My Biased Coin

It's time for the annual New Year posting. Last year , I talked about the potential power of affirmations -- in the sense of thinking a...

Posting will be light over winter break, in part because so little is going on, but more because I'm busy working on papers for upcoming...

Mikkel Thorup sent in the following guest post: Text-book algorithms at SODA This is a pitch for promoting good text-book algorithms at SODA...

I'm spending the morning as part of the committee for a thesis defense over in Europe. I'm watching the talk over Skype; we're...

My post today is live-blogging the NSDI PC Meeting -- with a delay for security purposes, of course. My take on the reviews (and from past ...

Harry Lewis (and Fred Abernathy) take a stand against the Harvard Corporation . Required reading for anyone associated with Harvard, or int...

The people at Microsoft Research New England are excited to announce that Boaz Barak will be joining them. I imagine the situation is simil...

You may have heard on the news that the TSA (temporarily) put up their Screening Management Standard Operating Procedure on the web. As poi...

Perhaps the most basic breakdown one can make of a college faculty is into the categories Natural Sciences / Social Sciences / Humanities. ...

No, not for me. But Harvard has announced its plans to encourage faculty to retire . I won't call it an "early retirement" p...

As I promised sometime back , we now have a paper ( up on the arxiv ) giving the thresholds for cuckoo hashing, a problem that had been open...

Harvard, like many other places, has an option by which students (with "Advanced Standing" from AP classes) can obtain a Master...

The Crimson is reporting that the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences will plan to decrease the size of the faculty * in response to budget...

Not for me, thank goodness. A very talented graduating senior (who may or may not be Harvard...) has obtained a number of job offers, and as...

A few weeks ago, I talked about the reviewing process for NSDI and LATIN. I suppose now is a reasonable time for an update. LATIN is neari...

This post is about surveys. It's motivated by one of my tasks last night, as I has to spend some time going over the final proofs for t...

What do people think about students going to work for a year or two and then applying to graduate school? Or applying but then deferring to...

An anonymous commenter asked an insightful question, worthy of a real answer: "Hi Prof, Why are you so obsessed with ranking things?...

I had a funny conversation with Madhu Sudan yesterday, with him relaying an idea he said he heard from Umesh Vazirani (and perhaps the trail...

This post will talk about Harvard's financial aid program, and why it's a perfectly good thing to give money to Harvard, despite wha...