akrish

This weekend, Carnegie Mellon’s Men’s ultimate team, Mr. Yuk, made the 8 hour drive out of snowy Pittsburgh to Charlotte, NC for Queen City Tune-Up. This was our first tournament since early November (Fall Easterns) and we have had very few opportunities to actually play ultimate since returning to school in January. While we haven’t had the best winter in terms of training, we did have a very productive fall season, so while my expectation was that we wouldn’t have the of best tournament, it was not unreasonable to think that we could do very well. As it turned out, my expectation was correct both results-wise and performance-wise.

Results-wise we went 3-4, with big wins against UNC, Cornell and NYU, but with upsetting losses to Ohio State and NCSU along with losses to Dartmouth and Michigan. This resulted in us taking 12th place out of 20, behind our original seeding of 10th.

Before I go on, let me just mention that the weather was a huge factor, particularly on Saturday. Reportedly winds were recorded at 20mph with gusts up to 40mph and all of our games were upwind-downwind. This had huge strategic implications for both teams, which ended up punting and playing defense on the downwind side, relying on the strong winds to help generate turns with favorable field position. Apart from Dartmouth, no team could move the disc up the field with any consistency, so upwind scores were hard to come by. Most games were consequently decided by one or two upwind scores.

Sunday was much less windy, but much colder than Saturday. The fields were frozen when we arrived and, at the start of our first game, the temperature was just about 32F. This more or less persisted throughout the day. But without the strong winds, Sunday was much more playable.

Performance-wise, we learned that we have many things to work on. Offensively, we struggled to move upwind against aggressive zone defenses. As I mentioned, part of this was because the winds were particularly strong, and most teams had difficulty doing this, but I think we can certainly improve in this area. Two specific things I think we can work on are keeping the disc off of the trap sideline and keeping the cup moving with fakes and crashes. Defensively, I think our zones need a lot of work; and I’m hopefully that this is just a product of not having practiced together in a couple of months. Our Defense-O and Offensive-D both need a fair amount of work; defensively we had many opportunities for breaks that we didn’t capitalize on and offensively we had trouble recovering the disc after a turn over.

While there are certainly many things to work on in preparation for the series, there were also some things that we did quite well. Firstly, our O-line didn’t get broken in 3 of our games on Saturday. This lead to our three wins of the tournament, all by a difference of just a couple of goals. If the offense can maintain this performance, we will be in a great position to win games in the future. Defensively, we managed to generate a lot of turnovers which is great, but as I mentioned, we had a hard time capitalizing on this. I was also pleasantly surprised with how well our D-line worked through zones, especially considering that we have a lot of people that are uncomfortable with their throws.

Here is a quick game-by-game recap:

1. UNC — UNC was the first seed in our pool, and since we had a first round bye, we got in a good warmup and were ready to play come game time. The wind had already picked up a decent amount and we traded downwind O-points for most of the game. Offensively the strategy for both teams was to immediately huck to a receiver streaking deep, and play defense in the event of a turnover. This turned out to be a successful strategy as both teams struggled to work upwind. After a fairly monotonous game, we finally managed to earn ourselves an upwind break, and the subsequent downwind break sealed the victory. CMU wins 11-8 on hard cap, our O-line did not give up a break.
2. Cornell — Coming off a huge with against UNC we were ready to bring it to Cornell. The winds picked up even more and this game proceeded much like the last one. We squeezed out a break just before half, and Cornell’s D-line could not score upwind, which resulted a positive result again for us. CMU wins 9-7 on hard cap and again our O-line did not give up a break.
3. Dartmouth — While the winds were still raging, Dartmouth did not play the hucking strategy that we had grown accustomed to in the last two games. They had solid throwers that were comfortable both up- and down-wind and they capitalized on our O-lines turnovers to earn breaks. We struggled to move the disc upwind while they continued to be successful in both directions and this lead to a fairly easy win for them. Dartmouth wins 13-4.
4. NYU — The last round of the day presented itself with a must-win situation for us if we wanted to make it to pre-quarters. Unfortunately we started out on the losing side of the coin flip, with NYU starting on offense going downwind. The game progressed as the previous ones had with both teams trading down-wind points and it looked like NYU would win in a hardcap situation, simply because they received first. However, just before half (pretty late in the game), our D-line somehow managed to get through NYU’s zone and earn a break. NYU looked about to do the same thing later but some game-saving plays helped us retain the lead and eventually earn the win. CMU wins 10-8 again on hard cap. O-line did not get broken.
5. Pre-quarters: Michigan — Michigan is a historically very strong team and their experience certainly showed in this pre-quarters matchup. While the wind wasn’t as strong as Saturday, we did not adapt our strategy and turned the disc over too easily. Meanwhile, Michigan was very conservative, repeatedly breaking our marks and working this disc up the field to earn easy scores. Michigan wins fairly easily 15-6.
6. 9th place bracket: North Carolina State — We played NCSU at Fall Easterns and beat them pretty handedly, but they were a much more prepared team this time around. Our O-line got broken several times early on and the D-line never managed to earn all of those breaks back. We went on a run later in the game but never managed to take the lead. In a disappointing loss, NCSU wins 10-8.
7. 11th place game: Ohio State — We also played and beat OSU at Fall Easterns in a fun, pretty close game but this time Ohio State’s preparation really showed. Having played two other tournaments already this spring, they were clearly more conditioned, experienced and familiar with each other than we were, and they beat us handedly. OSU wins 15-8, we end up in 12th place, 2 places behind our initial seed of 10th.

