[lowmagnet]

I like this because she is a professor at Harvey Mudd. They took steps to make CS more inclusive, with great results. I appreciate her attitude on accessibility, which is in keeping with that institution's philosophy.

That she ran into a paper wall doesn't bother her because she's openly publishing is even better.

[dsacco]

Regardless of her attitude on academic accessibility, it is inappropriate for a paper introducing a novel primitive with proposed security considerations to spend the time explaining why determinism is a concern in functions dealing with randomness. This paper could have been 10 pages.

If you want to make your research more accessible, there are ways to do that without assuming that your reader is coming in from a dead start on the field.

[mathperson]

I am not sure why you are being downvoted. I think this is clearly true.

An easy way to make research accessible is to write a monograph!

[thanatropism]

There's room for accessible and for abstruse literature. Usually what happens with novel work is that initial publications are abstruse but met with excitement by the scholarly community and gradually more accessible works (as the number of collaborators/coauthors grows too) are published.

That said, even if multi-culti math means that top-line researchers are going to be spending time with song-and-dance introductions, she should still have put a grad student onto the task of making the short paper that experts will actually read.

If the whole thing is a matter of style and not of obfuscation, this would have given a grad student an easy, cool first publication.

[pizza]

Well, Harvey Mudd is an undergrad-only STEM school, so I'm not sure having a grad student edit it would have been possible.

[thanatropism]

Well, her peers in her research program probably have grad students...

I mean, she's working in collaboration with someone, right?

[dminor]

In the history of the paper she mentions some summer research, but that is for undergrads. Harvey Mudd is all undergrad and tends to emphasize teaching over research (at least, that was the philosophy 20 years ago o_O).

[mathperson]

What is multi-culti?

[thanatropism]

It's a common sarcastic term hurled at things like "inclusive CS".

For all I know this iteration of "inclusive" could be the Right Stuff -- proper intellectual discipline even as it advances secondary goals of "inclusiveness". But stiiill... she should have by now had the common courtesy of producing a short document aimed at experts, possibly prepared by her underlings. This would also have helped the career of the underlings.

[tptacek]

"Physics for poets".

[thaumasiotes]

"Multicultural"

[CalChris]

I watched her EE380 talk [1] and thought she was a fine professor for a difficult (to me) subject. That she didn't get published for at best stylistic reasons means nothing.

[1] https://ee.stanford.edu/event/seminar/ee380-computer-systems...