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.
April 14, 2013
Endless Things [John Crowley] — Book four of the Aegypt Cycle, and the one most grounded in the present. The book moves more swiftly than the others, as if Crowley was racing to the end. Many of the concerns of the previous books, such as magic, history, and memory, are muted as the protagonist Pierce Moffett wends his way through his emotional an intellectual turmoil and into what in the end amounts to a kind of peace. Obviously only worth reading if you read the first three books.
Understanding Privacy [Daniel Solove] — A law professor’s take on what constitutes privacy. Solove wants to conceptualize privacy in terms of clusters of related ideas rather than take a single definition, and he tries to put a headier philosophical spin on it by invoking Wittgenstein. I found the book a bit overwritten but it does parse out the things we call privacy, especially in the longest chapter on the taxonomy of privacy. It’s not a very long book, but it has a number of good examples and also case law to show how muddled our legal definitions have become. He also makes a strong case for increased protections and shows how the law is blind to the effects of information aggregation, for example.
The Fall of the Stone City [Ismail Kadare] — An allegorical novel by a Man Booker prize winner chronicling the Nazi occupation and the communist takeover of Gjirokaster, an old Albanian city. It’s a dark absurdist comedy, partly in the vein of Kafka but with a bit of… Calvino almost. The tone of the book (probably a testament to the translator) has this almost academic detachment, gently mocking as it describes the ways in which the victors try to rewrite history.
Invisible Men [Becky Pettit] — A sobering look at how mass incarceration interacts with official statistics. Because most surveys are household-based, they do not count the increasingly larger incarcerated population, thereby introducing a systematic racialized bias in the statistics used for public policy. In particular, Pettit shows how this bias leads to underestimation of racial inequity because the (mainly young black male) prisoners are “erased” in the official records.
The Rise of Ransom City [Felix Gilman] — A sequel to The Half-Made World, and a wondrously engrossing read it is too, filled with the clash of ideas, the corruption of corporations, the “borrowing” and evolution of ideas, and the ravages of industrialization. Also has a healthy dose of Mark Twain for good measure.
February 28, 2013
My department chair sent out a recent notice from the NSF about the impact of the sequestration order on the NSF awards.
At NSF, the major impact of sequestration will be seen in reductions to the number of new research grants and cooperative agreements awarded in FY 2013. We anticipate that the total number of new research grants will be reduced by approximately 1,000.
In FY2011 the NSF funded 11,185 proposals, so that’s an 8.94% reduction. Yikes.
February 23, 2013
I signed a petition to the White House a while ago about increasing public access to government-funded research — if a petition gets 100,000 signatures then they White House will draft a response. Some of the petitions are silly, but generate amusing responses, c.f. This Isn’t the Petition Response You’re Looking For on government construction of a Death Star. The old threshold was 60K, which the petition I signed passed. On Friday I got the official response from John Holdren, the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The salient bit is this one:
(more…)
February 6, 2013
Since I’ve diversified my research interests beyond communications, I kind of lost track of what has been happening in cognitive radio. Via Kevin Drum I learned of another proposed FCC auction of broadcast spectrum in the 600-700 MHz range. Apparently there’s a political debate over how wide the guard bands should be. On the one side, wide guard bands prevent more spectrum from being auctioned off, and on the other, they may allow for some municipalities to put in services operating in those bands (?)
I never thought I would see the day when the sharpness of your bandpass filter would become a political issue, but there you have it.
September 12, 2012
Troubles in how science is marketed to girls.
Human remains at Richard III’s grave! (That sounds like a cryptic clue but it isn’t).
An interesting take on Karachi, but I’d want a local’s opinion of it…
The case of Aseem Trivedi is a real travesty.
Bad Lip Reading does a number on Mitt Romney. They’ve also done Obama.
August 15, 2012
Via Amber, a collection of grassroots feminist political posters from India.
Via John, some fun investigations on how 355/113 is an amazingly good approximation to 
I had missed this speech by a 10 year old on gay marriage when it happened (I was in India), but it’s pretty heartwarming. For more background on how the principal originally deemed the story “inappropriate.”
Unrelatedly, ML Hipster — tight bounds and tight jeans.
July 14, 2012
The Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African (Olaudah Equiano) — a classic autobiography of a 18th century African who was captured and sold into slavery, managed to save enough to buy his freedom, and then had a number of adventures in the Caribbean, Mediterranean, and Arctic. It’s a real window into the time period as well as one of the oldest textual accounts of Europeans through African eyes during that period.
That Awful Mess on Via Merulana (Carlo Emilio Gadda) — a allegorical murder mystery / police investigation. The use of language is dazzling, but the plot, as such, is a bit flat. Recommended for those who like florid prose, extreme vocabulary, and political satire. In this case Gadda is mocking fascism. It may be appealing to those who liked The Master and Margarita.
Red Plenty (Francis Spufford) — a lightly fictionalized history of the moment when it looked like central planning was going to work in the Soviet Union, and how it all then fell apart (later to be buoyed by oil prices). A tremendously engaging book about a moment in history that we never hear about in the US due to our stupid jingoistic Cold War know-nothing attitude. There was also a Crooked Timber event on it, which I am going to read now.
The Girl of Fire and Thorns — an engaging fantasy set in pseudo-Iberian (or colonial South American?) land. A bit heavy on the religion aspect, but that’s the world she builds at least. Has some of the endemic race issues that much fantasy suffers from, but that might get mixed up in later books.
Re-imagining Milk (Andrea S. Wiley) — a short monograph on the history, biology, and anthropology of milk consumption. It’s full of interesting analysis and critique of how the purported health benefits of milk drinking after weaning intersect with policy. For example, why push milk consumption as a public health issue in parts of Africa when many/most people cannot process lactose? Why do we call the (normal) process in which the body stops producing lactase with the pejorative “lactose intolerance”? See also this piece by Mark Bittman on the NY Times site.
A Conspiracy of Paper (David Liss) — a mystery novel set before the South Sea Bubble and full of gritty and grimy London locales, brawling, the rampant anti-Semitism of the time, and some discussions of probability . The book grew out of dissertation research, so it’s meticulously researched, although some of the probability discussion seems ahistorical (c.f. Ian Hacking).
July 6, 2012
I’m being lazy about more ISIT blogging because my brain is full. So here are some links as a distraction.
Via John, George Boolos’s talk entitled Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem Explained in Words of One Syllable.
D’Angelo is back!
This short video about a subway stair in New York is great, especially the music.
Crooked Timber is on a tear about workplace coercion and its proponents.
Luca’s thoughts on the Turing Centennial are touching.
May 23, 2012
In case you want to tell someone who is not an academic why open access to research is important, check out access2research and the video there. It’s important even for non-academics to sign the petitions — this is about access for everyone, not just cheaper access for universities.
