This comic made me want to go and read up on my philosophy of probability. For discussion : what concepts are being articulated by the two characters?
June 16, 2008
A comic apropos to the name of this blog
Posted by asarwate under Probability, Statistics, humor[4] Comments
June 10, 2008
Denali National Park and Preserve is a huge national park, somewhere around 6 million acres. Although some hiking is allowed in the park, there aren’t a lot of trails, so a lot of people take these tour buses along the central road through the park. Our bus driver/naturalist had a voice that reminded me of old filmstrip documentaries we would watch in grade school. A little soporific. We took an 8 hour trip, and we saw Dall sheep, caribou, grizzly bears, moose, a fox, hares, ptarmigans, owls, magpies, and other denizens of the woods, taiga, and tundra. The park was founded to save the Dall sheep, a kind of wild sheep that lives way up on the crests of mountains. We saw lots of them from a distance, with lambs prancing about. My simple camera wasn’t up to taking photos of most of the wildlife, but I managed to get a few (somewhat fuzzy) snaps.
June 10, 2008
The next stop was Talkeetna, which is apparently the town on which the TV show Northern Exposure was based (it’s a great show, in case you haven’t seen it). Talkeetna has the best views of the south side of Denali, which is the Dena’ina name for Mt. McKinley. From left to right, the peaks are Foraker, Hunter, and Denali:
June 10, 2008
The Kenai Fjords National Park is mostly inaccessible by land — there’s not much in the way of hiking, and a lot of it is occupied by the Harding Icefield, which is a gigantic sheet of ice out of which several glaciers flow. To see the park you need to take a boat into the fjords. We went around the Aialik peninsula to see the Aialik Glacier. We saw lots of Steller sea lions, bald eagles, tufted and horned puffins, harbor seals, a black bear or two, mountain goats, porpoises, and other birds whose names I forget. The sea otters kept their distance so it was hard to see them up close. The ocean was a bit choppy so most of my photos came out a bit blurry, but I managed to snap a shot of some Steller sea lions hauled out on a rock:
June 6, 2008
Interestingly, the internet in my hotel is provided by Meraki, which was speadheading an urban mesh network in San Francisco. On Wednesday we took the train from Anchorage to Seward, named for the US Secretary of State who pushed for the purchase of Alaska from the Russians for the sum of $7.2 million. The train ride is very scenic and we passed some beautiful mountains, the Turnagain Arm (named by the navigationally frustrated Captain Cook), and a beautifully clear lake:
In Seward we checked out the Sea Life Center, which had some puffins:
Today we went on a day long tour via boat of the Kenai Fjords National Park and saw the Aialik Peninsula and Aialik Glacier. I haven’t gotten the photos from there yet but if any turned out nicely I’ll post ‘em.
June 4, 2008
Sorry for the blog being down (not that anyone except for Adam noticed) — I forgot to renew my domain name. All that seems to be fixed now.
I’m in Anchorage, AK right now. The sun rises here at around 4:30 and sets at around 11:30 these days, so it’s still pretty bright out. Fortunately, the hotel has heavy drapes to block out the near-midnight sun. I may later spruce up this post with some photos.
May 22, 2008
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.
May 22, 2008
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.”
May 13, 2008
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!
April 25, 2008
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.