We are going back to North Carolina (this time Wilmington) in a couple of weeks for Eastern’s Qualifier. With a lot of the same teams, we certainly have the potential to make some noise, but we cannot perform as we did this passed weekend in Charlotte. Stay tuned for what I hope will be some more exciting news.

The fight against academic publishers is heating up as Tyler Neylon’s website continues to gain support against Elsevier. If you haven’t heard, the website is a place where you can publicly declare that you will boycott Elsevier, one of the academic publishers with particularly terrible practices. It may have been created in response to Timothy Gowers’ public boycott declaration, and it is supported by him and many other famous scientists and mathematicians. As of today there are 3867 total signatories, and 544 signatories in computer science alone.

First off, why is Elsevier (and most other academic publishers) so evil? In a nutshell, they exploit the work of academics (funded by taxpayers) to turn incredible profits without adding much value. Journals are run by volunteer editors (academics), papers are reviewed by volunteer reviewers (academics) and papers are written by academic researchers. Moreover, researchers are expected to prepare “camera-ready” versions of their papers, which makes the paper almost entirely ready for publication. Publishers charge exorbitant subscription fees for their journals, but their costs are minimal and their value-add is effectively non-existent.

But publishing companies effectively have a monopoly on the top journals that academics need to publish in to advance their careers. Alternative publishing venues haven’t caught on because publishing there doesn’t carry the same weight as publishing in elite journals like Nature and Science. The fact is that academia, as it pushes the boundaries of knowledge, is very conservative about accepting change. Thus, despite the fact that several alternatives have been proposed (i.e. this, this and maybe even the Arxiv along with several more abstract proposals), academia has been slow to adopt alternative venues/media for publication.

Movements like “The Cost of Knowledge” are designed to combat the inherent inertia in academia, in hopes that we can converge on a better method of publication. Once academics realize that the many of their colleagues are boycotting Elsevier/Springer/etc, it will become much more reasonable for them to boycott as well. And once the majority of a field boycotts one of these companies, either alternative publishing venues will gain credibility, or the company will be forced to change its policies/pricing/etc or risk going under.

To me, the only issue is that this movement has to involve academic institutions as a whole in addition to individual researchers. Institutions use impact factor of journals as a surrogate for research quality and use this metric in hiring and tenure decisions. Until this changes, young, untenured researchers are going to be reluctant to boycott publishing companies that run elite journals because of the career implications that boycott has. This is probably one of the primary reasons why I haven’t joined the boycott yet.

The public boycott does have some interesting side-effects. First, the fact that the boycott is public and supported by top researchers means that it is more likely to gain traction. The fact that there is a list of elite researchers who are boycotting may influence how institutions make hiring decisions, which could kick start a positive feedback loop resulting in a much more powerful boycott. A more indirect effect is that top researchers are now boycotting elite journals, meaning that the quality of those journals will decline. This might force institutions to rethink how they make hiring decisions while also enabling alternative publishing media to flourish.

Whether the boycott is successful or not, enough people are up in arms (in the blogosphere, etc.) about publishing that it finally seems that academics have enough traction to prompt some sort of change in the academic publishing system. Hopefully we’ll see some positive changes in the next couple of years.

This week I found several interesting online articles that I’d like to share here.

