the fastest way to embed fonts in a PDF (for me)

I needed to submit a PDF today with all fonts embedded.  I'm working on a Mac with TexShop, and after much angsty Googling, I found lots of answers that seemed to work for other people, but for one reason or another, weren't working for me.

This is what I ended up doing: I created the PDF like usual with TexShop (without all the fonts embedded...I'm looking at you, Helvetica).  Then, I used pdf2ps to convert it to a postscript file, and then Adobe Distiller to convert back to a PDF (with all fonts embedded).  There may be other ps to pdf options that do the font embedding (Dstiller isn't free), but I was sure Distiller did, and I was on a timeline.

This is the PDF equivalent of "just reboot it."  It's silly that embedding fonts is such a messy process.

on lady tech events

I recently had a colleague ask me about women in tech events, and I wanted to adapt my response into a blog post.

Women in tech events and long-term mentoring can be very fulfilling, especially when the audience is narrow enough. That said, I'm always hesitant about female tech mentoring because it seems like there is so very much of it, both soliciting mentors and mentees, so it's easy to commit to more than you actually want to do.

It's important that every individual takes a step back asks themselves: How much time do I want to dedicate to networking and mentorship? What kinds of interactions are most valuable to me? (What have I enjoyed about other events I attended?) Plan the big picture first, and then use that as a roadmap to make the smaller choices.

In the end, these are personal choices about you and your career. For me, going to WiML every year is enough. But other people might want more support or networking. Still others might not care at all about things like this—again, this is totally personal. It also varies depending on where you are in your career, because our needs and preferences evolve with time.

As a one-off, these kind of things won't make or break you, but it's the aggregate of multiple events over your career. If you're not certain about a particular event, it might be worth going, just to see how fulfilling these kinds of events are to you, so you can make informed choices going forward.

How to contact an academic

Ever since I started graduate school, I've gotten the occasional academic spam from applying students.  These folks are obviously trying to be clever by automating their emails, but usually people see through it.  I also regularly get emails from people who want to work for my advisor, or from friends and strangers who want advice on applying to grad school.  It feels as though I've repeating myself recently, so I'm collecting all of my advice about contacting professors (or other academics) into a blog post.

1. Keep it brief

Nobody likes a long rambling email, except maybe your mom.  At the most, attach or link a CV/resume.   A general template is to introduce yourself, express why you're interested in their work, and then tell them what you want.  Each of these can easily be one sentence, maybe two.  If you want to put lots of effort into this email because it's really important to you, don't just make it longer.  Instead, take the time to craft your words so they read quickly and easily.

2. Have a purpose / Make it easy for them to respond

Think about why you're writing to this person.  Is it because you want to be noticed in graduate applications?  If that's it, just skip the email because it probably won't do anything.  You should only email folks when you have a purpose.  Examples of good purposes: you want to be a research assistant, want to join their reading group, would like to sit in on a group meeting, or would like to schedule a meeting with them (e.g., to get their advice on a project).  If you make it clear what you want, and show that it isn't that much work for them (15m of their time or a two-line email response), then they're much more likely to respond positively.

Now, contrary to what I just said, you can still write to a professor even if you just want to be noticed for graduate school applications.  You just need an additional reason, like one of the examples I mentioned above.  You should simply say that you're applying, would love to join their research group, and then give them that extra something else that allows them to respond easily, like asking if you can stop in on their group meeting or if they could put you in touch with one of their current students.  Simply saying "I'm applying to grad school at your university" is usually a waste of everyone's time, yours included.

If you don't actually need them to respond, you can just say so, but sometimes it's implicit.  "I just wanted to thank you for your great work on ABC; I've used it for XYZ and thought you might be interested in seeing the results at <link>."  Regardless of whether or not you want a response, make it clear why you're writing to them so that they know what to with the email; this is just general email etiquette.

3. Do your homework

Read their papers.  Download and run their code.  This takes a bit of work, but you should only be contacting a handful of people anyway—probably under a dozen if you're applying to graduate school, or maybe three if you're looking for a research position at your current institution.  If reading their papers is intensely painful for you, then maybe you shouldn't be writing to them.

You also want to avoid looking silly.  You shouldn't be asking them questions that they've answered recently on their blog, or asking for their latest reading group paper that's posted on an easy-to-find publicly available schedule.

