Stanford offers free CS courses

From DeviceGuru

Last year at Educause, I heard Neil Gershenfeld (of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms) speak on a shift away from a scarcity-based model of education. A significant point was that technology has the potential to radically revolutionize the business of education. In the past, access to ideas was limited by access to physical resources: books, laboratories, faculty members. When resources are digitized, the nominal cost of reproducing them becomes insignificant.

In the latest of a series of similar examples, Stanford University has announced that it will be offering a series of 10 free online computer science courses, including their introduction to computer science, artificial intelligence, and robotics. As of a couple of days ago, more than 120,000 students had signed up for the courses.

Why Were Irene's Intensity Predictions So Off?

From Technology Review

A timely piece on weather prediction - a heavily data-intensive modeling discipline.

"Hurricane path prediction has enormously improved. Forecasters knew days before it made landfall that Irene would hit the Carolinas and move up the East Coast, reaching New York and New England."

"While path prediction has steadily improved over the decades, forecasting the intensity of storms still proves tricky. Irene's expected monster intensity—much to the nation's relief—was far less as she weakened a day or so after reaching land. "What made Irene especially difficult for the forecasting models was that she had three landfalls and followed the coastline," says Heymsfield. "We need a lot more research to understand how to better model this land interaction."

IBM's moves toward quantum computing

From Computerworld

Image Source: zmescience

IBM, one of the most patent-rich companies in the world, continues it's amazing pace of research and innovation. The future, they believe, is in a radically different paradigm of computing hardware (which will also require new thinking in software approaches as well).

"But the computing industry is moving to a new future as disruptive and as radical as the era that began with the introduction of silicon chips, and that future is quantum computing. These are systems that use the behavior of subatomic particles to conduct calculations now performed with transistors on a chip."

"An ordinary computer is a collection of bits that can either be a 0 or a 1. But quantum bits can hold those states, 0 and 1, simultaneously. Instead of doing a calculation one after the other, the processing power in a quantum computer can increase exponentially. Two quantum bits, or qubits, can hold four distinct states, which can be processed simultaneously, three qubits can hold eight and 10 qubits can hold 1,024 states. In time, researchers expect machines with thousands of qubits."

Profile Pics Put Your Privacy At Risk

From Discovery News

Data mining techniques applied to massive amounts of publicly available data make it easier than you would imagine to cyberstalk.

Image source: neonfudge.com

"In one experiment, Acquisti and his team uniquely identified 4,900 out of 5,800 anonymous dating site members."

"In arguably the most disturbing experiment, Acquisti used students who had their date of birth and hometown publicly posted on their social network profile to predict their Social Security numbers (SSNs). By using techniques from a previous study showing that SSNs can be somewhat accurately guessed using public information, Acquisti correctly identified the first five digits of SSNs in 16 percent of the students. After four attempts, the accuracy rate jumped to 27 percent."

How Computational Complexity Will Revolutionize Philosophy

From Technology Review

Image courtesy http://www.core.org.cn/

For those of you who have been in my Data Structures and Algorithms class... or anyone who is interested in what can be accomplished "before the heat death of the universe." :-)

"The theory of computation has had a profound influence on philosophical thinking. But computational complexity theory is about to have an even bigger effect, argues one computer scientist."

"Since the 1930s, the theory of computation has profoundly influenced philosophical thinking about topics such as the theory of the mind, the nature of mathematical knowledge and the prospect of machine intelligence. In fact, it's hard to think of an idea that has had a bigger impact on philosophy."

"And yet there is an even bigger philosophical revolution waiting in the wings. The theory of computing is a philosophical minnow compared to the potential of another theory that is currently dominating thinking about computation."

Data are traveling by light

From Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft

My favorite part of the article: the use of the word "ensconced." A visible light WLAN might be kind of impressive, but if the users are also ENSCONCED in a room, well then that's just amazing!

Joking aside, this is an interesting approach to networking that doesn't rely on traditional radio signals.

"Just imagine the following scenario: four people are comfortably ensconced in a room. Each one of them can watch a film from the Internet on his or her laptop, in HD quality. This is made possible thanks to optical WLAN. Light from the LEDs in the overhead lights serves as the transfer medium."

'via Blog this'

5D glass storage could revolutionize medical imaging, computing

From ExtremeTech

"Researchers from the University of Southampton, England, have successfully recorded, read, and erased data from a piece of nano-structured glass. This technique could revolutionize microscopy in general, and medical imaging in specific — and, perhaps more importantly for computing, it could also be used to store binary data, like an optical disc."

"The end result, and it’s hard to say this with a straight face, is permanent five-dimensional data storage. Not only can the standard three dimensions be used — vertical and horizontal position on the piece of glass, and varying depth depending on the duration of the femtosecond laser pulse — but the wavelength and polarization of the light can also carry data. These nano-structures are absolutely tiny, too — just a few nanometers, much smaller than a DVD or Blu-ray disc — so we could be talking about an incredibly high-density storage medium."