Peter Christy

Networks Heat Up

A notable year in high-performance networking has turned a technical conference into a very relevant discussion of important commercial issues. Stanford's 16th Hot Interconnects Symposium (formally an IEEE meeting -- 27/8 August) has what looks like some remarkably interesting discussions including a keynote and two panels on Wall Street networking, a talk by Mendel Rosenblum on Virtualization and Data Center Networking, and a keynote and technical papers on how to deal with all the cores in tomorrow's multicore CPU's (see http://www.hoti.org/hoti16/program/ ). 2008 is the year when 10G networking started to be competitive, virtualization swept the data center, multicore impact started to be felt in earnest, and when the importance of computational intensive finance became all too clear. Even if the technology of on-chip optical interconnect isn't what lights your personal fire, you might very well find something important at this Stanford meeting.

Ain't Science Wonderful

You probably believed it was true anyway, but now using expensive modern brain imaging technology Stanford researchers have now gathered real evidence that sex does in fact help sell products (in this case motorcycles). To quote from their news release "The study showed that when heterosexual men are exposed to positive emotional stimuli—in this case, erotic photos of a man and woman—an area of the brain associated with anticipation of reward is stimulated. In the immediate aftermath of that stimulation, men are consistently more likely to take bigger financial risks than they otherwise would, said Brian Knutson, assistant professor of psychology."