An Ergodic Walk

Apparently I am going to attend the Electrical Enginnernig & Computer Science Commencement on Saturday. Riddle me this: enginnernig is:

A. The sound an engine makes
B. The learnin’ you do in engineering
C. Fake “academic” engineering
D. All of the above

Also, the department’s official name is Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. Because, you know, there’s more than one computer science.

The defense/talk went pretty well, I thought. And there was champagne afterwards! However, filing the thesis has been pushed off until early in the summer. Although this has the benefit of making the finished document much better, the downside is that such a large object sitting in my brain tends to crowd out other more exciting projects that I would like to work on or think about. In the meantime, I will try to blog a bit more frequently so that I don’t end up with tunnel vision.

Robin sent along a link to some mathematical models in metal. They look like more hard-core versions of the sculpted surfaces seen in display cases in math department hallways. I took a few math classes at UIUC during high school and I remember walking past these dusty shelves filled with plaster (?) shapes with intriguing names like “the ring of the nodoid.”

This is why I’ve not been posting, but hopefully that will change.

Beyond the ABCs of AVCs : robust and adaptive strategies for future communication systems

Anand D. Sarwate
Advisor : Michael Gastpar
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
University of California, Berkeley

Thursday, May 15
1-2 PM
521 Cory Hall

Cutting-edge application areas such as cognitive radio, ad-hoc networks, and sensor networks are changing the way we think about wireless services. The demand for ubiquitous communication and computing requires flexible communication protocols that can operate in a range of conditions. This thesis adopts and extends a mathematical model for these communication systems that accounts for uncertainty and time variation in link qualities. The arbitrarily varying channel (AVC) is an information theoretic channel model that has a time varying state with no statistical description. We assume the state is chosen by an adversarial jammer, reflecting the demand that our constructions work for all state sequences. In this talk I will show how resources such as secret keys, feedback, and side-information can help communication under this kind of uncertainty. I will present results on list coding and rateless coding for discrete channel models and coding with side information for continuous channels.

And of course the most important part: refreshments will be provided!

Every time I hear about John McCain’s “Straight Talk Express” I can’t help but think of R. Kelly’s Real Talk (NSFW). Perhaps someone should do a mashup.

You know who you are. More egregious copyright violation on YouTube… Horace Silver’s “Filthy McNasty.”

I’m blogging up a storm, it seems.

At Pharyngula there’s a great article on evolution in action among a lizard population. On the other hand, maybe some aliens went and visited the island and intelligently redesigned the lizards so they could eat vegetation better…

Over at Crooked Timber, guest blogger Eric Rauchway has a set of links about academic freedom. Over here at Berkeley there’s a bit of a push to get the law school to fire John Yoo, author of the infamous “torture memos,” which provided the (il)legal justification for contravening the Geneva Convention. Yoo has tenure, so firing him is quite an extreme move. The argument for firing him is that he engaged in gross professional misconduct and is a war criminal and letting him teach constitutional law is questionable given his willingness to toss out the Constitution. The other side says that as a matter of academic freedom, he should be allowed to engage in whatever political activities he likes outside the academy and that he has already been judged an excellent scholar by the standards of his discipline. Firing him would set a dangerous McCarthy-esque precedent and we should err on the side of caution.

In my view, unless Yoo is formally censured by his own peers, public pressure to fire him is just that — public pressure. Jane Kramer wrote a fascinating piece in The New Yorker about the tenure battle of Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropologist at Barnard who drew the ire of some fringe pro-Israel because her book, Facts on the Ground tries to eludicate the discourse (in a Foucauldian sense) of archaeology in Israel and its relationship to Zionism and the concept of the Israeli state. These groups organized a petition threatening Barnard and Columbia in order to get them to deny her tenure. There too we saw a public outcry over perceived harmful actions of an academic. In Abu El-Haj’s case, her detractors basically made up things about her, selectively and misleadingly quoted from her book, and pretty much didn’t have a leg to stand on. Yoo’s case is different — he clearly wrote some odious memos that have had horrible consequences. However, unless he is disbarred (which is possible), I tend to side with those who say finding a loophole to fire him would do more harm than good.

Somewhere, languishing on my shelf is the book Academic Freedom after September 11. I read half of it and then switched to something less dry, but maybe I should go back to it now that my interest has been re-whetted.

I was re-listening to Thomas Hampson singing Samuel Barber’s Despite and Still, and realized that the song “Solitary Hotel” is a Barber-ized (but not barbarized) tango — the loping and chromatic triplets are a strange contrast to the text from Ulysses, but they share the same pensive suspension.

Of course, my favorite song is probably “A Green Lowland of Pianos”: (text by Czeslaw Milosz, after the Polish of Jerzy Harasymowicz):

in the evening
as far as the eye can see
herds
of black pianos

up to their knees
in the mire
they listen to the frogs

they gurgle in water
with chords of rapture

they are entranced
by froggish, moonish spontaneity

after the vacation
they cause scandals
in a concert hall
during the artistic milking
suddenly they lie down
like cows

looking with indifference
at the white flowers
of the audience

at the gesticulating
of the ushers

It’s 210 pages + 12 pages of front matter and out to my committee. My wrists are killing me.

Only in the UK could this happen:

The UK Treasury is facing a £3.5m bill, because of VAT wrongly imposed on a Marks and Spencer teacake, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled.

Customers paid VAT for 20 years before the authorities accepted the product was a cake, which does not command VAT.