My Biased Coin

I haven't posted for a while, primarily because I started by sabbatical by going to Copenhagen for most of August.  I was primarily visi...

I thought Nick Feamster's post on managing your advisor was a good read and good advice for new graduate students.  In fact, I'd re...

One of the more amusing conversations at the social part of the Microsoft faculty summit (initiated by the humorous commentary of Kevin Leyt...

1)  Last week a key came off my daughter's Apple Macbook keyboard.  One of my keys on my machine had also come loose -- the "E...

Day Two of the summit started with a keynote shared between Peter Lee and Jeannette Wing, who now seem to be sharing heading up Microsoft re...

Day one of the faculty summit was a great deal of fun.  Primarily, I found I enjoyed catching up with people -- I saw a number of past/curre...

Unless I'm asked not to, I'll try to live-blog a bit over the next few days from the Microsoft Faculty Summit.  It's my first ti...

Links regarding David Petraeus's offer from CUNY to teach a course for $200,000.  (Or, maybe, now $150,000.  Who knows.) Gawker has a ...

All sorts of news about the plug finally being pulled on Altavista, which I still have an attachment to, being partially the product myself ...

As my Area Administrator Tristen reminded me, "...today is officially your last day as my boss..."  Monday is July 1, which offici...

Some of my previous posts have led me to think about the following -- something I'm hoping to write a longer piece about in the near fut...

Les Valiant has a new book out:  Probably Approximately Correct: Nature's Algorithms for Learning and Prospering in a Complex World ...

There's been a mild hubbub toward the end of the week here, due to a report and some articles ( Boston Globe , WSJ ) that the number of...

Noam Nisan points to the NSF trying out some new rules for reviewing in its upcoming SSS program.  There's a lot here to discuss.  Fi...

Teaching reviews are in!  I'm happy to say students were more forgiving than last year .  But also, I notice in the reviews the effects ...

As I'm up working/watching a Memorial Day weekend Arrested Development marathon (OK, I'm not working that hard), I found myself wand...

The grades are in for CS 124.  Hooray! Interesting trend : freshmen, who make up a small fraction of the class, are highly over-represente...

Justin Thaler and Jon Ullman had back-to-back thesis defenses today.  Both talks were excellent -- Justin's on his work on verificatio...

While I greatly enjoy working at Harvard, there are many painfully stupid things said and done by people here -- as I suppose is the case an...

Some researchers at IBM are so good at playing with atoms, they decided to make a movie (called A Boy and His Atom), by moving atoms.  Cool...