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August 20, 2004
Functional Programming in Utah
The International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP) is being held in Snowbird, Utah this year on September 19-22. There's an associated Scheme workshop as well as workshops on Erlang and Haskell on September 23. I'm probably going up to the Scheme workshop if anyone's interested in a ride.
As an aside, if you're interested in Scheme, you may be interested in the Scheme MeetUp day on September 14. I'd be interested in putting one together for the Wasatch Front.
03:08 PM | Recommend This | Print This
eVoting Round-Up
Here are several current articles on eVoting and its problems:
According to a Wired magazine article, DeForest B. Soaries Jr., Chairman of the newly formed Federal Election Assistance Commission told an IEEE audience: "The country owes you a debt of thanks to have taken this challenge of voting systems seriously." He goes on to call for more dialogue between elections officials and Computer Scientists.
The Chicago Daily Herald reports on a lecture given by Dan Wallach of Rice University at a FermiLab colloquium. Dan said:
"Is it technically feasible for such a person or for a conspiracy of people to throw an election with these systems?" he asked a crowd of mostly employees of Fermilab. "Absolutely. Would there be any evidence? Not if they knew what they were doing."From Daily Herald
Referenced Fri Aug 20 2004 11:14:27 GMT-0600
ComputerWorld writes that Nevada officials are confident that their new eVoting system will perform well in the upcoming primary and general elections. Nevada will be the first state to use electronic voting machines with printers for creating a paper audit trail. Many voting officials claim that printers can't be made reliable enough to work in voting machines. This will be a good test case.
Finally, an older article entitled How They Could Steal the Election This Time covers the issues with electronic voting machines in some detail.
11:22 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Coming Home
I just returned home from ten days of vacation. We were in Pittsburgh visiting family and friends (my wife's from South Hills). I returned to 2100 email messages. 1690 of them were Spam. Of those, SpamAssassin caught around 1398, or 82%, of them. Of the rest there were probably around 100 that really needed my attention. The balance were notifications I have servers send, announcements, etc.