Mere colour is for unsophisticated lovers. A truly harmonious Valentine gift should smell beautiful as well. Sadly, commercial varieties of cut rose lack fragrance. This is because there is a trade-off between the energy that plants spend on making the complex, volatile chemicals that attract women and insects alike, and that available for making and maintaining pretty-coloured petals. So, by artificially selecting big, long-lasting flowers, breeders have all but erased another desirable characteristic.

The author of this article does a great job of making the science accessible to the general reader.

Biotechnology | Roses are blue, violets are red | Economist.com

It is surprising how affordable flowers really are: 120 years ago, the best roses sold in New York for $18 a dozen, and arrangements went for $40 or $50 — this at a time when hotel rooms rented for $5. Today a bouquet costs about the same as it did then, but $5 won’t cover cab fare to a hotel, much less a room for the night.

Local Color

Looks like this paper is not yet in IEEE Explore. So you can only buy it from the Computer Society. Here's the abstract:

The proliferation of the web and digital photography have made large scale image collections containing billions of images a reality. Image collections on this scale make performing even the most common and simple computer vision, image processing, and machine learning tasks non-trivial. An example is nearest neighbor search, which not only serves as a fundamental subproblem in many more sophisticated algorithms, but also has direct applications, such as image retrieval and image clustering. In this paper, we address the nearest neighbor problem as the first step towards scalable image processing. We describe a scalable version of an approximate nearest neighbor search algorithm and discuss how it can be used to find near duplicates among over a billion images.

Found via browsing after pointer to Google's Analysis of Disk Failures.

You probably won't pay $19 to read this paper. However, the lead author's thesis covers the same territory:

Spill-tree is designed for approximate knn search. By adapting metric-trees to a more flexible data structure, spill-tree is able to adapt to the distribution of data and it scales well even for huge high-dimensional data sets. Significant efficiency improvement has been observed comparing to LSH (localify sensitive hashing), the state of art approximate knn algorithm. We applied spill-tree to three real-world applications: shot video segmentation, drug activity detection and image clustering, which I will explain in the thesis.

Her lab page also offers additional resources, including a survey of approximate nearest-neighbor algorithms and a more recent study on autonomous visualization. That's more for the life sciences, but still quite interesting.

Note that the now-at-Google Ting Liu is not to be confused with the Ting Liu at Princeton, who interned with Kevin Fall at Intel Research in Berkeley. She works on DTNs in sensor networks.

One of the other co-authors, Henry Rowley, has recently directly addressed the question of the day; well, that's overstating it, but this is likely (part of) the technology behind SafeSearch. (He's also on his way to breaking the hot-or-not captcha.)

Clustering Billions of Images with Large Scale Nearest Neighbor Search

We have the technology.

We introduce a system for near-duplicate detection and sub-image retrieval. Such a system is useful for finding copyright violations and detecting forged images. We define near-duplicates as images altered with common transformations such as changing contrast, saturation, scaling, cropping, framing, etc. Our system builds a parts-based representation of images using distinctive local descriptors which give high quality matches even under severe transformations. To cope with the large number of features extracted from the images, we employ locality-sensitive hashing to index the local descriptors. This allows us to make approximate similarity queries that only examine a small fraction of the database. Although locality-sensitive hashing has excellent theoretical performance properties, a standard implementation would still be unacceptably slow for this application. We show that, by optimizing layout and access to the index data on disk, we can efficiently query indices containing millions of keypoints.

Our system achieves near-perfect accuracy (100% precision at 99.85% recall) on the tests presented in Meng et al. [16], and consistently strong results on our own, significantly more challenging experiments. Query times are interactive even for collections of thousands of images.

Efficient Near-duplicate Detection and Sub-image Retrieval

The word “scrotum” does not often appear in polite conversation. Or children’s literature, for that matter. Yet there it is on the first page of “The Higher Power of Lucky,” by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s literature.

Sammy told of the day when he had drunk half a gallon of rum listening to Johnny Cash all morning in his parked '62 Cadillac, then fallen out of the car when he saw a rattlesnake on the passenger seat biting his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

I am reminded of Manohla Dargis's review of 'The Polar Express':

Tots surely won't recognize that Santa's big entrance in front of the throngs of frenzied elves and awe-struck children directly evokes, however unconsciously, one of Hitler's Nuremberg rally entrances in Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will." But their parents may marvel that when Santa's big red sack of toys is hoisted from factory floor to sleigh it resembles nothing so much as an airborne scrotum.

