Formspring

Continuing my tradition of screwing around with "social media" sites, I'm now andreweckford on formspring. Here's Gawker's take on this question-and-answer service, although my goals for the site are more professional than personal.

Speaking of YouTube

White, middle-aged men should never rap -- they just end up looking like dorks. But I'll make an exception for this guy, 'cause if you're going to dork it up, you may as well go all the way. That mofo is ghost riding a Prius, yo:



[@IBMResearch via Gizmodo]

Disappointing arXiv paper title of the week

When I saw the paper Real Interference Alignment, I initially read the title as "Real-world interference alignment", but what they actually mean is "Real-number interference alignment".

This is not to criticize the paper -- Amir Khandani and his group do great work, and this paper looks nice. But I'm still hoping for a paper explaining how to achieve interference alignment under practical, real-world assumptions.

I won't be seeing you in Austin

For a variety of personal reasons (not the least of which is currently nine months old), I didn't get my act together to submit a paper to ISIT this year. I had a couple that I was working on, but they didn't come together in time. So I'll be missing my first ISIT since 2003 in Yokohama.

St. Petersburg is going to be a blast, though. Assuming the LHC hasn't destroyed the earth by then.

Information theory for the YouTube masses

I'm teaching a graduate-level course on information theory this term. As I've done with a couple of my other courses, I'm going to make video recordings of the lectures and post them online.

The course YouTube channel is here. As I've also done elsewhere, I'm organizing the video and course announcements on a blog, which is here. I just posted the first lecture -- this is still kind of experimental, so comments would be appreciated.

As far as I know, this will be YouTube's first full course on information theory. However, while searching for other IT-related material, I ran across this gem. Plus a slew of raging creationists and evolutionists, each using information theory to somehow try to prove their point.

Happy new year

I'm back at work for the first day after the holidays. Posting has been light for the past while, but I plan to be more disciplined about this blog in the new year. My goal for 2010: 52 blog posts, and at least two per calendar month.