Betrayed by Your Adviser

February 20, 2006 Chronicle of Higher Education

By David D. Perlmutter

The second source behind the dead-end dissertations, and the one I’ll focus on here, is advisers who, for whatever reason, decide to use a student’s dissertation as an extension of their own work — without regard to whether the text will build the student’s scholarly skills and career portfolio.

Security Myths and Passwords

From CERIAS:

In summary, forcing periodic password changes given today’s resources is unlikely to significantly reduce the overall threat—unless the password is immediately changed after each use. This is precisely the nature of one-time passwords or tokens, and these are clearly the better method to use for authentication, although they do introduce additional cost and, in some cases, increase the chance of certain forms of lost “password.”

Concise, SCANNABLE, and Objective: How to Write for the Web

John Morkes and Jakob Nielsen (1997)

Abstract
Studies of how users read on the Web found that they do not actually read: instead, they scan the text. A study of five different writing styles found that a sample Web site scored 58% higher in measured usability when it was written concisely, 47% higher when the text was scannable, and 27% higher when it was written in an objective style instead of the promotional style used in the control condition and many current Web pages. Combining these three changes into a single site that was concise, scannable, and objective at the same time resulted in 124% higher measured usability.

More here.