By
anders pearson
02 Apr 2002
in crypto class today, prof. Rabin mentioned that in world war II, the government decided that they had to test all the soldiers for syphilis and a few other diseases. the problem was that blood tests were extremely expensive and they couldn’t afford to pay for blood tests for all N thousand soldiers knowing that probably less than 1% or so would actually be infected. they had to find the few soldiers who were infected but they didn’t want to spend all the money on expensive tests for soldiers who weren’t infected.
<p>the novel solution they came up with was to take groups of the blood samples, maybe 100 per group, mix them together and test the mixture. if it came back negative, they knew that all 100 of those soldiers were healthy; if it came back positive, they’d break it up into smaller and smaller groups until they’d isolated which soldier was infected. by picking the sizes of the groups intelligently, they could effectively test large numbers of soldiers quite cheaply.</p>
<p>Rabin then went on to explain an algorithm for doing mass verifications of digital signatures using a similar strategy.</p>
<p>i think the whole syphilis testing example is a wonderful example of how a good understanding of the problem and a little cleverness can really pay off. it’s probably also a good explanation/example for the layperson of what computer science is really about and why algorithms are important.</p>
<p>the actual algorithm used interests me as well. the trick to applying it would be to find a situation with something analogous to the mixing of the blood; you need a large scale boolean operation:(A or B or C or …) that will let you combine tests over large groups. then you also need the probabilities involved in the problem to be small enough that combining the tests will help you. eg, if 99% of the soldiers could be expected to be infected, the divide and conquer strategy would end up being more expensive than just testing each soldier individually.</p>
By
lani
01 Apr 2002
so i left new york and spent about 24 hours in maine. only about 11 were spent awake at Bates.
<p>list form of highlights:</p>
<p>*walking along congress st., i gave a homeless guy 35 cents and he told me i was “cute…for a girl.”</p>
<p>*justin lloyd uses the word “swicked”. he’s been known to say stupid things, but i’m wondering if it’s a legitimate form of new england slang. “sweet” + “wicked”?</p>
<p>*julia has bangs and bob length hair.</p>
<p>*i tried japanese water candy. you start with a clear sugary liquid and a pair of chopsticks and keep twisting with the goal of not dripping until the candy turns white and gets more viscous. i’m trying to figure out if there’s rice in it. yuko doesn’t think so, but the taste reminds me of the rice paper that botan rice candy is wrapped in but sweeter.</p>
<p>*parv introduced me to the “honey roasted cigarettes” and “smokin’ joes” that she bought from a smoke shop in brunswick. “smokin’ joes” claim to be the “first native american tobacco company”. it’s pretty cool because they’re all natural and they took a shot at american spirits by putting the most prolific native american icon abused by large companies and sports teams in a cute rectangular frame of golden proportions: the great plains chief with headress. </p>
<p>*mrs. skannotto sells 30 cd’s at their cd release party which meant that chris hoover spent the rest of the show in his blue stripped boxer briefs with “30 cd’s sold” written on his chest. unfortunately, they didn’t sell enough to shave simon’s head or take out justin’s “liver” or light the cymbals on fire. damn.</p>
<p>*i mastered the art of swaying with a lit lighter in each hand.</p>
<p>*saw amy kinnunen in full village 1 debauchery dressed as a prostitute pirate. (think eye patch)</p>
<p>*blair, eric mac, simon, and i took turns using blairs new air gun to massacre a picture of alanis morissette.</p>
<p>*daphne says the words,“don’t give lani the gun. please, don’t give lani the gun.” </p>
By
anders pearson
28 Mar 2002
my whole apartment building smells like oil for some reason.
<p>and i think i’m starting to like it…</p>
By
Mark Boudreau
28 Mar 2002
http://www.johngaltpress.org/pressreleasesquelched.html
<p>If none of you Batesies know what the John Gault Press is, I encourage you to check out the archives. It’s really too bad that the school refuses to support a competitor to the <em>Bates Student</em>. I know the editor pretty well, and he is one of the hardest working, politically minded individuals I’ve met. He also has a bit of integrity left, which the <em>Student</em> lost after Sean O’Leary graduated.</p>
By
emile
27 Mar 2002
i’ve recieved a request to forward this info to mssm people, but i didn’t want to spam the front page. click here to read it
By
emile
27 Mar 2002
Alright Folks, no fun and games this time around.