In the preface to "Style: Toward Clarity and Grace" [2], Joseph Williams writes:

Whether we are readers or writers, teachers or editors, all of us in professional communities must understand three things about complex writing:

* it may precisely reflect complex ideas,
* it may gratuitously complicate complex ideas,
* it may gratuitously complicate simple ideas.

...

Here is an example of the third kind of complexity:

The absence from this dictionary of the a handful of old, well-known vulgate terms for sexual and excretory organs and functions is not due to a lack of citations for these words from current literature. On the contrary, the profusion of such citations in recent years would suggest that the terms in question are so well known as to require no explanation. The decision to eliminate them as part of the extensive culling process that is the inevitable task fo the lexicographer was made on the practical grounds that there is still objection in many quarters to the appearance of these terms in print and that to risk keeping this dictionary out of the hands of some students by introducing several terms that require little if any elucidation would be unwise.
-- From the foreword, Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language

This means,

We excluded vulgar words for sex and excretion not because we could not find them. We excluded them because many people object to seeing them. Had we included them, some teachers and schoolboards would have refused to let this dictionary be used by their students, who in any event already know what these words mean.

You'll also find the above excerpt discussed in American Lexicography, 1945-1973, an article by Clarence Barnhart, published in American Speech in the summer of 1978. (Subscription required for access to full text.)

With One Word, Children’s Book Sets Off Uproar

Filmmaker Byron Hurt, a life-long hip-hop fan, was watching rap music videos on BET when he realized that each video was nearly identical. Guys in fancy cars threw money at the camera while scantily clad women danced in the background. As he discovered how stereotypical rap videos had become, Hurt, a former college quarterback turned activist, decided to make a film about the gender politics of hip-hop, the music and the culture that he grew up with.

This program airs tonight on some PBS stations; its official premiere is on Tuesday.

About Independent Lens, the New Yorker wrote, in 2003:

Watching “Independent Lens” is like going into an independent bookstore —— you don’t always find what you were looking for but you often find something you didn’t even know you wanted.

That's how the New Yorker piece ends. I also like how it begins:

Cable news has a habit of treating viewers like children on a long car trip.

HIP-HOP: Beyond Beats and Rhymes | PBS Independent Lens

Worth your time.

Thomas C. Schelling held his Prize Lecture December 8, 2005, at Beijersalen, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm. He was presented by Professor Jörgen Weibull, Member of the Prize Committee for Economic Sciences.

Video and full text (in PDF) are available. The lecture was also published in PNAS and is freely accessible (in HTML, PDF) there.

An excerpt:

They will discover—I hope they will discover—over weeks of arguing, that the most effective use of the bomb, from a terrorist perspective, will be for influence. Possessing a nuclear device, if they can demonstrate possession—and I believe they can, if they have it, without detonating it—will give them something of the status of a nation. Threatening to use it against military targets, and keeping it intact if the threat is successful, may appeal to them more than expending it in a destructive act. Even terrorists may consider destroying large numbers of people and structures less satisfying than keeping a major nation at bay.

An astonishing 60 years: The legacy of Hiroshima | Thomas Schelling Nobel Prize Lecture

This short commentary analyzes a major report on the U.S. intelligence community that was released in August by Muhammad Khalil al-Hakaymah, a long-time operator in the Egyptian al-Gamaa al-Islamiya.

Al-Hakaymah recently joined Al-Qa'ida and seems to aspire to be its chief intelligence analyst. His report indicates that Al Qa’ida has evolved from studying U.S. security tactics and electoral politics to more sophisticated analyses of U.S. bureaucratic structure and weaknesses. Whereas security planners have tended to think of bureaucratic limitations as internal problems that may limit our ability to detect, prevent, or respond to an attack, we must now consider that Al Qa’ida will actively attempt to exploit these weaknesses.

Al-Qaida's Spymaster Analyzes U.S. Intelligence

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Hundreds of American posters printed from 1893 through the first years of the 20th-century. The collection represents the inception and heyday of magazine, book, and newspaper posters of the last decade of the 19th-century, and well into the 20th-century.

Turn of the Century Posters | NYPL Digital Gallery