  This paper studies biased riffle shuffles, first defined by Diaconis, Fill,
and Pitman. These shuffles generalize the well-studied Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds
shuffle and convolve nicely. An upper bound is given for the time for these
shuffles to converge to the uniform distribution; this matches lower bounds of
Lalley. A careful version of a bijection of Gessel leads to a generating
function for cycle structure after one of these shuffles and gives new results
about descents in random permutations. Results are also obtained about the
inversion and descent structure of a permutation after one of these shuffles.
