keeping simple

Category: academics

  • Computer Science 101

    CS101 – Introduction to Computing Principles Welcome to CS101 — the essential ideas of computing via little phrases of Javascript code. For interested teachers, here is a demo and discussion of this approach. From Stanford! When I taught CS 101 at the crappy state school, we did some coding in C, some algorithm analysis, some architecture,…

  • Free and Open Source Licenses

    Interesting discussion here. But many FOSS-based transactions are not commercial in the foregoing sense. Instead, software subject to a FOSS license may come into a product without the producer knowing that this has happened or, in any realistic way, assenting to the terms. Also, the software often comes from a non-commercial party. An engineer downloads software from an…

  • memories

    For some reason, all copies of an early variant of RTLinux called “myrtlinux” by its Italian “author” have disappeared from the web, but thanks to some archives we can find some fragments from old days.  For example, within a year or two of this email, the story had changed rather  dramatically. To me, there were…

  • R.L. Moore topologist and racist

    If you read this down to the bottom you get a little hint, but you have to read something like this to understand what that little hint means. In graduate school she was very much alone, though she was a grader for an undergraduate course taken by Raymond Johnson. In her first class, she was…

  • limits of state diagrams

    Here’s a graph of a simple state machine of somewhat under 512 states that models  a dumb fifo queue. The initial state is “e” for empty. We can append 1,2 or 3 to this queue and can delete the first in. To simplify suppose the alphabet is {0,1,2,3} where 0 means “dequeue”  and the others…

  • Computer science as a failed discipline again

    As a senior researcher, I am saddened to see funding agencies, department heads, deans, and promotion committees encouraging younger researchers to do shallow research. As a reader of what should be serious scientific journals, I am annoyed to see the computer science literature being polluted by more and more papers of less and less scientific…

  • Oh snap – Maurice Wilkes on Alan Turing

    He was a real mathematician except that he only learned one little bit of mathematics and then didn’t learn any more. He was no practical organizer and, well, if you had Turing around in the place you wouldn’t get it going. Looking back, what would you say was the significance of Turing’s 1936 Entscheidungs-problem paper?…

  • Peer review in the electronic age

    In academic computer science, conferences are often more important than journals, but The current system of publication in biomedical research provides a distorted view of the reality of scientific data that are generated in the laboratory and clinic. This system can be studied by applying principles from the field of economics. The “winner’s curse,” a…

  • Continuing mathematician sanity thread: Boltzmann

    [Boltzmann] Opposition to his ideas was harsh and his moods were volatile. Despondent, fearing disintegration of his theories,he hanged himself in 1906. It wasn’t his first suicide attempt, but it was his most successful. This kind of expresses the mood of Janna Levin’s book about topology, the size of the universe, and all sorts of…

  • More computer science as humbug [updated with Brazil dream sequence]

    Continuing my experiments in academic papers, I sent a paper on automata and circuit verification to CAV2010 (here’s an updated version with some corrections and better references). I actually got one carefully written and well informed review. Sending a paper to an academic conference with no references more recent than 20 years, was probably more…