Street Cry

Occupy Wall Street, Bay Street and the street nearest you.

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives released a study in early January highlighting the growing income disparities between the richest and poorest Canadians. Income tax files from 2007 show that the average income of the top 1% of income earners was over $400,000 compared to about $44,000 for the average Canadian, almost a tenfold difference. Those who laboured at the minimum wage earned...

Street Crime and Street Culture

A model of social interactions shows why and when reputation concerns may support an ‘underclass’ culture of street crime where the incentives for such behavior are otherwise weak. Those who do not gain from street crime directly nevertheless find it optimal to invest in violence and thereby build a reputation that will earn them deference from the rest of the community. Even when the fraction ...

A Cry from Kenya

Automatic infant cry detection

cry detection can be defined as a procedure where the voiced crying sounds are selected from the recording. the most difficult part of the cry detection is to recognize the inspiratory sounds and separate them from the voiced sounds. in addition, sound recordings may come from different places and recorded with several devices, in this way the method of the cry detection has to be universal. au...

No, Coreset, No Cry

We show that coresets do not exist for the problem of 2-slabs in IR, thus demonstrating that the natural approach for solving approximately this problem efficiently is infeasible. On the positive side, for a point set P in IR, we describe a near linear time algorithm for computing a (1+ε)-approximation to the minimum width 2-slab cover of P . This is a first step in providing an efficient appro...