Interesting Snippets from 2012-06-18

• The Weekend Interview With Sebastian Thrun: What's Next for Silicon Valley? - WSJ.com

  Mr. Thrun's cost was basically $1 per student per class. That's on the order of 1,000 times less per pupil than for a K-12 or a college education—way more than the rule of thumb in Silicon Valley that you need a 10 times cost advantage to drive change.

  So Mr. Thrun set up a company, Udacity, that joins many other companies attacking the problem of how to deliver the optimal online education. "What I see is democratizing education will change everything," he says. "I have an unbelievable passion about this. We will reach students that have never been reached. I can give my love of learning to other people. I've stumbled into the most amazing Wonderland. I've taken the red pill and seen how deep Wonderland is."

• Titan

  Titan is a distributed graph database optimized for storing and processing large-scale graphs within a multi-machine cluster.

• The highly productive habits of Alan Turing | Ars Technica

  Alan Turing's achievements speak for themselves—but the way he lived his remarkable and tragically shortened life is less known. What follows are seven Turing Qualities that we could all emulate to our benefit.

• Super-star programmers: Difference engine: Wired for speed | The Economist

  The idea that top-tier programmers are typically an order of magnitude more effective at writing computer code than their run-of-the-mill cohorts is not exactly news. In study after study since the 1960s, researchers have noticed that the productivity of individual programmers with similar levels of experience varies by a factor of at least ten-to-one.

  More interesting still, in “Peopleware”, published in 1987, Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister found that not only did the best programmers generally outperform the worst by a factor of ten, but that there was at least a tenfold difference in productivity among software organisations. Within individual firms, the difference in performance was only 20% or so. Clearly, the brightest programmers tended to congregate in places that had a reputation for attracting talented people; where the challenges were enticing, and the conditions conducive to good work. In many cases, that meant leaving large software companies to join smaller ones or to start their own.

• What Facebook Knows - Technology Review

  For one example of how Facebook can serve as a proxy for examining society at large, consider a recent study of the notion that any person on the globe is just six degrees of separation from any other. The best-known real-world study, in 1967, involved a few hundred people trying to send postcards to a particular Boston stockholder. Facebook's version, conducted in collaboration with researchers from the University of Milan, involved the entire social network as of May 2011, which amounted to more than 10 percent of the world's population. Analyzing the 69 billion friend connections among those 721 million people showed that the world is smaller than we thought: four intermediary friends are usually enough to introduce anyone to a random stranger.

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