The Third Bit

Lots of people still find it useful, but viewership is definitely down—really need to rewrite this:

Uncategorized

It’s not quite a transparent head, but it’s still pretty cool.

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Saturday, April 04, 2009 from 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM — http://hacklabjobfair.eventbrite.com/ has the details.

Announcements

David Crow has posted a schedule for DemoCamp 19 — still looking for a couple of presentations, if you have something cool to show or say.

DemoCamp

This thing really exists.  On our planet.  How cool is that?

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I’m very pleased to announce that noted computing author Charles Petzold will be giving a talk at the University of Toronto on Thursday, March 5, 2009.  The talk is based on his most recent book, an extended commentary the 1936 paper in which Alan Turing created Turing machines.  The talk is free and open to the public, and will be held in Room 1160 of the Bahen Centre at 40 St. George Street starting at 7:00 pm.

In 1936, English mathematician Alan Turing invented an imaginary computing machine to help him solve a problem in mathematical logic. From these humble beginnings, the Turing Machine has become an essential tool in understanding computation and so much more. In a discussion largely free of mathematics and technical issues, Charles Petzold—author of the recent book The Annotated Turing—traces the history of this odd mathematical tool: from its original conception in 1936, to its starring role in the cybernetics movement of the 1940s and 1950s, to its application by philosophers, neurologists, physicists and cosmologists in everything from understanding human consciousness to grappling with the information-saturated universe in which we live. In our post-Turing world, everything is a Turing Machine.

Charles Petzold is the author of Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software (Microsoft Press, 1999), The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour through Alan Turing’s Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine (Wiley, 2008), and several best-selling books on computer programming.

Announcements

Great post from David Humphrey about how to get a big project off the ground.  The secret?  Start small.  (See also Benjamin Smedberg’s post on sanity testing.)

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Somewhere in The Age of Uncertainty, Galbraith wrote that what made Das Kapital and the Bible great books was that they were so large, and so full of contradictions, that everyone could find support in them for anything they wanted. I have felt the same way about the phrase “computational thinking” ever since I attended a workshop at Microsoft Research in September 2007. In one of the breakout sessions, six of us tried to operationalize our understanding of the term by coming up with questions for a quiz that could be given to someone to determine if he or she was thinking computationally. It quickly became clear that we meant very different things when we used those two words. It was also clear (to me at least) that this ambiguity was socially very useful, since (to switch metaphors) it allowed people to attend the same church while disagreeing on the nature of salvation. It’s not a polite fiction per se, but rather a—um, damn, I don’t know the word—a thing that no one looks at closely because doing so would cause discomfort or friction.

Eventually, though, things do have to be looked at closely.  In this case, it’s the productivity of scientific programmers.  Based on feedback from people who’ve taken it, I believe that Software Carpentry significantly increases how much scientists can do with computers, but I don’t have anything that would pass muster as “proof”.  I’m actually not even sure what form such proof would take, since I don’t know how to measure the productivity of  programmers of any other kind either—not in any reasonable amount of time, either.  (Waiting to see if alumni produce more papers would take at least a couple of years, maybe more.)  If someone could figure out how to measure computational thinking ability, on the other hand, before-and-after testing might be good enough.  Any thoughts?

Software Carpentry, Uncategorized

Gary Westfahl’s latest essay for Locus magazine, titled “Pitfalls of Prophecy: Why Science Fiction So Often Fails to Predict the Future”, should be read by everyone trying to figure out what the next big thing in tech is going to be.

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DemoCamp Toronto 19 was announced on Thursday, after a 7-month hiatus.  It’s moving to a smaller venue as part of an attempt to get away from the “trade show” feeling of the last few ‘camps — lots of people had said that they were too big, and that the proportion of attendees who might plausibly one day present had shrunk too much.

Unfortunately, a smaller venue means there’s only room for smaller — er, I mean “fewer” — people, which in turn makes it harder for newcomers to break in.  The day before the announcement went up on his blog, David tweeted, “DemoCamp Toronto details coming tomorrow. Wowsers looks like we’re full UPSTAIRS before the announcement, I love the back channel.”  On seeing this, one of my students swore and said, “OK, so how do I sign up for the &*@!ing back channel?” The only comfort I could offer was that I didn’t find out about it ’til after all the tickets had gone either…

I don’t think there actually is an answer to this problem. Big get-togethers have low signal-to-noise ratios and require unsustainable levels of effort to organize; small ones have all the problems mentioned above, and meeting more often isn’t feasible for people who have children to tickle, companies to run, or assignments due at school.  As David says, there are lots of other ‘camp-style events now in Toronto that make it a lot easier than it used to be to get to know the community; maybe we just have to accept that you have to choose between thousands of fans in a stadium and the intimacy of a coffee-house show.

DemoCamp