Very well deserved. I've looked over dozens of papers for relational db's and every single one of them cites down to his foundational work. Congratulations Professor Stonebraker!
Seconded. He was on episode 199 of Software Engineering Radio two years ago (http://www.se-radio.net/2013/12/episode-199-michael-stonebra...), which I thoroughly enjoyed. It was so informative that I took a page of notes while listening! Really great stuff.
Agreed. I remember being very inspired by some of his papers when I started studying databases in grad school. His work along with all of those who developed the B-Tree and its variants[1] is really foundational to data storage and retrieval. He also helped to kick off the "NoSQL" and "NewSQL" movements with his C-Store paper.[2]
[1] Proposed by Bayer and McCreight, and independently developed by Chiat and Schwartz, and also by Cole, Radcliffe and Kaufman, improved by many including D. Knuth.
[2] C-Store: A Column Oriented DBMS. Mike Stonebraker, Daniel Abadi, Adam Batkin, Xuedong Chen, Mitch Cherniack, Miguel Ferreira, Edmond Lau, Amerson Lin, Sam Madden, Elizabeth O'Neil, Pat O'Neil, Alex Rasin, Nga Tran and Stan Zdonik. VLDB, pages 553-564, 2005.
This is what adjuncting is supposed to be for - folks with industry experience moonlight as professors. The benefit is not primarily salary but networking, knowledge sharing, and helping the next generation of industry professionals.
Now it's more of a way to have 2/3 or more of the department work for unliveable wages which allows for an ever-growing administrative overhead in colleges while tuitions double every decade.
As far as I know, not true at MIT, teaching is done by tenured or tenture track professors, with exceptions like this, or SF author Joe Haldeman, that prove the rule.
But, yeah, I hear from lots of sources that adjuncts making peanuts have become the rule rather than the exception in general US academia, and there's no disputing how administrators are taking over higher education, now even desiring to wrest little the faculty still control from them.
Management in all organizations should be automated by AI, with copious amounts of override buttons sprinkled throughout.
Education administration is a like a thorn stuck in my mind, they make _more_ than everyone else and for the most part only act as a gas to support their own structure.
This is how every bureaucracy works, whether government, commercial or academic. Once the institution has enough income/cash flow for momentum, then it attract people who are expert at operating the machine itself, rather than expert in what the machine is supposed to be accomplishing. After the first one lands, they continue to accrete.
It's hard to recognize when it starts, but you'll know it's happened once you see a lot of people who are not connected with the apparent goal of the machine, and there are posters all over the place touting whatever programs the administrators have created to justify their existence, as well as packaged training programs from motivational/educational consultants (think Franklin Covey).
Ha, A fork bomb of Agent Smith crossed with Nancy in Program Outreach.
The accretion or calcification model of bureaucratic formation is compelling, something like how a coral reef grows. The randomized surface provides eddies and pockets of protection for other life to flourish, RFPs and SBIRs can nestle in a protected arena with low local competition.
I just realized that large, messy codebases also follow the reef model of bureaucracy. Hadoop is like that coral reef, providing nooks and crannies for optimizations and integrations to take hold. I used to imagine Hadoop as Whale fall [0], but it is more of a mandlebulb. Had Hadoop not provided such a rich environment the secondary ecosystem wouldn't be as vibrant. Fail to Win?
I find management structures fascinating. Whenever I interact with one I probe it to see how much autonomy each individual in it has, what rules they can bend or not follow. Once the agents participating in the bureaucracy cannot bend the rules I think it will tend towards dystopia. Maybe 1984 isn't a warning against fascism, but the natural tendency of all bureaucracies to only support them selves.
note: I might sound like the stereo type of a hackernews-bitcoin-libertarian, but I assure you my politics are much more nuanced than that. I don't think that bureaucracy as a structure is bad, but it needs to be managed with something akin to the voting logic in a triple redundant control circuit [1] [2]. Most bureaucracies exist within a positive feedback loop, which rewards them for growth instead of efficiency. It is like getting paid by LOC instead of 1/LOC or 1/runtime.
Yup. In the case of people like Stonebraker -- or Butler Lampson, who's also officially adjunct at MIT -- Think of it as: You get an office, a community, resources with which to do research (and a framework within which to ask for grant/funding if you want), opportunities to advise students, the ability to teach classes when you want. In exchange, you don't get much money -- but also almost zero responsibilities unless you choose to assume them.
(source: I'm a CS professor and I got my Ph.D. at MIT while both Stonebraker and Lampson were there.)
Adjunct definitely means something different at MIT. For instance, departments are only allowed to hire adjuncts up to 5% of the total normal faculty members of their department[1]. MIT EECS only has six [2]. In effect, this means that adjunct positions are only for really, really qualified people -- they're not there to fill out the teaching staff but to augment the experience of the rest of the faculty.
Adjunct professors can also supervise research, which I believe is uncommon at other institutions.
