One day I will write all those posts that I’ve been intending on writing. One day… until then:
Nabokov’s butterfly theory is found to be correct.
Why you should encrypt your smartphone.
You should now call him Doctor Grover. No, not him, silly. Him.
MIT’s 150th year anniversary PR blitz has an article on Wiener.
At the end of last week I learned, much to my sadness, that Rudolf Ahlswede passed away in December. There will be some sort of commemoration at the ITA workshop. His Wikipedia entry has been edited, but I couldn’t find an obituary. It does have a rather dashing photograph of him in earlier years. I think the sideburns suited him.
Rudi Ahlswede was one of the pillars of Information Theory and had many seminal works in that field using tools from combinatorics, probability, and graph theory. I came to know his work through my dissertation work on the arbitrarily varying channel (AVCs); he had written extensively on the AVC starting in the 1960s. Of particular note (to me) was his paper on the “elimination technique,” which is one of the first derandomization arguments I’ve seen in the literature. And of course he was part of the start of Network Coding. I met Ahlswede at the 2006 ISIT and then most recently in September at ITW in Dublin, where I was presenting a paper on AVCs in which the adversary has a noisy look at the transmitted codeword. He presented in the same session a paper on “channels with time structure,” about which I will make a separate post later. I just wanted to note with sadness the passing of such a giant.
Terry Tao gives general tips on solving analysis problems.
A charming animation from Taiwan (h/t Bobak Nazer).
Apparently optical-scan ballots aren’t so simple to deploy.
A surprising fact about almost everywhere convergence.
James Fallows can Google that for you.
Even though the main website hasn’t been updated yet, the NIH has funded a new National Center for Biomedical Computing here at UCSD, headed up by folks from the new Division of Biomedical Informatics. I’ve already been collaborating with some people from the DBMI, but I’m going to be doing work this year with the new center, named iDASH. It’s the only new center funded this year, and the only one from a public university, so we’re pretty excited about it!
Also, we need a logo!
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).
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.
I read in Inside Higher Ed that an alumna of Stephens College will donate one million dollars if the campus can shed 250 pounds by 2011. What is this, the Biggest Loser?
Via Inherent Uncertainty I learned that David Blackwell passed away on July 8th.
Prof. Blackwell’s original paper (with Leo Breiman and Aram Thomasian) on the arbitrarily varying channel was an inspiration to me, and he served on my thesis committee a scant 2 years ago.
I’ll always remember what he told me when I handed him a draft of my thesis. “The best thing about Bayesians is that they’re always right.”
Joel Stein has an truly atrocious piece in Time magazine, which opens with
I am very much in favor of immigration everywhere in the U.S. except Edison, N.J.
I can see how Stein is sort of trying to be funny, but the whole piece has a stink (like uncooked hing) about it that got Anna up in arms and Mimosa writing:
But really, what bothers me about this piece, why it didn’t strike me as satire, is that it seems to assume that there really is a dominant narrative out there, i.e. that “white” culture is where it’s at. Assimilation is not an option, it’s a requirement for these rude new aliens – but of course, that assimilation is on the dominant narratives terms.
Klein’s response:
Didn’t meant to insult Indians with my column this week. Also stupidly assumed their emails would follow that Gandhi non-violence thing.
Perhaps he thought the emails would also be curry flavo(u)red?
On that note, here is a quote from Amitava Kumar’s Passport Photos, which I am enjoying right now:
If the word ‘curry’ doesn’t have a stable referent or a fixed origin, how can its changing use by postcolonials be seen as a sign of resistance?
The University of California (UC) postdocs are trying to form a union to (among other things) get a uniform contract, workplace protections, etc. The UC administration has (true to form) stalled on giving information for negotiations. Congressman George Miller sent a rather strongly worded letter to Yudof after a congressional hearing was was held in Berkeley. More recently the union filed an unfair labor practices charge with the California Public Employment Relations Board.
Beryl Benderly has been covering this story for Science Magazine – links to some of her posts are above.
An Ergodic Walk 