Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Submission + - Book about the way computers affect society for high school students

An anonymous reader writes: We are teaching an introductory class in computer science for high school students. We have the technical aspects of the course covered, there is a lot of information on the internet on designing that aspect of the class. We also want to cover some aspects of how computers affect society, privacy, expectations, digital divide etc. We were suggested Blown to Bits, which covers a lot of this but I'm not sure high school students are really going to enjoy it or even take away the right implications...any recommendations for anything else ? Movies, Fiction, Non-Fiction Books and any other media are all welcome.

Students are expected to read no more than 200 pages (that's all the time they have).

Comment Re:Clean It Up Boys (Score 1) 92

That would make sense, but the discussion has now veered off into also removing the ability to plug in components such as your own JavaScript engine, because it is expensive to maintain....if anything the cleanup should go the other way of making it more easy to plug-in different implementations for specific pieces into WebKit. The lesson here should be IMHO, to avoid future forks by making ports less expensive, not use this as an opportunity to cut down on extensibility.

Comment Re:Scalzi on Stross on ST (Score 1) 809

I took a class in neural networks almost 20 years ago. One project was to get a small network to "learn" how to recugnize handwritten numbers. On a 486/33 running overnight it got to the point where it could recognize a number right over 90% of the time, just with a a few dozen neurons. However, it would probably be impossible to determine *why* that network was able to recognize the numbers.

Consciousness (however you want to define it) is almost certainly an emergent property, and if it can emerge in a toddler it should be able to emerge in a properly designed piece of hardware. And even you can you can do a core dump on that hardware, you'll *never* figure out why it's conscious.

Moon

Unambiguous Evidence of Water On the Moon 251

Nethemas the Great writes "Information has leaked ahead of the scheduled NASA press conference tomorrow that we have found unambiguous evidence for water on the moon. From the article, 'Since man first touched the moon and brought pieces of it back to Earth, scientists have thought that the lunar surface was bone dry. But new observations from three different spacecraft have put this notion to rest with what has been called "unambiguous evidence" of water across the surface of the moon.'"

Slashdot Top Deals

Computer programmers do it byte by byte.

Working...