Special Interest Group on CRAP

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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It’s always sad news when someone you know dies. Regrettably, Sam Roweis died last night, apparently by taking his own life. It is always difficult to comprehend the situation that could lead to this, and my heart goes out to his family and friends. I had the pleasure of working with Sam on the Google [...]

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I went back to look at the spam that is sent out by ACM trying to get me to buy a membership. It turns out that it is sent out on the 11th of each month, right on schedule. I guess that means there is a cron job someplace that is firing off these things. [...]

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The impending demise of geocities.com reminded me of an event from 2004. In that year a former colleague named Larry Stockmeyer died from pancreatic cancer. I remember thinking at the time that those of us who knew him would always have our memories to appreciate his humanity and his intelligence. Other computer scientists need to [...]

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Today I got another spam from ACM, plus a spam from “World Scientific Publishing” that tries to look like they are acting on behalf of Purdue University. I have appended the one from World Scientific Publishers in the hopes that it will shame them into avoiding spam in the future. Why would Purdue University consent [...]

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Today I received spam from Cambridge University Press, using an email address that I used to register for the ACM Electronic Commerce Conference in 2006. It appears that even supposedly reputable organizations cannot resist the temptation to send spam.

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Today I got spammed from ACM. There were several annoying things about it: The fact that they use direct mail marketing in the first place. The email address they used is the one I used to register for SIGIR 2006, so at least they are using the “existing business relationship” loophole. They are still a [...]

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I went today to look at the program for CIKM, which is being held two hours away from my house. There are a few interesting talks, so I briefly thought about going. Then I looked at the fees for attending the conference. The fees range from 755 (if you already paid the ACM tax of [...]

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As I look around at what is happening in the world today, I keep seeing evidence that it all comes down to trust. As someone who spent a great deal of time working on information security, the subject of trust is one that I tried to design for, but I always regarded trust as a [...]

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I have been growing increasingly insistent that scientific publishing should move toward open access. This is caused in part because, as an employee of Google, I have very little access to commercially published literature, in spite of the fact that we drive most of their traffic. For example I have access to almost none of [...]

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