"talks" entries

Four short links: 29 February 2016

Four short links: 29 February 2016

Robots & Decisions, Brain Modem, Distributed Devops Clue, and Robots in Law

  1. Learning Models for Robot Decision Making (YouTube) — a talk at the CMU Robotics Institute.
  2. Brain Modema tiny sensor that travels through blood vessels, lodges in the brain and records neural activity. The “stentrode” (stent + electrode) is the size of a paperclip, and Melbourne researchers (funded by DARPA) have made the first successful animal trials.
  3. The Past and Future are Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed (Usenix) — slides, audio and video.
  4. Robots in American LawThis article closely examines a half century of case law involving robots. […] The first set highlights the role of robots as the objects of American law. Among other issues, courts have had to decide whether robots represent something “animate” for purposes of import tariffs, whether robots can “perform” as that term is understood in the context of a state tax on performance halls, and whether a salvage team “possesses” a shipwreck it visits with an unmanned submarine. (via BoingBoing)
Four short links: 4 February 2016

Four short links: 4 February 2016

Shmoocon Video, Smart Watchstrap, Generalizing Learning, and Dataflow vs Spark

  1. Shmoocon 2016 Videos (Internet Archive) — videos of the talks from an astonishingly good security conference.
  2. TipTalk — Samsung watchstrap that is the smart device … put your finger in your ear to hear the call. You had me at put my finger in my ear. (via WaPo)
  3. Ecorithms — Leslie Valiant at Harvard broadened the concept of an algorithm into an “ecorithm,” which is a learning algorithm that “runs” on any system capable of interacting with its physical environment. Algorithms apply to computational systems, but ecorithms can apply to biological organisms or entire species. The concept draws a computational equivalence between the way that individuals learn and the way that entire ecosystems evolve. In both cases, ecorithms describe adaptive behavior in a mechanistic way.
  4. Dataflow/Beam vs Spark (Google Cloud) — To highlight the distinguishing features of the Dataflow model, we’ll be comparing code side-by-side with Spark code snippets. Spark has had a huge and positive impact on the industry thanks to doing a number of things much better than other systems had done before. But Dataflow holds distinct advantages in programming model flexibility, power, and expressiveness, particularly in the out-of-order processing and real-time session management arenas.
Four short links: 1 January 2016

Four short links: 1 January 2016

Caffeine, Matt Webb, Human Robots, and Bloated Websites

  1. Is Caffeine a Cognitive Enhancer? (PDF) — Two general mechanisms may account for most of the observed effects of caffeine on performance: (1) an indirect, non-specific ‘arousal’ or ‘processing resources’ factor, presumably explaining why the effects of caffeine are generally most pronounced when task performance is sustained or degraded under suboptimal conditions; and (2) a more direct and specific ‘perceptual-motor’ speed or efficiency factor that may explain why, under optimal conditions, some aspects of human performance and information processing, in particular those related to sensation, perception, motor preparation, and execution, are more sensitive to caffeine effects than those related to cognition, memory, and learning. See also Smith 2005‘s caffeine led to a more positive mood and improved performance on a number of tasks. Different effects of caffeine were seen depending on the person’s level of arousal. Linear effects of caffeine dose were also observed. This is evidence against the argument that behavioral changes due to caffeine are merely the reversal of negative effects of a long period of caffeine abstinence. (via cogsci.stackexchange.com)
  2. On Stars and Thinking Things Through (Courtney Johnston) — Matt (to my eyes, anyway) doesn’t have a singular ‘thing’: he has this kind of spangly web of interests and skills that coalesces around a line of enquiry and results in the making or doing of a thing, and these things in turn become part of that web and generate further experiments and thinking. Seconded.
  3. Human-like Robot — and just like a real woman, the first paragraphs about the robot focus on soft skin and flowing brunette hair not how well she does her job. Progress!
  4. Website Obesity (Maciej Ceglowski) — The javascript alone in “Leeds Hospital Bosses Apologise after Curry and Crumble On The Same Plate” is longer than /Remembrance of Things Past/.
Four short links: 29 December 2015

Four short links: 29 December 2015

Security Talks, Multi-Truth Discovery, Math Books, and Geek Cultures

  1. 2015 CCC Videos — collected talks from the 32nd Chaos Computer Congress conference.
  2. An Integrated Bayesian Approach for Effective Multi-Truth Discovery (PDF) — Integrating data from multiple sources has been increasingly becoming commonplace in both Web and the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) applications to support collective intelligence and collaborative decision-making. Unfortunately, it is not unusual that the information about a single item comes from different sources, which might be noisy, out-of-date, or even erroneous. It is therefore of paramount importance to resolve such conflicts among the data and to find out which piece of information is more reliable.
  3. Direct Links to Free Springer Books — Springer released a lot of math books.
  4. A Psychological Exploration of Engagement in Geek CultureSeven studies (N = 2354) develop the Geek Culture Engagement Scale (GCES) to quantify geek engagement and assess its relationships to theoretically relevant personality and individual differences variables. These studies present evidence that individuals may engage in geek culture in order to maintain narcissistic self-views (the great fantasy migration hypothesis), to fulfill belongingness needs (the belongingness hypothesis), and to satisfy needs for creative expression (the need for engagement hypothesis). Geek engagement is found to be associated with elevated grandiose narcissism, extraversion, openness to experience, depression, and subjective well-being across multiple samples.
Four short links: 18 September 2015

