Science and Technology links (May 18th, 2017)
, 1 min read
Science and Technology links (May 18th, 2017)
Science and Technology links (May 18th, 2017)
, 7 min read
Google has announced at its annual conference (I/O 2017) that it has computing pods capable of 11.5 petaflops. They are made of 64 customized TPU (processors specialized for deep learning/AI), each generate 180 teraflops. It is going to be available to other companies via Google cloud. Google has…
Educational backgrounds of the CEOs of the top corporations in the US
, 1 min read
Apple is the most valuable company in the US. The CEO is Tim Cook who has a bachelor of science in industrial engineering from Auburn University. The chairman is Arthur D. Levinson who has a degree in molecular biology from the University of Washington. Alphabet (Google’s parent company) is the…
Has the Internet killed real estate agents yet?
, 5 min read
Back in 2002 when I was first interested in buying a house, I went on the Internet and found lots of houses for sale, directly from the sellers. I bought the house I own right now directly from the seller. At the time, I was convinced that the days of real estate agents were counted. I remember…
Science and Technology links (May 12th, 2017)
, 1 min read
Science and Technology links (May 12th, 2017)
My review of Change Agent: A Novel (by Daniel Suarez)
, 2 min read
Change Agent is a sci-fi novel still hot from the presses. It set in our near future (2049). The genre has been captured by writers who love dystopian futures. Suarez can’t quite distance himself from this trend. We are in for massive climate changes and millions of climate refugees. We have gene…
Science and Technology links (May 12th, 2017)
, 2 min read
The Apple watch can be used to diagnose heart disease automatically. This is not marketing talk, but hard research. And, of course, there is no reason for this kind of work to be limited to Apple products. In the near future, many of us, beyond a certain age, will wear devices monitoring our…
Signed integer division by a power of two can be expensive!
, 2 min read
Remember when you learned the long division algorithm in school? It was painful, right? It turns out that even on modern processors, divisions are expensive. So optimizing compilers try to avoid them whenever possible. An easy case is the division by a power of two. If a compiler sees x / 2 when x…
Science and Technology links (May 5th, 2017)
, 4 min read
Lungs make blood cells: In experiments involving mice, the team found that they produce more than 10 million platelets (tiny blood cells) per hour, equating to the majority of platelets in the animals’ circulation. Scientists have edited the genes of monkey embryos. The American government…
Science and Technology links (April 28th, 2017)
, 8 min read
It is estimated that our species, homo sapiens, appeared in Africa as far back as 200,000 years ago, and that we left Africa about 60,000 years ago. Confusingly, scientists found a 130,000-year-old archaeological site in southern California. So, maybe, there were human beings in America tens of…
Quickly pruning elements in SIMD vectors using the simdprune library
, 1 min read
Modern processors have powerful vector instructions. However, some algorithms are tricky to implement using vector instructions. I often need to prune selected values from a vector. On x64 processors, we can achieve this result using table lookups and an efficient shuffle instruction. Building up…
The real lesson of the human genome project
, 2 min read
When I was pursuing my PhD, the human genome project was often both regarded as overly ambitious (maybe even impossible) and full of possibilities. To many people’s surprise, the project was declared complete back in 2003, much earlier than expected. Today, we have a “roughly” complete map of…
Science and Technology links (April 21st, 2017)
, 7 min read
Can we trust software? Lance Fortnow, a famous computer scientist, answers… Sometimes I feel we put to much pressure on the machines. When we deal with humans, for example when we hire people, we have to trust them, assume they are fair, play by the rules without at all understanding their…
“I have read all of your papers”
, 1 min read
There is a common movie quote where one (often the hero) says to an academic: “I have read all of your papers”. This does not happen. If you are an academic and someone says something of the sort, you just know that they are lying to you. Well. Google has read all of everyone’s papers.
Science and Technology links (April 14th, 2017)
, 9 min read
I announced last week that Tesla, the electric car company run by Elon Musk, had surpassed Ford in value. This week, we learned that Tesla has surpassed General Motors. Tesla is the most valuable American car maker. Suppose I told you that you were about to die, right now. But I could offer you an…
Removing duplicates from lists quickly
, 3 min read
Suppose you have lists of numbers where some values are repeated (e.g., 1,1,2,3,3,3,4,0,0). You want these duplicates (or repeated values) to be removed (e.g., 1,2,3,4,0). To avoid potentially expensive memory allocations, we want to solve the problem in-place, writing back the answer is the…
Robots have not yet stolen our jobs
, 2 min read
Though it is not yet widespread, I encounter more and more people who seem to believe that there is growing unemployment, or falling labor participation rate, due to technology. It is true that technology has impacted the job market. Simply put, back in 1900, everyone was a farmer. Almost the…
Science and Technology links (April 7th, 2017)
, 15 min read
Many people suffer from obesity. I am not sure we know how to combat this epidemic effectively. There is a never ending stream of wonder diets, but nothing seems to actually work. Or we just tell people to have more will power. New research suggests that inactivity is more a consequence than a…
How much are elite universities worth?
, 1 min read
Will you do better if you attend a selective college? If you are Caucasian (white) and from a middle class or better background… you will not: “Our estimates of the return to college selectivity (…) are generally indistinguishable from zero” (Dale and Krueger, 2014) It is important to keep…
My review of `Ghost in the Shell´ (2017)
, 1 min read
Ghost in the Shell was, in 1995, a forward-thinking science-fiction anime. It is said to have had a lasting influence on movies such as the Matrix. Hollywood offers us a remake featuring Scarlett Johansson. It is a beautiful movie. The visual effects are simply wonderful. It is an ode to the…