> Then you must begin a reading program immediately so that you man understand the crises of our age,” Ignatius said solemnly. “Begin with the late Romans, including Boethius, of course. Then you should dip rather extensively into early Medieval. You may skip the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. That is mostly dangerous propaganda. Now, that I think about of it, you had better skip the Romantics and the Victorians, too. For the contemporary period, you should study some selected comic books.”
>
> “You’re fantastic.”
>
> “I recommend Batman especially, for he tends to transcend the abysmal society in which he’s found himself. His morality is rather rigid, also. I rather respect Batman.”
– **A confederacy of Dunces**, _John Kennedy Toole_
New comment on your post #550 “And the EMET 2007 prize goes to…”
Author : nostart
Comment:
I think that Micha Sharir was your advisor.
May I ask you, to ask him to help me, by giving me a loan?
I think that Micha Sharir was your advisor.
May I ask you, to ask him to help me, by giving me a loan?
!
Micha Sharir. See here for more details about the prize (there are about 10 winners in various categories for 2007).
New comment on your post #548 “Reject…”
Author : R.
Comment:
cute post
RejectA mathematica, next to come reject science, Reject evolution, reject logic, reject life.
The next stage is of course denial… After that comes despair, and only then acceptance.
New comment on your post #446 “India 11 – SirSir and YesYes”
Author : Bee
Comment:
I’m an Asian living in india for the last 3 years and I think this place SUCKS. Not better than any other Asian countries, and the worst part is they think that they’re great but they’re not and just too blind too see what other normal world is like.
I’m an Asian living in india for the last 3 years and I think this place SUCKS. Not better than any other Asian countries, and the worst part is they think that they’re great but they’re not and just too blind too see what other normal world is like.
My student Ke Chen (who is about to graduate soon [how come you did not offer him a job yet?]) just submitted a paper to SODA showing how to approximate k-median clustering with outliers. Here, you are given a set of points, and parameters k and m, and you like to remove m “outliers” from the input, so that the optimal price of the k-median clustering of the remaining points is minimal. It is a well known open problem to get constant factor approximation algorithm for that, as all previous algorithms were bi-criterion – they removed more outliers and got constant factor approximation.
In this paper, Ke shows how to get constant factor approximation, while removing **exactly** m outliers. Interestingly, local search per se does not work for this problem, as a not so hard counter example shows. However, Ke came up with an interesting modification that does work – he uses local search with increasing penalty to solve one of the cases. The other case requires some other techniques. It would be nice to have a 2 line solution for this problem, but somehow it seems not so easy. In fact, the problem seems hard and the solution is quite involved and delicate.
There is much gratification in your student writing a good paper without you being involved…
The previous time I was on the PC and Ke submitted a good paper it got rejected, lets hope history does not repeat itself again.