Economics is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The word 'economics' is from the Greek for (oikos: house) and íüìïò (nomos: custom or law), hence "rules of the house(hold)."
Adaptive user interfaces
<a
href="http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/kgajos/papers/supple-iui04.pdf">Supple:
automatically generating user interfaces</a>, by Krzysztof Gajos and
Dan Weld<br>
This shows a promising approach to something that is going to become
increasingly important as people start using different kinds of
devices to access their applications - phones, TVs, PCs, dedicated
devices, etc. They treat interface construction as an optimization
problem. Given a set of tasks and associated model elements, along
with a set of available user interface elements, Supple will generate
a user interface. It takes into account effort metrics for the
different elements and transitions so that it can generate different
widget selections for phones, touch screens, and WIMP
interfaces. Furthermore, it can include statistical information from
user activity traces to optimize the interface for more frequent
tasks. They actually did comparative studies with human designers
(students who had taken an HCI course), and Supple did about as
well. Supple isn't going to run the Excel or Photoshop UI anytime
soon, but it's not far from being useful for line-of-business
applications and third-tier websites, most of which have atrocious
usability. If Microsoft IT started using this I'd applaud - right now,
I cringe every time I fill out an expense report or renew my parking
permit. (On further thought, maybe it's not so far from being useful
for Office - I bet the new Office UI redesign produced much of the task
analysis that Supple would need...)
Economics of Software as a Service
<a href="http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/PDFDownload.aspx?L2=4&L3=43&ar=2006&srid=17">
Delivering Software as a Service - McKinsey Quarterly</a>
<p>Two interesting data points:</p>
<p>While SaaS companies have lower operating margins than packaged
software companies overall, if you restrict the comparison to
comparably-sized packaged software companies, the numbers look
essentially identical:<br>
<img src="/sw/McKinseySaas1.gif"/></p>
<p>However, if you look at the customer cost side, there's a huge
advantage to SaaS:<br>
<img src="/sw/McKinseySaas2.gif"/></p>
Bayesian Collaboration
<a href="http://nostoc.stanford.edu/jeff/personal/vita/pubs/CACHE2BayesCommunity.pdf">
Multistage Collaboration in CACHE: The Bayes Community Model</a><br>
CACHE has a simple structured collaboration model - an investigator
makes hypotheses as a result of evidence, and one person's hypothesis
can be another person's evidence. This is enough to allow the system
to track provenance of conclusions, and update beliefs through
Bayesian inference as new information is added. It would be a very
powerful tool for collaborative investigation, decision making, or
data analysis. (Via <a href="http://www.pancrit.org">Chris
Hibbert</a>). Quick Links
<p><a
href="http://www.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/logic-fast05.pdf">A
Logic of Filesystems</a><br> An interesting general logical framework
for modeling the memory & disk consistency of filesystems - not just
to ensure they are correct, but also to avoid unnecessary operations
that don't add to logical consistency guarantees. Of course, as my
officemate <a href="http://keithaka.com">Keith Kaplan</a> responds,
"Would I sound like a bitter FS guy if I pointed out that the vast
majority of disk hardware is provably incorrect, and then asked why
does everybody place such high standards on the filesystem? Yes, I
think I do sound like a bitter FS guy. <g>" I suppose it still might
be a way to analyze how you handle all the provably incorrect errors
disks throw at you...</p>
<p><a href="http://www.cs.wisc.edu/%7Ekchak/papers/csp-asplos06.pdf">
Computation Spreading: Employing Hardware Migration to Specialize CMP
Cores On-the-fly</a><br> Separating OS and application threads to
different cores yields significant performance increase by reducing
contention for cache, branch prediction, etc. They do this using VM
instructions, but a microkernel could do this more explicitly.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.bio-itworld.com/newsitems/2008/jan/16-sbnl-predictive-model-for-cell">A
Predictive Model for Transcriptional Control of Physiology in a Free
Living Cell</a><br> They were able to get significant predictive power
for transciption behavior in new experiments from a relatively small
number of microarray samples and other data. Unfortunately, Microsoft
doesn't (yet :-) have a subscription to <i>Cell</i> so I can't read
the original paper...</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.rufuspollock.org/economics/papers/optimal_copyright_talk.pdf">Forever
Minus a Day? Some Theory and Empirics of Optimal Copyright</a><br> A
very nice application of straightforward economic analysis of the
variables affecting the social welfare from copyright (discount rate,
"cultural decay" rate of value of work, production cost, value of new
work produced vs. additional value gained from releasing copyright on
older works, etc.) Even though the empirical data only give rather
wide ranges of estimates for these, they show that the current
copyright terms are much too long under a robust set of assumptions;
the best estimate is that the optimal term is around 15 years.</p>
K42 and Tornado
My colleague Eric Northup has mentioned these a few times, and I'm
glad I looked them up. The Tornado OS (from my alma mater, U of T) and
its successor <a
href="http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/k42.index.html#publications">K42</a>
(at IBM Research) use a fine-grained object-oriented approach to all
operating system structures (processes, memory regions, etc.), with
built-in clustering for replicated instances across processors. This
reduces lock contention and increases cache locality by operating on
the per-processor instance as much as possible. Since objects are
generally expected to be local, it can optimize for this case, and
track cross-processor operations as a special case. There are some
policy choices (e.g. maintaining replica tables for all processors)
that would probably need to be adapted for manycore.
