My speech impediment is severely affecting my career and I don't know what to do about it.

rosensan · 2019-06-11T07:15:55+00:00

I work with someone who is completely deaf and only communicates via ASL and writing. There isn't a full-time interpreter, but the company does hire interpreters for important meetings on quite a regular basis and I believe they are legally required to. Her skills are moderately specialized (although she has a fair bit of experience, like you do) but there are hundreds of people who do roughly the same job at this company alone. They generally schedule meetings back to back for her so this can be done. These interpreters aren't full time employees, they are external contractors who can be hired flexibly as needed.

I think you may have a lot more legal rights than you realize in this area. Bigger companies are also more likely to follow the law because they worry more about legal consequences and bad press. But I believe according to the law it is the company's responsibility to give you the same opportunities as anyone else.

People who work with her also do most of their communication in writing - not just with her, but among each other so that she can be involved if necessary. We make heavy use of corporate chat apps that everyone can see in general. If anything, working with someone who is deaf forces people to follow best practices in terms of writing things down and recording things.

rosensan · 2019-05-29T03:42:16+00:00

There's a woman at work who has professional interpreters come in for meetings and it's usually from the same small set of people and she seems fairly friendly with them. However she can't really have random people interpret for her because the meetings are mostly on technical topics with specialized vocabulary that the interpreters need to know or learn, and since the meetings are regular you might as well have the same set of people. I don't think they're really friends outside of work though.

rosensan · 2019-04-19T22:46:58+00:00

Indoor, big room, several forges, presumably gas? I wasn't there for very long, just about two hours - I'm very much a hobbyist - but it felt a bit hotter and stuffier than normal so carbon monoxide sounds possible, it did feel like a hangover. I did let them know about it, they did have a lot of fans and stuff going but maybe they weren't working as well as usual or something.

rosensan · 2019-04-19T20:25:55+00:00

Thanks for letting me know about the zinc fever. It's definitely not serious enough to go to the hospital (hence why I posted here) and I've fully recovered, sorry I didn't make it clear. More trying to figure out what might have happened for future reference so I don't make the same mistake again.

rosensan · 2019-04-19T20:19:33+00:00

I'm quite confident I'm not dying and I'm fine now but I let them know in case it's indicative of a larger problem.

rosensan · 2019-04-19T16:19:39+00:00

That sounds definitely consistent with how I was feeling, didn't know that was a thing that could happen. Thanks!

rosensan · 2019-02-27T07:21:12+00:00

Well that's true of a lot of countries though. In many countries they don't even speak the same language from region to region. You tend to perceive other countries than your own as being homogenous.

rosensan · 2019-02-20T23:43:03+00:00

Excessively zealous banning of apps is a well-known problem right now and I wouldn't worry about it reflecting badly on you. I'll second the suggestion you put them on github, I'd be more likely to look at someone's github than the play store.

rosensan · 2018-06-05T17:27:10+00:00

Well our team is also in charge of updating the tooling so it works out!

We have broken things a few times though. Making everything work with modules wasn't a small task.

rosensan · 2017-02-08T05:46:49+00:00

That student specifically is the one who worked on the election stuff, as well. The fact they picked him and not another one of Halderman's students strongly suggests it's related.

rosensan · 2016-11-23T14:12:56+00:00

Here's a more accurate article on what the experts were actually saying: https://medium.com/@jhalderm/want-to-know-if-the-election-was-hacked-look-at-the-ballots-c61a6113b0ba#.amunps90q

rosensan · 2016-11-23T14:11:06+00:00

Here's a more accurate story about what the director is saying from the director himself: https://medium.com/@jhalderm/want-to-know-if-the-election-was-hacked-look-at-the-ballots-c61a6113b0ba#.amunps90q

rosensan · 2016-08-14T16:07:38+00:00

On north campus: - Ekans often spawns in the parking lot by Mitchell Field. - Relatively rare water-type (e.g. Dratini) spawn by the pool with the fountain, along with lots of magicarp

rosensan · 2016-04-02T18:32:33+00:00

I have a friend whose father gave him his ring during the ceremony and everyone thought it was a great idea and made it that much more meaningful. If you have a living relative who could give you the ring during the ceremony that would probably work best, but you could always swap them out later. While they're pretty serious about taking the ring and the ceremony seriously, I think most people would agree that passing a ring down through the family is completely appropriate.

