Sometimes academia is retarded
Giving my resume a long overdue overhaul and writing about my summer 2004 research experience. I’m not really sure wtf I did the whole time. I think ideally my advisor would have had me compare his method of quantifying randomness to someone elses. But someone (probably me) grossly underestimated the time it would take to compute a number from 300 MB of data. I mean literally, my computer was unusable for a long time.
Anyways, the method I was supposed to compare to was called “The theory of runs” or something. Which basically said “flipping a coin is random. if you flip a coin an infinite number of times you are bound to have 8 headses in a row. therefore if a process is truly random, it can be boxed into this heads or tails paradigm and should have comparable statistics of 8 headses in a row as flipping a coin”.
But the ridiculous thing was that this paper listed the professor’s high school aged son as a contributing author. I mean really, wish that someone would tell people when to draw the line, since clearly they don’t know when. To wit, this “co-author” is a professor’s son, who may or may not be interested in math/computer science, he’s already gonna be smart as hell/poised to pursue some kind of technical career [via a phone call from dad]. There’s really no need to rob this opportunity from some gifted minority that would probably be the research assistant for peanuts. But that’s just my opinion. Oh, and he was Jewish.
