The Economist explains: Why South Korea is really an internet dinosaur

SOUTH KOREA likes to think of itself as a world leader when it comes to the internet. It boasts the world’s swiftest average broadband speeds (of around 22 megabits per second). Last month the government announced that it will upgrade the country’s wireless network to 5G by 2020, making downloads about 1,000 times speedier than they are now. Rates of internet penetration are among the highest in the world. There is a thriving startup community (Cyworld, rolled out five years before Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, was the most popular social network in South Korea for a decade) and the country leads the world in video games as spectator sports. Yet in other ways the futuristic country is stuck in the dark ages. Last year Freedom House, an American NGO, ranked South Korea’s internet as only “partly free”. Reporters without Borders has placed it on a list of countries “under surveillance”, alongside Egypt, Thailand and Russia, in its report on “Enemies of the Internet”. Is forward-looking South Korea actually rather backward?

via The Economist explains: Why South Korea is really an internet dinosaur | The Economist.

Three research positions at the French ANR project HPAC

Three research positions (postdoc or research engineer), offered by the French ANR project HPAC (High Performance Algebraic Computation), are open.

Title: High Performance Algebraic Computing

Keywords: parallel computing, computer algebra, linear algebra, C/C++ programming

Locations:

  • Grenoble, France (LIG-MOAIS, LJK-CASYS),
  • Lyon, France (LIP-AriC),
  • Paris, France (LIP6-PolSys),

Starting date: between June 2014 and January 2015

Type of position: 3 postdoc or research engineer positions of 1 year each

More information: http://bit.ly/1ivuKAW

At a conference in Rouen, France

2014-02-03 18.22.24Attending an interesting work-shop in Rouen, France, Working Full-Time on Strings, WFS2014, lots of good problems: http://bit.ly/1j2tB7f

Rouen is a medieval city, with an impressive Gothic cathedral, the historic capital of Normandy, and the place where Joan of Arc was executed in 1431.

One of the most impressive sites is the Gros Horlogean astronomical clock from the 16th century, still working today.

The Older Mind May Just Be a Fuller Mind

Now comes a new kind of challenge to the evidence of a cognitive decline, from a decidedly digital quarter: data mining, based on theories of information processing. In a paper published in Topics in Cognitive Science, a team of linguistic researchers from the University of Tübingen in Germany used advanced learning models to search enormous databases of words and phrases.

Since educated older people generally know more words than younger people, simply by virtue of having been around longer, the experiment simulates what an older brain has to do to retrieve a word. And when the researchers incorporated that difference into the models, the aging “deficits” largely disappeared.

“What shocked me, to be honest, is that for the first half of the time we were doing this project, I totally bought into the idea of age-related cognitive decline in healthy adults,” the lead author, Michael Ramscar, said by email. But the simulations, he added, “fit so well to human data that it slowly forced me to entertain this idea that I didn’t need to invoke decline at all.”

via The Older Mind May Just Be a Fuller Mind – NYTimes.com.

Two faculty positions at the School of Computer Science, Reykjavik University

The School of Computer Science at Reykjavik University invites applications for two faculty positions at the rank of an assistant professor, to begin in August 2014.  We are looking for energetic, highly qualified academics who, apart from developing their own research programs, will strengthen some of the existing research areas within the School, or build bridges between them or with industry.  Applications from all areas of computer science are welcomed, but of particular interest are candidates in systems, broadly construed, and other applied areas.

via Process Algebra Diary: Two faculty positions at the School of Computer Science, Reykjavik University.

Schumpeter: The not so Golden State

IN THE gold rush of the late 1840s, chancers dreaming of quick riches flocked to San Francisco. It is the same today, only this time they are armed with computer-science degrees rather than shovels and picks. It is boom time again in Silicon Valley. Startups are sprouting like mushrooms after rain. Investors are showering them with cash. Hoodie-clad geeks are quaffing champagne in trendy bars, as they celebrate their nascent firms’ multi-billion-dollar valuations. Meanwhile, Google and Apple continue their march towards world domination.Those observing from afar the valley’s burgeoning entrepreneurial scene could be forgiven for concluding that California must truly be a Golden State for business. But beyond the gilded strip of land between San Francisco and San Jose is another California, an inhospitable place plagued by over-regulation, mindless bureaucracy, high taxes and endless lawsuits. Last May, six months after the state raised its top income-tax rate to the highest in the land, Chief Executive magazine named it America’s worst for doing business—for the ninth year in a row. Four months later Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill raising the minimum wage from 2016 to $10 an hour, also the highest of all the states.

via Schumpeter: The not so Golden State | The Economist.

Microsoft’s Azure too expensive?

Azure positions Microsoft reasonably well to maintain its enterprise accounts. However, young Web-based companies generally do not use Microsoft products and services because they are too expensive. They prefer Linux and other free open source products, or hosting via Amazon, Google, and others. This preference does not bode well for Microsoft. The startup firms of today will become the larger customers of the future and, in general, they are not Microsoft customers.

via The Legacy of Steve Ballmer | January 2014 | Communications of the ACM.

The Market For Computing Careers

There are lots of myths about computing careers. One of the most ridiculous is the myth that all the computing jobs are going overseas. According to this recent Information Week article, the majority of the work that U.S. companies are “outsourcing” is actually going to companies here in the U.S., as can be seen in this chart from that article:

via Calvin College – Computer Science – The Market For Computing Careers.

You can read more about it in the Communications of the ACM January 2014 article by Joel C. Adams, “Hot Job Market for Computer Science Graduates“, following Guzdial’s discussion of MOOCs. In particular, an extract from this article:

This data suggests on average, there will be 97,000 more U.S. computing jobs than graduates each year, a shortfall that even the current H1B Visa Quota is insufficient to address. To meet this decade’s demand with homegrown talent, U.S. colleges and universities would need to produce 3.5 times as many computing graduates per year as they did in 2008. The Taulbee Survey data has shown modest increases in computing graduation rates the past two years at Ph.D.-granting institutions, but the observed increases do not come close to addressing the projected demand.

Companies seeking U.S. computing professionals will thus be competing with other companies for a limited supply of personnel. We are already seeing this competition, as many of our students are receiving multiple internship offers, and many of our graduates are receiving multiple job offers. The US-BLS projections suggest this competition will likely increase this decade.

French Team Invents Faster Code-Breaking Algorithm

A team of French mathematicians and computer scientists has made an important advancement in the field of algorithms for breaking cryptographic codes. In a certain class of problem, the new algorithm is able to efficiently solve the discrete logarithm problem that underlies several important types of modern cryptosystems.”Problem sizes, which did not seem even remotely accessible before, are now computable with reasonable resources,” says Emmanuel Thomé, a researcher at the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control INRIA and one of four researchers reporting the advance. However, he notes, the new algorithm poses no immediate threat to most existing cryptosystems, including the RSA-based cryptography used in credit cards and much of e-commerce.

via French Team Invents Faster Code-Breaking Algorithm | January 2014 | Communications of the ACM.

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