This week in charcuterie

Bacon-flavored bacon gum.

Strawberry-flavored gummy bacon.

Edible Rubik's Cubewich.

[via Gawker/Gizmodo.]

Nortel in liquidation

Here's what astonishes me. The federal government would drop 7 billion dollars to prop up a badly run company that has done its best to make itself obsolete. This same government then barely lifts a finger as foreign interests acquire the key assets of another badly run company that is at the forefront of the next generation of wireless networks.

Since the bidders were most likely interested in Nortel's patent portfolio, all those high-tech R&D jobs are either going or gone. This, and not the troubles in the auto sector, is the story that will have lasting ramifications for the Canadian economy.

Hot topics in info theory

I'm trying to figure out what's hot and what's not in information theory. So, for a laugh, I put together all the session titles from ISITs 2005-2009, and searched them for keywords.

In the following, I'm giving counts of the number of times a keyword appears in the list of sessions. The numbers of sessions at each conference were slightly different (from a low of 126 in 2005 to a high of 152 in 2006), but I don't bother to normalize since the range is small. Some findings:

MIMO is out, wireless is in:

Number of sessions with the given keyword:

Year            | 2005   2006   2007   2008   2009
----------------|----------------------------------
MIMO            |   5     14      7      6      0
wireless        |   3      5      5      4     14

Relay is on the downswing, cooperation is picking up the slack:

Number of sessions with the given keyword:

Year            | 2005   2006   2007   2008   2009
----------------|----------------------------------
relay           |   4      2      9      8      5
cooperation*    |   1      3      3      4      4

* includes "cooperative"

Turbo vs. LDPC -- LDPC is resurgent:

Number of sessions with the given keyword:

Year            | 2005   2006   2007   2008   2009
----------------|----------------------------------
turbo           |   3      0      1      1      1
LDPC            |  11     16      6      6     11

Source vs. channel -- sources are on the decline:

Number of sessions with the given keyword:

Year            | 2005   2006   2007   2008   2009
----------------|----------------------------------
source          |   6     15     11      9      6
entropy         |   1      3      1      1      0
                |
channel         |  12     19     25     16     22
capacity        |   7      7     13     11      9

I've posted the session lists here if you want to do your own grepping: 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009.

Another info theory guy with a blog

is Anand Sarwate. Thanks for the shout out.

Talk at ISIT 2009: We have video

Through the magic of YouTube, here's my talk at ISIT 2009 (this is a playlist):



I linked to the paper here.

I'm going to try to record more of my talks and upload them to YouTube.