Glencora Borradaile

I missed the business meeting to have dinner with a non-SODA-attending friend and so missed the voting over the location of SODA 2012 which was apparently a close tie.
I’m a little dismayed at SODA being outside of North America.  As a graduate student I would have probably been excited in my responsibility-free state.  But now [...]

Many people have been blogging on the technical content at SODA, but I won’t. Given that David has already hinted that I only value the first 10 minutes of most talks, clearly I’m not in the position to expound on the more than the definition of problems and all but the highest level of analysis.
I’ve [...]

I recently went to a Christmas party where, instead of a gift exchange, there was a donation exchange.  Essentially, we each placed a cause’s name into a hat, people draw the names and are asked to donate to the cause.  You may donate any amount you wish (including nothing if you are particularly opposed to [...]

The Combinatorial Potlatch is a semi-regular (which for last 7 years has been yearly!) one-day workshop in combinatorics held in Cascadia.  It is very informal (no name tags!), very relaxed (only three talks!) and runs on next to no funding*.  The latest installment was this past weekend in Vancouver, BC, held at Simon Fraser University’s [...]

There’s talk of postdocking* in the air – for one, Jonathan Katz posted about how to better match recent grads to postdoc positions. It looks like this year’s academic-job market is even worse than last and that postdocs might just fill in the gap for a year or two for some people – including those that are [...]

I recently found out that when I gave my job talk at Oregon State University last year, I was being recorded.  I was hesitant to post it, but I hope that, despite this far-from-perfect performance, it might be useful to those on the job market this year.  Note that Oregon State is not a theory [...]

I hadn’t heard of the “smart grid” until I arrived in Oregon.  Our department is pushing for a sustainability research collaboration initiative, SENERGI, and so it wasn’t long before I heard our former director, Terri Fiez, talking about the smart grid.  Now, at INFORMS in San Diego, I’m listening to a keynote on the smart [...]

While I hardly think I should be doling out advice …
In algorithms, there have been a lot of postdoc positions advertising on the two main email lists, TheoryNT and dmanet.  In my experience, many of the positions are in Europe.  I’ve found that a lot of postdoc’s get their position by word of mouth.
I think, [...]

I’ve survived my first week of teaching graduate algorithms and data structures. “Survived” really isn’t the right word. I’ve had a lot of fun and the students in the class are bright and interactive, which makes a 50 minute lecture go by in a flash.
Since the time is going by so quickly, I [...]

Bill Gasarch asked me to make a statement about my blog and in responding to him, I realized I might as well post it here.
This blog will likely be YATB (yet another theory blog) – hopefully I will have something new and interesting to say.  I’d been subscribing to the Theory of Computing Blog Aggregator [...]