Special Interest Group on CRAP

Thoughts by Kevin McCurley
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Entries from April 2010

Contextual advertising giggles

April 29th, 2010 ·

I saw a photo posted on Facebook that was tagged with Andrei Broder and Prabhakar Raghavan (both of Yahoo research). It’s ironic that both have worked on algorithms for contextual advertising, but the ads on Facebook next to the photos were hilarious. One of the ads is for “rich dads”. I’m not sure if that [...]

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Tags: Amusements · Research · security

Testing on the toilet

April 26th, 2010 ·

Where I work at Google they have a program called “Testing on the Toilet” where the put up things in the bathroom stalls for software engineers to read. I wonder what is next.

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Tags: Amusements

Stock markets are a Ponzi scheme

April 16th, 2010 ·

Like many small investors, I have recently started thinking of the stock market as nothing more than a Ponzi scheme in which companies and financial services companies conspire to print lottery tickets. Many of us have mostly sat on the sidelines while the DOW went from 7,000 to 11,000, while financial services companies who received [...]

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Tags: Economics · Politics · Rants

The annual tax torture

April 4th, 2010 ·

Every year when I fill out my taxes, I am amazed at how screwed up our taxation system is. If you are an average wage earner, perhaps with a mortgage, then you end up with a really simple procedure for filing your taxes. If you have a business (sole proprietorship, partnership, etc) or if you [...]

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Tags: Economics · Politics · Rants