Fav5

Today is the final day of classes at Harding. Next week: finals.

My listing of this week's top 5 items of interest:

1. Last week WWW2008 was held in Beijing, China. This is the annual conference that draws the top research papers from the Web search community; Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft usually contribute several papers apiece. I attended WWW2007 and loved it. I haven't had time yet to browse through the papers posted online, but I hope to report on some of the gems next week.


2. Iron Man is opening today (you can never have too many comic book movies ). If you're into CGI (computer-generated imagery), you'll enjoy this article which discusses many of the challenges faced by the movie's graphics team.
   


3. What happens when the bad guys make AIs to break your CAPTCHAs or use inexpensive foreign workers to do it for you? More spam. Blah.


4. This is why I tell my students to be very careful about what they put in their Facebook page (and who they befriend).


5. I enjoyed reading about Michael Buckley's "socially relevant" computing. He pushes his students to use technology to help their fellow man. Not only does it create more interest in computing, it's just the right thing to do.