tea.mathoverflow.net - Discussion Feed (Canadian Mathematicians here?)

grp comments on "Canadian Mathematicians here?" (9901)

grp — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 16:12:29 -0700

Anton, one of the talks I attended at the ICM was by Cynthia Dwork on differential privacy (check out the Wikipedia article for a taste). In addition to the mathematics it introduced, I was impressed by the idea of how much one's privacy can be lost to others in a collection of databases. I appreciate your response to my paranoia; it is my honest belief that you will appreciate your response even more, and that it will be beneficial to MathOverflow and the community that uses MathOverflow.

As with the international publicity issue I tried to raise in another thread, it may be too early to have formal action items regarding privacy issues and MathOverflow beyond what is presently implemented. I don't think it is too early to talk about what may be needed (e.g. for next year) in this regard.

Gerhard "Ask Me About System Design" Paseman, 2010.10.27

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Canadian Mathematicians here?" (9857)

Anton Geraschenko — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 18:10:53 -0700

@grp: Okay, I've edited the post to just the command used to generate the list. I will point out that only completely public information was used to produce the results, so it's hard to see how it can be viewed as a breach of privacy. But I do really care, so I'll be a little extra paranoid.

@Jacques Carette: if you're having any trouble getting something out of the public dump, feel free to email me.

Ryan Budney comments on "Canadian Mathematicians here?" (9854)

Ryan Budney — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 16:03:42 -0700

It's likely many people in that list are just people temporarily based in Canada. They may not be Canadian citizens, may not have permanent positions in Canada, may not be CMS members, etc...

grp comments on "Canadian Mathematicians here?" (9853)

grp — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 14:45:34 -0700

Anton, I suggest you edit your post to contain the command, and excise the results and send them to Jacques Carette. What you have done is not a flagrant breach of privacy, but it is not many steps removed from it. I urge caution over convenience in this case, just so there is no chance of extrapolation of the output into such a breach of privacy.

(I have no objection to the database being accessible, and others doing the work to extract the data. Having the data be extracted and posted in a publishable form is a much different matter, in my opinion.)

Gerhard "Paranoia Means You Really Care" Paseman, 2010.10.25

Jacques Carette comments on "Canadian Mathematicians here?" (9851)

Jacques Carette — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 13:38:46 -0700

@Anton, @Will: thanks, that is very helpful. I will probably contact a few people via email and see if I can get some further volunteers.

Will Jagy comments on "Canadian Mathematicians here?" (9847)

Will Jagy — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 12:01:50 -0700

Yemon Choi is in Saskatoon. I see what happened, he did not also put in the string "Canada" although he did put Saskatchewan in the profile section, that's the province. So I would try province names and city names as well. Makes sense, I put in Berkeley, California but I do not recall putting in USA.

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Canadian Mathematicians here?" (9845)

Anton Geraschenko — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 11:16:42 -0700

For what it's worth, you can query the public dump to find users whose location is in Canada. It may be an okay way to find likely candidates. Here's a command to generate a list of positive reputation users who have Canada anywhere in their profile:

MOdump20101004$ grep -i canada users.xml | grep -v 'Reputation="1"' | grep -o 'DisplayName="[^"]*"'

Jacques Carette comments on "Canadian Mathematicians here?" (9841)

Jacques Carette — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 10:25:49 -0700

Note to others who might be interested: I actually have 3 vacancies to fill...

Spiro Karigiannis comments on "Canadian Mathematicians here?" (9840)

Spiro Karigiannis — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 10:17:00 -0700

I'm actually on parental leave until November 8, so sitting at home changing diapers. But I've been sneaking in on Wednesdays for the Geometry and Topology seminar. Are you only in DC today? I suppose I can drop by later in the afternoon briefly.

Jacques Carette comments on "Canadian Mathematicians here?" (9837)

Jacques Carette — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 09:57:22 -0700

Hello Spiro,

Since I'm in sitting in an office in DC today, perhaps I could just pop over and talk with you about this.

Jacques

Spiro Karigiannis comments on "Canadian Mathematicians here?" (9836)

Spiro Karigiannis — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 09:53:39 -0700

Salut Jacques,

I would potentially be interested in doing this. It depends on the timing of the two meetings. I am intending to go to the 2011 summer meeting in Alberta. When and where would the other meeting be? I'm in the Pure Mathematics department at Waterloo. karigiannis at math dot uwaterloo dot ca

Regards,

Spiro Karigiannis

Jacques Carette comments on "Canadian Mathematicians here?" (9835)

Jacques Carette — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 08:14:18 -0700

I am looking for some Canadian mathematicians. More specifically, I am currently chair of the Electronic Services Committee for the Canadian Mathematical Society who is looking for some volunteers to serve on the committee starting in January 2011.

I would love to post this on MO itself for the wider exposure, but it would (correctly!) get closed right away, this is next-best. But I know a lot of people got to MO but not Meta, so I would appreciate it if you pointed out this thread to colleagues.

The committees' Terms of Reference is simple, and the time commitment is low (2 meetings a year during CMS meetings, and a few emails throughout the year). Feel free to email me directly if you don't feel like having a discussion in public -- carette at mcmaster dot ca.