Biology is on the verge of rediscovering the calculus...

Sometimes you love a paper, and sometimes you hate it. Today's paper is neither, but it will offer a glimpse as to why I sometimes deride less mathematically rigorous disciplines.

Here's a paper that pats itself on the back for using the trapezoidal method of integral calculation. And gets published. And cited like it's nobody's business. Wow.

abstract and paper

Monkey Consumers

In this paper, the researchers successfully introduce the concept of money to a group of monkeys, and run several experiments. Turns out that our concepts of supply/demand and loss aversion are not limited to humans...

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Worm Hunters

This first paper is quite possibly my favorite. If you're a math nerd, a computer networking enthusiast, or just a fan of general badasses, I promise you'll appreciate this one. From a handful of packets these guys analyzed an internet virus, and could construct the entire infection tree, identify which of the victims' disks were corrupted, who started the worm.

Exploiting Underlying Structure for Detailed Reconstruction of an Internet-scale Event

by

Kumar, Paxson, and Weaver

Abstract

In this work we apply such an analysis to the propagation of the Witty worm, a malicious and well-engineered worm that when released in March 2004 infected more than 12,000 hosts worldwide in 75 minutes. We show that by carefully exploiting the structure of the worm, especially its pseudo-random number generation, from limited and imperfect telescope data we can with high fidelity: extract the individual rate at which each infectee injected packets into the network prior to loss; correct distortions in the telescope data due to the worm’s volume overwhelming the monitor; reveal the worm’s inability to fully reach all of its potential victims; determine the number of disks attached to each infected machine; compute when each infectee was last booted, to sub-second accuracy; explore the “who infected whom” infection tree; uncover that the worm specifically targeted hosts at a US military base; and pinpoint Patient Zero, the initial point of infection, i.e., the IP address of the system the attacker used to

unleash Witty.

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Change in Focus

Lately I've been reading a lot of articles and books that summarize cool research (think Freakonomics). This blog could use a new focus to recapture some of its author's passion, so I've decided to focus for the time being on the "greatest hits" of all the articles I've read. I'll give a short summary of why it's cool and provide a link to the original research (yay for Google Scholar) for each white paper that I choose. Enjoy!