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How much should software cost?
The biggest VA outlay — and its biggest savings generator — was the Vista’s Computerized Patient Record System, the home-grown system for electronic health records that was found by the study to cost $3.6 billion. Other IT networks for administering medications with bar codes, picture archiving and communication systems and the Laboratory Electronic Data Interoperability…
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Computer science as a failed discipline again
As a senior researcher, I am saddened to see funding agencies, department heads, deans, and promotion committees encouraging younger researchers to do shallow research. As a reader of what should be serious scientific journals, I am annoyed to see the computer science literature being polluted by more and more papers of less and less scientific…
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Notes on modularity
Modularity is a desirable but elusive design property for large scale programs and computer systems [10, 11]. Designs that appear modular may, once put into practice, actually turn out to be example of “false modularity” because of interdependencies between components. For example, the apparently modular architecture of micro-kernel operating systems [9] has run into practical…
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Oh snap – Maurice Wilkes on Alan Turing
He was a real mathematician except that he only learned one little bit of mathematics and then didn’t learn any more. He was no practical organizer and, well, if you had Turing around in the place you wouldn’t get it going. Looking back, what would you say was the significance of Turing’s 1936 Entscheidungs-problem paper?…
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Peer review in the electronic age
In academic computer science, conferences are often more important than journals, but The current system of publication in biomedical research provides a distorted view of the reality of scientific data that are generated in the laboratory and clinic. This system can be studied by applying principles from the field of economics. The “winner’s curse,” a…
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Continuing mathematician sanity thread: Boltzmann
[Boltzmann] Opposition to his ideas was harsh and his moods were volatile. Despondent, fearing disintegration of his theories,he hanged himself in 1906. It wasn’t his first suicide attempt, but it was his most successful. This kind of expresses the mood of Janna Levin’s book about topology, the size of the universe, and all sorts of…
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More computer science as humbug [updated with Brazil dream sequence]
Continuing my experiments in academic papers, I sent a paper on automata and circuit verification to CAV2010 (here’s an updated version with some corrections and better references). I actually got one carefully written and well informed review. Sending a paper to an academic conference with no references more recent than 20 years, was probably more…
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Shape of the internet
“When we started releasing data publicly, we measured it in petabytes of traffic,” said Doug Webster, a Cisco Systems market executive who is responsible for an annual report by the firm that charts changes in the Internet. “Then a couple of years ago we had to start measuring them in zettabytes, and now we’re measuring…
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Power savings via software
This press release is particularly fluffy, but whatever the reality of this very vaguely defined algorithmic development the basic message is correct to validate nine terabytes of data (nine million million or a number with 12 zeros) in less than 20 minutes, without compromising accuracy. Ordinarily, using the same system, this would take more than…
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Queues and algebra