April 2009
5 posts
Consular comedy
Yesterday I went to the Greek consulate in NY to get a certified copy of my degree. The level of absurdity seems to increase each time I visit them.
I brought in color photocopies and, of course, the original (a big thing, with raised seals etc, in a leather case). The officer helping me suggested I instead ask for a “true copy” from CMU, which they will notarize and subsequently...
Less is definitely more
After suffering through a big, steaming pile of (mostly) poo of 18-page(!!) paper submissions for a conference I shall not name, I was ecstatic to discover that my next batch of reviews consisted of 3-page papers. A bit on the other extreme but overall I think that, at least in data mining / machine learning, lower page limits are appropriate for conference submissions (journals are another...
On data ownership, again
When I went through the identity verification process for a Cyworld account, I didn’t think much of it. But the recent news about Google and S. Korean laws (WSJ and RRW coverage — oddly, NYT coverage seems to have disappeared) got me thinking about that and also about what I wrote on data ownership. The problem seems to be one of dual standards: revealing some information (true...
Super-nodes!
Someone recently told me that, in a Chinese online forum dataset, a few very popular posts are commented by everyone and claimed that they may have up to hundreds of millions (!!) of distinct commenters! Generally, I’d find that hard to believe (number of commenters on a single post is at least an order of magnitude larger than the whole population of Greece, and about equal to the...