Four short links: 18 September 2015

Mass Customization, Monolithic Codebase, Database Implementation, and Encrypted Databases

  1. The Wild Wild East (The Economist) — Fung Retailing Limited, a related firm, has over 3,000 outlets, a third of them in China. Victor Fung, its honorary chairman, sees the era of mass production giving way to one of mass customization. Markets are fragmenting and smartphones are empowering consumers to get “directly involved in what they buy, where it is made and how they buy it.” Zhao Xiande of CEIBS in Shanghai points to Red Collar, a firm that used simply to make and export garments. Now it lets customers the world over design their own shirts online and makes them to order. Another outfit, Home Koo, offers custom-built furniture online.
  2. Motivation for a Monolithic Codebase (YouTube) — interesting talk about Google’s codebase, the first time I know of that Google’s strategy for source code management was discussed in public.
  3. SQL in CockroachDB: Mapping Table Data to Key-Value Storage — very easy-to-follow simple database implementation lesson.
  4. cryptdbA database system that can process SQL queries over encrypted data.
Four short links: 29 January 2015

Four short links: 29 January 2015

Security Videos, Network Simulation, UX Book, and Profit in Perspective

  1. ShmooCon 2015 Videos — videos to security talks from ShmooCon 2015.
  2. Comcast (Github) — Comcast is a tool designed to simulate common network problems like latency, bandwidth restrictions, and dropped/reordered/corrupted packets. On BSD-derived systems such as OSX, we use tools like ipfw and pfctl to inject failure. On Linux, we use iptables and tc. Comcast is merely a thin wrapper around these controls.
  3. The UX ReaderThis ebook is a collection of the most popular articles from our [MailChimp] UX Newsletter, along with some exclusive content.
  4. Bad AssumptionsApple lost more money to currency fluctuations than Google makes in a quarter.
Four short links: 6 October 2014

Four short links: 6 October 2014

Nerd Culture, Cited Papers, Better Javascript, Robo-Provisioning

  1. Why Nerd Culture Must Die (Pete Warden) — Our ingrained sense of victimization has become a perverse justification for bullying. Hear, hear.
  2. Best Papers vs Top Cited Papers in CS (since 1996) — it is astonishing (to your humble not-in-academia author) how often “best paper” is not the most cited paper.
  3. Javascript: The Better Parts (YouTube) — Douglas Crockford laying it down.
  4. Boxenautomate the pain out of your development environment.
Four short links: 18 September 2014

Four short links: 18 September 2014

Writing Testable Code, Magical UIs, High-Performance ssh, and BASIC Lessons

  1. Guide to Writing Testable Code (PDF) — Google’s testable code suggestions, though C++-centric.
  2. Enchanted Objects (YouTube) — David Rose at Google talking about the UX of magical UIs. (via Mary Treseler)
  3. hpn-sshHigh Performance SSH/SCP.
  4. Lost Lessons from an 8-bit BASICThe little language that fueled the home computer revolution has been long buried beneath an avalanche of derision, or at least disregarded as a relic from primitive times. That’s too bad, because while the language itself has serious shortcomings, the overall 8-bit BASIC experience has high points that are worth remembering.
Four short links: 30 June 2014

Four short links: 30 June 2014

Interacting with Connected Objects, Continuous Security Review, Chess AI, and Scott Hanselman is Hilarious

  1. Interacting with a World of Connected Objects (Tom Coates) — notes from one of my favourite Foo Camp sessions.
  2. Security Considerations with Continuous Deployment (IBM) — rundown of categories of security issues your org might face, and how to tackle them in the continuous deployment cycle. (via Emma Jane Westby)
  3. The Chess Master and the Computer (Garry Kasparov) — Increasingly, a move isn’t good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn’t been done that way before. It’s simply good if it works and bad if it doesn’t. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers. (via Alexis Madrigal)
  4. Virtual Machines, Javascript, and Assembler (YouTube) — hilarious Velocity keynote by Scott Hanselman.
Four short links: 13 June 2014

Four short links: 13 June 2014

Decentralized Web, Reproducibility Talk, Javascript Microcontroller, and Docker Maturity

  1. Mapping the Decentralized Movement (Jon Udell) — the pendulum is about to swing back toward a more distributed Web.
  2. John Ioannidis: Reproducible Research, True or False? (YouTube) — his talk at Google. (via Paul Kedrosky)
  3. Tessel — a microcontroller that runs Javascript. For those who can’t handle C.</troll>
  4. Docker MisconceptionsThis is not impossible and can all be done – several large companies are already using Docker in production, but it’s definitely non-trivial. This will change as the ecosystem around Docker matures (via Flynn, Docker container hosting, etc), but currently if you’re going to attempt using Docker seriously in production, you need to be pretty skilled at systems management and orchestration.