My Biased Coin

One nice thing about traveling to New Zealand was that I spent several days disconnected from e-mail. I went a whole 80+hours without check...

In the last of my posts about New Zealand, I'll talk about Mike Langston's talks on computational biology. He talked a lot about th...

Continuing my efforts to prove I was not just sitting out by the pool in New Zealand , I'll mention a highlight of the talks of Brendan...

While at NZIMA, I listened to Dominic Welsh's talks on Markov chains. It was a general talk, with a large chunk devoted to rapid mixin...

For the last week, I've been at a workshop in New Zealand, sponsored by the New Zealand Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications . ...

Because of an inadequate lack of attention regarding conference deadlines on my part, I find myself currently reading lots of papers while c...

A few interesting pieces of news from Harvard. First, Harvard is setting up a scheme to avoid restrictive access policies of some journals. ...

I was avoiding posting on Les Valiant's EATCS award and the obvious question about the somewhat odd fact that he hasn't yet been gi...

This year, my undergraduate algorithms and data structures class is about 25% women. This is significantly more than average (enough that I...

Despite the last round of budget horrors, the CRA is optimistic about 2009 . While I'd like to believe it, I'll believe it when I s...

I just received the class reviews for my Randomized Algorithms class. Historically, I have found my reviews are bimodal. Some students des...

I've noticed a phenomenon surprising to me on this blog: comments trickle in regularly on older posts. Whether that's from new rea...

As I mentioned two posts ago, Harvard has an unusual tradition of a "shopping period" -- you don't preregister for a class, bu...

It's officially hit the wires , Jennifer Chayes and Christian Borgs will be heading up a new Microsoft lab in Cambridge II -- that is, h...

One of the great Harvard "traditions" that I enjoyed as a student is the "shopping period". Students don't pre-regi...

A talk I just went too (by Lynn Stein ) raised the following question for me. While I have some strange ideas about how an algorithms class ...

Another fun SODA activity: getting to (belatedly) congratulate Susanne Albers on her Leibniz Prize in person. I had the great pleasure ...

If you aren't regularly reading the Computing Research Policy blog at the CRA, I recommend stopping by once a month or so. This month:...

Bill Gasarch asked me to comment further on Harvard's new financial aid policy, which I briefly mentioned here , a post which strangely ...

I am chairing the search committee for Harvard this year, motivating me to comment on the view from the other side of the search process. E...