Filed under Politics by Oscar Boykin | 1 comment
There is an interesting news story at Wired titled Petroleum Joyride Almost Over?. It discusses the effects and timing of Peak Oil (the point in time when oil production is maximized).
Apparantly, some people think that the peek is going to happen very soon (before 2010 or perhaps even now). Furthermore, it appears that it could have a very serious effect on world economies.
After seeing the dot-com bubble, it seems that when things are good, humans have a very difficult time believing they could ever get bad again. I think it does not speak well of our collective decision making abilities that we do not have a good plan for this issue. It seems like the only plan is to hope that the magic of technology will save us.
Filed under Politics, Research by Oscar Boykin | 0 comments
There is an interesting paper on the Arxiv: A network analysis of committees in the United States House of Representatives. This paper examines the voting records and committee structure of the House using tools from network analysis.
Interestingly, in the final figures of the paper, you can see the house turning from control from the left to control from the right as the the Democrats become more bipartisan and the Republicans become partisan.
Hopefully, this kind of mathematical analysis of government will help us to understand the mechanics better. This kind of work could lead to much better “voter sheet” information about candidates.
Filed under Research by Oscar Boykin | 0 comments
New Scientist is running an article on P2P Spam Filtering. This is based on the preprint Let Your CyberAlter Ego Share Information and Manage Spam (I know the title is absolutely insane, sorry…)
This is work I did with Vwani Roychowdhury and his group at UCLA: Joe Kong, Behnam Rezaei and Nima Sarshar.
Filed under Software by Oscar Boykin | 0 comments
There is now a Local Wiki on boykin.acis.ufl.edu. I installed MediaWiki, which is used for Wikipedia.
I believe in being open with ideas, because they are not scarce. By collaborating we can improve the quality of the many ideas that we have to pursue. Technologies like Wikis make it easier to collaborate, and therefore more is produced.
I hope my new Wiki will be a huge hit with students and collaborators.