00_NOP - Slashdot User

Submission + - Death of the last great amateur scientist (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP on Sunday December 09, 2012 @12:04PM

00_NOP writes: The death of amateur astronomical legend Sir Patrick Moore surely marks the end of the era when amateurs could make an impact on science that would rival the professionals. Though many of Moore's ideas were disproved by space-borne probes, his impact on planetary astronomy was deep and profound, while his efforts at popularising astronomy were unmatched.

Submission + - Should we teach 11 year olds to write mobile apps? (wordpress.com)

Submitted by

00_NOP

on Saturday November 17, 2012 @05:43AM

00_NOP writes: "New proposals, commissioned by the UK government from the British Computing Society (BCS) for a computing (ICT) curriculum for schools in England have been published and they are a huge step forward from the existing teaching, now widely discredited, of how to use various "office" products.
But there is some confusion about what they actually contain: the formal proposals do not contain some of the ideas that have been spun to the media. Most eye-catchingly, this morning's reports suggest 11 year olds will be taught how to write apps for cell phones but no such proposal is in the paper from the BCS — are we about to see a new form of corporate lock-in with Google, Apple and Microsoft battling to get their technology adopted even while the real world moves on to completely new multicore paradigms?"

Submission + - Time to stand up against Amazon (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by

00_NOP

on Monday October 22, 2012 @05:11AM

00_NOP writes: "Amazon are taking fire in the UK for insisting that publishers pay them for 20% VAT (sales tax) when in fact the online retailer is only paying 3% VAT. Given that the Kindle is rubbish at displaying maths and science and that Amazon are as dangerous a monopoly as Microsoft ever was, is it not time that regulators and consumers stood up to them?"

Submission + - Unreal Tournament to highlight AI breakthrough (wordpress.com)

Submitted by

00_NOP

on Friday September 07, 2012 @05:28PM

00_NOP writes: "This coming week is to see AI researchers battle it out through the medium of Unreal Tournament and hopes are high that researchers at Imperial College in London have built a bot that is sufficiently human like that it will, in effect, pass the Turing Test and win a $7000 prize at the IEEE's Conference of Computational Intelligence and Games in Grenada, Spain.
Interestingly, the breakthrough, if proven, comes not from ever greater computational processing of the environment, but in discriminating between less and more important stimuli. In Alan Turing's centenary year one of the points he was ridiculed for in his lifetime — that machines could match human behaviour and 'thought' may be on the point of decisive vindication."

Submission + - Don't use a Kindle for Math or CompSci books (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP on Wednesday August 15, 2012 @08:41AM

00_NOP writes: Many Kindle users who read technical books will be used to having to handle what looks like second-class edits of the book: the ease of use of the device (just) making up for the problems caused by missing and misplaced paragraphs and non-Roman letters and symbols. But my experience in the last 24 hours has meant I will be avoiding using the device for technical reading — especially after a leading technical publisher told me the issue was not their editing, but the Kindle itself.

Submission + - Breakthrough in drawing complex Venn diagrams (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP on Sunday August 12, 2012 @07:43AM

00_NOP writes: Venn diagrams are all the rage in this election year, but drawing comprehensible diagrams for anything more than 3 sets has proved to be very difficult. Until the breakthough just announced by Khalegh Mamakani and Frank Ruskey of the University of Victoria in Canada, nobody had managed to draw a simple (no more than two lines crossing), symmetric Venn diagram for more than 7 sets (only primes will work). Now they have pushed that on to 11. And it's pretty too.

Submission + - BASIC as a domain-specific language (wordpress.com)

Submitted by

00_NOP

on Monday June 25, 2012 @10:49AM

00_NOP writes: "BINSIC is a reimplementation of Timex Sinclair 1000/1500 (ZX80/ZX81) BASIC that runs on Groovy/Java and is supplied, to start you off, with a BASIC script that runs the hacker classic Conway's Game of Life.
BINSIC — the name stands for Binsic Is Not Sinclair Instruction Code — actually extends the Sinclair BASIC (e.g. to support an ELSE clause in IF..THEN..ELSE) but does have a few issues about GOTO statements (the lack of native support for them in Java and Groovy makes them very difficult to emulate — though GOTO does work outside loops. The BASIC of the 1980s was crude but also had some expressive power lacking in today's much more sophisticated programming environments — INPUT can do in one line what it takes Java 20 to 25 lines to master. The initial thought for the "domain" was introducing kids' to programming skills (something also taken up by the RaspberryPi people) but now I am not so sure, but I hope it brings fun if nothing else."

