How to Develop a Mindset for Math | BetterExplained
Elegant, “a ha” insights should be our focus, but we leave that for students to randomly stumble upon themselves. I hit an “a ha” moment after a hellish cram session in college; since then, I’ve wanted to find and share those epiphanies to spare others the same pain.
Solid two-page article on developing a mindset for math. I’ve often lamented about how American public education fails mathematics completely.
How To Break Anonymity of the Netflix Prize Dataset
We present a new class of statistical de-anonymization attacks against high-dimensional micro-data, such as individual preferences, recommendations, transaction records and so on. Our techniques are robust to perturbation in the data and tolerate some mistakes in the adversary’s background knowledge.
We apply our de-anonymization methodology to the Netflix Prize dataset, which contains anonymous movie ratings of 500,000 subscribers of Netflix, the world’s largest online movie rental service. We demonstrate that an adversary who knows only a little bit about an individual subscriber can easily identify this subscriber’s record in the dataset. Using the Internet Movie Database as the source of background knowledge, we successfully identified the Netflix records of known users, uncovering their apparent political preferences and other potentially sensitive information.
I’m almost done with a research project regarding Tor, so I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at anonymity. This is pretty sweet.
Swap Adjacent Gems to Make Sets of Three: A History of Matching Tile Games
This article aims to write the history of a video game genre. The genre is that of matching tile games, video games where the object of the player is to manipulate tiles on a grid in order to create matches.
Swap Adjacent Gems to Make Sets of Three: A History of Matching Tile Games [via]
Stony Brook at Supercomputing Conference ’07
My dad goes to “Supercomputing Conference” for his job at HPTi, and grabs me fun swag. I never hear about it on the regular nerd sites I read, but this year there was a post on Metafilter Projects:
Myself and 4 other undergrads from Stony Brook University, plus a faculty supervisor, are competing against 5 other international teams to build the faster, more powerful, and most impressive supercomputing cluster to operate under 26 Amps of power. I’m covering (in reverse chronological order, start at the bottom) the progress of the Stony Brook team on the SC07 section of my blog.
I mentioned this to my dad, and he stopped and talked with the guys and snapped some pictures.
Rands In Repose: The Nerd Handbook
A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That’s the nerd working on his project in his head.
Tonsure – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tonsure is the practice of some Christian churches, mystics, Buddhist and some Hindu temples of cutting the hair from the scalp of clerics, devotees or holy people as a symbol of their renunciation of worldly fashion and esteem.
As Slow As Possible
Organ²/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible) is a musical piece composed by John Cage. It was originally written in 1987 for organ and is adapted from the earlier work ASLSP 1985; a typical performance of the piano piece lasts for about 20 minutes.
A 1997 conference of musicians and philosophers discussed the implications of his instruction to play the piece “as slow as possible”, given that an organ imposes virtually no time limits. A project emerged to perform the piece so that it would take a total of 639 years to play. This length was decided based on the estimated lifespan of the organ. The origin of this number is as follows: the piece was to be performed in the St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany, beginning in the year 2000; 639 years earlier, in the year 1361, the first big organ had been constructed in that church.
Cryptome source claims NSA backdoors in Windows Mobile smartphones
The vast IP ranges published by Cryptome are used by NSA, by NSA’s private sector contractors, and by NSA-friendly non-US national government agencies to access both stand-alone systems and networks running Microsoft products. This includes wireless wiretapping of “smart phones” running Microsoft Mobile. Microsoft remote administrative privileges allow “backdooring” into Microsoft operating systems via IP/TCP ports 1024 through 1030. This is most often triggered when machines visit Microsoft update servers. Once remote administrative privileges are established, machines can be accessed remotely as desired. Some firewall/intrusion detection software publishers knowingly facilitate this; further details regarding which publishers and their means of facilitation are currently unavailable but will be provided to Cryptome upon discovery.
Clock of the Long Now
I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years. If I hurry I should finish the clock in time to see the cuckoo come out for the first time.
— Danny Hillis
The Clock of the Long Now, also called the 10,000-year clock, is a proposed mechanical clock designed to keep time for 10,000 years. The project to build it is part of the Long Now Foundation.