Pittsburgh was a pink apparition, too cold and covered with gray clouds to be attractive, and made the return to Urbana a happy occasion. I rode with some of the UIUC theory students that drove to the conference. Timewise this is slightly worse than flying, but there are some other benefits.
The ride to Urbana from Pittsburgh is about eight hours short, and we arrived back around 2am. It was inspiring to see how the interstates at night are inherited by trucks that roam the highways, from any direction to any other direction, like desperate hunters looking for pray (here is a picture of the hunters on the move), and all other cars, for their own safety, remain at home locked up behind gates and walls.
The conference itself was interesting and the panel and tutorials were even better. I had concluded that the only way for CS to get wide recognition, is for each one of us to serve as an advertisement to the field. While tattooing the original proof of the PCP on our foreheads might serve to this end, it might create a backlash among the lumberjacks. Instead, I think that just using T-shirts with slogans on them, would be sufficient, so here are some suggestions (more suggestions from the readers [or snarks, which are as numerous in this world as the readers of this blog] are hereby solicited). People that can not handle silliness should stop reading NOW. In any case, I apologize for the lameness in advance…
1. “I will pay $5,000 in registration fee for FOCS 06, and all I would get is this lousy T-shirt”
2. “Did you know that theoretical computer science causes global warming?”
3. “It is too late for you to become a dinosaur, but you can still become extinct – become a theoretical computer science researcher!”
(The idea here is that the public is interested in dinosaurs, and any PR is good PR.)
4. If computer science is heaven, then programming must be hell.
New comment on your post #293 “I have nothing to say, but I must scream…”
Author : miranda
Comment:
hmmm… not mentioning to said teenagers that you’re having conferences in pittsburgh might be a start. 
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hmmm… not mentioning to said teenagers that you’re having conferences in pittsburgh might be a start. !
So I am here in FOCS 05. Subhash Khot gave an interesting tutorial on the UniqueGames conjecture. Bernard Chazelle gave, what was for me, a very interesting talk about geometric techniques in geometry. I would do separate blog entry about his talk, since they really expose some beuatiful and simple results in geometry that are insightful, although being relatively simple.
As for the buisness meeting, there was interesting talk about how to get TCS and CS more exposure. The interesting twist was by people on the panel outside CS which where science writers. First, all fields complain about not getting due credit, secondly there is a problem that the public does not care about CS (unlike about astronomy and Dinusaurs or things that effect global warming). There was speach about submitting papers to Science and Nature, since they get more exposure. There was a suggestion to submit a paper to science showing that global warming is caused by computer science.
In the end of the day, I think the culture gap is too big, as pointed out by several speakers. We might improve our general exposure by better PR and so on, but in the end of the day, we need to be able to convince teenagers to do CS, as many of us were convinced ourselves. Maybe a merge dance can reach more people than any PR.
Or maybe not. I find the abstract beauty of merge sort to be more convincing than any dance, and that was true even when I was a teenager playing around with sorting. But I am not normal, Does anybody really know what will atract intelligent and capable tennagers to do CS? I do not.
New comment on your post #279 “Flying Spaghetti Monster”
Author : Ramses
Comment:
Glad to see I’m not the only pastafarian on campus!
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Glad to see I’m not the only pastafarian on campus!
is here.
I know a really good joke about a goat, but one has to be careful…
New comment on your post #290 “A simple solution for trouble with students…”
Author : Lauren P.
Comment:
Thanks for your post on American Experience’s Two Days in October. I’m a publicist for the series and was glad to see some buzz about it in the blogosphere.
I thought you’d be interested in hearing our podcast on the show. It features our series executive producer Mark Samels, and the producer/director of Two Days in October, Robby Kenner. They answer questions from the over 500 emails that we received in the hours following our broadcast. You can listen to it on iTunes (just search for “American Experience”). Or you can actually just listen to it as an audio file at http://broadband.wgbh.org/amex/rss/media/twodays_03_pb.mp3.
And if you’re interested in American Experience, you can subscribe to our podcst on iTunes or at our Web site at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/podcasts.html.
Thanks again for your attention to Two Days in October.
Best regards,
Lauren Prestileo
–
National Publicist
American Experience
WGBH
To delete this comment, visit: http://valis.cs.uiuc.edu/~sariel/blog/wp-admin/post.php?action=confirmdeletecomment&p=290&comment=172
Thanks for your post on American Experience’s Two Days in October. I’m a publicist for the series and was glad to see some buzz about it in the blogosphere.
I thought you’d be interested in hearing our podcast on the show. It features our series executive producer Mark Samels, and the producer/director of Two Days in October, Robby Kenner. They answer questions from the over 500 emails that we received in the hours following our broadcast. You can listen to it on iTunes (just search for “American Experience”). Or you can actually just listen to it as an audio file at http://broadband.wgbh.org/amex/rss/media/twodays_03_pb.mp3.
And if you’re interested in American Experience, you can subscribe to our podcst on iTunes or at our Web site at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/podcasts.html.
Thanks again for your attention to Two Days in October.
Best regards,
Lauren Prestileo
-
National Publicist
American Experience
WGBH
Once I sat on the steps by a gate of David’s Tower, I placed my two heavy baskets at my side. A group of tourists was standing around their guide and I became their target marker. “You see that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there’s an arch from the Roman period. Just right of his head.” “But he’s moving, he’s moving!”
I said to myself: redemption will come only if their guide tells them, “You see that arch from the Roman period? It’s not important: but next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who’s bought fruit and vegetables for his family.”
-Yehuda Amichai, Tourists