Submission + - Can we build a better mouse trap/hex editor? (wordpress.com) 4

Submitted by

00_NOP

on Tuesday June 05, 2012 @02:47PM

00_NOP writes: "Hex editors are probably one of the most basic parts of any serious coder's toolkit, yet earlier this year, when working on a filesystem driver for Linux I could not find one that did what I wanted — handle big and little endian 16 bit representations and block:offset addressing (I am not saying it doesn't exist, only that I could not find it).
I had a bit of a moan on my blog and then decided to do the free software thing of writing my own (in Groovy). I've now done that — and it's available for testing — but apart from personal satisfaction, was it really worth it? Should we still be working on such basic tools or getting on with building higher applications?"

Submission + - "FatFonts" to add to infographic accuracy? (wordpress.com)

Submitted by

00_NOP

on Saturday May 05, 2012 @09:40AM

00_NOP writes: "FontFonts — a font where the weight of the number on screen or paper is proportional to the number itself — have been developed by researchers in Scotland and Canada as a way of adding numerical rigour to inforgraphic type displays, reports the New Scientist. A '2' has twice as much ink on the page as a '1' and so on. The magazine provides at example based on mapping Sicily and Mount Etna and reports that the fonts are to be tested with users and compared to alternatives such as heat maps. The big advantage is that the graphics can included detailed figures (with 0.1% accuracy) as well as be easy to understand and absorb for the casual reader."

Submission + - OLPC project disappoints in Peru (wordpress.com)

Submitted by

00_NOP

on Saturday April 07, 2012 @08:17AM

00_NOP writes: "The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has disappointed in Peru, reports the Economist, apparently because in general teachers did not make creative use of the technology. As in other cases the computers seem to have been regarded as ends in themselves rather than tools to help change the ways kids are taught. Quite disappointing for those of us looking for Linux-Global-Domination but not really much of a surprise given the experience in richer countries either."

Submission + - "Radical manifesto" for computer teaching in English schools (wordpress.com)

Submitted by

00_NOP

on Saturday March 31, 2012 @04:24PM

00_NOP writes: "Everybody (or almost everybody) in England agrees that computing teaching to kids in high school is broken. In response the government promised a radical overhaul and a new curriculum. But then last week it was discovered the government had scrapped the bit of the education department that would develop any such curriculum. Not to be deterred John Naughton, the Cambridge University academic who wrote the "Short History of the Future" has now published his own "radical" manifesto on how computing should be taught."

Submission + - Linux kernel hacking: these days its just another job? (wordpress.com)

Submitted by

00_NOP

on Saturday March 24, 2012 @10:23PM

00_NOP writes: "Using GitHub's "punchcard" tool we can see when commits go into the kernel and the pattern is pretty clear: it's between 9 and 5 on a weekday. Hardly any work is done at the weekend and not much overnight. So these days building the kernel seems to be just another job."

Submission + - Why do computer scientists use such lousy citation systems? (wordpress.com)

Submitted by

00_NOP

on Saturday February 25, 2012 @08:17AM

00_NOP writes: "Computer scientists often use the citation systems of the American Mathematical Society or the IEEE which seem to make it very difficult indeed for anyone to grasp what paper or book is being referenced without checking the bibliography directly. Given that one of the giants of the computing world, the ACM, promotes a reference system that does not have this problem and that there are pelnty of other systems about (eg., the Chicago system) which are clear as well as concise, why do computer scientists persist with such obfuscated systems? Is it something in our/their nature?"

Submission + - Herb Sutter on "Moore's End" (drdobbs.com)

Submitted by

00_NOP

on Friday February 03, 2012 @12:53PM

00_NOP writes: "Over a Dr Dobb's website, Herb Sutter discusses what he calls "Moore's End", in other words the effective end of the popular interpretation of Moore's Law — that computing power doubles every 18 — 24 months — and tells us all not to panic but to adapt our development styles to a world of multicore heterogeneity and to embrace parallel computing as it is never going away. At my own blog I also suggest we should be focusing more than ever on better algorithms in response to Moore'sEnd/Peak Silicon. Of course, if we could prove P=NP maybe we could get a second helping of what Sutter calls a "free lunch" — ever faster computing. Otherwise the future looks as though it will be hard work."

Submission + - Computing not to be taught in flagship school in E (wordpress.com)

Submitted by

00_NOP

on Sunday January 22, 2012 @07:06AM

00_NOP writes: "About two weeks ago the British education secretary waxed lyrical about the prospects and opportunities for pupils in English schools that will come from his plans to reform the schools computing curriculum.
This week, though, it has been revealed that his department is to spend some of its money — in short supply because of spending cuts — on a new school that will not teach computing because it is only a "skill" and not suitable for an institution that aims to copy the ethos of England's top public (ie fee paying) schools. Languages are to be taught, though: why they are something more than a mere "skill" is not so clear.
The headteacher of the new school is Katharine Birbalsingh, who quit her previous job after launching a very public attack on the education system at the 2010 conference of the ruling Conservative Party."

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