Modularity is a desirable but elusive design property for large scale programs and computer systems [10, 11]. Designs that appear modular may, once put into practice, actually turn out to be example of “false modularity” because of interdependencies between components.
Oh snap – Maurice Wilkes on Alan Turing
He was a real mathematician except that he only learned one little bit of mathematics and then didn’t learn any more. He was no practical organizer and, well, if you had Turing around in the place you wouldn’t get it
Peer review in the electronic age
In academic computer science, conferences are often more important than journals, but The current system of publication in biomedical research provides a distorted view of the reality of scientific data that are generated in the laboratory and clinic. This system
Continuing mathematician sanity thread: Boltzmann
[Boltzmann] Opposition to his ideas was harsh and his moods were volatile. Despondent, fearing disintegration of his theories,he hanged himself in 1906. It wasn’t his first suicide attempt, but it was his most successful. This kind of expresses the mood
More computer science as humbug [updated with Brazil dream sequence]
Continuing my experiments in academic papers, I sent a paper on automata and circuit verification to CAV2010 (here’s an updated version with some corrections and better references). I actually got one carefully written and well informed review. Sending a paper
Shape of the internet
“When we started releasing data publicly, we measured it in petabytes of traffic,” said Doug Webster, a Cisco Systems market executive who is responsible for an annual report by the firm that charts changes in the Internet. “Then a couple
Power savings via software
This press release is particularly fluffy, but whatever the reality of this very vaguely defined algorithmic development the basic message is correct to validate nine terabytes of data (nine million million or a number with 12 zeros) in less than