Category: Uncategorized

By STEVE LOHR  Published: March 10, 2013

Trading stocks, targeting ads, steering political campaigns, arranging dates, besting people on “Jeopardy” and even choosing bra sizes: computer algorithms are doing all this work and more.

But increasingly, behind the curtain there is a decidedly retro helper — a human being.

Although algorithms are growing ever more powerful, fast and precise, the computers themselves are literal-minded, and context and nuance often elude them. Capable as these machines are, they are not always up to deciphering the ambiguity of human language and the mystery of reasoning. Yet these days they are being asked to be more humanlike in what they figure out.

“For all their brilliance, computers can be thick as a brick,” said Tom M. Mitchell, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University.

 

via Computer Algorithms Rely Increasingly on Human Helpers – NYTimes.com.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: As the U.S. fights to keep up in math and science, a growing effort has started to encourage better education in computer science. In this guest column, Code.org founder Hadi Partovi weighs in on the topic.)

We all know the U.S. is falling behind China and India in math and science, and we worry if this will hurt our future. But the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on fixing this problem ignore the fastest-growing sector of innovation and job growth: computer science.

In 41 states, computer science doesn’t even count towards high school graduation requirements. Although programming jobs are growing at double the pace of the nation’s average, computer programming is declining in our education system. This is a skill that can be taught as early as 5th grade, yet it’s not even offered in 90% of US schools. Why isn’t today’s curriculum preparing our students for the 21st century?

via Column: A push toward more computer science education.

A 30-second video of a newborn baby shows the infant silently snoozing in its crib, his breathing barely perceptible. But when the video is run through an algorithm that can amplify both movement and color, the baby’s face blinks crimson with each tiny heartbeat.

The amplification process is called Eulerian Video Magnification, and is the brainchild of a team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

The team originally developed the program to monitor neonatal babies without making physical contact. But they quickly learned that the algorithm can be applied to other videos to reveal changes imperceptible to the naked eye. Prof. William T. Freeman, a leader on the team, imagines its use in search and rescue, so that rescuers could tell from a distance if someone trapped on a ledge, say, is still breathing.

via Scientists Uncover Invisible Motion in Video – NYTimes.com.

The Computing At School Working Group (CAS) is a grass roots organisation that aims to promote the teaching of Computing at school. CAS is a collaborative partner with the BCS through the BCS Academy of Computing, and has formal support from other industry partners.

via Computing At School :: Computing For the Next Generation ….

This curriculum, produced by a working party within CAS, describes in concrete terms what a Computing curriculum at school might look like. It uses the same structure as the National Curriculum Programmes of Study: importance of the discipline; key concepts; key processes; range and content; and level descriptors. It is not cast in stone, so please send feedback.

No doubt about it, I’m a glass-is-half-empty kind of person. Ask my wife, ask my kids, ask my friends and they’ll tell you that I love to complain. It’s one of my favorite hobbies and, dare I say, skills. Always Look on the Bright Side of Life is agreat song, but advice that I’ve never chosen to follow. Nothing beats a good bitch session, I say.

Not surprisingly, then, when I look back on my career as a programmer, I focus on the negatives. That leads me to write posts like the one I wrote last week, 7 frustrating things about being a programmer. It’s the annoying things that I remember most.

As they say, though, it’s never too late to change, right? So, in effort to be one of those eternally positive people (the ones most of us want to throttle), at least for a few minutes, I thought I’d follow up last week’s post with one that focuses on some of the things about being programmer that I actually liked (yes, there were some such things):

via 6 good things about being a programmer | ITworld.

Everywhere I turn, there seems to be a new way to learn how to program online. There are free resources like Codeacademy, Udacity, Coursera, Mozilla’s P2PU, Google Code University, and MIT Open Courseware. There are also more and more high-quality paid resources, both online and off, like General Assembly, Treehouse or Bloc, not to mention local continuing ed classes across the spectrum of relevance and quality

via Learn To Code #1: Does Everybody Really Need To Program? – Forbes.