blind people's perception of race

Can blind people perceive race? What about those who were born blind (who learn about race in a mostly unsupervised way)?

How does their conceptions of race affect their attitudes?

Are there cases of former racists who lost their prejudice because of going blind, thereby realizing that they really couldn't tell the difference afterall? "OMG! My best friend is a X!"

today: ML presentations; Hinton; FOPI

Machine Learning presentations:
* Lots of bioinformatics stuff, which I understood nothing of.
* kutta's talk had a slide about "Lacerdian Multinoullis". (I coined the term "multinoulli" because "multinomial" sounds too much like "binomial". Kevin loved it, and has been pushing its usage since; he's promoting this term in his book)
* My presentation went well, it seems. kutta found it one of the clearest. Kevin only pointed out a minor flaw in a scatterplot, and made a suggestion to couple my 24 autoregressions. I'm really enjoying this project, though I occasionally worry about having to solve a difficult inference problem and running out of time.

Then I met with Geoff Hinton, which was biggest the flurry of ideas I've discussed in a really long time. I don't remember ever having such an idea-dense meeting. Time really flew, and I have a full page of notes.

After that, I attended the FOPI reading group. Thanks to my nitpickiness about people who use "d-separation equivalence" interchangeably with "distribution equivalence", we got into tangent in which I essentially gave my UAI talk to everyone there. I really enjoyed that.

Then I did my extra Vision homework; and researched¹ a paper on Soft Weight-Sharing to solve my problem (by guess who? Hinton!).

I'm getting used to these 12h days, and I don't mind it at all. :-)

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^{1 - what do you call it when you skim a paper, find the section you want, and read that section very thoroughly / several times? Did you "read" the paper?}

spammers are not all equal

In the last year, I've been put on mailing lists of two musicians:

* Sarina Suno
* Becky Durango

The former swore that she had met me at a party in Tribeca. I had to ask 4 times to be removed.

The latter had no excuses, just a link to my info, so I can update/unsubscribe yourself. Somehow, her system knew that I lived in Pennsylvania (how??). But after deleting myself from her system, I feel confident that I won't hear from her again.

They both entered my email from the PNG image I have on my homepage (I don't think they're using OCR). I know this because I never send email from that address.

If this were your regular Viagra enlargement / get-rich-today / debt-free / lose weight / fake rolex / diploma mill / online casino / silverfernz spam, I wouldn't even think of clicking on such a link. (Also it would have been put on my spam folder)

What about people who added you to their mailing list by mistake, but are too careless to take you off? Are they spammers? What about those who added you legitimately, but still neglect your request to unsubscribe?

Doesn't anyone maintain a wall of shame? Like a BBB for the web. Surely, big retailers like Silverfernz need to be named.