Biweekly links for 08/14/2009

  • ongoing · Blog & Tweet
    • Tim Bray: “Because whenever you see a vendor owning a communications medium, that’s part of the problem, not part of the solution. Even if the vendor is as lovable as Twitter; and I do love ’em. So I’m going to route around the breakage, and you might want to think about doing the same.”
  • Motivic stuff
    • Another interesting new mathematical blog, this one focusing on cohomology, homotopy theory, and arithmetic geometry.
  • Augmented Social Cognition: More details of changing editor resistance in Wikipedia
    • Data showing that new editors are much more likely to have their edits reverted. Claims that this shows Wikipedia is become more resistant to new ideas. The obvious objection is that maybe all it shows is that the contributions of new editors aren’t very good compared to established editors. Stil, lots of interesting data.
  • Augmented Social Cognition: The slowing growth of Wikipedia: some data, models, and explanations
    • Wikipedia’s growth rate has essentially plateaued.
  • David Byrne: So, How Does It Work on the Bus?
    • Excellent article from David Byrne about being a rock star on tour. A few little tidbits: they place at least 4 shows a week to make ends meet, so there’s not a lot of time to stick around; the tour used to be viewed as a loss leader to sell albums (no more!); they usually depart just 90 minutes after show ends; and much more.
  • A Comparison of Open Source Search Engines « zooie’s blog
  • Benchmarking Amazon EC2 for High-Performance Scientific Computing
    • Interesting, though many others factors will often need to be compared in practice. Abstract: “How effective are commercial cloud computers for high-performance scientific computing compared to currently available alternatives? I aim to answer a specific instance of this question by examining the performance of Amazon EC2 for high-performance scientific applications. I used macro and micro benchmarks to study the performance of a cluster composed of EC2 high-CPU compute nodes and compared this against the performance of a cluster composed of equivalent processors available to the open scientific research community. My results show a significant performance gap in the examined clusters that system builders, computational scientists, and commercial cloud computing vendors need to be aware of.”

Click here for all of my del.icio.us bookmarks.