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...

PDF

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.

PDF

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!

College -> Real World

Well, long story short, I've completed 18 years of school and am now off to the real world. I graduated from Stanford three weeks ago, and I start work on Monday.

So what have I been up to in the interim you ask?

Apartment

I've moved into an apartment near downtown Palo Alto. The location is pretty nice, and the rent is not too bad. Here are some pictures:

Finances

I've also started paying off some students loans. I have roughly $20,000 that needs to be returned at some point. Even though no payments are due until December, the juice is running (yikes!), so I'm trying to pay down the principle as much as I can. My goal is to get it all done by Jan 1, 2012.

I've also begun putting rungs down for a "cd ladder." A cd ladder works as follows (I'll use 12-month cds as an example): every month for 12 months, you put $x.xx in a 12 month cd. When each matures, you simply open another 12 month cd with those funds.

A 12 month cd gets a better rate than shorter term certificates of deposit, but you have to promise not to touch the money for a longer period of time (like, you know, 12 months). Anyways, once you've done this for 12 months you have a cd maturing every month but at a higher interest rate than if you had a 1 month cd. It's a nice way to set up an emergency fund that can still draw good interest. Ally.com gives some pretty solid rates (imo), plus they have some bizarre vehicles where you can withdraw early without penalty, so I've decided they've earned the honor of becoming my bank of choice.

Random Web Stuff

Since I'm going to start work shortly for a company that's on the web, I figured I would brush up on some html/css/php/mysql stuff. So I've been working on some short little projects to try to keep my brain from atrophying.

Well, that's what I've been up to. Someday I'll get the hang of this blogging thing and post more than just updates.

May Projects

My past lamentations over boredom are about to be resolved... with a vengeance. This month I have not one, but two, major projects to complete for my spring quarter classes. They're pretty cool, though, so I thought I'd give a brief overview.

CS315a - Parallel Computer Architecture and Programming

For this class, I'll be working with two others to code and parallelize an Item Response Theory based program. Props go out to Andy for introducing me to the idea, and for pointing me towards several white papers to get us started.

CS343 - Advanced Topics in Compilers

For this class, I'll be working with one partner to create a test-case generator. I'm pretty excited about this project, as it allows me to get my hands dirty inside a compiler and could prove to be pretty useful (hopefully). The idea is pretty simple. Let's say you have the following block of code:

foo(int a, int b) {

if( a < 10 )

//do something

} else {

if( b != 0)

//meant to do something, but instead causes a runtime crash

else

//do something

}

}

My program would create three input test cases: foo(1,0); foo(11,1); foo(11,0); These can then be run by the user, knowing that they likely get X% path coverage on their code. It should be pretty sweet.

Computer Documentaries

Here are a couple of really cool computer documentaries. I personally find the history of the computer really interesting, so naturally I found these two documentaries to be fun to watch.

1. The Machine that Changed the World. This is one of my favorite documentaries of all time. It's really interesting, and they find a lot of interesting people to interview. Similar to the second of these two documentaries, they made this at a time when the Internet was very infantile, so their predictions and insights are hilariously way off.

2. Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet. This documentary provides some interesting tidbits about the ARPAnet, various protocols, and other technical features, but overall I think context of when it was filmed is what gives it real value. This was made in 1998, when the Internet as we know it was barely three years old. Everyone still seems very unsure of where the Internet will go and the documentary is enfused with the detail-bereft optimism that the Internet was an untapped moneywell. With over ten years passed since the filming, it's also interesting to look at which companies they profiled. The internet was still an electronic wild, wild west, and the .com bubble was still a few years away. These companies are the ones that made millions in their IPO, and of course became nothing after the crash. Guess they should've profiled the brand new company known as Google :).