<p>Bad news. Mark Tasker is getting canned. After 7 years of service and with </p>
<p>a</p>
<p>baby due in September, the administration evidently thinks it appropriate </p>
<p>to</p>
<p>eliminate his position. That means Anthropology, Mythic Realm, Political</p>
<p>Geography and the Expedition will no longer be offered at our fine school.</p>
<p>I spoke with a few folks at the school to get some facts so you all would </p>
<p>be</p>
<p>confident when talking to someone else about this.</p>
<p>When asking the administration about it you may hear a few excuses.</p>
<p>(1) There’s not enough interest in his classes.</p>
<p>Mark is teaching 72 kids this term. Roughly half the student body. He had </p>
<p>to</p>
<p>turn away people from his Anthro. course and there are still people sitting</p>
<p>on the heater. Three times as many people are asking to take part in the</p>
<p>expedition as they have room for this year.</p>
<p>If they mention low attendence in his Anthro course last term, it was</p>
<p>because it was placed in the same time slot as Leadership, a required</p>
<p>course.</p>
<p>(2)Funding</p>
<p><span class="caps">MSSM</span> is facing financial times considerably better than when any of us </p>
<p>were</p>
<p>there. Although not robust, next years budeget is one of the largest to</p>
<p>date. Funding is evidently sufficient enough to justify buying new furniture</p>
<p>in the offices and giving the administrators a raise but not to retain</p>
<p>faculty.</p>
<p>Actually, funding for faculty is evidently in surplus as they are hoping to</p>
<p>get a PhD with no teaching experience to teach the History course next </p>
<p>year.</p>
<p>PhDs don’t come cheap.</p>
<p>Sure, there’s more to the issue, but basically, it stinks. It stinks like</p>
<p>only a beureaucratic administration can. But you know what? They want </p>
<p>out</p>
<p>money. Call them. E-mail them. If Tasker or any of the classes you took </p>
<p>with</p>
<p>him influenced your life at all, let someone know. Hell, even if you just</p>
<p>think its horrible to fire someone with no reason after 7 years of popular</p>
<p>service, especially with a child due, call someone and tell them that.</p>
<p>In fact, I know just who you should talk to. Dave Patterson. He’s head of</p>
<p>the Board of the Directors. Here’s his e-mail: dpeterson@tamc.org</p>
<p>Wasn’t that easy? And while you’re at it, call Mark, he misses everybody,</p>
<p>and he’d love to hear your support.</p>
<p>Dammit people, if you have any compassion, do something about this. </p>
<p>We can</p>
<p>change their minds.</p>
<p>-One pissed off Lithuanian.</p>
<p>ps…please forward this far and wide. I know there are folks out there who</p>
<p>care who I’ve lost touch with. Even if you do nothing else, let someone </p>
<p>know</p>
<p>who will.</p>
By
lani
27 Mar 2002
yura finished up the pictures in the disposable camera and took it apart to retrieve the film because he claims they charge extra money if you drop the whole camera in the box.
<p>“now we can make a taser,” i said as chris and yura were examinining the parts.</p>
<p>“so i’m thinking about my butt plug idea here,” says chris,“and figuring out what a good voltage would be to make it noticeable but not too painful.”</p>
<p>“now we can make a taser!”</p>
<p>[more talk mingled with sounds of television. talk moves to background and attention is drawn to Smallville.] </p>
<p>[bzzzt pop!]</p>
<p>oh f*ck!</p>
<p>[yura jumps out of his seat and falls back into it holding his wrist and twitching a bit.]</p>
<p>“taser! taser! taser!” i said, with arms cheering.</p>
<p>[yura calms down and laughter breaks loose]</p>
By
anders pearson
24 Mar 2002
lani came up to visit and prasanth came down from maine for the weekend.
