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Didier took a stab at cryptography. He implemented a toy RSA program “that can encrypt and decrypt a whole file”. His Python program is available for download from his blog. That’s what I call learning. There is a pretty good chance that Didier has a solid grasp of the RSA algorithm now,…
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Question of the day, what is this building? Where is it? (Hint: it is not a church!)
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Harold has a beautiful post on the fact that technology and new media don’t fit in the classroom: All of the action is outside the classroom – blogs, wikis, IM, podcasting – you name it. Soon, the only place to get away from media will be inside the classroom. Hey, they don’t even have a…
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Google open sourced some Python functional programming code : Google Goopy. (Got this through Sean McGrath.) Update: Marcel Ball who now has a blog and big large scholarship, pointed out to me that http://code.google.com is a better link to give out.
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I don’t know how reliable this is, but through Didier, I learned that French is the third language spoken in the US. Here are the numbers: Rank Language Speakers 1 English 215,423,555 2 Spanish 28,100,725 3 French 1,606,790 4 Chinese 1,499,635 It seems amazing that Chinese would…
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Michael Pazzani offers a course on Web Personalization. I have no time to check it further, but it looks like a very interesting course and the slides are available online. What’s more interesting is that he offers his students a Word version of a 2004 TiVo paper (TiVo is a company that sells a…
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The Social Software Revolution is happening!
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What’s the social software revolution? Well, I’m not expert in social software, go see Seb Paquet or Stephen Downes. But my understanding is as follows. Software has long been seen as a way to support business processes or automate number crunching. Software has also been tool for providing…
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Simple Recipe for Debugging Web Services
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Standard Deviations gives a Simple Recipe for Debugging Web Services (where he defines “Web Services” as SOAP as does my friend Yuhong) and it involves downloading a compiling a small command line utility called netcat. Cool! I like it! Only requirement is that you’ve got to be running Linux,…
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Through Tall, Dark and Mysterious, I found this web page on How to Read Mathematics by Shai Simonson and Fernando Gouvea. This quote says it all: Students need to learn how to read mathematics, in the same way they learn how to read a novel or a poem, listen to music, or view a painting. Some of…
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Paul Graham has done it again. He wrote a beautiful article on How to Start a Startup: You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they…
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In the latest issue of SIAM Review (volume 47, no 1) (articles to be available online soon), I read a great paper for those who like mathematics and want a deeper understanding of how Google works. I knew how the PageRank algorithm worked, roughly, but I never imagined it was a true Linear Algebra…
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Gmail is a really smart email client. I found out it is even better than I thought. If you want to quickly find unread messages in your inbox, just search for “label:inbox is:unread”. The trick also is to “star” the messages you want to come back to. This is much better than leaving them…
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Yuhong reacts to the paper Don’t Become a Scientist! by Jonathan I. Katz. Here’s what she had to say: Whenever I met students who want to have a ph.d., I would ask them, do you really want it if I tell you the truth? Many students tell me that a scientist can be free to think anything and…
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I’ve had quite a number of posts lately about how going for a Ph.D., if you don’t have all the facts about job prospects, can be a frustrating experience for many people. Sometimes I wonder if I’m not too much of a pessimist. The same way some people paint the Ph.D. track as rosy, I could…
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Slashdot is running a discussion on the Best Degree to Pair w/ a B.Sc. in Computer Science. The answers are interesting and range from a MBA to Mathematics. These two seem to be the most frequent answers. I was not surprised to the MBA there, but Mathematics was a bit more suprising. Here are two…
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Best Degree to Pair w/ a B.Sc. in Computer Science?
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The professoriate is likened to a slime mold
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This post makes the point that university professors are essentially self-organizing: (…) universities are valuable primarily as the habitat of academic disciplines, whose self-organizing systems cannot be brought under central command. Bossing academics is like herding ants — creatures that…