Perhaps the most powerful lawyer in the Bush administration is also the most reclusive. David Addington, who was Vice President Dick Cheney's counsel from 2001 to 2005, and since then his chief of staff, does not talk to the press. His voice, however, has been enormously influential behind closed doors, where, with Cheney's backing, he has helped shape the administration's strategy in the war on terror, and in particular its aggressively expansive conception of executive power. Sometimes called "Cheney's Cheney," Addington has twenty years of experience in national security matters—he has been a lawyer for the CIA, the secretary of defense, and two congressional committees concerned with intelligence and foreign affairs. He is a prodigious worker, and by all accounts a brilliant inside political player. Richard Shiffrin, deputy general counsel for intelligence at the Defense Department until 2003, called him "an unopposable force."

When I sat down to write this, I had hoped for a simple, straightforward mapping between Ed's taxonomy and mine. Unfortunately, no. All three of Ed's points -- about engineering, economics and free speech -- bear in different degrees on all six of my issues. But there's one big plausible fourth point -- about organizational culture -- that's arguably missing. The telephone companies and cable companies are institutions that see themselves as providers of applications, and much of the NN discussion is about adopting the network architecture to this central cultural perception. Put in pro-neutrality language like Ed's other three, it'd be something like Layered Functionality.

This class studies the effect of faults on the routing properties of networks. We largely focus on random fault models. Apart from routing, we will also study the more general problem of emulating a fault-free network on a faulty version of itself. We will formalize the routing problem and relate it to the expansion (isoperimetric constant) of a graph. We will introduce percolation as a model for the study of random faults and discuss some basic techniques of this area and their applicability to the study of routing. The square mesh will be primary network we will work with but we will also look at the butterfly and expanders. The class assumes only a basic working knowledge of probability and graph theory.

e.g. better, faster, cheaper, pick any two; three reasonable conditions for a clustering algorithm that cannot be simultaneously satisfied

Abstract: In power law graphs, cut quality varies inversely with cut balance. Using some million node social graphs as a test bed, we empirically investigate this property and its implications for graph partitioning. We use six algorithms, including Metis and MQI (state of the art methods for finding bisections and quotient cuts) and four relaxation/rounding methods. We find that an SDP relaxation avoids the Spectral method's tendency to break off tiny pieces of the graph. We also find that a flow-based rounding method works better than hyperplane rounding.

METIS is a family of programs for partitioning unstructured graphs and hypergraphs and computing fill-reducing orderings of sparse matrices. The underlying algorithms used by METIS are based on the state-of-the-art multilevel paradigm that has been shown to produce high quality results and scale to very large problems.

The isoperimetric inequality is a geometric inequality involving the square of the circumference of a closed curve in the plane and the area of a plane region it encloses, as well as its various generalizations. Isoperimetric literally means "having the same perimeter". The isoperimetric problem is to determine a plane figure of the largest possible area whose boundary has a specified length. A closely related Dido's problem asks for a region of the maximal area bounded by a straight line and a curvilinear arc whose endpoints belong to that line. It is named after Dido, the legendary founder and first queen of Carthage. The solution to isoperimetric problem is given by a circle and was known already in Ancient Greece. However, the first mathematically rigorous proof of this fact was obtained only in the 19th century. Since then, many other proofs have been found, some of them stunningly simple.

In chemical reactions involving a solid material, the surface area to volume ratio is an important factor for the reactivity, that is, the rate at which the chemical reaction will proceed. In some industries it is abbreviated sa/vol.

network structure of communities

on personality and network coordinates; how people who are good actors get ahead by molding themselves to the situation.

