Technology

There’s something unavoidable about Wikipedia, even when you acknowledge its flaws, which makes it a constantly interested phenomenon to investigate and analyze. As the article notes, its rankings in search results and use in question answering systems like Siri only make it more interesting to understand what’s going on with it. Looking at the effect of the editorial structure and automated tools for handling edits is particularly interesting; I hadn’t really thought about the effect of bots on participation in this way: In their paper on those findings, the researchers suggest updating Wikipedia’s motto, “The encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” … Continue reading Building the right community for community editing

This is awesome – I’ve long been in love with intrusions that rely on listening in on the sound of keystrokes, or the wiggle of a laptop screen, or what have you to learn and then reproduce what has been typed. This variation where a smartphone on your desk can pick up typing vibrations and from there learn to recognize what you are typing. It’s proof of concept, not found out in the wild at this point, but still very cool.

Starting out as an explanation of the traveling salesman problem, this article goes on to also be an excellent, and I think understandable, explanation of what an algorithm is and computational complexity. If you want to get a quick sense of what computer science is concerned about that goes beyond just “how to program”, and is more the “how to solve problems” side of things, this is a good read. In 2006, for example, an optimal tour was produced by a team led by Cook for a 85,900-city tour. It did not, of course, given the computing constraints mentioned above, … Continue reading Traveling Happy Truck Drivers

I’m supervising a capstone project right now where students are providing data analysis and visualization support for a local organization, and the following set of links have been queueing up in my feed as to-read items for me related to that project (and, hopefully, to-read items for them): eagereyes has a nice summary of ISOTYPE (International System of Typographic Picture Education) which in the roughest strokes is those charts where the number of an item is represented not by a bar but as a collection of images or icons representing the thing being counted. But it’s a lot more complicated … Continue reading Data Vis Roundup

My security class is talking about the types of commonly seen mistakes that can crop up when writing programs that lead to security flaws, and while I usually introduce the ideas using “normal” programming examples because it is the common background I can assume my students have, I’m trying to help the students map these ideas to what they’ve seen of database or web development as well. So I finally went back in my saved links and read through a Google blog post from a month ago about security issues in hosting user content, specifically web content. After a brief … Continue reading Risks in user content

This security critique of the Tesco website is a hoot. It walks through an increasingly deep, and increasing damning, look at what is wrong with their setup, and how you can tell. The critique is well peppered with links to additional content about the problems being described, so it’s not a bad starting place to learn something about web security. It is also an accessible illustration of the type of exploration and deduction that can be used to profile a system and its vulnerability. Finally, to me, it reads as a nice lesson in why you can’t just “throw some … Continue reading This entry readable in lynx 2.8.3 or higher.