The first relates to SOPA and PIPA, the two legislative acts about fighting online copyright infringement. I personally don’t know too much about them but in an effort to learn about these pieces of legislation, I found a report published by the ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, that has a decent amount of influence, especially with scientists and technical people. The article is a bit technical, but the thesis is that the costs associated with blocking traffic (i.e. blocking DNS lookups and search engine hits) is quite high and it cannot be done simply by tampering with US-based DNS servers. Therefore the article proposes that anyone (or entity) that requests a court order under these acts needs to financially compensate the other party for carrying out the court order. This would mean that anyone who would like to censor a website would need to pay for that website to remove itself from DNS servers and search engines. The ACM article states that this is a non-trivial task, meaning that the prosecuting party would have to pay a substantial amount. If these bills were to pass, I hope this would mean that corporations would not be willing to actually carry out these court orders.

In somewhat related news, this NY Times article about academic publishing looks at alternatives to the traditional (read: antiquated) publishing system. This relates also to this article I wrote earlier but is not only better written but also better informed. There are several attempts to circumvent traditional academic journals; one mentioned in the article is ResearchGate, which is more or less an academic social network. I’m really happy to see that people are working on this and I hope that some of these catch one, despite the fact that academia is fairly conservative at adopting change. Another interesting facet of the NY Times article is that they managed to talk to spokespeople of Elsevier and Science, who gracefully toe-d the party line saying that the costs for maintaining curated records of publication motivates the exorbitant prices for journal subscriptions.

Cathy O’Neil, mentioned this article and wrote about one of her own horror stories of dealing with publishers. In fact her experience with publishers partly contributed to her leaving academia. In a nutshell, the publication process is atrociously slow, and this really slows innovation and also makes impatient people incredibly annoyed. Alternative form of publication and recognition could almost certainly speed up the dissemination of knowledge and foster more rapid innovation. I can see how this would really annoy me, but since machine learning is a field where top publication venues are mostly conferences, I haven’t noticed this much. Conferences are a great way to spread ideas quickly and efficiently, but in many fields they are regarded as second or third tier publication venues, so technical content is often lower quality. Maybe one quick fix in other fields is to convince people that conferences are a reasonable way to publish, thereby increasing their impact factor while simultaneously promoting more rapid innovation.

Timothy Gowers, a famous mathematician (a Fields Medalist) and blogger, also wrote here specifically about the bad practices of Elsevier, one of the big academic publishing companies. In his article he publicly declared that he would boycott Elsevier in every way, refusing to peer-review for, publish in, or in any other way serve for Elsevier journals. He also considers both top-down and bottom-up approaches for changing how these companies operate, and his boycott is a step in the bottom-up direction, an individual act rather than a more coordinated effort from academics. Either way, I’m glad to see that academics are taking a starting to take a stand against publishers.

Author: Simon Singh

Singh recounts the history of cryptography, starting from the primitive ciphers used in ancient times, through the famous protocols used in World Wars I and II, and up to the current state of the art in public key cryptography, including a brief tour of quantum cryptography. His discussion starts with the famous Caesar Cipher, which simply shifts the plaintext alphabet by a fixed number of positions to obtain the ciphertext alphabet, which is easily broken by frequency analysis. He then progresses to more advanced polyalphabetic ciphers, which switch between different Caesar shifts over the course of a message, which culminated in the Vigenere cipher that was popular in World War I. Again the Vigenere cipher can be broken by a more careful frequency analysis and Singh details how one can do this with a fairly simple example. He continues to World War II, where the German Enigma machine presented itself as a new challenge for cryptanalysts. Here the work of several British mathematicians, including Alan Turing, ended up breaking the Enigma code, but the technique is quite complicated and very heuristic. Next, he discussion the famous Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol and RSA public key cryptography, both of which are still in use today. Finally he presents some more theoretical topics, namely how quantum computers can possibly used to break RSA and how quantum cryptography offers a truly unbreakable cryptography protocol. Singh also goes on several tangents, discussing the Navajo Whisperers, archaeological decoding, and some legends involving cryptography.

He’s narrative is framed as an arms race between the code makers and the code breakers, and one of the prominent themes of the work is that necessity is the mother of invention. In other words, there is no need for innovation if the current state of the art is good enough. This happened many times on the side of the code makers, if their existing messages could not be decrypted, then there appeared to be no motivation to develop stronger protocols. Similarly, on the side of the code breakers, if their techniques worked well enough to decipher enemy messages (or if there was no threat from an enemy), there was no need to develop more advanced methods. This is why a lot of the advancement in cryptography, on both sides, takes place during times of war.

