Glencora Borradaile

I was asked a question a few months ago: Do women have an advantage in our field? There was a time when I would have chirped ‘NO!’ and stormed off.  That time might not have been too long ago.  But it is an interesting question, perhaps because it is so ill-defined.  What does advantage mean? [...]

Finally an excuse for my bad black/whiteboardpersonship! Apparently, retention of information is improved if the way it is presented is difficult to read: … if something is hard to see or hear, it feels disfluent … We’d found that disfluency led people to think harder about things. Aside: the lead author, Connor Diemand-Yauman, either has [...]

In a more significant experiment than the am-I-ready-for-this quiz, I am rethinking the assignments that accompany my grad algorithms course.  In last year’s class, I had the grad students work in randomly-assigned and rotating (different for each assignment) groups.  I will comment on this in another post. I’m sticking with the group-based approach – partly for [...]

Last week, I gave the students in my grad algorithms class an am-I-ready-for-this? quiz.  I promised to report back, and I’m already a little late on that.  The average for the quiz was ~ 70% – I was hoping for a higher average, given how easy the quiz was (in my opinion).  Two students did [...]

Corvallis is a great place to live to as a bicycle camper/tourer.  My partner and I have done several two-day bicycle tours on weekends over the summer, mostly to Alsea Falls, which I’ll blog about later.  Planning these trips takes some time: which campground to go to?  will they have a spot available? do they [...]

I am teaching ‘the grad algorithms course’ for the second time.  It is the first time I am teaching a course for the second time and am excited at finally having the opportunity to fix my previous mistakes.  ’The grad algorithms course’ is required for all CS Ph.D. students in our department and a prerequisite [...]