A course I used to teach -- cs50 -- has seen some on-campus news (and editorial) coverage recently in the wake of a leak that 60 students in the course were reported to the Administrative Board on suspicions of academic dishonesty. I don't have any relationship with the course since 2016 and I don't have any particularly relevant inside information as a former Teaching Fellow. As a relatively junior member of the course staff, I wasn't asked to work on any cases of academic dishonesty; the revelations that I could give have already been shared with the press.

But there's one thing that's come up in the ensuing commentary that I would like to put a finer point on.

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The Crimson's Editorial Board has called for the course to lay out a more explicit collaboration policy:

The course has an open-ended and amorphous honor policy, under the banner of being "reasonable." We understand that the collaborative nature of computer science requires students to work together, and may thus make promulgating strict rules about plagiarism more difficult...

Though the course staff have undoubtedly given this matter some thought, we urge them to more explicitly delineate what is allowed and what is unacceptable. That many of the accused students allege that they were unaware of having done anything wrong may suggest

Alasdair MacIntyre, The 1984 Lindley Lecture at the University of Kansas. excerpted to 1787 words.

One of the central tasks of the moral philosopher is to articulate the convictions of the society in which he or she lives so that these convictions may become available for rational scrutiny. This task is all the more urgent when a variety of conflicting and incompatible beliefs are held within one and the same community, either by rival groups who differ on key moral questions or by one and the same set of individuals who find within themselves competing moral allegiances. In either of these types of case the first task of the moral philosopher is to render explicit what is at issue in the various disagreements and it is a task of this kind that I have set myself in this lecture.

For it is quite clear that there are large disagreements about patriotism in our society. And although it would be a mistake to suppose that there are only two clear, simple and mutually opposed sets of beliefs about patriotism, it is at least plausible to suggest that the range of conflicting views can be placed on a spectrum with two poles. At one end is the view, taken for granted by almost everyone in the nineteenth century, a commonplace in the literary culture of the McGuffey readers, that 'patriotism' names a virtue. At the other end is the contrasting view, expressed with sometimes shocking clarity in the nineteen sixties, that 'patriotism' names a vice. It would be misleading for me to suggest that I am going to be able to offer good reasons for taking one of these views rather than

Today's the first time that many of Harvard's graduands will hear the little-known final verse of "Fair Harvard". So it seems as good a time as any to muse on the administration's decision to change that verse's final lyric.

It would be pretty natural to be outraged at the prospect, but after trying to start that blog post and failing for a while, I realized that I'm actually in favor of the change.

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"Fair Harvard", as far as almae matres go, is actually quite good. Here are a few others for comparison:

Notre Dame, our Mother
tender, strong, and true,
proudly in the heavens,
gleams thy gold and blue.
Glory’s mantle cloaks thee;
golden is thy fame
and our hearts forever
praise thee Notre Dame.

MSU, we love thy shadows
When twilight silence falls,
glushing deep and softly paling
o’er ivy covered halls;
beneath the pines we'll gather
to give our faith so true,
sing our love for Alma Mater
and thy praises, MSU.
When from these scenes we wander

and twilight shadows fade,

our mem’ry still will linger

where light and shadows played;

in the evening oft we’ll gather

and pledge our faith anew,

sing our love for Alma Mater

and thy praise, MSU.

Where the rolling foothills rise

up t’wards mountains higher,

where at eve the Coast Range lies,

in the sunset fire,

flushing deep and paling;

here we raise our voices hailing

thee, our Alma Mater.

Tender vistas ever new

thru’the arches meet the eyes,

where the red roofs rim the blue

of the sun-steeped skies,

My mother's given me an awful lot over these 23-odd years, but here are three gifts from her I'm particularly thankful for:

1) An instinct to not assign to malice that which is explained by ignorance -- to seek first to teach, rather than fight. It's easy to assume that the person causing you harm thinks the same way you do, and so is doing it on purpose -- but surprisingly often, that's not the case. And when the culprit really is malice or active apathy, I learned from Mom just how strong relentless politeness can be at clearing problems.