The last reason you want to do your homework is that you don't want to look like a bot.  Consider the difference between "I like your research in machine learning" and "I like your research on visualizing topic models".  The first could be sent to thousands of people, but the second could only be sent to a handful.  If the content of your email is sufficiently personal, it's obvious that you're a human being that might be worth responding to.

Summary

Keep your messages short, sincere, and specific.  These seem like good guides for general correspondence as well.

WiML 2014 workshop

Yesterday was the culmination of many months of planning for the annual Women in Machine Learning workshop.  I think it will easily be my favorite part of being up in Montreal for the duration of NIPS 2014.

We had an amazing program; our invited speakers were Carla Brodley, Tina Eliassi-Rad, Diane Hu, and Claudia Perlich with Finale Doshi-Velez giving our opening remarks.  Our student oral presentations were thought provoking, and the breadth of our poster session was immense.  Corporate sponsors sent great representatives, and the round table mentoring session enabled some amazing discussions.  I feel like I can through positive adjectives at basically any aspect of the event, from our volunteers to the food.

I loved working with my fellow organizers Marzyeh Ghassemi, Sarah Brown, and Jessica Thompson.  It was an amazing experience and I'm very glad to have had this opportunity.

Thanks to @kmkinnaird for her photography!

the new MCMC

MCMC typical stands for Markov chain Monte Carlo, a standard class of algorithms in the world of machine learning.  Well, now that I'm done with generals, I'm redefining MCMC to stand for Minecraft and Mac'n'Cheese.  I look forward to rebalancing myself, but for now I'm spending a night on the sloth end of the spectrum to make up for the roughly nine months of uncharacteristic pertinacity. I swear, if my life were a movie, the vast majority of this year so far would have been a look-at-me-working montage.

(I won't actually know the results officially for a bit yet, but I feel pretty good.)

this bird wouldn't voom if you put 4 million volts through it

Generals prep.  Migraine.  Wash, rinse, repeat.

I'm looking forward to binging on Minecraft, sleeping 9 hours a night, and generally going back to a normal-human schedule once this exam is done.

nerd sniped: books about distributions

It was decided today that I need to learn more about the Poisson distribution, and preferably not just from Wikipedia.  Thus, I decided a two-pronged approach to build up my intuition: playing with it in R and reading up on it in Johnson et al.'s Univariate Discrete Distributions.

What should have been a quick trip to the library ended up involving me sitting on the floor (bottom shelves always make me stay longer for this very reason) and browsing the books for at least ten, maybe fifteen minutes.  That's not terribly long, you might say, but I'm an incredibly decisive person* and this is a topic that most normal people would spend fifteen minutes avoiding.

{* Aside: As long as I'm the only one making the decision, I'm very decisive.  As soon as other people's opinions come into play, I'm wishy-washy like whoa.  Anecdote: my wedding invitations were selected down to font and ink color probably within 7 minutes of opening the two huge binders full of options.  But, ask me for restaurant preferences for a group dinner and you'll get an annoyingly placatory response. }

So I end up leaving with not just the book that I had intended to check out, but also Severini's Elements of Distribution Theory and Consul's Generalized Poisson Distributions.  Great reading for a Friday night.

While I was there, I also stumbled upon a book called A Folio of Distributions, which, as far as I could tell, consisted entirely of plots for all of its 500-some pages.  It was originally published in 1987, long before the age when a student of statistics could simply fire up R in order to see how a distribution behaves in different contexts.  I almost checked it out, but given the facts that A) I was on foot and B) the computer I was already carrying could produce the same results, I let it be.

The moral of the story: I love university libraries, especially those belonging to absurdly privileged institutions.  If these books don't grow my brain, they'll certainly grow my muscles.

ah, September

The campus is teeming with new students and excited old ones--it makes me feel a bit cantankerous.  I mean, I'm happy, but it's not intrinsically tied up in the rush of starting a new semester.  Durn young'uns.

It was nice to get a change of scenery for the summer (by being at Microsoft Research in NYC, in case you didn't know).  Jake Hofman was an incredible mentor, and I learned about things in a refreshingly different light.  It's always a little sad to leave anywhere pleasant, but I'm happy not to spend three hours on a train each day.

