Beethoven’s “Tempest” Exposition

A Scientific Tempest

Tap water tempest

You know the news isn’t going to be good when the report of a new study cites sources in City Hall rather than the scientific literature. That’s exactly how the story broke in February, reporting a link between tap water and miscarriages in a California study. On February 10, the Los Angeles Times warned its readers in a front page report that “drinking five or more glasses of cold tap water pe...

Soft Tempest – An Opportunity for NATO

NATO countries spend billions of dollars a year on electromagnetic security, of which the Tempest shielding of personal computers, workstations and peripherals is a large component. In the absence of a capable motivated opponent such as the former Soviet Union, this burden on both traditional and new members is increasingly difficult to justify. As a result, many systems at a medium level of se...

Tempest: A Substrate for Portable Parallel Programs

This paper describes Tempest, a collection of mechanisms for communication and synchronization in parallel programs. With these mechanisms, authors of compilers, libraries, and application programs can exploit—across a wide range of hardware platforms—the best of shared memory, message passing, and hybrid combinations of the two. Because Tempest provides mechanisms, not policies, programmers ca...

Randomness Extractors – An Exposition

Randomness is crucial to computer science, both in theory and applications. In complexity theory, randomness augments computers to offer more powerful models. In cryptography, randomness is essential for seed generation, where the computational model used is generally probabilistic. However, ideal randomness, which is usually assumed to be available in computer science theory and applications, ...