There were only two panelists (the Q&A was organized somewhat last minute due to scheduling problems), but there were a couple of themes that I thought I’d summarize.

1. Propose as early as possible. This is especially useful because the proposal requires that you find an external committee member. This requires that you network (a little), which is something you should start to do early. Also, the proposal process forces you to think critically about the structure of your overall thesis project, set some limits where needed, expand ideas where the picture is less clear. Also, there is some comfort to having the project be vetted rather than waiting till most of the work is completed and then running into problems.

2. Don’t worry too much about it. If you do the hard work of researching and writing papers, you will most likely pass your proposal (even if the proposal itself gets a little bit bumpy).

3. Focus on the motivation, and the connection between the motivation and the specific technical work you are doing. This should always be in your mind as you work on your proposal.

4. Write out a concrete schedule of milestones for completing the proposed work. If you find this difficult (or if your schedule is not concrete), that may indicate that you have to go back and think more about the structure of the thesis project.

5. Do a practice talk.

6. Have experience giving talks on your research both inside and outside the department. Discuss your research with peers in the lab and outsiders. This is one of the best ways to avoid the kind of tunnel vision that results in people being blindsided by difficult and unexpected questions during the proposal talk.

7. Consider going to a doctoral consortium in your area. In AI, both IJCAI and AAAI have doctoral consortiums that provide a forum for people embarking on dissertation research.

Honestly, I don’t know what to believe. This post has a lot of good info. The fact that the Cactus Cafe is now under control of KUT makes this KUT’s problem. From my perspective, the important battle has already been won. That said, I was curious enough to look up the salaries of each of the two contenders for the management position:

Cameron Smith: $83,400*
Griff Luneburg: $38,628^

Given the salary disparities, it is hard to understand why Cameron Smith even wants the job. It is even harder to imagine that Griff Luneburg’s salary was really breaking the bank of the Texas Union budget. Honestly, when I discovered the salary discrepancy here my whole understanding of what is really going on was turned upside down. Now I’m not sure what to think.

* Cameron Smith has reportedly already quit as assistant director of Texas Performing Arts.

^ How does that salary even make sense for a guy with friends like these?

Update: And the new manager is … none of the above.

But that sort of begs the question: who’s turning Austin normal?

I came across one answer as I was reading up on the latest counter-proposal for the Cactus Cafe closure over at Student Friends of the Cactus Cafe. That in turn led to a series of Chronicle articles detailing the brutal budget slash and burn that the Union has faced under the direction of Andy Smith.

I guess Andy gets to retire after he’s eliminated everything unique about the Texas Union. Maybe when the Starbucks gets to expand into the gutted corpse of the Catcus Cafe, Andy will get free mocha lattes for life. But first Kinko’s has to take over for the UT print center, and we definitely need some kind of satellite Border’s bookstore.

Only then, Andy, will you have a career you’ll be proud to look back on.

It was no accident that Time Warner Cable included Austin in its plans to roll out tiered pricing plans for Internet access. In fact, the city’s concentration of tech-savvy customers is the very thing that attracted the company’s efforts.

And some worrying usage cases being considered:

Austin American Statesman said today that a family that streams 7.25 hours of video (that’s 3 movies folks) will see an increase in their bill of upwards of $200. This is not an issue of keeping up with technology.

My primary concern is that without any competition, TWC will have no incentive to offer more capacity at lower prices and that capacity pricing will simply result in higher charges for the same service. I also don’t particularly buy into the notion that “high usage” customers are using up all the capacity. Without context, this kind of distinction coming from TWC could mean anything. In particular, maybe the high-versus-low usage distinction divides customers by who watches videos online and who doesn’t. If this is true, then TWC changing their pricing scheme is entirely anti-competitive, since the cable provider is trying to shift people who watch online videos to the DVR+Cable revenue stream and away from competing sources of video content.

Without competition, there is no alternative.

Of secondary concern is that the whole notion of capacity versus bandwidth pricing may not really align with how capacity and bandwidth are allotted on the actual network. If you are going to create a finer set of pricing distinctions, and force customers to estimate their future behavior and needs when making broadband purchasing decisions, those fine distinctions should allow for better network performance for everyone, by aligning customer usage with network constraints. But if the pricing distinctions are not really closely coupled with any network constraints, then why should we expect better service for the increased cost and hassle?

Web users, the meter is running. In a strategy that’s likely to rankle consumers but be copied by competitors, Time Warner Cable (TWC) is pressing ahead with a plan to charge Internet customers based on how much Web data they consume. Starting next month, the company will introduce tiered pricing in several markets.

I’m not sure this is going to go over well in Austin, TX. In fact, I can imagine all kinds of nefarious consequences. Do you really want to waste 40mb updating Windows every week? Do you get billed for visiting Time Warner’s website? What if a neighbor steals your bandwidth? What if a virus steals your bandwidth? In fact, why should we believe TWC usage statistics at all? Are they a regulated utility now? Some guy working at TWC could up everyone’s bill by 5% using a single database update.