Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Podcast Q&A

For the next Complexitycast, Bill Gasarch and I will attempt to answer reader's questions. We will pick the best questions and answer them in the next podcast.

You can either email me your question on any topic related to this weblog or better yet record yourself asking the question (in either MP3, WAV or OGG) and send me the audio file.

Think of good questions for if we don't get many we'll make up our own.

13 comments:

  1. This is the time of the year when graduating students are preparing their job packets. Assuming that you're not a superstar, but not below average either, how best to advertise yourself to get an academic interview call?

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  2. That's a very good question!

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  3. How about "How to write a good TCS paper?" or even, "Tips to make your TCS paper better"?

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  4. Why does complexity theory benefit by being in a CS department, together with systems, AI, graphics, HCI, etc, as opposed to being in a math department, together with number theory, algebra, topology, combinatorics, etc?

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  5. I don't know how complexity theory benefits, but complexity theorists benefit by receiving CS-scale rather than Math-scale salaries...

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  6. What is a general framework for identifying emergence and how do you measure emergentce?

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  7. How does one deal with the frustration of working on a problem without getting any results?

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  8. To anon 4:

    Have you ever set foot on a math department? they look down on anything that is applied.

    You are suggesting we leave the well paid, well funded world of CS (which is also the main source of inspiration for our theoretical discoveries) to join an underfunded department that will treat TCS as the ugly duckling of math.

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  9. How can TCS stay relevant?

    What are the big challenges out there to be resolved in TCS, from a systems perspective? What are the big challenges in TCS from a theory perspective? Discuss the gap between the two.

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  10. math people don't like tcs people.
    that is my impression of a very limited experience though.

    Maybe it's because of the CS-scale salaries.

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  11. The enrollment of North American physics graduate students is down forty per cent over the past forty years ... now biology graduate student is similarly flattening ... so what will be the future trend for complexity theory enrollment?

    ❏ down 40% per generation
    ❏ flat enrollment
    ❏ up 40% per generation

    And most important, are these flattening trends determined mainly by the blind forces of history, or are they subject to planning & optimization by the leaders of the computational complexity community?

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  12. What do you think should be the tradeof between working on reasonable problems that can lead to reasonable results with high probablity, to working on very difficult problems that can lead to great results with very small probability. Does your answer change as a function of status of the researcher (that is Graduate/PostDoc/Tenure/etc.)

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  13. a question about P and NP

    in the last podcast, lance said he believed that P!=NP because "god is evil". well, does your (or does anyone's) belief also depend (strong) mathematical intution?

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