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One of my colleague who started a blog, and then shut it down, is putting into question blogging as a useful activity. While he won’t deny that blogging can be fun, he is arguing that it is simply not very useful in a career. He is also making a comparison with real life meetings and how so much…
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Here’s a picture of Bill Gates in his office. I’m not impressed.
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Kunal Anand: The uncloneable web
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Science in an exponential world
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Kunal Anand talks about the uncloneable web: Anyone can write AJAX or make a usable interface. But how many people can actually program a library and API for delivering facial recognition over port 80? The average web developer will discover that the learning curve for replicating Riya‘s…
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Many predict dramatic changes to the way science is done, and suspect that few traditional processes will survive in their current form by 2020. (…) The wireless sensors that were US$300 a year ago are $100 today, and will be $30 next year. A similar phenomenon occurred with DNA chips and gene…
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NRC has published Java clocks for those who want to be sure they have, precisely, the right time! Naturally, you can also use their Network Time Protocol (NTP) server and type: netdate time.chu.nrc.ca as root. (This is for Linux machines.) Windows XP has a builtin NTP client. Go in the control…
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Is the software industry heating up?
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Repeatedly, in the recent past, I’ve heard people claim that the IT sector was heating up and that there was much demand for new graduates. Is this true? What is happening in the schools: Michael Stiber reports that the number of students who began a Computer Science degree in the USA, went down…
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There 4 big CS schools in the USA, Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, and Carnegie-Mellon. How you define “big school” is left to you, but I’m taking the word of the president of the ACM on this. Carnegie-Mellon University offers the Master in Software Engineering and the Master in IT in distance…
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Formatting advice everyone should know
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I just finished reviewing, as an editor, some of the camera-ready papers for CSWWS 2006. Here are some rules everyone ought to know: When citing papers, do not use multiple brackets (such as [1][2][3]), use a single one (such as [1,2,3]). Typically, we abbreviate see “Figure 10” to “see Fig.…
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Sci-Fi Writer, Math Professor and Communist, All in One!
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Ever since I worked on Collaborative Filtering, people have asked about applying ideas from Collaborative Filtering to Web Services. Well, I found a recent paper that seems to cover this topic: U. S. Manikrao, T. V. Prabhakar, Dynamic Selection of Web Services with Recommendation System,…
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The president of the ACM comments on the culture that prevails at the Stanford CS Department: “What sets Stanford apart is the startup culture,” said Patterson, the Berkeley professor, adding, “I have this sense that it’s an almost unwritten rule that you have to start a company to be a…
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As a M.Sc. student, the most influential professor to me, at the time, was Chandler Davis. He taught a great Operator Theory class. Though I don’t recall much of Operator Theory at all, I remember that his classes were great. He vaguely suggested Wavelets as an interesting new field. Sure enough,…
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Computers live their lifes in sensory deprivation This is a quote from my friend Martin Brooks in relation with an earlier post of mine.
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This has been around for quite some time, but it keeps on popping up left and right. “Google (…) believes that strong AI requires huge data volumes to really exist.” Since nobody knows what is required for strong AI to exist, this is a currently non-falsifiable conjecture. One thing is for…
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Web forms are evil. You know these things where you enter text in a text box and then click submit? Yes, I know there are better, more XMLish, ways of coding them, but my beef is with the current user model of a text form and I don’t see this changing any time soon unless the browser people start…
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Thoughts on Software Complexity