I'll Wear Your Clothes for Money

Times are tough for universities everywhere. Shrinking endowments have forced some schools to close departments, some to double tuition, and many others to freeze salaries and hiring. While the administration claims that CMU is doing better than its competition, I can't help but thinking of steps to guarantee that we can make ends meet.

I therefore have decided to start a limited-time offer: I'll wear clothes with your logo for money. Think about it, big software companies, what better way to recruit the top students than having their professor directly advertise to them? You'll see the results faster than you can say "Targeted Advertisement!"

I will wear your paraphernalia during every lecture. The prices quoted here are per semester.

Valentine's Day

Instead of spending time with my lovely fiancee, I've been thinking about dating sites. Before you romantics start yelling at me, (A) I'm cooking for her soon, and (B) this is strictly for work purposes: I'm trying to figure out if we can get people to do useful work while they flirt online (ideas about this are welcome). Just imagine: below the picture of a hot girl the site could say "This person is looking for somebody who can speak both French and English. You must translate this Wikipedia article to French before you can go on a date with them."

Anyhoo, related to dating sites:

• One thing I'm wondering is how the very first person signs up to a new dating site. If the site is completely empty, it makes little sense to spend time filling out a profile. I guess the same happens with new social networking sites, but the problem is more pronounced with dating sites, since there is (still) some stigma in writing a profile, and since you get no benefit out of a dating site unless it has people who are not your friends. My guess: new dating sites put fake profiles to seem more popular.


• Has anybody done a good study comparing online versus real world dating? I've seen a few, but they are all pretty much bunk: either they have ~5 subjects (note to the HCI community: let's please stop writing papers with only 5 subjects), or they are done by the dating sites themselves (sorry, eHarmony, I just can't believe your propaganda). The study I'd like is a long term one: if you meet online versus in the real world, what is the probability that you are still happily together 10 years later? My personal guess is that unless the study is done carefully, online dating would win big because of a sample bias.

I don't think my fiancee reads my blog, so let's not tell her what I've been doing all day.

You Can't Join My SECRET Site

"Refer a friend" button: okay. Bigger "refer a friend" button: I can take it. Forcing me to give my gmail password so that you can invite everybody I've ever emailed: NOT cool.

Over the last couple of years I've seen many sites use increasingly more aggressive tactics to get you to invite your friends to join the site. My favorite are the ones that innocently ask you for your gmail password (to save you time, of course), and don't quite tell you they're gonna email EVERYBODY you know saying "Luis is PERSONALLY inviting YOU to join!" I understand the desire to become viral, but at some point you have to wonder whether this actually works. From a psychological standpoint, I would assume it's not great to seem so...desperate?

So I'd like to try an experiment using the opposite tactic: making everybody want to join my highly exclusive, SECRET, site. If you join the site, the first rule is that you cannot tell ANYBODY about this site (like Fight Club). The only way to join is if somebody who is a member tells you the secret AND if all the current members vote you in once you know the secret. But that's the kicker: it's against the site rules for a member to tell anybody the secret, and if we find that a member told somebody the secret, we throw them out. So the only way for the site to grow is if the members secretively tell the secret and then lie about it. Let's see if we can make this grow faster than PushyWeb2.0SiteX.com.

Real Men of Genius: Mr. Domain Name Hoarder

Today I salute you, Mr. Cybersquatter. When nobody thought of buying staythin.com or wikiredia.com, you saw a business opportunity. I salute you for stifling my productivity and the progress of humankind by owning every name that could be interesting on the Web. For making me waste my time and money when I don't want to settle for a .biz domain. For crawling the Web to find strings that are mentioned often and buying the associated domain names. Thank you.

[Editor's Note: After spending hours yelling at his computer, Professor von Ahn would like to finally strike back against squatters by somehow making them think uninteresting strings are actually valuable names so that they buy them and lose money.]

Some Tough Questions

Reporter: What's your ultimate goal? Luis: I'm trying to get computers to do everything humans can. (More honest answer that I didn't use: I want to watch more TV.)

Reporter: But, what will *we* do once computers can do everything humans can? Luis: Computers will be our slaves and we'll dedicate our lives to watching TV, playing sports, and philosophizing. Personally, I'll watch more TV.

Reporter: Aren't you scared that computers will take over the world when they become smarter than us? Luis: I'll tell you a great quote from Pedro Domingos: People fear computers becoming smarter and taking over the world, but currently computers are not very smart and they already have taken over the world!

Academic Publications 2.0

Maybe I'm in the wrong line of work, but I hate writing academic papers.

• Current conventions in computer science mandate that each time I write a paper, I should state my result four times: once in the abstract, once in the introduction, once in the body, and once in the conclusion.


• The introduction section is, to a large extent, a waste of everybody's time. Nearly every paper about a given topic has the same introduction: "Topic X is important because A, B, C."


• Here's a simple formula that seems to work for (and is overwhelmingly used in) computer science papers:
  
  Abstract: We solve problem Y.
  Introduction: Problem X is so important, that if we solve it, the world will be a much better place. Y is an approximation (or subproblem) to problem X. We solve Y.
  Body: Here's a convoluted explanation of how to solve Y.
  Conclusion: We did Y. Doing X would be awesome.


• Once a paper is "published," it is set on stone and cannot really be changed, even if you find a much better way to convey the results or if you find that the data is better explained by a different hypothesis. The reason for this restriction is that, 30 years ago, papers were published using physical paper. Such a restriction makes no sense today.


• As an academic community, it sometimes feels that the final goal of doing research is publishing papers. The goal of doing research should be, well, doing research. I understand that communicating the results of our work is important, but surely there is a better method than one that was invented before computers were around.


• Given the number of people working in computer science and the fact that publishing papers is considered the goal of our work, there is an insane number of papers written every year, the vast majority of which contribute very little (or not at all) to our collective knowledge. This is basically spam. In fact, for many papers (including some of my own), the actual idea of the paper could be stated in one paragraph, but somehow people manage to write 10 pages of it.

Can a combination of a wiki, karma, and a voting method like reddit or digg substitute the current system of academic publication?

Why Don't Students Tip Professors?

I hate tipping. I do it, but (A) I usually don't carry cash on me (who does these days?), and (B) I don't understand the logic behind who should be tipped and who shouldn't. Why do we tip waiters but not flight attendants?

But most importantly, why don't students tip professors? In this economic downturn, every cent matters. If we do an ok job, we should get 10% of the tuition for that lecture. For an excellent job, we should get 20%. Given that students pay ~$100/lecture, and that my class has 200 students, I'd be getting $2,000 every time I give a mediocre lecture and $4,000 every time I give a good one. This will surely increase the quality of education.

Alternatively, I guess I could start singing about God and send the TAs with baskets around the class to collect money.