Monday morning there was CS434 and in the afternoon there was a seminar given by the adjunct who taught the WebCampus section of cryptography. WebCampus was the online learning branch of Stevens and, as I understood, contributed greatly to the general fund. I had already gathered from masters students in CS503 that the WebCampus classes were often easier and that graduate students took them to fill requirements for classes that are notoriously difficult.
On Tuesday there was CS765A in the morning. At lunch time there was the LSS lunch meeting. Before the lunch meeting I went to the Howe Center and bought a tray of tekka maki which I brought with me to the meeting. Tuesday night I went to CS510. I didn't particularly like the textbook for CS510, but I was able to pick up what I needed to know from Pablo's presentation. On Wednesday it was CS434 in the morning, followed by office hours. Margarita came to office hours. She didn't really seem to need help as much as a little hand holding. I think that she was also angling to get me to give her a better grade. While at office hours, I designed my part of the quiz and posted the whole thing to WebCT.
Wednesday night I went to CS503 where Dean Suffel furiously scribbled number theory on the blackboard. On Thursday I had CS765A Privacy in the morning followed by a meeting with my adviser. I had already written seven pages on digital credentials toward the privacy term project as the ``project proposal''. On Friday I did my laundry and graded the CS434 quizzes.
There was a television with cable in the dining room of the orphanage, but I never watched it. Mostly because whenever I was home, the dining room was full of students who had already made up their minds to watch something mindless on the television. I only wanted to watch Fox News and it didn't seem as though anyone else in the building did. I mostly kept out of the dining room and kitchen area, although I did put my pots and pans and dishes in my assigned cupboard. Sometimes I would make some Ramen noodles, but that was the extent of my cooking that first semester. I stayed in my room on the third floor almost all of the time that I was home. On Sunday I read fifty pages out of my CS520 book and a hundred pages out of Tannenbaum, which was suggested for the qual. I spent the rest of the weekend doing homework.
Monday was pay day. I deposited my check and I also set up direct deposit with the payroll office. I got news that my paternal grandfather passed away. My Uncle Gil and Uncle Malcolm didn't want to have a funeral for him, so we planned our own memorial service at my mother's church. I wrote to my adviser to tell her that I needed to take a day off for the service. I didn't know the dates, but she said that that would be fine. I aimed to make it happen on Friday, so that it wouldn't affect my academic schedule. Since there were only a handful of us involved and the body had already been burned, I was able to exercise influence on the timing of the service. Then I went to CS434 where I scribbled notes as Professor Compagnoni talked. Monday afternoon was the computer science seminar and then the day was done.
On Tuesday I had CS765A Privacy in the morning, and CS510 Programming Languages in the evening. I got home late and fell into bed. On Wednesday I stumbled into CS434. After class I got some coffee and held office hours. A couple of students came to challenge their grades on the quiz. In one case I was able to change the student's grade but in the other case I had been too generous as it was. I put the new quiz on WebCT and did some research on digital credentials. I also sent my project proposal for CS765A Privacy to Professor Wright. It was seven pages long and she admonished me to send her Postscript or PDF files rather than DVI files in the future.
On Thursday, after CS765A, I had my meeting with Professor Wright. I proposed that we merge my research for the semester with the CS765A Privacy project. She agreed and I focused on doing research in CS765A. CS520 was taking up a lot of my time with pointless homework and I felt that I could pass the operating systems qualifier without doing all of that homework. I asked my adviser if I could drop CS520 and replace it with CS960 Research in Computer Science. First she expressed concern that I wouldn't pass the OS qual. I argued that I could learn the material without doing twenty hours of homework a semester. She agreed to it, so I got her to sign my add/drop form and brought it to the Student Service Center. They charged me half of the cost of the class that I dropped and applied it to my student loan. They also marked my transcript with a W for the class. I was disappointed, but it was my own fault for not dropping the class sooner. On Friday I did my laundry and graded quizzes until my mother picked me up and took me to church for my grandfather's memorial service. My paternal grandmother was not entirely coherent as she was 95 and had little short term memory but was of sound body. She had moved in with my father after her husband died. My maternal grandmother, on the other hand, was of sound mind and somewhat frail body. She lived in Starkville, New York, which is in the middle of the wilderness of upstate New York, on the dairy farm where I spent my teenage years.
