Items of interest in computer and network security, privacy, voting, public policy, etc., plus a few that just tickled my fancy or provoked my outrage.
In June, 2005, Bernanke was sworn in at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. One of his first tasks was to deliver a monthly economics briefing to the President and the Vice-President. After he and Hubbard sat down in the Oval Office, President Bush noticed that Bernanke was wearing light-tan socks under his dark suit. “Where did you get those socks, Ben?” he asked. “They don’t match.” Bernanke didn’t falter. “I bought them at the Gap—three pairs for seven dollars,” he replied. During the briefing, which lasted about forty-five minutes, the President mentioned the socks several times.If you can fully occupy your mind with the color of officials' socks, what need to clutter it up with information about the nation's economy?
The following month, Hubbard’s deputy, Keith Hennessey, suggested that the entire economics team wear tan socks to the briefing. Hubbard agreed to call Vice-President Cheney and ask him to wear tan socks, too. “So, a little later, we all go into the Oval Office, and we all show up in tan socks,” Hubbard recalled. “The President looks at us and sees we are all wearing tan socks, and he says in a cool voice, ‘Oh, very, very funny.’ He turns to the Vice-President and says, ‘Mr. Vice-President, what do you think of these guys in their tan socks?’ Then the Vice-President shows him that he’s wearing them, too. The President broke up.”
Labels: Amusing, Assorted, Outrageous, Policy
Leute benutzen auf der ganzen Erde das tägliche Internet, um Waren oder Dienstleistungen zu kaufen, um zu Information zu suchen, Ablenkungen zu finden.If you find that hard to read, here's their translation back to English:
Aber ist das World Wide Web wirklich weltweit?
Es ist schwierig, den Fall zu bilden. Schätzungen behaupten, dass ungefähr 70 Prozent Webseiten heute in der englischen Sprache verursacht werden, während der Prozentsatz der nicht-Englischen Lautsprecher schneller als der der englischen Lautsprecher wächst. So was, wenn Sie nicht Englisch sprechen? Oder was, wenn Sie tun und Sie finden eine interessante Seite geschrieben auf Deutsch? Oder Russe? Oder Chinese?
Microsoft-Forschungsziele zu bitte.
People use the daily Internet on whole earth, in order to buy goods or services to find in order to search to information, diversons.If German is too hard, let's try Portuguese:
But the World Wide Web is really world-wide?
It is difficult to form the case. Estimations maintain that approximately 70 per cent of web pages is caused today in the English language, while the percentage of the non-English loudspeakers grows faster than that of the English loudspeakers. So which, if you do not speak English? Or which, if you do and you find an interesting side written on German? Or Russian? Or Chinese?
Microsoft aims of research too ask.
Os povos usam pelo mundo inteiro o Internet diário, para comprar bens ou serviços, para procurarar pela informação, para encontrar diversões.And back:
Mas é o World Wide Web verdadeiramente mundial?
É difícil fazer o caso. As estimativas reivindicam que aproximadamente 70 por cento dos Web pages estão criados hoje na língua inglesa, quando a porcentagem de altofalantes não-Ingleses crescer mais rapidamente do que aquele de altofalantes ingleses. Assim que se você não fala o inglês? Ou que se você faz e você encontra uma página interessante escrita no alemão? Ou russo? Ou chinês?
Alvos de pesquisa de Microsoft a por favor.
The peoples use for the entire world the daily Internet, to buy good or services, to procurarar for the information, to find diversions.I have two concerns about such machine translation services:
But it is the truily world-wide World Wide Web?
It is difficult to make the case. The 70 estimates demand that approximately percent of the Web pages are created today in the English language, when the percentage of not-English speakers to grow more quickly of what that one of English speakers. As soon as if you do not say the English? Or that if you make and you find an interesting page writing in the German? Or Russian? Or Chinese?
Targets of research of Microsoft please.
Google Books takes books as a storehouse of wisdom to be opened up with new tools. They fail to see what librarians know: books can be obtuse, obdurate, even obnoxious things. As a group, they don’t submit equally to a standard shelf, a standard scanner, or a standard ontology. Nor are their constraints overcome by scraping the text and developing search algorithms. Such strategies can undoubtedly be helpful, but in trying to do away with fairly simple constraints (like volumes), these strategies underestimate how a book’s rigidities are often simultaneously resources deeply implicated in the ways in which authors and publishers sought to create the content, meaning, and significance that Google now seeks to liberate. Even with some of the best search and scanning technology in the world behind you, it is unwise to ignore the bookish character of books. More generally, transferring any complex communicative artifacts between generations of technology is always likely to be more problematic than automatic.
