Almer S. Tigelaar

A Little Bit of Everything

Posts

Argo

An escalation of violence in a foreign embassy, whilst a sad thing in itself, is nothing short of spectacular material for news coverage, but can it also make a good movie? Perhaps one that educates the...

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Skyfall

James Bond is back in his twenty-third installment, the third portrayal of Bond for Daniel Craig, and the first Bond movie not to derive its name from Ian Fleming's work: Skyfall. This is also the 50th...

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Shard Ranking and Cutoff Estimation for Topically Partitioned Collections

Large document collections can be partitioned into topical shards to facilitate distributed search. In a low-resource search environment only a few of the shards can be searched in parallel. Such a search environment faces two intertwined...

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Peer-to-Peer Information Retrieval

The Internet has become an integral part of our daily lives. However, the essential task of finding information is dominated by a handful of large centralised search engines. In this thesis we study an alternative to...

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Designing a Thesis

A while ago I spent quite some time to research the best options for designing my thesis. I used ideas from various sources, and in this brief article I will explain some of the choices I...

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Total Recall

A good science fiction story is not easy to write. Total Recall is loosely based on a short-story by famous science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, the mind behind "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", the basis...

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The Dark Knight Rises

Christoper Nolan started his dark-toned Batman trilogy with 2005's Batman Begins, followed by the superb The Dark Knight in 2008. This years it is time for the conclusion of the series: The Dark Knight Rises. We...

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Peer-to-Peer Information Retrieval: An Overview

Peer-to-peer technology is widely used for file sharing. In the past decade a number of prototype peer-to-peer information retrieval systems have been developed. Unfortunately, none of these has seen widespread real-world adoption and thus, in contrast...

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The Avengers

Marvel teased us with the release of this film near the end of various previously released super hero flicks like Captain America and Iron Man 2. This would be the movie that unites all the super...

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Hugo

Hugo is based on a relatively recently released (2007) award winning book by Brian Selznick. It is not surprising that the film rights to the books were quickly sold, and certainly not by the least of...

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How long would it take to read Wikipedia?

Wikipedia has become the de facto encyclopedia on the Internet. A traditional encyclopedia spans many textbook volumes which would take any normal person ages to read. Few people would likely engage in such an endeavor. However,...

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Life in a Day

The premise behind the YouTube documentary "Life in a Day" is interesting: invite everyone around the world to shoot video on one specific day: July 24th 2010. Have people upload their raw footage and edit it...

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