The Next Web
This video is probably worth it only for Tim O’reilly and his discussion of what Web 2.0 is:
This video is probably worth it only for Tim O’reilly and his discussion of what Web 2.0 is:
I read a paper on the Google Similarity Distance this morning by Cilibrasi and Vitanyi. They search for word cooccurrences using the Google search engine. Their formula goes as follows: (G(x,y)-min(G(x,x),G(y,y)))/max(G(x,x),G(y,y)) where G is the “Google code” function. The Google code function is defined as -log g(x,y) where g(x,y) is the normalized number of web pages containing both term x and term y: the normalization is such that if you sum up g(x,y) over all x,y then you get 1.0. With this simple approach, they seem to be able to translate between English and Spanish, build a thesaurus, and so on. This reminds me a bit of the recent work done by Turney on analogies.
The Australasian Database Conference (ADC2008) will be held at the University of Wollongong. It looks like a pretty good generic database conference.
In the last year, I decided to go back to science-fiction novels and learn what is out there. Here are my favorite scifi authors.
I plan to try my luck next with Iain Banks. I am actively looking for recommendations on what to read next.
I did a little bit of research on the Web today, following a statement by my friend Owen to the effect that yield returns were not something Joe Programmer could be expected to know about.
Turns out that yield returns are supported in C#, Visual Basic (VB.NET), Python and Ruby.
So, yes, I’d say that if you are programmer out there, you ought to know about yield returns.
The New Scientist (and slashdot) reports that a very simple method that basically achieves what million-dollars Quantum Cryptography set out to achieve: unbreakable two-way communication. This is due to Laszlo Kish. His papers are on arxiv and they appear pretty convincing, but I have left the world of Physics a long time ago.
Bruce Schneier describes it in those terms:
How would you feel if you invested millions of dollars in quantum cryptography, and then learned that you could do the same thing with a few 25-cent Radio Shack components?
And he concludes:
Basically, if Kish’s scheme is secure, it’s superior to quantum communications in every respect: price, maintenance, speed, vibration, thermal resistance and so on.
Is this true? Is Quantum Cryptography obselete?
There seems to be theoretical difficulties with Kish’s approach, but his experiments seem to suggest that he got it right.
The New Scientist (and slashdot) reports that a very simple method that basically achieves what million dollars Quantum Cryptography set out to achieve: unbreakable two-way communication due to Laszlo Kish.
Bruce Schneier describes it in those terms:
How would you feel if you invested millions of dollars in quantum cryptography, and then learned that you could do the same thing with a few 25-cent Radio Shack components?
And he concludes:
Basically, if Kish’s scheme is secure, it’s superior to quantum communications in every respect: price, maintenance, speed, vibration, thermal resistance and so on.
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© 2004-2008, Daniel Lemire (lemire at acm dot org). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
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