Being "always on" is being always off, to something.
How to Think About Algorithms
Topic: Science
6:51 am EDT, Jul 8, 2008
Jeff Edmonds:
There are many algorithm texts that provide lots of well-polished code and proofs of correctness. This book is not one of them. Instead, this book presents insights, notations, and analogies to help the novice describe and think about algorithms like an expert. By looking at both the big picture and easy step-by-step methods for developing algorithms, the author helps students avoid the common pitfalls. He stresses paradigms such as loop invariants and recursion to unify a huge range of algorithms into a few meta-algorithms. Part of the goal is to teach the students to think abstractly. Without getting bogged with formal proofs, the book fosters a deeper understanding of how and why each algorithm works. These insights are presented in a slow and clear manner accessible to second- or third-year students of computer science, preparing them to find their own innovative ways to solve problems.
Karl Neder - physicist, Communist and all-round maverick - thinks he has made a discovery that will offer mankind energy for free. But no one believes him - or rather, no one understands him. And so he is forced to wander like a vagabond across Cold War Europe, an outcast from his native Hungary, leaving chaos and half-built machines in his wake." "But who, and where, exactly is Karl Neder now? Young journalist Lena Bomanowicz wants to find out, hoping to kick-start a stalled career but driven more by motives she would rather not interrogate. Yet to understand Karl Neder, she must wrestle with his story, which ranges from the castles of Transylvania to the rocket labs of NASA, from Viennese cafes to the blasted borderlands of the Soviet Union.
Philip Ball writes a "Lab lit" novel;. See reviews here and here.
Access to Google’s global Web server logs enabled the authors to provide the first in-depth global perspective on the state of insecurity for Web browser technologies. Understanding the nature of the threats against Web browser and their plug-in technologies is important for continued Internet usage. As more users and organizations depend upon these browser technologies to access ever more complex and distributed business applications, any threats to the underlying platform equate to a direct risk to business continuity and integrity.
By measuring the patching processes of Web browser user populations, we have been able to identify the potential global scale of Web-based malicious exploitation of browser technologies and prove how existing mechanisms such as Firefox’s auto-update can outperform more complex and less timely solutions.
Based on direct measurements of the adoption of new Web browser updates based upon available USER-AGENT major and minor browser software version numbers, and by combining that data with Secunia’s latest PSI local-host scanning results for plug-in patch adoption (even though sample sizes are radically different), we quantified the lower bounds of the Web browser population vulnerable to attacks through security weaknesses.
Unfortunately, just like a floating iceberg, we were only able to measure and accurately estimate the tip above the water.
This presentation provides an analysis of the various factors behind a six year, six-folding in oil prices and the market conditions likely to either accelerate that rise or result in a significant downturn.
On April 15, 2008 in San Francisco, Green Works brought together an English reverse graffiti artist and a critically acclaimed documentary filmmaker, to create an environmentally friendly work of art and a film about a philosophy of clean.
Now 12,000 partners had suddenly learned what betrayal really was. Surely, I surmised, they'd be venting on starbucksgossip.com, the website largely of, by, and for Starbucks employees.
In 1876, a man named Henry Wickham smuggled seventy thousand rubber tree seeds out of the rainforests of Brazil and delivered them to Victorian England’s most prestigious scientists at Kew Gardens. Those seeds, planted around the world in England’s colonial outposts, gave rise to the great rubber boom of the early twentieth century -- an explosion of entrepreneurial and scientific industry that would change the world. The story of how Wickham got his hands on those seeds -- a sought-after prize for which many suffered and died -- is the stuff of legend. In this utterly engaging account of obsession, greed, bravery, and betrayal, author and journalist Joe Jackson brings to life a classic Victorian fortune hunter and the empire that fueled, then abandoned, him.
Rule No. 1: Betray your employer before your employer betrays you. Rule No. 2: Remember what you are selling. Rule No. 3: Hide your motives. Or, specifically, minimize the appearance of financial interest.
For some, the new era of lightweight, lightning-fast software design is akin to a guerrilla movement rattling the walls of stodgy corporate development organizations. "They stole our revolution and now we're stealing it back and selling it to Yahoo," said Bruce Sterling.
Dick’s novels, reread, invite us to pick one page and draw a thick line across it, separating the novel into before and after the protagonist learns (or believes he has learned) what’s really going on: often we realise, far into the after portion, that we may never know.
America will be a more secure country once it discards the notion that ... [ Read More (1.2k in body) ]
Chayes: I think that recommendation systems are going to be as important as search algorithms. In a recent piece of work, we came up with a list of desired properties for a recommendation system, and what we ended up doing was proving mathematically that there is no possible recommendation system that has all these desired properties. So I would have to choose which properties I am willing to give up and design recommendation systems that preserve the properties I want most.
TR: What kinds of properties?
Chayes: There's transitivity. If I trust the recommendation of person B, and person B trusts the recommendation of person C, then I should trust the recommendation of person C.
It could be that at some point somebody could go onto a social network and say, "Here are the properties that I want for my recommendation system," and a different person could go in and say, "Here are the properties that I want," and they could get two different recommendation systems.
Beeswax is an information management system inspired by Lotus Agenda. It aims to recreate Agenda's flexibility and efficiency in a clutter-free, text-based (ncursesw) user interface with vi key bindings. Beeswax views & reports will have specifications for sections, columns, filtering, and sorting.
Release v0.2.0 is a somewhat stable base of functionality on which the remaining features will be built. Since columns and custom views are not yet included, it is essentially Beeswax with just a single hierarchical view of all items.
The concept is that you have a database of information stored as individual items. Each item is a bit of information shown on the screen with a small bullet character at the beginning. In addition, each item can have a note attached to it to hold more extensive information. Notes are stored within the Beeswax database, but are edited by Beeswax launching your favorite text editor. When an item has a note attached, there is a small musical note displayed at the beginning of the item.
The Beeswax database has no predefined structure; instead, the structure is built up in a flexible manner as you work with the data. Each item of information can be assigned to zero or more categories. Categories are nothing more than items that have other items assigned to them. In Agenda, there was a separate distinction between items and categories, but in Beeswax I've generalized it even further and removed this distinction. If an item has other items assigned to it, then it is considered a category. On the other hand, if an item is assigned to more than one category, then it itself can not be used as a category.
The relationships between items of information are highly flexible. An item can be easily assigned to several different categories and the view immediately displays the new relationships. An item can just as easily be detached from categories. As you move items through Beeswax, their relationship to each other remains highly flexible.
The best way to understand all this is to get into Beeswax and start using it!
