Weekly Workflow is a special edition of Bits & Bytes that will serve as a Monday check-in message to help CSE students stay connected to the department during the COVID-19 pandemic. It will include announcements, resources, tips, and messages from our department chair.
We continue to encourage everyone to visit our CSE COVID-19 web page for regular updates and additional resources.
On-campus learning to resume this fall
On Friday, University of Nebraska President Ted Carter issued an Update on Fall 2020 Planning, "to let you know that we will have plans in place to safely resume in-person teaching and learning in fall 2020.
Chancellor Ronnie Green also communicated about our next academic year in an email to the university community, "Planning for Fall Classes."
Course evaluations available in Canvas
Course evaluations are now available in Canvas. Please fill them out this week, and be sure to include any possible feedback about our transition to remote learning this semester.
A message from the department chair:
The latest experiment from Dakidd Serious both answers an important scientific question—How many rubber bands does it take to explode a watermelon?—and points to the greater importance of silliness.
Silliness is a grad tradition in science and particularly in computer science. A few examples are in order:
The Unix Lab, 1127, was a cauldron of silliness. As one example, the team painted a convolution of Ken Thompson and the AT&T logo onto the Murray Hill water tower one night. (Don’t know who Ken is? Look him up.)
My first department head at that august institution, George Smith (look him up), once treated a delayed work order to change a plug in an office this way. He unfolded a paper clip and stuck it into the socket that needed to be moved. He then opined to his staff, “Why, this is an obvious safety violation. As departmental safety representative, I am obliged to report it immediately.” The socket was moved the next day. Problem solved.
Over in 1138, the executive assistant of our director Arun Netravali (look him up) filled Arun’s office with balloons. Arun had a big office; that was a lot of balloons My department head in 1138 decided to surprise me with a bucket of water propped on top of my door. He forgot to take into account our cleaning lady, an Italian grandmother who cleaned our offices early each morning. Angie had calmed down by the time I arrived, but the evidence of her volcanic display of displeasure to being doused was everywhere.
One of my more important experiments of the era was the Evel Knievel/David Letterman Memorial Stunt, in which I ran a model car off the roof of our building. The principal experimental result was that the car was in sufficiently good shape after a three-story drop that I could run it off the roof one more time under its own power. I was also one of the instigators of the Great Squirt Gun War. Each of us built our own weapons: I used a tree sprayer; one of our department heads powered a Water Pik with a rack of ni-cads and fed it from a gallon jug. One day, we held our lab meeting in the very nice conference room owned by the legal center. Just as in the Old West, the gunfight was never announced but everyone knew it would happen. At the end of the meeting, we all drew our weapons simultaneously. The innocents fled. We hosed down each other and the lawyers’ nice furniture and carpet. We then ran back to the safety of our offices.
Precarious times call for grand measures. Dare to be silly.
—Marilyn Wolf
Department Chair