<p> The scalability architecture is best described in <a
href="http://www.research.ibm.com/K42/papers/scalability-techrep.pdf">this
paper</a>. The memory manager was key, e.g. for locality-aware
allocation, padding to cache line size to avoid false sharing,
deferring deletion until quiescence to avoid existence locks, etc. An
insight as the basic Tornado model was applied to real workloads was
that creation-time object specialization isn't sufficient, instead it
is better to for example start with an unshared implementation and
then upgrade to shared implementation when multiple processes share an
object. They were able to improve their 24-proc scalability from
"terrible" to pretty good in 2 weeks of work because of good OO
discipline and <a href="http://www.research.ibm.com/K42/papers/sc03.pdf">
tracing infrastructure</a>.
<p> Overall, I found it striking how the scalability architecture
mirrored that for distributed systems - state partitioning,
replication, <a
href="http://www.research.ibm.com/K42/papers/oasis04.pdf"> dynamic
upgrade</a>, etc. I had expected this from general principles, but it
was valuable to see it confirmed in practice with significant
workloads. The scalability graphs are impressively linear. Security
isn't mentioned, but I expect that the same OO design that gives the
OS good modularity and scalability could be applied to give it good
capability discipline as well. Concurrency is here to stay
I was looking through the <a
href="http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/News/07/1114BOF.html">slides from the
NCSA Petascale BOF session at SC07</a>. The slides weren't a
particularly good substitute for the actual presentation,
unfortunately. However, this graph caught my eye - in case you were
wondering whether we'd hit the single-processor scaling wall, it
leaves little room for doubt:<br> <img src="/sw/NCSAPetascale-Shalf.jpg">
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British Etiquette For Tourists By Roberto Bell To enjoy your travelling experience in Britain it is wise to brush up on your knowledge of the cultural norms and attitudes prevalent in England. Though you will meet all types, you will find it helpful to be familiar with certain local norms regarding polite socialization. Thus armed, you will avoid awkward cultural trip-ups and attract the true charm of England's inhabitants.
First, the British prefer to minimize contact and so are uncomfortable with backslapping, hugging or greetings by way of kissing. They prefer for a wide comfort zone to be adhered to during conversation. Conversation should be kept polite and light. You may, however, find yourself being called affectionate names and you should not feel offended when you do (such as being called “dearie, love, chick, guv, me duckie, chuck and many similar names.) Madam, sir, miss and ma'am are safe starting points for your own greetings.
