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Latest blog posts from Ernie's 3D Pancakes

Competitive ratios
The performance gender gap: Does competition matter? Women are under-represented in top management positions on both sides of the Atlantic. The academic literature suggests a number of explanations for this underrepresentation, including self-selection, investment in family and child bearing,...
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Published 2 days ago

Call for volunteers
Richard Beigel, one of the program directors for NSF's Theoretical Foundations cluster, is soliciting volunteers to review CDI proposals. In order that proposals from CISE PIs get a fair and knowledgeable review it is important that we have experts available for all areas covered by CISE to...
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Published 2 days ago

Abstract sausage due today
Don't forget to submit your SOCG abstracts today. Don't have an abstract to submit? Submit this one! Title: Programming with lines Abstract: We describe a novel algorithm for computing upper and lower envelopes of surfaces using linear programming. A surprising corollary of our reduction is...
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Published a week ago

G33k
Rate Your Students asks who's the geekiest, and the faithful readers respond: Computer Science profs have to be the geekiest. When I went to graduate school in mathematics I thought I'd be surrounded by nothing but geeks, but I was pleasantly surprised--the faculty and grad students were...
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Published 2 weeks ago

I love the Java Jive and it loves me
Malcolm Gladwell writes about coffee. Erdös's unadulterated self was less real and less familiar to him than his adulterated self, and that is a condition that holds, more or less, for the rest of society as well. Part of what it means to be human in the modern age is that we have come to...
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Published 3 weeks ago

STOC 2009 reminder
The deadline for submitting STOC abstracts is still more than six hours away! There's still time! Quick, prove something! (Don't worry, you've still got a week to write the paper.)
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Published 3 weeks ago

Computational geometry at FOCS, part 2, plus true rumors
Here are a couple more computational geometry highlights from yesterday's FOCS schedule. Ankur Moitra and Tom Leighton solved the greedy embedding conjecture for 3-connected planar graphs, posed by Papadimitriou and Ratajczak in 2004. A path in the plane is distance-decreasing if the distance...
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Published a month ago

Computational geometry at FOCS
So here I am at FOCS in Philadelphia, the only place I've ever been that has plenty of good coffee shops, but they're all all closed on Sunday. My usual algorithm breaks down hereâ€"one block from every Starbucks is a Dunkin Donuts; all were packed this morning. I eventually found an Au Bon...
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Published a month ago

Duality, duality, duality
Here are some slides from a talk I gave two weeks ago at the UIUC math colloquium (thanks, Nathan) and again earlier this week at TTI in Chicago (thanks, Benoît). We'll have a preprint soon, honest! Meanwhile, see how many different kinds of duality you can spot. Sadly, we couldn't work in...
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Published a month ago

Hey! I can see my house from here!
Okay, I can sometimes see a greenish pixelated smudge in the neighborhood of my house, but still.... [Thx IlliniPundit]
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Published a month ago