Another interesting theme is how secretive all of the advancements and cryptanalysis research was until very recently, and also how important it was that things remain secret. When the Vigenere cipher was broken, the British government successfully covered up the fact that it was broken and the Germans continued to use it throughout World War I. Only before WWII did it become apparent that the British could read messages encrypted by the Vigenere cipher, prompting the Germans to develop the Enigma machine. It is also interesting to know that both RSA and Diffie-Hellman key exchange were independently discovered by British academics, but this information was not released to the public until very recently.

Overall, “The Code Book” combines elements of science, mathematics as one would expect, with interesting historic, political and personal elements as Singh introduces all of the major players in the cryptographic arms race. Most of the cryptography itself is fairly primitive, because for much of history things were done by hand, and the resulting protocols are far from secure in the age of computers. However, this progression set the stage for the modern cryptographic protocols which are now in widespread use.

As far as a “The Code Book” is a popular-science book, I did not get too much out of the book, probably because I already know a decent amount about cryptography. In many cases it was obvious to me where the primitive protocols broke down and how one could break them. However, when viewed as a historian, I found it interesting to see how and why cryptography has developed to where it is today.

Author: Ray Bradbury

In Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury describes a dystopian supposedly-futuristic society in which reading is not allowed. This policy is enforced by book burnings orchestrated by government-employed firemen. The novel follows Guy Montag, a fireman who starts questioning the censorship policy after meeting a young girl with a unique curiosity, and after he watches a woman voluntarily burn herself alive with her books. He collects some books and starts reading them, but is soon found out and forced to flee the city. He escapes and runs into some other fugitives living in the forest. These people have memorized whole books and serve as the protectors of literature, waiting for a era devoid of censorship. At the end of the story, war breaks out and the city is bombed, leaving the exiled people to rebuild the city (presumably also the country) and start the new era.

Bradbury prediction about the future is not entirely inaccurate. His main qualm is that technology has changed the pace of life and how people think to a point that creative, inquisitive thinking does not happen anymore. Specifically his criticism is against television, but I would argue that many other technological advancements are contributing to this transformation. Now days it is increasingly common that people are unwilling to devote more than a couple of minutes to any single task and consequently people are not informed to the point where they can make educated decisions and ask provoking questions. The increasing popularity of twitter as a media source is evidence for this phenomenon. I don’t mean this as a criticism of twitter, it is actually a criticism of the population, who soaks up an application that is just providing what they want. This is along the same lines as Bradbury’s criticism; the media is giving people what they want, the problem is that people prefer television, news clips to potentially more intellectual tasks like reading literature.

Another related theme is that people are wrapped up in their own fantasy worlds, often oblivious about reality. This results in less stimulating conversations with people as well as a lack of appreciation for complex things like natural beauty. My guess is that this also contributes to people’s preference toward television and mass media. In Fahrenheit 451 this theme is portrayed by Mildred Montag, Guy’s wife, who is constantly listening to the radio or watching tv, ignoring Guy’s existence and oblivious to her surroundings.

This theme again is becoming more and more pertinent to our society, where people are always listening to music, on their smartphones, or otherwise unaware of their environment and the people around them. This is one of my main criticisms with smart phones and I really believe that it is ruining society, so I was glad that Bradbury wrote about it in Fahrenheit 451. On my bus ride to school, everyone is listening to music or playing games on their phones, making it that much harder to strike up potentially stimulating conversations. At meals people are constantly distracted by their smart phones that conversation becomes much more superficial and uninteresting. Needless to say, I find it incredibly annoying.

Technology has a lot to offer in terms of efficiency, but there are negative side effects, like hindering social interaction and decreased attention span, that are often neglected but are also hard to quantify. How do we combat these negative side effects, so that we can enjoy the positives? For one, we can consciously avoid using technology in places where we could be interacting with other people. My friends have a “no phones at the dinner table rule” which I think is a great example of this. I also generally try to avoid using my cell phone when I am with other people, but it is important that everyone buys into this. As far as decreasing attention span, one solution is to promote reading literature. I think this is the approach Bradbury is aiming for.

So to summarize, Fahrenheit 451 is very applicable to modern society. It is interesting, well written, and its implications to our world are certainly thought provoking and hopefully inspirational.