The Third Bit

Neat map.

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From TitleZ, which I found via Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools blog:

Beautiful Code

Even the CBC covered it!

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http://www.fudgie.org/ is neat: the movie shows real-time raindrop-style visualization of HTTP traffic.  I want one…

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“If ease of use was the only valid criterion, people would stick to tricycles and never try bicycles.”

– Doug Englebart

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The Gini coefficient is a widely-used measure of inequality in which 0 corresponds to perfect equality (e.g., everyone is equally wealthy), while 1 corresponds to perfect inequality (e.g., one person owns everything, nobody else has anything). I calculated the Gini coefficient for each team in my CSC301 class based on the number of lines of Java code each team member contributed to what was in version control at the deadline.

The results are shown below. The first number shows the Gini coefficient taking into account only those people who actually contributed lines of code to the final solution, while the second shows the value when people who didn’t contribute (or whose contributions didn’t survive in the final submission) are given a score of 0. By comparison, the Gini coefficient for incomes in highly unequal countries like Brazil is about 0.6, while Canada’s is about 0.32.

I’m the first to acknowledge that this isn’t an accurate assessment of how equally work was divided among team members. For example, one member of one team did a “reformat all” in Eclipse shortly before the submission, so almost all of their code appears to have been written by him. Similarly, people in other teams used pair programming (which means two people did the work, but only one gets the commit credit), while the written part of the assignment (which was submitted as a PDF) wasn’t included in this count at all. But I still the numbers are interesting and revealing: twenty-to-one line count ratios are common, and a few are fifty-to-one.

Teaching

I just finished the final [sic] round of edits on A Bottle of Light, my next children’s book, and sent them to the publisher. I’ve been over this manuscript a dozen times or more, but I still keep catching silly typos and inconsistencies—I wonder if my code is this flaky, too?

Books

David Wolever and Andrew Louis have come up with an interesting way to provide secure(ish) RSS feeds from DrProject. (See previous posts, e.g. this one, for background on the problem, or read David’s article.) I’d be interested in reactions to their idea.

DrProject

IPSI Public Lecture Series Fall 2007

The Identity, Privacy, and Security Initiative (http://www.ipsi.utoronto.ca) at the University of Toronto is launching public seminar series this fall.

Location: Galbraith Building, Room 120 (35 St. George)

Times: Mondays, noon-1PM.

Oct 1: Kostas Plataniotis (Dept of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UofT)
Biometrics & Authentication Technologies
Oct 15: Svetlana Yanushkevich (Dept of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Calgary)
Biometric-based assistance for situational awareness and risk management support
Oct 22: Alex Stoianov (Biometrics Specialist, Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, Ontario)
Biometric Encryption: The Privacy-Enhancing Biometric of Choice
Oct 29: Peter Hope-Tindall (Privacy Lead Service, Ontario)
Privacy, Security and Customer Service
Nov 5: Dean Barry (Senior Policy Advisor/International Affairs Directorate Public Safety Canada)
Policy and New Security Technologies: Roles, Responsibilities, Influences and Outcomes
Nov 12: Andrew Clement (Faculty of Information Studies, UofT)
Security Theatre, No-fly lists and Identity Integrity

These lectures are open to the public.

Announcements

From Ron Deibert at the Citizen Lab:

Citizen Lab’s recently completed Internet censorship circumvention guide intended for non-technical users, called Everyone’s Guide to By-Passing Internet Censorship for Citizens Worldwide. There is a companion guide yet to come on how to publish information online targeted for censorship, and we are presently working on having this guide translated into multiple languages. Feedback most welcome.

http://deibert.citizenlab.org/Circ_guide.pdf

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