Blog Archives: School
Running – Week 6
Riverwalk trail on Brisbane River My goal running this week was to avoid stopping during runs. Because I start from home in the city and have to run about 1-1.5km before I hit a trail, the beginnings and ends of most runs involve frequent stops for stop lights. Once I hit the trail, though, I’m aiming for my long runs and tempo runs to be non-stop, and I achieved those goals this week.
My tempo and speedwork runs (Thursday mornings) are along the Riverwalk trails which run quite a ways along the Brisbane River. This week’s picture is the view along the river about 2 km from downtown looking back at the central business district.
| May 4 Mon | Rest day | |
| May 5 Tue | 3.8km | Easy run |
| May 6 Wed | Rest day (rock climbing rained out) | |
| May 7 Thu | 8.0km | Tempo run |
| May 8 Fri | Rest day | |
| May 9 Sat | Rest day | |
| May 10 Sun | 11.6km | Long run |
| Total | 23.4km | Year to date: 172.0km |
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Thesis analysis
When I was writing my PhD thesis, I kept my thesis in CVS. For my non-technical readers, that’s a form of revision management software, which lets you keep track of your document as it changes over time. That allows you to fix something if you realize you want to go back to a previous version, it allows you to create diffs (like Microsoft Word’s track changes) between any versions of your document, and it also means you can analyze the history of your document.
Thesis analysis Inspired by something I once saw on another blog, I wrote some scripts to find out statistics of my thesis over its lifetime. In the graph at left (click it for a larger version), the green area represents the total number of pages over time, and the the blue bars represent the number of lines of code changed each day. In other words, the green represents the overall picture and the blue is the amount of work done each day.
I was most interested to discover that my thesis work happened in chunks with long breaks in between. As you can see I worked on my thesis over a period of 6 months before submission on January 22, 2009, but in that six month period only about 55 days were actually spent editing my thesis. Rather than slacking off, what really happened is that I was working on turning the research into papers that eventually turned into thesis chapters. So a lot of work would happen outside the thesis for a few weeks and once that was done there would be a flurry of activity to bring it all into the thesis.
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Thesis, summarized
Words in my thesis by frequency In case you haven’t finished reading my thesis yet, here’s a summary. (Word size denotes frequency of use in the thesis. Generated by Wordle.)
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PhD and Postdoc
It’s been a busy few months, and I haven’t been writing a lot on here, but times, they are-a-changing.
Ste09 In January I submitted my thesis, entitled Classical Authenticated Key Exchange and Quantum Cryptography, to my examiners. After that was 6 long weeks of waiting, most of which consisted of working on other things and travelling to Calgary to visit Donny (for research) and Marika, and then frantically preparing my slides for my defense. On March 5, I successfully defended my thesis and have thus completed all the requirements of my PhD. My final revisions have been now been accepted and the thesis is off to the printers! You can read the abstract and full thesis online.
Not one to sit still I left Waterloo one week later — after an awesome party at the Grad House and lots and lots of packing — to move all of my stuff to my parents’ place in Windsor, where I am now. And one week after that — this Thursday — I will leave Windsor to fly to a 2-year postdoctoral research position at the Information Security Institute at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia.
This will be quite an adventure. I don’t know anyone in Australia at the moment, though I’m sure I’ll meet people. I don’t have a place to live yet. But all of these things will work out. I’ll be updating my blog much more frequently once I move to Australia, so hopefully I’ll attract some readers back. You can follow me on my website or on my notes on Facebook (blog entries appear in both locations).
And for those of you concerned that, sadly, I’ll be going from winter in Canada to winter in Australia, let me just say this: the average high in Brisbane in July is 21 degrees Celsius.
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Certificate in University Teaching
I have just completed the Certificate in University Teaching offered by the Centre for Teaching Excellence (formerly the TRACE Office) at the University of Waterloo.
The Certificate is designed to help participants prepare for and improve at university teaching. It consists of a few different courses:
- GS 901: Preparing for University Teaching. For this course I attended a number of workshops and submitted short response papers.
- GS 902: Preparing for an Academic Career. This course requires the most work. It consists of the preparation of a teaching dossier and a research paper. My teaching dossier describes my teaching philosophy, techniques, and experience, and includes extracts from course evaluation forms submitted by students. My research paper was about my proposal to use tutorial periods to have students present solutions to certain types of problems that are designed to improve formal reasoning and proof skills.
- GS 903: Teaching Practicum. For this course, observers from the Centre for Teaching Excellence came into the classroom three times during a course I taught (MATH 136, Spring 2006), provided me with a written report on strengths and areas for improvement, and I wrote response papers.
In doing the Certificate and in teaching two courses (MATH 136, Spring 2006 and Spring 2007), I have realized that I enjoy teaching and want it to be a part of my career. The Certificate could be improved in some ways, but overall it provides decent preparation for university teaching and causes one to think more seriously about the role of teaching in university.
I’ll receive the Certificate at graduation, assuming I ever finish this PhD thing.
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Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation
The Right Hon. Stephen Harper
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A6
Prime Minister Harper,
I am writing to encourage your government to renew the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation before its mandate expires in 2009.
The Foundation supports over 100,000 post-secondary students annually and is responsible for about 30% of all non-repayable grants awarded in Canada. As such, it is a vital component of the funding available to post-secondary students and allows many students who could otherwise not afford to do so to attend college and university.
A collective of student alliances from across Canada have issued recommendations regarding renewal of the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation. I [...] encourage you to adopt their recommendations and continue supporting Canada’s students.
Respectfully,
Douglas Stebila
Encl.: Sleepwalking towards the precipice: The looming $350 hole in Canada’s financial aid system (full version available at http://www.grantsreloaded.ca/thepressroom.html)
Cc: The Hon. Andrew Telegdi, The Hon. Stéphane Dion, The Hon. Jack Layton, Gilles Duceppe
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Snow day
Ice-covered trees, Waterloo Another snow/ice closure day here in Waterloo (that’s 2.5 this winter!), although you wouldn’t know it by walking outside. Sure, there’s another 4 inches of snow or something like that, and ice coating all the branches and roads, but this morning the sky was blue, the temperature was above freezing, birds were singing, and little animals were frolicking. But 
Snow-covered car in Waterloo I suppose that if I had to get this car out on the road, I wouldn’t want to go anywhere either.
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IQC Christmas
Donny, Gus, Mike, me, and Lana at the IQC Christmas party My research group, the Institute for Quantum Computing had its Christmas party at the beginning of December. We had dinner and then went curling, which I am not very good at but enjoyed nonetheless. It was a family party, so Pere Noel and his elf came to give presents to the children. My supervisor Mike was dressed up as an elf (with curly elf shoes too, which unfortunatey you can’t see in this picture). We asked him to take a picture with us when he was done with presents. He suggested we wait a moment so he could go change out of his outfit, but we said it would be fine. I’m sure you can imagine why.
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