Thursday, January 22, 2009

Exams, migration

My exam on Decision, Computation and Language took place yesterday, co-located with another one on Animal Parasitology. I could hopefully have scraped together a few marks had I taken the rival paper; could probably make a few constructive comments on the distinction between parasites, parasitoids and predators, not to mention lice and ticks. Not sure how those biologists would have gotten on with regular expressions for words that contain "aaa" as a substring, and the like. After that, listened to a talk by former Liverpool postdoc Edith Elkind on "beyond weighted voting games". She convinced me (not during the talk) that Singapore is, for climate, a nice place at this time of year, or failing that, Southampton. One good thing about heading south for the winter is, your reduced domestic heating probably offsets the carbon you burn in order to travel.

The latest CACM merits inspection. (Added a day later: that is, the Feb 09 issue, which became available online a day before my paper copy of the Jan 09 issue arrived! The Jan issue has an article on "Computational Challenges in E-Commerce" that I really should read.)

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