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Hasnain says:

"The following is our June 2014 Chess Life cover story. Normally this would be behind our pay wall, but we feel this article about combating cheating in chess carries international importance. "

This is really well written, and a great analysis.

Posted on 2014-06-02T05:42:32+0000

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Hasnain says:

“When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in a confederacy against him.”

Posted on 2014-06-02T05:40:33+0000

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Fifa faces call to vote again over 2022 World Cup after leaked Qatari emails

Communications purport to show series of payments to officials by Mohamed bin Hammam, who was Fifa's member for Qatar

Click to view the original at theguardian.com

Hasnain says:

"The Fifa inspection team ranked Qatar as the only "high-risk" option overall, yet it was still chosen by 14 of the 22 voting members of the executive committee in December 2010. The Fifa president said it was now "probable" that it would be played in the winter rather than the summer due to the heat. Blatter insisted, however, that Qatar, which spent huge sums on ambassadors and development programmes, had not "bought" the World Cup."

Posted on 2014-06-02T01:20:43+0000

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Patience is a Virtue: Revisiting Merge and Sort on Modern Processors

Badrish Chandramouli and Jonathan Goldstein, in ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2014), ACM SIGMOD [June 2014]

Click to view the original at research.microsoft.com

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Fixed Soccer Matches Cast Shadow Over World Cup

An investigative report by FIFA, obtained by The New York Times, found that a match-rigging syndicate and its referees conspired to fix global soccer exhibition matches and exploit them for betting purposes.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

Hasnain says:

"South Africa won, 1-0. In Mr. Perumal’s memoir, he wrote that the fixers had wanted three goals in the match, and that $1 million “went up in smoke.” He also wrote that Mr. Goddard was “a big troublemaker.”

“This time, you really have gone too far and, you know, we’re going to eliminate you,” he said, according to Mr. Goddard. Mr. Perumal later bragged about the episode, the report said. But in his memoir he said that he had threatened only to sue Mr. Goddard for breach of contract, not kill him."

Posted on 2014-06-01T06:36:14+0000

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It's the Latency, Stupid

Years ago David Cheriton at Stanford taught me something that seemed very obvious at the time -- that if you have a network link with low bandwidth then it's an easy matter of putting several in parallel to make a combined link with higher bandwidth, but if you have a network link with bad latency t…

Click to view the original at rescomp.stanford.edu

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Hasnain says:

"I don't believe that we can actually do much about this. There are always those who go on to higher education seeking what is actually a vocational education: be it science, engineering, or math students, they are simply seeking a means to a job. Nevertheless, universities remain one of the only places where young people will encounter new ideas. This creates a tension: should we give in to the pressure, and become vocational training centers? After all that is what the majority of students, parents, employers, and politicians want."

Posted on 2014-06-01T00:59:47+0000