There are some topics you should avoid when starting or having a conversation, considered impolite :
1)Avoid the topic of religion altogether, and the science vs religion debate. 2)Avoid speaking about politics and racial issues – this should go without saying. Avoid talking about immigration and immigration laws. The British are very passionate about their political views, and are easily offended by this. 3)Avoid talking about – can often be closely linked in with politics, so it's a good idea to avoid this topic. 4)Don't speak about the class system – this can offend Britons, especially in certain areas. 5)Don't criticise Britain or the British 6)Avoid issues of sexual orientation, or asking someone their age
There are certain topics that will always get a conversation going and will be quite welcomed by many of the British :
1) Sport. Especially football (soccer,) rugby
IS this <em>Really</em> something we want? (<a href="http://www.techcentralstation.be/2051/wrapper.jsp?PID=2051-100&CID=2051-070303N" target="_blank">Review</a>) Joseph Goeller writes that, while the Germans aren't all that keen on military cooperation with the US, they appear to be increasingly k Wanted: Dead or Alive (<a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,91035,00.html" target="_blank">Review</a>) Twenty-five million smackers. That's the reward the US is offering for Saddam Hussein's head. Uday and Qusay are going for 15 mil a pop. Bad News for job Seekers (<a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,91015,00.html" target="_blank">Review</a>) The econoboys were unpleasantly surprised by the weak employment numbers this morning.<blockquote>The nation's unemployment rate (search) shot up to 6.4 percent in J Destroying black youth (<a href="http://www.townhall.com/columnists/walterwilliams/ww20030702.shtml" target="_blank">Review</a>) Economist Walter Williams writes that all the affirmative action programs in the world won't be of much help to minority youths whose opportunities How do our soldiers do it? (<a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson070203.asp" target="_blank">Review</a>) Victor Davis Hanson asks how our soldiers do it.<blockquote>At this point, I must ask, how do our men in arms do what they do? We so often forget that their dilem The road to Mars (<a href="http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030701-092327-8295r.htm" target="_blank">Review</a>) Robert Zubrin says it's time to go to mars. He's right. Getting the party started (<a href="http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/030630/biztech/30market.htm" target="_blank">Review</a>) James Pethokoukis, writing for <em>US News</em>, notes that the stock market rally looks like it may be the real deal.<blockquote>But a broader trend see And it's about time, too (<a href="http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1054966581303&p=1012571727126" target="_blank">Review</a>) Gordon Adams writes in the <em>Financial Times</em> that Europe should face the fact that it's t More Photos This weekend, Chris and I spent all day Saturday taking pictures along the San Diego coast. A couple of good photos came out of it. Click on the thumbnails below to see the full picture.<br /><br /><table width="500" border="1" cellpadding="2" cellspa 'Road map' to nowhere (<a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2003-07-01-oplede_x.htm" target="_blank">Review</a>) Max Boot's thesis about the Road Map can be summed up in one sentence: "Successful negotiations are impossible when one side won't recognize th The Crackup of the Arab Tyrannies? (<a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/853fjapb.asp" target="_blank">Review</a>) Amir Taheri writes that Arab governments have tried every bad political idea of the 20th century, an effort that has led to unremitting Mystical Balk (<a href="http://www.mysticalball.com/" target="_blank">Review</a>) OK. This is just freakin' me out. The other crisis (<a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-mcquillan-gloger070103.asp" target="_blank">Review</a>) Lawrence J. McQuillan & Andrew M. Gloger write that, even though California's other crises<sup>1</sup> are at the top of the news, it's the hi Note to Black America: Liberals are not your friends (<a href="http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/2135.htm" target="_blank">Review</a>) Dennis Prager succinctly explains how Affirmative Action harms black Americans.<blockquote>The first and most important reason affirmative action hurts black Not as bad a Nick Kristoff seems to think (<a href="http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/2135.htm" target="_blank">Review</a>) Ralph Peters writes that we shouldn't take counsel of our fears about how things are going in Iraq. They are evidently going a lot better than the big media
or cricket. These are the favourite sports of the country. Careful, though, you don't want to bring up the topic if a match has just been lost! 2)The weather 3)Entertainment – the latest music, trends or celebrities. 4)Travel – you can speak of your own travels or speak about travelling in general, many British do travel, but it depends where you are 5)Current affairs – keep away from politics or racial issues, but you can speak about current affairs in a light and polite way. Perhaps more local affairs would stir up more interest. 6)History – most especially British history. If you are in a specific town or place, ask questions about it, the British are proud of their heritage.
In Britain, it's good to remain polite and patient at all times. If there is a Queue , go to the back of the Queue and wait your turn. Greet people with a short “good morning,” “hi,” or “how do you do.” The latter is a greeting, not a question in Britain. If you are a man, it is important to take off your hat whenever you go indoors, every time. A brief firm handshake when being introduced or introducing yourself is ok with most people, but for a second meeting don't shake a woman's hand unless she initiates. Never kiss or hug as a greeting. Always say 'excuse me' if you bump into someone or need to move past, and don't speak to people with your hands in your pockets. Lastly, it is important to remember that at most restaurants and hotels a service fee of 10-15% is charged, and a tip is typically appreciated.
Chris Morley is a major contributor at Rate Free Stuff. She is also the editor of the UK freebies category at UK Free Stuff.
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