Linkage
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The Scandinavian Symposium and Workshops on Algorithm Theory, SWAT 2018. This year it will be in Malmö, Sweden, on June 18–20. The submission deadline is February 18, coming soon. I’m PC chair. Send papers, please.
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Google memory loss (via). Tim Bray observes that Google searches are becoming worse as a comprehensive index to the web; there’s lots of old stuff that they used to find but have forgotten.
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How Duolingo achieved a 50:50 gender ratio for new software engineer hires (G+).
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Judge orders journal to identify peer reviewers (G+). It’s a messy legal case in which a journal is accused of corrupt reviewing and is suing for slander, but it raises issues of how safe we are as reviewers in the supposed confidentiality of our identities.
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The 2018 Mathematical Art Exhibition Awards at the Joint Mathematics Meetings.
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Pier Review (via). Jessica Langer found the best newspaper pun.
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Cannons and sparrows (G+, via). Günter Ziegler makes an appearance on numberphile, with a nice discussion of equal-area equal-perimeter convex partitions. There are no cannons or sparrows; the title refers to using heavy machinery to solve simple-looking problems.
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Writing women in mathematics into Wikipedia (G+). Marie A. Vitulli describes her experiences creating biographies of women mathematicians on Wikipedia.
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Hypatia (G+). Now a Good Article on Wikipedia, thanks to the efforts of Katolophyromai. But see Clement et al., “Re-righting the History of Women in Science”, Math Horizons 2009 for a critique of the male-gaziness of some of our sources.
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Perceived gender bias in a discipline strongly affects women’s choices of what to study (G+). In other news linked from the comments, sea lion attack leads to ban.
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How fast can you bit-interleave 32-bit integers?. Daniel Lemire shows that special Intel-only instructions can be beaten by careful SIMD coding.
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Trouble with Wikidata (G+). Its inter-language links are useful, but its proponents refuse to institute reliable sourcing requirements that are compatible with Wikipedia’s and have been pushing to force their data to be shown automatically as part of Wikipedia articles despite their poor sourcing, while the spammers close in.
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More secrets of the associahedra. A neat connection between the face counts of different types in an associahedron and the coefficients of inverse power series, with an illustration that appears to be redrawn from an old one of mine.
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Porous marble boulders sculpted by Sibylle Pasche (via). Some of her other sculptures look inspired by hexagonally-tiled hyperbolic horospheres.
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Scottish solids again. The latest piece on polyhedral unfolding in the Notices and its corresponding G+ post repeat a myth, debunked by Lloyd in 2012, that the neolithic Scots carved Platonic solids out of stone. David Roberts sets the record straight.