Regularly Expressing

Category: tweed jacket

  • Tweed Jacket: Facebook Saves Student

    It’s been a long time since I posted under “Tweed Jacket.” Tweed Jacket is how I think of my relatively new job title, “Adjunct Professor of Computer Science.” Anyway, we were administering a final for a course named “Multiprocessor Systems.” One student, a good student, failed to show up. Perhaps it was to be expected, as the exam time changed from what was announced by LSU.

    Hurriedly, I booted up my laptop googled for the student’s name. I found his Facebook page and messaged him, and he was able to get to the exam in time. For many people, Facebook is little more than a waste of time. In this one instance at least, it made a difference.

  • Tweed Jacket Attends a Faculty Meeting

    All through grade school, and even into college I found myself doodling in class. As the years have gone by, I’ve found myself drawing less and less. This afternoon, however, I needed to attend a faculty meeting. As I listened to a precise legal discussion of just what a professor emeritus is, what he/she is entitled to, and how that differs from an adjunct professor, I found myself regressing. Here are the fruits of my doodles. I hope you find them entertaining.

  • It’s Fun to Stay at the NCSA

    This week I visited my old graduate school, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I took my two graduate students on a trip through campus visiting all my old haunts… Papa Del’s, Loomis Lab, the Etc., Dairy Queen, and so on. That was fun. The purpose of the trip, however, was work and much of it was spent at the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) building.

    The picture at right is some high tech art from the ground floor. The little circuit boards on the underside of the board wake up periodically (or they would if the display were functioning) and scan for reflective surfaces (i.e. bald people or people with white hair). When they find something reflective, they all coordinate and point lights at the target. Why? Art needs no reason.

  • World Famous in Poland

    To quote an old movie, “I am world famous in Poland” (“To be or not to be,” Mel Brooks). It is a term that I use for a minor claim to fame. What is this new accolade that I have achieved? The office where I work does a regular feature calls “Spotlight” where they write an article about an employee. This latest issue was my turn. You can read about me here.

  • Tweed Jacket disciplines a student

    I recently had a student submit an assignment (a computer program, Tweed Jacket is how I refer to myself in my role as Professor of Computer Science) that was not his original work. It was so clearly beyond the student’s ability, it was as if a 3rd grader had turned in the Mona Lisa as an art project. What surprised me was that the student defended what he did as his own work, but admitted that he used “internet resources.” When questioned, it was clear he could not even answer simple questions about how the program worked, yet he insisted that he had done something more than copy. After sleeping on the incident, I am coming to think the student really believed what he told me. We are all good at justifying our own behavior, and I can see how someone accustomed to quoting internet articles on assignments and rephrasing them here or there might imagine that taking a program and renaming variables, adjusting the indentation, and changing the comments might think he was doing nothing wrong. Except, in this case at least, sources were not cited. I think that a basic lecture about what constitutes copying, may not be obvious to students.

    [ Oh, and if you’re wondering whether I’ve revealed anything by use of the masculine pronoun, I’m not. This is merely a subtle way of expressing how upset I am that there are so few female students in computer science. ]

  • Enter the Tweed Jacket….

    This morning I received word that the faculty of the computer science department at LSU voted unanimously to make me an adjunct professor. This does not involve an increase in pay, nor is it tenure–but it marks a new education component to my career. The august rank of “Professor” is not something I ever expected to attain, but I won’t let the success go to my head. I’ll still wear T-shirts with cartoons on them instead of the cliched tweed jacket.