Math and Computer Science

We had a recent post mentioning Codecademy and their well-publicized CodeYear project to bring learning to code to the masses. The opportunity to learn programming over the Interwebs is ever-increasing.

Sebastian Thrun, of Stanford and Google, has left his tenure at Stanford to start a new online university called Udacity. His first course, on how to build a search engine is available online — FOR FREE.

http://www.udacity.com/

“CS 101: BUILDING A SEARCH ENGINE – Learn programming in seven weeks. We’ll teach you enough about computer science that you can build a web search engine like Google or Yahoo!”

Edit: There is also a class at Udacity titled, Science 373: Programming a Robotic Car.  This class is being offered in Python, here is a link to the YouTube video.

These classes start on February 20th…

And here’s a blog post from Reuters titled “Udacity and the future of online universities”  http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/01/23/udacity-and-the-future-of-online-universities/

“Udacity looks great, and I can’t wait for it to be a revolutionary success, educating and empowering students around the world, especially in places like Africa and India, and, in those places, especially women.”

Let’s not forget the Khan Academy: http://www.khanacademy.org/
Here’s a good example of what you might find at Khan:

• Insertion Sort in Python : Basic implementation of insertion sort algorithm http://www.khanacademy.org/video/insertion-sort-in-python?playlist=Computer+Science

And don’t overlook –

• Stanford’s free courses for Spring 2012: http://therohanaurora.com/new-stanfords-free-courses/
• MIT OpenCourseWare is free and requires no registration: http://ocw.mit.edu/
• Mathematics http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/#mathematics
• Computer Science  http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/#electrical-engineering-and-computer-science

Happy coding!

HTML 5 still isn’t totally ready, but for those already using it, here’s a good resource I just came across: http://html5please.us/

(From the site) “Look up HTML5 features, know if they are ready for use, and if so find out how you should use them – with polyfills, fallbacks or as they are.”

Happy new year!

Peter Ohring forwarded this http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/computer-coding-2012-1/ to some faculty, which prompted Brooke Singer to forward this: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/should-all-majors-not-just-computer-science-majors-learn-code

Please post a comment on what you think.

Google has changed the way it responds to search requests: it now will include information on Google+.  Facebook also is gradually rolling out a change involving its Timeline.  Please comment on what you think about that. It does occur to me that one needs some sense of programming, algorithms and data to understand these consumer products and services.

Moving to the mathematics front, would someone please explain this article to me: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/science/pasta-inspires-scientists-to-use-their-noodle.html?ref=mathematics

See you on campus soon.

It took me 3 sessions, but I enjoyed this:

The technology patent crisis is crucial to the future development of the internet; open source software is a foundational component of the patent crisis. Copyrights and patents legalize the reproduction, sale, or publication of an individual’s work. Copyrights permit limited reproduction which ensue monetary enticements documented acknowledgement for the inventors creations. Open source software provides source code and rights of software that would be typically available solely to the licensed copyright. The speed of the technologic progression occurred at a faster rate than the law resulting in unprotected patenting of web development.

Opens source software is surrounded by the controversy of protecting intellectual property. Incentives for developers to permit open source software discussed in Tom Casson’s Open Standards, Open Source Adoption in the Public Sector, and Their Relationship to Microsoft’s Market Dominance are:  (1) security (2) affordability (3) transparency and (5) localization. Security is affirmed in the large number of knowledgeable users recognizing potential security loop holes. Open source often grants people permission to download the software at no cost. Some scholars boast a positive to the current economic crisis was the “boost” for open-source software. Jim Whitehurst chief of Red Hat, an open source technology provider, spoke about the increase in development despite economic investment since enterprise-level software is a great expense. Open source software promotes increase in technologic advancement despite limited funds allocated to growth and research. Transparency grants all people equal rights to software and software development regardless of title or licensing. Localism fosters global collaboration and diverse innovation.

Illegal software use or pirating software results in a loss of $11.75 billion for the global economy and a loss of $2.6 billion in the United States. Laura Forlano’s article continues these pirating statistics stating “What is odd about all the panic over software piracy is that there is a competing trend in the high-tech world, and that is what is called “open source”. . . . Certainly, the goal of the Business Software Alliance is to crack down on the use of illegal software. But, New Yorkers might be better off if we start to use “open source” software and reduce our dependence on monopolistic software companies.” Open source software is encouraged by officials to aid in the illegal pirating of privately licensed software from ‘monopolistic companies’. Alexis Kold  described the developers risk implementing open source software, “Sadly, the age of open source ideas is actually the age of shameless stealing.” Big companies are free to steal from defenseless startup companies.  Kold continues, ‘. . . To not have patents at all means that at the end of the day big companies will always absorb all the best innovation for free.’”

Many professionals claim that if given proper licensing and acknowledgement many open source software advancements could threaten some leading software companies.  A large portion of open source software is downloaded and redistributed without measure. This potentially is immeasurably aiding in economic and business productivity without limitation or proper recognition manifesting an unknown future in regards to the protection and compensation of many developers.