My father gave a powerful eulogy where he noted that the only time that his father ever spanked him was for speaking ill of another person. He said that Grandpa always sought to build people up rather than tear them down and that that was a trait that he admired. I gave a talk in which I mentioned his encouragement of my literary efforts and noted all of the books that he had published and the lives that he had touched through his writing. My cousin Adrienne gave her own tearful eulogy and soon the service was complete. We had dinner and Mom took me back to Hoboken where I worked on my paper on digital credentials for CS765A and CS960.
In class on Monday morning, Professor Compagnoni said that a couple of exercises were to be done for homework. I quite reasonably interpreted that as a homework assignment and posted it on WebCT. I also posted clear instructions that the assignment should not be submitted in Microsoft Word format, as I was not using a Microsoft system. I happened to know that Stevens installed a PDF distiller on all undergraduate students' laptops so I suggested that students submit the assignment in PDF format. PDF is my preferred format, anyway, and is the standard from the National Archive and Records Administration for document preservation. I wrote to my former roommate Lincoln and told him about my insistence that the students not use Word format. He wrote back:
Microsoft Word format is wildly inappropriate for homework submission.
Mostly, this is because Microsoft Word format is no format at all. Classic anti-competitive (and pro-upgrade-to-latest-version) Microsoft tactics have guaranteed that no two versions of the software store documents in the same format. Even intra-version variations such as those introduced by "Windows Update" virtually guarantee that no two instances of Word share the same font base.
What is worse, Microsoft Word is not open, is not free, and is not cross- platform. Although some attempt has been made (most notably by Sun Microsystems) to inter-operate with Word documents, the results are frankly mixed - especially when it comes to representing mathematics. To represent mathematical statements using Word, the student is required to draw from a wide variety of fonts in order to identify characters whose appearance approximately match actual mathematical operators and symbols.
Any system in which the character 'j' appears as various unrelated symbols depending upon font is (at best) a kludge. When we consider that virtually no two machines share the same set of fonts, the whole situation becomes quite unworkable.
If you were teaching a business course, it would be wholly appropriate to accept homework in Microsoft Word format. Word is the ubiquitous tool for (non-published) text document formatting in business. It is the de facto standard tool of the trade. In science, however, Word is not ubiquitous, it is not standard, and in fact it is not even appropriate. This is primarily due to the fact that it is not suitable.
Attempting to submit work in Word format makes the tremendous assumption that you have access to an installation of that software (I say tremendous because clearly your department is based upon BSD). More interestingly, it is not only unfair to expect you to interpret whatever format is thrown at you, but it would be all the more unfair for you to agree to do so. Why? Simply, mathematics is a precise language. foo2bar-style document format converters are however not precise. The student should have the same expectation of "What They Intend is What You See" that they would have if they submitted a proof-read hard copy. The only way to guarantee this is to use a well-defined typesetting language such as Adobe PDF.
Lincoln
I thought that that summed up the situation so well that I posted it to my CS434 webpage for the students to read. Unfortunately, our words fell on deaf ears. About three students, including Margarita, submitted homeworks in Word format, which I couldn't read. I was determined that Margarita and the other students would submit their homework in PDF format and sent a couple of emails demanding that and offering to help her convert it. She ignored my emails and skipped the next class. I tried to track her down to make sure that she was okay and make sure that she was going to submit her homework in an acceptable format, but I didn't have any luck. I thought I heard her shouting something outside of my building, but I may have been mistaken. I decided to have a PDF clinic for the students who didn't know how to convert their files into PDF format. It seemed to me that this was a basic skill that computer science students should possess.
On Tuesday I gave a presentation to the Laboratory for Secure Systems based on my masters thesis (I used the same slides). Professor Bloom, who was the department director at the time, was there. He didn't usually come to the LSS meetings. I set up my laptop at the podium, and felt very nervous. My mouth was dry while I talked. I rushed through the 72 slides and the presentation came out in about 25 minutes. The talk was primarily about factoring large integers (for breaking RSA) and I mostly read off of my slides. I had made my slides with LATEX, but without any of the nice slide packages for LATEX such as Prosper. This gave my slides a primitive and archaic look compared to the polished slides used by other speakers. I did have some nice graphs in my slides that I made with GnuPlot, though. Professor Wright said that she could see the patterns in my graphs which, hopefully, might lead to a method to minimize my function to allow factoring. Overall, I don't think that anyone got anything out of my talk. Professor Bloom expressed relief that it was short. After that talk, I shelved that research to focus on what I was doing with Professor Wright. I needed to come up with some good research for the oral qualifying exam which I would take soon after I passed the written qualifying exams.