I still remember the talk on statecharts (and the digital watch) that David gave at DEC/SRC, circa 1984-5. And I remember the number of people I urged to have a look at the method, but did not have the eloquence to convince.The process leading to the eventual publication of this paper is interesting in its own right. For almost two years, from early 1984 until late 1985, I repeatedly submitted it to what seemed to be the most appropriate widely read venues for such a topic. These were, in order, Communications of the ACM, IEEE Computer and IEEE Software. The paper was rejected from all three of these journals. In fact, from IEEE Computer it was rejected twice ― once when submitted to a special issue on visual languages and once when submitted as a regular paper. My files contain quite an interesting collection of referee reports and editors' rejection letters. Here are some of the comments therein:
"I find the concept of statecharts to be quite interesting, but unfortunately only to a small segment of our readership. I find the information presented to be somewhat innovative, but not wholly new. I feel that the use of the digital watch example to be useful, but somewhat simple in light of what our readership would be looking for."
"The basic problem […] is that […] the paper does not make a specific contribution in any area."
"A research contribution must contain 'new, novel, basic results'. A reviewer must certify its 'originality, significance, and accuracy'. It must contain 'all technical information required to convince other researchers in the area that the results are valid, verifiable and reproducible'. I believe that you have not satisfied these requirements."
"I think your contribution is similar to earlier contributions."
"The paper is excellent in technical content; however, it is too long and the topic is good only for a very narrow audience."
"I doubt if anyone is going to print something this long."
Indeed, the paper was quite long; it contained almost 50 figures. The main running example was my Citizen Quartz Multi-Alarm digital wristwatch, which was claimed in the rejection material by some to be too simple an example for illustrating the concepts and by others to be far too detailed for a scientific article… Some claimed that since the paper was about the much studied finite-state machine formalism it could not contain anything new or interesting…
One must understand that in the mid-1980s there was only scant support for visual languages. Visual programming in the classical sense had not really succeeded; it was very hard to find ways to visualize nontrivial algorithmic systems (as opposed to visualizing the dynamic running of certain algorithms on a particular data structure), and the only visual languages that seemed to be successful in system design were those intended to specify structure rather than behavior. Flowcharts, of course, were a failure in that most people used them to help explain the real thing, which was the computer program. There was precious little real use of flowcharts as a language that people programmed in and then actually executed. In terms of languages for structure, there were structure diagrams and structure charts, hierarchical tree-like diagrams, and so on. The issue of a visual language with precise semantics for specifying behavior was not adequately addressed at all. Petri nets were an exception, but except for some telecommunication applications they did not seem to have caught on widely in the real world. My feeling was that this had mainly to do with the lack of adequate support in Petri nets for hierarchical specification of behavior...
[T]he inability to get it published was extremely frustrating. Interestingly, during the two years of repeated rejections, new printings of the 1984 technical report had to be prepared, to address the multitude of requests for reprints. This was before the era of the internet and before papers were sent around electronically. So here was a paper that no one wanted to publish but that so many seemed to want to read... I revised the paper twice during that period, and the title changed again, to the final "Statecharts: A Visual Formalism for Complex Systems". Eventually, two and half years later, in July 1987, the paper was published in the theoretical journal Science of Computer Programming. That happened as a result of Amir Pnueli, who was one of its editors, seeing the difficulties I was having and soliciting the paper for the journal.* [pp. 9-10]
* By the way, this story of the repeated rejections of the paper would not be as interesting were it not for the fact that in the 20 years or so since its publication it has become quite popular. According to Citeseer, it has been for several years among the top handful of most widely quoted papers in computer science, measured by accumulated citations since publication (in late 2002 it was in the second place on the list).
Labels: Amusing, Assorted, Outrageous
"I've got a little list, I've got a little list."When police wanted to make a quick judgement on a suspect, they could just check his/her collection of IDs, rather than looking her/him up in the database.
Labels: Amusing, Assorted, Outrageous
I've already gotten mine, generated by the VirtualLandGrab technology inspired by the AACS LA. I don't guarantee that I'll protect mine as viciously as they promise to protect theirs.
Labels: Amusing, Stimulating
It looked like the perfect crime.
Starting on Christmas Eve, a ring of thieves -- mistaken by neighbors as a moving crew -- removed $2.5 million in art, antiques and rugs from a Jackson Street mansion in San Francisco's Presidio Heights, taking two truckloads of loot without being detected.
It took months of planning to execute but afterward just days to become a perfect mess -- when one of the burglars decided to try to sell back some of the loot to the victim.
Hooked on computing since 1959.
