5 ms·
She was a CS PhD and somewhat itinerant professor with a long career who wrote a prominent CS paper about computer memory, Hitting the Memory Wall: Implications
by DespairYeMighty 5mo ago
She was a CS PhD and somewhat itinerant professor with a long career who wrote a prominent CS paper about computer memory, Hitting the Memory Wall: Implications of the Obvious
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/216585.216588 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/216585.216588
on her obituary page, you will see a prominent "Memory Wall" link that is NOT a reference to her paper, but a place for sharing your thoughts about her life
- deater 5mo agoyou wouldn't believe how many people cite that paper as "Wulf et al." when that's practically more characters than saying "Wulf and McKee" I notice these things a bit more as she was my PhD thesis advisor
- marricks 5mo agoThere's only two authors! That's so rude!
- bjourne 5mo agoWhy? For all the automatic academic score tracking systems it doesn't matter one bit if it is Wulf et al. or Wulf and McKee.
- john_strinlai 5mo agoits about respect, not about academic score tracking systems
- mattkrause 5mo agoThe automated ones don't care, but it absolutely matters for the informal credit assignment process that actually runs academia. I really wish we had a better way to "name" papers. Big clinical trials often have an acronym (often hilariously forced: "CXCessoR4"). That takes the emphasis off (one) lead author but it's implausibly hard to make up one for every research paper.
- bjourne 5mo agoWhat "informal credit assignment"? It's automated and it runs entirely on quantitative data.
- remexre 5mo agothe one where i think of a particular piece of work, and i know who did it, then tell a student "oh, see if $author's group published anything else about this." i'm not using software for this if this is off the top of my head, and it's the sort of thing that, at scale, hurts the forgotten author and their students
- bjourne 5mo agoI see. The informal credit assignment process is something that only runs inside of your head.
- ohnei 5mo agoRight, academics who deligate their entire intellectual life to GPT will be unaffected.
- bjourne 5mo agoRight, and everyone else unaware of this made up "informal credit assignment process".
- ohnei 5mo agohttps://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- mattkrause 5mo agoI don’t know that everyone would label it like that, but it’s inarguably true that success in academia comes from your reputation/name recognition. Metrics are often attempts to formalize this but they’re not how most people actually make decisions: nobody is inviting seminar speakers or choosing collaborators because they have a high h-index. If anything, it goes the other way: name recognition gets you invited to speak or collaborate, which makes more people aware of your work, which boosts metrics.
- setgree 5mo agoIt’s also not correct; et al. is conventionally applied to three or more authors (it means “and others,” plural)
- SecretDreams 5mo agoet al should never be applied when only two authors!!!
- fsckboy 5mo ago...unless the second one is named Alfred and is an informal person
- SecretDreams 5mo agoBruce et al
- thaumasiotes 5mo ago> you wouldn't believe how many people cite that paper as "Wulf et al." when that's practically more characters than saying "Wulf and McKee" Wulf et al. Wulf and McKee 35% less isn't usually described as "practically more". It'd be interesting to see someone use the unabbreviated form; I have a hunch they wouldn't know to say "et alia".
- tomjakubowski 5mo agoHow did you arrive at 35% less? The first is 11 characters, the second is 14, and 3/14 is 21%.
- thaumasiotes 5mo agoThat is a good question. As you say, it's 21%. I had the 11 and the 14 correct; I don't remember how I got 35%.
- b473a 5mo agoYeah tenure is nice but there's just a hint of mystery behind the title "itinerant professor." Like a wizard that just pops up in places to work computer science magic.
- seanmcdirmid 5mo agoI was a phd student when sally was a professor at Utah. I get the feeling that a lot of people came together for an interesting project (systems/memory related, I can’t even remember the name ATM) and dispersed when the project was at its later stages. I think it’s common in our field for many phds to work as professors for just a few years and not commit to it as a career.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- swyx 5mo agobit ironic i guess but unintentionally fitting