2) A thorough appreciation for the power of good visual design. Mom's a computer scientist with research interests in visualizing data, and to this day, I'll call her when a problem at work seems to call for some special technique. Some of the best tricks I know (and regularly use!), she taught me.

3) Open eyes to problems of gender bias in the field of computer science. It's easy to see the obvious statistics and cases of blatant discrimination; it's harder to realize the ways that implicit bias creep into the behaviors of well-intentioned people. But they're easier to see after years of deep and thoughtful dinner-table conversation about exactly that topic.

Not a week goes by that these lessons and instincts don't serve me well in some way. And for that, and for them, and for so much more, I'm enormously grateful.

(In which the author, through timely blogging, attempts to rekindle a fading feeling of connection to his alma mater.)

On a Thursday morning four years ago, upperclassmen pounded on the door of my friends' suite where I had slept over (again), and when we let them in, they popped a (well-shaken) bottle of champagne to welcome us to Eliot House. Over the next three years, I'd spend some of the best afternoons (and the most miserable all-nighters) in Eliot, and though I'd be stretching the truth to say that I became close with everyone in the house, I had a place that was home to come bck to, year after year. Of course, I had the best friends I could possibly have asked for, but for that I owe more thanks to the Freshman Dean's Office for throwing us all into Canaday than the housing lottery for giving us the best of all houses.

(My dad puts his arm around my shoulders and gestures at the courtyard, where the commencement canopies have already been taken away. He repeats words that his father spoke to him thirty years before, a few blocks from here. "This is Eliot House, that has been your home. Look, and fix it in your memory. Remember the time you've spent here.")

Because yes, with a lucky roll of the metaphorical (but quite literally random) dice, we landed in the house that was near (if not at) the top of almost every freshman's list. The house with the largest endowment (grandfathered from the days when houses still had endowments!). The house with the best formals (in both quality and quantity!). A plurality of three

including a review of The Idealist, by Justin Peters

You haven't seen a roomful of students' eyebrows shoot up simultaneously until you begin your CS50 section with a content warning for suicide.

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It was the week we were covering web development and walking through a project that had students scraping an RSS feed to extract news stories geotagged as local. It was also Aaron Swartz's birthday.

And so it seemed wrong not to include, in that lesson, some words for the young visionary who was no older than some of my students when he invented the protocol we'd be using that week. It seemed wrong not to take the occasion to remind my students that the things they were learning could be used to literally change the world. And it seemed wrong not to tell the story about how federal prosecutors enforcing unjust laws hounded that young man until he took his own life.

And so I took a few minutes to talk about the activist, hacker, and visionary who invented Rich Site Summary as a way of allowing websites to share their content with the world. I talked a bit about how Aaron's projects -- RSS, Markdown, Creative Commons, Reddit, the anti-SOPA movement -- each drove forward in their own way his vision of an Internet, and a world, built for the creation and exchange of ideas. I talked about how the tools they were learning to use could be used to change the world, given passion and a willingness to bounce back from failure. And I talked about how Aaron's pursuit of a better world led

I've finally left the environs of Cambridge to do...whatever comes next...in New York City. I really enjoyed my time at Harvard and was truly sad to see the community of friends that I'd come to love go their assorted and separate ways, but on a personal level, it was time. So I'm glad to be moving on to the next thing.

One piece of "the next thing" is that I'm beginning work as an trader at Jane Street. It's an amazing company that I'm incredibly excited to be returning to full-time -- one of the most intellectually stimulating environments I've found anywhere, with a double helping of diverse and varied day-to-day projects and a culture of social trust, intellectual humility, and collaborative truth-seeking.

In many (great) ways, I feel like I'm starting college again -- my days are long and full, all of my work is interesting and new, and once again I feel like I'm out of my depth and running flat-out to keep up. Coming from the place of comfort I had reached at the end of college, it's certainly a pleasant change.

Incidentally, we're already hiring summer interns for both trader and dev roles, so if you want to work with some of the most clever, intellectually curious, and deeply thoughtful people I know (plus me), do drop me a line, and I'll be happy to chat, answer questions, or just point you at the application.

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However, my employer is emphatically not the reason that I've been negligent about writing in the last month. The only explanation for that is