Me and My Algorithm, Seth Freeman, nyt op ed

This op-ed piece really has nothing to say about algorithms in the computer science sense of the word. Apparently in common usage algorithm is now related to those pieces of code that peak over your shoulder at your emails and offer suggestions for things it thinks you want. The author mentions how when reading an email he got from a friend that mentioned holocaust deniers it helpfully offered adds for holistic dentists. This kind of simple word match and weighting is not what we think of when we are preparing to learn or teach algorithms. But the piece is fun for other reasons.

When I taught this spring, one of the things that made the class animated was the discussion of whether cloud based email services should be doing this kind of analysis on our emails. I could argue that it was merely a machine and that no human ever saw their words but it gave them little comfort. They were profoundly disturbed by this. There is a clear collision between the desire to monetize a free service with new and improved advertising and people's sense of privacy.

In the end the article doesn't even begin to suggest the depths to which modern advertising can go in gathering, analyzing and categorizing us so as to better match their pitches to our needs and and ability to pay. Someday soon some poor schmuck will wake up to find that the ads next to his emails are no longer selling Benz's but Corollas since he just got sacked last week. Ain't that a kick in the pants.

Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking by Dr Nathan Myhrvold

I think I need to reconsider how I apportion my portfolio. When the NYT reviewed this mammoth work 9mar2011 it carried a retail price of $625 and an online price of $467.62. But Amazon shows it out of stock and others who are willing to part with it are asking $1200. Who knew that there was this good a market in the arbitrage of objects that are said to be obsolete?

If I had the time, money and space, I'd surely be the first in line to get this book. But at 6 volumes, 2438 pages, 1522 recipes, and just under 40 lbs, I'll pass. Yes it is impressive that they spend 5 years and many millions of dollars with a staff of 46 to create this encyclopedic survey of food. But no matter the incredible photos or the cutting edge research, this will find many professional or wannabes who will buy it and ponder whether to invest in a rotary evaporator to try out a recipe. For me, I'll just hope that one of my friends will buy it and let me come over and look at the pictures. Seriously, can I come over and look at the pictures?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0982761007/ref=dp_olp_new?ie=UTF8&qid=1311116763&sr=8-1&condition=new

Researchers show how a car's electronics can be taken over remotely; nyt 10mar2011

I found this article chilling. Computer scientists from UC San Diego and U Wash reported that a hacker with only moderate skills could gain remote access to someone's car and take over basic functions including control of the engine. While no known cases of this kind of hacking have been reported, it is a cold comfort. It isn't as much that I am afraid someone will cause my car to hit the brakes when I'm going 80 down 80 (I'd never do that) or even pop the lock and make off with my car when its parked in public. What I find most upsetting about this is that entire staffs of engineers worked on a system that had cell phone connectivity and never stopped to think about the kind of security that the software needed to avoid this kind of malicious tampering. No one. At least no one that management listened to.

Losing control of our cars is bad enough. But this past year has seen a flurry of reports of the security of major portions of our infrastructure like the electric grid and transportation systems. Ghansah at school has the right idea after all. Software security awareness and response is a wave that is coming ashore.

David Brooks in Today's WSJ: The Road Not Taken

David Brooks is my hero. He is smart, articulate and not completely conservative. Today he write about how the repubs are squandering an opportunity to do some real good for the country. I am no fan of them but when they have a good idea I'll agree. So before my house gets egged, let me explain.

To have a social safety net we must fund it. I myself am very comfortable paying the taxes needed to fund it. However there are many people out there who are short sighted enough to believe they are self sufficient and will never need the net. For them, it becomes an issue of paying for someone else who cannot (or will not in their opinion) manage their affairs properly. They probably took Atlas Shrugged as their own personal morality play. I can't change their opinion. But the congress people they send to Washington already know that these constituents will be the first to clamor for government assistance when a tornado blows down their home or a hurricane washes away their second home on a barrier island. Their extreme position that they don't need the federal government is the worst kind of hypocrisy.

Here is where there is an argument that should be made that is not. There is no doubt that the federal government oversees a very significant flow of cash. Where the pubs could get a rise out of even me is the efficiency with which this money is used. There are far too many overlapping federal agencies that oversee sprawling empires that often lose sight of their core missions. Congress too is guilty of passing far too many laws that are poorly written and giving the assignment to oversee the enforcement of those laws to agencies that they then refuse to properly fund. This must stop. Our system of government in 4 year increments will never allow for the kind of sweeping changes that are needed to rationalize the federal government's mission. An in an environment in which a significant proportion of American's don't even understand the federal government's contribution to our economy and society will never accept it no matter the size.

So to see us on the brink of a bi-partisan deal that would bring us closer to a balanced budget and right even a few wrongs in those sprawling agencies and vast rule books and then pull back is just galling. What is wrong with those people anyway?

