Posts with keyword: academics

11 entries

iPhones On Campus

Tue Mar 11 21:10:00 2008

Abilene Christian University has a program to give all students an iPhone. They've also got a video that shows how the iPhone might be used on campus (the video is conceptual, not factual). I found some of the ideas to be pretty interesting, but wonder how much IT support would be needed to pull them off. For example, in one sequence the students type things into an application running on the iPhone and a tag cloud is built on the projected screen in real time. Slick. The current standard in teaching IT support is Blackboard and anyone who watches
Continue reading {iPhones On Campus}

Microwulf - The World's Cheapest Supercomputer

Fri Aug 31 12:59:00 2007

The world's cheapest supercomputer, built by a Calvin College CS professor Joel Adams and student Tim Brom is very interesting. They built an 8 core Beowulf cluster using four motherboards and a gigabit network switch for less than $2500. The resulting machine has a price/performance ratio of $100/Gigaflop. That's just plain fun. I think there ought to be a yearly competition of this sort for students. Who can build the fastest supercomputer for $2500? Update: here's Joel Adams' website
Continue reading {Microwulf - The World's Cheapest Supercomputer}

JA-SIG Keynote on Digital Identity

Mon Jun 25 11:45:00 2007

I gave my keynote presentation on the social and economic impact of digital identity to the JA-SIG 2007 Summer conference. JA=SIG promotes the development and use of open architectures in higher education. In addition to their semiannual conference, they also have several projects that members develop and contribute to. The presentation went pretty well, I thought. There were probably about 150 people in the room. The PDF of my slides is available as well as a screencast demoing CardSpace and another screencast demoing OpenID which I showed in lieu of live demos. Neither is edited nor does either have
Continue reading {JA-SIG Keynote on Digital Identity}

Great Principles of Computer Science

Wed Jun 6 17:44:00 2007

Today at lunch, I was watching how the person who took orders communicated the type and number of sandwiches to the sandwich makers. She had a stack of cards for each sandwich type and she'd place them in order on the table by the sandwich making station. I remarked to my friend that there were using a queue to decouple the order taking unit from and processing unit (sandwich makers) so that order taking could happen independently of sandwich making. They could add more processing units (competing consumers) if things got busy. The world is full of these kinds
Continue reading {Great Principles of Computer Science}

Web Science: Do We Need a New Discipline?

Wed May 9 11:54:00 2007

Web Science panel(click to enlarge) I'm in a panel at WWW2007 on Web Science, essentially a proposal for a new discipline. The field would be interdisciplinary, taking things from areas as diverse as sociology, physics, biology, law, and psychology, as well as the areas you might immediately think of like computer science or math. What is Web Science? Here's a quote from a Science paper on Web Science: When we discuss an agenda for a science of the Web, we use the term "science" in two ways. Physical and biological science analyzes the natural world, and tries to find
Continue reading {Web Science: Do We Need a New Discipline?}

Jeannette Wing on Computational Thinking

Wed Apr 25 20:40:00 2007

Tonight is Jeannette Wing's general interest talk as part of her Organick Memorial Lecture at the University of Utah. The talk is on computational thinking. Here's an article she wrote for ACM Communications. These slides are close to the ones she used tonight. Computational thinking will be a fundamental skill, like reading, writing, and arithmetic, in the 21st century. Computational thinking enables what one person cannot do alone. There are two components: abstraction and automation. CT involves thinking at more than one layer of abstraction at a time. Automation mechanizes the abstraction layers and their relationship. These allow the
Continue reading {Jeannette Wing on Computational Thinking}

Harnessing Decentralized Resources in Disasters

Tue Apr 17 11:39:00 2007

By now we know that the gunman responsible for yesterday's carnage at Virginia Tech was a South Korean student. A video-game crazed South Korean student, if you believe the other Dr. Phil. It's not too early to think about what we could do differently in the future, however. Yesterday, I received an email from David Stephenson, who's blog is still broken with some of his ideas of the role Web 2.0 technologies could play. I'm sure he won't mind me giving them broader exposure here and commenting. David said: There's NO PLACE in our society that should have been
Continue reading {Harnessing Decentralized Resources in Disasters}

Conflicting Roles and the Use of Tor

Sat Feb 10 19:38:00 2007

This story from the Chronicle for Higher Education does a good job of illustrating the conflict that often exists between academic Computer Science departments who want to teach computer science and the campus information technology organization who is responsible for keeping the network running and legal. In this report, Paul Cesarini, an assistant professor of visual communication and technology education at Bowling Green State University, receives a visit from the campus police because he's teaching students about Tor, a tool for anonymizing Web browsing. The detectives and network-security technician listened patiently to me, wearing their best poker faces. They
Continue reading {Conflicting Roles and the Use of Tor}

BibDesk for BibTeX

Thu Jan 4 14:12:00 2007

If you use BibTeX for managing paper references (and after all, who doesn't) and you use a Mac, then you should know about BibDesk, an open source tool for managing BibTeX bibliography files. BibDesk is at a great intersection: open source tool used by people who, for the most part, know how to program. There are frequent updates and the set of features is impressive. For example, I love the ability to not only manage the bibliographic data for an article, but the PDF as well, if I happen to have it. It turns my BibTeX file into a
Continue reading {BibDesk for BibTeX}

Open Access to Research

Mon Jul 3 15:09:00 2006

Last week I published a show at IT Conversations by Paula Le Dieu talking about Science Commons. Science Commons is a project of Creative Commons aimed at making more of scientific results and data available without copyright restrictions. I personally believe that academic research has less impact because the primary journal publication organizations (whether for-profit or non-profit) lock up results behind copyright. Le Dieu goes through some very real scenarios where this could have negative impact. Mind you, we're not talking about private data generated by private companies, but results that you paid for in many cases with your
Continue reading {Open Access to Research}

CS Department RSS

Fri May 26 02:08:00 2006

The BYU CS Department has added RSS feeds to it's Web site. Now, if I could convince the CS department to not send them to the faculty mailing list, I'd be set. Otherwise, I just see them in RSS after I've deleted them from my mailbox. A good first step though...
Continue reading {CS Department RSS}