Happy New Year..

By -
..to everyone. I've been playing with the idea of starting a weblog for some time, but never quite found the courage to do it. So let the experiment commence, and see where it leads us. (See an excellent discussion of the academic use of pluralis majestaticus in Scott's blog.)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Full stomach

By -
had a good chat with Elliot over Mexican food. Conversation was excellent, thanks to my resourceful and ever entertaining companion, ruptured by occasional spells of silence contributed by me. Elliot came to give a talk at Columbia, brought news and gossip and had compassion with the slow-witted, gloomy, aging homo corporatus (that is me). Enjoyed the chat, escorted Elliot to train, bought a loaf of bread, heading home after a day of work. The beef burrito was not so good, but there was lot of it and for some reason I felt compelled to eat it all. Stomach not happy. Sigh.
Read more

Algorithmic theory of MapReduce?

By -
Last Friday,  Il Professore  gave a talk at Google NY on  'algorithmic theory of mapreduce'. As is his style, the talk was to draw attention to a topic and provide food for thought, technical results riding along  mostly to make a point. Muthu spent a good chunk of time talking about the model and results from  A Model of Computation for MapReduce  by Karloff, Suri and Vassilvitskii. Let me chime in with some comments. On a practical note, the MapReduce library we have at Google (with Hadoop being the open source equivalent) is a great tool that simplifies many data processing tasks. The typical use of MapReduce is to process logged data of some sort: search queries, records of auctions being  run to sell ads on a page etc. Typically, the input data file contains a lot of extraneous information that is irrelevant to the task at hand. For example, information identifying machine serving the request, request timestamp or the list of matching ads is i...
Read more

Things aren't always what they appear to be

By -
All of this turned out to be fairly relevant to my life, especially in the past couple of months. A paper by Adam and Ehud Kalai on Strategic Polarization . // TODO(mpal): Yes I know, there are many more Kalai-Kalai papers for me to read.. This PhD Comics . Steve Jobs: One Last Thing The Final Insult in the Bush-Cheney Marriage (via Sariel ) The Hunt for Red October  (just started watching, not sure when I can finish. No spoilers please) I wish there was a simple tagline to summarize all of the above. The best I can come up with is, "things aren't always what they appear to be".
Read more