Cliff hanger

Cliff hanger

The asparagus season has recently ended for northern hemisphere crops. Tradition has it that, at the summer solstice, growers stop cutting spears to allow the plant to grow and produce enough resources to generate spears for the next spring’s crop. The plant is becoming increasingly fashionable and production is increasing to meet demand. But the cultivated asparagus has a wild relative that is...

Kinetic hanger

A kinetic priority queue is a kinetic data structure which determines the largest element in a collection of continuously changing numbers subject to insertions and deletions. Due to its importance, many different constructions have been suggested in the literature, each with its pros and cons. We propose a simple construction that takes advantage of randomization to achieve optimal locality an...

Cliff hangers

The peregrine falcon holds a special place in the minds of environmentalists and conservation biologists. The crash in its population throughout the 1950s and 60s was linked to the rapidly increasing use of agricultural organochlorine pesticides which led to a thinning of the birds’ eggshells and dramatic breeding failure. Since the widespread ban on the use of these chemicals, populations have...

CLiFF Notes

The Cliff at the Border