Fav5

My pick of the top five items of interest for the week:

1. The Los Alamos National Laboratory (where I'm currently working) is now home to the world's fastest supercomptuter: the Roadrunner. This machine is the first to break the 1 petaflop barrier.
   
   
2. Live Search Academic is no more. Apparently Microsoft is giving up on their Google Scholar competitor, and for good reason: its interface was horrible and coverage second-rate. I hate to be so critical, but it really was never a match for Google Scholar.
   
   
3. Scotland's failing exam rates are being blamed on students copying information from websites like Wikipedia and passing it off as their own.
   


4. Nicholas Carr ponders, Is Google Making Us Stupid? Actually the question being asked is if the Web has somehow changed the way we read and process information.
   

   The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”
   

5. Gwap, a collection of games that use human intelligence to improve artificial intelligence, was recently launched by Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science. Readwrite has more about it.