P. Oscar Boykin

My algorithm for physical mail is the following:


for each day:
mailbasket.add( usmailbox.letters )
if day == "Sunday":
for each letter in mailbasket:
open letter
if letter is CreditOffer:
shred letter
else:
#This code is rarely called:
read letter


Of course, if you are not careful about such credit offers someone will steal your identity. Why the onus is on me to prevent theives from getting credit cards in my name is beyond me. It makes sense to me that the company issuing the card is taking the risk there, but of course, it is more profitable for them to pass the risk on to the consumer.

There is at least one minor thing you can do to reduce the amount: Opt Out. I finally got around to calling 1-888-567-8688 [1-888-5-OPTOUT]. I asked to opt out permanently. We will see if this reduces the amount of credit offers I get.

My coauthors (Jesse Bridgewater and Vwani Roychowdhury) and I just got a new preprint on the Arxiv: “A Statistical Mechanical Load Balancer for the Web”.

This work gives a decentralized randomized algorithm for finding nodes to which load may be transfered. In the process, we show how the algorithm increases entropy of the graph, and results in the formation of an Erdos-Renyi random graph. The paper describes a version of the algorithm that we can analyze: namely that nodes are discovered by taking the last node on a random walk. If we instead select the least loaded node on a random walk the results improve quite a lot. This will be the subject of a future work.