I’m on the organizing committee for this pretty cool conference at MIT this week. Any readers of the blog who are in Cambridge on Friday might want to attend the plenary lecture. I hear it’s going to resolve a fundamental enigma that has been puzzling scientists for decades.
Information Theoretic Estimators Toolbox
Zoltán Szabó of the Gatsby Unit forwarded me a link to his Information Theoretical Estimators Toolbox, which has MATLAB-friendly estimators for standard information-theoretic quantities. It might be of interest to readers of the blog.
CFP for DCOSS 2014
The The 10th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems has issued a call for papers. Deadlines are 1/31 and 2/7.
Linkage
I’m in the process of moving to New Jersey for my new gig at Rutgers. Before I start teaching I have to go help run the the Mystery Hunt, so I am a little frazzled and unable to write “real” blog posts. Maybe later. In the meantime, here are some links.
The folks at Puzzazz have put out a bevy of links for the 200th anniversary of the crossword puzzle.
The UK has issued a pardon to Alan Turing, for, you know, more or less killing him. It’s a pretty weasely piece of writing though.
An important essay on women’s work: “…women are not devalued in the job market because women’s work is seen to have little value. Women’s work is devalued in the job market because women are seen to have little value.”. (h/t AW)
Of late we seem to be learning quite a bit about early hominins and hominids (I had no idea that hominini was a thing, nor that chimps are in the panini tribe, nor that “tribe” is between subfamily and genus). For example,
they have sequenced some old bones in Spain. Extracting sequenceable mitochondrial DNA is pretty tough — I am sure there are some interesting statistical questions in terms of detection and contamination. We’ve also learned that some neanderthals were pretty inbred.
Kenji searches for the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe.
Linkage
My cousin Supriya has started a blog, wading through soup, on green parenting and desi things. Her recent post, Pretty in Pink: Can Boys Wear Pink? made it to HuffPo.
Larry Wasserman is quitting blogging.
Maybe I should get a real chef knife.
If you have a stomach for horrible things, here are some images from the Nauru immigration center, where hundreds of (mostly Iranian) asylum-seekers are kept by the Australian government (via mefi).
At Rutgers, I am going to be in a union. Recent grad student union actions have come under fire from peeved faculty at UChicago (a place with horrendous institutional politics if I have ever seen one). Corey Robin breaks it down.
GlobalSIP vs. NIPS: poster sessions
After attending GlobalSIP I flew to Reno and drove to South Lake Tahoe for NIPS 2013. NIPS is large conference that is unfortunately single-track. All papers are posters and a very small number are selected for longer oral presentation. A slightly larger number are selected for 5 minute “spotlight” advertisements. The poster session is 7-11PM for the first three days, and each poster session contains around 90 posters in a giant room. It’s very loud, and some poster presenters lose their voice for a day or two after presenting.
The contrast with GlobalSIP could not be starker. Obviously these are very different venues, but I found that all of the noise and commotion at NIPS made it nigh impossible for me to understand or retain any explanations at the poster session. Instead, I found myself circling titles in my program guide so that I could take a look at the papers later. Perhaps it was harder for me since I’m an “outsider” so I have more to learn about the basic models/assumptions in most of the papers, and I need more of an explanation than most.
In a sense a poster is “better” for the viewer because they can see what they want/need. You can get an explanation “at your level” from the poster presenter, and it’s more interactive than sitting for some 20 minute talk where the presenter feels the need to have a TOC slide (c.f. ISIT). But the lack of noise isolation and the sheer volume of posters is not ideal for actually digesting new ideas. I wonder if the NIPS model is really sustainable, and if they would ever consider going to parallel sessions. I think that even with posters, some isolation would help tremendously.
GlobalSIP 2014 : the format
I’m in Austin right now for the first GlobalSIP conference. The conference has a decentralized organization, with semi-independent day-long workshops (“symposia”) scheduled in parallel with each other. There are 8 of these, with 6 running in parallel per day, with 1 session of “plenary” talks and 2 poster sessions. Each workshop is scheduled in AAB, ABA, or BAA, where A = posters and B = plenary, so there are 2 talk sessions and 4 poster sessions running in parallel.
Fortunately, there are a wide range of topics covered in the workshops, from biology to controlled sensing, to financial signal processing. The downside is that the actual papers in each workshop often fit well with other workshops. For example, the distributed optimization posters (in which I am interested), were sprinkled all over the place. This probably has a lot to do with the decentralized effects.
In terms of the “results” at the conference, it seems from my cursory view that many people are presenting “extra” results from other conference papers, or preliminary work for future papers. This actually works well in the poster format: for the former, the poster contains a lot of information about the “main result” as well, and for the latter, the poster is an invitation to think about future work. In general I’m a little ambivalent about posters, but if you’re going to have to do ’em, a conference like this may be a better way to do it.
MIT Mystery Hunt Registration Now Open
Hi there, puzzle hunters!
We’re pleased to announce the 2014 Mystery Hunt! This year’s Hunt will begin at 12pm on Friday, January 17, 2014 in Kresge Auditorium.
