FXPAL Blog

Ten days ago,  a theoretical computer science community Q&A site went beta and seems to be generating a fair amount of activity. I’m a big fan of MathOverflow, and am delighted to see a similar site springing up for a different field.

Thirty-nine days ago,  a new mathematics site went beta, which initially puzzled me since the mathematics community already has the highly successful MathOverflow site. The difference appears to be that MathOverflow is specifically for research mathematics whereas the new site aims to be broader, allowing more elementary questions.

Overall, I think a proliferation of such sites is great, but it is also confusing. It isn’t always clear when a question is research level or not. There are questions tagged algebra or topology on the CS theory site that are pure mathematics questions. There’s a question tagged  graph theory that had been posted previously to MathOverflow. I am delighted to see that both cs.cr.crypto-security and quantum computing already are populated with a few questions, but similar questions in these areas received good answers on MathOverflow. It would be a shame if the proliferation of sites lead to less interaction between fields rather than more. I’ll be curious to see how the usage patterns play out over time.

For those of us with a passing (or greater) interest in algorithms, last week was particularly interesting: Vinay Deolalikar circulated a paper that attempted to prove P≠NP. This is one of the great unsolved problems in Computer Science, and its solution has some important implications for real-world problems such as keeping your money in your bank account.

I won’t attempt a summary of the proof, and will limit myself to social commentary.

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If you work for a small or medium business, someone in your office needs to buy things.   Paperclips, computers, mailing envelopes, office furniture, etc.   If you work for a small or medium research lab, someone in your office needs to buy these same things, but someone also needs to buy more unusual stuff.   Twenty pounds of modeling clay.   A Sony Aibo.  Make that two.   Lots of different types of video encoding software and hardware.  Stuff like that.

At our research lab, I am often the person who does the actual purchasing of the strange items.   If I’m buying a computer from HP, I expect the process to be pretty straightforward.   If I’m buying industrial laser elements from Bob’s House-o’-Lasers, I expect complications.  Reality is often the other way around.  Since I’ve been doing this since the mid 1990’s, I’ve seen how technology has often made it easier and sometimes much harder to buy things, use things, and deal with problems.   I’m going to describe a few examples in this and later posts.  Just a warning that my bias is somewhat anti-technology – I joke that I’m a neo-luddite.

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I read newspapers (seriously, print newspapers) as they pile up around my house.  A nice thing about such piles is they don’t admit order, producing serendipitous juxtapositions (I should credit my children at this point). The data-driven life is an article by a Wired writer that looks into wearable computing and how the ability to outfit oneself with sensors might better inform decisions and behavioral strategies. By my reading, it was a basically positive take on the application of technology to help people live better lives on their own terms, whatever they might be.

Next I came across Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price which took a fairly negative slant, ranging somewhere between blaming technology for diminishing our quality of life and attributing to it irreversible neurological damage. (more…)

The ’sphere is a-twitter about BP’s buying keywords (e.g., “oil spill”, “BP”, “gulf disaster”, etc.) to place links to their versions of the story at the top of the search results.  ABC News writes:

According to Kevin Ryan, the CEO of California-based Motivity Marketing, research shows that most people can’t tell the difference between a paid result pages, like the ones BP have, and actual news pages.

So we have two issues: one related to BP, and one related to the search engines.

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On Thursday I saw Genevieve Bell’s entertaining PARC Forum talk titled “Feral Technologies: An ethnographic account of the future.” I learned all about animals–camels in Australia, rabbits in Australia, cane toads in Australia–each imported for specific reasons, each going feral and causing various kinds of trouble. Apparently there were also goats, donkeys, foxes, and other species, but she didn’t talk about those.

It was a good talk, following on her CHI 2010 keynote address. My problem with it was that the notion of unintended consequences of technology deployments (animal, mineral, or vegetable) is not particularly new.

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Last night I watched Carl Malamud’s fascinating, inspiring, and informative WWW2010 address in which he discussed his 10 Rules for Radicals, a strategy for working with (or against) bureaucracies. I won’t summarize here; watch the video.

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A while ago I wrote about the general threats to one’s privacy posed by search engine histories. It appears that the threat is more than theoretical, as researchers at INRIA and UCI have shown recently. They were able to exploit security weaknesses in the Google Web History used to generate personalized suggestions through what they termed a “Historiographer” attack.

Google appears to be taking the researchers’ warnings seriously, and has modified some of its services to use HTTPS. Not all aspects have yet been secured, however.

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A lot of people (like me) will use the iPad as an e-reader, among other things. It’s a good opportunity to play around with what a e-book actually can be, since the iPad offers things that Kindle can’t (color, animation…). I vote for more like this, please:

It’s in the iTunes store here.

Starting in the fall of 2010, Seton Hill University (not to be confused with Seton Hall University) is going to be equipping its students with iPads. It’s not clear from the description on the web site what the students are expected to do with these devices, or what educational advantage the iPads are likely to impart beyond the laptops the students will also receive.

But is the iPad the right tool?

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