Check out this article from InfoWorld on programming trends:

http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/11-programming-trends-watch-179761

At least with print media, “don’t believe everything you read” was more or less easy to apply– stay away from fringe publications and radical sources, and you could eliminate a lot of the lies that are out there.

On the Interwebs, things are more than a little different.  There are “paid posters” providing their opinions on message boards and social media to affect popular opinion.  From the Wikipedia page titled Sockpuppet, ”A sockpuppet is an online identity used for purposes of deception.  The term—a reference to the manipulation of a simple hand puppet made from a sock—originally referred to a false identity assumed by a member of an internet community who spoke to, or about, himself while pretending to be another person.   The term now includes other uses of misleading online identities, such as those created to praise, defend or support a third party or organization.”

This sort of activity is known to be a tool of propaganda used by the Chinese, but it’s not limited to the great communist dictatorship of the East.  In an academic paper by Cheng Chen, Kui Wu, Venkatesh Srinivasan, and Xudong Zhang titled “Battling the Internet Water Army: Detection of Hidden Paid Posters” it is stated that, “…the use of paid posters extends well beyond China.  According to a recent news report in the Guardian [9], the US military and a private corporation are developing a specific software that can be used to post information on social media websites using fake online identifications. The objective is to speed up the distribution of pro-American propaganda.”

The paper is a little difficult to get through but is overall informative.  Particularly useful were the links provided in the sources section.  With a focus on technical information, it’s somewhat taxing to read, and falls short on conclusions– probably as this is a developing topic.  It explores sockpuppeting as a new job opportunity, and gets into some details of its inner workings.  It’s a good piece because it brings these issues to light, and reminds us how careful one must be out on the Interwebs.  You can find a link to the .pdf on this page from Cornell.

From The Guardian article titled “Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media,” “The project has been likened by web experts to China’s attempts to control and restrict free speech on the internet.  Critics are likely to complain that it will allow the US military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives.”

Reportedly, American military interests in this activity are for overseas activities only.  However, use of these techniques are not limited to our forces fighting terror around the globe.  Corporations and politicians have their hands in this business as well.

Beyond defining the term, the Wikipedia page on Sockpuppet provides a section titled Notable Public Examples to detail how this propaganda technique is known to have been used.

In the end, the ‘user’ must find a way to think for themselves.  I realize this isn’t easy in a world where things are handed to us on the “silver-plated platter” known as the WWW.  That being said, somewhere between loading a page and clicking the next link, I hope people are still asking questions and doing some critical thinking for themselves.

Don’t believe everything you read.

It took me long enough…

For several years now, I’ve been meaning to figure out this whole RSS thing. Well, earlier tonight, I finally got my start. I installed Liferea (a news aggregator for Linux and Unix) onto my Ubuntu netbook and quickly scrambled to find some worthy RSS feeds.  There are alternatives to Liferea, but it caught my attention with good reviews and popularity ratings.

A step back…

RSS or RDF Site Summary, is more commonly known as Really Simple Syndication and is a document written in XML that contains a summary or full document (with metadata publishing details) of frequently updated resources such as blogs, news items, audio, and video from across the web.  This technology has been around for over a decade and could be looked at as a modern Usenet (wow, really dating myself here) for the web.

Getting started…

Liferea, or Linux Feed Reader, came installed with example feeds that include Planet Ubuntu (hurray!) and Slashdot!  It didn’t take me long to add new feeds. I easily found this blog that lists top Technology RSS and followed up with this crazy-long list of science-related feeds.  Now, I’m still weeding through that long list, and ultimately I see myself eliminating some of the lesser feeds, but right now I am all about trying out as many as possible to find the best sources of information.

Why this is so cool…

You see, instead of using Google to seek articles of interest, and instead of actually going to all of these websites every day to find articles worthy of reading, THEY WILL ALL COME TO ME NOW.  The client (Liferea) downloads the feeds so they can be read offline AND there’s a bookmarking feature that is linked to your default browser (mine is Chrome).

What this all means…

Less effort yielding more (and better) information means a happy(er) me, and also means I will more than likely have plenty more things to blog about.  So, stay tuned Mathematics and Computer Science peoples!  And if you haven’t already done so, look into setting up your own feed reader– RSS is great late 20th Century technology!

Check out this article on partially successful efforts to defeat methods to distinguish people from programs:

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/110111-researchers-defeat-captcha-on-popular-252620.html

The Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan has (at least) 2 exhibits that may be of interest.

I saw both of these a couple of weeks ago, and easily would go back again.

One is

Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects

July 24–November 7, 2011

Special Exhibitions Gallery, third floor

and the other is

Standard Deviations: Types and Families in Contemporary Design

March 2, 2011–January 30, 2012

Architecture and Design Galleries, third floor

By the way, I am told that Purchase students get free admission to MOMA.

You can contact the museum to confirm.