Graph vertices are often organized into groups that seem to live fairly independently of the rest of the graph, with which they share but a few edges, whereas the relationships between group members are stronger, as shown by the large number of mutual connections. Such groups of vertices, or communities, can be considered as independent compartments of a graph. Detecting communities is of great importance in sociology, biology and computer science, disciplines where systems are often represented as graphs. The task is very hard, though, both conceptually, due to the ambiguity in the definition of community and in the discrimination of different partitions and practically, because algorithms must find ``good'' partitions among an exponentially large number of them. Other complications are represented by the possible occurrence of hierarchies, i.e. communities which are nested inside larger communities,

NetworkX (NX) is a Python package for the creation, manipulation, and study of the structure, dynamics, and functions of complex networks.

ev, biz, it's time to get acquired by some big company (yahoo, e.g.) so you can fight the cell phone wars.

scientific communication is a different beast than normal human communication. Scientists talk to their friends, but when talking to people they don’t know, it’s much more formal. They use communication to spec theories and to claim ground as theirs.

visualization of book relationships

In the early morning hours of Tuesday, August 21, 2007, EDT, a scheduled fiber maintenance of Level 3 fiber on the Lansing (MSU) to Detroit (WSU) path was completed. This path was successfully tested at the switch ports and placed back in service after th

Service has been restored on the Merit Network but there are still issues related to the Aspen Switches.

It appears that we have experienced another extreme Aspen switch failure similar to those of last week (August 15, 2007) and described in previous notifications

but not bzzzagent, which is a parked domain; didn't try all the z{2,10}agent combinations

Please plan to join us via web and audio conference on Tuesday, August 21, 2007 at 11 AM to Noon for a Merit Community Update where we will have more information about the problem and provide you with the ability to call in and ask questions. Merit engine

I've been told more than once that I'm a 'networked' guy. Although I've built my Portland network from scratch over the past 11 years, I don't consider myself a networker in a traditional sense. To me, a stereotypical networked person wears a suit, shows

nder the terms of the agreement, AT&T will expand its current wide area network (WAN) services to integrate 700 additional sites into Learning Care Group's network. The 700 new sites will include 650 locations for its subsidiaries, La Petite Academy and M

Maybe, but I can only manage what I can measure. And in terms of things that I value, such as links, smart comments, traffic to my blog, etc, the SL appearance might as well have never happened. It didn't leave a ripple in the world I live in (AKA Real Li

now in 48198

valdis has a blog

Wibree is the first open technology offering connectivity between mobile devices or personal computers, and small, button cell battery power devices. By extending the role mobile devices can play in consumers' lives, this technology increases the growth p

U Chicago sociologist

Focus on one person at a time. This is a skill that the world's best leaders cultivate. While in conversation with someone, work on shutting out distractions so that you really hear what they have to say--and not just its surface meaning but also its subt

trend spotting in style and fashion, sort of like digg and delicious meets the fashion world.

In order to deliver the signal over the entire 720sq. miles of Washtenaw County, 20/20 must mount over 2300 radios on existing and new structures.

We construct a connected network of 3.9 million nodes from mobile phone call records, which can be regarded as a proxy for the underlying human communication network at the societal level.

partnership w/purdue, michigan state, marquette mi. general hospital

art project cell phones + geolocation in chicago

via groff

"myspace for world of warcraft"

"petabyte age"

Network Analysis Could Shed Light on NSA Activities

"access to the wifi network is free from the yellow chair"

CRACIN brings together community informatics researchers, community networking practitioners and government policy specialists from across Canada to document and assess the achievements of community-based ICT initiatives in the context of, among other thi

Jaron Lanier essay (an "old-timer") on the net.

board designs and software swiped from Stanford

there's a song about backhoe fade, I hope I can dig it up

lada adamic teaching pajek to her students. (hint: try graphviz too, analytics are not good but it makes pretty graphs fast - or omnigraffle)

note the black Houston to Atlanta link 8/31/05

gui showing your network performance along a scale (no diagnostics but nice visualization)

at LBL

haptic interface to visual human

high performance astronomy and geodesy applications

better, i guess, than 3-5 years

fire in one closet -> 5 years of downtime? longer than it took to build that part of the system

classic from Phil Agre on how to work an online network in support of your research ends