As we celebrate the holidays and get set to close the books on 2011 — a banner year for the CCC Blog, with more than twice as many page views as in any previous year — we thought we would take a quick look back at some of the most popular topics on the Blog in the past year. After the jump, a rundown of our 10 most viewed posts since January 1 (not handicapped by date):

Google is calling for applications to its 2012 Google Policy Fellowships, which offer undergraduate, graduate, and law students interested in Internet and technology policy “the opportunity to spend the summer contributing to the public dialogue on these issues, and exploring future academic and professional interests.” According to Google: Fellows will have the opportunity to work at public interest organizations at the forefront of debates on broadband and access policy, content regulation, copyright and trademark reform, consumer privacy, open government, and more. Participating organizations are based in either Washington, DC, San Francisco, CA, Ottawa or Toronto, Canada and include: American Library Association, Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, Center for Democracy […]

Seeking to motivate the development of novel solutions to serious computer security threats, Microsoft Corp. has launched an inaugural BlueHat Prize contest, offering a grand prize of $200,000 to the most innovative submission. In particular, Microsoft aims “to challenge security researchers to design a novel runtime mitigation technology designed to prevent the exploitation of memory safety vulnerabilities.” According to the contest website, submissions must:

IBM is out with its sixth annual “Five in Five” list, specifying five technology innovations that have the potential to change the way we live, work, and play over the next five years. It’s a list that has met with some success over the years — for example, a 2007 prediction that “cell phones will be wallet, ticket broker, concierge, bank, shopping buddy, and more” has largely come to fruition. So what’s on this year’s list of science fiction stories that could be reality by the year 2016? Find out after the jump…

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced its Young Faculty Award (YFA) program for 2012, seeking to “identify and engage rising stars in junior faculty positions [i.e., untenured Assistant or Associate Professors within five years of appointment to a tenure-track position] in academia and expose them to Department of Defense (DoD) needs.” Among the core technical topic areas — exactly one of which must be specified in any proposal — are quantum science and technology; mathematics; predictive materials science; advanced electronics; MEMS/NEMS; digital direct manufacturing; neuroscience (including brain-machine interfaces); computational and quantitative social, decision, and behavioral sciences; and robotics. From DARPA’s official Research Announcement (RA):

An excellent example of how novel data-driven methods can advance science and society: In February 2012, the journal Nature Climate Change will publish a paper on rainfall extremes in India by principal investigator Vipin Kumar of the University of Minnesota’s computer science and engineering department and co-principal investigator Auroop Ganguly of the civil and environmental engineering department at Northeastern University in Boston, members of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) [Expeditions in Computing] project team…   “This Expeditions in Computing project brings together interdisciplinary researchers from multiple institutions to pursue a bold, ambitious, research agenda by building reliable predictive models from climate data that could potentially transform how we understand and respond to climate change,” explains Vasant Honavar … program manager in NSF’s Division of Information and Intelligent […]