Weird Sun Media - York U Internet Problem (Update 2)

Are you at York University right now? Quick, try to connect to torontosun.com, ottawasun.com, winnipegsun.com, calgarysun.com, and edmontonsun.com.

Add a comment below (or email aeckford@gmail.com if you don't want it to be public) with the following info:

1. What do you see?
2. What's your computer, operating system, and browser?
3. What's your IP address? (fastest way to find it: use Google)

I'll update when I find out more.

Update Dec. 3: The outage is fixed! I got a call from Sun Media's Director of Networks, Telecom, and Information Security. He asked me to send some technical details, and their tech team seems to have solved the problem. It's not clear what happened, but the director mentioned that it might have been in response to hacking attempts, as I suspected. (Meanwhile, the only response I got from York's UIT was to close my support ticket without explanation.)

Update Dec. 1: The outage is real. I can't reach the Sun papers from either of the computers in my office (in the cse.yorku.ca subnet), nor can I reach them when I connect to AirYork. The outage has lasted several days at least. However, the outage is not universal to Sun Media sites (listed here). Only the above five sites are affected.

If I were Dean of Graduate Studies: Rethinking the PhD

With the departure of Douglas Peers to Waterloo, York University is now looking for a new Dean of Graduate Studies. So let's say I put my resume in, and let's also say all the other candidates got struck by lightning. What would I do if I were Dean?

I've sat on the graduate faculty council, so I'm well aware that the nuts and bolts of graduate administration is mundane; even the controversies are kind of boring. But as your new Dean of Graduate Studies, I would address an issue that I don't see discussed very much: what should a graduate faculty be teaching?

UPDATED: Big news for York Engineering

UPDATE Nov. 2: York science librarian John Dupuis livetweeted the event (and collected a summary of tweets here). From John's blog:

I did a ton of live tweeting of the announcement, some of which is here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. The most significant new information revolves around naming the new engineering school The Lassonde School of Engineering. As well, what is now the Computer Science and Engineering Building will be known as the Lassonde Building.

Original post follows.

Canadian entrepreneur Pierre Lassonde is donating $25 million to expand engineering programs at York University. The donation will be matched by the university, and combined with the earlier announcement of $50 million for a new engineering building, that makes a total of $100 million for engineering expansion at York. We've been told that Lassonde's contribution is the largest single private donation in university history.

The official announcement will happen today at 1 PM, but in the meanwhile you can read more about the donation in this Globe and Mail story.

With the donation, the university's goal is to move away from the "niche" engineering programs currently in the program, and become a full-fledged "traditional" engineering school. You can expect York to add traditional engineering disciplines like civil, mechanical, and chemical over the next few years.

However, it's electrical engineering that will take the lead in expansion. I am chairing the committee that will write the EE proposal, and we're operating under the assumption that the first students will be admitted in 2013.  I'll try to blog more about our progress as things develop.

For now, it's definitely an exciting time to be at York.

UPDATED: Talk at Case: Models and Capacities of Molecular Communication

Updated Oct 26, 2011: Here's the video of the talk (this is a playlist). Try HD (720p) and fullscreen, which makes it easier to read the slides.

Original post from October 13 follows.

I'm continuing my 2011 "lecture tour" with a visit to Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. My host is Prof. Peter Thomas, and he would be able to give you further details.

"Models and Capacities of Molecular Communication"

Friday, October 14, 11:30 AM

Abstract: What are the fundamental limits of diffusion-mediated molecular communication? This question, which has only recently attracted attention from information theorists, turns out to be surprisingly difficult. Not only is the communication medium unfamiliar to communication engineers; but the mathematical details of the communication environment are complicated. In this talk, we discuss mathematical models for molecular communication, which are both information-theoretically useful and physically meaningful; we discuss the difficulties of dealing exactly with these models; and we present some simplified scenarios in which capacity can be evaluated.  Finally, we discuss the engineering and biological significance of these results.

Fixing undergraduate education

Here's Jeffrey Simpson's column this past Friday -- his latest in a series (1, 2) taking universities to task over undergraduate education. (The Globe seems to be on a tear lately about our "unsustainable" universities.)

I seem to live in a different world than Simpson's hard-luck undergrads: in my program, classes are small and are (almost) all taught by full-time, tenure-track faculty. The small classes probably come from the newness of our program -- we're expecting to ramp up enrollments over the next decade. But the use of full-time faculty in teaching is more or less universal at Canadian engineering schools. Why is that? It's partly because engineers with PhDs can get lucrative jobs, so perma-adjuncting is not very attractive. But it's also because you need a license to teach engineering in Canada -- licenses are tough to get, and until very recently you couldn't get one if teaching was your only work experience.

So here's something the provincial government could do, which would cost very little up front: require teachers at public universities to be licensed, much as public school teachers are. As a condition of the license, the province could require a course or two on teaching at the postsecondary level (something very few professors have ever received -- right now it's a learn-on-the-job kind of situation). The province could also distinguish between "adjunct" licenses and "tenure-track" licenses, and require at least some minimum fraction of education hours be given by tenure-track license holders.

This kind of solution strikes me as much easier to implement than trying to strong-arm universities into opening up collective agreements with faculty, as Simpson seems to want. It wouldn't do much about class sizes, but that is more of a monetary issue.

Of course, I disagree fundamentally with Simpson's view of the university -- particularly his disregard for research and graduate education -- but that's a topic for a different post.

Stimulus, Response: The G&M on Universities in Canada

On Tuesday, the Globe and Mail called out Canadian universities for their poor undergraduate teaching, calling current practices "unacceptable" and "unsustainable".

Here's one of many twitter discussions it triggered, letters to the editor (scroll to "Connecting the Dots"), and blog-length responses by Melonie Fullick, OCUFA, and Worthwhile Canadian Initiative.

There's lots of good stuff to read there, and I only have this to add: the Globe editorial frames the problem in terms of tension between research and teaching, and disregards any role for the modern university beyond the training of undergraduates. This is consistent with positions expressed by their senior columnists, Jeffrey Simpson and, more outrageously, Margaret Wente (seriously, go read Wente's column if you haven't already).

The "tension" between teaching and research is about as real and helpful as the War on the Car. Strong research programs help faculty keep their teaching dynamic, current, and topical; besides which, graduate-level teaching (like supervision of a Ph.D.) is research, and is totallly ignored by the Globe. So let's please put to bed this corrosive idea that research is some kind of luxury, or an optional activity that can be cut without consequences. (Again, where have we heard this kind of simplistic thinking before?)

[h/t @qui_oui for the links]

Talk in Kobe: Information-theoretic problems in molecular and nanoscale communication

I'm in Osaka right now on a research trip, getting caught up on my many Japanese research contacts. One of the items on my agenda is a talk in Kobe on Monday afternoon, at the Kobe Advanced ICT Research Center, part of NICT. Details:

Title: Information-theoretic problems in molecular and nanoscale communication

Abstract: Recent advances in MEMS/NEMS and systems biology have made it possible to manufacture customized nanoscale devices, such as swarms of nanorobots. However, manufacturing is not enough: a significant remaining challenge is to solve the communication problem among these devices, which would allow them to coordinate their actions. Furthermore, the nanoscale communication environment is rather different from the systems that are usually studied by information and communication theorists. In this talk, I will introduce the nanoscale communication problem from an information-theoretic perspective, focusing on molecular communication, which mimics the way in which microorganisms communicate. Mathematical models and achievable-rate results will be presented, and important open problems will be discussed.

[Link for further details]