— Broad Topics Archives

Metrics That Matter

Communications of the ACM, April 2019
By Benjamin Treynor Sloss, Shylaja Nukala, Vivek Rau

“One of the most important choices in offering a service is which service metrics to measure, and how to evaluate them. The difference between great, good, and poor metric and metric threshold choices is frequently the difference between a service that will surprise and delight its users with how well it works, one that will be acceptable for most users, and one that will actively drive away users—regardless of what the service actually offers. … What follows are the types of metrics the Google SRE team has adopted for Google services. These metrics are not particularly easy to implement, and they may require changes to a service to instrument properly. It has been our consistent experience at Google, however, that every service team that implements these metrics is happy afterward that it made the effort to do so.”

Computing & Technology / Articles

Identity by Any Other Name

Communications of the ACM, April 2019
By Pat Helland

“The fascinating thing about identifiers is that while they identify the same “thing” over time, that referenced thing may slide around in its meaning. Product descriptions, reviews, and inventory balance all change, while the product ID does not. Reservations, orders, and bookings all have identifiers that do not change, while the stuff they identify may subtly change over time. Identity and identifiers provide the immutable linkage. Both sides of this linkage may change, but they provide a semantic consistency needed by the business operation. No matter what you call it, identity is the glue that makes things stick and lubricates cooperative work. … The judicious use of ambiguity and interchangeability lubricates distributed, long-running, scalable, and heterogeneous systems.”

Young girl at keyboard. "Informatics" written on chalk board in background.

Computing & Technology / Articles

Informatics as a Fundamental Discipline for the 21st Century

Communications of the ACM, April 2019
By Michael E. Caspersen, Judith Gal-Ezer, Andrew McGettrick, Enrico Nardelli

“The emphasis of the report is on informatics education, with informatics seen as the science underpinning the development of the digital world—a distinctive discipline with its own scientific methods, its own ways of thinking, and its own technological development.”

Articles / Computing & Technology

Web Science in Europe: Beyond Boundaries

Communications of the ACM, April 2019
By Steffen Staab, Susan Halford, Wendy Hall

“For the past decade, Web Science has been building the interdisciplinary expertise to face the challenges and realize the value of this rapidly growing and diversifying Web. This task transcends the work of any single academic discipline. While our universities continue—overwhelmingly—to be organized in siloes established in the 20th century, or much earlier, the Web demands expertise from computer science, sociology, business, mathematics, law, economics, politics, psychology engineering, geography, and more. Web Science exists to integrate knowledge and expertise from across fields, integrating this into systematic, robust, and reliable research that provides an action base for the future of the Web.”

Computing & Technology / Articles

The Web Is Missing an Essential Part of Infrastructure: An Open Web Index

Communications of the ACM, April 2019
By Dirk Lewandowski

“A proposal for building an index of the Web that separates the infrastructure part of the search engine—the index—from the services part that will form the basis for myriad search engines and other services utilizing Web data on top of a public infrastructure open to everyone.”

Computing & Technology / Articles

Access Controls and Healthcare Records: Who Owns the Data?

Communications of the ACM, July 2019
By CACM Staff

“RICHARD MCDONALD: Questions come up as to who actually owns those records, who looks after them, and who needs to have access to them.”

Articles / Computing & Technology

The Top 10 Things Executives Should Know About Software

Communications of the ACM, July 2019
By Thomas A. Limoncelli

“In 2011, Marc Andreessen wrote an article predicting, ‘Software will eat the world.’ By that he meant two things: First, many traditional businesses are being replaced by software companies. Second, all other companies are finding the value they deliver is increasingly a result of software.

When Andreessen wrote his article none of the 10 biggest companies (by market value) were in software-driven businesses. Today, six of the 10 biggest companies are primarily driven by software. The others are ripe for a transformation.”

Computing & Technology / Articles

A New Labor Market for People with ‘Coolabilities’

Communications of the ACM, July 2019
By David Nordfors, Chally Grundwag, V. R. Ferose

“Powerful technologies are today ready to open the door to a new paradigm of work: instead of squeezing people into existing job slots, companies can tailor work that fits individuals’ unique skills, talents, and passions, matching them with inspiring teams and offering them a choice of meaningful tasks. This has tremendous benefits for both the employee and employer by creating a “long-tail labor market” in which diversity brings competitive advantage.”

Computing & Technology / Articles

Smart Cities – Who Benefits?

Communications of the ACM, July 2019
By Susan J. Winter

“This column uses the case of smart cities to illustrate the ethical dilemmas created by an otherwise innocuous-seeming issue. … Cui bono, which means “who benefits?” … Cui bono? In principle, everyone. But a closer look at the smart cities rhetoric shows the benefits focused on a subset of the total.”

Smart Cities – Who Benefits? Read More

Computing & Technology / Articles

The Sounds of Silence: In salute to landing on the moon 50 years ago

MIT Technology Review, June 26, 2019
By Chuck Klosterman. Illustration by Keith Rankin.

“The rock era and the space age exist on parallel time lines. The Soviets launched Sputnik in October 1957, the same month Elvis Presley hit #1 with “Jailhouse Rock.” The first Beatles single, “Love Me Do,” was released 23 days after John F. Kennedy declared that America would go to the moon (and not because it was easy, but because it was hard). Apollo 11 landed the same summer as Woodstock. These specific events are (of course) coincidences. Yet the larger arc is not. Mankind’s assault upon the heavens was the most dramatic achievement of the 20th century’s second half, simultaneous with rock’s transformation of youth culture. It does not take a deconstructionist to see the influence of the former on the latter.”

