New adverbs were coined today by Tsachy Weissman: Wyner-Zivly, Slepian-Wolfly, and Gel’fand-Pinskerly. Good ways to describe your complicated coding schemes…
June 29, 2009
ISIT 2009 : new adverbs
Posted by asarwate under Uncategorized | Tags: humor, Information Theory |1 Comment
June 28, 2009
ISIT 2009 : post the first
Posted by asarwate under Uncategorized | Tags: academia, compressed sensing, Information Theory, Travel |Leave a Comment
I’m at ISIT 2009 now at the COEX Center. Korea is pretty good so far (pictures to be posted later). The conference started today with a plenary by Rich Baraniuk, who talked about compressed sensing. I’d seen parts of the talk before, but it’s always nice to hear RIch speak because he’s so passionate about how cool the thing is.
I’ll try to blog about talks that I saw that were interesting as time permits — this time I’ll try to reduce the delay between talks and posts!
June 16, 2009
Academic freedom and speech as public citizens
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Michael Bérubé has a nice post on academic freedom up at CT.
June 4, 2009
I’m going to spend all of Friday at the NSTA/Toshiba ExploraVision Awards in Washington DC. Twelve years ago I was on the winning team (with my friends Ranjit and Asad). The NSTA and Toshiba were kind enough to ask me if I wanted to come this year to meet the winners and say a few words at the awards banquet in the evening. As luck would have it, my high school fielded a team whose project took first place this year, so I’ll get to see my team’s coach and Biology teacher David Stone. I’m very excited and I’m sure the whole day will be a blast!
June 3, 2009
Fa la la-la-la-la, fa la la-la laaaaaa!
HT to the Yeti.
May 28, 2009
Futurama and information theory
Posted by asarwate under Uncategorized | Tags: engineering, humor, Information Theory |1 Comment
According to the article The Truth About Bender’s Brain in the May 2009 issue of IEEE Spectrum, one of the writers of Futurama, Ken Keeler, “confirms that he does read every issue of IEEE Spectrum and occasionally looks at the Transactions on Information Theory.” So is it true that source coding people are more funny than channel coding people?
May 27, 2009
musical cross-pollination
Posted by asarwate under Uncategorized | Tags: humor, music |[2] Comments
I was listening to the song “Gasoline” by The Airborne Toxic Event on Pandora today:
I noticed that it samples the music from the incredibly popular Telugu condom commercial:
Did anyone else hear this immediately?
May 16, 2009
More photos and a hiatus
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Just as I started blogging more, I’m going to take a break for a family vacation. In the meantime, I put up some more photos from Hong Kong and Rio de Janeiro on my Picasa album.
May 15, 2009
they’re doing it by degrees
Posted by asarwate under Uncategorized | Tags: culture, Math, Web |[4] Comments
Obviously it’s clear I’m a big nerd, but thinking back on the wonder that was Square One, I am astonished at how much work they put into their cultural references/parodies. You can dance if you want to… as long it is the Angle Dance!
On the official website you can watch the some other clips. If they ever released this show on DVD I would queue up to buy it.
May 15, 2009
Postprint server for the California Digital Library
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I’m surprised that there are fewer people using the Postprint server at the California Digital Libary (CDL). This is a service for University of California students, staff, and faculty that lets you post your paper in its final version and makes it freely available. The nice thing is that they pay attention to all the copyright details for you so you don’t have to sort that out. There are a few good reasons to use it : (a) it’s good to archive your work with your “employer,” (b) it helps promote open access to postprints for disciplines which don’t use ArXiV, and (c) they can give you statistics on number of downloads.
Just looking through it seems that a small fraction of the papers written by UC people make it into the repository. The University of California does not have a mandate for open access like Harvard does, but provides this as an option. As Michael Mitzenmacher has noted, mandates can become tricky, which is why the CDL’s managing of the copyright thing is nice.
