Kendall Giles

So, there was this turtle, going the wrong way on a busy street. Naturally, having swerved to miss him, I pulled off the road, ran through traffic, and rescued him.

I put him in the floorboard of the car and drove home. We have a small pond, so he was quite happy to get out of the car and into the water!

Actually, a terrapin. Undertook a massive relocation effort to save this little guy from a subdivision of cars, lawn mowers, and dogs. He seemed to like his new country digs.

With the summer travel season nigh, here are a few travel tips, especially for those who are more technologically inclined and security conscious.

For general technology travel tips, from wired.com:

Pick up some CD-Rs for backing up your images. If you don't have a laptop with you, make your backups at an internet cafe. Not only do CD backups let you clear out your memory card, they also aren't affected by x-rays at the airport. X-ray machines around the world are often much stronger than those in U.S. terminals. Memory card don't get scrambled often, but it does happen, and optical media has definite advantage.

For tips on making your laptop safe for from customs officials, from news.com:

Turning off your computer is especially important for OS X users, at least until Apple patches a security glitch that keeps account passwords in RAM. In the default configuration, the account password is the keychain password and yields passwords to wireless networks, Web sites, accounts accessed via SSH, network-mounted volumes, etc.

Finally, here are some more security-related technology tips, from the EFF's Jennifer Granick:

Another option is to bring a clean laptop and get the information you need over the internet once you arrive at your destination, send your work product back, and then delete the data before returning to the United States. Historically, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) generally prohibited warrantless interception of this information exchange. However, the Protect America Act amended FISA so that surveillance of people reasonably believed to be located outside the United States no longer requires a warrant. Your email or telnet session can now be intercepted without a warrant. If all you are concerned about is keeping border agents from rummaging through your revealing vacation photos, you may not care. If you are dealing with trade secrets or confidential client data, an encrypted VPN is a better solution.

Travel safely, and securely!

I've "known" Michael Yon for years now. And I put "known" in quotes because, though I've not yet had the privilege of meeting him in person, I've talked to him by phone and we've traded emails over the years---mostly him sending me pictures and details of his latest adventures. (It's a bit one-sided, because, whereas he's been off to foreign countries, getting shot at, have dinner with cannibals, etc., I've just been driving around the Washington D.C. beltway from Richmond to Baltimore for the past five years.)

For the last several years he has been embedded with the U.S. and international troops in Iraq, detailing the tremendous changes occurring in that country, considering not only the perspective of our and allied troops trying to restore order, but also the perspective of the everyday Iraqis, whose country and lives were tossed into the air like so many pick-up sticks.

While some of you may be familiar with Michael's first book, Danger Close, which details his experiences becoming a Green Beret, Michael has chronicled his experiences in Iraq in a new book, called Moment of Truth in Iraq: How a New 'Greatest Generation' of American Soldiers is Turning Defeat and Disaster into Victory and Hope. From what I have seen, Michael tells it like it is, much to the dismay of the military brass.

Special signed editions of his book are available here.

You can read the first chapter of the book here.

Get it while you can---Michael is heading back to Iraq, already having logged more time in combat situations than any other reporter. I think he has a unique perspective on the situations on the ground there, and I believe his voice is an important one.

Last week I attended Interface 2008, which was the 40th symposium of a conference celebrating the interface between computing science and statistics. It was held at the Durham Marriott, in Durham, North Carolina. The Interface series of conferences is sponsored by the Interface Foundation, and this year's conference was hosted by the National Institute of Statistical Sciences.

I particularly enjoyed the sessions on data analysis and knowledge extraction - finding patterns and knowledge in large, complex, high-dimensional datasets. Along these lines, I gave a talk titled "Interactive Text Analysis with Iterative Denoising".

Durham, a former tobacco town, is home to Duke University and serves as one vertex of Research Triangle Park. One restaurant I particularly enjoyed was Toast, a small but good paninoteca, which was within walking distance of the hotel.