My chair wants me to post about.. Mohammad Haj wants me to post about.. I want to post about...

Maryland is looking to hire lecturers and my chai  Samir  wants me to post it on my blog. I think he overestimates the power of the blog, however, here is the link. I could use this to launch into a post about either the value of lecturers or how to handle the fact that CS enrollment is so high, but I've already posted on those in the past: here and here. (ADD- Actually my chair wanted me to post on all of our hiring which also includes professors, so see here)

Mohammad Hajiaghayi  is the Program chair of the SPAA conference and wants me to post it on my blog. I think he overestimates the power of the blog, however here is the link. I could use this to launch into a post about the prestige-conference model of academia,  or other conference issues, or parallelism, but these topics have also already appeared on the blog, mostly by Lance.


But here is the real question: Is it easier or harder to get information (e.g., UMCP CS is looking for a lecturer, SPAA call for papers is out) than it used to be.

EASIER: We have so many different mechanisms. Blogs, email, FACEBOOK, Twitter.  Conferences used to have posters as well- I don't think I"ve seen one for a while. (If someone knows where some of the
old posters are, on line, please leave a comment- some of them were real neat!).

HARDER: we all get too much email (for those still on email), and get too much input in general. Hence things can get lost. I'm on so many mailing lists for talks that I actually MISS talks I want to goto since I tend to ignore ALL of those emails.

If you WANT to find something out, is that easier. If you want to find out

when is the SPAA conference

yes- you can Google it.

For something like

what schools are advertising they want to hire a lecturer?

prob yes though I am not quite sure where to look.

There are things out there that if you knew about them you would want to know, but you are not quite sure how to look.  Do we come across them more or less than we used to. I think more since, at least in my case, people I know email me stuff they think I will care about and they are usually right (Ramsey Theory, Cake Cutting papers, and satires of Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan find there way to my inbox.)