I Hate Your Paper — some suggestions for modifying the peer review process. I have a few more thoughts on this with respect to IEEE journals (and maybe the IT Transactions in particular), which is a topic of more than passing interest for me. I don’t know how much the link above applies, however.
4G consolidation : Broadcom to buy Beceem
Broadcom is planning to buy Beceem for a cool $316 million. This was announced a week after we had an event here at ITA called “From GSR to CTO,” for which there was a panel with the CTOs of Qualcomm (Padovani), Broadcom (Sheshadri), and Beceem (Paulraj).
Linkage
It seems as good a time as any to link to this chestnut from McSweeney’s. Warning : full of highly profane language.
Did you know Krish Eswaran has a blog? Neither did I, until today. He appears to not be updating it, however. C’mon Krish, more posts!
Andrew Gelman pins down one of the things that annoys me about arguments based on personal finance — it’s not true that we do things for money or for fun, unless “fun” is really broadly construed. Plus there’s this zinger at the end: “as a statistician, I’m not impressed with an argument when it doesn’t work on the example it’s been applied to.”
A pretty cool video on hand-pulled noodles.
More chaconne than you can handle.
Via CT, an amazing cartoon in which Donald Duck meets Glenn Beck.
How to write about Pakistan, inspired by the classic How to write about Africa.
Allerton 2010 : the only talks I’ll blog about
Hey, lookit! I’m blogging about a conference somewhat near to when the conference happened!
I’m just going to write about a few talks. This is mostly because I ended up not taking as many notes this year, but also because writing up extensive notes on talks is a bit too time consuming. I found the talks by Paul Cuff, Sriram Vishwanath, Raj Rajagopalan, and others interesting, but no notes. And of course I enjoyed the talks by my “bosses” at UCSD, Alon Orlitsky and Tara Javidi. That’s me being honest, not me trying to earn brownie points (really!)
So here were 5 talks which I thought were interesting and I took some notes.
Partha Niyogi has passed away
Partha Niyogi passed away after battling brain cancer (via Suresh).
Readers of this blog might be familiar with some of the work he did on Laplacian Eigenmaps and other topics in machine learning, especially manifold learning. I read the Laplacian eigenmaps paper my first year in grad school, as a holdover from my undergrad research in machine learning.
Allerton 2010 : the sessions’ (lack of) timing
Warning: small rant below. I’m probably not as ticked off as this makes me sound.
One thing that seemed significantly off this year from previous times I’ve been to Allerton is that around 3/4 of the talks I attended went over the alloted time. Why does this happen?
For one thing, more than half of the sessions at Allerton are invited. This means that some speakers know what they are going to talk about in general, but haven’t necessarily pinned down the whole story. This is amplified by the fact that the camera-ready paper is due on the last day of the conference (the deadline was pushed back to Monday this year). For invited talks, many people have not even started writing the paper until they get on the plane, adding uncertainty as to what they can or should present. Little lemmas are proved hours before the deadline. It’s not unusual to make slides on the plane to the conference, but if the actual results are in flux, what are you going to put on the slides? Why, the entire kitchen sink, of course!
The actual session brings up other issues. Because people are editing their slides until the last minute, they insist on using their own laptop, causing delays as the laptops are switched, the correct display is found, and the presentation remote is set up. This is a gigantic waste of time. Almost all laptops provided by conference organizers are PCs, which can display PDF (generated by LaTeX or Keynote) and PowerPoint. Why must you use your own laptop? So the slide transitions will be oh-so pretty?
Finally, many session chairs don’t give warnings early enough and don’t enforce time constraints. Once a habit of talks running over is established, it becomes unfair to cut off one speaker if you didn’t cut off another. Naturally, speakers feel upset if someone got more time to present than they did.
What we should ask ourselves is this : is the talk for the benefit of the speaker or for the benefit of the audience?
PSA for Allerton authors who use TeXShop
The papercept website will throw an error if your final PDF is lower than version 1.4. If you use latex -> dvips -> ps2pdf then you will likely get PDF 1.3.
To fix this in TeXShop, go to Preferences and select Engine. Under “Tex + dvips + distiller” enter simpdftex tex --maxpfb --distiller ps2pdf14 and you should be good to go.
More posting about Allerton later!
Allerton 2010 : un-quote of the day
“Need to avoid priors that are full of fail” — Cosma Rohilla Shalizi, slide from “Bayesian Updating, Evolutionary Dynamics, and Relative Entropy,” Allerton Conference 2010, Monticello, IL.
ITW 2010 : finishing up
Blogging conferences seems to have gone by the wayside for me, but some quick takes on things from ITW. It was a more coding-focused conference so there were fewer talks of active research interest to me, but I did get to catch up and talk shop with a few people, so that was nice.
Tali Kaufman (who seems to have no homepage) gave a plenary on “Local computation in codes” which looked at fast (sublinear time) algorithms for detecting if a binary vector is from a code, and fast ways to correct single bit errors. In particular, she was looking at these properties in the context of LDPC codes. It’s a nice place where information theory and CS theory look at the same object but with different intents.
Ueli Maurer gave a great talk on “A Cryptographic Theory of System Indistinguishability,” which started out kind of slow and then ended up at a breakneck speed. This was a way of thinking about crypto from the perspective of systems being able to simulate each other.
Rudolf Ahlswede talked a bit about strong converses and weak converses for channels with a rather generic “time structure.” Essentially this boils down to a difference between lim inf and lim sup, and he gave a rather short proof showing that capacities exist under very mild conditions and that the additivity of capacity (e.g. for two parallel channels) may hold in some settings but not others.
There were lots of other good talks that I enjoyed but I didn’t take particularly good notes this time (I blame the jet lag), so I don’t have much to say here. Tomorrow is the start of Allerton, so I might take better notes for that.
Information Theoretic Anagrams
I have been visiting Berkeley for the end of last week and beginning of this week, and part of my job was to clean out this old box of papers and printouts that I left when I moved down to UCSD. Most of the papers I printed out in grad school didn’t make it down, and a small fraction of those I ended up re-printing at ITA. It’s a sad waste of paper, but I also noticed that I printed out lots of them because someone said to check them out and I did print-first-read-second. Thankfully as time wore on I have switched to the other direction, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do the all-electronic e-reader thing. I just love marking up papers with a red/green/purple pen. Some of the more heavily marked ones are coming back with me. Hopefully they won’t weigh down the plane too much.
One of the little gems I found among the photocopies of old reimbursement forms, conference schedules, and mouldering reprints of my optical queueing article was Bob McEliece‘s handout from his 2004 Shannon Lecture on “Some Information-Theoretic Anagrams”:
- A Sound Channel
- Brainy Coed
- Rome Noodles
- Cubed Roots
- UCLA Shenanigans
- Coordinate Spasm
- Momentary Mixup
- Acquiescent Yelp
An Ergodic Walk 