Everyone wants to work for Google, Facebook, Apple or preferably the next big tech company (well at least lots of our students do). Silicon Valley is booming like never before and San Francisco has become a dormitory town with real estate prices going through the roof and locals being priced out of traditional neighbourhoods. Understandably this is causing some resentment against the tech company employees. However, it's not just the obvious people who are starting to question if the Silicon Vally boom is healthy. This piece, by Andrew Yang, called What's eating Silicon Valley asks some very interesting questions about how sustainable this all is. Thanks to my colleague, Mark Wilson, for noticing this.
"A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates" is an unlikely title for a best seller but this book has been in print since 1955. If you're a mathematician you'll know that it's actually very hard to generate truly random numbers and since random numbers are widely used by statisticians, physicists, poll takers, market analysts, lottery administrators, and others this publication was designed to solve that problem. So, if you are in the need of a series of random numbers this book is for you.
Happy New Year. This blog is back from its annual holiday. Some of you will probably have received a fitness tracker, such as a Fitbit, for a Xmas present. So-called "wearables" had a very good year in 2015 and 2016 look to be even better. This article in Wired explores the trends and suggests that wearables are soon to become even more wearable.
It's always nice to see an article on A.I. in the local newspaper, The New Zealand Herald. So the article titled Autocorrect fails could be distant mammary as computers start to learn like us, by Sarah Knapton made for an interesting read. Here's a quote: "Most mobile phone users have suffered the indignity of an embarrassing autocorrect mistake, but smartphones may soon be smart enough to understand what we are trying to say." Scientists claim that for the first time, they have programmed a machine to learn in the same way as humans. I recommend the full article.
A recent article in The Atlantic titled The Moral Failure of Computer Scientists argues that computer scientists should take on the surveillance state rather than providing governments with the tools to strip away citizens privacy. Phillip Rogaway, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, puts forward his opinion in an interview with journalist Kaveh Waddell.
My colleague Mark Wilson brought this to my attention.
Our very own Clarke Thomborson! The iSANZ Awards are a showcase of excellence in New Zealand information security. Their mission is to formally recognise the achievements of outstanding New Zealand InfoSec professionals, companies and initiatives / events. The Best International Superstar award category is open to individuals who achieved significant results in the development or promotion of work that has had a high international profile. Clarke won the award for his contributions in trust, identity and privacy management which have helped significantly raise the profile of ICT within New Zealand.
We're all used to Google Earth and the phrase "large enough to be seen from space" has little meaning now when you can see my patio furniture on Google Earth. But, high quality satellite images have been generated since the 1960s. Many of these have been declassified and are available on the US Geological Survey's Earth Explorer website. These images are not restricted to the US - they're spy photos so the whole world is pretty much covered. The interface takes a bit of figuring out but there are a lot of resources available on the site. Many researchers, such as archeologists, are finding these images very useful, as is reported in this National Gepgraphic article.
