May 1, 2013
An op-ed from n+1 on the safety of being brown.
Via Mimosa (I think), a profile of photographer Nemai Ghosh, who worked with Satyajit Ray.
Via my father, the story of Indian Jewish actresses in early Bollywood.
Things seems to be heating up on the LAC. Not a good sign.
The death toll in Dhaka keeps rising. This makes Matthew Yglesias’s reaction (see a stunningly poor example of self-reflection here) a bit more that the usual brand of neoliberal odiousness.
March 15, 2013
A rather pretty video of an L-system made by my friend Steve.
LACMA, which I finally saw with a friend in February, has decided to offer high-resolution downloads of many of the items in its collection. This Ganesha has a pretty impressive belly. Via MeFi.
This may answer David Bowie’s question.
This slideshow makes me want to go to Slurping Turtle again.
Sometimes I wish we could just name p-values something else that is more descriptive. There’s been a fair bit of misunderstanding about them going on lately.
March 9, 2013
This link is worth its own post. Please check out ProPublica’s article on data brokers — it’s very relevant to how much is already known (and sold) about you.
January 12, 2013
Aaron Swartz, who most recently made headlines for expropriating a large amount of information that was on JSTOR and making it available to the public, committed suicide. Cory Doctorow has a remembrance of Aaron and also a reminder of how we should remember how terrible depression can be. In making sense of what happened it’s tempting to say the threat of prosecution was the “cause,” but we shouldn’t lose sight of the person and the real struggles he was going through.
November 16, 2012
Krish Eswaran sent me a story about how a group at Virgina Tech described how LTE networks are susceptible to a certain kind of jamming strategy:
“An example strategy would be to target specific control or synchronization signals, in order to increase the geographic range of the jammer and better avoid detection,” the Wireless @ Virginia Tech research group said in a filing (PDF) submitted to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. “The availability of low-cost and easy to use software-defined radios makes this threat even more realistic.”
Color me unsurprised! For my PhD, I studied arbitrarily varying channels (AVCs), which are information-theoretic models for communication against adversarial interference. There are a couple of design insights one can distill from considering the AVC model:
Here we have a case where the protocol is easy to spoof/disrupt, essentially because the control information in unprotected.
This separation between control information and payload is often suboptimal in other senses. See, for example, Tchamkerten, Chandar and Wornell.
October 1, 2012
The NY Times only mentions him in passing and the Yale CS department hasn’t issued a press release, but that’s pretty awesome news. You can read all about his research on his homepage. (h/t Kevin Chen).
April 1, 2012
Stanford has put up a page where people can leave remembrances of Tom Cover. (h/t Gireeja Ranade)
March 27, 2012
According to Sergio Verdu‘s twitter feed, Tom Cover has passed away. (h/t Alex Dimakis)
March 26, 2012
I’ve been refraining from talking about the Dharun Ravi case, because it’s pretty complicated. On the one hand, after reading the New Yorker article and other material, it’s pretty clear Dharun is a grade-A jerk. And Tyler Clementi’s death was a terrible tragedy. But on the other hand, 10 years in prison is a serious thing, as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out. Ashvin shared a link to a blog post on “Deporting Homophbia”:
I have been Tyler and Dharun in a post 9/11 U.S. that accuses white men of exploiting the rest of the world and accuses brown men of destroying it. I have been Tyler and Dharun in a post 9/11 world where white men advocate for homosexual rights and advance homophobia and where brown men are understood as always homophobic. I am being presumptuous, so let me stop.
It’s an interesting take on things, and has made me think about the media coverage of the event and if and how Dharun’s race has played into how the story has been told.
Via Kamalika I learned about a lawsuit against IMDB.
A gem from SMBC via Cosma. The Beef Tensors are a nice touch.
Sepia Mutiny is shutting down, and Amardeep has some closing thoughts.
We always get to hear these stories about how service providers needs differential pricing for network traffic because they can’t make money, but then stories like this make me question the integrity of the complainers.
I heard Of Monsters and Men on KEXP and their show is sold out in Chicago, boo. Here’s their crazy video though:
March 16, 2012
After reading and hearing about The Lifespan of a Fact, I was primed to learn from TPM that the This American Life story involving Mike Daisey’s “trip” to see Apple’s products being made at Foxconn was retracted due to significant fabrications by Daisey, resulting in a episode entitled Retraction going into it:
When the original 39-minute excerpt was broadcast on This American Life on January 6, 2012, Marketplace China Correspondent Rob Schmitz wondered about its truth. Marketplace had done a lot of reporting on Foxconn and Apple’s supply chain in China in the past, and Schmitz had first-hand knowledge of the issues. He located and interviewed Daisey’s Chinese interpreter Li Guifen (who goes by the name Cathy Lee professionally with westerners). She disputed much of what Daisey has been telling theater audiences since 2010 and much of what he said on the radio.
