Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (January 12th, 2019)
You can buy a 512GB memory card for $140 from Amazon. We have been told for decades to avoid saturated fats, the kind found in meat, cheese and butter. After an...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (January 5th, 2019)
There are nearly 70,000 centenarians in Japan. China’s population fell by 2.5 million in 2018. Obesity is associated with increased senescent cell burden and neuropsychiatric...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Memory-level parallelism: Intel Skylake versus Intel Cannonlake
All programmers know about multicore parallelism: your CPU is made of several nearly independent processors (called cores) that can run instructions in parallel...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Important science and technology findings in 2018
The Gompertz-Makeham law predicts statistically the mortality rate of human beings. The key takeaway is that it is an exponential function. Every few years, the...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (December 29th, 2018)
Low-dose radiation from A-bombs elongated lifespan and reduced cancer mortality relative to un-irradiated individuals (Sutou, 2018): The US National Academy ofContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (December 22nd 2018)
For equity reasons, many people advocate for double-blind peer review, meaning that the author does not know who the reviewer is, nor does the reviewer know who...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Fast Bounded Random Numbers on GPUs
We often use random numbers in software in applications such as simulations or machine learning. Fast random number generators tend to produce integers in [0,232)...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Sorting strings properly is stupidly hard
Programming languages make it hard to sort arrays properly. Look at how JavaScript sorts arrays of integers: > v = [1,3,2,10] [ 1, 3, 2, 10 ] > v.sort() [ 1, 10...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (December 15th 2018)
Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. There is weak correlation between grades and job performance. Grant reviews the evidence inContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (December 8th 2018)
The energy density of lithium-ion batteries doubled between 1995 and 2005 but only increased by about 15% between 2005 and 2015. It is estimated that there is relatively...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Asking the right question is more important than getting the right answer
Schools train us to provide the right answers to predefined questions. Yet anyone with experience from the real world knows that, more often than not, the difficult...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (December 1st 2018)
Autism affects about 1% of the population and four times as many males as females. In older highly educated people, drinking 2 cups of coffee a day is associated...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Quickly sampling from two arrays (C++ edition)
Suppose that you are given two arrays. Maybe you have a list of cities from the USA and a list of cities from Europe. You want to generate a new list which mixes...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (November 24th 2018)
There is no association between birth order and personality traits: The results of both within- and between-family research designs revealed no consistent evidence...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (November 18th 2018)
It seems that reducing your carbohydrate (sugar) intake might be a good way to lose weight: lowering dietary carbohydrate increased energy expenditure during weight...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Simple table size estimates and 128-bit numbers (Java Edition)
Suppose that you are given a table. You know the number of rows, as well as how many distinct value each column has. For example, you know that there are two genders...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Memory-level parallelism: Intel Skylake versus Apple A12/A12X
Modern processors execute instructions in parallel in many different ways: multi-core parallelism is just one of them. In particular, processor cores can have several...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (November 10th, 2018)
It already takes more energy to operate Bitcoin than to mine actual gold. Cryptocurrencies are responsible for millions of tons of CO2 emissions. (Source: Nature)...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Measuring the memory-level parallelism of a system using a small C++ program?
Our processors can issue several memory requests at the same time. In a multicore processor, each core has an upper limit on the number of outstanding memory requests...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog