A World Transfixed by Screens – The Atlantic
Excellent “In Focus” this week — ‘The continued massive growth of connected mobile devices is shaping not only how we communicate with each other, but how we look, behave, and experience the world around us. Smartphones and other handheld devices have become indispensable tools, appendages held at arm’s length to record a scene or to snap a selfie. Recent news photos show refugees fleeing war-torn regions holding up their phones as prized possessions to be saved, and relatives of victims lost to a disaster holding up their smartphones to show images of their loved ones to the press. Celebrity selfies, people alone in a crowd with their phones, events obscured by the very devices used to record that event, the brightly lit faces of those bent over their small screens, these are some of the scenes depicted below.’
(tags: mobile photography in-focus alan-taylor the-atlantic phones selfies pictures)
“Incremental Stream Processing using Computational Conflict-free Replicated Data Types” [paper]
‘Unlike existing alternatives, such as stream processing, that favor the execution of arbitrary application code, we want to capture much of the processing logic as a set of known operations over specialized Computational CRDTs, with particular semantics and invariants, such as min/max/average/median registers, accumulators, top-N sets, sorted sets/maps, and so on. Keeping state also allows the system to decrease the amount of propagated information. Preliminary results obtained in a single example show that Titan has an higher throughput when compared with state of the art stream processing systems.’
(tags: crdt distributed stream-processing replication titan papers)