Password Generation with R

Submitted for your amusement. This script will generate ten passwords (N) of length 25. These are strong passwords. The program draws from numerals 0-9 and upper/lower case letters of the alphabet. Tune the parameters to your liking.

#!/usr/bin/Rscript --no-restore --quiet
#
length=25
N = 10
choices=c(0:9,letters,LETTERS)
for (n in 1:N) {
  pw = sample(choices,length,replace=TRUE)
  cat(pw,sep='',"\n")
}

This is a sample output. Don't use these passwords posted here, generate your own with your own copy of R. It only makes sense to use passwords like this if you're using a password manager such as LastPass or 1Password. You are using a password manager, right?

Er5Qu2KtAAmcyRVJ1IlAgR16O
vV8GtgPrf58U0Mo7SqPQ7YyGz
fIVSxjNsP46DOyDhrnW8OXxr4
1t9dF29UrZCHEvDi8Pd6REjXm
7H6hhxX2dSLebUbc5S1VaPBdu
1WlDWDaN2lrf5xPHHET41xvJR
ZNy8X3WFHCFe5YxFK4FJBoNt5
6MHmMnaScoxDfoApvNeugvuWx
VODxLoAF8M9KkTRVN2R12wOKJ
CdYuHafhTbcMEmG6GUsYZk9vl

Gedenktafeln

Alfred Wegener is one of my heroes. He first postulated the theory of continental drift, now known as plate tectonics. For this he was ridiculed, scorned, and abused during his lifetime, which ended tragically. He never relented, however. The wikipedia article does not give precise dates, but it took until the 1960s before the theory of continental drift was widely accepted. Someone remarked once that all the old scientists who were opposed to the new, correct theory had to die off before it could be accepted. That's how science progresses sometimes, by the death of the intolerant.

Here's the "Gedenktafel" (commemorative or memorial plaque) on the wall of the gymnasium (think high school if you're American) he attended in Berlin. Gotta love "Kontinentalverschiebungstheorie" for continental drift theory. An mp3 of the pronunciation is at http://goo.gl/e6MnkR.

"The polar researcher Prof. Dr. Alfred Wegener b. 1880 in Berlin, d. 1930 in the midst of the Greenland ice sheet. He was a student of the former Cologne Gymnasium, earned his PhD in 1905 from the University of Berlin, and in 1912 laid the groundwork for the modern theory of continental drift."

As one can read in the wikipedia article linked to above, Wegener perished on the ice in Greenland in late 1930. One can only imagine how brutal the weather conditions must have been. His body was buried with care by a 23-yr old name Rasmus Villumsen, who marked the site with a pair of skis that Wegener had used. Villumsen continued on and is presumed to have perished. His body was never found.

Why college tuition has outstripped inflation, in one graph

The American Association of University Professors has published an interesting graph [pdf]. I would embed it here, but that's not easy with blogger, since it's a pdf. The graph shows the percentage change in the number of employees in higher education institutions, by category of employee, from 75-76 to 2011. The graph is figure 1 in their annual salary report.

To get to the point, it's the administrators. The "Full-time Nonfaculty Professional" category has increased by 369% in the last 35 years. During the same time period, faculty positions have increased a measly 23%. There are now 3.7 times as many administrators bloating the payrolls of our universities as there were 30-some years ago. So that's why college tuition has grown by about 1200% in three decades. We're paying twelve times as much for tuition to finance a bunch of bullshit jobs.

It doesn't have to be like this. As Rebecca Schuman has noted in a slate.com post, there is one (one!) university in the USA that has been hiring more faculty and getting rid of bloated salaries on the administration payroll. That school is Iowa State University. What is their secret? ISU provides an existence proof that sanity can be restored. This one school is increasing faculty, while others are eliminating majors.

How do we fix this problem? I suppose the state legislators could do it. They approve the university budgets, right? The professors could go on strike. Eventually, this bubble will burst. This is some kind of deep irony, or a very cruel joke on college students, who are graduating in droves with debt that will take decades to pay off and lousy job prospects.

The TL;DR on this topic is Thomas Frank's post at salon.com.

Grading Software fooled by BABEL

BABEL, the Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language generator, is software created by Les Perelman and others [chronicle.com] at MIT. Perelman was a "Director of Undergraduate Writing" at MIT. He has used BABEL to generate nonsense essays and feed them to automated essay grading software. The BABEL output gets high marks with sentences like "Privateness has not been and undoubtedly never will be lauded, precarious, and decent." I think Perelman has a point here. Clever students will no doubt learn to game any such grading system to their benefit. Teachers must question what, if any, benefit an automated essay grading system has.

Back in 2005, Perelman discovered an excellent predictor of score [nytimes.com] on an SAT essay test. It was the length of the essay. No other variable he examined correlated nearly as well with the score. The top scoring essays had many factual errors, too. No matter, according to SAT. The writing quality depends not on the correctness of any facts, according to SAT. Perelman's advice for scoring well is to practice writing fast and make up facts. Perhaps the high scorers can land a job with Fox News?

A paper by Perelman in the Journal of Writing Assessment critiques automatic scoring of essays.

Racial, Gender Bias in Mentoring

Heard on NPR Morning Edition today: the depressing results of a study done by Katherine Milkman of the Wharton School of Business and two others. The researchers emailed 6,548 faculty mentors at  258 schools pretending to be students aspiring to earn a PhD. All potential advisors received the same message; only the name of the sender was changed. NPR says the names were all different. The messages said in part "I really admire your work, would you have some time to meet?" Names were purposely chosen to distribute across racial and ethnic identities. All that was measured was how often the profs wrote back agreeing to meet with the students.

Women and minorities were less likely to get responses, relative to caucasian males, and less likely to get positive responses. Caucasian males obtained access 26% more often. Remember, the text of the messages was identical. NPR says the letters were "impeccably written."

Perhaps the most distressing results were that that the gender of the professor had no effect, according to NPR, and that the business professors discriminated the most in favor of white male names like "Brad Anderson."

Evidence Of Racial, Gender Biases Found In Faculty Mentoring [npr.org audio].

HETEROGENEITY IN DISCRIMINATION?: A FIELD EXPERIMENT [pdf]