Via Kirk Pruhs, and, I am sure, to be reported elsewhere: 10,000 free round-trip tickets to SODA Japan Maybe this will help alleviate the concerns around such a remote (for the US and Europe) location.
October 3, 2011
My office hours are gender balanced
If I didn’t see the students sitting in the lecture room while I taught and only knew who I was teaching to by the students who speak to me after class, in the hallways or in my office hours, I would think the gender ratio was at least balanced in computer science. Overwhelmingly, one-on-one, my [...]
September 25, 2011
Thinking like a computer scientist
I’m teaching a course called “Orientation to Computer Science“. It seems all the engineering departments have such a course at Oregon State. It acts as an overview to a degree in a particular field. I’ve been asked to teach it because I’m young and female delightful and, apparently, likely to increase retention. I’ll talk more [...]
September 22, 2011
Inoffensive stable matching
I like to start my grad algorithms course with stable matching. It is a beautiful, clean, practical algorithm. It can be covered relatively quickly and give an overview of the basics of algorithm design and analysis. I love it. What I hate is that every treatment of stable matching available online and in the textbooks [...]
September 21, 2011
How do you find conference acceptance rates?
It’s getting to be that time. Mid-tenure. I apparently am supposed to include acceptance rates for conference publications. Google got me about half the numbers, but for the rest … is it annoying to email the program chair for that conference? Even if it was a few years ago? How else would you find out? [...]
July 18, 2011
Responsibility for versus responsibility to
I received some advice from an established biochemist via a friend in regards to the stress related to advising graduate students. See, of the new tasks in the past year, graduate advising has been the most stressful for me. I feel this weight of a person’s career in my hands. What if I pick the [...]
July 3, 2011
Conversations with other theoretical computer scientists
Claire Mathieu caught me on IM a few weeks ago – she was in the middle of a discussing a quote with Valerie King by Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, at Barnard College’s commencement. You can read our discussion on Claire’s much-more-prolific-than-mine blog. I’m not sure at what point it became clear that this discussion would [...]
May 18, 2011
Lecture notes for Baker's technique for PTASes in planar graphs
In teaching so far, I have relied almost exclusively on textbooks and other people’s lecture notes (Jeff Erickson comes to mind, again and again) for providing materials to my students. Yes, I would recommend this to anyone who has not been teaching for too long. Preparing lecture notes that are hand-out-to-your-students worthy is time consuming! [...]
May 9, 2011
A lens on the sciences
The workshop on Theory of Computation as a Lens on the Sciences at Berkeley was this weekend. For the three people out there that haven’t seen Christos Papadimitriou’s talk on the same, I recommend it. A follow-up to a focus on the use of theoretical computer science as a methodology for study in seemingly distance fields [...]
February 22, 2011
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Topology through crochet
A good friend taught me how to crochet on Sunday night. I started with the classic square-to-be-used-as-a-dish-rag project and moved onto the spiral-to-be-used-as-a-pot-stand project. Project number three? The Möbius Strip. Now, I understand the Möbius strip well. What kid has not taken a strip of paper, twisted it, taped the ends together and then drawn [...]