Registration for this year’s Hunt is now open. Please have one member of your team register at
http://web.mit.edu/puzzle/www/registration.html
Instructions for unattached hunters can be found at http://web.mit.edu/puzzle/www/unattached.html.
Just like in past years, we’ve obtained a number of rooms from the Schedules Office and will be assigning them to teams who need to use classroom space for their HQ. If you need classroom space for your HQ during Hunt, please indicate so on your registration form in the Base Reservation System section. Please do not contact the Schedules Office directly for space during Mystery Hunt, as we’ve already worked with them to reserve rooms. A list of this year’s rooms is available at http://web.mit.edu/puzzle/www/rooms-14.html.
The registration deadline for teams requesting classroom space for their HQ is December 18. We ask that all teams try to register as soon as possible. We’d prefer teams to be registered by January 6, although registration will stay open right up until the beginning of the Hunt. We’d much rather receive a partially filled out registration form now with final details emailed to us in a few weeks than a fully completed registration form submitted right before the deadline.
More details about this year’s Hunt can be found at http://web.mit.edu/puzzle/www/currhunt.html. We’ll email out any major updates, but up-to-date news can also be found there.
If you have any questions, you can always reach us at puzzle@mit.edu.
See you in January!
-the team formerly known as [the entire text of Atlas Shrugged]
A week later, a response from Ventra
I wrote to Ventra a week ago to ask them if there was any way for me to get an automated notice when it would charge my bank account. This was a nice feature of the Chicago Card — by letting me know when it added another $20 I could get a rough sense of my transit usage. A week after asking, I got the following response:
Dear Customer,
I am very sorry, but at this time, we do not have any alerts set up to notify customers when their card is auto loaded with value. If you have transit auto load set up, you just have to be aware that when your balance gets to $10.00 and below, that is when the funding source you have on your acct is charged for what ever value preference you have selected to be added to your card. Or if you have Pass auto load set up, then you just need to be aware that it will always charge your funding source for the pass you have chosen and add it to your acct, three days prior to your existing pass expiring. You can keep track of your balance via your web acct on the internet or can call us to check your balance, and can also check your balance at any Ventra Vending Machine as well. We do apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but if you have any further concerns, please feel free to contact us for assistance. Thank You And Have A Nice Day.
The old CTA system would even flash your current balance and how much was being debited when you went through. On each transaction you could tell your balance, at least at train stations. Given that I have had to tap my Ventra card 10+ times (no hyperbole) to get through a turnstile at a CTA station, I have almost no confidence that the system is charging me the correct amount. Add to that Ventra’s penchant for charging debit cards in people’s wallets without informing them, there’s only one conclusion: Ventra is wholly set up like a scam. They say “give us your bank account information and then log into our website (with its awful UI) periodically to verify that we are not overcharging you.”
I guess it’s all moot since I’m leaving Chicago, but still… arrrrrrrrrgh.
Readings
Sorry Please Thank You: Stories [Charles Yu] — collection of short stories by the author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. Cute, heart wrenching, cutting, it’s all in here. They are more like snapshots than anything else, or fiction experiments. People may think that Yu is writing science fiction but space opera this is not. Some of the best ones are like Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills — you wonder what the rest of the world is that engendered the slice you saw.
After Dark [Haruki Murakami] — this novel felt a bit more spare and ephemeral than some of Murakami’s earlier works. It’s certainly not as sprawling as 1Q84 or Kafka on the Shore, but weeks later I still feel it’s a little haunting. Fans of Murakami will enjoy it because it’s different but I’m not sure it would make a good introduction to his work.
That Thing Around Your Neck [Chinamanda Ngozi Adichie] — a collection of short stories set in both Nigeria and the US. It’s a glimpse into a certain slice of the Nigerian immigrant community which I found both familiar (from similarities to the South Asian experience) and different (how Biafra looms large). I’m reading Americanah, her latest novel, right now, but this was available from the library earlier. I recommend it highly.
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents [Terry Pratchett] — a cute twist on the Pied Piper thing. It’s Discworld without being too Discworld, and would have been totally up my alley when I was a kid. It’s a little less serious than Diana Wynne Jones, for example, but the humor adds to the adventure, rather than distracting from it (that may be a matter of taste though). A good present for kids at that early-YA reading level.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane [Neil Gaiman] — like the Murakami, this rural English weirding fairytale felt familiar and wistful. Unlike the Murakami, however, I found it a bit spare and… predictable I guess. That’s not wholly a bad thing, but I don’t find myself wanting to read it again, like, say, Neverwhere.
The Girl From Foreign [Sadia Shepherd] — a lovely memoir by a Pakistani-American woman who discovers her grandmother was originally from the Bene Israel community of the Konkan coast. She goes to rediscover her Jewish roots in India and indeed, to discover this community. Definitely recommended for those who like historical memoir travelogues (think of Ghosh’s In An Antique Land, which is also a wonderful book).
An Ergodic Walk 