P. Oscar Boykin

It occurred to me today that by looking at the cost of insurance for various shippers, you can bound the probability of package loss. If C is the cost of the insurance, and I is the insured amount, and we assume that the shipper at least breaks even by selling insurance we have:

C - p I > 0

Which means that C/I > p. I looked this information up for UPS, USPS, and Fedex at the values of 100, 500, 1000 US dollars. For UPS and Fedex, I couldn’t find the cost of insurance, but could estimate it from increasing the value of the item (it seems both offer a certain amount of insurance for free, which appears to be 100 dollars). USPS publishes their insurance costs. Looking only at the 500 and 1000 dollar amounts I have:

USPS: p < 1.2 % (2.3% for lower amounts, and tending to 1.05% in the limit of the most insurance)
UPS: p < 4/500 = 0.8 %
Fedex: p < 2.75/500 = 0.55%

It’s interesting to note that these are upper bounds assuming all insurance is profitable. If some cases are not profitable the bound may be violated. If the insurance is overpriced, the bound may be very weak, but from this is seems that packages are probably lost with probability on the order of 1% (with Fedex loosing 1/2 the packages of USPS and about 2/3 of UPS).

It would be interesting to compare this to experiences of large scale ebay sellers (or other online retailers). I can’t seem to find a link where any of the above shippers publish statistics on this.

I gave a talk for the UF chapter of Eta Kappa Nu yesterday. My slides in PDF format are online.

I used the Beamer package for LaTeX to produce this talk. For some reason, Acrobat has problems with one of the images included, but my Free PDF reader (Evince) can show it just fine. More evidence of the superiority of Free Software.

Update:
Brian Sapp (President Epsilon Sigma Chapter Eta Kappa Nu) forwarded a link to the RSA Secret-Key Challenge. 64-bit RC5 keys have been brute forced (they try all possible keys until they decrypt the message). The Factoring Challenge is also interesting. Recently, a 640 bit number was factored to win 20,000 dollars! If you have a (sufficiently large and accurate) quantum computer, it looks like you can get 605,000 dollars from RSA by factoring all the numbers on this page.

I have installed the RSS aggregator Planet to produce Planet ACIS. This is an aggregation of blogs from members of the ACIS Lab.

So far, there are only a few (semi-)active bloggers. Hopefully this will encourage more ACIS people to blog.

I am on the editorial board for a new journal called “Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications”. See the call for papers (pdf). Xuemin (Sherman) Shen is the editor-in-chief and the journal will be published by Springer.

Please make this new journal known to any researchers working in P2P networking. Manuscripts may be submitted at http://ppna.edmgr.com.