Links for Friday, August 8, 2008

• The Economist: Risk and the Credit Manager – “We thought that we had focused correctly on the non-investment-grade paper, of which we held little. We had not paid enough attention to the ever-growing mountain of highly rated but potentially illiquid assets. We had not fully appreciated that 20% of a very large number can inflict far greater losses than 80% of a small number.“
• Terry Tao: On Time Management – “There are also many situations in which it makes tactical sense to defer, delay, delegate, or procrastinate on any given task, and go work on something else instead in the meantime; not everything is equally important, and also a given task may in fact become much easier (and be completed in a much better way) if one waits for one’s own skills to get stronger, or for other events to happen that reduce the importance or need for the task in the first place.“
• Circos: Meaningful Search – “Circos is the only search engine that uses complex algorithms to understand the actual meaning of words and the people who write them. We scour the web for reviews, blogs, and recommendations about places, products and services, and our algorithms understand the words in context.“
• Google Open Source: Distcc’s Pump Mode: A New Design for Distributed C/C++ Compilation – “Pump mode works by pushing even more processing onto the servers. Based on an incremental static analysis of the source code, pump mode is able to quickly identify the sets of files needed for the preprocessing phase of compiling C/C++ programs and send them to the compilation servers for preprocessing. This achieves a dramatic decrease in the CPU load of the workstation and of course much better build speed.“
• iReport: Virtual Africa in Second Life – “She suggested I adopt an artificially intelligent meerkat to help sustain the simulation.“