Free Thought
jdupuis | September 9, 2009Just yesterday I posted on preserving the the history of the computing field, musing at the end that digitization projects could save a lot of documents.
Well, what comes along today in the latest What's New @ IEEE for Students is a note about the IEEE-USA History Project:
Digital Archives, Organization's Four Decades of Service Unveiled
IEEE-USA is building a digital archive featuring documents and photos of its 36-year history of promoting the careers and public policy interests of U.S. IEEE members. Part of the IEEE-USA History Project, the archive features:
An overview of the first four…
pontiff | September 8, 2009Over at the most uncertain blog, he of uncertain principles (aka Chad) takes up a challenge posed by @EricRWeinstein on twitter concerning Paul Krugman's recent article on why economists got the economic crisis so wrong. Since I know even less economics than anyone around here this seems like a great opportunity for me to weigh in (this is, after all, the blogosphere!)
Krugman's article is deceptively enticing, yet I find it disturbingly inadequate. In particular the critique is very much written as a just-so story, and there is very little in terms of concrete claims made nor of actual…
jdupuis | September 8, 2009An interesting article from the most recent IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Preserving Records of the Past, Today by James W. Cortada. In concerns the difficulty that scholars of the history of computing have in finding primary materials to work with, mostly in the form of documents.
Scholars examining the history of information technology run into many practical, nuts-and-bolts problems more frequently than historians in other fields that
have existed for considerable periods of time, such as diplomatic and political national history. Problems with the history of information…
mikethemadbiologist | September 8, 2009If you haven't read Paul Krugman's recent NY Times Magazine article "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?", I recommend it highly. One of the interesting things about Krugman is that he has been talking about this issue for over a decade. In a 1996 lecture, he presented an argument that economics needs to learn from evolutionary biology:
....consider the question of whether and how monetary policy has real effects. In the end this comes down to whether prices are sticky in nominal terms. In my view there is overwhelming evidence that they are. But many economists reject such evidence on…
hrynyshyn | September 8, 2009The typical western post-industrial human being has two roles to play in society: citizen and consumer. Both offer the opportunity to exert power and influence, and whether we like it or not, neglecting one over the other invariably gives competing interests an opening. On matter climatological, most campaigners have been focused in recent times on the political sphere, and understandably so: legislation and regulatory proposals are on the table in the U.S., Europe, Australia and elsewhere. But there are those who are keeping an eye on the marketplace, where it may also be possible to effect…
dsalo | September 7, 2009Happy Labor Day, US readers. Time to clean out the "toblog" tag on del.icio.us again:
Everyone else has already linked to this Wall Street Journal article on data curation, so who am I to go against the tide? My chief takeaway is the trenchant observation that judging the value of data is not straightforward. One scientist's noise is another's signal, and everything is grist for the history-of-science mill.
My friend from ebook days Gene Golovchinsky is learning by experience some hard truths about migration versus emulation. Welcome to the fold, Gene!
Let's all play with supercomputers!…
gregladen | September 5, 2009To the extent that one would have booted such a machine.
Britain's oldest original computer, the Harwell, is being sent to the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley where it is to be restored to working order.
The computer, which was designed in 1949, first ran in 1951 and was designed to perform mathematical calculations; it lasted until 1973.
Details here at the BBC
pontiff | September 4, 2009Scott Aaronson, Leonid Grinberg, and Louis Wasserman's "Worldview Manager" is now live at http://projects.csail.mit.edu/worldview/home. It seems that I am not in much conflict over quantum computing
So, damnit, I may be wrong, but at least I'm consistent (the hobgoblin of a little mind, mind you.) Via @cgranade and @mattleifer.
pontiff | September 4, 2009Congrats to Andrew Houcke for being selected as one of MIT Technology Reviews 2009 Young Innovators under 35. Houcke has been one the leading experimentalists in superconducting qubits, in particular doing pioneering work in circuit quantum electrodynamics. News article from Princeton:
Andrew Houck, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and a past Princeton valedictorian, was named to Technology Review magazine's list of the top 35 young innovators for 2009.
Since 1999, the editors of Technology Review have honored the young innovators whose inventions and research they find…
oracknows | September 3, 2009As wrong and illegal as "smash and grab" theft is, I have to admit to a grudging respect for the skill and precision with which these thieves managed to despoil a sanctum sanctorum of computing, an Apple Store in New Jersey:
Yikes. All in all, they took they took 23 Macbook Pros, 14 iPhones and nine iPod Touches, all in 31 seconds flat.
If only these thieves hadn't put their ambition and skills to such an illegal and immoral use...
dsalo | September 2, 2009Just a quickie post today—
In answer to my post about intertwingularity, commenter Andy Arenson suggested that the way to rescue an Excel spreadsheet whose functions or other behaviors depended on a particular version of Excel was to keep that specific version of Excel runnable indefinitely.
