I really love language, but my desire to be idiomatic often runs athwart to the goals of scholarly communication. Especially when motivating a paper, I enjoy writing sentences such as this:
In the data-rich setting, at first blush it appears that learning algorithms can enjoy both low privacy risk and high utility.
(Yes, I know it’s passive). However, consider the poor graduate student for whom English is a second (or third) language – this sentence is needlessly confusing for them. If we are really honest, this is the dominant group of people who will actually read the paper, so if I am writing with my “target audience” in mind, I should eschew idioms, literary allusions, and the like. Technical papers should be written in a technical and global English (as opposed to a specific canonized World English).
Nevertheless, I want to write papers in a “writerly” way; I want to use the fact that my chosen career is one of constant writing as an opportunity to improve my communication skills, but I also want to play, to exploit the richness of English, and even to slip in the occasional pun. Am I a linguistic chauvinist? Unlike mathematicians, I never had to learn to read scholarly works in another language, so I have the luxury of lazily indulging my fantasies of being an Author.
When I review papers I often have many comments about grammatical issues, but perhaps in a global English of scholarly communication it doesn’t matter as long as the argument is intelligible. Do we need so many articles? Is consistent tense really that important? I think so, but I don’t have a philosophically consistent argument for what may appear, in situ, to be a prescriptivist attitude.
The cynical side of me says that nobody reads papers anyway, so there is no point in worrying about these issues or even spending time on the literary aspects of technical papers. Cynicism has never been very nourishing for me, though, so I am hoping for an alternative…
of 
of size 
at each node. The subset is the set of keys available at each node; two nodes can talk (securely) if they share a key in common. We keep the edge in the RGG is if the link can be secured. The question is whether the secure-link graph is connected. It turns out that the important scaling is in terms of 
, where 
is the connectivity radius of the RGG. This sort of makes sense, as the threshold is more or less 
, so the keys provide a kind of discount factor on effective radius needed for connectivity — if the number of keys per node is small then you need a larger radius to compensate.
shares of a secret such that any 
of them can be used to reconstruct the secret but 
or fewer cannot. The idea here is that the dealer has to distribute these shares over the network, which means that if a receiver is not connected directly to the dealer then the share will be passed insecurely through another node. Existing approaches based on pairwise agreement protocols are communication intensive. The idea here is use ideas from network coding to share masked versions of shares so that intermediate nodes will not get valid shares from others. To do this the graph needs to satisfy a particular condition (
where 
where 
and 
are the input and output of the channel. He gets a single-letter expression for the capacity under a bound on the max surprise and gives an example for which the same distribuion maximizes mutual information and achieves the minimax surprise. The flip side is to ask for capacity when each output should be surprising (or “attention seeking”). He gets a single letter capacity here as well, but the structure of the solution seems to be a bit more complicated.
, so the idea is to get bounds on
.
from a list and we want to guess the choice that is made. We’re only allowed to ask questions of the form “is the item 
. This paper looks at the number of guesses one needs if 
is uniform on the typical set according to 
conditioned on 
for the 
to infect 
if 
An Ergodic Walk 