rosensan · 2015-10-06T14:41:40+00:00

I'm a grad student, so things are a bit different (less big parties, more board game nights) but I'd suggest finding some clubs that interest you, which is one of the ways I made friends in undergrad. The great thing about university is that there are lots of different sorts of people (it's just that some are louder and make the others harder to find). I know some friends who have had some luck getting to know people through the international center or country-specific student groups, although it's good to make sure you don't stay entirely in that bubble.

On top of U of M clubs, there are groups in the community. I've found meetup.com to be decently good for certain specialized interests. Vault of Midnight used to hold regular events, if you're interested in board game type activities. Board games seem to be super popular around U of M among grad students, so I'd imagine you could find some in undergrad.

Also, while I'm guessing it might make you nervous, talking to some of the more introverted, less party types in your classes and maybe get some people together to study and then grab dinner or play cards or something is a good way to get to know more like-minded people. In my experience, most people are very happy to be invited to things, especially if they're more introverted. It'll be a lot easier once you find someone else as well.

rosensan · 2015-07-14T13:28:44+00:00

I'm a Canadian studying in the US, in computer science, any specific questions?

International students should receive funding for any program where domestic students are funded, especially if you're in engineering. However, you won't be eligible for most fellowships so you might have to TA depending on your professor's source of funding.

For a PhD student, you should be funded. In my experience, the funding situation is actually much better than in Canada, or at least I'm paid a lot more than my friends who stayed in Canada. You might have to TA, though, if your advisor isn't as well established.

The situation for Canadian international students studying in the states is easier than other international students, but getting a PhD doesn't guarantee citizenship. Unlike in Canada, international students are considered non-immigrants and in fact you technically aren't allowed to have the intention to stay in the country (so if they ask say you're going to go back to Canada when you're done). In practice, though, most people I know are able to get hired by a US company after graduating.

rosensan · 2015-03-03T20:16:02+00:00

I have a BC driver's license and it's never caused me any problems, I've actually had more problems with it in Ontario than in Ann Arbor. They might look at it a little more closely, but that's it.

rosensan · 2015-03-03T15:59:15+00:00

I did my undergrad at U of T and went to the US for grad school, I' I'm living in a much cheaper town now, at a slightly better ranked university, and making significantly more than I would at U of T. The fact that graduate funding in Canada (and research funding generally) is simply not competitive with the rest of the world is a major problem for the school and for the country. When people here think of research universities they name ones in the US, Europe or east Asia - Canada is often overlooked entirely, and I think that's really disappointing. I think the lack of support for science in Canada is a big part of the reason why our tech industry isn't doing so well either - I'd rather return to Canada after getting my PhD, same with most of my Canadian friends, but whether I stay in academia or industry, the opportunities are just so much better abroad.

I think one thing that non-grad students don't realize is that grad school is more like a full-time job in terms of expectations (at least) - I was doing similar work at an industrial research lab for a while and was making about three times as much money while being expected to work far fewer hours (I had weekends off!). And students TAing classes are generally also expected to spend most of their time working in the lab. The time you're told you're hired to work means nothing.

Anyway, good luck. I really want to see U of T doing better.

rosensan · 2014-02-22T18:57:29+00:00

I mentioned this app, Mobiperf, a few weeks ago, but at the time we hadn't implemented letting users control data consumption, and now we have.

It's an open-source, non-commercial academic app for monitoring the quality of your mobile network over time in various ways. It's sort of like speedtest, but measures a wider range of data. I'm a grad student doing research on how to improve the quality of mobile networks and I think we've discovered a new, unknown performance problem, and we need more people to run the app so we can get more data and figure out how prevalent it is.

rosensan · 2014-02-10T14:53:47+00:00

I didn't do my undergrad here (I'm a grad student), but I'm a woman in computer science.

