Leave the sinking ship behind
—CCR
Come away, come away if you're going
Leave the sinking ship behind
—CCR
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From August 2000 to August 2007, I was a Ph.D. student in the CMU Computer Science Department, advised by Frank Pfenning. I worked on refined type systems for programming languages, which allow programmers to state, and compilers to check, more invariants about programs. For more information, see my research page and the slides from my thesis defense. I turned in the final version of my dissertation in August. In September, I moved to Montreal for a postdoc with the Computation and Logic Group at McGill University. If for some reason you're interested, you can look at my curriculum vita. I went to Portland State before it hit the big time.
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One is open access to research: in most scientific disciplines, research is funded by the public (in the US through agencies such as NSF, NIH, etc.) and then published in journals that neither the public nor the research community can freely access. There is no coherent justification for this situation; it is a historical accident resulting from the need to physically distribute (a relatively small number of) copies of journals, at significant cost. With the Internet, the cost of distribution is practically nil. The only rational defense of the current situation comes from journal publishers, who are myopically defending their own interests. I'm fortunate to work in a field that, unlike most, has been practicing open access (albeit very informally) for years; I believe we still have an obligation to learn about and support efforts in other fields. For these reasons, I read Open Access News and the AMSCI mailing list, and signed the petition in support of FRPAA, which would mandate open access for all research funded by the US government.
I'm also concerned about sexism—overt and covert—in academia. There's clear evidence that both men and women unconsciously discriminate against women in a variety of ways. Educate yourself and try to, at least, not contribute to the problem (though you'll find that might not be as easy as it seems).
(On a related note, I regard singular "they" as perfectly correct English. If you disagree, please examine the evidence; I think it's quite clear.)
Links:
Icebike;
cars suck;
Jon Bell's Abandoned Drake Line page; Warsaw:
ZTM,
tram fansite,
funny; Trolleybuses: Seattle,
Montevideo (1,
2),
New Zealand