Category: Uncategorized
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Identifying Trends that Drive Technology
I’m trying to compile a list of major technological and societal trends that influence U.S. computing research. Here’s my initial list. Please post your own suggestions! Ubiquitous connectivity, and thus true mobility Massive computational capability available to everyone, through the cloud Exponentially increasing data volumes – from ubiquitous sensors, from higher-volume sensors (digital imagers everywhere!),…
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The Stock-market Flash Crash: Attack, Bug, or Gamesmanship?
Andrew wrote last week about the stock market’s May 6 “flash crash”, and whether it might have been caused by a denial-of-service attack. He points to a detailed analysis by nanex.com that unpacks what happened and postulates a DoS attack as a likely cause. The nanex analysis is interesting and suggestive, but I see the…
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On kids and social networking
Sunday’s New York Times has an article about cyber-bullying that’s currently #1 on their “most popular” list, so this is clearly a topic that many find close and interesting. The NYT article focuses on schools’ central role in policing their students social behavior. While I’m all in favor of students being taught, particularly by older…
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Did a denial-of-service attack cause the stock-market "flash crash?"
On May 6, 2010, the stock market experienced a “flash crash”; the Dow plunged 998 points (most of which was in just a few minutes) before (mostly) recovering. Nobody was quite sure what caused it. An interesting theory from Nanex.com, based on extensive analysis of the actual electronic stock-quote traffic in the markets that day…
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How Not to Fix Soccer
With the World Cup comes the quadrennial ritual in which Americans try to redesign and improve the rules of soccer. As usual, it’s a bad idea to redesign something you don’t understand—and indeed, most of the proposed changes would be harmful. What has surprised me, though, is how rarely anyone explains the rationale behind soccer’s…
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Rebooting the CS Publication Process
The job of an academic is to conduct research, and that means publishing manuscripts for the world to read. Computer science is somewhat unusual, among the other disciplines in science and engineering, in that our primary research output goes to highly competitive conferences rather than journals. Acceptance rates at the “top” conferences are often 15%…
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Developing Texts Like We Develop Software
Recently I was asked to speak at a conference for university librarians, about how the future of academic publication looks to me as a computer scientist. It’s an interesting question. What do computer scientists have to teach humanists about how to write? Surely not our elegant prose style. There is something distinctive about how computer…
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The Gizmodo Warrant: Searching Journalists in the Terabyte Age
Last Friday night, police officers in California used a warrant to search the home of Jason Chen, the Gizmodo blogger who wrote about the iPhone prototype found in a Redwood City bar. Orin Kerr has written an interesting post assessing the legality of the search. I wanted to touch on an important issue he didn’t…
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Needle-in-a-Haystack Problems, and P vs. NP
Last week I wrote about needle-in-a-haystack problems, in which it’s hard to find the solution but if somebody tells you the solution it’s easy to verify. A commenter asked whether such problems are related to the P vs. NP problem, which is the most important unsolved problem in theoretical computer science. It turns out that…
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Needle-in-a-Haystack Problems
Sometimes the same idea comes flying at you from several directions at once, and you start seeing that idea everywhere. This has been happening to me lately with needle-in-a-haystack problems, a concept that is useful but often goes unrecognized. A needle-in-a-haystack problem is a problem where the right answer is very difficult to determine in…