Now I'm trying to find my routine for the semester; I need to be productive and prepare for my General Exams in October.  It's a little scary, but I'm feeling much more confident about my work than I used to be.

There's a lot of non-research I need to do as well, things that I let slip over the summer.  Fixing up my bike, harvesting the last tails of the garden, making dentist appointments.

Nothing is overwhelming yet, and hopefully it'll stay that way.  Maybe that's why everyone likes September so much.

seeking Mormon women in Computer Science

There was a lunch presentation at work recently by Mary Fernandez, CEO of MentorNet. She talked about connecting students with mentors in STEM fields, focusing on women and ethnic minority groups, who have fewer role models. This got me thinking (again) about Mormon women in STEM fields, specifically computer science.

I ran some really rough numbers based on the number of PhDs in computer science in the United States and the number of Mormons. Uniformly sampled, there should be a non-trivial number of Mormon women with PhDs in computer science--on the order of tens to low hundreds. But have I met a single one? No. Have I heard of a single one? No. Does BYU's faculty have any?  No. On the U of U's CS faculty listing, three out of 67, or 4.5% of the faculty are female.  But even still, one does not simply email women faculty at Utah-based schools and ask them if A) they are Mormon or B) they'd like to give me life advice.  I have some social skills.

I've known plenty of Mormon women who have gotten a Bachelors or Masters in STEM fields, or PhDs in Social Sciences or Humanities. I appreciate the camaraderie of both of those genres of similarity, but it'd also be really nice to have someone who I could talk to about the particular situation of being a Mormon woman in a STEM PhD.

But why is the particular combination of Mormon and STEM PhD important?  These two cultures are the strongest external pressures on my big life decisions, and have largely conflicting objectives. 

Mormon culture says I should be having my second child by now (let alone a first), that my husband's career should be getting priority, and if I do pursue higher education or have a job, I should only do around my children's schedule--once my children are in school is ideal.  I want to talk about how when I meet other Mormons, male or female, they usually ask me about what I do only after they have asked me about what my husband does, if at all.  And they pretty much never ask my husband about what I do.

On the flip side, I want to talk about the pressures of academia, and not in an abstract sense.  I want to talk about the technical details about what I'm doing and have them understand.  I want to talk about what I should do after my PhD program beyond the general categories of industry and academia--I want advice on particular institutions and people.  I want to talk about being female in a male-dominated field and how that impacts the way I perceive things and the way people perceive me.

Putting it all together, I want to talk about how I feel when my male academic colleagues and female Mormon colleagues are having kids.  I want to have kids, but I feel that I can't right now, or I'll risk falling behind.  There needs to be substantial planning for it to work, which doesn't feel fair.  I want to talk about no matter how strong my ego is, sometimes I think that I'm just not smart enough, but don't want to admit it because I need to be an example to other women, both at church and in CS.

It's actually not that important for me to have a female Mormon CS or even STEM mentor, since I have all sorts of wonderful support: my husband, my parents, my advisor, my mentor at work, my colleagues at school and work, and select friends from church.  Perhaps I've just been adding modifiers until I get such a tiny subset of people that I can complain that I haven't run into any.  That said, it never feels bad to know that you're not alone.

Regardless, if you are or know of other LDS women in CS or STEM fields that are looking to connect with similar folks, please let me know!  That is, unless they kvetch as much as I do.

How do you process online content?

I put together an informal survey so that I can better understand what online services people use and how they use them.  In particular, I'm trying to figure out what can be done to make information-processing services smarter and more adaptive to their users; this is a first step in understanding the problem.  If you have a moment, please take the survey.

day done

The big task of this past weekend: editing an eight page paper down to four pages for ICWSM (due this evening).  But now it's all done and submitted for publishing, providing I didn't violate some obscure formatting rule.  Now for the fun part: logistics for a trip to Ireland!  I really should work on other things, but all I really want to do is eat Trader Joe’s Cocoa Almond Spread, watch Star Trek TNG, and stalk kayak.com, so that's what I'm going to do.  By the way, the almond spread is quite a find; it's similar to Nutella, but I'm an almond junkie, so I think it's better.  I like it on untoasted bread topped with pecan pieces.  Ah, the life.

recovery

I just finished my last class for the semester.  Whoooew.  After three years off school, it hit hard.  I'll still be doing a bit of research for the next little bit, but I'm also going to plan my garden, take a trip to Boston, clean the house, read like mad, paint, sew...you name it.  This here brain is tired.  Speaking of which, a nap is in order; my sleep deficit is high.

tailspin

The semester is ending, and I've been working too much.  I took a problem set home over Christmas, worked on projects on the airplane, and have been buried since we returned (just before the new year).  I don't mind the occasional day or two of stress, but several weeks in a row is painful.