I went to my adviser's office. ``I am sorry that my talk wasn't very good. Also, I know that I went through the slides too quickly.''
``That's OK. It's easy to have a tendency to rush. That's one reason I liked handwritten slides.''
``Okay, thanks.''
``The more talks you give, the better you'll get at it.''
``I hope so.''
``You should improve your slides. Use PowerPoint.''
``I'm not running Windows at home or at work. Maybe I can use OpenOffice.'' I had Windows on my laptop but I only used that for presentations.
``I haven't liked open-source replacements for Microsoft programs, but you can try that.'' I didn't really want to use PowerPoint or OpenOffice, but I didn't know how to make nice LATEX slides. I knew it could be done, I just didn't know how to do it.
I emailed the students who didn't submit the homework in PDF format and told them that I would have a clinic during my next office hours to show them how to submit files in PDF format. The turnout was rather disappointing, but the students who did attend found that it was easy. On Wednesday night, as usual, I went to CS503 so that Dean Suffel could baffle me with number theory. I got home pretty late and had a couple of beers before I went to bed. My shoulder hurt pretty badly and it seemed like a rotator cuff injury. I had probably gotten the actual injury lifting weights while I was working on my masters degree at SUNY IT, but it was definitely aggravated by carrying the heavy backpack around.
On Thursday morning, I had Privacy and then a meeting with my adviser. My adviser gave me back a draft of my CS765A proposal completely marked up with comments. After the meeting, Margarita came to the lab with her laptop and I showed her how to make PDF files as well. That night I went to CS520, as usual, although I had dropped it. I sat in the front, next to Margarita in a puddle of light thrown off by one of the few lights that the professor left on. The professor seemed unaware that I had dropped the class, and I suspected that he might have thrown me out of class if he had known.
On Friday I spent the morning on my laundry and on grading quizzes and did research in the afternoon. Now that I had been paid, I was able to eat at the restaurant across the street known as Ted and Jo's. I had a hamburger and a beer. It was a rather expensive hamburger and a rather expensive beer, but that was okay with me. It tasted a lot better than anything that I had gotten in the Howe Center. On Sunday I went to a restaurant called India on the Hudson which served Indian food and took Ducks Bills. It would become my habit to go to India on the Hudson on Sunday afternoons for a couple of years.
By this time my left shoulder hurt terribly and I could barely move my arm. Getting dressed and undressed was a challenge. I had paid a health service fee so I decided to go to health services to have them look at my arm. I would go after CS434 on Monday. Meanwhile my research paper for CS765A/CS960 was going well. It was based on the idea of creating credentials by solving a new problem that I devised called "Secure Set Membership" using an algorithm I devised for generating 3SAT problems. 3SAT is a logic problem known to be NP-complete where each clause has three literals. The literals are joined with OR and the clauses are joined with AND. Any Boolean expression can be expressed as a 3SAT problem. The 3SAT problem is to determine whether the expression is satisfiable, but my system required one to find a satisfying assignment in order to break it. NP-complete problems are believed to have some hard instances, but most are easy. For this reason I needed to devise a method to make sure that I only chose hard instances. I discussed the possibility of submitting the paper to a prestigious conference called FOCS, which stands for Foundations of Computer Science, with my adviser. We decided that we would work toward the FOCS deadline for the paper. The FOCS deadline was immediately after spring break, so I decided that I would work through spring break. This was to become a pattern throughout graduate school.
A team at the University of New Mexico had a paper that generated SAT problems (like 3SAT but with any number of terms per clause) but their system generated problems with an exponential number of clauses. My system only required eight times as many clauses as variables, so it was scalable while theirs wasn't. I still needed to cite them prominently in my paper. As it turned out, the lead on that project, Professor Forrest, was on the same National Science Foundation project as my adviser. The name of the project was PORTIA for Privacy, Obligations, and Rights in Technologies of Information Assessment. For this reason, my adviser suggested that I contact them.