Tandem is not just a bike with two seats, it also means “at last” in Latin. At last I received my Ph.D. Diploma today! After only eight months of waiting time –yeah! (clap) Guess in what language it was written? Click the photo…
I hope I will be able to translate it at some point. For US immigration officers this appears to be too hard of a job. 🙂
Update: Here is the text and English translation. Thanks to Nicholas Greco!
The Sable Research Lab is located in the McConnell Engineering Building, which is really old and ugly. At the lab we are used to disruptions. We have flaky fire alerts leading to evacuations on at least a monthly basis. Power outages occur even more frequently – not funny if you had just had your most important experiments set up to run on a dozen machines overnight. Unfortunately, instead of tearing the building down and building a new one, McGill has kept on trying to fix it – for ages. The year’s sweet deal is the re-building of an underground tunnel that connects the building with the James Administration building. It began a couple of weeks ago, when people began really upset because McGill destroyed a huge park of the on-campus park and tore down a bunch of really old trees. Nothing major though compared what happened today.
As I read today, Google has added website traffic statistics to Google Trends. I thought it may be interesting to compare the major Canadian universities…
As you can see both McGill and the University of Toronto clearly dominate the picture. Interestingly their traffic seems to follow the same pattern with a clear lack of interest in the early summer months and a peak in the fall (enrollment time?). Second is Vancouver’s UBC, followed by the University of Waterloo and Queen’s.
For those of you who have been following news about the TA Strike…
In a General Assembly held [yesterday], a landslide 91.5% vote by McGill’s teaching assistants ended their 72-day strike. TAs are eager to return to work now that the parties have agreed on a collective agreement.
At the same time, TAs voted by an even stronger margin–97.5%–to reject the Administration’s Back-to-Work Protocol tabled [yesterday] morning. Members refused to accept a protocol that would inadequately address the TAs fired and suspended from their on-campus employment and would rather return to work and let their cases proceed in court.
Photo by Claudio Calligaris
I am sure you already saw the latest trailer of Get Smart. Part of that movie was actually shot on McGill campus. Watch for yourself (and pay attention to the red car – at around 1:31):
Yesterday McGill’s teaching assistants voted 96.2% in favor to accept a recommendation made by the conciliator a few days earlier. I think that the recommendation is a fair compromise and in particular it does not contain any strange loopholes no more like they did exist in the original proposal that McGill tabled some weeks ago. All that’s missing now is a proper back-to-work protocol. Once that’s negotiated and ratified the strike will finally be over – yeahhh!
The back-to-work protocol might cause another long debate though because McGill wants to avoid the lawsuits that AGSEM is currently running against them but on the other hand still does refuses to pay any compensation to people who were fired because of the strike. On the other hand McGill is running out of time as the case will go before the court in a little more than a week.
In case you didn’t know yet: McGill’s Teaching Assistants have been on strike for serveral weeks now, demanding, among other things:
a sufficiently fair representation of TAs within McGillAGSEM, the TA union has been negotiating with the McGill administration since October but only after a strike was called in early April did McGill begin to move. The first moves were however to intimidate current TAs by firing them from additional jobs that some of them had, as invigilators or research assistants. Whether that’s actually illegal or not is currently being fought out in court, but no matter how this process is going to end, it certainly is bad for McGill’s reputation in general.
To find out more from the union’s point of view, watch the following video or go to http://www.agsem.ca/. (links to media coverage included) To find out more about more about McGill’s point of view click here.
Today we released version 2.2.5 of Soot, our program analysis and transformation framework for Java. Release 2.2.5 contains some exciting new features, for example:
Furthermore there have been several improvements to the Soot Eclipse plugin to enhance its ease of use.
You can probably believe believe how astonished I was to find a three to 4 four meters high trojan horse standing in front of McGill’s McConnell Engineering Building today! It had a huge sticker on it, saying something about Queen’s University Engineering Society. Must have to do with a really old rivalry… Too bad, that I did not bring my camera. By the afternoon it was gone. I wonder who took it home 😉
Next term, I will be a TA for COMP 621 Optimizing Compilers. In my opinion, it’s a really interesting course. It’s certainly the most relevant course if you are interested in the kind of research I do. So yeah, sign up and see you there 🙂
