Those who trade security for coffee deserve neither

A recent article reports results from a survey which shows, among other things, that companies are spending more money on coffee for their employees than securing their "web applications", whatever that means. (In this day and age, is there any application that doesn't have at least some network-facing capability?)

In any case, being an advocate of both strong coffee and strong encryption, I can understand the dilemma. You need to caffeinate your sysadmins so they can keep up their daily grind of writing Javascript, while still allowing them to esperesso themselves that, actually, not beaning standards compliant is going to cause a latte problems.

(Coffee pun hat tip)

these past couple of sunny days can do wonders for a girl.  grey days totally mess with my mood!!  i am longing for spring...i hope these pretty days are here to stay...

*images courtesy of suzie beezie, emily henderson, design darling, my home ideas, emily henderson

Gallaudet University plans to cut Computer Science

Read this, and tell me if anything looks unusual to you:

Be it resolved that the Board of Trustees, recognizing the need to strategically reallocate resources, approves the recommendation of the university administration to close the following major degree programs:

• Ed.S. Change Leadership in Education
• M.S. Administration
• Ph.D. Special Education Administration
• M.A. Deaf Studies: Deaf History
• M.S. Leisure Services Administration
• B.S. Computer Information Systems
• B.A. Chemistry: Chemical Technology
• B.A./B.S. Computer Science
• B.A. French
• B.A. International Government
• B.A. Theatre Arts: Educational Drama

Two of these things are not like the others. I've made them red. (Not because I'm angry, I just like the color.)

I can understanding cutting French and Leisure Services Administration - I doubt there are a lot of jobs in these fields.  Same also for International Government and Theater Arts, though I suspect both of those fields could stand to have a higher representation of people who are deaf and hard-of-hearing. I don't know anything about the fields of Education, Administration, or Deaf Studies so I can't comment on those. As for the Chemical Technology major, given its stated purpose is to prepare students to be laboratory technicians and given the rumors of large numbers of people with Chemistry PhDs scrambling to get lab tech jobs, I'm not entirely surprised to see the major cut.

But CS and CIS? Why?

Why on earth would a university cut CS programs in this economy? If anything, those are the majors most likely to yield jobs for undergraduates. An undergraduate degree in Computer Science is a golden ticket for a job from now until 2018. Here's what the Computing Community Consortium has to say about this (boldface and italics are theirs):

Looking at all science and engineering occupations — “Computer and mathematical,” “Architecture and engineering,” and “Life, physical, and social science” — computer science occupations are projected to be responsible for nearly 60% of all job growth between now and 2018. The next largest contributor — all fields of Engineering combined — is projected to contribute 13.4% of total growth. All of the life sciences combined: 5.6%. All of the physical sciences combined: 3.1%. In other words, among all occupations in all fields of science and engineering, computer science occupations are projected to account for nearly 60% of all job growth between now and 2018.

So, I am puzzled by Gallaudet's decision. And troubled.

Check yo self

FSP's post today on getting blogged about reminded me of something I meant to write about awhile ago. And that is - ways to actively monitor how others talk about you publicly.

I highly suggest setting up several Google Alerts. This is a great service that emails you whenever someone mentions your name on a site Google indexes*. You can set this up for general search results, as well as for blogs, twitter, and news articles.

You also can set up citation alerts in Google scholar, which will tell you if someone has cited you generally, or you can set one up for individual papers if you're so inclined.

For these alerts, I have quite a few variations of my name, for example:
(Ada A. Lovelace) OR (A. Lovelace) OR (Lovelace, A.) OR (Lovelace AND Analytic Engines) 
etc.

I've found these alerts invaluable, because over the years I have given several talks where my privacy requests were violated. This happened along the lines of:
"Can we have a copy of your slides?"
"No."
"Pretty Please? It's for those poor undergraduate students who couldn't attend your talk today."
"No."
"Pleeeeease? We promise not to put it on the internet."

Because I'm a pushover when it comes to pleas about wee undergraduate students, I acquiesced, and sure enough two weeks later, surprise! There are my slides.

But these alerts have also relayed good news, for example, I've learned of news articles about my research I didn't know existed, learned of entirely unexpected paper citations, and, I also discovered a really juicy paper basically trashing one of the subfields I work in. (Not trashing me specifically, just saying something factual about my publication frequency).

So, these alerts are worth setting up. Unless you're the academic equivalent of Lindsay Lohan, in which case I do not recommend this service.

(*) If you're a Bing person, sorry - there are no Bing alerts at present. Their academic.research.microsoft.com site offers RSS subscriptions, though I imagine there is a fair bit of overlap with Google scholar. 

questions answered...

i had several questions and emails about painting my kitchen so i thought i would do one last post and then you don't have to hear about it anymore :)

painting: while i would love to say that i was cool enough to tackle this project myself, i'm not.  i left it to the professionals but i did buy all of the supplies so i can guide you a little on what they used.  our cabinets were a light stained wood so to get the paint to adhere they first started w/ sanding all of them.  next, they used zinsser cover stain.  this stuff is heavy duty and so we moved out of our house for 4 days while they painted.  it's an oil based primer that covers really well over wood, knots, etc. here is a pic of the can if you need a visual:

my paint colors were Benjamin Moore from the Classic Color collection.  the cabinets were oil base, which is not my favorite thing to use but the durability is a lot better.

cabinets: Vapor Trails 1556 (this is actually one shade lighter then Sally Wheat's kitchen)

and the walls: Northern Cliffs 1536

a lot of people also asked about my chair fabric....its one of my spare DR chairs and the stripe is lulu dk's catwalk light blue w/ brown.  

thanks a million for all of your sweet comments!  it was fun sharing the process and even more fun to get the "after" product!  

and i can't end w/out saying happy valentine's day!!  seriously, can this cake make its way into my kitchen so i can eat it?!! xoxox