Right now feels like a winter dawn--the sky is starting to brighten almost imperceptibly, but it's going to be freaking cold for a long while before the sun actually gets here.

bit-wise

I'm taking a class just for fun this semester, because its title nerd-sniped me in an instant: The Future of the Book.  So far, we've read a motley of opinion pieces and delved into technophilosophy, which is a word I just made up.  I've discovered that I am a bit of a luddite, or rather, I've discovered how much of a luddite I really am.  I'll give up my bound paper books when my ashes are mingled with N's under an oak tree.

Of more general interest than ashes, I read two articles that resonated with me, and I thought I'd share them.  The first, The Future of the Book, shares several topics with those mentioned in my class.  There's a lot to discuss about the future of books, libraries, the privilege inherent in the shift to digital media, expectations of society as that shift happens, how much things will change and how fast, what one's ideal future look like, and how to contribute to or shape that future.  But since I'm thoroughly opinionated in class, I think I won't bother to rehash everything here, at least not right now.

The second, Is Google Making Us Stupid? talks about the digital age more generally.  Carr writes, "what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation," and I feel it as well.  Ironically enough, I couldn't even finish the article on the first go-round.  I have a hard time reading novels just sitting down at home--it's much easier when I'm on a bus or walking somewhere.  My prayers are generally shorter and less meditative.  Certainly not everything can be blamed on the Internet, but no matter: there's nothing wrong with culling the excess time spent online.  At the very least it makes more time for those other things.

I've committed to spending less time online in lots of different ways over the past few years.  My first year out of college, I had no internet at home, which was amazing.   I've put restrictive apps on my browsers, made mutual promises with N, intentionally left my laptop off or at home for extended periods of time, but the Internet still calls.  It's like sugar for the brain.

So with that, I'll turn off my computer for the night.

useful knowledge and respect

Last week, in the second lecture of my AI class, there were a host of undergrad students jabbering annoyingly during the lecture.  I almost pulled out my scolding matron voice, but decided against it.  Upon being dismissed (or rather, upon dismissing themselves since most of the students can't sit still a minute after the official end time, even when the professor still has things to say), these students continued to gab disrespectfully.  We were covering breadth-first and other uninformed/naïve searches, and the students were complaining along the lines of "If we're never going to use it, why is he teaching us about it?"  Second lecture material guys, seriously?  Also, if you're putting merit on stuff you're going to use, go get an apprenticeship somewhere or take a cooking class.  In my experience, undergraduate education is more about developing the mind in general than about acquiring stores of practical knowledge.  I know that in some ways I'm being just as arrogant and pretentious as they were, but... I don't know.  I guess I think there's some honor in defending the respect of a professor, especially an excellent one.  But perhaps I've been reading A Game of Thrones too much recently and am overly caught up in the concept of honor.

twas the first day of classes

My first day of grad classes: nothing special except a back ache from not getting to class early enough (sitting on stairs = ow).

In other news: inspired by Anna Garforth, I've been collecting various species of moss.  I don't like the idea of using a blender to propagate it, as many "recipes" online call for, so we'll see if I can get it to grow without that.  The method so far: quarter-sized moss pieces in sugar water.  I might add buttermilk--we'll see. (Unless N throws them out the window.)

In other other news: I got a new computer at the office.  Given that it's a shiny-shiny iMac, it makes me want to redecorate the office.  I imagine a minimalist look (all papers, pens, etc. being put away) and having a few nice decorative things: a sheepskin rug, a single-stem white orchid, and a huge 4'x4' painting of a pastel sky with an eight inch wide white frame.  I can do this fairly economically, especially if I make and frame the painting myself, but there are still several problems with doing this, most of them stemming from the fact that doing so would be very atypical behavior for someone in my office.  It might be viewed as excessive or simply odd, and I might feel guilty for caring about my environment.  In our office of five, nobody really has anything personal at their desks.  Well...here's to change!