Feathered ice crystals. Photo by Kirill Pershin on Unsplash.

Articles / Weather | Snow | Utah

Snow, Graupel, Hail, Sleet & Freezing Rain

Article by WWD Webmaster
July 11, 2019

Graupel is supercooled water droplets coming into contact with falling snow, heavily rimed new snow. Hail is solid balls or lumps of ice. Sleet is smaller ice pellets, in between snow and freezing rain.

Articles / Weather | Snow | Utah

2018-19 Snow Season at Mid-Gad

Records? I think so. Granted I’m comparing Mid-Gad snow study plot to the Alta Guard station study plot, so it’s not exact. But, if you look at season totals at Alta Guard you will see that there are only 2 seasons where we’ve had 700″ or more at Alta Guard. In my book 711 inches at Mid-Gad is fairly rare. Record-worthy to be sure. (Ya, but then there was the 2022-23 season which blew the doors off of 2018-19!)

Computing & Technology / Articles

Why I Still Love Tech

Wired, May 14, 2019
By Paul Ford

“I was exceptionally lucky to be born into this moment. I got to see what happened, to live as a child of acceleration. The mysteries of software caught my eye when I was a boy, and I still see it with the same wonder, even though I’m now an adult. Proudshamed, yes, but I still love it, the mess of it, the code and toolkits, down to the pixels and the processors, and up to the buses and bridges. I love the whole made world. But I can’t deny that the miracle is over, and that there is an unbelievable amount of work left for us to do.”

Computing & Technology / Articles

Corp to Cloud: Google’s Virtual Desktops

Communications of the ACM, November 2018
By Matt Fata, Philippe-Joseph Arida, Patrick Hahn, Betsy Beyer

“Until recently, our virtual desktops were hosted on commercially available hardware on Google’s corporate network using a homegrown open source virtual cluster-management system called Ganeti. Today, this substantial and Google-critical workload runs on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This article discusses the reasons for the move to GCP, and how the migration was accomplished.”

Computing & Technology / Articles

Modern Debugging: The Art of Finding a Needle in a Haystack

Communications of the ACM, November 2018
By Diomidis Spinellis

“When the going gets tough, the programmer should humbly fall back on the systematic process instead of randomly poking the software trying to pinpoint the fault through sheer luck.”

Computing & Technology / Articles

Will Supercomputers Be Super-Data and Super-AI Machines?

Communications of the ACM, November 2018
By Yutong Lu, Depei Qian, Haohuan Fu, Wenguang Chen

“High-performance computing (HPC) plays an important role in promoting scientific discovery, addressing grand-challenge problems, and promoting social and economic development. Over the past several decades, China has put significant effort into improving its own HPC through a series of key projects under its national research and development program. Development of supercomputing systems has advanced parallel applications in various fields in China, along with related software and hardware technology, and helped advance China’s technological innovation and social development.

To meet the requirements of multidisciplinary and multidomain applications, new challenges in architecture, system software, and application technologies must be addressed to help develop next-generation exascale supercomputing systems.”

Computing & Technology / Articles

China’s Computing Ambitions

Communications of the ACM, November 2018
By Elliott Zaagman

“China plans to become the world’s high-tech leader, and quickly. In 2015, the Chinese government’s State Council approved “Made in China 2025,” an initiative designed to position China as a world leader in fields such as robotics, aviation, advanced information technology, and new-energy vehicles in less than a decade. In support of this governmental initiative, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) released a three-year action plan to drive growth in areas including smart drones, facial recognition, AI-supported medical diagnosis, speech recognition, and language translation. If successful, the initiative would grow China’s AI industry to a size of $150 billion by 2020, approximately 100 times its size in 2016. As China pushes AI forward, here are a few names, trends, and technologies to watch.”

Computing & Technology / Articles

Weighing the Impact of GDPR

Communications of the ACM, November 2018
By Samuel Greengard

“When the European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect on May 25, 2018, it represented the most sweeping effort yet to oversee the way businesses collect and manage consumer data. The law, established to create consistent data standards and protect EU citizens from potential privacy abuses, sent ripples—if not tidal waves—across the world.”

Articles / CyberSecurity

DoD Cyber Strategy – 2018

Cyber Strategy: Summary, 2018
U.S. Department of Defense

“American prosperity, liberty, and security depend upon open and reliable access to information. The Internet empowers us and enriches our lives by providing ever-greater access to new knowledge, businesses, and services. Computers and network technologies underpin U.S. military warfighting superiority by enabling the Joint Force to gain the information advantage, strike at long distance, and exercise global command and control.”

CyberSecurity / Books, Reports, Films & Images

Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems, 2nd Ed.

“The world has changed radically since the first edition of this book was published in 2001. Spammers, virus writers, phishermen, money launderers, and spies now trade busily with each other in a lively online criminal economy and as they specialize, they get better. In this indispensable, fully updated guide, Ross Anderson reveals how to build systems that stay dependable whether faced with error or malice. Here’s straight talk on critical topics such as technical engineering basics, types of attack, specialized protection mechanisms, security psychology, policy, and more.”