Crimson Has Itself to Blame

I am appalled at the lack of quality control exhibited in The Crimson. I have just seen the Feb. 2 issue of The Crimson, featuring a story about CS50. After glancing at the mislabeled photograph and reading only a few paragraphs, I have found so many errors that I am forced to write.

First, as I pointed out on several occasions last semester, my current title is Assistant Professor of Computer Science, not Instructor (I called your office on at least two occasions last semester after you made the same mistake. My phone calls were never returned).

Secondly, my name is spelled Margo, not Margot.

Third, CS50 originally met in Science Center D, not E.

Simple grammatical mistakes abound. For example. "'It's comforting to know that what I'm learning in CS50 can be applied so that I can get a job,' says Yuval Segal '97, hopes to put his skills to use over the summer."

There are logically inconsistent statements: "And Hewlett Packard recently donated seven new computers and 20 workstations, worth close to a million dollars." Workstations are computers.

Your tickler line "The class is usually about 150 students. This year more than 300 computerhungry undergrads took it, and the department is learning the lessons of..." is both wrong and inconsistent with numbers reported later in your story (you report 276 students, we had 252).

Finally, you dwelled on the theoretical focus of the department so completely as to obscure the fact that the last three hires in computer science (Kung, Smith, Seltzer) were all in the area of computer systems, not computer theory.

Many of these mistakes should have been caught by an astute editor. The first three could have been looked up in any number of official Harvard documents. I have heard Crimson staffers wonder why The Crimson gets so Little respect. From my experience, you have only yourselves to blame. Margo I. Seltzer '83   Assistant Professor of Computer Science