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Bill Gasarch

An Undervalued Math Problem

As most of you know there are 7 problems worth $1,000,000 (see here). It may be just 6 since Poincare's conjecture has probably been solved. Why are these problems worth that much money? There are other open problems that are…

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spectacle at Web2.0 Expo... from my perspective

Last week, I gave a talk at Web2.0 Expo. From my perspective, I did a dreadful job at delivering my message. Yet, the context around my talk sparked a broad conversation about the implications of turning the backchannel into…

Users Rationally Rejecting Security Advice

Users Rationally Rejecting Security Advice

This paper, by Cormac Herley at Microsoft Research, sounds like me:

Abstract: It is often suggested that users are hopelessly lazy and unmotivated on security questions. They chose weak passwords, ignore security warnings, and…

fMRI used in Sentencing

Having just personally experienced my first fMRI, this caught my eye. Apparently the first time that this has been done in a courtroom. Not that the method is being used to determine truth/falsehood, a much tougher thing, but…

4-year Masters

Harvard, like many other places, has an option by which students (with "Advanced Standing" from AP classes) can obtain a Master's (in some programs) as well as their undergraduate degree in 4 years. The School of Engineering…

Real Code is Messy

Reading John Harrison's blog of November 3 got me thinking about what I am trying to teach my students in my third-semester (university) course about the development of large software systems. They seem to have a good handle…

An Extra Piece of Chicken

I see that Marco Marsan has set up a new site and blog for Marco Polo, his strategic innovation company. So what is this about chicken? See his great story about this aspect of under promising and over delivering. The Lagniappe

Run-length encoding (part I)

Run-length encoding (RLE) is probably the most important and fundamental string compression technique. Countless multimedia formats and protocols use one form or RLE compression or another. RLE is also deceptively simple. It…

DIMACS at 20

Last Friday DIMACS celebrated its 20th anniversary. Muthu summarizes the event.

DIMACS has served the theoretical computer science community well over these two decades. They have hosted a number of postdocs and visitors usually

links for 2009-11-24

links for 2009-11-24
  • From Forbes, no less: "In 2009, 30 million people sit unemployed in America. Yet, the speculators have managed to lift the stock market up, and the media pretends that we're having

Norbt

Norbt

Norbt (no robot) is a low-security web application to encrypt web pages. You can create and encrypt a webpage. The key is an answer to a question; anyone who knows the answer can see the page.

I'm not sure this is very useful…


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