The Third Bit

RHoK #3 will take place June 4-5, and once again, Toronto will be a host site. Do some good doing something you love…

Announcements

http://uoftventurecompetition.wordpress.com/ is aimed at Computer Science students who want to try commercializing an idea this summer—give it a whirl!

Announcements

StreetKnit, a charity that collects knitted goods for the homeless, will be on Canada AM this coming Monday (January 31). I’m looking forward to Maddie seeing her mummy on TV!

Update: Sadie’s interview has been moved to Thursday because of events in Egypt.

Announcements

Rethinking the Community Calendar:
A Case Study in Learning and Teaching Fourth R Principles
Jon Udell, Senior Technical Evangelist, Microsoft
Tuesday, January 18, 2 pm
John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto
230 College Street, Room 103

Do you publish community calendar events? You are invited to:

• Realize that event data published in a structured format, unlike data published as HTML or PDF, can be routed through pub/sub syndication networks.
• Make public calendars available in the appropriate structured format: iCalendar (RFC 5545), the venerable Internet standard supported by all major calendar applications and services.
• Recognize that iCalendar is the RSS of calendars. It can enable a calendar-sphere in which, as in the blogosphere, everyone can publish their own feeds and also subscribe to feeds from other people or from network services.
• Help build the data web by owning the parts of it for which we ourselves are the authoritative sources.

The elmcity project delivers enabling technical infrastructure for this new approach to the community calendar. The project’s calendar syndication service is free; it runs open source code on the Microsoft Azure platform; it provides all of its syndicated data in open formats.

The real challenge isn’t technical, though, it’s conceptual. Most people don’t know how they could (or why they should) be the authoritative publishers of their own data. Missing concepts include:

• The pub/sub communication pattern
• Indirection (“pass-by-reference” vs “pass-by-value”)
• Structured versus unstructured data
• Data provenance
• Service composition

Along with reading, writing, and arithmetic, these Fourth R principles will empower an informed and engaged 21st-century citizenry. As Jeannette Wing argues in her computational thinking manifesto, computer and information scientists are no longer the only ones who need to understand and apply these principles. Now we all do. Drawing from the experience of the elmcity case study, this talk will explore what these Fourth R principles are, why they’re hard for most people to understand, how we can teach them, and why we should.

Jon Udell is an author, information architect, software developer, and new media innovator. His 1999 book, Practical Internet Groupware, helped lay the foundation for what we now call social software. Udell was formerly a software developer at Lotus, BYTE Magazine’s executive editor and Web maven, and an independent consultant.

A hands-on thinker, Udell’s analysis of industry trends has always been informed by his own ongoing experiments with software, information architecture, and new media. From 2002 to 2006 he was InfoWorld’s lead analyst, author of the weekly Strategic Developer column, and blogger-in-chief. During his InfoWorld tenure he also produced a series of screencasts and an audio show that continues as Interviews with Innovators on the Conversations Network.

In 2007 Udell joined Microsoft as a writer, interviewer, speaker, and experimental software developer. Currently he is building and documenting a community information hub that’s based on open standards and runs in the Azure cloud.

Announcements

Call for Submissions

Subtle Technologies Symposium 2011

Toronto, June 2–5, 2011

Submission deadline: December 12, 2010

Submit here!

(Submissions require only a title, abstract and CV.)

In 2011 The Subtle Technologies Festival celebrates its 14th year of bringing people together to promote wonder, incite creativity and spark innovation across disciplines. Through symposia, exhibitions, workshops, screenings and performances we provide a forum to pose and explore questions and inspire work that bridges the gap between science and art.

Scientists who have attended Subtle Technologies have said:

“Refreshing and a breath of fresh air…. Unique event of the highest quality that should not be missed.” -Sema Sgaier (geneticist and photographer)

“I thought the diversity and depth of talks at Subtle Technologies were outstanding and I will highly recommend the conference to my scientific colleagues” -Scott Menary (physicist, York University)

For the exhibition and performance portion of our program we typically showcase work that is engaging and technology based. Our symposium is made up of presentations, demonstrations and panel discussions that range from 15 to 45 minutes in length. Possible areas to be explored at the 2011 Festival from either a scientific or artistic approach include:

The above topics are only suggested topics for inclusion in the Festival. Other
topics within the realm of art, science and technology will be considered.

Announcements

Qiyu Zhu and Colin Morris will give at talk at noon on December 8, 2010, at the SciNet Users Group meeting titled “Fault Tolerant Scientific Computing with Erlang”.  Qiyu and Colin have been implementing the Cowichan Problems, a set of model problems similar to numerical HPC “kernels”, in Erlang, a language designed to support distributed, fault-tolerant, soft-real-time, non-stop applications. In this talk, they will give a brief introduction to Erlang, and discuss their experiences implementing two different parallel programming paradigms in it.  The talk will take place at SciNet Headquarters, 256 McCaul St., Rm 235.

Announcements

Mark Guzdial, who has been doing top-notch research on computing education for many years, is speaking at the University of Toronto on Tuesday November 23 at 11:00 a.m. in Bahen 1180. You really don’t want to miss this…

Announcements

Random Hacks of Kindness 2.0 is in Toronto on December 4-5, 2010, and we’d like you to take part. As Heather Leson says:

RHoK is a community of developers, geeks and tech-savvy do-gooders around the world, working to develop software solutions that respond to the challenges facing humanity today. RHoK is all about using technology to make the world a better place by building a community of innovation. RHoK brings software engineers together with disaster relief experts to identify critical global challenges, and develop software to respond to them. A RHoK Hackathon event brings together the best and the brightest hackers from around the world, who volunteer their time to solve real-world problems.

RHoK Toronto will run from 9:00 am on December 4, 2010 to 8:00 pm on December 5 (yes, overnight), in Rooms 2015, 2016, 2019, and 2020 of the Sidney Smith building at 100 St. George Avenue on the University of Toronto’s downtown campus.  Registration is now open: we need hackers, storytellers, software engineers, programmers, university students, marketers, web content creators, emergency planners,international policy and development students, teachers, librarians, videographers, event planners, organizers, project managers, and someone who knows how to calm Miles down after his fourth cup of coffee. I know the timing isn’t great for students, who will be in the middle of the death march leading up to final projects and exams, but come on, it’ll be fun, and we’ll make the world a slightly better place.

Announcements

I am pleased to announce that ComputerWorld Canada has named me the 2010 IT Educator of the Year for “…recognizing the application of innovative techniques and development of new curriculum and delivery of programs that stimulate learning.” My thanks to Prof. Karen Reid and Prof. Marsha Chechik for nominating me; to the faculty, staff, and students of the Dept. of Computer Science at the University of Toronto; and most especially, to my mum and dad, who taught me the things that matter most.

Announcements

If you’re a knitter in the Greater Toronto Area, StreetKnit needs your help for Nuit Blanche this coming weekend.

Announcements