A Thought for Graduate School Admissions

I was discussing the admissions process for the EECS department with a friend at lunch today, and a question popped into my head. Why is there nothing similar to "early decision" for applying to grad school? Actual early decision probably would not work, as we have no admissions office reading applications, so the extra work of going through applications early would be too much. My idea is instead to have a checkbox on the regular application, saying something to the effect of, "If admitted, will accept offer." This should probably actually say something like you won't accept an offer from another school, whatever the early decision form says for undergrad admissions.

According to my friend, this information would be useful during the admissions process. There are lots of qualified students that get rejected for essentially arbitrary reasons, and with this information, it might be slightly less arbitrary, as certain students could be accepted to guarantee a certain yield. The very top students would be admitted regardless of whether they had committed or not, but for others, checking the box may provide their application with a little boost. Of course, applicants who don't check the box may be at a disadvantage compared to those who do. But, some applicants who would definitely come to Berkeley may be at a disadvantage now, since they can't communicate this information to the admissions committee.

Anyway, I'm curious as to what others think about this proposal.

Wikipedia shock

I had a bit of the "Wachet Auf" Bach cantata stuck in my head earlier today, so I went to seek it out on Rhapsody, but couldn't find it. Then, as I often do with random things in my head, I looked up its Wikipedia article. Lo and behold, the article links to a recording of a full performance of the piece...done by the MIT Chamber Chorus, when I was singing. Yikes! I realized that if they had our Wachet Auf recording, they may also have the Schubert Mass performance from the same concert, where I sang in the trio in the Benedictus, having never taken a voice lesson in my life...yup, it's there. Well, we gave it our best; enjoy, worldwide Internet listeners.

The Met. Opera and Levine

Here's a nice article on James Levine, showing him geeking out about some Mozart. Incidentally, I've been making fairly decent quality recordings of the Met. Opera broadcasts this season; check out this site for the schedule, and Operacast for where you can listen online. Wozzeck was really good, and An American Tragedy grew on me after a couple of listens. Let me know if you want the recordings.

Music Rights for TV DVDs

I just read this article on securing music rights for DVD releases of TV shows. The difficulties particularly annoy me since I imagine they are holding up the DVD release of The State and make releasing the Beavis and Butt-Head music videos almost impossible. There has to be a better way.

Greasemonkey script for Rhapsody

I wrote a Greasemonkey script for Rhapsody that shows full album names in the album lists. The truncated album names were really getting on my nerves. Hooray for Greasemonkey!

Anti-aliased Emacs on Fedora Core 4 (and 5)

I managed to build Emacs with anti-aliased fonts on my FC4 machine. I mostly followed these instructions (ignoring the Debian-specific stuff), with the following extra steps:

• I had to install the libpng-devel RPM (I used yum). The lack of this library was not detected by the emacs configure script.
• I had to install setarch to use during the build process. The exec-shield functionality and randomization of virtual address spaces in Fedora Core 4 messes up the emacs bootstrapping process. I ran ./configure ; setarch i386 -R make bootstrap to build emacs.

The build seems to run fine, and the anti-aliased fonts make a big difference.

UPDATE (10/27/06): I just did a re-build on Fedora Core 5 using these instructions, and everything went fine. Now, when compiling, you need to run ./configure --with-gtk --enable-font-backend --with-xft; setarch i386 -R make bootstrap to make things work. Hopefully soon this code will be stable enough that someone releases an RPM.

Wall Street Journal through ProQuest

I found a fairly decent way to read the Wall Street Journal (which charges for online access) through ProQuest, which I can access through the UC Berkeley library proxy. Go to this page to see issues by date. Then, after choosing an issue, sort the articles by page number rather than alphabetically. Finally, skip all the articles listed as being on "p. 1", as they are just short blurbs; the long articles start on "p. A.1".

Vlissides

I just read on Lambda the Ultimate that John Vlissides, co-author of the well-known Design Patterns book, just passed away. I talked to John a few times when I was at IBM, and ended up co-authoring a paper with him. I remember him giving me good advice on grad. school the first time I met him; he told me how he worked insanely hard (16 hours days) as a grad. student, and how (not unsurprisingly) it turned out to be a bad idea. He also gave me a free copy of Design Patterns, which I thought was really nice of him. Anyway, he was a really good writer and a very nice guy, and I was sad to see the news of his passing.

"I'm da boss"

I just finished watching Raging Bull for the first time in a while; what an incredibly powerful film. The very last moments, where La Motta repeatedly mutters "I'm da boss" while shadowboxing, reminded me in some remote way of the ending of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. Both endings take a small piece of thematic material, emblematic of the work as a whole, and fade away while repeating it more times than one would expect. When the work finally does end, the audience is left with a sublime echo that resonates more deeply as one reflects on the work as a whole. Anyway, just a random connection that popped into my head.

"I Come From Lake Titicaca, Nicaragua"

Slate has a nice review of the new Beavis and Butt-Head DVD release. It's too bad they couldn't get all the music videos, though, as they often had the most brilliant observations.

Microloans

I just saw this site Kiva, which looks really cool. It allows you to loan money to small businesses in the developing world, and get paid back if/when the business succeeds. It looks like all their businesses are funded now, but I put myself on the mailing list for when they find more.

TV on DVD

This sounds familiar. And yet again, one must ask: why no mention of The Wire, which is at least as marathon-inducing as any of these shows?

Rosen on Recording

Here's an interesting book review by Charles Rosen of Performing Music in the Age of Recording. It made me feel bad that I don't perform music nearly as much as I used to; I really need to get a piano.

Catching Up

It looks like Alex Ross is catching up on episodes of The Wire, and he comes to the same conclusion I did a few months back. Yet another confirmation of his good taste :)

Doctor Atomic reviews

I thought I'd collect links to reviews of Doctor Atomic as I find them. I'll try to update this list as I see more reviews. Maybe I'll add my own after I see it :). Alex Ross has some cool stuff up on the opera too.

• Los Angeles Times
• Bay Buzz
• SF Chronicle
• New York Times

Best-Of Compilations

When I used to watch a lot of television, I can remember seeing certain commercials for "best-of" compilations (like Ultimate '70s or Piano by Candlelight Platinum) so many times that the little song excerpts would merge in my head into a new song. Even now, I can still remember chunks of songs from some '50s love songs compilation commercial I saw in elementary school, and I cringe when I think about it. I always found it jarring when I'd here the full version of some song that I only knew through an excerpt from one of these commercials. It was almost always disappointing; my brain was so used to the commercial that the real song seemed worse than a chunk of it in the context of the commercial. Or perhaps the song had been built up too much by being associated solely with a "best-of" collection. Anyway, not sure if others have experienced this; just a random thought.

A Little School Pride

It looks like MIT came out first in the new Washington Monthly college rankings, which emphasize both academics and service to the community (also covered in The Tech). The statistics used to compute these rankings are not ideal, as acknowledged in the article, but it still seems like a good idea to me. Hopefully they'll be able to find better ways to measure service in the future and MIT will stay close to the top.

I've been meaning to write a couple of other posts; I'll hopefully get to them soon.

Saul Bass Titles

You can view stills from a bunch of titles done by Saul Bass here. I posted on Saul Bass before (but the link in that post is broken). Cool stuff.

More on Diet Coke

Here is a page that breaks down the various diet versions of Coke, vaguely related to a post of mine from a while back.

Poor Guy

Check out the White House press briefing [RealPlayer link] where Scott McClellan tries to dodge questions about Karl Rove. He's not very good at it, and it's just kind of sad to watch.