Too Much Programming Too Soon? by Mark Guzdial and Judy Robertson

OK, I'm a little behind in my reading. But this is just as important as the day I read it. I'm talking about the article of this name in the March 2010 CACM where the authors discuss Mark's book "How We Teach Introductory Computer Science is Wrong". (http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/45725-how-we-teach-introductory-computer-science-is-wrong/fulltext) Both the article and the book are an indictment of the practice of doing minimal instruction in the teaching of programming. The research cited suggests that showing fully worked examples of programs significantly improves the speed and quality with which students learn how to program.

At the risk of reading too much into this fact I have always had the feeling that teaching programming has a storied history of a form of hazing. Perhaps because no one really knows how best to teach it or we all think that somehow we can teach it by lecturing and talking about the atomic syntax. But the reality is that students are always flumoxed at figuring out how to assemble the pieces. This "minimally guided instruction". You would think that the text books would do the job of providing the worked examples that this article suggests but I have been disappointed in most of the texts I've looked at. Ironically this is exactly the same suggestion that I have gotten from advanced students. So what could be going on the heads of these students that makes showing them worked examples help them learn? I have an idea.

Since the 1980s there has been way too much ink spilt over the discussion of patterns. While I think some of the discussion of pattern languages a bit over the top, there can be no doubt that there is something very important in patterns. Instead of teaching the core instructions of the language with their formal syntax, what we really need to do is teach them basic problems solved by computers and the patterns of language that solves that problem. I believe what this does it allow the student to learn by induction. By showing how to solve one problem we reasonably expect the student to learn how to solve a similar problem. If we show how to read a number from the keyboard, we certainly expect them to follow that pattern when they must read another number. For the gifted students, we expect them to figure out how other data types are read. This sounds very close to the thesis of one of my favorite books; Metaphors We Live By.

Metaphors We Live By was written by Lakoff and Johnson which has gone through many printings since it was published in 1980 and imho a book everyone should read. The central point is that metaphor is not merely a poetic device but a key insight into how we learn new things. This fits perfectly with Mark's suggestion that we should show a complete working program first and then ask the student to first make a small change and then quickly advance the distance between the example and the problem.

But then that's just me...

College The Easy Way, Bob Herbert NYT, 5Mar2011

In this column Bob summarizes a book "Academically Adripft: Limited Learning on College Campuses" by Profs Richard Arum of NYU and Josipa Toksa of UV. He quotes the book, "Many students come to college not only poorly prepared by prior schooling for highly demanding academic tasks that ideally lie in front of them, but--moretroubling still--they enter college with attitudes, norms, values, and behaviours that are often at odds with academic commitment."

Wow.

I don't know that I agree with this dire assessment of the current student. Both as a new undergraduate oh so many years ago and teaching relatively new undergraduates this past year, I don't see this vast change in the youth of america. However I can see where these authors get their thesis. According to Bob, "the authors cite empirical work showing that the average amounts of time spent studying by college students has dropped by more than 50 percent since the early 1960s." The study is available at highered.ssrc.org. I am not going to take the time to verify it, but my suspicion is that some societal trends are reflected in these numbers, not some fundamental change in the students.

First, I believe that far more high school students aspire to attend college than in the 1960s. There has been a drumbeat for my entire life telling young people that the key to a better life is education. This has had an affect on student and parent alike with their willingness to dig deeper to afford the inexorably rising cost of education. So demand, I suspect, is much higher now than it was back then.

Second, the natural response of educational institutions to an increase in demand in a market that has been relatively inelastic is to increase supply. At least here in California, there is no shortage of educational options from community colleges to mediocre universities to some of the best schools in the world. They range from publicly financed state schools, to for-profit institutions to prestigious private universities. Let's not kid ourselves, these institutions compete against each other whether they want to admit it or not. And internally they are very concerned about how many they graduate. What student or parent will find a school attractive that graduates a very small percentage of their accepted students? Once you are in there is a lot of pressure to get the student out with a degree.

Has there been a diminishment of the critical reasoning skills of our students in this period? I confess to having a inclination to agree. For what I need to teach, critical reasoning and abstract thinking are vital. I can accept that not everyone will have those skills but I am already working with a class of students who have presumably already demonstrated this ability over many semesters of work. I am not sure I always see this demonstrated in their written product. I have attributed it more to the lack of the kind of deep intellectual writing that is required to succeed in academia or a profession tilted toward the liberal arts. I have always thought it was a reflection of the kind of oral tradition TV, radio and internet give us and away from the book, academic paper and dissertation that is the academic tradition.

But maybe their right and I'm wrong.

Here we go again...

While I posted a few things several years ago, I will start again. In this period of time I completed my master's in software engineering and haltingly started a new career in teaching. This spring I taught two sections of introduction to computer science at a community college and one section of software architecture, graduate level, at the nearby university. I will use this blog to gather my thoughts about these experiences while I have the time over the summer and lay down some short essays on topics I may want to pickup on again later.

Dear reader, I must warn you that my interests range far and wide. I will do my best to give each posting a title that will clue you into what that one will be about. In particular, I will be cleaning out my stash of accumulated clippings and using this blog to record the clipping reference and why I found it interesting. I can only hope you will also find a few interesting.

And so it begins (again)...