WASHINGTON -- The directors of Russia's three main intelligence and espionage agencies all traveled to the U.S. capital in recent days, in what observers said was a highly unusual occurrence coming at a time of heightened U.S.-Russian tensions. Russia's ambassador to the United States had earlier confirmed that Sergei Naryshkin, the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), was in Washington in recent days to meet with U.S. officials about terrorism and other matters.
Month: February 2018
Checkin Arco
👓 Read Professor Verdu’s emails to student where he invites her over to watch explicit film before sexually harassing her | The Tab
‘P.S. Please call me Sergio ☺️’
Now I know the sad and painfully disappointing answer.
👓 Sexual harassment allegations roil Princeton University | WHYY
Another high-profile instance of sexual harassment has rocked a major institution — this time Princeton University in New Jersey. And students say administrators didn’t act transparently or strongly enough when disciplining the alleged perpetrator, a decorated professor.
It would be nice if Universities were required to register offenders like this so that applicants to programs would be aware of them prior to applying–a sort of Megan’s Law for the professoriate. Naturally they don’t do this because it goes against their interests, but by the same token this is how a lot of issues run out of control within their sports programs as well. If someone did create such a website, I imagine the chilling effects on colleges and universities would be such that they might change their tunes about how these cases are handled. Immediately recent cases like Michigan State’s athletics problem, USC’s Medical School Dean issues, Christian Ott at Caltech come to mind, but I’m sure there must be hundreds if not thousands of others.
Maybe we need a mashup site that’s a cross between RateMyProfessors.com and California’s Megan’s Law site, but which specifically targeted Universities?
Fortunately even given Sergio’s accomplishments and profile, it will probably take forever for web searches for his name to not surface the story within the top couple of links, but this is sad consolation, particularly in a field like Information Theory which is heavily underrepresented already.
Want to watch: Claude Shannon Project (Documentary)
Directed by Mark Levinson. With Judith Ivey, Michael Rose, Kaliswa Brewster, Geoff Schuppert. A film about Claude Shannon, the "Father of Information Theory"
50 percent long soak 1 Jonathan Bethony, who runs Seylou Bakery in Washington DC, mills his own wheat and uses 100% of the grain. Talking to him for Eat This Podcast I learned about the difference in bran between softer European wheats and harder North American wheats. My wholemeal, from softer whe...
Checkin Rite Aid
Checkin Jamba Juice East Pasadena
Checkin Bloomfield Creamery
🎧 Bread as it ought to be: Seylou Bakery in Washington DC | EatThisPodcast
Jonathan Bethony is one of the leading artisanal bakers in America, but he goes further than most, milling his own flour and baking everything with a hundred percent of the whole grain. He’s also going beyond wheat, incorporating other cereals such as millet and sorghum in the goodies Seylou is producing. I happened to be in Washington DC just a couple of weeks after his new bakery had opened, and despite all the work that goes into getting a new bakery up and running, Jonathan graciously agreed to sit down and chat.
And almost as if to prove my point after writing about Modernist BreadCrumbs
, Jeremy’s is a stunning example of love and care in a podcast dedicated to food. I’m really so pleased that he can take a holiday, have so much fun with bread, and simultaneously turn it into something like this.Even the title reads as if he were trying to out-do the entirety of eight episodes of Modernist BreadCrumbs in one short interview. I think he’s succeeded handily.
There’s so much great to unpack here, and simultaneously I wish there was more. I found myself wishing he’d had time to travel to some of the farms and done a whole series. With any luck he actually has–I wouldn’t put it past him–and we’ll be delighted in a week or two when they’re released.
📖 Read pages 39-74 of Henry and Beezus by Beverly Cleary
Henry could have done far better here, but apparently his business acumen and concept of economics was just dreadful. Still in all, an entertaining chapter where everything that could go wrong in selling found bubblegum does. As always, Ramona steals the show for laughs with the gum in her hair.
🔖 Decoding Anagrammed Texts Written in an Unknown Language and Script
Algorithmic decipherment is a prime example of a truly unsupervised problem. The first step in the decipherment process is the identification of the encrypted language. We propose three methods for determining the source language of a document enciphered with a monoalphabetic substitution cipher. The best method achieves 97% accuracy on 380 languages. We then present an approach to decoding anagrammed substitution ciphers, in which the letters within words have been arbitrarily transposed. It obtains the average decryption word accuracy of 93% on a set of 50 ciphertexts in 5 languages. Finally, we report the results on the Voynich manuscript, an unsolved fifteenth century cipher, which suggest Hebrew as the language of the document.
Checkin Foster’s Family Donuts
🎧 This Week in Google 442 Queen of the Mole Rats | TWiG
Amazon to launch its own internal healthcare service. Alphabet's Verily researches naked mole rats to extend human life. Facebook and Google promote local news. Google Clips on sale for some. Facebook Messenger Kids draws ire. Why you shouldn't buy Twitter followers. Bill Gate's new favorite book. The Boring Flamethrower. Stacey's Thing: Texting with Alexa; Jeff's Number: Google I/O May 8, Facebook F8 May 1-2
https://youtu.be/0oQfDxWYJ1w
👓 ‘Fits neatly inside a lizard’s cloaca’: Scientists are leaving Amazon reviews, and it’s amazing | Washington Post
There are worse things you can put through a tea strainer than ants.
I love the Post’s disclaimer about Bezos’ ownership of the Post:
Disclaimer: The Washington Post is owned by Jeffrey P. Bezos, who also runs Amazon, though we really don’t think we’re doing the site any favors with this article.
Also noted: They’ve quietly hidden the key word “poop” into the meta data for the article!