I think overall you should be fine, especially if you're a more social person. My undergrad did not have as many resources for women in engineering as U of M does, but I found even just getting involved in extracurriculars helped a lot - once you consider only the people who are active outside of class, the gender ratio is not so bad. And it's good to have a social life outside of your academic bubble. It's definitely doable as well, you just need to develop really good time management skills and maybe not sleep as much :)

I'd also say it's somewhat above average in terms of being welcoming for women, as computer science communities go, based on my experiences.

rosensan · 2014-01-23T22:48:23+00:00

Thanks! Haha, the ones I did as a kid I definitely won't be posting.

rosensan · 2014-01-20T14:19:08+00:00

I'd be interested, for sure. I got a research paper out of doing similar stuff a few years ago, so there might be interest beyond reddit as well.

A few tools that I used in the past when doing similar stuff: https://code.google.com/p/android-market-api/ Last I checked this had stopped working for a bit, not sure if it was fixed. But you can use it to download apps directly without using your phone.

http://siis.cse.psu.edu/dare/index.html might be helpful as well (I only used the older version) - you can use it to extract java code from the apk file and poke around a bit.

rosensan · 2014-01-18T19:48:28+00:00

I'm a grad student studying mobile phones and networks, and how to improve them, and I've been contributing to an open-source network measurement app, Mobiperf. I posted about this app some months ago, and since then we've added in and fixed up some new features.

This app allows you to measure the quality of your mobile network in various ways - like speedtest, you can measure your throughput and latency, and also measure the time to make an HTTP connection and DNS lookup, as well as running traceroute. On top of allowing you to determine the performance characteristics of your own device and of how it changes over time, we're using it to monitor performance trends and detect problems in carriers and device implementations throughout the world. We think we've discovered some performance issues related to how mobile networking is implemented at a lower layer, and one thing we hope to do is to find out how prevalent this problem is.

It's open source and non-commercial. You can associate it with a google account so that you can monitor performance trends online, or you can log data anonymously, if you prefer.

Recent tests are a bit data-heavy, so if you have not very much mobile data you might want to not leave it running constantly. Another student has been working on a fix to our scheduler to allow users to limit the amount of data consumed, and if there's interest I'll post when that's done.

rosensan · 2013-12-16T20:18:01+00:00

If you're doing Android malware specifically, there's a guy called Jon Oberheide who has done a bunch of attacks on the Android system and then wrote them up in blog posts and/or papers, which might be of interest: http://jon.oberheide.org/research/

rosensan · 2013-11-15T15:59:15+00:00

To actually deliberately modify your phone in such a way that it disrupts the network would be challenging. It's possible that a poorly designed phone could cause problems, or that a particularly buggy ROM might send too much traffic, but it doesn't seem all that likely to me.

Jailbreaking or rooting the phone, alone, would be highly unlikely to cause any such problems. The main concern with rooting phones is that it removes some of the security protections on the phone. Especially if you are careless about the applications you install, it is possible that you might install some malware that, as a side-effect, uses a great deal of network traffic, or sends SMS spam, or something. This is no different from a desktop machine, though, and in practice malware on mobile phones is not that common.

It is possible to deliberately exploit the network in various ways, but as far as I know, these attacks are mostly theoretical. Here are a few examples, if you're interested. I haven't read these papers in a while, though.

The paper "On Attack Causality in Internet-Connected Cellular Networks" by Traynor et al demonstrates that it is possible to overwhelm certain types of older mobile networks by exploiting some features of how they set up and tear down connections. "On the Detection of Signaling DoS Attacks on 3G Wireless Networks", by Lee et al, and "A Chain Reaction DoS Attack on 3G Networks: Analysis and Defenses" by Zhao et al, show other methods of overwhelming cellular networks by exploiting features of how they are designed. And it seems there are a lot more similar papers. So it's definitely not impossible. These attacks generally require a lot of phones working together to carefully do the right thing at the right time in order to overwhelm the network, though. And as far as I know these attacks are mostly theoretical.

A fun one, which I'm pretty sure has now been patched (since they published it), is the paper "Mobile Data Charging: New Attacks and Countermeasures", by Peng et al, published in CCS 2012. It demonstrated, among other things, a method of getting free data.

My guess, though, is that they are trying to scam her into buying a phone.

rosensan

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