<p>we were standing outside Tom’s waiting for a table to open up so we could get breakfast and milkshakes when someone rode by on a Segway. there were some people on a golf cart with a videocamera following and filming.</p>
<p>after breakfast we went down to the <span class="caps">MOMA</span> but the line was massive so we went to the natural history museum instead and looked at various dead animals stuffed and behind glass.</p>
<p>then we watched Blade 2. it was cheesy, not terribly creative and the special effects were overdone. still, it was entertaining and there’s something about that whole cyber-vampire aesthetic that i find innately appealing even if the plot doesn’t really make sense and the acting is uninspired. </p>
<p>we spent the rest of the night at Decibel, a sake bar down on east 9th st, having sake and japanese snacks.</p>
By
lani
20 Mar 2002
Yesterday the NSF sponsored a symposium on Nanoscience mostly featuring leading scientists from their six newly funded nanoscience centers, which are located at Northwestern, Harvard, Cornell, Rice, Columbia, and RPI. It was more of a showcase of what these scientists have been doing and why NSF should keep funding them, but I got to see a lot of cute demos and animations. Including a prototype cellphone and DVD player with OLED displays (I could make out shapes on the DVD player from across the auditorium!).
<p>Since it was not just scientist targetted symposium, I did get to see a few presentations and panel discussions on the social and economic impact of nanoscience. Although most of it could have been classified under the “we’re doing this because <span class="caps">NSF</span> is making us” genre, there were some interesting insights. Herb Goronkin of Motorola (who plainly stated that their research is not funded by <span class="caps">NSF</span>) identified several of the risk factors that they have considered in their nanoscience research, two of which included that quantum behavior will require probabilistic circuit design approaches and that power consumption of nanodevices may be nonlinear. However, the advantages of nanodevices (which are enough that Motorola is still investing R&D) were reviewed in various presentations. Ralph Calvin used a statistic (to which he admits some skepticism) that an <span class="caps">NEC</span> executive presented which stated that at the rate that consumer use of electronic devices…and don’t think that miniaturization will help…Japan will have to build 30 new nuclear reactors. A <a href="http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/wwwr_thinkresearch.nsf/pages/cmos398.html">paper by Philip Wong</a> of <span class="caps">IBM</span> was also referenced on what <span class="caps">CMOS</span> can’t do.</p>
<p>Some of the more fun science presented included that of Eigler who is famous for being able to <a href="http://www.almaden.ibm.com/vis/stm/atomo.html">move atoms controllably</a> using an <span class="caps">STM</span> tip (Scanning Tunneling Microscopy), and was also referred to as an expert in nanopolitics by Eric Heller because the first thing he wrote was “<span class="caps">IBM</span>”.</p>
<p>They’ve developed a lot of fun media tools to make the moguls happy, including an animation of flying through an <a href="http://www.almaden.ibm.com/vis/stm/stm.html#fly-by">atomic landscape</a>. He also did a demo of a teaching tool that he has developed where you can move atoms from a remote computer. (Sorry, didn’t get the password on that one.) Eigler does some theoretically interesting work that “mimicks” on an atomic level what the Weber brothers (had trouble finding picture) by building atomic corrals which are shaped in circles, ellipses, etc. and various atoms at different points and “imaging” the mirage of wave patterns that occur with one or two or four atoms.</p>
<p>Another impressive presenter was Angela Belcher who does <a href="http://txtell.lib.utexas.edu/stories/b0006-full.html">biocomposite research</a> at U of Texax. She demo’d a clear film made of viruses engineered to grow inorganic quantum dots to exploit the viruses natural organizational properties for materials. These engineered viruses exhibited three different types of liquid crystal behavior (smectic, nematic, and cholesteric). </p>
<p>And the great part about <span class="caps">NSF</span> funding for people like me is that to satisfy the community outreach requirement, Purdue has put together <a href="http://www.nanohub.purdue.edu/NanoHub/HubInfo/resources.html#courses">NanoHub</a>. This includes some tutorials and links. Including one to the Center for Quantum Computation, which has a section on <a href="http://www.qubit.org/intros/cryptana.html">quantum cryptoanalysis</a>. </p>
<p>“Those who control materials control technology.”</p>
—Eiji Kobayashi, Panasonic
By
anders pearson
20 Mar 2002
it will happen.
<p>some day. you can count on it.</p>
<p>The Surgery Channel: all surgery. all the time.</p>