Friday Nov 23, 2007
An art installation about the Entscheidungsproblem
Last night all my BTEC class did art installations. Mine involved 16 PCs all running a Flash movie and was named 'the Entscheidungsproblem'.
Tuesday Nov 20, 2007
Back doors, complexity and the death of RSA?
Thanks to Financial Cryptography for a reference to Adi Shamir's work on ways of cracking RSA by a 'bug attack' - using a deliberate or accidental bug in the PC processing chip itself.
Monday Nov 19, 2007
Quintuplets crying and journalistic integrity
The BBC has admitted adding a sound track to video news footage. Why is this so disturbing?
Saturday Nov 17, 2007
Boutique MMOGs - they can and do exist
Thanks to Cliffski for a link to an article about 'boutique MMOGs'.
US National Planning Scenarios and exercises
The US has a list of National Planning Scenarios for use in major exercises. Scarcely a day passes without some sort of exercise there, usually with a terrorist-based scenario.
Thursday Nov 15, 2007
Quintuplets and probability
The BBC has a story about quintuplets born in the UK last Saturday. On the radio news, they said the odds against natural quintuplet birth are 65 million to one. Which makes me think about our perceptions of probability
Wednesday Nov 14, 2007
Forecasting dissent: forecasting anything?
Excellent posting on Naqniq about US government systems designed to forecast dissent. It tracks the history of ICEWS and includes some critical comments.
Tuesday Nov 13, 2007
Politics in Turkey visualised by an artist-munger.
Thanks to Networked Performance I've just seen tr_act.info by Arzu Ozkal Telhan, which graphically summarises live data about Turkish politics.
Sunday Nov 4, 2007
A massive simulation network - protein folding.
The BBC has a story about folding@home (FAH) which has just been recognised by Guinness World Records as the world's most powerful distributed computing network.
EpiSimS: a simulation made transparent
JASSS has a paper about the EpiSimS model which simulates the spread of pandemic influenza. This gives a fascinating insight into the way a model is built up, and the assumptions underlying it.
Complexity in World Politics.
Interesting review in JASSS of Complexity in World Politics edited by Neil Harrison, on the complexity of political systems and the need to simulate them to understand them.
Saturday Nov 3, 2007
On controlling electromagnetic radiation and the data it carries
WearTec blog posts about a fabric that claims to block mobile phone radiation and Netowrk Performance reports an art-work by Susan Hartig that uses it to make a tent.