My Biased Coin

SPAA 2008 list of accepted papers is up. (I was on the PC... standard rules apply, I take credit if you like the program, but pass the bla...

As I was reading Freedom to Tinker , catching up on the latest reports of flawed voting machines, I remembered my favorite class project of ...

For that epsilon-fraction of the world that regularly reads my blog but not the complexity blog, here's a great post about the awe-inspi...

A few of my students in CS 124 (Algorithms and Data Structures) pointed me to this xkcd cartoon -- amused, no doubt, that we had covered th...

I very much like the conference-based publication system of computer science. But an obvious problem with the system -- which mathematician...

A post by Mihai Patrascu brought up the difficult issue of how to deal with papers that may or may not be correct when on a program committe...

The subject of Program Committees and conferences seems to be a timely one; besides my recent posts, here an interesting post on the theme...

[Note: coincidence! I wrote this over the weekend, but have found myself "scooped" by a post on the same theme at the Complexit...

After my first conference rant on competitive analysis (based on my current stints on the SPAA and ICALP committees), I feel it's only ...

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...