My parents were visiting this past weekend, and they thought MIT was very impressive, but that Harvard was much more beautiful. Not only do many buildings have that this-was-trendy-in-the-70s architectural aesthetic going on (mine, of course, excluded), the campus is very badly laid out. I associate college campuses with cute cafes, a wide variety of cheap international food, hippie stores selling nag champa and tie-dye that couldn't survive anywhere else, and lots of culture. MIT has one crappy diner that no one goes to (maybe cause it closes at 4 PM) and a gay dance bar*. Seriously. That's it. These are the businesses in the center of campus. Oh, aside from the parking lot and Bank of America ATM.

I don't understand how this happened! Is this because they moved to Cambridge in 1916? It takes 93 years and counting to develop a proper urban landscape? We have over 10,000 students. 1,000 faculty. There are countless biotech firms in the area. Don't you think we could support a cafe closer than Central Square? Berkeley has Euclid and Telegraph (among others, I'm sure). Harvard has the entire square, even Dartmouth had a lot of great stuff in Hanover (I actually miss Dirt Cowboy Cafe and Rosey's was a great place to hide away).

I'm not really sure what to do about this, since I'm not about to get into the cafe business. But if you are, and you are thinking about opening something new, put it near MIT! I feel like a late-night source of caffeine would be totally packed. Better yet, a cafe that turns into a bar at night, European-style. Raze the BoA ATM. My last-ditch hope is that Clover ends up closer to campus. I think they are amazing and their truck is a really great addition to the area -- food that is healthy, organic, tasty, and fun.

* i have no issues with gay dance bars. I have a lot of issues with crappy diners serving boring food.