This is called "emulation," and it assuredly has its place in the digital-preservation pantheon. Some digital cultural artifacts are practically all behavior—games, for instance—and just hanging onto the source code honestly doesn't do very much good. The artifact is what happens when that code is run,…
jdupuis | September 1, 2009A bunch of recent journal & magazine issues to catch up on. There's lots of cool stuff to highlight, so I'll only list a couple of articles from each issue. Unfortunately, most of it will be behind the IEEE paywall.
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, v31i2
Think Piece: Preserving Records of the Past, Today by Cortada, J.W.
Anecdotes: Prototype Fragments from Babbage's First Difference Engine by Roegel, D.
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, v28i2
K-Net and Canadian Aboriginal communities by Fiser, A.; Clement, A.
Communication technology, emergency alerts, and campus safety by…
gregladen | August 29, 2009In August, Goddard added 4,128 new-generation Intel "Nehalem" processors to its Discover high-end computing system. The upgraded Discover will serve as the centerpiece of a new climate simulation capability at Goddard. Discover will host NASA's modeling contributions to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the leading scientific organization for assessing climate change, and other national and international climate initiatives.
And they're adding another 4,128 in a couple of months. This will be the first major. Nehalem based climate simulation project. Details here.
pontiff | August 26, 2009I'm off to Zurich tomorrow for 8th Symposium on Topological Quantum Computing which I'm greatly looking forward to (this will be my first trip to Switzerland.) What I'm not looking forward to is the 15.5 hours it will take me to get from the Seattle airport to the Zurich airport! So, any recommendations for papers I should read, lectures I should listen to, or videos I should watch in order to keep from going insane on during the flight?
pontiff | August 21, 2009An interesting paper on the arXiv's today, arXiv:0908.2782, "Adiabatic quantum optimization fails for random instances of NP-complete problems" by Boris Altshuler, Hari Krovi, and Jeremie Roland. Trouble for D-wave?
Adiabatic quantum algorithms are a set of techniques for designing quantum algorithms based upon the adiabatic theorem in quantum physics. The basic idea is as follows: (1) take the problem you are trying to solve and convert it to a Hamiltonian whose ground state (you could use other energy eigenstates, but in general this is not done) is the solution to this problem, (2)…
ejohnson | August 20, 2009Below, Michelle Borkin responds to the question:
The boundaries of science are continually expanding as scientists become increasingly integral to finding solutions for larger social issues, such as poverty, conflict, financial crises, etc. On what specific issue/problem do you feel we need to bring the scientific lens to bear?
Advances in science and computing have extraordinary potential to address social issues around the globe. The challenge is making sure there are people dedicated to leverage the newest scientific advances and make them applicable and affordable to the cause at hand…
jdupuis | August 20, 2009During my summer blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from September 3, 2008. There was some nice discussion on Friendfeed that's worth checking out.
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Some recent posts that got me thinking about various escience/science 2.0/open science issues:
First, Christina gets us rolling with some definitions:
So I'm asking and proposing that e-science is
grid computing - using distributed computing power to do new computational methods in other areas of science (not in CS but in Astro, in bio,…
pontiff | August 19, 2009Want a job hacking away at topological quantum computing (and more) by day and surfing (by morning?) on the beautiful Southern California coast near Santa Barbara? Okay, well maybe surfing isn't part of the job description, but Microsoft's Station Q at UCSB has postdocs available with a deadline of October 16, 2009:
Station Q will be recruiting postdoctoral researchers. We are primarily interested in applicants with a strong background in quantum Hall physics, topological insulators, quantum information in condensed matter, and/or numerical methods, but will consider excellent candidates…
pharyngula | August 17, 2009But the sentiment is worthy. There is a petition you can sign asking the British government to express some public remorse for what was done to Alan Turing. I'm sure you all know who he was, but just in case…
Alan Turing was the greatest computer scientist ever born in Britain. He laid the foundations of computing, helped break the Nazi Enigma code and told us how to tell whether a machine could think.
He was also gay. He was prosecuted for being gay, chemically castrated as a 'cure', and took his own life, aged 41.
The British Government should apologize to Alan Turing for his treatment…
dsalo | August 17, 2009The publisher Information Today runs a good and useful book series for librarians who find themselves with job duties they weren't expecting and don't feel prepared for. There's The Accidental Systems Librarian and The Accidental Library Marketer (that one's new) and a whole raft of other accidents.
I suspect "The Accidental Informaticist" would find an audience, and not just among librarians.
The long and short of it is, we just don't know who is going to do a lot of the e-research gruntwork at this point. Campus IT at major research institutions is seizing on the fun grid-computing work,…