Thoughts on STEM Education Innovation, Software and more.
There is increasing controversy around whether someone used AI or not in their writing. Even Nobel laureates with decades of pre-AI writing records are being raked over by internet mobs. A new class of AI detectives have emerged who see AI in every written text; AI has saturated the internet so I understand the impulse but there is no reason to accept AI vigilantism from random internet audiences.…
I find the outrage machine around the Jeffery Epstein "revelations" (in the same way Harvey Weinstein was a revelation, ie everybody knew) mostly to be unconvincing, not least because it conveniently ignores the reality of our society as it relates to sex, money and power. There is also the fact that it has become a political football wielded by whomever it might benefit. I however hope whoever…
James Damore's memo has been all the rage on the internet lately, both for and against. I think most responses to the memo miss some important points that are probably as relevant to the matter as the content of the memo itself. On Corporate openness to ideas Let's start with the argument around free speech. Any well adjusted and intelligent adult knows what is acceptable speech in the workplace.…
It is now universally acknowledged that basic password authentication does not offer sufficient security. 2-Factor authentication is a major improvement and hopefully would become the standard form of authentication over time. Another approach that might work well would be to use public key cryptography to authenticate with a signed password instead of just the plain password. An application (web…
For the past 5+ years I have tried all sorts of technical contraptions in an effort to create the ultimate media box. For me the ultimate media box is actually a simple product that could be easily controlled remotely, easily customizable and easily connects to the internet. For my music need I mostly solved this problem by building Rhythmote (http://code.google.com/p/rhythmote/) For TV I have had…
A couple of weeks ago I decided to buy my first tablet. The Kindle Fire HD 7" seemed like a good start, for a 140 bucks, that's less than the average speeding ticket. I got my tablet only to discover that I hadn't actually bought a tablet at all. Instead what I paid for is an obscene device that would be more appropriately called a "Personal Advertisement Consumption Assistant" (PACA), because…
Bitch about the client Bitch about the client Bitch about the client Bitch about the client Bitch about the client Bitch about the client Bitch about the client Bitch about the client Bitch about the client Don’t deliver what the client paid for (that is; if you even decide to deliver anything at all) Of course the actual title of this post should be “why IT projects fails”. A lot has been written…
The process of mining Bitcoins is meant to emulate the process of mining precious metals. Unfortunately unlike precious metals Bitcoins have no ornamental or practical value. Gold for instance can be used for jewelry or in semiconductor components, what can Bitcoins be used for? Basically Bitcoins can't be used by a human being directly, because they aren't real. Like agent Smith from The Matrix…
I love New York but one thing that has always bothered me about the city is the general crappiness of the subway system. For a city of its size where virtually all residents rely primarily on the subway to get around, one would expect upkeep and continuous innovation on the subway system to be the number one priority of the city government. I didn't realize how bad the New York system was until…
This sim shows the various sorting algorithms that one may encounter in intro to computer science classes.
This is a skeleton implementation of the PhET Sim for a Pendulum Lab . I am currently buried in work so I haven't finished it yet. Nevertheless it demonstrates the versatility of SimuPad . This lab uses the excellent Box2DFlash library. I manually converted the ActionScript to Javascript (not fun). There is a JS port but it is outdated.
ColaboPad is now SimuPad. It is a development environment for building interactive programs using Javascript/SVG/Html/CSS. Consider SimuPad an HTML5 replacement of flash, though not a complete replacement. Development on the SimuPad platform is browser and cloud based. Below are some examples of applets built on the platform:
Oh how much difference a few short years make...I don't work for Google and don't know anyone who does, but I imagine there has to be some discontent within Google about the company's seeming inability to make successful products. It was less than 5yrs ago when Google could do no wrong, they were anointed the smartest guys in the tech game with super human intelligences and insight. There is only…
For some time now I have thought about the cost of higher education and who should be paying it. Obviously the answer to this question would be “whoever is the beneficiary should also pay the cost”, fair enough. But then the question becomes, who's the beneficiary of an educated population/workforce? A naive and short-sighted response would be to say the person acquiring the education, but is that…
Recently I was wondering about the disjoint between the high-minded message that hot startups engage in versus how they actually behave. Specifically regarding early stage hiring practices. We all know there is no better time to join a high flying tech startup than when it is pre-IPO. However when one examines how recent alumni (Google et al) of this group hire you see a really exclusive…
First, it is important to separate the two types of software developers, those for whom writing code is merely a path to a paycheck (nothing wrong with that) and those of us who devote more time beyond 9-5 to personal projects. For the former the paycheck is enough, for the latter I find that generally there are four sources/levels of satisfaction that comes from creativity: Realization of vision…
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